A Coast Guard helicopter refuels during the response to Haiti’s January earthquake. Image by Petty Officer 2nd Class Etta Smith.

The Coast Guard since 2005 has dedicated fewer and fewer resources to environmental protection, one of its myriad responsibilities that includes preventing oil spills like the BP catastrophe now making history in the Gulf of Mexico.

A new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog inspector general says the number of resource hours committed annually by the Coast Guard to stopping perpetrators from dumping illegally into the ocean and otherwise halting the discharge of dangerous substances dropped in 2009, continuing a trend that’s lasted now for five years.

Lawmakers mounted ever-increasing pressure on the Coast Guard to fight terrorism after Sept. 11 while also insisting that it maintain traditional duties the public is more familiar with, among them plucking citizens from raging floodwaters and rescuing boaters stranded at sea. Resource hours dedicated to search and rescue have also dipped since 2001, although that particular mission depends on how many people actually need help.

Energy devoted to the Coast Guard’s so-called “homeland security missions,” which include things like securing the nation’s ports and stopping undocumented migrants from entering the United States, have increased markedly since the 9/11 hijackings. The federal government defines “resource hours” as the amount of time aircraft are in flight and ships are in the water carrying out specific missions.

More of those hours were spent by the Coast Guard in 2009 protecting the nation’s ports, waterways and coastlines from “maritime security threats” than anything else. Marine environmental protection has been at the bottom of the Coast Guard’s several missions for at least four years when using resource hours as a measurement. The IG is required by Congress to report on the division of resource hours annually.

Actual incidents involving the spillage of oil and other dangerous chemicals were declining prior to the BP disaster, which may account at least in part for the fact that such environmental hazards were “not at the top of the list,” as a retired Coast Guard captain described it to the Washington Post recently.

The Post published an assessment of the Coast Guard Aug. 13 and pointed out that its inspectors relied on decades-old regulations when they visited offshore drilling rigs to ensure workers were adequately protected and units were seaworthy:

Since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, investigations into oversight gaps have focused on systemic problems within the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which in recent weeks has been renamed and revamped. But the Coast Guard, which shared oversight with MMS, has largely escaped scrutiny. … Some analysts said the spill highlights the need to rethink Coast Guard priorities. In the past 35 years, Congress has handed the agency at least 27 new responsibilities, according to a tally by Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. ‘They just don’t have enough personnel to carry out all those missions,’ said Oberstar, who favors severing the Coast Guard from the Homeland Security Department. ‘That’s just not possible.’

Elevated Risk reported in May that budget plans by the Obama administration called for cutting $75 million and hundreds of personnel from the Coast Guard. That included decommissioning a strike force coordination center in North Carolina, which provides support to specialized teams in charge of handling oil spills and the release of other hazardous materials. Coast Guard officials promise the center’s responsibilities will be taken over by offices elsewhere and not abandoned.

Members of a key Senate subcommittee that controls the federal government’s purse strings nonetheless complained in a July report that the Coast Guard’s obligation to protect the environment “has been diluted by the increased demands of other homeland security missions.” The panel noted a 45 percent drop overall in mission hours dedicated to marine environmental responses since Sept. 11.

Obama’s proposed 2011 budget also sought an increase in funding of more than $45 million for the Coast Guard to battle drug traffickers, a homeland security mission, while its search-and-rescue functions, considered a “non-homeland security mission,” was scheduled to lose almost $50 million over the previous year.

But many of the Coast Guard’s high-profile response missions in recent months had nothing to do with the drug war. Coast Guard men and women were among the earliest to arrive in January when a colossal earthquake turned Haiti’s Port-au-Prince into near rubble. Its personnel were there to free motorists and homeowners trapped during torrential May floods in Tennessee. It remains the face of Washington’s response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people before launching an unforgettable environmental tragedy.

Recently retired Adm. Thad Allen likes to remind the public that all of these doubtlessly heroic episodes were carried out despite the Coast Guard having one of the oldest fleets in the world. He said during a February speech that two water vessels were forced to abandon the Haiti relief effort for emergency repairs and aircraft were diverted to help supply repair parts rather than participate in evacuations.

