Yesterday, ten Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sued their own agency.They allege the most shocking thing anyone in law enforcement can imagine. Specifically they say their bosses told them not only to let people break immigration law, but to break it themselves.

Immigration law and non-enforcement

The ten immigration agents name the agency boss, John Morton, and his boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. They complain that their bosses will not let them do their jobs. Their job is to find out who is in this country illegally, hold them, and at least serve a Notice to Appear on them. The Notice to Appear tells the possible illegal alien to come to court, and tell a judge why that judge should not send him home. “Home”: means the country he came from.

Only that’s not happening. Two months ago, putative President Barack Obama issued an executive order to stop that from happening. He said he applied this to children and young adults whose parents brought them to America when they were too young to remember any other country. Children like these are, of course, the subject of the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. Congress voted that Act down, so Obama decided to run around Congress. (Years ago he said he couldn’t do that, because he was not a king!) Napolitano then issued this memo saying that the immigration authorities would not prosecute such children. She called that “prosecutorial discretion.”

How does this really work out? Whenever ICE stops someone, if that someone tells them, “I’m a DREAMer!”, the immigration agents are to take his word for that. The Napolitano memo does not even let them check on that.

Napolitano excuses her policy by saying that the government does not have enough immigration agents to deport everybody. So immigration authorities must concentrate on deporting known criminals. The problem is: sometimes an immigration agent has someone dead-to-rights for a criminal act. Then he shouts, “I’m a DREAMer!” and the agent must let him go.

An immigration agent loses his job for doing his job

Janet Napolitano. Portrait: Department of Homeland Security.

Three weeks ago an immigration agent, working out of the Newark, DE office, found out what this means. On March 27, he and a fellow officer watched a car with license plates registered to a known criminal alien. Someone, not the registered owner, got into this car. So the agents picked him up and brought him to the immigration office to check his fingerprints.

He wasn’t their target, but he was an illegal alien, 35 years old, with ten earlier traffic tickets. He got one ticket for driving without a license. So the immigration officer decided to book him and “let the judge sort it out.”

Then two supervisors, including the acting head of that immigration office, told him to let the man go. He was not a “Presidential priority.”

The agent still gave the man a Notice to Appear, as the law says. And for that he got a notice of his own. His bosses threatened to suspend him. They further said they would fire him if he did it again.

Whether he is one of the ten agents now suing their agency, reports don’t make clear.

Flouting Congress

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is the lead counsel for the ten immigration agents. In an interview with Fox, he said this was just as bad as Operation Fast and Furious.

In both instances, the Obama administration ordered federal law enforcement agents to break the law, to ignore the laws that they’re supposed to enforce, and, in the case of the ICE agents, to actually break federal laws that say you’re supposed to deport certain people. And in each case, the Obama administration seems to be doing so for political reasons.

Seems to be? Is. Those illegal aliens can’t vote. (Maybe. Attorney General Eric Holder actively fights States who try to clean up their voter rolls or ask for ID.) But some of their friends and relatives can and do vote. And this year, Obama knows that he needs every vote he can get.

But he might have to find another Secretary of Homeland Security. Rumor has Napolitano thinking of stepping down. She started thinking of that even before the ten agents sued the immigration office. The issue was the lewd behavior of another immigration official.

This lawsuit is far more serious than one or two top women acting like members of a raunchy sorority. This goes to separation of powers, and a President’s duty to

take care that all the laws be faithfully executed.

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