09/10/02

and RICHARD READ

The nation's largest federal law enforcement agency, which has guarded borders, tracked foreigners and granted citizenship for nearly 70 years, is about to vanish, brought down by fallout from Sept. 11.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose tarnished image was indelibly stained when its contractor mailed visa confirmations for two dead hijackers, has become Washington's favorite whipping boy in the war against terrorism.

Congress and President Bush intend to dismantle the INS and put most, if not all, of its more than 35,000 employees under the new Homeland Security Department.

But in many ways, the INS already is disintegrating.

Its besieged leader, incommunicado for weeks after undergoing back surgery, is preparing to resign.

Inspectors, detention officers and Border Patrol agents are quitting in record numbers, leaving the Canadian border little more covered than it was a year ago.

Applications for visa renewals, work permits and citizenship stack up in milk crates as employees run newly required security checks through balky computers. Meanwhile, deportations dropped 24 percent from a year ago.

"We're talking about an agency in disarray, an agency demoralized, thrown new mandate after new mandate," says Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

An ongoing conflict on Capitol Hill between INS unions and the Bush administration reveals the enormous political and logistical challenge officials face in overhauling government during wartime. Debate may extend for weeks as Congress tries to cobble together 22 federal agencies, 17 unions and 170,000 employees into a Homeland Security Department.

In its remaining months, the beleaguered INS faces a staggering task combating terrorism. While the agency has struggled to identify threats and respond, there's no sign that Americans are any safer today on account of its efforts.

Long before the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS was a deeply troubled agency. Its litany of abuses, inefficiency and corruption was documented in a six-part series published by The Oregonian in December 2000. The newspaper conducted a national investigation after controversy over jailings, strip-searches and deportations of foreigners led to the departure of the Oregon INS director.

A year ago, the agency was moving toward reform. James Ziglar, its new commissioner, worked to cut paperwork backlogs and to boost professionalism. He prepared to split the agency, separating its ballooning enforcement ranks from the overwhelmed divisions that processed applications.

The terrorist attacks stunned the INS. The high-profile agency took more public heat than the CIA, the FBI and the State Department. Ziglar's boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, usurped the commissioner's authority by announcing a series of enforcement measures. Immigration managers scrapped customer-service initiatives and cranked up overtime on the borders. They were plagued by widespread doubts about the agency's ability to accomplish even routine tasks.

A year later, the INS remains hamstrung, a bureaucratic dinosaur laboring to confront a modern-day threat. Ziglar's reforms are buried under a stream of urgent orders to boost security. Lawmakers who oversee the agency say it's not up to the task.

"This is an agency with no focus on internal security, no priority-setting in how to apply resources and morale so low that people simply go through the motions, spending eight hours a day praying until they can go home and retire," says Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who met with INS inspectors and Border Patrol agents in several states during the August recess.

INS cracking down After the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS scrambled to tighten the borders and to flush out foreigners who had ducked earlier deportation orders. Congress poured nearly $1 billion more into the agency, boosting a $5.5 billion budget that had steadily ballooned since 1996.

The INS achieved some success nationally and locally. Officers nabbed more than 2,200 people illegally working at U.S. airports. In Portland, where 124 were working illegally, 40 were jailed for immigration violations. Portland INS officers also checked for unauthorized workers at the defunct Trojan nuclear power plant, the Umatilla Chemical Depot, water-treatment plants and companies that make and store chemicals. None was found.

Border Patrol agents formed new teams with Canadians, cracking down on illegal immigrant and drug smugglers. And the INS began to launch a new Internet-based system to track foreign students electronically. "The INS is making extraordinary progress in implementing this system, at a rate no one would have believed possible a year ago," says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education.

Inspectors are flexing long-standing authority to limit foreign tourists to fewer than the six months automatically granted before Sept. 11. The agency also is screening refugees more closely. Wednesday, inspectors at more than 300 U.S. ports of entry will begin fingerprinting, photographing and monitoring all arriving foreigners that intelligence reports or INS officers determine may be a threat as well as citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria.

But critics say the country is no safer.

"What INS has done is go after the easy targets, people who comply with the rules already," says Greg Siskind, a Memphis, Tenn., immigration lawyer who publishes a national online immigration newsletter. "Millions and millions of people are affected by these new, stringent rules."

Crackdown backfires Among the new tougher rules is requiring foreigners living in the United States to register a change of address within 10 days of moving. Ashcroft dusted off the 50-year-old law on July 26.

Foreigners complied, flooding the INS with more than 700,000 change of address cards, which the agency announced last week it had no time to process.

A federal judge in August stopped the agency from deporting a legal immigrant from the Middle East solely for failing to register a change of address. The judge said the man could not be expected to know of a law that hadn't been enforced since 1958. The INS has begun revising 30 forms to publicize the requirement, which affects about 18 million noncitizens.

The agency already was choked by paperwork. Each year, the INS has more than 550 million encounters with people. Last year, more than 623,000 legally immigrated to the United States through the INS. Applications for citizenship have shot up 63 percent since last year to 568,000.

The agency has invested heavily to shorten waiting times, cutting the average for work permits, citizenship and permanent residency from 30 months to 11 months. But many immigrants, especially in busy districts, must wait more than a year for some permits.

And now, newly required security checks are slowing the agency further. INS employees in a multistate service center in Vermont have lost 22,000 man-hours running names through a balky computer system, according to one internal study. Workers there are so squeezed for space that many work from home and are preparing to add a second shift.

Confusion over INS handling of tourist visas has turned off would-be visitors -- including some from friendly countries such as France and Germany -- who don't even need visas, according to the travel industry.

