By A.W. Morgan
10/25/2011
With the Obama administration crowing about all the illegal aliens it has deported (no more than Bush but don’t expect the Main Stream Media to look past the press release), the average American unschooled on immigration must think those uniformed sentinels on the Southwestern frontier work day and night to keep out the riff-raff.
But alas, the Los Angeles Times, in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berserkley, has revealed that such isn’t the case. Rather, the team reports, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has quite a problem with corruption.
Since 2004, no less than 132 of its 58, 000 employees have been nailed on corruption charges. And by that we don’t mean snatching a few pesos from the petty cash account, or wangling a free tortilla from the corner bodega in return for not deporting the owners and half their cousins.
The problem: The agency has hired so many agents so quickly it cannot perform thorough background checks to ensure they haven’t hired members of the Juárez Cartel. And so the agency has, in fact, hired drug smugglers.
But let’s permit the LAT to open the story with an almost comical first few paragraphs:
“When Luis Alarid was a child, his mother would seat him in the car while she smuggled people and drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. She was the sweet-talking commuter, he was her cute boy, and the mother-son ploy regularly kept customs inspectors from peeking inside the trunk.
Twenty-five years later, Alarid was back at the border in San Diego, seeking a job as a customs inspector. To get hired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, he first needed to clear screening that examined his personal, financial and work histories.
Alarid had served in the Marines and Army, which was a factor in his favor. But there was cause for concern: His finances were in shambles, including $30,000 in credit card debt. His mother, father and other relatives had been convicted of or indicted on charges of smuggling.
After the background check and an interview, Alarid was cleared for a border posting.
Within months, he turned his government job into a lucrative criminal enterprise. In cahoots with a gang that included his uncle and, allegedly, his mother, Alarid let cars into California filled with drugs and illegal immigrants.
‘I was inside now, going around understanding how things work,’ Alarid said in a telephone interview from federal prison in Kentucky, where he is serving a seven-year sentence for corruption. “[Links added]
Border agency’s rapid growth accompanied by rise in corruption, By Andrew Becker and Richard Marosi, October 16, 2011
But Alarid isn’t the worst of it. Another character in the comedy is John Paul Yanez-Camacho, “a former law enforcement officer from the Mexican state of Chihuahua and a manager of a nightclub in Ciudad Juarez owned by a suspected drug trafficker when he applied in 2003 to be an inspector.”
The LAT did not reveal whether Yanez-Camacho is a naturalized citizen, and barring that, how a man who appears to be a Mexican citizen landed a job with the federal government. Nor does the report explain why no one at the agency seems to have thought it strange that a Mexican cop wanted to catch Mexicans crossing the border.
Anyway, here’s the rest:
“Two years after being hired, Yanez-Camacho started accessing a sensitive law enforcement database without authorization. From 2005 to 2006, he did so more than 250 times, often trying to get information about law enforcement investigations involving the suspected drug trafficker, according to his plea agreement.
“Authorities suspected that Yanez-Camacho was passing along confidential information, but his motives remain a mystery. ‘He can’t explain how he did that, why he did that and why he compromised his situation at the port of entry,’ Assistant U.S. Atty. Ed Weiner said at a court hearing in 2009 at which Yanez-Camacho was sentenced to probation for the misdemeanor violation.
“Agents who are longtime border residents are often more susceptible to corruption because they often inherit networks of family members involved with organized crime, Customs officials say.
“Former Border Patrol agent Salomon Ruiz, convicted of corruption in 2009, had uncles who were longtime smugglers in the McAllen, Texas, area, and his father had been deported to Mexico for drug trafficking. Jesus Huizar, a Border Patrol agent convicted in 2008, partnered with his wife’s uncle, a known trafficker, in a human-smuggling scheme in El Paso.”
By now the picture is clear. It didn’t much matter who your uncle or father was … you could work for the Customs and Border Patrol.
And just how much criminality and corruption was there? According to the story,
“132 Customs employees have been indicted or convicted on corruption-related charges, the majority from the Southwest border. Since 2006, the number of investigations has more than tripled, from 244 to about 870 last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General.”
According to a graphic provided by CFIR, those corrupt employees, or at least the 128 featured at its website, committed 212 offenses. Forty-five offenses involved drug smuggling. Second on the list of crimes was bribery, with 35 offenses, and then, naturally enough, comes “human smuggling” at 32 offenses. False statements (12), document fraud (9) and money laundering (6) are also among the offenses.
Almost all the corruption cases are in Texas (44), California (22) and Arizona (19), with nine in Florida. Seventy-six of 124 of the cases CFIR uncovered occurred between 2008 and 2011, and 47 of those 76 occurred since 2009; i.e., during the Obama Administration.
All very interesting. But reporters Becker and Marosi left out one significant fact that is obvious from the mug shots of the guilty: At least 60 percent of them are Hispanic, judging from the surnames that appear when one rolls over the photos with his cursor on the CFIR website. (Click on the screenshot to go there.)
Granted, the gallery of crime features the occasional black fellow and an Arab or two; even a cat named Walter Golembiowski.
But at least 80 and perhaps as many as 85 of the 128 perps at CFIR’s website are obviously Hispanic. So as many as 66 percent of the culprits have something, one big thing, in common. The CFIR provides lists organized by State, Gender, Agency, Years of service, Type of crime, Year, Age, and Duty station, but not national origin or ethnicity.
To their credit, Becker and Marosi did not highlight Golembiowski, Wanda Hopkins, Kirk Washington or Natan Ben-Shabat.
Rather, they highlighted the men they should have: Alarid, Ruiz, Huizar and Yanez-Camacho. The faces are mostly brown; the names are mostly Hispanic.
Naturally, those reporters did not draw the obvious conclusion one might draw from this profile of corruption. They know what that conclusion is, of course, but would never permit themselves to entertain it, much less put it in writing.
So we at VDARE.com will: importing immigrants from a country where corruption and crime suffuse the culture inevitably means a concomitant increase in corruption and crime where the immigrants live and work.
And that includes the Border Patrol.
Amusingly, the LAT story quoted Alarid, who “wonders how he got the job. ‘If I was a background investigator, I wouldn’t have hired me,’ he said.”
A further obvious question: how many of these Hispanics would have landed jobs anyway, regardless of a background check — precisely because they are Hispanic, as part of the Obama Administration’s intensified drive to turn the civil service into a race-based spoils system.
Would the agency have rejected Alarid because his mother is a criminal?
Would the agency have rejected Ruiz because of his father and uncles?
We’ll report. You decide.
A.W. Morgan is fully recovered from prolonged contact with the Beltway Right. He now lives in America.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.