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July 22, 2003

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· Battling immigration;
· ASU researchers help the war on bio-terror by looking at ways to identify biological weapons
In-Studio Guests:
Tom Derouchey, Interim Special Agent, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement;
Stephen Fickett, District Director, Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services;
Deborah Rodriguez, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection;
Ron Calhoun, mechanical and aerospace engineer, Arizona State University;
Jonathan Fink, Vice President, Research and Economic Affairs, Arizona State University;
Charles Arntzen, founding Director, Arizona Biodesign Institute.
Important Links and Resources:
· Department of Homeland Security: Immigration & Borders
· Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
· Bureau of Immigration & Customs Enforcement - Reorganization Fact Sheet

>> Michael: Tonight on "Horizon," the agencies that deal with immigration are reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security. We'll look at their new roles. Plus, ASU researchers help the war on terror by looking at ways to identify biological weapons. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. Welcome to "Horizon." More than 20 people died in the desert last week, a grim reminder that Arizona is a major corridor for illegal immigration. Earlier this year the agencies responsible for dealing with immigration underwent a major reorganization. In a moment, I will talk to those in charge of the new immigration bureaus, but first Paul Atkinson outlines the demise of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the shifting of its duties to the Department of Homeland Security.

>> Paul Atkinson: The Border Patrol was the Immigration and Naturalization Service's most noticeable component. The agency's work away from the border was less seen. Agents tracked down criminal aliens, processed jail inmates for deportation, checked I-9 Forms and I.D.s to determine if people could legally work in the U.S., and processed thousands of applications for legal residency and citizenship.

>> Lisa Magana: It's always been responsible for illogical mandates.

>>Paul Atkinson: ASU Chicano studies professor Lisa Magana has studied the INS and has a new book on the agency that will be published this fall.

>> Lisa Magana: It was an agency that was responsible for controlling illegal immigration when I would suggest illegal immigration is uncontrollable, and so it's always been set up to look ineffective, and because it's looked ineffective, I think it's easier to reorganize it, move it into different departments, which what is going on right now. This is historical. It's been moved and placed in different departments throughout history.

>> Paul Atkinson: The INS reported to the Department of Justice and had five distinct missions, Border Patrol, Inspections, Investigations, Detention and Removal, and Services and Benefits. Beginning March 1st of this year, the 111-year-old agency was disbanded. Its responsibilities now fall under the Department of Homeland Security. The new agencies and their missions: The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection includes the Border Patrol, Port of Entry Inspectors and Agriculture Inspectors. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversees immigration investigations, customs investigations, detention and removal of immigrants and intelligence for national security. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services handles the processing of people applying your legal residency, asylum and citizenship.

>> Russel Ahr: The important thing to emphasize is that there is no interruption of service to the public. As far as the public perception after March 1, there really aren't very many perceivable differences. You are going to find for the large part the same officers in the same locations doing the same job, but the purpose was to consolidate functions that had for a long time been viewed as duplicative.

>> Paul Atkinson: Those applying at the Phoenix office find a building and agency much different from the one under INS. A canopy shades people waiting in line outside the building on Central Avenue. Inside the waiting room is double the size it was a couple years ago and new service windows have also been added.

>> Russel Ahr: They have done away with our lines early, early in the morning. People know if they are here by 1:30 in the afternoon, we see them. So we do have a few die-hards that start lining up 5:00 in the morning, but most of our traffic now is fairly steady all day long, and we try not to keep them outside too long at all.

>> Paul Atkinson: A new building entrance and plaza is under construction for those seeking assistance with immigration matters. Also under construction are new detention and processing facilities for those apprehended by investigation agents.

>> Tom Baranick: In the '90s when the alien immigration problem got to be severe across the border, it overwhelmed the facilities that we had to the point where it was affecting safety and security. So that was the impetus to start this whole project, which was to build -- to expand our detention processing and hold room facility area.