One of the Coast Guard’s leading preoccupations for several years now has been a gigantic, multibillion-dollar campaign to modernize its aging ships and aircraft and purchase advanced technologies. Known as Deepwater, Allen doesn’t always emphasize publicly for obvious reasons that the program has suffered from serious allegations of poor contractor oversight, mismanagement and waste.

The bungled handling of Deepwater has since made pleas from senior leaders for more money a tougher sell even as many acknowledge that the rank-and-file are being asked to do too much. Allen himself eventually conceded that the Coast Guard relied excessively on large defense contractors to direct Deepwater, but not before the program endured costly setbacks.

Reporter Ben Greenberg talks to the hosts of The Takeaway, a national online news program, about a 2007 federal initiative to investigate and solve "cold case" murders from the civil rights era, and why so few cases are being pursued.

Listen to the program:

This August DIRTY BUSINESS joined the debate over coal-fired electricity in Kansas. We held two screenings timed to coincide with a public comment and hearing process opened by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) about expansion of the Holcomb Station power plant in the western part of the state. Sunflower Electric Power Corporation has proposed to expand its existing 360 megawatt (MW) coal plant, built in 1983, to 895 MW, enough to meet the power needs of 448,000 households.

Proponents of Sunflower’s expansion cite the need to update the old, existing plant and to meet the growing load requirement in Kansas and the region.

Opponents argue that Kansas has the nation’s second-best wind resource and that, in the long run, renewable energy and increased energy efficiency can meet energy requirements at lower cost to ratepayers and to the environment. Moreover, local critics point out that only about 200 MW of the expanded plant’s power would remain in Kansas – the rest would be exported to electric cooperatives in Colorado and Texas.

The screenings took place on August 9^th in Lawrence, Kan. and August 11^th in Wichita and were organized by Working Films. The Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club, the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy (GPACE) and Films for Action of Lawrence helped draw the audience.

“We saw a lot of new faces in the crowd, especially in Lawrence,” said Stephanie Cole of Sierra Club Kansas. “Sometimes we feel like we’re preaching to the choir, but we were thrilled that the film brought out these new people who are interested in the issues.”

Tim Hjersted of Films for Action did a great job promoting the screening in Lawrence and some 100 people turned out. Many stayed for a Q & A session afterwards with Stephanie and Scott Allegrucci of GPACE, in which they discussed the Sunflower coal plant situation and how folks could participate in the permitting process.

The Wichita screening had a good turnout on short notice, as well. Stephanie Cole: “People I spoke with liked that the film looked at the entire lifecycle of coal vs. only covering one aspect of coal, such as mining. One person also commented to me that it was encouraging to see folks outside of Kansas who are also opposing coal plants. I had requests from folks for a copy of the film. People are interested in showing the film to community groups in Wichita, as well as hosting house parties.”

Pete Ferrell of Energy for Generations (E4G), a rancher and operator of the Elk River Wind Project who appears in DIRTY BUSINESS, was on hand for a Q & A session following the Wichita screening. Pete said that, “Most of the people I talked to who saw the film reacted much the same way Jeff Goodell did when he first saw an open-pit coal mine: incredulous. The impact is a bit overwhelming. ‘Do we still depend on a filthy 19^th century energy source in the 21^st century?’”

According to a Sierra Club Kansas report, Holcomb will burn 4,712,500 tons of Wyoming coal per year, sending upwards of $100 Million to Wyoming mines and railroads. However, as described in the permit application, emissions from the expanded Holcomb facility – including mercury and nitrogen oxide, a precursor to ozone - would be far greater than emissions from many coal-fired plants today.

Local press reported that about the same number of people who saw DIRTY BUSINESS turned out for a public comment meeting held in Garden City, near the site of the Holcomb coal plant, the afternoon of August 9^th. Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) officials heard from both sides as they considered whether to approve the electric company's air quality construction permit.

Proponents of the plant expansion, like Seward County Commissioner Jim Rice, said the coal plant would generate jobs and an export economy. (Sunflower claims that 1,900 would be employed for construction and 70 would be hired as full-time employees.) "How I look at the coal plant is it is a new wealth industry," Rice told the Southwest Times. “The way I look at that is it would bring money in from out-of-state and an export of electricity.”

