Immigration and Customs Enforcement won't say whether findings from its investigation into the source of an election-eve leak about the immigration status of Barack Obama's aunt will be made public.

Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for ICE, told TPMMuckraker in an email: "I ... don't know if the results [of the probe] are made public."

Just days before the election, the Associated Press reported, sourced to a federal law enforcement official, that Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, had ignored a deportation order issued four years ago by a U.S. immigration judge. The leak appeared to be a politically motivated effort to damage Obama's candidacy at the eleventh hour.

ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, quickly announced that it had launched an investigation into the source of the leak, which, according to our reporting, clearly violated government regulations, and could even make it more likely that Onyango could be persecuted for having sought asylum in the U.S. if she is ultimately deported to Kenya.

But now it appears that we may never know the identity of the leaker.

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that TPMmuckraker favorite Julie Myers will step down as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), effective November 15th.

Myers, the niece of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, had little experience in homeland security issues when she joined DHS, but was known for her loyalty to the White House. Her husband, John Wood, has served as chief of staff to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

ICE has been in the spotlight during her tenure -- and not for the right reasons.

First, there's this from earlier this year:

Last Halloween, at a fundraising event for charitable organizations held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Headquarters Building, they held a costume contest. And the winner was a white lawyer dressed in dreadlocks and prison stripes.

When it came time to present himself to the judges, among them Julie Myers, the chief of ICE, he said "I'm a Jamaican detainee from Krome -- obviously, I've escaped." Krome is an ICE Detention facility in Miami that is mostly filled with Jamaican, Haitian and Latin American detainees. The judges, Myers among them, laughed, according to a report (pdf) issued yesterday by the House Committee on Homeland Security.

(Click through to see the picture of Myers and the contest winner -- it's worth it!)

Then last week, on the eve of the election, law enforcement sources leaked to the Associated Press the news that Barack Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, had been denied a request for asylum four years ago. The leak, which is being looked into by internal investigators at ICE, appears to have violated government regulations, and, as TPMmuckraker reported Monday, may increase the chances that Onyango could be persecuted if she's deported.

In a statement announcing Myers' departure, Chertoff said that Myers approached him about stepping down in mid September.

It looks like last week's leak of information about the immigration status of Barack Obama's aunt might be even more despicable than we'd thought.

The Associated Press reported Saturday morning that an application for asylum made by Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, was rejected four years ago by an immigration judge. It sourced the information to a federal law enforcement official, and another source in a position to know.

We added later that day that the leak -- which is now being probed by government investigators -- appears to clearly violate government regulations, as laid out in a memo written by a US Customs and Immigration Services official.

But the memo also contains one important reason why there's such a strong prohibition against disclosing asylum applications. It reads:

These regulations safeguard information that, if disclosed publicly, could subject the claimant to retaliatory measures by government authorities or non-state actors in the event that the claimant is repatriated, or endanger the security of the claimant's family members who may still be residing in the country of origin. Moreover, public disclosure might, albeit in rare circumstances, give rise to a plausible protection claim where one would not otherwise exist by bringing an otherwise ineligible claimant to the attention of the government authority or non-state actor against which the claimant has made allegations of mistreatment.

In other words, the leak could well increase the chances that Onyango could be persecuted -- maybe even tortured -- for seeking asylum in the U.S. if she is ultimately deported to Kenya. Or that her family members could be similarly mistreated, whether or not she's deported. And thanks to that very danger, the leak could even bolster Onyango's asylum claim.

Immigration experts confirmed to TPMmuckraker that this reading was accurate.

Matthew Hoppock, an immigration lawyer in Kansas City who focuses on asylum cases, noted the regulations in an email to TPMmuckraker, and argued that the leak has "made it more likely that if Ms. Onyango is removed to her home country, she will face persecution for having sought asylum in the United States."

Dan Kowalski, an immigration law expert and the editor of the the online newsletter, Bender's Immigration Bulletin, agreed. In an email to TPMmuckraker, he added that the leak is sufficiently serious that, because of it, Onyango now "has a good shot at reopening her case."

We'll keep you posted on the progress of the investigation into the source of the leak.

The leaking of information about the immigration status of Barack Obama's aunt appears to directly violate regulations for confidentiality laid out in a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo obtained by TPMmuckraker.

As we reported earlier, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which is the law enforcement arm of USCIS) has begun an internal probe into the leak to the Associated Press, which revealed early this morning that Obama's aunt "is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago."

The memo, written in 2005 by Joseph Langlois, director of the Asylum Division in the Office of Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations, reads in part:

The federal regulations at 8 CFR 208.6 generally prohibit the disclosure to third parties of information contained in or pertaining to asylum applications, credible fear determinations, and reasonable fear determinations--including information contained in RAPS or APSS1--except under certain limited circumstances. These regulations safeguard information that, if disclosed publicly, could subject the claimant to retaliatory measures by government authorities or non-state actors in the event that the claimant is repatriated, or endanger the security of the claimant's family members who may still be residing in the country of origin.

