Outgoing Commissioner Assesses INS Work, Future

AP via TBO ^ | 10/17/02 | Suzanne Gamboa

[Jean S]

WASHINGTON (AP) - James Ziglar, who is stepping down as Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner, said Thursday the agency has made progress with post-Sept. 11 security measures, but the improvements often are hampered by criticism of the agency.

"At some point the fingerpointing and the bashing needs to stop and the atmosphere needs to be one of trying to make progress and not just assigning blame," Ziglar said in a speech sponsored by the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank.

Ziglar has said he would leave his volatile job by the end of the year to work in the private sector.

Ziglar said his primary mandate when he took the job was to restructure the INS, splitting its enforcement duties from its service duties. He said he delivered a restructuring plan to Attorney General John Ashcroft Sept. 10.

Work on that plan though was thwarted by the Sept. 11 attacks, which occurred barely a month after Ziglar became commissioner. His job then became about identifying potential terrorists and shutting down immigration avenues that could be exploited by terrorists.

The agency received strong condemnation from members of both parties after it was learned that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States legally on travel visas. Three were admitted with business visas and the 19th entered on a student visa.

Since the attacks, the agency has created a system for tracking foreign students that universities and colleges that enroll such students must participate in by Jan. 1; entered names of immigrants who failed to report to deportation hearings into a criminal database system used by law enforcement; changed the Border Patrol chain of command and made hundreds of arrests of undocumented immigrants working in airports and at nuclear plant sites, Ziglar said.

But the agency also found itself forced to respond to bad publicity, Ziglar said. He cited an incident when student visa paperwork for two of the hijackers arrived at a Florida aviation school six months after the attacks.

"It did prove embarassing and made the INS a bigger target" for criticism, Ziglar said. "To this day this episode is still reported incorrectly in newspapers and referenced by those who should know better."

The agency has a rapidly expanding mission that goes beyond its available technological and personnel resources, he said.

The agency has 2,000 investigators, 5,000 inspectors, about 10,000 Border Patrol agents and 3,000 adjudicators who inspect 550 million people every year and arrested 1.2 million undocumented immigrants last year.

Ziglar said he supports INS becoming part of the proposed Homeland Security Department, saying it may be the best way to preserve goals he has for the agency. But he cautioned against the INS becoming insignificant.

"What is important is that we don't have such a big organization that this gets lost in the noise," he said.

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On the Net: Immigration and Naturalization Service: http://www.ins.gov

AP-ES-10-17-02 1804EDT

[Crusader21stCentury]

Anyone who hires this individual had better be prepared to put him in a position with no responsibilities whatsoever. Ziglar should be charged with fraud for accepting his salary.

[waxhaw]

While Zigler was, in my opinion, the absolutely worst pick in Bush's stable (I regard Colin Powell as SecState to be almost as sorry as Zigler), the problems of the INS cannot be blamed on him. The INS and all other government agencies remember, went through 8 years of Clintonista meddling. Doris Meisner headed up the Clinton INS; I have a number of friends in the INS and Meisner is viewed with extreme disgust and contempt by these people. She did what Clinton wanted her to do - she turned the INS into an organization where one hand had no idea what the other was doing. She is most faulted for having turned the INS into a "service providing" agency instead of a law enforcement agency. So today's INS is simply one more facet of the million-faceted Clinton legacy.

[Marine Inspector]

Agreed.

I work for INS and Ziglar was a breath of fresh air (in the beginning). He turned into a bozo, but he still had the best plan on reorganizing the INS. The House and Senate plans are disasters, and IMHO, the Homeland Security Department will make things worse.