>> Paul Atkinson: The overhaul of immigration facilities in Phoenix was planned well before the reorganization of the former INS. There's no question improvements to the building will help more immigrants be processed and decrease a backlog of cases. The bigger question is, will the organizational restructuring of the former INS improve the nation's ability to deal with immigration?

Michael: Joining me now is Tom Derouchey, Interim Special Agent in charge of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Stephen Fickett, District Director for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services; also here is Deborah Rodriguez, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection. Thanks to each of you for showing up. I want to get to individual functions and where they are now and what they are, but first I want to ask an overall assessment. It's now been, I guess, three months-plus, going on four months, Tom, since the reorganization took place. What's the overall assessment to date?

>> Tom Derouchey: I think the overall assessment, one of the things that we did do is a very historical and monumental task that the federal government undertook, and that was under the creation of the Department of Homeland Security the abolishment of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the re-creation of different bureaus within the Department of Homeland Security, and here we are now basically slightly more than 90 days since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we're continuation of operations, we're merging our agencies like functions within different bureaus within the Department of Homeland Security. So we have come a long way in a relatively short period of time within each of the bureaus under Department of Homeland Security.

>> Michael: Deborah, the hope always is with these kinds of reorganizations that you will get a better, more efficient, more streamlined product capable of better fulfilling its mission. Sometimes that doesn't turn out to be the case. It takes a while to integrate different agencies cultures and those kinds of things. How is it working this time?

>> Deborah Rodriguez: Well, for Customs and Border Protection it's working extremely well, probably better than any of us would have guessed at this early point. There were three different agencies in three different departments of the federal government at the land border ports of entry and the airports of entry, and the seaports of entry. Now those former customs inspectors and immigration inspectors and agricultural inspectors are all under one agency with one clear chain of command. There's one individual in charge at that port of entry. Everything from routine scheduling to implementing special operations just works better and more effectively because of that.

>> Michael: Now, previously on some of those functions, because you had customs was treasury, agriculture obviously was agriculture, and Border Patrol was INS, you did have some cross training that went on among the various people assigned to those different functions.

>>Deborah Rodriguez: We did. At the land border the inspectors were all cross designated to perform the functions of the other agency on the primary inspection lane. At the airports, that was never the case. We're now implementing a one-stop program, if you will, one face at the border at the airports where the inspection for all disciplines will be done d the primary inspection will be done by one inspector who is trained and well-versed in all of the areas.

>> Michael: Steve, give me your overall feel for how this is going 90 daze days plus in.

>> Steve Fickett: Citizenship and immigration service is very pleased with how it's going. We have the advantage unlike the other two bureaus of all our current employees came from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. We didn't have to integrate any employees from other organizations. We were able to very much hit the ground running. It's gone wonderfully for us, from the perspective of your lead-in with the ASU professor, we, the services side, have obviously completed competed with the enforcement side for attention for years. Now we are one agency. All the energy of that agency is devoted to providing a secure application process that efficient and effectively moves those applications through the process. So we're very pleased with it.

>> Michael: Getting to function, I mean, the function of your mission is to attempt to make sure that the people who are here are lawfully here, either getting in in the first instance, or for that matter, continuing to be here.

>> Steve Fickett: We're dealing with basically three groups of people, the non-immigrants, who are trying to become immigrants, or green cardholders, as the public would know them, and the people that have had green cards for a period of time and now want to naturalize as a second group and as a third group, all those people that want benefits that are associated with a large range of aspects of the law which we administer. People who want employment cards, people who want copies of their naturalization certificates. There is an awful lot of things going on. Last year we had 7 million applications come into our agency. That's a lot of applications to adjudicate.

>> Michael: Now, Deborah, at least on the Border Patrol side of your operation, well, I mean, certainly one of its main missions is to try to keep people out who are not supposed to be here, who can't pass the test that Steve just outlined, correct?

