The U.S. immigration system is so broken that it can't be fixed, a former top security official at the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) told NewsMax in an exclusive interview.

"Internal corruption at CIS is so pervasive that hostile foreign governments have penetrated the agency," said Michael J. Maxwell, who was forced to resign as chief of the CIS Office of Security and Investigation earlier this year...

..."Even if the adjudicators get a terrorist hit, the regulations say they must refer the case to the FBI," Maxwell said. "It doesn't say, deny them an immigration benefit. It just says, refer. That's very dangerous, because once they get the immigration benefit it becomes very hard to investigate them."

If the FBI fails for whatever reason to send over the case file on the individual who has been flagged, "then statutorily, the case officer must grant the benefit, even if there's a warning the person is a terrorist," Maxwell told NewsMax.

That means that individuals from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, whose identities could not be verified and who could be working for terrorist groups, have been granted green cards or even citizenship, Maxwell added...

...More than 7 million immigration-related "benefit" claims are adjudicated every year, which Maxwell and other critics say have led immigration officers to "rubber-stamp" green card and citizenship applications. Many CIS service centers have policies that reward immigration officers who adjudicate the highest number of cases per day, giving them additional paid leave and other benefits...

...USCIS has documented an immigration route through the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico that could be exploited by foreign intelligence services and terrorists, with the complicity of U.S. immigration officers.

"The smugglers know that only one flight per day is inspected," Maxwell said, "so they put these folks on other flights," Maxwell said. An internal CIS investigation into the operations of the San Juan immigration district, obtained by NewsMax, describes the Virgin Islands-Puerto Rico immigration pipeline in great detail...

...In sworn testimony before House International Relations subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation on April 6, 2006, Maxwell said that his office had received complaints of "USCIS employees providing material support to known terrorists or being influenced by foreign intelligence services."

One USCIS employee, "co-opted by a foreign intelligence entity," had "the ability to grant the immigration of their choosing to the person or persons of their choosing," Maxwell said in his sworn testimony.

In an unclassified meeting with senior USCIS leadership in February 2006, which he attended, Maxwell says that agency Director Emilio Gonzales "mentioned two foreign intelligence operatives who work on behalf of USCIS at an interest section abroad and who are assisting aliens into the United States as we speak..."