IMMIGRATION

ENFORCEMENT

Challenges to

Implementing the INS

Interior Enforcement

Strategy

Statement by Richard M. Stana, Director, Justice Issues

United States General Accounting Office

GAO Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims,

Committee on the Judiciary,

House of Representatives

For Release on Delivery

Expected at 2:00p.m. EDT

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

GAO-02-861T
GAO-02-861T

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am pleased to be here today to discuss selected issues pertaining to the Immigration

and Naturalization Service’s (INS) enforcement of immigration laws within the interior of

the United States.

In the 1990s, INS developed a strategy to control illegal immigration across the U.S.

border and a strategy to address enforcement priorities within the country’s interior. In

1994, INS’s Border Patrol issued a strategy to deter illegal entry. The strategy called for

“prevention through deterrence”; that is, to raise the risk of being apprehended for illegal

aliens to a point where they would consider it futile to try to enter. The plan called for

targeting resources in a phased approach, starting first with the areas of greatest illegal

activity. In 1999, the INS issued its interior enforcement strategy designed to deter illegal

immigration, preventing immigration-related crimes, and removing those illegally in the

United States. Historically, Congress and INS have devoted over five times more

resources in terms of staff and budget on border enforcement than on interior

enforcement.

In my statement today, I make the following points:

• INS’s interior enforcement strategy is designed to address the detention and removal of

criminal aliens, the dismantling and diminishing of alien smuggling operations,

community complaints about illegal immigration, immigration benefit and document

fraud, and employers’ access to undocumented workers. INS faces numerous

enforcement issues in each area.

• INS could do a better job of using its limited interior enforcement resources. For strategy

implementation to be effective, INS needs better data to determine staff needs, reliable

information technology, clear and consistent guidelines and procedures for workinglevel staff, effective collaboration and coordination within INS and with other agencies,

and performance measures that help INS assess program results.

• Having an effective interior strategy is an essential complement to having an effective

border strategy. Addressing management challenges is important if INS is to achieve

their full potential.

My testimony today will be based primarily on the results of work that we have

completed in recent years, namely, our February 1999 testimony on INS’s efforts to

identify and remove criminal aliens,1

 our April 1999 report on INS’s worksite

enforcement program,2

 our May 2000 report on alien smuggling,3 our May 2001 report on

the processing of immigration benefits,4

 our January 2002 report on immigration benefit

 1

 U.S. General Accounting Office, Criminal Aliens: INS’ Efforts to Identify and Remove Imprisoned

Aliens Continue to Need Improvement, GAO/T-GGD-99-47 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 25, 1999). 2

 U.S. General Accounting Office, Illegal Aliens: Significant Obstacles to Reducing Unauthorized Alien

Employment Exist, GAO/GGD-99-33 (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 2, 1999). 3

 U.S. General Accounting Office, Alien Smuggling: Management and Operational Improvements Needed

to Address Growing Problem, GAO/GGD-00-103 (Washington, D.C.: May 1, 2000). 4

 U.S. General Accounting Office, Immigration Benefits: Several Factors Impede the Timeliness of

Application Processing, GAO-01-488 (Washington, D.C.: May 4, 2001). 
2 GAO-02-861T

fraud,5

 and our March 2002 report on INS’ Forensic Document Laboratory.6 In these

reports we made many recommendations to improve INS operations. INS has

implemented or is in the process of implementing some of these recommendations. We

plan to follow up on INS’s plans to improve the various programs.

Components of the Interior Enforcement Strategy

In January 1999, INS issued its Interior Enforcement Strategy. This strategy focuses

resources on areas that would have the greatest impact on reducing the size and annual

growth of the illegal resident population. Certain criteria were used to develop the

priorities and activities of the strategy. The criteria focused on potential risks to U.S.

communities and persons, costs, capacity to be effective, impact on communities,

potential impact on reducing the size of the problem, and potential value for prevention

and deterrence. The strategy established the following five areas in priority order:

1. Identify and remove criminal aliens and minimize recidivism. Under this strategic

priority, INS is to identify and remove criminal aliens as they come out of the federal

and state prison systems and those convicted of aggravated felonies currently in

probation and parole status.

2. Deter, dismantle, and diminish smuggling or trafficking of aliens. This strategic

priority calls for INS to disrupt and dismantle the criminal infrastructure that

encourages and benefits from illegal migration. INS efforts are to start in source and

transit countries and continue inside the United States, focusing on smugglers,

counterfeit document producers, transporters, and employers who exploit and

benefit from illegal migration.

3. Respond to community reports and complaints about illegal immigration. In addition

to responding to local law enforcement issues and needs, this strategic priority

emphasizes working with local communities to identify and address problems that

arise from the impact of illegal immigration, based on local threat assessments.

