Merger urged to correct ICE woes

A growing number of disgruntled U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — concerned about mismanagement, financial problems and low morale — say ICE should be merged into a sister agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), to ensure its ability to fight terrorism.

“As a longtime ICE employee and legacy Customs special agent, I wonder when we will see changes. We can’t continue in our current state, or we will implode,” said a former U.S. Customs Service agent assigned to ICE when the agency was created in March 2003 as a part of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Every week, senior agents are retiring. No one wants anything to do with ICE,” said an agency supervisor who heads an ICE field office. “This is a huge debacle for the national security of the country.”

Another veteran agent, noting what he called a lack of a clearly defined mission, said: “Most of the people I talk with have a defeatist attitude — that the train is not just derailed, but the track and track bed has been removed, and nothing can be done to fix it.”

Those comments, by the agents who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, were similar to others expressed during interviews with ICE employees from New York to California.

As the Homeland Security Department approaches its second anniversary, officials inside the department and congressional investigators said preliminary discussions have taken place on a merger of ICE and Customs and Border Protection, or the assignment of ICE as a separate Office of Investigations within CBP.

Those discussions coincide with the release this month of a report by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies that urged a “significant reorganization” of Homeland Security to consolidate and strengthen agencies with overlapping missions.

The report specifically recommended that CBP and ICE be merged.

“Merging CBP and ICE will bring together under one roof all of the tools of effective border and immigration enforcement — inspectors, Border Patrol agents, special agents, detention and removal officers and intelligence analysts — and realize the objective of creating a single border and immigration enforcement agency,” the report said.

“The split of responsibilities between the CBP and ICE was done without a compelling reason, other than the vague and ultimately incorrect descriptive notion that CBP would handle border enforcement and ICE would handle interior enforcement,” it said. “Indeed, in various interviews, not one person has been able to coherently argue why the CBP and ICE were created as separate operational agencies.”

The report said the decision to put CBP and ICE into separate agencies could be compared to a move by the New York Police Department to house its uniformed “beat cops” in one agency and its detectives in another.

Tasia Scolinos, Homeland Security’s deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said there are “no discussions under way” regarding a change in the structure of the department’s border agencies.

She said Congress created Homeland Security’s existing structure “to allow for focus and expertise within key areas, and we remain supportive of that concept.”

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia, who heads ICE, said that while there have been budgetary and organizational challenges in creating an agency with 15,000 employees and that he was aware of “anxiety in the field,” ICE has been “very successful” during its 19-month existence.

Mr. Garcia described the agency as “an incredibly powerful tool” in the war on terrorism, immigration enforcement, alien and drug smuggling, and financial crimes.

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