Border Security Agents Have Been Told To Stop Enforcing The Law

According to the director of Homeland security, we can all rest easy now. Last week Janet Napolitano touted her border security credential with a photo-op on top of the Bridge of the Americas over the Rio Grande separating El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

As she straddled the international border, Napolitano announced to the country,

“There is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been. That is wrong. The border is better now than it ever has been.”

It seems as if the director is totally clueless, but there may be some truth in her words. She may be talking about the fact that border arrests are down, but not because any lessening of crime, but because the border security agents have been told to reduce and/or completely stop making arrests. Ms Napolitano has told them to "scare" people back over the border.

Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods.

“The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away. … They were not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.”  

That conjures up a picture of some poor border agent  putting on a ghost costume and traveling to the border so they can hide behind a cactus, leap out and scream Boo every time an illegal crosses the border.

Dever said he plans to relay the substance of these conversations when he testifies under oath next month before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

“I will raise my hand to tell the truth and swear to God, and nothing is more serious or important than that,” he said. “I’m going to tell them that, here’s what I hear and see every day: I had conversation with agent A, B, C, D and this is what they told me.”

The Sheriff is not the only one questioning Napolitano's statement:

Mark Hanna, CEO of Real Life Enterprises, a Phoenix-based technology integration and security company, has testified before the Arizona Senate about what he called Homeland Security’s flawed methodology used to compile border security statistics. Hanna maintains the numbers are dangerously misleading.

But those charts left out crucial data, Hanna said.

“Since we don't know how many illegal crossings are occurring, then a decrease in apprehensions might mean that there are fewer illegal crossings, and the border is more secure. But it could also just as easily mean that more illegal border crossings are occurring, and we're just not catching as many. In order to know how secure the border is, you need to know how many are crossing and the threat level of those who are crossing illegally," he said.

It makes no sense, the progressives have heard over and over, before you talk about immigration reform--start controlling the US border. If DHS and the Obama administration ever got serious about controlling who comes in and out of the country, the people who oppose immigration reform would have no leg to stand on...but they won't even do that. It is the progressives preventing comprehensive immigration reform.