4. Minimize immigration benefit fraud and other document abuse. Under this strategic

priority, INS is to aggressively investigate and prosecute benefit fraud and document

abuse to promote integrity of the legal immigration system.

5. Block and remove employers’ access to undocumented workers. The strategy

emphasizes denying employers access to unauthorized workers by checking their

compliance with the employment verification requirements in the Immigration

Reform and Control Act of 1986. Coupled with its efforts to control smuggling

activity, this effort could have a multiplier effect on access of employers to illegal

workers and on the overall number of illegal residents in the country.

 5

 U.S. General Accounting Office, Immigration Benefit Fraud: Focused Approach Is Needed to Address

Problems, GAO-02-66 (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 31, 2002). 6

 U.S. General Accounting Office, INS Forensic Document Laboratory: Several Factors Impeded

Timeliness of Case Processing, GAO-02-410 (Washington, D.C.: Mar. 13, 2002).
3 GAO-02-861T

Figure 1 shows that INS has generally allocated its interior enforcement resources

consistent with these priorities and that the workyears devoted to several of INS’s

interior enforcement efforts have either declined or stayed about the same between

fiscal years 1998 and 2001.

Figure 1: INS Investigations Workyears

Note: Workyear totals do not include administrative time.

Source: GAO’s analysis of INS’s data.

Challenges Exist in Implementing Interior Enforcement Programs

Our work has shown that INS faces numerous daunting enforcement issues. For

example, the potential pool of removable criminal aliens and fugitives numbers in the

hundreds of thousands. Many are incarcerated in hundreds of federal, state, and local

facilities, while others are fugitives at large across the country. The number of

individuals smuggled into the United States has increased dramatically, and alien

smuggling has become more sophisticated, complex, organized, and flexible. Thousands

of aliens annually illegally seek immigration benefits, such as work authorization and

change of status, and some of these aliens use these benefits to enable them to conduct

criminal activities. Hundreds of thousands of aliens unauthorized to work in the United

States have used fraudulent documents to circumvent the process designed to prevent

employers from hiring them. In many instances, employers are complicit in this activity.

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

Criminal alien removal Alien smuggling Noncriminal removals Benefit and other fraud Employer investigations

Program

Workyears

FY 1998

FY 1999

FY 2000

FY 2001
4 GAO-02-861T

Given the nature, scope, and magnitude of these activities, INS needs to ensure that it is

making the best use of its limited enforcement resources. We found that fundamental

management challenges exist in several of INS’s interior enforcement programs and that

INS could do a better job using its limited resources.

Need for Better Staff Levels and Allocations

In several reports we noted that INS did not believe it had sufficient staff to reach its

program goals. Having data on how to effectively allocate staff and placing sufficient

staff in the right locations is important if INS is to achieve program goals.

Staff shortages have contributed to INS’s inability to promptly remove the majority of

criminal aliens after they have completed their prison sentences. In 1995, INS did not

place into removal proceedings 57 percent of potentially deportable criminal aliens who

were released from federal prisons and state prisons from 5 states. In 1997, INS did not

place about 50 percent of these aliens. We reported that, although the removal of

criminal aliens was an INS management priority, INS was facing the same staff shortage

issues in 1997 as it had in 1995. In particular, agent attrition – about 30 percent in 1995,

and about 32 percent in 1997- continued to impede INS’s ability to meet its program

goals. INS has told us that since 1997, the attrition rates of agents in this program has

stabilized and that, in fiscal year 2003, the agents from this program would be

reclassified as detention removal officers, which INS believes should further help reduce

attrition.

INS’s Forensic Document Laboratory (FDL) has been beset with staff shortages for

years. According to FDL officials, staff shortages have made it difficult for the FDL to

stay current with its workload and produce timely responses to requests for forensic

document examination. Congress’s January 2002 supplemental appropriation will nearly

double FDL’s current staff of 35.

Even if INS had additional staff working in these program areas, it lacked good

management information to determine how many staff it needed to meet its program

goals and how best to allocate staff given the limited resources it did have. With respect

to its program for removing incarcerated criminal aliens, INS told us that beginning in

fiscal year 2002, the agency implemented our recommendation to use a workload

analysis model to help identify the resources the agency needs for its criminal alien

program in order to achieve overall program goals and support its funding and staffing

requests. We have not reviewed this new model to ascertain its usefulness.