Opponents were mainly concerned about the deterioration of air quality that would inevitably result from the new facility. Others, like James Cottrell, worried about the further depletion of ground water resources in Western Kansas, and he told the officials that approving the plant would be a step back in the development of alternative energy sources.

"Global warming is real," Cottrell said. "We cannot continue making decisions on our energy future without taking global warming into account. Not if we want to preserve our planet for future generations. All of us share a responsibility for limiting CO2 emissions. We can't put this off until tomorrow because tomorrow has already come."

Other KDHE-sponsored public meetings were held in Salina and Overland Park before the public comment period ended August 15^th. Video of comments by proponents and opponents alike can be viewed at the Kansas WatchDog site.

Read the original blog post here.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Obama administration have repeatedly said this summer that the agency is on track to meet its stated goal -- or what its budget allows for: to remove about 400,000 people from the country this year.

The number, officials say, indicates that ICE is tougher than ever on immigration. The agency projected, however, to be "well under" that goal about halfway through the fiscal year -- at a rate 20 percent below the year before. Reaching 400,000, therefore, would be an achievement.

As of August 2nd, the agency had removed 310,013 people, about 90,000 removals shy of its 400,000 projection with two months left in the fiscal year. In the final two months of last fiscal year, the agency removed a little more than 67,000 people.

A review of ICE's own figures, as posted on the agency's web site, shows that the most removals in any month in the last four fiscal years, including FY2010 to date, is slightly more than 39,000. This year in only three months -- October, November and June -- have ICE removals exceeded the same month in FY2009.

So, is or isn't ICE on pace to reach 400,000?

ICE spokesman Brian P. Hale wrote in an email:

At this point in time indications are that we will meet or exceed our overall removal numbers from last year. The caveat is that criminal removals take longer to complete and the average length of stay (in detention) is longer too. So the lag time (in reporting the statistics) can take a few months.

Last year, ICE removed nearly 390,000 people. Including the "lag" from FY 2008, the agency removed 389,834 individuals. Excluding the lag, the agency removed 387,790.

The latest figures -- as of Aug. 23 -- show ICE has removed a total of 343,883 people, of which 167,742 are convicted criminals, Hale said. That means the agency has deported more noncriminals -- 176,141, to be precise -- than criminals so far this year. A month earlier -- as of July 22 -- the agency' figures showed total removals at 292,663.

The record the Obama administration is setting is the removal of criminals, as ICE expects to have a significantly higher number of criminal removals than last year, Hale said. Many of those people have been found through a program that enables local law enforcement to identify immigrants with criminal records who are in their custody. The program, dubbed Secure Communities, has been criticized for sweeping up noncriminals despite the stated goal of targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals.

Overall, the Obama administration seems hard-pressed to please anyone when it comes to immigration. As the rhetoric heats up this political season, the right has hammered the White House for being soft on immigration enforcement while the left has slammed Obama and ICE for being too tough. John Morton, the agency chief, just says the administration is putting more people into immigration proceedings than ever before. But some telling shifts may be happening.

ICE has begun a review of all cases in immigration courts, and in some instances is dropping efforts to deport illegal immigrants and legal residents who have committed minor crimes.

Morton also issued a memo recently instructing ICE attorneys and immigration officials to dismiss deportation charges in certain situations where, among other concerns, the person has properly requested to stay in the country, and has an application or petition that appears eligible for approval.

The issue at hand addressed in the latest Morton memo is the growing backlog -- nearly 250,000 -- in the nation's immigration courts. Morton points out in the memo that in July 2009 there were roughly 17,000 removal cases held up in immigration courts because of pending applications.

A version of this story also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Martha Garnica was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Photo: Department of Homeland Security

EL PASO — A veteran customs employee who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery charges was sentenced today to 20 years in prison by a Federal District Judge.

Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was also ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and supervised release for four years once released from prison. Judge David Briones denied prosecutors' request for Garnica to forfeit $1 million.

