On Edge

sked about President Bush's proposal to create a new Homeland Security Department, a longtime employee of the Immigration and Naturalization Service feels confident speaking for agency veterans: "We'll believe it when we see it," he says.

Washington policy-makers-from the White House to Capitol Hill-have been trying to restructure the INS since at least the Truman days. Almost everyone believes that the INS' split mission-keeping illegal aliens out of the country while granting visas, green cards, and citizenship to legal ones-has resulted in poor performance on both fronts. But for years, proposals for reform have faltered because no one can agree on the agency's fundamental goals. Should it enforce border control, as many conservatives argue, or should it allow for greater immigration, as many businesses, minority groups, and, increasingly, unions believe?

With President Bush's proposal to move the INS from the Justice Department to a new Homeland Security Department, the issue of INS restructuring has become even more perplexing, especially for the agency's employees. Those on the front lines-inspectors, adjudicators, border patrol agents, interior investigators-are quick to complain that the agency lacks clear goals and is poorly managed. For the most part, they support restructuring. But they aren't convinced that the Bush proposal will correct the agency's management ills or resolve the debate over its primary purpose. Moreover, they aren't even sure that the Bush team believes in its own proposal. Bush, they point out, has now backed three different restructuring plans within the course of nine months.

It would be nice to think that "the folks in power had a pretty good idea of how everything would turn out when the dust settled. [But] I have no such assumption in this situation, " says an INS public affairs officer. The confusion has been unsettling for the agency's employees, adds Mark Reed, a recently retired regional director. "Employees are asking: 'Where are we going? How do we fit in? What needs to be done next?'" Reed says policy-makers need to answer these questions, and quickly. "There's a real danger of INS staff losing focus on the work by getting consumed by restructuring. It's been hanging over the INS' head for too long," he says.

Representatives of organizations that work with the INS say they are just as confused as everyone else. "I talk with people on the Hill every day and nobody knows anything," says Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group that favors looser restrictions on immigration. "It's like watching a tennis match and trying to follow the ball as it goes back and forth. [Policy-makers] are trying to tie all the proposals together in a neat little package, but it's hard to swallow."

Indeed, before Sept. 11, President Bush was moving to allow more immigration. He was planning to let more Mexican workers enter the country on temporary visas and to give amnesty to those already living here. He appointed Senate Sergeant at Arms and former Wall Street businessman James Ziglar as INS commissioner, and Stuart Anderson, staff director for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, to the top policy planning position at the agency. Neither favored a tougher stance on illegal immigration.

But Sept. 11 threw a wrench into that plan, and the INS suddenly became an enforcement agency again. Agents were called to airports, borders were locked down, hundreds of Muslims were detained on immigration charges. In November, Ziglar announced his own restructuring plan, one that would shut down district and regional offices and separate the agency's service and enforcement personnel while keeping them under one roof. "There is no debate about whether or not to reform the INS," Ziglar told a House Government Reform subcommittee in December.

So agency employees were surprised on April 24, when Bush and Ziglar endorsed legislation, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., that went beyond the Ziglar's reorganization and called for splitting the INS into two separate agencies, one for immigration services, one for enforcement. The bill passed the House the next day, 405-9.

When Bush then proposed the creation of a new Homeland Security Department in early June and Ziglar announced that the creation of the department would supersede all previous restructuring plans, agency veterans say their heads began to spin.

But INS employees in field offices across the country were more skeptical. "There's a huge amount of anxiety," says Linda Church, an INS attorney in Florida and head of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 511, "I guess they have a plan to overhaul the agency, but there doesn't seem to really be a plan to do it." Sorely missing, she says, are the details.

A MISSION AT LAST?

