An Ignoble Experiment

2. Divisive Mayorkas nomination advances in Senate

For the first time, the Homeland Security Department has achieved a clean audit opinion on all its financial statements, the department announced Dec. 12.

The office of inspector general called (.pdf) it "a significant milestone" for the department.

Rafael Borras, the acting deputy secretary at DHS, said in a blog post that the preparations for the audit included many of the components of DHS "cataloguing material that existed long before we were one Department." Officials had to integrate the practices of the department's 22 agencies, he said.

The accounting firm KPMG, which performed the audit, did find a number of internal control weaknesses related to financial reporting, grants management and other areas.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, praised the department in a statement. "Given the size of the department, the fact that it encompasses 22 separate agencies, and the scope and importance of its mission, producing a clean financial audit is no small task," he said.

For more:
- download the report, OIG-14-18 (.pdf)

Read more about: Rafael Borras, Tom Carper
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By Zach Rausnitz

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3. Some Coast Guard performance goals impossible in declining budget, says Currier

The nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas for deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department advanced to the full Senate after a party-line vote Dec. 11 in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The committee's Republicans all voted "present" and had boycotted the confirmation hearing held in July for Mayorkas, currently the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Mayorkas is the subject of a DHS office of inspector general investigation into allegations that he helped Terry McAuliffe--now the governor-elect of Virginia--obtain EB-5 investor visas from USCIS. He and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the committee chairman, both said they learned of the investigation days before the July hearing, and only after word of its existence leaked to Congress.

Before members voted on the nomination Wednesday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the ranking member, said the vote should be delayed until investigators release their findings. Coburn said he was not blindly obstructing the process, noting that he has supported nearly all of President Obama's nominees that the committee has considered this year.

To approve Mayorkas now would violate a well-established precedent for how the Senate handles nominees under investigation, he said. He also argued that Mayorkas will suffer a shortage of credibility and trust in his new role if he takes it on before his name is cleared.

Additionally, Coburn said, approving Mayorkas would send a message to OIGs that lawmakers do not take their investigations seriously.

Carper said the OIG's investigation has taken too long. It first received the allegations regarding Mayorkas in September 2012, but took nearly a year to begin the investigation, Carper said, and it remains months from completion. He said the OIG has so far found no evidence of criminal misconduct.

The position of deputy secretary has been vacant since May, when Jane Holl Lute left DHS. The department has also had an acting secretary since Janet Napolitano left in September.

"In a perfect world, I would prefer to have the OIG complete its report on the allegations" before voting on Mayorkas, Carper said. "The Department of Homeland Security is in dire need of Senate-confirmed leadership."

Carper also said his staff have tried to meet with the whistleblowers who made the allegations against Mayorkas but have not been given an opportunity, even though the whistleblowers did meet with the committee's minority staff. The minority staff have not shared what they know with their majority counterparts, he added.

Coburn said whistleblowers may prefer not to meet with Carper's staff because his actions "suggest the chairman has made up his mind."

Carper's approach to the nomination "does not suggest to potential witnesses of wrongdoing that their information will be received with willingness, interest or discretion," Coburn said.

For more:
- go to the meeting webpage (webcast available)

Read more about: Tom Coburn, USCIS
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By David Perera

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4. Deportees report abuse, theft in U.S. custody

Some Coast Guard annual mission performance goals are "virtually impossible" to meet given the service's declining budget, a high-ranking Coast Guard official told a House panel.

The metrics for those goals--which measure program performance, such as the interdiction rate of drugs or migrants--were "made on an assumption that you were funded at a higher level," said Vice Adm. John Currier. He testified before a Dec. 11 hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee on the Coast Guard and maritime transportation.

"When you're in a declining level of funding, then that biases your ability to achieve the performance goals, because they made an assumption that you were funded at a higher level. That's a kind of trick that happens, that we do to ourselves," he told the committee.

Of the 23 performance measures the Coast Guard uses to measure execution of its 11 statutory missions, the Coast Guard did not meet 12 of them in fiscal 2012. On paper, it did especially bad in the homeland security mission goals, although deeper analysis shows that the Coast Guard did better in many of them during fiscal 2012 when compared to fiscal 2011, and that achieving some of the goals would have set a years-long record of achievement.

"It's virtually impossible to meet many of them, some of which are aspirational," Currier said.

During the hearing, Currier also said that the service has completed a business case analysis on the prospect of refurbishing the USCGC Polar Sea, one of two of the service's intact heavy icebreakers. The ship is currently on inactive status following engine failure it suffered in 2010.

Repairing the ship would require $99 million to $100 million to add another five to seven years of operational life, Currier said. Acquiring a new icebreaker would cost about $1 billion--something probably beyond the Coast Guard's financial capability, he added.

The federal government should take a "whole of government" approach to new icebreaker acquisition, he said, one in which the National Science Foundation, the Defense Department "and everyone else who has a stake in the Arctic contributes to the requirements build and ideally contributes to the financial solution, the funding of this ship--because $1 billion is something we clearly cannot absorb," he said.

He also said an operational validation of the Response Boat-Medium has found that the Coast Guard only needs 167 of them, as opposed to the 180 called for in the 2012 reauthorization act. The service intends to submit to Congress a request to operate no more than 170, Currier said.

For more:
- go to the hearing webpage (prepared testimony and webcast available)

By Zach Rausnitz

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5. Flooding on track to worsen regardless of hurricane changes

Eleven percent of recently deported Mexican migrants said they suffered physical abuse while in U.S. custody, and 34 percent said one of their possessions was stolen, a report from the Immigration Policy Center says.

The findings stem from the Migrant Border Crossing Study, a project of the University of Arizona and George Washington University. In 2011 and 2012, researchers interviewed more than 1,000 recently deported migrants upon their return to Mexico, randomly selecting participants at ports of entry and migrant shelters.

Each participant was asked 250 questions in face-to-face interviews that lasted about 45 minutes.

Of the 11 percent who reported physical abuse while in U.S. custody, 70 percent characterized the abuse as something other than a blow to the body, the the Immigration Policy Center report says. They may have been pushed, dragged, lifted, placed in painful positions or spat upon.

Thirty percent of those who reported physical abuse said they were hit, kicked or thrown.

Six percent of them said they received lasting injuries, and three percent said they were sexually abused while in U.S. custody. Migrants who reported lasting injuries or sexual abuse represented less than 1 percent of all the study's participants.

Multiple past academic studies have found similar rates of physical abuse, suggesting that "abuse of migrants while in U.S. custody is a systematic problem relating to an ongoing institutional culture rather than simply a consequence of a few people who are acting inappropriately," the report says.

Nearly one-fourth of all migrants interviewed said they were subjected to verbal abuse. Some recalled being cursed at, yelled at or threatened. Others said they were the targets of nationalistic or racial slurs, or anti-immigrant remarks.

Stealing from apprehended migrants "is a systemic problem," the report says. More than one-third of the study's participants said they had belongings taken and not returned. Clothes, backpacks, cellphones and Mexican identification documents were among the items commonly lost.

One-fifth of those who said they lost possessions in custody said they had cash taken from them. The median amount reported lost was $55.

The report says one challenge to studying migrant mistreatment is that victims may have no way to take effective action.

"It is imperative that U.S. officials create transparent avenues with which to file complaints of mistreatment and ways in which interested parties can follow up on pending investigations," it says.

For more:
- download part one of the report, "Bordering on Criminal: The Routine Abuse of Migrants in the Removal System" (.pdf)
- download part two of the report (.pdf)

Read more about: ICE, southwestern border
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By Zach Rausnitz

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