La Linea

The troubled federal agency in charge of the Rio Grande might have a new commissioner soon, according to  El Paso’s Newspaper Tree.

The current commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission C.W. “Bill” Ruth has been on “personal leave” since the Inspector General showed up last week to investigate some serious allegations made by the agency’s former general counsel Robert McCarthy.

Reportedly there are a few names in the ring for a possible replacement. El Pasoan Ed Drusina is  working the phone lines hard and collecting letters of recommendation to win the presidential appointment, according to Newspaper Tree.

Here is a little on Drusina’s background from David Crowder’s article in the NPT:

Drusina, 57, is a graduate of Burges High School and holds an engineering degree from the University of Texas at El Paso.

Until recently, he was president of OMNI Construction Services LLC, a subsidiary of the El Paso engineering and construction firm, Moreno Cardenas Inc. While with Moreno Cardenas, the company reported, Drusina was construction manager for over $28 million of infrastructure construction associated with El Paso Water Utilities’ desalination plant.

He is now the El Paso area director for Paragon Project Resources Inc., a national engineering firm with offices in El Paso.”

Anyone who wants this position should be commended,  (or possibly have his or her sanity checked )because it’s going to be a pain in the Elephant Butte to clean up the mess. If McCarthy’s allegations are true about the IBWC the new commisioner will need a large mop and some intestinal fortitude to get the job done.

It never fails to amaze me how congressional leaders who are not from border states believe they know more about border security than the residents and law enforcement who live there.

Take Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina for example. DeMint, a relative newcomer to Congress who has become the conservative leading light in the Republican Party, introduced an amendment in July to build an additional 369 miles of border wall.

Apparently, DeMint didn’t get the GAO report released three weeks ago that says the wall is costing us bilions and Homeland Security can’t even tell whether it’s working or not. One thing it is good for is providing scrap metal to thieves, apparently. Oh, and it’s ugly, infringes on people’s private property rights, destroys the environment and guarantees private defense contractors like Boeing limitless  taxpayer dollars.

Luckily, according to this Rio Grande Guardian story today, Congressman Ciro Rodriguez, a Democract who represents the Texas border, was able to strip the amendment yesterday from the $42.8 billion Homeland Security bill.

The biggest disappointment in all of this is that our two Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchinson — who should really know better — voted for DeMint’s border wall amendment. How many times have Cornyn and Hutchinson looked border residents in the eye and said they’d do everything in their power to stop the wall?

What a waste of time.

 

 

The Department of Homeland Security announced some long awaited changes to immigrant detention policies today. While it’s a step in the right direction it sounds like it’s going to be a Herculean task to centralize the more than 300 contracts operated by disparate Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices across the country. You can check out the new DHS guidelines here.I called Bob Libal, from the nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, someone way more knowledgeable than I on immigrant detention matters. I was wondering whether these new initiatives will make a difference in curbing the numerous human rights abuses that have been reported over the years in these facilities. Texas has more immigrant detention facilities than any other state in the nation.Libal’s organization focuses on immigration reform and stopping the expansion of prisons. He said he was happy to see the Obama Administration addressing the numerous problems with immigrant detention facilities. But he was disappointed that  the Administration is going to continue to build detention facilities.He brings up a good point. On top of the world’s largest prison population it looks like we are also going to have the world’s largest immigrant detention population at this rate (if we don’t already). Libal said he’d like to see some really poorly run detention facilities like the Willacy County “tent-city” detention facility in South Texas be shut down. For more on the long and sordid history of the Willacy facility check out our Observer coverage. In addition, I should also mention that Grassroots Leadership is helping organize a candlelight vigil to be held in front of the Willacy facility that will take place on October 16th. For more info contact Bob Libal who will be organizing a caravan from Austin.”There’s been all kinds of neglect, abuse and lack of healthcare at this facility,” Libal said. “Also at the Port Isabel facility which is actually federally run there have been hunger strikes for the last several months because of the long periods of time they’ve been detained and lack of access to legal representation.”Of course closing down these county cash cows will be a huge political minefield for the politicians. It’s awful that counties ever embarked on jails as a concept for economic revitalization in the first place. Now they are hooked.According to Libal, there are 4,200 detainees in the Rio Grande Valley alone and only three immigration judges to hear their cases. This means detainees wait months if not years in detention facilities for their day in court.One new DHS initiative I was glad to see was that they will develop a system to place detainees in a facility that matches their risk level be it non violent offender or a detainee with a long criminal rap sheet. According to Libal, currently DHS has no way to determine the security risks of its detainee population. People seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries, for example, are being held in U.S. jails until they get their day in court. One thing that really struck me while helping my co-worker Forrest Wilder report on his latest story in the Observer which details two riots at an immigrant detention facility in West Texas was the differences in criminal backgrounds among the detainee population. There were guys in there who had crossed illegally to look for work serving time at the Pecos facility alongside men with long criminal histories. The only thing this policy does is create more criminals and problems for both Mexico and the United States.The good news is that Homeland Security will now seek alternative forms of detention for low risk immigrants. Instead of jails they are looking at other solutions such as repurposed nursing homes or hotels.