Garnica, who pleaded guilty in May, choked back tears in the courtroom as she apologized to several family members in attendance, the government and the judge. About two dozen federal agents sat in the courtroom as the sentence was handed down.

Garnica conspired with drug traffickers to import more than 200 pounds of marijuana between April and November 2009. Garnica and a co-defendant also paid bribes totaling $5,500 to a Customs and Border Protection officer to allow drugs and an illegal immigrant into the country. The inspector, in turn, cooperated with federal internal affairs agents in the investigation.

Hired as customs inspector in February 1997, Garnica became a CBP officer when DHS formed in 2003. Since March 2008 she had been a technician assigned to an El Paso-area border crossing.

Three other defendants received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juarez.

In journalism school, our professors were fond of reminding us that perspective is essential. It’s not always enough to simply report that tens of thousands of people had their lives upended by a tornado in south-central Oklahoma.

How many is 15,000 or 26,000 or 367,000 people? Maybe there’s a sports stadium in the newspaper’s coverage area and readers would better understand the story if they knew the storm’s survivors could fill every seat plus the skyboxes.

Take the recent catastrophe that hammered Pakistan. Authorities from the United Nations and the Pakistani government say floodwaters have left as many as six million people without homes. If true, that’s nearly enough disaster victims to replace every single resident in the U.S. cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego. Combined. Have you ever been to San Francisco? There are people everywhere. You can’t escape them.

The BBC of London has taken this valuable journalism exercise and turned it into an online public-service tool driven not by reporters but readers themselves. Found at Howbigreally.com, the Dimensions project allows you to take the geographic breadth of a major event and place it over a map of where you live or work with the help of satellite images.

The best example there now is the segment of Pakistan believed to be affected by the deluge. We overlayed it with the San Francisco Bay Area where the Center for Investigative Reporting is located (see first image).

By typing in our main office’s zip code, we could instantly see that the flooding reached far into Oregon at its northern tip and well past California’s southern border with Mexico at the base. Or, to look at it another way, driving the length of the damage would take roughly 13 hours.

“We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history,” the project’s site says. “Dimensions is part of the BBC’s continual experimentation in trying to find new ways to communicate history.”

Unfortunately, there’s no embed option, so we had to use screen shots here instead of interactive versions you could play with. But check out the numerous other events they’re making available for you to visualize in entirely new ways. How big are the footprints of the Twin Towers in your neighborhood? Is a deep-sea trawler net used by commercial fishermen and banned in some parts of the world big enough to drag away your local corner store and maybe a few neighbors or a rec center?

An extraordinarily giant mass of trash swirling endlessly in the Pacific Ocean is big enough to cover the entire southwestern United States with plenty of room to spare. Of course, there’s a Gulf oil spill mapping option, too.

A service like this could potentially contain all kinds of accuracy issues. We’re not professional cartographers to begin with, and debate continues over how far oil in the Gulf has actually spread. But Dimensions at least begins to help anyone interested develop a stronger grasp of one moment in time that may otherwise seem worlds removed from the average American.

Image credits: British Broadcasting Corporation

It wasn't a lead story when scientists from the University of California at San Francisco first publicly expressed their unease earlier this year about the possible negative health effects caused by full-body airport scanners now being used across the United States to stop explosives from making it onto jet airliners.

By then the Transportation Security Administration had largely managed to remove itself from headlines announcing privacy complaints some were making about the devices, which allow security screeners to see underneath the clothing of passengers unlike traditional metal detectors.

Powerful members of Congress have since begun to throw their weight behind the issue, however, threatening to place whole-body imagers back in the spotlight as the federal government continues to spend tens of millions on them, much of it from economic stimulus dollars.

This month Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, ranking member of a key committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Secretary Janet Napolitano raising questions about the federal government’s decision in May to purchase 100 more scanning devices, particularly those using so-called “backscatter X-ray” technology.

Joined by fellow GOP senators Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Richard Burr (N.C.), Collins requested that the department’s chief medical officer and a group of independent experts review the health impacts of full-body scanners on airline travelers, employees of the Transportation Security Administration and other airport personnel. The trio wants homeland security officials to find out what happens as a result of repeated exposure to radiation from the machines.

