Consequently, I urge all potential candidates to review my Test Prep Blog. Additionally, HSI requires detailed resumes to ensure candidates are qualified. Read my Resume Failures Blo g post to learn more. Depending on your background and type of announcement, the HSI application process can take anywhere from 7 months to 2 years. In Conclusion. HSI is first and foremost, a federal criminal investigative agency.
Expect to conduct surveillance, write warrant affidavits, execute arrests and move at a fairly fast pace with a cadre of aggressive law enforcement officers.
Although it is the second largest agency in the United States, Homeland Security Investigations HSI is still relatively unknown to the public and most of its workforce is comfortable with being silent public servants.
Consequently, if name recognition is truly important to you then this is definitely not a suitable home for your personality. Conversely, if you want to be a true criminal investigator, work amazing pro-active cases and make a difference, I encourage you to consider HSI as your premier federal law enforcement agency of choice. SA Blog.
The day to day of an HSI special agent can vary drastically based on geographic location and group assignment: The U. A typical duty day can involve massive seizures of narcotics, responses to stash houses where illegal migrants are held hostage, or apprehensions of violent cartel members. The major U. The Airport Group traditionally focuses on narcotics interdiction and money laundering activities. The Child Exploitation unit often targets child pornography suspect and runs stings focused on phedophiles.
Seasoned special agents in major offices tend to gravitate towards Commercial Fraud i. Experienced special agents are often assigned to various task forces i.
More often than not, HSI personnel execute search warrants and tend to use the following investigative methods: Border Search: HSI Special Agents are the only criminal investigators that have routine use of this vital authority. This allows HSI criminal investigators to intercept criminal syndicates operating on the border or exploiting our international airports.
As shown on the To Catch a Smuggler series, HSI Special Agents routinely identify major drug shipments crossing the border, follow smugglers to their destination and then conduct high risk raids to apprehend dangerous criminals. This is truly ninja work. Controlled Deliveries: Dangerous package shipments containing contraband i.
This is one of the most efficient tools to capture smugglers and career criminals. Immigration Authority: Although comically misunderstood and vilified, the use of immigration authority is vital to HSI's mission. Special Agents routinely use this authority to track dangerous suspects, elicit cooperation from apprehended criminals and provide legal shields to victims and witnesses.
This is a common tool in human smuggling, terrorism JTTF and human rights investigations. This often leads to the discovery of vital evidence and quick apprehension of suspects. HSI is a relatively larger agency that does offer a few benefits, career variety and important responsibilities: All criminal investigators are assigned a take-home vehicle.
Temporary duty assignments are frequently available both domestically and overseas. Virtually all investigative groups have access to at least one intelligence research specialist for investigative support. Advanced academic and career development programs. According to Lehtinen, "In this particular case, we saw no benefit to the Government by our participation. At the time of the plea agreement, BCCI's attorneys became aware of the possibility that BCCI's guilty plea on drug money laundering charges might well result in BCCI's closure by the various state banking regulatory agencies that had licensed it to do business in Florida, New York, and California.
Accordingly, the attorneys asked the Tampa prosecutors to send a letter to the state regulators asking the regulators to keep the bank open. Within the U. Attorney's offices, there was some sentiment that Justice should recommend BCCI should be closed down entirely. The Tampa prosecutors accordingly on January 31, , wrote state regulators to advise them that the Tampa U. Attorney's office had no position whatsoever as to whether BCCI should be closed down, or stay open.
BCCI's lawyers, principally former federal prosecutors Lawrence Wechsler, Lawrence Barcella, and Raymond Banoun, dissatisfied with this result, decided to talk to others in the Justice Department to bring about a different result. Two weeks later, they achieved their goal. Soon afterwards, the letter did, in fact, arrive, signed by Saphos, stating that BCCI's cooperation was important to the Justice Department and that keeping it open would allow the Department to monitor BCCI's customer accounts:.
The rationale for keeping the bank open was in fact, very weak. First, there were like to be few significant drug money launderers still using BCCI following its highly publicized indictment in October, Second, to the extent such accounts existed at the time of the indictment, BCCI's lawyers had systematically sought to shut down them or refer them over to law enforcement as part of its consent decree entered into with the Federal Reserve in early as a result of the indictment.