At least the Department of Homeland Security is moving ahead and trying to make positive changes instead of leaving everything to fester as it did under former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his boss “W”.

I was speaking with a law enforcement official from the border today and he remarked how arrogant Chertoff was and that his arrogance reflected in his DHS representatives. This official was glad to report that under the new Secretary Janet Napolitano the agency was finally willing to listen to law enforcement in the field. Hopefully, we’ll see Napolitano’s DHS make good on its promises.

Poor Sheriff Joe, how are you going to get re-elected if you can’t persecute brown people? I just had to laugh when I saw this news clip today saying that the federal government has finally limited Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s ability to conduct immigration raids and road blocks. Now his relentless campaign to harass brown people and check their immigration status on the streets of Arizona has been seriously curtailed.

I’m waiting for a Native American road block to send him back to Italy.

Spying on employees, altering federal documents, giving yourself (or a friend) a pay raise…Just another day at the office at the International Boundary and Water Commission, according to its former general counsel.

Investigators from the Inspector General of the State Department are in El Paso right now investigating these serious allegations made by whistleblower Robert McCarthy. The lawyer was fired by the IBWC’s commissioner in July after reporting the misconduct to the State Department, which loosely oversees the agency.

Not many people are familiar with the IBWC, but they are a key federal agency along the border. Created in 1889, the IBWC carries out border treaties with Mexico and operates several international dams and water treatment plants and (supposedly) keeps levees along the Rio Grande from crumbling into dust.

If the USIBWC and its Mexican counterpart don’t function properly then it means millions of lives, billions in property and several important levees and dams are at stake on the Rio Grande. We have to only remember the disastrous flooding in Presidio last year and the millions of dollars of damage from flooding in the Mexican city of Nogales.

The (now former) USIBWC General Counsel Robert McCarthy reported to the Inspector General that the agency had violated several federal laws and regulations. Among those allegations are that the agency mismanaged $220 million in Recovery Act money to raise levees along the Rio Grande. 

He also reported that agency officials conducted secret surveillance of agency employees, altered official government records, made false reports to the Inspector General, manipulated payrolls, and misappropriated funds.

IBWC Commissioner C.W. “Bill” Ruth fired McCarthy three days after he made his report to the Inspector General. In 2008 President Bush appointed Ruth commissioner after the tragic death of Commissioner Carlos Marin who died in a plane crash while surveying the flooding in Presidio.

If even some of McCarthy’s allegations are true then the executive leadership and Commissioner Ruth should be replaced.

The IBWC is tucked away in a musty, dusty corner of the State Department. It has little oversight other than “foreign policy guidance’ from the State Department. The Commissioner is even allowed to set his own salary. Wouldn’t we all like to have that option?

This is not the first time the IBWC has been investigated by the State Department IG for complaints of mismanagement. In 2006, the IG wrote:

“The agency is simply too small, too isolated, and too vulnerable to management abuse to continue without the protection and oversight of a major government department.”

 The IBWC is far too important to border residents to be treated like a government orphan. Hopefully, the Obama Administration will clean up the mess and put the IBWC under the oversight of a larger agency.

The nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is assisting McCarthy with his whistleblower case against the agency. Jeff Ruch, executive director of the nonprofit, said that this is not McCarthy’s first time crying foul on a federal agency. In 2007, he was a whistleblower at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in California where he helped manage accounts for Native American landowners in the Palm Springs area. McCarthy was a key witness against the federal government in a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit that claimed among other things that Native American leases were mismanaged and landowners were charged exorbitant fees by the federal agency.