With respect to alien smuggling, INS lacked field intelligence staff to collect and analyze

information. Both 1998 and 1999 INS Annual Performance Plan reports stated that the

lack of intelligence personnel hampered the collection, reporting, and analysis of

intelligence information. Although INS’s Intelligence Program proposed that each

district office have an intelligence unit, as of January 2000, 21 of INS’s 33 districts did not

have anyone assigned full-time to intelligence-related duties.
5 GAO-02-861T

The worksite enforcement program received a relatively small portion of INS’s staffing

and budget. In fiscal year 1998, INS completed a total of 6,500 worksite investigations,

which equated to about 3 percent of the estimated number of employers of unauthorized

aliens. Many immigration experts have said that as long as opportunities for

employment exist, the incentive to enter the United States illegally or overstay visas will

persist, and efforts at the U.S. borders to prevent illegal entry will be undermined.

Need for Better Information Technology

INS has had long-standing difficulty developing and fielding information systems to

support its program operations. In 1990, we reported that INS managers and field

officials did not have adequate, reliable, and timely information to effectively carry out

the agency’ s mission. We also reported that INS had not conducted a comprehensive

agencywide information needs assessment. As a result, program and management data

were kept in a loose collection of automated systems, as well as a number of ad hoc

labor-intensive manual systems.

Effectively using information technology continues to remain a challenge for INS. For

example, benefit fraud investigations have been hampered by a lack of integrated

information systems. The operations units at the four INS service centers that

investigate benefit fraud operate different information systems that do not interface with

each other or with the units that investigate benefit fraud at INS district offices. As a

result, sharing information about benefit applicants is difficult. The INS staff who

adjudicate applications did not have routine access to INS’s National Automated

Immigration Lookout System (NAILS). Not having access to or not using NAILS

essentially means that officers may be making decisions without access to or using

significant information and that benefits may be granted to individuals not entitled to

receive them. Thus, INS is not in the best position to review numerous applications and

detect patterns, trends, and potential schemes for benefit fraud.

FDL’s database, the Forensic Automated Case and Evidence Tracking System (FACETS),

did not contain sufficient data for managers to know the exact size and status of the

laboratory’s pending workload or how much time is spent on each forensic case by

priority category. As a result, FDL managers were not in the best position to make factbased decisions about case priorities, staffing, and budgetary resource needs.

With respect to the criminal alien program, INS lacked a nationwide data system

containing the universe of foreign-born inmates for tracking the hearing status of each

inmate. In response to our recommendation, INS developed a nationwide automated

tracking system for the Bureau of Prisons and deployed the system to all federal

institutional hearing program sites. INS said that it was working with the Florida

Department of Corrections to integrate that state's system with INS's automated tracking

system. INS also said that it planned to begin working with New York, New Jersey, and

Texas to integrate their systems and then work with California, Illinois, and

Massachusetts. INS projected that this entire project will be completed by the end of

fiscal year 2002. We have not examined these new systems to ascertain their

effectiveness.
6 GAO-02-861T

INS lacked an agencywide automated case tracking and management system that

prevented antismuggling program managers from being able to monitor their ongoing

investigations, determine if other antismuggling units were investigating the same target,

or know if previous investigations had been conducted on a particular target. In

response to our recommendation, INS deployed an automated case tracking and

management system for its alien smuggling investigations to many of its antismuggling

units by August 2001 and planned to complete deployment by the end of fiscal year 2002.

Again, we have not examined the new system to ascertain its effectiveness.

Need for Better Guidance to Program Staff

Our review of the various program components of the interior enforcement strategy

found that working-level guidance was sometimes lacking or nonexistent. INS had not

established guidance for opening benefit fraud investigations or for prioritizing

investigative leads. Without such criteria, INS cannot be ensured that the highestpriority cases are investigated and resources are used optimally.

INS’s interior enforcement strategy did not define the criteria for opening investigations

of employers suspected of criminal activities. In response to our recommendation, INS

clarified the types of employer-related criminal activities that should be the focus of INS

investigations.

INS’s alien smuggling intelligence program had been impeded by a lack of understanding

among field staff about how to report intelligence information. Staff were unclear about

guidelines, procedures, and effective techniques for gathering, analyzing, and

disseminating intelligence information. They said that training in this area was critically

needed.

Need for Better Program Collaboration/Coordination

Over the years, we have issued a number of reports identifying program coordination

and cooperation both within INS and between INS and other agencies as problematic.

This was verified as an issue in a 1995 GAO survey of INS managers and in our reviews of

individual program components. For example, although both the Border Patrol and INS’s

Office of Investigations have antismuggling units that conduct alien smuggling

investigations, these units operate through different chains of command with different

reporting structures. INS’s antismuggling program lacked coordination, resulting in

multiple antismuggling units overlapping in their jurisdictions, making inconsistent

decisions about which cases to open, and functioning autonomously and without a single

chain of command. INS investigation officials told us that the autonomy of individual

units and the lack of a single chain of command were major obstacles to building a more

effective antismuggling program.