Finally, the plea agreement, and promise to cooperate with the government, would be as public as the indictments had been. It would be hard to imagine that any drug money launderers could still be enticed to use BCCI under such conditions.
Saphos' letter had adopted BCCI's position about the case, rather than recognizing the true facts at the time. In Florida, state regulators were baffled by the Saphos letter. The day after receiving the Saphos letter, Florida Comptroller Gerald Lewis wrote Saphos back in the following terms:. Because BCCI has pled guilty to felony charges, the ultimate decision of renewal becomes a difficult one.
Your letter indicates that you may have information I should consider in resolving this matter. To this end, I invite you and any other appropriate Department of Justice officials to meet with me in Tallahassee on February 19, Saphos, although chief of the narcotics section, had little previous involvement with any aspect of the BCCI investigation or prosecution.
He immediately wrote Lewis back to change his position:. I must apologize if there was ambiguity in my letter of February 13, , which led to a belief on your part that the Department of Justice wished to influence your decision on whether to permit BCCI to retain its license.
The Department of Justice takes no position in that regard. The sole purpose of my letter was to indicate that, if you allow BCCI to continue in business, there may be occasions where the Department of Justice may request BCCI, pursuant to its obligations under the plea agreement, to make or continue a banking relationship with customers who are the subjects of criminal investigations.
I merely wanted to make certain that you and I were communicating concerning criminal investigations. Thus Saphos who had only three days earlier stated "we are therefore requesting that BCCI be permitted to operate in your jurisdiction," was now forced to state on the record that this was not the position of the Department of Justice, and to mischaracterize the position he had clearly taken to help BCCI in his earlier letter.
In testimony before the Subcommittee, Assistant Attorney General Mueller struggled to explain the circumstances surrounding the Saphos letters, admitting, "that first letter is ambiguous at best," and "I do not know what initiated it Saphos" and "[they] tried to go behind my back.
In testimony before the Subcommittee, US Attorney Genzman did little to clarify this bizarre chain of events. The US Attorney told the Subcommittee that " The obvious explanation for what happened is that Saphos was personally lobbied by people he knew who had formerly been with the Justice Department and now represented BCCI on the outside, and agreed to do them a favor.
There is no record of any other person within the Justice Department signing off on Saphos' letter, and it appears likely that he sent it without the letter having gone through any formal approval process.
When his recommendation to keep BCCI open became an issue, he retreated from it. It was Lehtinen's belief that this case would not be barred by double jeopardy, because it involved different facts from the Tampa case, and because the Miami office had refused to participate in the plea agreement with BCCI.
Lehtinen testified that the investigation was "an important matter. Lehtinen described to the Subcommittee the strategy behind his two-track investigation and the aggressiveness with which his assistants moved to make the case against the bank:. Lehtinen explained that the case was "records intensive," which made the subpoenas vitally important.
Many of the subpoenas were to BCCI in other countries for records and documents that had been moved from the Miami branch. Lehtinen's assistants then proposed to seek compulsion through the courts to have the records located abroad produced.
Lehtinen told Senator Brown, "[O]ur circuit, the Eleventh circuit is very clear, those subpoenas will be enforced. Some other circuits are a little bit different, but our circuit is very aggressive.
Before proceeding, however, Lehtinen's office was first required to have authorization from the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs. However, according to Lehtinen, the response from the Justice Department was that they would not authorize enforcement of the subpoenas. Lehtinen and his assistants continued to urge the Department of Justice to assist in the enforcement of the other subpoenas.
By August, , following the Morgenthau indictment, the Justice Department began a series of meetings in an effort to move more swiftly against BCCI. In one such meeting at Justice in Washington, Lehtinen again raised the issue of the failure to enforce his subpoenas in response to Assistant Attorney General Mueller's offer to provide assistance to any US Attorney office pursuing a case against BCCI.