>> Deborah Rodriguez: Absolutely. The priority mission of customs and Border Patrol is to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States, but at the same time, we know that we need to facilitate the entry of lawful legitimate trade and travel. The Border Patrol is one part of our agency that is really mainly concerned with apprehending those trying to come in illegally between the ports of entry and at the ports of entry we're -- we've got a process where we've got to determine who is entitled lawfully to come in and who might have a bad intent.

>> Michael: And, of course, the customs side of that operation is Mort property side of that?

>> Deborah Rodriguez: Right and trade. Absolutely.

>> Michael: Is that working significantly -- is the function working significantly different under the Department of Homeland Security than necessarily we would have seen Border Patrol and customs working February 28th?

>> Deborah Rodriguez: Well, we certainly have one priority mission now, which we didn't before. We were separate agencies with different missions. Now we all know and happy to work for the organization that puts keeping terrorists and terrorism weapons out of the country. Certainly customs in the past had put a high priority on trade, on facilitating legitimate trade and they continue to do so. We're now working together, and so that in itself is a force multiplier. We're doing lot of cross training and we can take on initiatives that we never could have before.

>> Michael: Steve, one of -- or, Tom, one of your bureau's main functions, as I understand it, is providing investigative support to both of them?

>> Tom Derouchey: That's correct. We are the investigative division for the Department of Homeland Security, in particular when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. Our responsibility is to ensure that the integrity of the legal immigration process is maintained, and that's through what the bureau of citizenship and immigration services does, and likewise, preventing, like the bureau of border and customs border protection, preventing terrorists from illegally entering you the United States or otherwise individuals ineligible from entering the United States from coming in. We so provide that investigative arm to the bureau of both border and transportation security and bureau of citizenship and immigration services.

>> Michael: I was interested in your comments in the paper where you said you were surprised about illegal -- illegal aliens smuggling operations, and you compared really the people being transported to any other commodity involved in an illegal enterprise such as drug smuggling or weapons smuggling or other things. I never had thought of it that way, either, but I suppose that is what is going on and what is the nature of the operation?

>> Tom Derouchey: That is exactly correct, and it's the way it has been ongoing with smuggling organizations that traffic not only in human cargo, but other types of contraband as well. A smuggling organization is the mechanism for which illicit contraband makes it way into the United States and that contraband could be human life, it could be weapons of mass destruction, it could be terrorists, or it could be other types of narcotic or other types of contraband or even to, say, cigarettes that get smuggled in from the northern border.

>> Michael: But the violence between the rival smuggling operations where essentially Smuggling Group B can -- quite a bit if it waits and tries to knock off Smuggling Group A once they have the people over the border they haven't yet been paid.

>> Tom Derouchey: Right. It is a very significant challenge for the bureau of immigration and customs enforcement in targeting these smuggling organizations, in particular when they're smuggling human beings. We don't know who they're bringing in. We have no way of conducting any types of background investigate eggs. It's very difficult to conduct an investigation against them simply because we're dealing with human beings that can fit in with society relatively easily. But it's not only the violence that's being committed against one smuggling organization against the other but also within -- against the smuggled aliens themselves. For example f a smuggled alien can't pay the smuggling fee, it's typically -- it's very likely that that smuggled alien could be the victim of violence perpetrated against them by the smuggling organizations, that include rapes, assaults, pistol-whippings, other types of intimidation. It's going to be a huge challenge for us.

>> Michael: And some substantial money involved.

>> Tom Derouchey: Substantial money. Globally it's a $9.5 mill billion a year industry.

>> Michael: Deborah, it's a long, long border. Are we doing -- are we making any progress?

>> Deborah Rodriguez: Well, I wouldn't speak for the Border Patrol except to say that I think they are making progress in that they've been able to funnel, because of their strategies and their targeting, they have been able to concentrate in specific areas and give resources to those areas. I certainly think at the ports of entry where we're making progress, we're developing new initiatives all the time --

>> Michael: Increased technology, improved technology, increased surveillance kinds of -- we hear from time to time about a variety of different surveillance techniques.