INS employees are demoralized. In interviews with two dozen agency veterans, nearly all said that morale is at an all-time low. Representatives of the three INS unions-the National Immigration and Naturalization Service Council, the National Border Patrol Council and Local 511, all of AFGE-are worried that the Bush administration may soon bar collective bargaining at the agency by asserting that the INS has a vital role in the homeland security effort. Employees aren't thrilled, either, about the beating they've taken in the news media. But they direct most of their ire at Congress, which they say has failed for years to come to a consensus about the agency's mission. As a result, they say, the agency has had to struggle to meet goals and to manage for results.

"Congress is the main cause of problems within the agency," complains San Diego detention officer Randy Callahan, the Western Region vice president of the National INS Council, which represents a range of workers, including adjudicators, asylum officers, clerical employees, deportation and detention officers, and immigration inspectors. He said that the service side of the agency-which grants immigration benefits such as green cards, work and student visas, and naturalization-has long faced unfunded mandates and confusing new laws. Of the enforcement side-which is responsible for catching illegal immigrants at the border and in the interior-he says, "Congressional leaders may state publicly that they want the agency to remove all illegal immigrants in the U.S., only to privately send a letter to the commissioner asking him to grant a waiver for the family of a constituent. The INS is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't do its job."

That double jeopardy has an impact on how employees view their jobs. Border Patrol agents are leaving in droves, boosting the turnover rate this year to more than 20 percent. Many have left to become air marshals at the new Transportation Security Administration. They complain loudly of low pay-agents start at the GS-5 level, making $22,000 a year. About one-third of them get the maximum, $52,000. Federal air marshals, by contrast, start at $35,000 and max out at $80,000. A proposal sponsored by Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would boost pay for some Border Patrol agents, and Ziglar has said he supports higher wages.

But most Border Patrol agents say their primary gripe is with agency managers over enforcement protocols on the border. "When you have the commissioner saying that he doesn't support the removal of all illegal aliens in the United States-a view that's contrary to law-agents in the field who are risking their lives every day are asking why it's worthwhile," explains Montana Border Patrol agent and National Border Patrol Council Vice President Jerome Pawluck. Agents say they are routinely routed away from areas where they believe large numbers of immigrants are crossing the border. Agents are told to "sit on an X," Pawluck says, and not to move, even if they see immigrants crossing the border just outside their assigned areas. Agents are told not to chase cars they believe are smuggling immigrants. "The rules change depending on the political climate," he says. Pawluck dismisses Operation Gatekeeper-a massive infusion of resources that has tripled the size of the Border Patrol in the last 10 years, and outfitted it with millions of dollars' worth of high-tech equipment-as a political nod to anti-immigrant constituencies.

Interior investigators-charged with rounding up illegal immigrants deep inside U.S. borders-express similar dismay about management support for their efforts. The head of investigations for one state said his team has received no new resources and has been forced to leave 15 percent of its open positions unfilled for the last three years. The "interior enforcement structure at INS is the only agency in the country that pursues undesirable aliens in the interior, such as terrorists," he says. "How can an agency with such an important role and mission be directed at a level of 85 percent? The reason is that most field management is not law enforcement and they never agreed with nor saw the need for an enhanced law enforcement presence."

Gripes about INS service personnel hogging top leadership positions are common among investigators and Border Patrol agents, but the service side has its own set of beefs. Service staffers complain that Congress repeatedly has passed legislation that adds to the service side's workload, but rarely considers the extra resources the agency needs to keep up with applications for immigration benefits.

"Over the last decade, we are seeing record levels of legislation," says Bill Yates, deputy executive associate commissioner for Immigration Services. "In 2000, we had the LIFE [Legal Immigration Family Equity] Act [which allowed certain illegal immigrants to apply for amnesty]. We had the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act dealing with H1B visas [work visas granted to high-tech workers]. There were refugee adjustment programs. Every year we have this. We are always playing catch-up. A law is passed. A million more applications come in. It's an absurd kind of situation."