“Please explain why the department continues to purchase this technology when legitimate concerns about its safety appear to remain unanswered,” they wrote.

The four medical experts at UCSF warn that whole-body imagers could subject the skin to “dangerously high” doses of radiation because of the unique technology used. They’re worried certain travelers may be particularly vulnerable to emissions from the scanners including seniors, women prone to breast cancer, expectant mothers and children for which the impact hasn’t been fully evaluated.

Their own April 6 letter to President Obama’s top science advisor says independent safety data on the devices do not exist to determine if radiation damage is occurring. The UCSF scientists are hardly first-year med students. One is a biophysicist, while another is an internationally known cancer expert. Three are members of the National Academy of Sciences. According to their letter:

Crises create a sense of urgency that frequently leads to hasty decisions where unintended consequences are not recognized. Examples include the failure of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to recognize the risk of blood transfusions in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, approval of drugs and devices by the [Food and Drug Administration] without sufficient review, and improper standards set by the [Environmental Protection Agency], to name a few.

The more recent crisis they’re referring to is the failed Christmas Day bombing when would-be radical Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on its way to Detroit. That set off a campaign to more rapidly implement full-body scanning at airports around the globe, including several in the United States and those in the Netherlands and Nigeria where Abdumutallab reportedly boarded connecting flights with explosives hidden in his underwear.

One maker of whole-body imagers, California-based OSI Systems, has since begun boasting to investors about the surge in demand reporting that total orders stood at $50 million worth as of mid-May. Authorities in Great Britain also announced this year following the attempted attack that they would be purchasing scanners from the company.

Meanwhile, federal officials have been able to quell some grievances over privacy associated with the machines by promising the flying public that images generated from them would not be stored or transmitted. Security officers also review the images in a separate room preventing workers from seeing the actual passenger, TSA says. Those assurances haven’t stopped some briefly high-profile and even bizarre incidents from occurring.

A whole-body imager in May led to one situation seemingly worse than any dreadful scenario a privacy advocate could dream up as evidence against their use. The Smoking Gun obtained a police report showing that an airport screener had beat his co-worker with a baton causing “bruises and abrasions” after he was teased relentlessly by fellow security officers for having a small penis.

How were they familiar with the size of his genitals? It was revealed during a training session involving an X-ray scanner. The man “stated he could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind,” according to the report.

Sen. Collins had already been asking the Department of Homeland Security why it wasn’t using whole-body scanners like those deployed in Amsterdam that rely on software to automatically detect the presence of dangerous items on flyers as they pass through security gates. That way screeners don’t need to review detailed images or conduct further inspection unless the program alerts them to a possible threat.

She wrote in a separate mid-April letter to the department that Amsterdam’s scanning machines are faster at moving travelers past security and they also prevent passengers and screeners from being exposed to radiation.

While no technology is 100 percent effective at detecting dangerous items, the Dutch officials we talked to expressed confidence that there was a high probability that this technology would have detected Abdulmutallab’s concealed explosives. We wanted to bring this technology to your attention because it appears to offer a solution to the significant privacy concerns that have been raised about DHS’s deployment of whole-body imaging machines in the United States.

The letter was co-signed by senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).

Flickr image courtesy Mad House Photography.

Flickr image of St. John in the Virgin Islands courtesy Snap Man.

Virtually everything today is in one way or another a potential danger to U.S. national security. There are foreign terrorists, of course. Beyond that authorities cite drug cartels, downturns in the economy, espionage, street gangs, counterfeit goods, right-wing militias, left-wing environmentalists and the multiple personalities of Mother Nature.

Beautiful Caribbean locales, on the other hand, face their own hazards. For the Virgin Islands, one of several U.S. territories many Americans forget have deep historical, political and economic ties to the mainland, it’s apparently adult beverages and “Puerto Rican terrorists” that together form a feasible threat.