>> Deborah Rodiguez: Right. We are constantly looking at new technologies, developing new technologies for communication, for sharing of intelligence information, for -- for example, for trade or even people who are travelling to the United States by plane from a foreign country, we're getting information in advance so that we can run checks and do those kinds of things before the people or the goods ever touch U.S. soil.

>> Michael: Steve, I know one of the concerns historically had been, okay, someone gets here legally, they do have a green card or a tourist card or whatever -

>> Steve Fickett: Visa.

>> Michael: Visa. But it expires after some period of time. Student visa, I guess, would be a good illustration of that. And they don't leave. They're still here and they're really -- at least -- my perception, there was ant good policing of those people that kind of got lost in what is a very large country. Are we doing better at the monitoring of not only, did you get here legally, but do you remain here legally?

>> Steve Fickett: I think we are. There's some new databases that we put in place, there's a student school monitoring system that requires schools and students to keep INS up to date on their addresses and whether they're in status or not as far as a student goes. We've also had a registration program on countries of interest related to national security and terrorism, which is the forerunner of where we're going. Congressman dated three years -- well, it's a year-and-a-half now into the future that the immigration service come up with a system for tracking the 35 million people that come into this country under tourist visas and other types of visas. That's kind of the forerunner. We're trying to get that going. And in our normal course of business, in these applications that we receive, we uncover an awful lot of situations where people have either engaged in criminal activity or they've engaged in activity that's illegal under immigration law. Then we turn them over to Tom.

>> Michael: All right. We're out of time. Steve Fickett, thank you very much for joining us. Deborah Rodriguez, our thanks to you. Tom Derouchey, thank you very much. Best of luck in the assignments. The threat posed bye-bye logical and chemical weapons has become too real in recent years as the war on terror continues. Some ASU researchers are using their expertise to help protect the nation from increased threats of bioterrorism.

>> Mike Sauceda: Efforts to combat terrorism continue to go forward on a number of fronts, and the contributions of scientists are proving to be of considerable value. At ASU researchers are expanding their work to include these vital applications.

>> Jonathan Fink: Normally what we do is our faculty members work on the things that they are most expert in, and they look for applications after they have done their research, and in the case of -- an emergency like the terrorist threat, it reverses the process a bit where there is an external need, and then we need to find out from the outside community what do they really want and what do they really need and then we look back at our capabilities and try to match those up.

>> Mike Sauceda: One critical area of research is environmental fluid dynamics where engineers study the movement of air, important for addressing the problem of airborne pollutants as well as a threat posed by any release of dangerous substances by terrorists. Ron Calhoun is a mechanical and aerospace engineer who recently came to ASU from Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.

>> Ron Calhoun: There's a couple different areas we're working on here at ASU and basically most is concerned with when material gets released in the atmosphere that shouldn't be there, either from air pollution or from more frightening types of things like radionuclides or say SERIN gas or something. Something that shouldn't be in the atmosphere, where does it go, how do we figure out how it moves through, for example, the urban environment, should people be evacuated, how should they be evacuated, that type of thing.

>> Mike Sauceda: Calhoun and his colleagues use two different approaches for racking material in the atmosphere. One involves instruments such as the LIDAR, which uses laser light and is similar to radar. The output can be used to provide graphic representations of airborne particles.

>> Ron Calhoun: They've taken their LIDAR out into a field and they had an airplane fly out with a bag of something that was simulated to be like anthrax in the way it disperses, and it's -- imagine a five-pound bag of flour and then you flew over an airplane and you ripped it open, and that all comes out. Where does that stuff go? So with -- turns out that flour bounces laser light back. So we can actually look and see where that cloud of flour moves. That's what you see inside the box. Inside the box is how that cloud is breaking up and moving downstream and they're showing here they can track that over the course of about eight to ten kilometers.