Today, the number of pending immigration benefits applications is about 5 million, an increase of more than 1 million from a year ago. And one INS veteran expressed concern that the INS system for performance measurement creates an incentive for service side personnel to do less than thorough work, hurting the agency's efforts to combat fraud. "If I told you that you had to do an interview every 15 minutes and complete so many a day in order to get a satisfactory rating, then you wouldn't want to deny too many applications," he explained. "You can approve one with a stroke of a pen, but to deny one means typing up a denial decision."

Thomas Fischer, the former head of the Atlanta district office, says he views the Homeland Security proposal as "a joke" because it doesn't do anything to set better performance measurement standards. "Does this plan mean that in six months we will see significant improvement [in setting and meeting goals]?" he asked. "They don't know. The plan isn't connected to results. To be meaningful it's got to be measurable."

Will a New Department Work?

INS employees are a cynical lot. Their agency is rife with turf wars. Enforcement personnel vie with the service side for money and influence. Districts compete against each other for credit on investigations. Meanwhile, entry- and mid-level personnel gripe about their superiors. Field staffers grumble about Washington leaders. In addition, the agency has struggled for years to bring its computer systems up to date, and to keep track of and repair its capital assets. It lacks detention space for illegal aliens and the personnel to track immigrants in the interior.

"The INS faces significant challenges in assembling the basic building blocks of good management," says Richard Stana, the director of Justice issues at the General Accounting Office. Stana, who has examined the agency's management in several reports for Congress, says the INS lacks clear responsibilities, procedures to balance competing priorities, mechanisms to boost internal and external communication, and basic computer systems to manage its enforcement and service responsibilities. "These are basic building blocks that don't automatically get fixed [when] the boxes on the organizational chart get moved around," he says.

And T.J. Bonner, a San Diego Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council, believes a new department will not cure the agency's ills. "Any new organization will bring a lot of confusion and chaos and turf battles," he says. "It takes time for this sort of change to take hold."

'Bastard Child'

On the service side, employees wonder whether a Homeland Security Department would take their work seriously. The service side "looks like the bastard child in all this," says INS attorney Church. "They are going to be very challenged to maintain some autonomy and integrity" in a homeland security agency. Church says she and her colleagues are in a particularly difficult spot, because agency lawyers work with both sides of the house. She says that even if the new department lent a degree of clout to INS enforcement personnel, "we are years and years behind the curve. There's no detention space. We need to hire deportation officers, investigators, allow for faster hearings." Meanwhile, Sen. Feinstein, who chairs the Judiciary Committee's Technology, Terrorism and Government Information

Subcommittee, said in June that she would not support inclusion of the service side in the new agency.

Church also worries that her relationship with the immigration courts-which will remain part of the Justice Department under the Bush plan-will be damaged. "It may lead to a sense that we are the bad people at Homeland [Security]. The current relationship is very respectful. We have a lot of candor with the court, but this might make the court view us more adversarially." Kelley, at the National Immigration Forum, adds: "If the immigration judges and the board of immigration appeals are divorced from the INS, they'll have no ties to the cases and no understanding of the policies behind them."

The Perfect Storm

More than anything else, people who are concerned about the INS-both its employees and the organizations that work with the agency-say they are confused and thirsting for information. The INS public affairs officer says the Bush administration has told the agency's leaders not to give interviews on the plan, and to direct all calls to the White House. Top officials who have spoken to Government Executive in the past-such as Ziglar; George Bohlinger, executive associate commissioner for management; Joe Greene, deputy associate commissioner for Enforcement; and Richard Cravener, director of restructuring-did not return phone calls or said they could not comment.

INS employees in the field say they have not fared much better in gathering information from headquarters about what the Bush plan will mean for them. "The analogy that I personally prefer is 'The Perfect Storm,'" said the longtime public affairs officer. "We have three storms coming together [the internal restructuring plan, the House-passed legislation and pending Senate bill, and now the Homeland Security Department proposal]. Any discussion of what will happen to INS in this maelstrom would be pure speculation. In other words, your guess is as good as mine."