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"If employees of the federal government are aiding and abetting foreign nationals and helping them obtain benefits and avoid deportation, Congress needs to exercise oversight in this area to ensure the problems are corrected," Grassley wrote.
Since then, members of Congress have been fighting a war over terrorism, and it's not the one in Iraq. It's a war over information, one that Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark says is long overdue.
"The efforts of this executive branch of this administration to prevent effective congressional oversight or any public oversight of its actions are really remarkable," said Clark, an expert on whistle blowers and their role in government. "It sounds to me like Michael Maxwell's situation is an example of that."
Culberson says Congress members know what has to be done. The immigration system must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.
"Then we need to identify the terrorists who walked over the border unmolested or through the front door at USCIS and had their applications rubber stamped," he says.
But before any of that can happen, Congress has got to figure out exactly what is going on inside USCIS. On that count, they're getting nowhere fast. Members of at least three congressional committees are waiting for answers from the Department of Homeland Security that still haven't come.
Working with Blinders on
Maxwell, 35, didn't have any illusions when he took the job at USCIS in May 2004. Director Eduardo Aguirre Jr. made it clear that his job was to clean house.
"He said to me, 'Your job is to regain the public's trust in the immigration system,'" Maxwell says. "We were dirty as the day is long and he knew it. He knew it wasn't a big step from taking a bribe to give somebody a green card to taking a bribe from a foreign intelligence agency or a terrorist group or an organized crime family for that same green card."
To make his point, Aguirre held a teleconference with 120 of the agency's senior managers nationwide with Maxwell at his side. He warned them that he had told Maxwell to go after those who were "dirty" and "squish them like an apple."
Aguirre had authorized the hiring of 130 more full-time employees who would work for Maxwell, ferreting out corruption. But before Maxwell could hire them, Aguirre and the second-ranking official at USCIS departed suddenly for reasons that aren't clear.
Maxwell says that the new acting deputy director, a Bush appointee named Robert Divine, abruptly changed course. Divine set staffing levels so low that investigations into employee corruption cases, including some involving allegations of espionage and links to terrorism, were jeopardized.
Maxwell was left with just four full-time investigators to handle 2,771 internal affairs complaints, including more than 500 that involved bribery, extortion and influence by foreign intelligence services trying to place their citizens inside the country.
Only six security specialists were charged with handling a backlog of 11,000 employee background checks.
Maxwell soon learned, to his horror, that without a full background check to make sure they aren't terrorists or criminals themselves, employees who process immigration applications don't qualify for the "Level 3" security clearance that allows them to access databases that contain terrorist watch lists, information about ongoing national security and criminal investigations, and full criminal histories. They were essentially approving these applications blindly.
Maxwell says about 43 percent of the adjudicators who worked at USCIS when he did didn't have the security clearance they needed to determine if they were approving a green card for a terrorist or a tomato picker. Maxwell estimates that these employees processed over 645,000 applications in the fiscal year of 2005 alone.
The problem was compounded by the fact that the more sensitive -- and serious -- the national security information was on an applicant, the tougher it was for USCIS employees to access it. Even if the employee had earned the Level 3 database security clearance available to USCIS employees, usually they still weren't qualified to see much of this information.
That means that when an employee sees a note in a database about an ongoing CIA, FBI or DEA investigation, they have to contact those agencies for clarification and wait for an answer they may not legally be allowed to receive. And they don't actually have to receive an answer to approve the application. Merely asking why an alien is flagged is enough to approve the application, regardless of whether the employee actually obtains any data.