Border Wars

Same border (with Mexico), different war. This time, it’s a turf war over which Homeland Security agency should be charged with investigating corruption among our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers: CBP’s internal affairs or Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office? The inspector general clearly doesn’t trust the CBP with policing its own. A directive written in 2009 from the Thomas M. Frost, an assistant inspector general, to the CBP’s James F. Tomsheck, the CBP assistant commissioner for internal affairs, was incredibly less than subtle: “I direct that as of this date, your office cease criminal investigation of any matter involving a DHS program or employee.” Reported in the Washington Post, June 8^th. Insert dramatic music.

The turf war is alive and well in 2011, and a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee is holding hearings to find out what’s going on. “Charles K. Edwards, the DHS acting inspector general, plans to tell the hearing that the internal affairs office has a ‘crucial complementary role’ to the inspector general’s criminal investigative function. That complementary role includes pre-employment investigations of applicants. But it is his office, he says in prepared testimony, that has ‘the authority and responsibility within DHS for investigating allegations’ of corruption… Friction between the two agencies remains, with the inspector general’s office complaining that the internal affairs office continues to conduct criminal investigations of DHS employees even though it lacks the legal authority to d o so.” The Post. Doesn’t Edwards’ statement beg you to read between the lines?

The stakes are high, and it’s not primarily about illegal immigration or al Qaeda infiltration. It’s about powerful Mexican drug cartels getting their products over the border and into the American market, which has been and remains a seemingly insolvable issue for this country. The cartels have untold fortunes these days, and the trivial cost of bribing those charged with guarding our borders given the value of the flow is of little disruption to these criminals. They have tons of narcotics, boatloads of money and millions of Americans ready to buy across the border. The power of these cartels is most certainly emphasized in the lack of trust between two investigative units of the same governmental agency. I wonder if CBP’s managers have any concern over possible bribes to folks in the IG’s office?

While clearly, most CBP officers are doing their jobs, it doesn’t take too many security breaches to open that vast 1,969 mile border with Mexico. Investigating and prosecuting CBP corruption is a substantial endeavor: “The DHS inspector general’s office has 267 active investigations of CBP employees who have been accused or suspected of corruption. This represents 44 percent of the office’s investigations of CBP staff members and is, by far, the largest category.

“Since October 2004, 127 CBP officers have been arrested or indicted on corruption charges. Just last month, former Border Patrol agent Yamilkar Fierros of Tucson was sentenced to 20 months in prison for taking $3,000 from a suspected drug dealer in exchange for a list of 109 Border Patrol sensor locations in the Sonoita, Ariz., area. He also was indicted for accepting $1,000 in return for a sensitive law enforcement map and $1,500 to help a dealer move a load of drugs to Tucson... Last year, a CBP technician named Martha Garnica was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges that included bribery, conspiracy to import 100 kilograms of marijuana and conspiracy to smuggle in people.” The Post.

History is a funny teacher, but I seem to remember the United States sending troops and ships to China to aid our allies in the middle of the 19^th century, pulling away only because those military assets were needed back home in our own Civil War. We were on the side of the British who were using force to open China to foreign trade. The issue? England was importing tea in such volumes that her trade balance was severely negatively impacted. Hmmmm…. Sounds a bit like the trade imbalance with China today. And damned China was trying to ban the one product that Britain had that was capable of generating any demand from Chinese consumers: opium. Silly Chinese said they didn’t like unproductive addicts lying around, slowly dying, stealing to get money for the drug.

Drug-issues consume the vast majority of our criminal investigations and prosecutions, and some aspect of the drug trade is present in over half of our criminal convictions. Murder, mayhem and ultra-violence in Mexico as cartels protect their trade routes has spilled onto our side of the border, and Americans are making a bundle smuggling illegal arms down south to fuel the fire. We spend billions on enforcement and are getting nothing back in the way of taxes. There are increasing calls to legalize the drug trade, and “medical marijuana” appears to be the tip of the growing pressure to move this activity from government prohibition and enforcement to government control and taxation. In these impaired economic times, shouldn’t we be considering this tact more seriously? Remember Prohibition?

International forces, particularly in Mexico, are beginning to clamor for a change: “Former Mexican president Vicente Fox, who has watched a national drug war claim 28,000 lives in less than four years under his successor, Felipe Calderón, says that ‘radical prohibition strategies have never worked.’… Fox, a member of the same conservative National Action Party as Calderón, was president between 2000 and 2006 and was a staunch U.S. ally in the war against drugs. But he says he now favors legalizing drugs… ‘Legalization does not mean that drugs are good,’ he wrote in an Internet posting, according to Reuters, ‘but we have to see [legalization of the production, sale, and distribution of drugs] as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits.’” Newsweek, August 10, 2010. “We must legalize the production, distribution, and sale of drugs,” said U.S.-educated Fox in his blog last year. There are no good solutions to this problem, but whatever we are doing now is a colossal failure.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really do need to rethink our narcotics policies from the ground up.