"Homeland Security? Not Yet"
Heather MacDonald has a new column discussing, among other things, political correctness, Norm Mineta, the Temecula illegal alien sweeps, and our porous northern border:
...A glance at a tiny section of the northern border, separating Vermont and a small part of New York from Canada, makes clear how lackluster the government's response to illegal entry remains. Every week, agents in the border patrol's Swanton sector catch Middle Easterners and North Africans sneaking into Vermont. And every week, they immediately release those trespassers with a polite request to return for a deportation hearing, since the Department of Homeland Security failed to budget enough funding for sufficient detention space for lawbreakers. In May, Swanton agents released illegal aliens from Malaysia, Pakistan, Morocco, Uganda, and India without bond. In July, they gave illegals from 11 terror-sponsoring countries a free pass. Since all these aliens chose to evade the visa process, none has had a background check by a consular official that might have uncovered terrorist connections. All are now at large in the country, outside the reach of law enforcement.
The failure to interdict northern trespassers is particularly worrisome, since Canada is a proven springboard for terrorists. Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian caught at the Canadian border with 100 pounds of explosives destined for the Los Angeles airport in December 1999, ran an al-Qaida cell in Montreal, despite having previously been ordered deported by the Canadian government. Two of the seven most wanted al-Qaida members, announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft in May, are naturalized Canadians. One, a Tunisian who has received flight training, has videotaped a "last will" in preparation for "martyrdom"; the other, an Egyptian who allegedly trained in Afghan terror camps, may already have slipped into the U.S. And Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, arrested in July in Pakistan with detailed computer plans for attacks on financial buildings in New York, Newark, and Washington, visited Canada in 2000 and had recently applied for a return visa.
In response to the detention-space crisis, the Swanton bureau chief admonished his agents in May that before they released an illegal from a terrorist-producing country into the woods, they should write up a Significant Incident Report, listing all "suspicious facts and issues." A typical report: on May 31, agents stopped an illegal Bangladeshi whose visas the State Department had revoked in 2003 and whose driver's-license records contained a notice that he was a member of a terrorist organization. After the FBI told the border agents that it was not interested in the Bangladeshi, the agents released him...
See also "Illegals detained at border released onto U.S. streets" and "D.C. hamstrings border officers".