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ICE leader looks forward to higher funding, renewed hiring

By STEPHEN LOSEY


Now that two years of underfunding and understaffing at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are ending, Acting Director John Clark has his eye on improving retention, morale and training and better using the agency’s investigators.

ICE has dealt with a massive budget shortfall practically since it was created in March 2003. But Congress is restoring the agency’s funding: The $3.9 billion budgeted for ICE in fiscal 2006 is $216 million more than the preceding year.

The funding provides for 500 new employees in fiscal 2006, including criminal investigators and immigration enforcement agents. ICE also will be able to reinstitute performance bonuses it had suspended to cut costs, start a new management training program, and free up investigators now assigned to detention and removal of illegal aliens so they can track down criminals.

Although the budget shortfall — which was as much as $350 million in December 2004 — stretched ICE to its limits and hurt morale, Clark said the agency performed admirably.

Budget shortfalls of that size can sink fledgling agencies, Clark said, and even established agencies usually see productivity plummet.

Not only did ICE survive, Clark said, it made significant accomplishments — including new initiatives that netted thousands of suspected criminals.

“We scrapped and scraped and did whatever we could,” Clark said in a Nov. 8 interview in his Washington office. “To find out, when the budgets [of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service, the agencies that made up ICE] merged in October 2003, that we were short quite a bit, it made things all that much more difficult for us.”

Clark objected to former Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin’s comments in the Oct. 31 Federal Times that ICE was the most dysfunctional agency in the department. Clark said ICE improved its performance while facing tremendous challenges that were not of its own making.

ICE got “the short end of the stick,” in terms of funding and resources when it was created, Clark said. And a lengthy dispute between ICE and five other Homeland Security bureaus over payments to ICE for accounting and other services did not help. ICE and the other bureaus did not reach a payment agreement until late in fiscal 2004, which left the agency short hundreds of millions of dollars.

ICE realized it was burning through money by the middle of fiscal 2004 and would not make it to the end of the year if it did not make changes, Clark said. So it began several cost-saving measures — a yearlong hiring freeze that ended this fall, elimination of nonessential travel, cuts in specialized training and suspension of all performance bonuses. The shortages also meant ICE often had to shift resources around to react to emergencies.

Clark commended ICE’s employees for working through such a difficult period. He said he recognizes many were frustrated by the hiring and bonus freeze.

Those days are over, Clark said. In addition to the planned new hires, Clark said ICE will begin grooming its next generation of middle- and upper-level managers in early December, when it begins a new management development program.

Under the program, about 25 GS-13, -14 and -15 employees will spend a year in Washington for training and mentoring. They will then return to their home offices with added experience. And Clark said the program may have a trickle-down effect that benefits other employees. He hopes the ICE employees in field offices who fill in during the the management trainees’ absence will also develop new skills.

While Clark is impressed with what ICE has so far accomplished — he singled out programs like the anti-gang initiative Operation Community Shield and anti-sex offender program Operation Predator — he wonders where ICE would be if it was fully funded from the start.

Clark would not speculate on what ICE might otherwise have accomplished, except for one area: detention and removal of illegal aliens. The agency has long wanted immigration enforcement agents to handle this instead of its investigators, but has not had enough enforcement agents to do so. The additional hiring planned for 2006 will let ICE take significant steps toward freeing those investigators so they can track down suspected criminals, he said.

But Charles Showalter, president of the National Homeland Security Council, said that while catching child pornographers and sex offenders is important, ICE continues to neglect the immigration side of its mission. Showalter said the many ICE managers and agents who came from the former Customs Service are more comfortable enforcing customs law.

And Showalter said that while fixing the budget problems is an important step, other issues — such as improving relations between local managers and agents — also need to be addressed.

http://www.federaltimes.com/index2.php?S=1375981