"The bigger concern is who would want to come to the U.S. if you have no idea how long you can stay until you're at the gate," says Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association of America.

And the stream of refugees that the United States has historically welcomed has all but been choked off, splintering families and dismantling a 25-year-old network of support agencies. "It's ironic that a program so well-screened and so well-run has been so crippled by Sept. 11," says Susan Baukhages, director of communications for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. "We never, in our wildest dreams, expected anything like that to happen."

Agents flee INS In the past year, Congress directed the INS to add 625 agents and inspectors on the Canadian border. But the agency has managed to station only 15 more officers there so far, according to Syracuse University researchers. Managers expect to deploy 870 officers by Jan. 1.

Nationally, Congress told the INS to hire 1,900 new inspectors and Border Patrol agents. But the agency has managed to boost its ranks by only 525.

The problem: Officers are quitting, sometimes whole shifts at a time. One out of four agents in Arizona left during the past year. In the San Diego area, 30 to 40 agents turn in their badges each week. The national turnover rate for Border Patrol agents has almost doubled this year, to nearly 19 percent.

"Our guys are working 18 hours a day because we're so short-staffed," says Inspector Edward Bell, a union president in San Diego.

Congress raised the top base pay for inspectors last month to $54,185. Signing bonuses and job advertisements featuring action-movie star Chuck Norris have helped quadruple job applications.

But hundreds are leaving to become air marshals, who earn between $35,000 and $80,000 a year and receive law-enforcement benefits that include superior retirement packages.

"They have a salary scale that, for the most part, we can't compete with," says Sid Waldstreicher, INS recruitment and hiring manager.

The INS will have to spend more than $44 million recruiting and hiring replacements for the 2,212 inspectors and agents who have quit this year, not including the cost of training them.

Now, as Congress demands yet more hiring, the agency braces for another wave of defections when the Transportation Security Administration begins hiring officers for airports.

Commissioner also quitting Neither Commissioner Ziglar nor any other top INS managers responded to requests for interviews.

When Ziglar took over just a month before Sept. 11, the former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms and doorkeeper was a well-connected onetime investment banker -- but no immigration expert. He won over many employees with reforms designed to slash backlogs, to improve customer service and to boost professionalism. He won over several of the agency's harshest critics, too, by battling the backlash against immigrants after the attacks.

"He was a voice of reason who said, 'Let's remember that not all immigrants are terrorists,' " Butterfield, of the immigration lawyers association, says, "and he continued to be that kind of even-handed voice."

But that tone increasingly clashed with an administration that viewed foreigners first and foremost as a security concern. As Ashcroft's Justice Department took 32 administrative steps during the next 11 months to vastly expand the government's ability to detain, to track and to investigate foreigners, Ziglar fell in line, too.

But the commissioner couldn't escape that his agency allowed most of the Sept. 11 hijackers to enter the United States legally on travel, business and student visas -- or that an INS contractor mailed visa confirmations to a Florida flight school for two dead hijackers on the six-month anniversary of the attack. The disclosure outraged Bush and left the agency's dismemberment almost certain.

Ziglar said Aug. 16 he would resign by year's end, saying his job of restructuring the agency would be achieved through its absorption by Homeland Security.

INS prepares to move Even before Sept. 11, the INS appeared headed for the guillotine. Reformers, exasperated by decades of abuses, inefficiency and corruption, persuaded the administration to chop it in half. One division would handle enforcement, and the other would administer services -- processing applications including for citizenship, work permits and permanent residency.

After the attacks, security became paramount. The House passed a bill that would leave INS services in the Justice Department and move enforcement to the new Homeland Security Department, which would also include Customs, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration.

Since then, the administration and Congress worried that splitting INS functions might weaken enforcement and dry up funding for services. The current administration-backed bill, filed by Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and co-sponsors, would move the whole agency into Homeland Security. A competing bill, filed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., also would move the entire agency into Homeland Security, while reorganizing it to improve chains of command and protections for children.

Immigrant advocate Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, fears that the INS and its ability to serve millions of newcomers will get lost in Homeland Security.

"It's a disaster, a disaster that will only be made a mega-disaster if thrown into a big transportation division of Homeland Security," Kelley says. She wants to see services gain clout as a separate Homeland Security division.

Many fear the move to Homeland Security will further erode customer service. INS inspectors, who once raced to process planeloads of visitors within a mandated 45 minutes, now take the time to more closely screen foreigners.

"There will always be a tension between customer service and security," says Chuck Murphy, president of the National Immigration & Naturalization Service Council. "And in every case, my view would be customer service be damned. Slow it down. Make sure that anyone you're letting in deserves to be let in."

Yet the most controversial legislative issue is whether to retain union representation in the Homeland Security agency. Almost three-quarters of INS workers belong to unions.

Lieberman would retain those workers' union rights, except when doing so in individual cases would jeopardize national security. The administration wants authority to exclude unions, arguing that the president needs maximum flexibility as he manages the new agency.

Congress will also debate whether employees should retain civil-service privileges and whistle-blowing protections.

Bush threatens to veto legislation that protects union membership. Other big national unions are jumping into the debate, which threatens to overshadow security and immigration issues.

Lieberman characterizes the union fray as an unfortunate distraction. Murphy, the INS union president, says the union issue may undermine the administration's Homeland Security goals.

"If people think there is hemorrhaging out of INS now," Murphy says, "wait until they see what happens if the Congress passes legislation that eliminates unions."

Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com. Julie Sullivan: 503-221-8068; juliesullivan@news.oregonian.com. Staff writer Kim Christensen and researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.