...

According to established guidance, confidentiality is breached when information contained in or pertaining to an asylum application (including information contained in RAPS or APSS) is disclosed to a third party in violation of the regulations, and the unauthorized disclosure is of a nature that allows the third party to link the identity of the applicant to: (1) the fact that the applicant has applied for asylum; (2) specific facts or allegations pertaining to the individual asylum claim contained in an asylum application; or (3) facts or allegations that are sufficient to give rise to a reasonable inference that the applicant has applied for asylum.

It's worth noting again that we don't know for certain the leak came from ICE, since people at other government agenicies could have had access to the information.

Still, from the available evidence, it appears ICE is the most likely source. And Dan Kowalski, a leading immigration law expert, told TPMmuckraker that there's "no question" the leak violated ICE's guidelines as laid out in the memo.

And he identified for TPMmuckraker some additional, pertinent questions, asking:

1. Did the leaker know it was a violation? 2. Was the leak politically motivated? 3. A solo action, or conspiracy of 2 or more? If the latter, who is the boss?

We'll be working to bring you answers...

Looks like the 'crackdown' against illegal immigrants crossing over the Mexican border has been a boon for corrupt border guards.

Federal officials say their decision to dissolve the Internal Affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection unit a few years ago was a bad idea (go figure), and now the Department of Homeland Security is reconstituting it. Reborn with a whopping five investigators last year, the unit is projected to grow to 200 by the end of this year.

The New York Times reports this morning that a growing number of border patrol guards are under investigation for taking bribes from smugglers and letting vehicles packed with drugs and people pass into the U.S. unchecked.

There's a lot of money out there for border agents on the take:

In another recent case, Margarita Crispin, a customs inspector in El Paso, Tex., began helping smugglers just a few months after she was hired in 2003, according to prosecutors. She helped the smugglers for four years before she was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit up to $5 million.

The number of border patrol agents has almost doubled since 2001, swelling the force to nearly 20,000. But the smugglers are savvy.

The smugglers use any ruse available to lure border workers but seem to favor deploying attractive women as bait. They flirt and charm and beg the officers, often middle-aged men, to "just this once" let an unauthorized relative through. And then another and another.

In recent years, Texas has seen the most corruption investigations, with California a close second.

One law enforcement expert describes "policing the border as 'potentially one of the most corruptible tasks in law enforcement' because of the solitary nature of much of the work and the desperation of people seeking to cross."

From the AP:

The head of meatpacker Swift & Co. said federal officials wanted a high-profile example of an immigration crackdown when they staged raids at its plants in six states, including Minnesota, in an identity theft investigation late last year.

ICE arrested 1,282 workers during raids in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa and Minnesota. Of those, 246 now face state or federal identity theft charges and the rest face immigration charges.

President and CEO Sam Rovit said the government rejected the company's offer to help in the investigation months before the Dec. 12 raids.

"They were looking for a marquee to show the administration it was tough on immigration,'' he told the Greeley Tribune for a story published Friday.

Here's a reminder of the toll of this demonstration.

Senators angry over the recent six-state "identity theft" raids by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently held a closed-door meeting with the agency's chief, according to AP.

Their concerns appear to center not around the arrest and detainment of the thousand or so workers who were never charged with crimes, but how DHS treated their employer, a large meat-packing company who had participated in a DHS-sponsored worker identity program, the news service reports today.

The identity program, known as "Basic Pilot," screens for workers using fake Social Security numbers. It does not verify that a valid Social Security number is being used by its rightful owner.

"I can't think of a system that would be better designed to fail," Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told a reporter.

"[W]e need to have a clear understanding with the business community," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN). "I think it's very unclear now."

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged problems with the program, AP says.

Remember "Operation Wagon Train," the six-state operation to bust up an "identity theft" ring? The Department of Justice just posted a final tally of prosecutions.

Of the nearly 1,300 workers arrested and detained, 148 have been prosecuted on criminal charges, all for identity theft.

Good enough for government work?

The press release is after the jump.

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As more details come out about the federal raids on six meatpacking plants two weeks ago, union officials continue to voice concerns about the agents' methods.

In particular, the Feds' habit of detaining legal workers, and denying detainees access to lawyers, are drawing closer scrutiny. In their defense, a spokesman for the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement say they followed the law to the letter.

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We're getting a better picture of the results of the federal "identity theft" raids last week. And it's increasingly clear that if the Feds were trying to protect citizens from identity thieves, they failed.