>> Mike Sauceda: Relying on the laws of physics, the second approach Calhoun employs is numerical computer model, which help predict where airborne plumes of material will move through a given location.

>> Ron Calhoun: This is a building, a particular building at Lawrence Livermore national lab that I did this calculation around together with a team there. The urban dispersion group there. What we're going to see is a release, a simulated release, of a gas in front of the building and we want to see and try to understand how it fume gates the building, and the possible application for this is, say, you believe a building might be vulnerable to attack, some building where there is dignitaries or important people that are located there. So you want to understand how stuff from the outside gets in, how it might fume gate the outside of the building.

>> Mike Sauceda: ASU currently is developing a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore Labs that will allow for greater access to their national atmospheric released a advisory center and its quick response capabilities, and while engineers continue their search for ways to prevent or minimize exposure to toxic agents, biologists pursue a different but equally critical course. Charles and his team at the Arizona biomedical institute have been working on the creation of new plant based vaccines with the specific needs of third world countries. They now are developing defense applications as well.

>> Charles Arntzen: A little over a year ago we began an application process to the Department of Defense, and particularly the military command of the army, suggesting to them that we could perhaps make a strategic reserve of vaccines for the U.S. for anthrax and for plague. Then that proposal just sort of was going around and they showed a lot of interest in it but all of a sudden after September 11th now we've gotten more interest, and it has been approved for funding.

>> Mike Sauceda: Arntzen's work uses techniques developed by the U.S. military's biological research with organizes called pathogens, the agents that cause diseases such as the plague.

>> Charles Arntzen: We know there are certain proteins of the pathogen that are important for the first initial events, for attachment to our cells, and the initiation of disease. If we can stop the invasion at the earliest point, then we can stop the disease. So in a nutshell, the way we make vaccines is identify what that protein is that's involved in the first initial attachment of -- just take that protein out and use it as a vaccine, and then our body builds up a defense response.

>> Mike Sauceda: Rather than use traditional methods for vaccine production which involve the use of human cells, Arntzen and his colleagues have developed a new approach.

>> Charles Arntzen: We, instead, put the Gene for that protein into a plant cell, and we can grow the plant cells up in culture and isolate the protein, or what we prefer to do is cause the plant cell to regenerate into a whole plant, and now every cell of the plant contains this new protein, and what we have shown in principal is that you can now just feed an animal for in three cases we've done it with humans, just feed them a piece of that plant material and it becomes an oral vaccine.

>> Mike Sauceda: Arntzen's plant based oral vaccines promise to be not only highly convenient and effective in preventing certain diseases, the relative low cost of production and storage could potentially save taxpayers millions of dollars as well if the need for mass inoculations arose. It is one more instance of how the fruits of cutting edge research are extending beyond the campus.

>> Jonathan Fink: As a state university in a major metropolitan area, one of ASU's main responsibilities is to provide services to that community, and research is a main part of that, and the terrorist threat provides an opportunity for us to try to match up what we're good at with what the needs are. This is part of the larger responsibility of the university to be looking for ways to make our research more relevant and more useful to a wide range of stakeholders.

>> Michael: If you would like more information on tonight's immigration topic, you can visit our website at www.kaet.asu.edu, then click on "Horizon." You will find web links to the federal bureaus in charge of immigration. You can also look at transcripts of this and the past "Horizon" episodes. "Horizon" returns Thursday night, and here's what's in store.

>> Mike Sauceda: Planes taking off at Luke Air Force Base in the West Valley, the only training base in the country for F-16 fighter pilots, but urban development is threatening Luke Air Base, however, the City of Surprise reversed its position recently on additional development around Luke. Learn more Thursday at 7:00 here on "Horizon."

>> Michael: And then, of course, on Friday journalists Roundtable will feature reporters talking about the week's top news stories. Thank you very much for joining us on this Tuesday evening. I'm Michael Grant. Have a pleasant one. Good night.

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