Former INS Commissioner James Ziglar Sr. said the Bush administration’s focus on anti-terror might shortchange citizens’ rights due to the fact that officials fear being blamed for another major terrorist attack. Ziglar retired on November 30, 2002, after losing support when an INS contractor mailed student-visa approval receipts for two of the September 11 hijackers six months after the attacks.

In a speech given last weekend at the inaugural membership meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., Ziglar criticized the power of the government to intervene in the lives of Americans.

“The overwhelming means that the government has at its disposal today to invade and intimidate suggests to me that we must be even more vigilant in deterring government overreaching,” he said.

Ziglar said Americans need to unite in defending liberties against government abuse. He compared himself to Barry Goldwater in his speech, quoting Goldwater’s conception of freedom: “[It] depends on effective restraints against the accumulation of power in a single authority.”

He argued that those who try to convince the American people to give up some of their liberties in order to ensure national security are “well-meaning, but misguided.” 

Ziglar said that the FBI should be made into an independent institution, like the CIA, thereby avoiding abuses of power by the Justice Department. He argued that the Department of Justice as a whole needs to be restructured, suggesting the government narrow the “scope of the department’s mission to prosecuting crime and protecting the rights and liberties of all Americans.”

“Some vintage Americans seem to be ambivalent, or perhaps schizophrenic is a better term, about recently arrived immigrants and immigration in general,” he said. “The pessimists among us want to judge all immigrants by the actions of terrorists.”

“Immigrants formed this nation out of a desire for independence and freedom; immigrants have built this nation and enriched its culture and strengthened its resolve to remain free; and it will be the immigrant of the future that will renew and refresh that spirit,” he said.

Ziglar said he was glad that the government was taking the threat of terrorism seriously and has restructured with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in order to protect the country.

“However, there are other values that must be protected in our society and other laws must be enforced in order to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” he said.