Unfortunately, while the Department of Homeland Security held a press conference immediately after the raids to announce nationwide totals for arrests, they have been less chatty about the number of detainees charged with criminal violations, and the Department of Justice has announced indictments in each state as they are handed down from grand juries.

As a result, the picture is incomplete: We know that 1,282 workers were detained in the raids ten days ago. Over 100 were charged with a variety of crimes. So far, grand juries have handed down indictments for 58 of them: 20 from Worthington, Minn.; 15 from Grand Island, Neb.; and 23 from Marshalltown, Iowa, according to reports in local papers. I have not seen indictments reported from the raids in Cactus, Texas, or Greeley, Colo.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has not released a tally of the number of innocent legal workers its agents detained in the raids but later released, nor details on how long they were held before being let go.

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Following Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Iowa Governor and presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack has also come out strongly against last week's immigration raids.

In Iowa, indictments have come down from DHS's massive immigration raid last week. Not surprisingly, the number of workers who have been charged with a crime represents a fraction of the number of workers who were arrested in the December 12th raids.

The U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of Iowa has indicted 23 workers from Swift's meat-packing plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, on "immigration and identity theft charges," according to a Justice Department press release. Ninety workers were arrested in Marshalltown last week.

As Justin has pointed out before, only a very small number of the 1,300 detainees from last week's raids of six Swift plants face criminal charges.

The Des Moines Register reports today:

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa wrote Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on Tuesday to say he is appalled by the process used to detain and deport workers in raids earlier this month at six Swift & Co. packing plants, including one in Marshalltown.

Harkin, a Democrat, said a telephone hot line for information for family members set up by the government has gone unanswered at times. It "provided no information of any use" at other times, Harkin said in the letter.

It has been "almost impossible" for lawyers and members of the clergy to gain access to workers who were detained, and workers were taken to other states without being granted access to lawyers, Harkin said.

Although assurances were made that parents with small children would be released to make arrangements for their children's care, "there continues to be reports of numerous single mothers remaining in custody," Harkin said.

Harkin said he hopes Chertoff shares his belief that "the failure to ensure that basic legal rights and humanitarian protections are afforded to individuals in our immigration system reflects poorly on the principles that have made the United States strong."

Update: Iowa governor Tom Vilsack also fired off an angry letter to Chertoff, criticising the agency's "information blackout" following the raids and for putting his state's National Guard at risk.

President Bush teed off on immigration reform in today's press conference. But while his point may be admirable -- the country needs comprehensive immigration reform -- his portrayal of the facts wasn't. Here's how he described the results of last week's unprecedented raids on meatpacking plants:

"I don't know if you've paid attention to the enforcement measures that were taken recently at some meat-packing plants. They found people that had been working illegally, but all of them had documents that said they were here legally — they were using forged documents."

Not exactly, as regular readers are aware. A day after the raids, ICE announced that only 65 of the nearly 1,300 detainees faced criminal charges, and only some of those involved document fraud. That number has since grown to over a hundred. Still, the vast majority of those arrested in the raids and held for days were not charged with identity theft.

Meanwhile, a number of the detainees have proven they are legal residents and workers, and didn't deserve to be arrested and detained. Some rights groups and union officials are mulling legal action in their cases. Unfortunately, the president gave no word on whether he thought the tactics of immigration enforcement are also up for some comprehensive reform.

The Department of Homeland Security is still holding and processing several hundred workers grabbed in early-morning raids Tuesday -- and finding some surprises.

Agents have charged at least 35 more detainees with criminal violations, according to DHS figures quoted in the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent. "More than 100 people nationwide have now been charged with criminal violations," the paper reports this morning. On Wednesday, that number was 65.

DHS has not said how many of those charged were accused of identity theft.

Meanwhile, agents have also identified a number of legal workers they swept up in the raids, dubbed "Operation Wagon Train," and held for days before releasing them. The United Food and Commercial Workers union has rented vans to pick up newly-released workers from government holding facilities and bring them back home.

Announcing the success of its massive "Operation Wagon Train" yesterday, DHS officials insisted the raids that netted nearly 1,300 arrests were about busting up an identity theft ring. The stats tell a different story.

According to DHS' own tally, only 65 of the 1,282 arrests were for criminal violations, including identity-theft related crimes. That means that over 1,200 of the people arrested had no connection to any identity theft rings, and were guilty only of run-of-the-mill immigration violations. That didn't temper the agency's rhetoric.

“'Enforcement actions like this one protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans while striking a blow against illegal immigration,'” an official press release quotes DHS chief Michael Chertoff.

"[H]undreds of these illegal aliens may have illegally assumed the identities of U.S. citizens," the press release goes on the explain, "and improperly used their Social Security numbers and other identity documents in order to gain employment at Swift facilities."