Despite Mueller's offer, no assistance was forthcoming and the subpoenas continued to languish, leaving Lehtinen perplexed:. We in Miami wanted all of those steps taken that we proposed. They were not taken and we are just not able to say why. Despite the problems with not having the subpoenas enforced, Lehtinen's office continued to pursue the investigation of BCCI for tax fraud.
Lehtinen testified that in his meeting with Assistant Attorney General Mueller in early August, Mueller encouraged him to "work aggressively on it as much as possible. I asked why we weren't returning the indictment, if it was tax, tax was on-site and tax would talk to us. I asked, why we are being told this way not to indict, and he said he didn't know.
Lehtinen thought that it was strange that he would be receiving a telephone call from "non-tax" people telling not to proceed. The next day Lehtinen received a letter from the Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division Bruton, informing him that he should not move forward because his investigation of BCCI was not "an authorized" tax investigation. Lehtinen told the Subcommittee, "I don't know what they are talking about there That is very odd.
Well, the statement that you are not doing an authorized Tax Division case is foolish. If it is not an authorized tax case that is because the Tax division -- I don't know what that means. I mean, you are doing a grand jury. The Tax Division knows it. You are urged for more than a month by DOJ to indict it. You coordinate with tax. You ask for a special review and then a day after you get a phone call saying the Attorney General says don't do it.
The tax division tells you, oh, by the way, your grand jury isn't an authorized grand jury. In late July or early August, the head of the criminal division, Mr. Mueller, told us he -- he told Andreas Rivera directly that he would specifically make sure the Tax Division handled this case effectively and efficiently. So to say tax didn't know until August 19th doesn't make a lot of sense.
Moreover, Lehtinen had sent a letter to the Justice Department on May 13, in which he concluded that "the BCCI tax case is a case of the greatest national urgency. Lehtinen was particularly concerned because the statute of limitations was set to run on one his counts. When he conveyed his concern, the reply from the tax division, according to Lehtinen was "Why don't you just claim that BCCI was out of the country," because the statute does not run if the target is out the country.
Lehtinen testified that he dismissed this advice as "disingenuous and a real legal problem. Lehtinen testified that he would have understood had the tax division criticized his case on evidentiary grounds, but, at the time, that did not appear to be the case. Instead the Miami US Attorney was given the somewhat ambiguous instructions that more work needed to be done on the case. According to Lehtinen, "[T]here was functionally speaking no additional work that could be done," pointing out that "if you [the Justice Department] want me to do additional work, you should have approved my grand jury subpoena.
Lehtinen became even more confused when one month later he was told by the Justice Department that he could not indict because of problems of double jeopardy arising out of the Tampa case.
Senator Brown spoke for the Subcommittee when he characterized the unwillingness of the Justice Department to allow the Grand Jury to return indictments in the southern district as "very strange. By early November, the concerns over evidence and double jeopardy previously expressed by the Justice Department had all but vanished. Terwilliger, wrote Lehtinen that he was "prepared to defer to your prosecutorial judgment on this matter While it is difficult to sort out precisely what went wrong between the U.
Attorney for Miami and main Justice in Washington, it is obvious from the above account that two important cases involving BCCI in Miami were frustrated, if not paralyzed, by inaction at main Justice in Washington during much of In part, that outcome may have been the result of continuing attempts by the Justice Department to defend the plea agreement in Tampa, and to steer any further activities pertaining to BCCI to the Tampa office. Additionally, the Justice Department may have been uncomfortable dealing with the possible preclusion of investigation or prosecution in Miami arising out of the double-jeopardy problems created by BCCI's plea in Tampa, problems that had to date not surfaced even in interviews with Congressional investigators.
In the course of his investigation into narcotics trafficking in Panama, Blum had come into contact with "a very senior BCCI officer who was in the process of disengaging from the bank. Blum proceeded to seek authorization from the Foreign Relations Committee to issue subpoenas to the bank, which were granted. Before issuing the subpoenas, however, Blum contacted the US attorney's office in Miami and Tampa, which asked him not to proceed.
