AZ sheriff: Fed agents told to reduce border arrests

An Arizona sheriff says U.S. Border Patrol officials have repeatedly told him they have been ordered to reduce -- at times even stop -- arrests of illegal immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S. border.

Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods.

“The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away. … They were not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.”

Dever said his recent conversation with the Border Patrol supervisor was the latest in a series of communications on the subject that he has had with various federal agents over the last two years. Dever said he plans to relay the substance of these conversations when he testifies under oath next month before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

“I will raise my hand to tell the truth and swear to God, and nothing is more serious or important than that,” he said. “I’m going to tell them that, here’s what I hear and see every day: I had conversation with agent A, B, C, D and this is what they told me.”

Dever’s charges were vigorously denied by a commander with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “The claim that Border Patrol supervisors have been instructed to underreport or manipulate our statistics is unequivocally false,” Jeffery Self, commander of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Joint Field Command in Arizona, said in a written statement.

“I took an oath that I take very seriously, and I find it insulting that anyone, especially a fellow law enforcement officer, would imply that we would put the protection of the American public and security of our nation’s borders in danger just for a numbers game," he said. "Our mission does not waiver [waver?] based on political climate, and it never will. To suggest that we are ambiguous in enforcing our laws belittles the work of more than 6,000 CBP employees in Arizona who dedicate their lives to protect our borders every day.”

In recent days, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the U.S.-Mexican border is more secure than ever, and Homeland Security officials have used recent statistics to support those claims. "There is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been," Napolitano said at the El Paso border crossing last week. "That is wrong. The border is better now than it ever has been."

Dever doesn’t agree. “Janet Napolitano says the border is more secure than it’s ever been. I’ve been here for 60 years, and I’m telling you that’s not true,” he said.

The sheriff of Santa Cruz County, which borders Dever’s Cochise County to the west, said, “This is news to me,” when asked about reports that border agents were being told to turn illegal immigrants back to Mexico rather than arrest them.

“It comes as a complete surprise that that would be something that’s going around,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said. “I meet with Dever all the time and I have great respect for him, so I expect he’d come forward and say what he knows and give the source. “Not knowing who the source is, how reliable that source is, I really don’t have much of a position,” Estrada said. “I’ve been around a real long time and haven’t heard anything like this. By the same token, you learn new things every day.”

Both sheriffs are elected officials. Dever is a Republican, Estrada, a Democrat.

Others have questioned the methodology and conclusions of the Homeland Security numbers showing the border is more secure. Mark Hanna, CEO of Real Life Enterprises, a Phoenix-based technology integration and security company, has testified before the Arizona Senate about what he called Homeland Security’s flawed methodology used to compile border security statistics. Hanna maintains the numbers are dangerously misleading.

Hanna, who is currently working on a private/public partnership pilot program along the Arizona border, said he attended a February conference at which Michael Fisher, chief of the United States Border Patrol, and Mark S. Borkowski, assistant commissioner for technology and innovation acquisition, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, showed off charts indicating arrests were decreasing and argued the border was more secure. The charts also showed an increase in marijuana seizures along the border and an increase in Border Patrol agents.

But those charts left out crucial data, Hanna said. “Since we don't know how many illegal crossings are occurring, then a decrease in apprehensions might mean that there are fewer illegal crossings, and the border is more secure. But it could also just as easily mean that more illegal border crossings are occurring, and we're just not catching as many.

In order to know how secure the border is, you need to know how many are crossing and the threat level of those who are crossing illegally," he said. “It is a very dangerous condition for the secretary of Homeland Security to be using incomplete data to form such a conclusion, and then repeatedly announce these conclusions as fact,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security did not return repeated requests for comment on Hanna’s specific challenges to the agency’s methodology.

Whatever the methodology, Dever said the numbers don’t accurately describe what’s happening on the ground. “We do not know who’s crossing that border, but that anyone who wants to can. That’s the message our nation needs to hear, that anyone who wants to can, and is. And our own Department of Homeland Security does not have clear definition of what securing the border even means," Dever said.

“People are disgusted, the smiles are gone off their face, their general sense of welfare been taken away from them and until that’s returned you can throw all the numbers on the board. … I’ll tell Napolitano, in spite of all of your declarations and efforts to the contrary, things are not safe. No, they are not secure. "You can use your numbers to say it’s more secure, but it does not define a sense of safety or well-being. You can say it’s more secure, but it’s more dangerous than ever.”

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Migrant crime wave revealed: Foreign arrests in Britain have almost doubled in just THREE years

The number of foreign nationals arrested in Britain has almost doubled in just three years, police figures show. And the biggest rises are among rural forces, such as Kent and Cambridgeshire.

In the worst-affected rural areas, arrests of non-Britons have soared nearly four-fold since 2006.

A total of 91,234 foreign nationals were arrested last year on suspicion of crimes including murder, burglary and sex offences. In contrast, the figure for 2008 was 51,899 and 81,625 in 2009.

And the true number is likely to be much higher, as only 19 out of the 52 police forces provided the figures, in response to Freedom of Information requests.

For the country’s biggest force, the Metropolitan Police, foreign-national arrests more than doubled. Scotland Yard recorded 24,264 in 2008, but last year the total reached 58,870.

Critics blame surging migration for placing a huge burden on forces, which are already facing cuts. Peter Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said: ‘I’m not surprised it’s so high because London is getting more diverse by the day.

‘It’s a problem when you get someone in who can’t speak English and we wait hours for an expensive interpreter to hear their side of the story. Even in trivial cases where you might be giving a caution, officers could be off the street for five or six hours.’

Kent Police saw arrests rise from 1,075 in 2006 to 4,119 last year. Surrey Police recorded arrests going up from 1,959 in 2006 to 2,079 last year.

For Cambridgeshire Constabulary, these types of arrests rose from 3,316 in 2008 to 4,803 in 2010. In 2007 it made just 1,850. Durham Constabulary saw arrests rise from 65 in 2006 to 474 last year.

The rise comes despite an overall fall in crime recorded during the past five years.

In January 2008, Mike Fuller, then chief constable of Kent, warned that his force was struggling with an ‘immigrant crimewave’. He said surges in migrant numbers had contributed to sharp increases in violent crime.

An Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman said: ‘The growing number of new communities has certainly brought greater complexity to the pattern of crime and have contributed to already stretched resources.’

Hugh Robertson, Conservative MP for Mid Kent, said: ‘These figures are deeply concerning. Immigration is a key issue that many people in my constituency speak to me about and it’s a very emotive subject. It may be that the rise in arrests is linked to the mass increase in immigration but it’s hard to say for sure.’

Official figures show 5,235 foreign national prisoners were deported last year. Nearly one in seven of the 85,000 inmates in England and Wales was born overseas.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘When people commit a crime they should feel the full force of the law regardless of their nationality. We are committed to removing foreign law breakers from the UK.’

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