"Border Patrol union says new rules 'muzzle' critics of the agency"

Our border enforcement is about to get a lot better. Or, at least, it's about to be made to look a lot better:

New labor rules proposed by the Department of Homeland Security would muzzle internal critics of the Border Patrol by making it easier to punish and fire agents, who have often been vocal critics of management policies, union officials said...

"People aren't going to be willing to talk. It's going to have a very chilling effect," T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said Wednesday...

The proposed regulations allow the government to fire people for national security reasons under an expedited process; create new mandatory firing offenses and eliminate arbitration for removal, said Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees.

The new rules would also allow Homeland Security to control pay raises and make it easier to transfer workers to different regions of the country. "They are literally (making them) second class government employees," Roth said...

A week ago there was a townhall meeting about immigration in Temecula, CA. It featured DHS Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and Congressman Darrell Issa. At the meeting, T.J. Bonner stood up and asked Hutchinson, "Why don't you let us do our jobs?" While these new regulations were apparently proposed months before the meeting, it looks like they're at least partially designed to prevent things like that from happening in the future.

And, in bipartisan news, recall this:

Joanne Peters, a [U.S. Rep. Joe] Baca [D-CA] spokeswoman, said the union members who attacked the congressman are "loose cannons" who have been reprimanded by their superiors...

To tie everything up together nicely, Baca was one of the main people who got Asa Hutchinson to stop the now-infamous minor immigration sweeps.

Immigration2004 · Fri, 08/20/2004 - 13:53 · · Importance: 1