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The Denver Post reports at least one bogus arrest: a legal worker at the site of the Greeley, Colo. raid was cuffed, bused away and detained for the day, before being released that evening. Yesterday, a DHS spokesman told me there had been no such incidents:

Sergio Rodriguez was taking a break about 8 a.m. near his position on a production line when ICE agents approached.

"One guy showed up and said, 'Why are you hiding there?' He put handcuffs on me and I still have the marks," he said, rolling up his left sleeve and pointing to a thin red line on his wrist.

Rodriguez, who said he has been in the United States for 27 years, said he didn't have his resident alien card with him. Although his wife brought the document to the plant, she wasn't allowed to give it to him, he said.

He said the agents told him they had a warrant for his arrest. He said he was taken to Denver and held until 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and then released.

Anyone hear of others?

Another story of kids left behind by the DHS raids (earlier stories here and here). From today's Worthington (Minn.) Daily Globe:

Jesus Alcantar, a Swift employee and union representative, said through an interpreter that he had found four children knocking on doors looking for their mother.

“I took them by the hand and started knocking on doors, looking for family members who would take them in,” he said. “I saw a little girl on the street. I saw someone take her, but I don’t know who that was.”

For Washington insiders, one of the most troubling aspects of the Department of Homeland Security's six-state raids is their timing. An agency doesn't execute the largest immigration raid in U.S. history, complete with a press conference and a pretty color map for republishing, because it woke up one day and decided the weather was right.

In fact, it seems there's almost no political climate for the raid. The elections are over, Congress is in recess, it's two weeks to Christmas, the White House has no plans to talk about immigration until next year. I talked this morning with one of the top corporate lobbyists on immigration issues this morning, who echoed the sentiment.

Laura Reiff is with Washington powerhouse firm Greenberg Traurig (once home to Team Abramoff), from where she chairs the "Essential Workers Coalition" -- a bunch of corporations and trade groups which rely on low-wage labor.

Saying she was "very disappointed" with DHS for the raids, she lambasted their political sensibilities. "It makes no political sense whatsoever" to run these raids now, she told me. "I can understand doing this prior to the elections." Furthermore, everybody in power is already focused on immigration -- as an issue for next year. "I talked to the president and Karl Rove last week" about the importance of immigration reform, she said. It's a top priority for both Democratic and Republican leadership. . . You don't need to go in and do these high-profile raids."

Anybody?

The federal government continues to hold hundreds of detained workers from Tuesday's six-state "Operation Wagon Train" raid on Swift meatpacking plants, and the fallout continues.

In Iowa, governor and presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack (D) expressed displeasure with the Department of Homeland Security, which has opted to bar access to detainees by family members or lawyers. DHS is changing its policy, Vilsack's spokeswoman said.

The operation -- which was the largest federal immigration raid in U.S. history -- may not have gotten much play in the national media, but made a profound impression on the communities which lost hundreds of members overnight. "The sight of federal agents raiding the local packinghouse is nothing new. In fact, it's happened several times over the past 15 years," reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune of the Worthington, Minn. raid. "But never quite like this. . . .

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Merry Christmas, baby:

A priest's and nun’s mission to find the mother of a nursing baby was thwarted today after they said officials from Camp Dodge would not let them inside to tell their story.

Sister Christine Feagan, from the St. Mary’s Hispanic Ministry, and The Rev. Jim Miller, who is a priest from the St. Mary’s Parish, both said they drove to Camp Dodge [an ICE detention center] this afternoon to find out the status of a nursing mother who was deported and nursing a baby. . . .

At the church’s Hispanic ministry, the baby whose mother was arrested was passed among staff and a community activist who had agreed to help care for her.

They said they don’t know when the girl, whose father is absent, will be reunited with her mother.

I just spoke with a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While most of the 1,282 workers arrested and transported to "processing centers" have been processed in "Operation Wagon Train," their multi-state raid, Michael Keegan told me, he has not heard of anyone being released after proving their legal U.S. residency.

"So far we haven't had any reports," he said. (Union officials are complaining that workers aren't allowed to contact them or lawyers.)

I mentioned to Keegan the report from Utah that ICE agents had separated workers by skin color. "Is that right? I can't confirm that," he replied.

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The fate of children whose parents have been swept up in the government's meatpacking plant raids isn't going unnoticed by the media. As just one example, KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, Utah, reports on the fate of affected kids in its local schools:

[A]t Lincoln Elementary School in the Cache Valley School District there are dozens of children who went home with someone else yesterday, a relative or only one parent.

A similar situation in the Logan City School District at Bridger Elementary School. Yesterday, secretaries and teachers found themselves calling homes to make sure students got picked up. . . .

Just at Bridger Elementary School alone there were seven students affected by yesterday's raid. One teacher said that most of those students were not in school today.

As the principal said, one issue is the fact that they are afraid, but the other issue may be that they are literally preparing to say goodbye to their parents.