New White Paper Lays Out National Security Concerns with ICE’s Surge

Contact: Anna Nix Kumar

akumar@monumentadvocacy.com

WASHINGTON – The Council on National Security and Immigration (CNSI) today released a white paper on the unintended consequences of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) unprecedented increase in funding and resources.

In Unintended Consequences: National Security and Law Enforcement Concerns with ICE’s Surge — author and Department of Homeland Security alumna Theresa Cardinal Brown looks at the funding allocated for 10,000 additional immigration officers and raises concerns over adequate training, diversion of resources from other law enforcement agencies, and the implications of primarily focusing the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS's) missions on immigration enforcement.

The paper calls for careful attention to the integrity of hiring and oversight processes to ensure that national security and law enforcement objectives are not compromised.

“The federal government is undertaking an immigration enforcement campaign unlike anything seen in recent decades, with ICE receiving extraordinary resources and cross-government support,” Brown said. “This rapid expansion — bolstered by billions in new funding and a push to hire 10,000 additional officers — raises serious concerns about diverted federal capacity, weakened oversight, and accelerated vetting and training of officers.

“To protect public safety and national security, the administration and Congress must examine the unintended consequences of ICE’s growth and ensure hiring and accountability systems keep pace.”

Below are excerpts from the paper. To view the paper in its entirety, click here.

Excerpts:

• The dramatic surge in ICE resources and hiring raises significant concerns regarding their broader implications, including the diversion of resources from other federal law enforcement agencies. This shift may impact these agencies’ ability to fulfill their important law enforcement and national security roles, and the government’s focus on expanding ICE could affect other agencies’ recruiting and staffing efforts.

• Such a hiring spree also has raised concerns about the proper vetting of new hires; their fitness for the particular mission of immigration enforcement; and whether or how the hiring push might impact recruitment to other law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as military recruitment, all of which tend to prioritize similar candidate profiles. Any of these issues could raise national security and law enforcement concerns.

• Recent reporting by The New York Times suggests that the focus on immigration is compromising some of ICE’s and DHS’s other missions, including investigations of money-laundering, human trafficking, and online child exploitation — and even extending to Coast Guard search and rescue. Other reporting has shown that federal drug prosecutions, usually led by the DEA, have fallen to the lowest levels in decades. ATF, meanwhile, reassigned 80% if its special agents to immigration cases and is on pace for a 90% drop in gun license investigations.

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About Theresa Cardinal Brown: Theresa Cardinal Brown is a former federal government official, serving for over six years with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. She served as a policy advisor in the office of the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under then-Commissioner Robert Bonner, served on Secretary Michael Chertoff’s Second Stage Review of USCIS, was a member and later director of the Immigration Legislation Task Force for the DHS Office of Policy in 2006 and 2007 and served in the DHS Office of International Affairs as both the first Director of Canadian Affairs and the first DHS Attaché to Canada, supporting international and bilateral homeland security missions for Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Janet Napolitano. Read more here.

About CNSI: The Council on National Security and Immigration is a group of American national security leaders who believe immigration reforms are imperative to bolster and maintain the United States’ global leadership in the 21st century. Find out more here: www.cnsiusa.org

Leaders of CNSI speak and act solely in their individual capacities, and their views should not be attributed to any organization with which they are affiliated.