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tor job, as standing by while a coworker
called him “Havana Club” and
“poster boy” for affirmative action.
Bringing the INS Reporting
to the Public
I turned in a story that I thought was
compelling. It might have been, but
Bennett pressed me to go further and
determine whether the INS culture was
any worse than that of other federal
agencies. I interviewed Congressional
overseers, former top Justice Department
officials and inspectors
general, law professors
and judges. I
compared numbers of internal
investigations in the
INS to those in other agencies.
Earlier I had sent
FOIA requests to every INS
district in the nation to
determine how line officers
were evaluated.
Finally, with this additional
reporting setting
the context, the story
passed muster.
We did all we could to
get top INS agency officials
to respond to our
findings. But INS Commissioner
Doris Meissner,
who resigned three weeks
before we went to press,
never spoke to us. Only by showering
interview requests on then-Attorney
General Janet Reno, who oversaw the
INS, were we granted last-minute marathon
interviews with top agency managers.
Many of their answers were vague
and off-point. So Bennett played the
role of INS defender as she tried to tear
apart each story and conclusion.
Our stories generated extensive reaction
from readers, members of Congress,
interest groups, and immigration
lawyers, but never a word from the
agency itself. We expected to receive a
rebuttal from the INS and were prepared
to publish whatever the agency
had to say.
Given our findings, none of us was
surprised by the INS blunders and misplaced
priorities that surfaced after the
September 11 attacks. It turns out that
while inspectors threw the book at
families and businesspeople, the doors
stood open for potential terrorists.
The Oregonian has continued to
write about the agency. We’ve broken
stories on the dysfunctional studentvisa
system. We covered the Portland
police department’s initial refusal to
question foreigners from countries
linked to terrorism. We’ve watched the
Bush administration and Congress
grapple with restructuring the INS, an
entity that has endured dozens of studies,
commissions and reorganizations
Claudia Young, center, is met by her husband and child. She was separated
from her family after being deported by the INS and then allowed
to return. Photo by Ross William Hamilton/The Oregonian.
in almost 70 years of operation. We see
milk crates stuffed with immigration
files stack up in corridors of swamped
INS service centers. We watch inspectors
try to run security checks using an
antiquated computer system. We watch
burned-out INS officers quitting for
higher-paid jobs as sky marshals.
We’ve seen some improvements.
James Ziglar, President Bush’s INS commissioner,
tried to reform the agency’s
structure and culture. The Cuban-
American inspector who was fired in
Vermont recently won his job back—in
Miami. But our conclusion to date is
that the agency is more inept and less
efficient than ever. Ziglar’s reforms have
been buried under a stream of urgent
orders to boost security. Congress has
poured nearly one billion more dollars
into the agency, which struggles to stay
INS Coverage
ahead of mass defections of borderpatrol
agents. There are few signs that
Americans are any safer today on account
of INS efforts.
Now Congress and the Bush administration
are preparing to dismantle
the agency, putting its 35,000 employees
into the new Homeland Security
Department. The main Capitol Hill controversy
over this reorganization has
been neither boosting security nor improving
processing of green cards and
other benefits the agency administers,
services that might well be neglected in
the Homeland shuffle. Instead
lawmakers have disputed
whether INS employees
should retain
union representation.
The union issue is a
sideshow in many respects,
except that it does
have significance for the
work we do as journalists.
We found that INS
workers, who generally
feared losing their jobs if
they spoke with reporters,
were able to do so if
they held union-officer
positions, however low in
rank. In contrast, sky marshals,
for example, are far
less accessible to reporters,
not only due to security
prohibitions but also
because of their lack of union cover.
As the INS prepares to vanish with
two dozen federal agencies into the
new Homeland department, its functions
will likely become even more
opaque. That’s unfortunate as we enter
an era in which immigration enforcement
should be subject to more,
not less, public scrutiny. ■
Richard Read, a 1997 Nieman Fellow
and The Oregonian’s senior
writer for international affairs, won
the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory
reporting. The INS series,
“Liberty’s Heavy Hand,” which won
the 2001 Pulitzer for public service,
is posted at www.pulitzer.org/year/
2001/public-service/works.
richread@aol.com
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 29