October 10, 2003

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A Georgia Reader Contemplates Being Gone With The (Hispanic) Wind

From: Richard Humphries [email him], A Very Disgusted Ex-Cop in Elfrida, AZ.

Re: Another encounter with Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE.]

Early last month, I called the office of Robert Gattison, the Agent in Charge of the Tucson office of ICE. I got an answering machine and left the message that I wished to make an appointment to see him regarding the lack of enforcement of our Employer Sanction laws, those laws that make it illegal to hire anyone in this country illegally.

The next day I received a call from an Agent Dale Brown, a subordinate to Gattison, asking me what I wanted. I told him that I wished to speak to his boss, Gattison, about why a local illegal alien work camp, "La Perra Flaca", was being ignored.

Brown then refused to assist me in contacting his boss. He asked me what La Perra Flaca was, saying that he had never heard of it.

I told him that it was a camp in northern Cochise County that, according to two front page newspaper articles, written a year apart, housed at least 300 illegal alien farm workers and that several Border Patrol Agents had told me that they had orders to stay away from it, even though its existence has been widely known for a number of years.

The articles even quoted a farmer as saying that he wouldn't hire anyone but an illegal, if he could just get enough of them.

Brown refused another request to let me speak to Gattison - even though I told him that I was taking notes of the conversation.

I told Brown that I was very surprised that he, the second in command of the Tucson office of the BICE, had not heard of La Perra Flaca and that I wanted his office to enforce the Employer Sanction laws, starting right there.

At that point (are you ready for this?) Brown told me that he was unaware of those laws but doubted that his office had anything to do with them.

[VDARE.COM NOTE: ICE is indeed responsible for "conducting work site raids, imposing employer sanctions, and detaining and removing undocumented employees." Its website says, however, that "Agents arrest and identify unauthorized aliens at the worksite only as a result of criminal and administrative investigations of employers, not as a primary targeting strategy."]

When I expressed extreme surprise that an agent with his position didn't know what the Employer Sanction laws were, he told me that he was new on the job, had recently come over from U.S. Customs and was still "learning the ropes."

I then asked for an email address and or fax number for Gattison. Brown refused to give them to me, saying that, if I had something they needed to see, I could send it postal mail.

The next day, Brown called me back to tell me that he still didn't know who was supposed to be enforcing the Employer Sanction laws but that he would find out for me.

I doubt that he would have called me back had someone not told him to do so.

A week went by without my hearing from him, so I went into Tucson and knocked on the door of ICE. I was told that Gattison was not there, so I asked to talk to Brown.

Brown came into the small "reception" room, did not invite me into his office or to sit down anywhere, just kept me standing for a five minute talk, where he once again told me that he didn't think his office was responsible for the laws in question, but that he would find out for me.

Now a real clincher: I tried to give him papers that I had retrieved from vehicles that were being used in my area to smuggle illegal aliens, which contained names, addresses and phone numbers that quite probably were solid leads into illegal alien smuggling. But he refused to take them, saying that I should give them to the Douglas office of U.S. Border Patrol - even though the addresses were in the Phoenix area. I still have those papers.

That meeting was two weeks ago. I still have heard nothing from his office.

All of this simply leads me to believe that no one is enforcing these laws.