Homeland Security: Challenges to Implementing the Immigration Interior Enforcement Strategy
Released: 2003-04-10T00:00:00

Letter

Components of the Interior Enforcement Strategy

In January 1999, INS issued its Interior Enforcement Strategy. This strategy focused 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 was 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 called for INS to disrupt and dismantle the criminal infrastructure that encourages and benefits from illegal migration. INS efforts were 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 was 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.

Figure 1 shows that INS had generally allocated its interior enforcement resources consistent with these priorities and that the workyears devoted to several of INS’s interior enforcement efforts had either declined or stayed about the same between fiscal years 1998 and 2002.

Challenges to Implementing the Interior Enforcement Programs

Our work has shown that INS faced numerous daunting enforcement issues, as will BICE as it assumes responsibility for the strategy. 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.

Given the nature, scope, and magnitude of these activities, BICE 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 the interior enforcement programs and that addressing them will require the high-level attention and concerted efforts of BICE.

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 BICE is to achieve program goals. Staff shortages had contributed to INS’s inability to promptly remove the majority of criminal aliens after they have completed their prison sentences. In 1997 INS did not place into removal proceedings 50 percent of potentially deportable criminal aliens who were released from federal prisons and state prisons from 5 states. In 1999 we reported that, although the removal of criminal aliens was an INS management priority, INS faced the same staff shortage issues in 1997 as it had in 1995. In particular, agent attrition – about one-third of the workforce - continued to impede INS’s ability to meet its program goals. INS had 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 believed should further help reduce attrition.

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. This was to help identify the resources the agency needed 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. Our ongoing work at land ports of entry shows this to be a continuing problem.

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. Given limited enforcement resources, BICE needs to assure that it targets those industries where employment of illegal aliens poses the greatest potential risk to national security. The program now has several initiatives underway that target sensitive industries.

Need for Better Information Technology

INS had long-standing difficulty developing and fielding information systems to support its program operations, and effectively using information technology continued to remain a challenge. For example, in 2002 we reported that benefit fraud investigations had 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 did 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 was not in the best position to review numerous applications and detect patterns, trends, and potential schemes for benefit fraud.

Further, in 2002 we reported that another INS 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, managers were not in the best position to make fact-based decisions about case priorities, staffing, and budgetary resource needs.

With respect to the criminal alien program, in 1999 we reported that 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. We have not examined these new systems to determine whether they were completed as planned or to ascertain their effectiveness.

In 2000 we reported that 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 all of its criminal investigations, including alien smuggling investigations. 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 could not be ensured that the highest-priority cases were investigated and resources were 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 Performance Measures

INS had not established outcome-based performance measures that would have helped it assess the results of its interior enforcement strategy. For example, in 2000 we reported that while INS had met its numeric goals for the number of smuggling cases presented for prosecution in 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.

In 2002 we reported that 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, in 1999 we reported that the strategy stated that INS would evaluate its performance on the basis of such things as changes in the behavior or business practices of persons and organizations, but did not explain how they expected the behavior and practices to change. And 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 required INS to reexamine strategies and approaches to ensure that INS efforts fully addressed 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 planned to target 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.

Challenges Faced by DHS Relating to Interior Enforcement

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and with the formation of DHS, a number of management challenges are evident. Some of the challenges discussed above carry over from the INS, such as the need for sound intelligence information, efficient use of resources and management of workloads, information systems that generate timely and reliable information, clear and current guidance, and appropriate performance measures. Other challenges are emerging. These include creating appropriate cooperation and collaboration mechanisms to assure effective program management, and reinforcing training and management controls to help assure compliance with DHS policies and procedures and the proper treatment of citizens and aliens.

Need for Program Collaboration/ Coordination

BICE will need to assure that appropriate cooperation and collaboration occurs between it and other DHS bureaus. For example, both the Border Patrol, now located in the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (BCBP), and BICE’s immigration investigations program conducted alien smuggling investigations prior to the merger into DHS. These units operated through different chains of command with different reporting structures. As a result, 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. It’s unclear at this time how the anti-smuggling program will operate under DHS. Should both BCBP’s Border Patrol and BICE’s Investigations program continue to conduct alien smuggling investigations, Under Secretary Hutchinson will need to assure that coordination and collaboration exists to overcome previous program deficiencies.

The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) is responsible for administering services such as immigrant and nonimmigrant sponsorship, work authorization, naturalization of qualified applicants for U.S. citizenship, and asylum. Processing benefit applications is an important DHS function that should be done in a timely and consistent manner. Those who are eligible should receive benefits in a reasonable period of time. However, some try to obtain these benefits through fraud, and investigating fraud is the responsibility of BICE’s Immigration Investigations program. INS’ approach to addressing benefit fraud was fragmented and unfocused. INS’ interior enforcement strategy did not address how the different INS components that conducted benefit fraud investigations were to coordinate their investigations. Also, INS had not established guidance to ensure the highest-priority cases are investigated. Secretary Ridge will need to ensure the two bureaus work closely to assure timely adjudication for eligible applicants while identifying and investigating potential immigration benefit fraud cases.

BICE’s Intelligence Program is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating immigration-related intelligence. Immigration-related intelligence is needed by other DHS components such as Border Patrol agents and inspectors within BCBP and personnel within BCIS adjudicating immigration benefits. BICE will need to develop an intelligence program structure to ensure intelligence information is disseminated to the appropriate components within DHS’s other bureaus.

Need to Reinforce Training and Internal Controls

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and with the formation of DHS, the linkages between immigration enforcement and national security have been brought to the fore. Immigration personnel have been tapped to perform many duties that previously were not part of their normal routine. For example, as part of a special registration program for visitors from selected foreign countries, immigration investigators have been fingerprinting, photographing, and interviewing aliens upon entry to the U.S. Immigration investigators have also participated in anti-terrorism task forces across the country and helped interview thousands of non- immigrant aliens to determine what knowledge they may have had about terrorists and terrorist activities. As part of its investigation of the attacks of September 11, the Justice Department detained aliens on immigration charges while investigating their potential connection with terrorism. An integrated Entry/Exit System, intended to enable the government to determine which aliens have entered and left the country, and which have overstayed their visas, is currently under development and will rely on BICE investigators to locate those who violate the terms of their entry visas.

All of these efforts attest to the pivotal role of immigration interior enforcement in national security and expanded roles of investigators in the fight against terrorism. It is important that BICE investigators receive training to perform these expanded duties and help assure that they effectively enforce immigration laws while recognizing the rights of citizens and aliens. It is also important that DHS reinforce its management controls to help assure compliance with DHS policies and procedures.