Lisa Rein reports for the Washington Post:
“President Trump’s plan for an aggressive hiring surge of 15,000 Border Patrol and immigration personnel to help keep out undocumented immigrants is unrealistic — and the Department of Homeland Security has not made a case for it, the agency’s watchdog says.
A report released this week by the DHS inspector general concludes that based on its rigorous screening requirement for law enforcement jobs and the relatively high rate of attrition among Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security would have to vet 750,000 applicants to find 5,000 qualified personnel.
In addition, to hire the 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents the president called for in executive orders he issued in his first days in office, a pool of 500,000 candidates would need to apply, auditors found.
The report calls into question whether DHS officials even need 15,000 new hires to target undocumented immigrants. Agency leaders have done such poor planning for what their workforce should look like, with an understaffed, poorly trained human resources operation, that they cannot justify thousands of new employees, the report says.
“Neither [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] nor [ICE] could provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional 15,000 agents and officers,” the report by the office of Inspector General John Roth said.
[Read the inspector general’s report here]
DHS officials told auditors that they are still three to four years from getting a system in place that will be able to tell them how many new personnel they need and where to deploy them.
“Without comprehensive staffing models, operational needs analyses, and deployment strategies, CBP and ICE will not be able to identify clearly the correct number and type of employees required, what positions must be filled, or where to deploy those employees,” the report said.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to vastly beef up enforcement against undocumented immigrants with a new border wall, a surge in agents to help seal off the Southwest border with Mexico and a “deportation force” to arrest people in the country illegally. The 15,000 new front-line employees would come with almost 9,600 more technical and support staff, the report said.”
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Read Rein’s complete article and get a link to the IG’s report at the above link.
More fraud, waste, and abuse from the “Fraudster In Chief.” For a fraction of the money Trump & Co propose to squander, we could build a first-class U.S. Immigration Court system that would be a model of due process and fairness and would contribute much more to fair, efficient, and effective enforcement of the immigration laws.
PWS
08-03-17