After reading your piece, Creative Loafing declined to print it not out of a desire to censor you, but because several facts in your piece that you attributed to CL's prior coverage and took issue with weren't actually part of our coverage. Other details in your piece were factually inaccurate.

The purpose of this response to your column is to clear up any confusion over Creative Loafing's ongoing coverage of former Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Eduardo Aguirre and whistleblower Michael Maxwell. I'd like to clear it up. I'll go point by point.

[Unedited version of Rafael Prieto Zartha's "My People" column available here]

Your column inferred that Maxwell had unfairly criticized Aguirre.

You wrote: "Then Aguirre said the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the defunct federal agency, "had been the target of serious criticism for its slow responses to immigrant applications for benefits such as work authorization, permanent residency and naturalization."

The criticism Aguirre is referring to here came from Congress and pro-immigration activists, NOT Maxwell, Numbers USA or Creative Loafing, and it has to do with the backlog of immigration applications. The criticism of USCIS that Creative Loafing has been covering deals with entirely different issues, namely USCIS' unresolved internal fraud investigations, thousands of background investigations of USCIS workers that haven't been completed, USCIS workers who lack the security clearances to make immigration decisions on cases with national security red flags and holes in the system that allow criminal and terrorist elements to exploit it. Most of these breaches were first made public not by Maxwell, but by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigatory arm of Congress, which has been investigating these problems since 2002. That's why I keep referring to the GAO when I write about Maxwell.

You wrote: "On June 2003, at the nomination hearing of Aguirre, senator Orrin Hatch said BCIS "inherited the legacy of its predecessor, such as an enormous backlog of applications waiting to be adjudicated."

The implication in your piece was that this wasn't Aguirre's fault.

That's true. I have never criticized Aguirre for the general backlog of immigration applications, and neither has Maxwell in any of his testimony. In fact, the opposite is true. Maxwell worked for Aguirre in a security capacity before Aguirre brought Maxwell to USCIS to document and clean up fraud/national security problems and deal with the backlog of security background checks on employees and fraud investigations at USCIS -- the very same problems we've been writing about. So, Aguirre and Maxwell are on the same team here. To Aguirre and Maxwell, these were national security and criminal issues, not immigrant or Hispanic issues.

Aguirre left his post at USCIS months before Maxwell began testifying before Congress. In Maxwell's testimony to Congress -- which I attached in an email to you and which can be found here (scroll down and see April 6, 2006) -- Maxwell takes pains to explain that Aguirre was the one who tried to clean up the fraud Maxwell is complaining about and that Aguirre even authorized a large staff for Maxwell to do it with. Maxwell testified that those who took over AFTER Aguirre left USCIS for the diplomatic post have stonewalled and refused to clean up USCIS, NOT AGUIRRE.

I make that clear in my JUNE cover story. Here's an excerpt on Aguirre from my June cover story on USCIS (available here) which I hope you'll read if you haven't already had a chance to.

From the cover story:

"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.

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."

You wrote: "Maxwell has testified before the US Congress pleading against any program aim to regularize undocumented immigrants."

Again, I'd ask that you read Mr. Maxwell's testimony word for word as I have. Maxwell has NEVER argued against "ANY program aimed at regularizing undocumented immigrants" in any of his testimony, as you claim. As you'll see if you read it, Maxwell's dry, highly detailed testimony is targeted at fixing VERY SPECIFIC terrorism and national security problems before piling another 20 million applications on a system that is broken from a national security perspective.

In his testimony, Maxwell opposed regularizing the small percentage of undocumented immigrants who have legitimate national security red flags in their files until those issues are resolved. He has never targeted Hispanics as a group in any of his testimony or taken a political stance on immigration issues. As you'll see if you read his testimony, all of his examples (again, see my cover story and his testimony) involve individuals with terrorist or criminal connections.

You wrote: "He has argued corruption and terrorism, but behind him the shadow of his lawyer Rosemary Jenks appears. Jenks is known for giving frequent legislative assistance to the Immigration Reform Caucus chaired by congressman Tom Tancredo. Plus she is a former senior fellow of the Center for Immigration Studies and present director of Government Relations for Numbers USA, two main national restrictionist organizations."

Again, please see my June cover story available here. In it, we told our readers who Jenks was, who she was with, and emphasized that the issues Maxwell has been pointing out to Congress first caught on with Republican opponents of immigration/Tancredo's organization but gradually became a general national security concern on the Hill to members of both parties. As you point out, Numbers USA really wants a humane approach to immigration and one that doesn't threaten our national security. So do I.  

You wrote: "I am afraid the information Maxwell is giving to our own Tara Servatius is not quite accurate.

"That's wrong" told me Jose Pertierra, a well recognized national immigration attorney, in reference to the easiness to apply for lawful permanent resident status and the expedite reception of a work permit, as was described by Tara in her column "Memo to Terrorists."

"The mailing of a work authorization document neither is a sure thing", Pertierra added."

Pertierra is correct and so is my column. It isn't a sure thing, but it's not hard to do either. I took pains to point that out in my column when I explained that processing times vary at different locations. If Maxwell were the only one spouting this stuff, we wouldn't be printing it. As Creative Loafing reported, the problem with the LPR status was well documented by other federal investigatory bodies before and after Maxwell testified before the Congressional committees. As I have repeatedly written, the Government Accountability Office has been chronicling the immigration fraud, corruption and chaos at USCIS from a national security perspective since 2002. The GAO's latest report on the problems in March 2006 called "Additional Controls and a Sanctions Strategy Could Enhance DHS's Ability to Control Benefit Fraud" addresses the legal permanent resident status problem as one of many potential immigration benefit fraud problems at USCIS.

I didn't attach the other GAO reports going back to 2002 because I was afraid it would jam up your email, but I would be happy to send them if you want. Again, this is NOT anti-immigration stuff. It's a methodical compilation of serious national security breaches in our immigration system that are inexcusable five years after Sept. 11.

Hopefully, the opening lines of the March 2006 GAO study, which I have pasted here, will peak your interest:

"Although the full extent of benefit fraud is unknown, available evidence suggests that it is a serious problem. In 2002, GAO reported that immigration benefit fraud was pervasive and significant and the approach to controlling it was fragmented."

You wrote: "Even illegal aliens deserve humane treatment as they are detected, detained and deported," says Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA in its website.

We are all in agreement on this. If terrorists use weaknesses in the immigration system to gain immigration benefits, as Maxwell, the independent investigators at the GAO and many others believe they are currently doing, the potential resulting terrorist attack will kill Hispanics, legal or illegal, just as fast as it kills the rest of us. This is not a Hispanic issue. It's a national security issue.

Tara