First, background. The story begins with daiquiri-addicted Americans who love the taste of sweet rum at home and while away visiting sun-drenched vacation resorts. More specifically, it’s the Spring Break love potion known as Captain Morgan, manufactured by a company called Diageo PLC, the U.K.-based conglomerate behind such intoxicating substances as Guinness beer and Smirnoff vodka. Certain rums like Captain Morgan are produced in vast Caribbean distilleries.

From there the story leads to a monthly magazine called Homeland Security Today, which, at the risk of offending those fine folks, would not be easily mistaken for the New Yorker and certainly won’t be appearing next to Cosmo at the check-out stand anytime soon. Its readers are narrowly focused, many of them government contractors and bureaucrats, so an intriguing revelation within its pages could slip by without much notice.

The June issue of Homeland Security Today contained a feature from its editor, David Silverberg, who described changes the Virgin Islands have been making to better prepare for catastrophes and build a stronger culture of emergency management.

Established as a U.S. territory in 1917, the cluster of stunning beaches and seaside hills is by no means free from peril, despite what travel brochures suggest. Droughts can occur on the Virgin Islands due to a dependence on limited rainwater, in addition to the possibility of hurricanes, tropical storms, earthquakes and tsunamis. Plus, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil are refined on the island of Saint Croix every day, Silverberg writes.

But emergency managers in the Virgin Islands didn’t emphasize any of these scenarios when they developed a response exercise last year to challenge the area’s preparedness capabilities. Instead, according to a brief sidebar from Silverberg headlined “Rum and radicals,” they came up with a narrative seemingly capable of causing diplomatic problems by pretending that a group of Puerto Rican terrorists called “The People’s Hope” planned to attack facilities on the islands with improvised explosive devices.

Puerto Rico is also a U.S. territory located not far west in the Caribbean.

Why Puerto Rico?

The response exercise leads back to rum, Silverberg implies. An ambitious governor of the Virgin Islands who took office in 2007 but went to school in Ohio, John deJongh, persuaded Diageo, parent of Captain Morgan, to move its rum-making operations from Puerto Rico to his tropical destination. DeJongh did so by promising massive subsidies to Diageo, but the departure would also cost Puerto Rico jobs and tens of millions in tax revenue.

View Trouble in paradise in a larger map

Officials in the Virgin Islands argue that Diageo planned to head elsewhere with Captain Morgan anyway, but the perception of a coup enraged the Puerto Rican community, both on the island and the mainland. This summer a group that coordinates New York City’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade rejected Diageo as a sponsor following a years-long relationship between the two.

Rum taxes collected from the drink’s sale to consumers in the United States are administered by the federal government, so Washington found itself at the center of an ugly political clash over the fate of Captain Morgan. Leaders in the Virgin Islands planned to use those rum taxes to lure Diageo eastward, while advocates for Puerto Rico sought to stop what they characterized as a bailout for the company and keep production where it’s been for more than two decades. The whole thing is now known as the “rum wars.”

There are reported racial tensions as well. The Congressional Black Caucus has actively defended deJongh’s campaign in Washington, while Puerto Rico is linked politically with Hispanic lawmakers.

So now consider in that context not only what’s regarded by one side as a drive to “poach” jobs and income needed for public services, but also an exercise for emergency responders in which one government refers to the citizens of a nearby government as terrorists. According to Homeland Security Today:

The scenario was fictional and intended mainly to test areas of responsibility and jurisdiction among island responders – but the real resentment continues. As recently as April, deJongh was fighting legislative efforts in Congress to nullify the deal and keep Captain Morgan rum in Puerto Rico.

Aggressive lobbying under the capitol dome is one thing. But are Puerto Ricans aware that the folks next door have imagined them as something far worse? The rum wars may in the end serve as a larger commentary about the use of labels in the global war on terror.

The United States has again broken its previous record for the number of immigration cases waiting to be resolved by a federal court judge. There were nearly 248,000 cases pending by the middle of June this year, a whopping 33 percent higher than where the figure stood at the end of fiscal year 2008. The latest numbers come courtesy of researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which specializes in federal law enforcement statistics.

