Immigration agency seeks to beef up financial investigations

The Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Bureau's financial investigations program has successfully integrated legacy personnel, and plans to hire additional agents, a senior official said Tuesday.

ICE launched the Cornerstone program a year ago this month to target alternative financing mechanisms that terrorist and criminal organizations use to earn, move and store money. The initiative has 400 agents working at 27 field offices around the country.

While the program is meeting its current mission, ICE plans to add more agents in the future, said Marcy Forman, the agency's director of investigations, at a forum in Washington.

"Everybody can always use more [agents], but I think we have enough right now to address the threats that we're identifying," Forman said, adding that "as more and more time goes on, more and more agents will be trained to assume money laundering investigations." She did not know how many additional agents would be hired.

"A key component in our training academy is Cornerstone and money laundering," Forman added. "Any time a new recruit comes in, they are trained in the money-laundering aspects of the various authorities [we have], as well as Cornerstone."

The program has successfully integrated personnel from the now defunct Customs Service and the Immigrations and Naturalization Service, said Forman, who was previously with Customs.

"Any agent, whether they are legacy Customs or legacy INS or from another agency, takes a period of time to learn these methods on how to detect and then follow the money," she said.

ICE Assistant Secretary Michael Garcia acknowledged, however, that his bureau faces constraints. The Washington Times reported Tuesday that ICE has 18 fugitive teams consisting of about 200 officers trying to track down and arrest about 400,000 criminal aliens and absconders.

"We have limited resources," Garcia said during the forum. "What we have to do, like every force and agency has to do, is prioritize how we use them. I think we've done a good job at that."

The Government Accountability Office concluded in a November 2003 report that government agencies should investigate how terrorists might use alternative financing schemes.

"Terrorists earn assets through illicit trade in myriad commodities, such as drugs, weapons, cigarettes and systems, such as charities, owing to their profitability," GAO said. "Like other criminals, terrorists can trade any commodity in an illegal fashion, as evidenced by their reported involvement in trading a variety of counterfeit goods."

Forman said Cornerstone has uncovered activities by criminal organizations, but officials don't know whether it has disrupted terrorist plots.

"We believe we may have choked funds that may have been destined for terrorists or terrorist acts from leaving the country," she said. "We've identified methods and means of these various financial systems, to include charities and nongovernmental organizations, that we believe were facilitators of funds destined to terrorists."

She said agents are investigating transactions within the United States that are suspected of financing terrorism, but nothing definite has been confirmed.

"As long as we know there's an illegal act involved," she said, "we'll just choke off the funds and then work the investigation from there to determine what the use of those funds was supposed to be for."