Melting ICE

As it turns out, my old SRT DID eventually make it to New Orleans, but minus 3 experienced team members from CBP. Once they get back to San Diego, I will publish an update about how they were utilized. That is if anybody on the Team will talk to me now. Even in primitive NOLA, my post on ICE HQ’s completely asinine and gutless leadership was printed out and distributed to the guys and certainly the San Diego SAC office as well. Bureaucracy feels it’s weakest and most defensive when the bright light of sanity and common sense are brought to bear on the institutional paralysis and political obstinacy that it spends much of its time trying to conceal. This is a fancy way of saying that ICE HQ read that post and didn’t like seeing its CYA shell game knocked off the table. Sorry.

But it’s about to get even worse for ICE. It was bad enough for Customs Investigations when they were put beneath caretaker INS Chief Michael Garcia when ICE was created. When James Ziglar resigned after sending Mohammed Atta a visa renewal in the mail six months after he dropped the WTC, Garcia was tapped to act in his stead until a new INS Commissioner could be nominated. Lo and behold, the abortion called the Department of Homeland Security survived the womb, and Mr. Garcia won the lotto by getting moved over to be the first chief of ICE. Garcia oversaw the devolution of a once great investigative agency by allowing the publicity hungry FBI to takeover terrorism investigations and seizure proceeds, turning away from contraband investigations in favor of illegal alien child porn cases, and the inevitable weight of incompetence brought over by the presence of barely literate INS Investigators that haven’t produced a decent case since the beginning of time.

Now, in the wake of legitimate criticism of DHS for Hurricane Katrina and the firing of Michael Brown of FEMA, the President has foolishly nominated a well connected creampuff to finish the job of destroying ICE that Garcia had so ably begun. Julie Myers is the 36 year old niece of General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently married to DHS Secretary Chertoff’s Chief of Staff, John F. Wood. I’m not kidding, she’s a true trifecta of affirmative action, nepotism, and cronyism. Her law enforcement experience amounts to basically 2 years as an Assistant US Attorney, and two years as the head of the BXA which enforces export regulations in the same way that Customs used to enforce importation of contraband. BXA is one of those tiny boutique federal law enforcement agencies that has a nationwide presence smaller that the ICE San Diego SAC office.

Michelle Malkin is all over this story and has some representative emails from current ICE employees that pretty much sum up their thoughts on hiring a snot nosed, 30something. Her law enforcement experience is insufficient to make her a viable Field Training Officer for junior Special Agents let alone the chief executive of a 25,000 person agency that purportedly is the lead investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. At a minimum, this appointment is a political disaster in the making if AQ is able to hit our homeland again. More importantly, the nation and the employees of ICE deserve someone with serious experience and leadership ability to take the reins, not another political hack checking blocks on the way to a cabinet post in future Republican administrations. I can only hope that the Senate will save the President’s and our bacon on this one, but I’m not optimistic.