TRAC also found that the average length of time it’s taken to conclude immigration cases during 2010 reached 459 days, a number higher than any year since at least 1998. By state, California remains the leader in average wait times with more than 640 days. One hearing location in San Diego posted an extraordinary average wait time of nearly 1,300 days, or to put it another way, more than three years.

Experts attribute the enormous backlog of immigration cases to a list of possible factors. First, the number of judges available to hear immigration cases is declining, and as of March, one out of every six such positions was unfilled. Just five immigration judges have been sworn in since that time. “[The federal government] still has a very long way to go to fill existing judge vacancies,” according to TRAC.

Second, immigration enforcement in one region of the country over another may be changing, which could lead to a greater number of cases that judges are suddenly required to contend with. New proceedings have actually gone down somewhat during the 2010 fiscal year nationwide. But new matters that required attention from an immigration court reached all-time highs in 2009.

Individual courts in Texas, Nevada, Illinois and Arizona, meanwhile, saw the number of pending cases accumulate rapidly during the first none months of this year, from 37 percent in Phoenix to as high as 67 percent in Harlingen, Texas.

Illustrating the amount of pressure faced by politicians in Washington on the issue of illegal immigration, a bill pumping $600 million into increased border security easily passed both the House and Senate last week before Obama signed it Aug. 13.

The White House first requested more money for border security from Congress earlier this summer when Obama committed to sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest following complaints by high-profile elected officials that the federal government wasn’t doing enough there. The money will also be used to build new Border Patrol stations and acquire unmanned surveillance aircraft.

But as we’ve noted before, hiring personnel to fight drug traffickers and illegal border crossers costs taxpayers a fortune. After factoring in background checks, fitness evaluations, night-vision goggles, uniforms, mobile radios and more, Customs and Border Protection estimated last year that the cost of each new hire is about $160,000. If correct, that would put the price tag of taking on 1,000 new border-patrol agents at $160 million.

Under former President Bush, the number of law-enforcement officers carrying out patrol activities on the border grew to nearly 19,000 nationally by April 2009 from about 12,000 just a few years before. Bush also sought to dramatically scale back the federal government’s policy of releasing people charged with immigration violations until a court hearing could be held. That led to a jump in the expense needed to keep them in detention.

The Department of Homeland Security has in addition already spent $800 million on the troubled SBInet program, an attempt to line the nation’s border with surveillance devices capable of alerting authorities to the presence of border crossers. But SBInet has so far failed to meet expectations and is under review.

Senior homeland security officials will face the difficulty of finding reliable border agents as they embark on a new recruitment drive. The department’s watchdog inspector general had 230 corruption cases under its purview last year, in part because drug traffickers have succeeded at bribing some border agents. The FBI had more than 110 border-related cases during that time. Customs and Border Protection has added over 200 internal affairs agents since 2006.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spoke with NewsHour on PBS last week about border security. During the interview she was asked to comment on a statement made by Arizona’s two GOP senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, who said the latest measure from Congress “is a start.” They complained nonetheless that it still didn’t include enough for more customs inspectors in some parts of their home state. Her response:

What we want to make sure that we do is, don’t just throw money at the border, but do things that make sense, do things that are efficient, and establish control along that whole 2,000-mile-long border. And as we do that, let’s make sure that we’ve got the right mix – the right mix of manpower, the right mix of technology, the right mix of infrastructure.

Figures in chart courtesy Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Image: North American Aerospace Defense Command

It’s one of the most powerful addictions formed by government since the Sept. 11 hijackings. Blooming in every corner of the country are high-tech command facilities for fighting terrorism, battling crime linked to national security, coordinating disaster responses, enhancing infrastructure protection and more. The desire for them is insatiable, and Congress seems ever the enabler.

Some existed prior to the attacks and received an injection of cash when new, massive spending on homeland security by Washington exploded. Others were created following 9/11 to address every hazard imaginable.

Many of these coordination and intelligence centers are not unlike how action-film directors portray them. There are banks of monitors with analysts working behind three or four panels each, large screens on the wall tuned to cable news networks or weather feeds, lights bleeping from server racks and, of course, lots of maps. Always lots of maps. The only thing missing is a chain-smoking character actor determinedly leading the response to total pandemonium as it rages outside.