INS’s approach to addressing benefit fraud is fragmented and unfocused. INS’s interior

enforcement strategy does not address how the different INS components that conduct
7 GAO-02-861T

benefit fraud investigations are to coordinate their investigations. Also, INS had not

established guidance to ensure the highest-priority cases are investigated.

With respect to collaboration with other agencies, some of our reports have noted the

importance of INS working with other governmental entities to achieve program

objectives.7 For example, with respect to worksite enforcement, we recommended that

INS seek assistance from federal and state agencies, such as the Department of Labor

and state labor agencies, in disseminating information to employers about INS’s pilot

programs for verifying employees’ eligibility to work. INS has implemented our

recommendation with respect to state labor agencies, but coordinating with the Labor

Department is problematic because of the different interests of the two agencies. That

is, Labor officials will not delve into worksite immigration matters if it would have a

detrimental effect on Labor’s primary mission of enforcing worker protection laws. If

employees perceived that Labor investigators were trying to determine their immigration

status and possibly report those who may be unauthorized to INS, it would have a

“chilling effect” on employees’ willingness to report workplace violations. With respect

to criminal aliens, INS needed to work with states to make enhancements to the removal

process, such as reducing the number of state prison facilities that served as intake,

hearing, and release sites for foreign-born inmates. At the time our work was completed,

INS had variable success with getting states to agree to make such reductions.

Need for Better Performance Measures

INS does not have established outcome-based performance measures in place that would

help it assess the results of its interior enforcement strategy. We have found this to be

an issue in both border enforcement and interior enforcement areas. For example, we

have issued several reports pertaining to INS’s border strategy and have noted that INS

has not evaluated the strategy’s overall effects on illegal entry and has not analyzed key

performance data.

While INS had met its numeric goals for its antismuggling program, it had not yet

developed outcome-based measures that would indicate progress toward the strategy’s

objective of identifying, deterring, disrupting, and dismantling alien smuggling. This was

also the case for the INS intelligence program. INS had not developed outcome-based

performance measures to gauge the success of the intelligence program to optimize the

collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information.

INS had not yet established outcome-based performance measures that would help it

assess the results of its benefit fraud investigations. Additionally, INS had not established

goals or measurement criteria for the service center operations units that conduct fraud

investigation activities.

INS’s interior enforcement strategy did not clearly describe the specific measures INS

would use to gauge its performance in worksite enforcement. For example, the strategy

states that INS will evaluate its performance on the basis of such things as changes in the

 7

 GAO/T-GGD-99-47, GGD-99-33, GGD-00-103, GAO-02-66.
8 GAO-02-861T

behavior or business practices of persons and organizations. Although INS indicated that

it would gauge effectiveness in the worksite area by measuring change in the wage scales

of certain targeted industries, it left unclear a number of questions related to how it

would do this. For example, INS did not specify how wage scales would be measured;

what constituted a targeted industry; and how it would relate any changes found to its

enforcement efforts or other immigration-related causes. The strategy stated that

specific performance measurements would be developed in the annual performance

plans required by the Government Performance and Results Act.

According to INS’s fiscal year 2003 budget submission, the events of September 11th

have required INS to reexamine strategies and approaches to ensure that INS efforts fully

address threats to the United States by organizations engaging in national security crime.

As a result, with regard to investigating employers who may be hiring undocumented

workers, INS plans targeted investigations of industries and businesses where there is a

threat of harm to the public interest. However, INS had not set any performance

measures for these types of worksite investigations.

Concluding Observations

Having an effective interior enforcement strategy is an essential complement to having

an effective border strategy. To be sure, INS’s tasks with regard to interior enforcement

are considerable given the nature, scope, and magnitude of illegal activity. Nevertheless,

in reviewing our work, we find that INS is an agency that faces significant challenges in

appropriately staffing program areas, providing reliable information for program

management, establishing clear and consistent guidance for working-level staff to do

their jobs consistent with the goals of the program, promoting collaboration and

coordination within INS and with other agencies, and developing outcome-based

measures that would indicate progress toward the strategy’s objectives. Addressing these

issues is important if INS is to achieve full program potential.

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement, I would be pleased to answer any

questions that you or other members of the subcommittees may have.
9 GAO-02-861T

Contacts and Acknowledgments

For further information regarding this testimony, please contact Richard M. Stana at

(202) 512-8777. Individuals making key contributions to this testimony included Evi L.

Rezmovic and Michael P. Dino.

(440141)