Keeping track of the centers turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. It’s never clear where one overlaps with or replaces another. There’s the National Response Coordination Center, the National Operations Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Transportation Security Operations Center (aka the “Freedom Center”), the Transportation Security Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, the National Vessel Movement Center, the National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center, the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center, the Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. That’s a partial list.

View Center of the world in a larger map
A sample array of intelligence and coordination centers located in or around the nation’s capital. Click on the tabs to learn more.

The Department of Homeland Security also spent more than $250 million over a three-year period helping to build 70 local police fusion centers where authorities trade information about terrorists, natural disasters, threats to public health and everyday crime (it used to be just terrorists, but the expense proved difficult to justify).

Last year’s homeland security appropriations bill contained over 80 earmarks totaling almost $52 million for so-called emergency operations centers located in dozens of communities across the country, from the city of Green Cove Springs in Florida to the city of White Fish in Montana (estimated combined population – about 15,000). Officials say EOCs are necessary for coordinating disaster response and recovery.

Then there’s the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, not to be confused with the National Biosurveillance Integration Center. The first determines what dangers we face if biological agents fall into the hands of terrorists.

The second center’s annual budget is about $8 million. Officials who work on preparedness issues elsewhere in government told congressional investigators last year they weren’t sure if it “contributed anything to the federal biosurveillance community that other agencies were not already accomplishing,” according to a December 2009 report.

Passage of a law in 2007 that implemented leftover recommendations from the 9/11 Commission led to the establishment of the biosurveillance integration center. Its job is to analyze biothreat data flowing in from “partner” agencies and to send out an alert if disturbing trends or events are detected. At least that’s its job on paper.

The center’s “partners,” interviewed by the Government Accountability Office, expressed “widespread uncertainty and skepticism” about its purpose and responsibilities. Its partners include the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Others complained that during the response to H1N1, the center “was not able to demonstrate that it had unique value to add.” Some said they’d rather deal with another of the many centers available, namely the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center.

There were even worries that the biosurveillance center would fail to accurately interpret data and end up mass distributing ill-informed reports. Interviewees said they were concerned “that [the center’s] lack of contextual sophistication could lead to confusion, a greater volume of unnecessary communication in the biosurveillance environment, or even panic.” In other words, an overabundance of centers could lead to the very shockwaves from non-existent impending doom that we fear.

To be certain, the risks involved shouldn’t be dismissed as science fiction. Experts say the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. during 2001 led to billions of dollars in losses suffered by the food and agricultural industries. If perpetrators actually figured out a way to spread deadly biological agents over, say, a large vacation resort, it would cause unbelievable tragedy and no doubt send tremors through the economy. The Obama administration is training postal workers to distribute treatments if something like anthrax is loosed into the air.

But the GAO learned that federal agencies responsible for transmitting essential data to the biosurveillance center aren’t doing so with enthusiasm, leaving it to rely in part on publicly available information, which includes news stories. The center’s “partners” also weren’t detailing personnel there with enough expertise to make it effective in rapidly detecting biological threats.

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center isn’t alone in its troubles.

Federal drug enforcement officials created the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) all the way back in the 1970s to collect, analyze and share information about narcotics traffickers and border violence. More than 20 agencies have representatives there. Yet requests for information from its own federal partners, some of them critical, have declined substantially in recent years, the Justice Department’s watchdog inspector general concluded in a June report.

Its ability to coordinate with state and federal bureaucracies “is inconsistent,” the report said. And the center did not keep an up-to-date list of all the other intelligence and fusion centers it should have ties with, nor did EPIC know if it had users in each of those facilities. The following quote, however, seems to say the most about the rise of such centers:

When we compared EPIC with other multi-agency centers having counterdrug intelligence responsibilities, we found increasing potential for overlap in certain areas. … With the emergence of new centers and EPIC’s expansion into program areas that were not addressed [in earlier planning], there is an increased likelihood for duplication of effort among the centers.

If only the federal government would create a command center for processing Freedom of Information Act requests. At least then there would be a single institution to hold accountable.