Blum told the Subcommittee:. I talked to Joe Maigre, who was then the deputy in Tampa, who told me there was an undercover operation underway. I was not told the nature of the operation. What I was told was that agent's lives were in danger, and that he -- and that he was followed-up by the Department of Justice in a formal way -- requested that we defer the issuance of a subpoena until we get a go-ahead.
Blum did defer issuance of the subpoenas until late July, At that time, he contacted Tampa, and asked if he had clearance for now issuing the subpoenas. He was told there was no objection. Blum's next contact with the Department of Justice occurred in March The contact was precipitated after Blum received a telephone call from a former client who knew a highly placed BCCI officer who claimed that the Senate investigation "almost brought the house down and there was a full court press to make sure that it didn't get anywhere.
Blum then arranged to have Customs and IRS secretly "wire" a hotel room in Miami to secretly record their conversation. Blum debriefed the BCCI official over the course of the next three days. He testified that the BCCI official "laid out in exquisite detail the false capitalization of the bank, the question of straw men holding stock, the use of the bank to purchase First American, National Bank of Georgia, Independence Federal in Encino, CA The agents were quite excited.
They seemed ready and eager to go forward. I had lengthy conversations with at least one of the assistants, Mark Jackowski. He was eager to go forward. Two weeks later, after Blum had left the Subcommittee, he made arrangements with law enforcement to secretly tape the BCCI official who had originally provided him a great deal of information about the bank.
Again, Blum secretly met the individual in a hotel room in Miami and debriefed him for several hours. And, again, Blum believed that the Justice Department would use the information in its investigation of the bank. Following the taping, Blum had further contact with the Tampa investigators and prosecutors, providing further information over the course of a lengthy conference call.
However, according to Blum, the Justice Department did not follow-up on the information:. Then, I talked to the agents, and the agents said, well, we're very busy. No follow-up. And I began to worry that something was very wrong with this case. In -- I now believe it was late May, I decided that I would bring this matter to another jurisdiction, and that was New York On the basis of the same evidence essentially, and he ultimately communicated with the same witnesses, he produced the indictment.
Mark Jackowski, the principal assistant United States attorney in Tampa handling the prosecution of BCCI from through , presents a very different version of events:. The ex-BCCI official who had been portrayed by Blum as having direct, firsthand knowledge concerning various matters, either did not have such information, or was unwilling to admit it. The ex-official's information appeared to be primarily hearsay, gossip, rumor and innuendo.
He was also unwilling to testify at any public proceeding. We were disappointed because Mr. Blum had led us to believe that the witness could provide firsthand information relative to the bank's involvement in money laundering and other matters.
Rather than tell Blum that the interviews had been failures, and that the U. Attorney's office would not make use of the witnesses he had proffered, Jackowski and the Tampa prosecutorial team issued a subpoena to the Federal Reserve for documents pertaining to the First American relationship, and then permitted the broader inquiry suggested by Blum to lapse.
In justification of this failure to act, Jackowski, in sworn testimony, raised questions about Blum's credibility and even his honesty. Jackowski testified that he discounted what Blum told him about BCCI because Blum had made several wild accusations about the Subcommittee and asked for money for the information he was providing the Justice Department.
Blum took the same information that he had presented to Jackowski to the Manhattan District Attorney's office some weeks later after he had been told by his BCCI informants that Justice Department officials in Florida were not following up on the information. According to the Manhattan District Attorney's office, which provided the Subcommittee with a letter dated November 21, At no time did Mr. Blum ever seek or request money form this office for his assistance to us in the investigation of BCCI, nor did he receive any money from this office for his out-of-pocket expenses.
Blum ever ask for or suggest that he wanted, employment with this office. At no time, during this office's dealings with Mr. Blum, did he ever accuse you, Senator Kerry, of misconduct. It seems highly illogical and unlikely that Blum would make the kind of representations to Jackowski which Jackowski has asserted, and then, only weeks later, adopt an entirely different demeanor with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
What is more likely is that Blum did complain about not being able to complete the investigation of BCCI that had begun to develop in his final months with the Subcommittee, and may have offered to assist the U.
Attorney's office on the case if they wanted his help. It is notable that both of the witnesses who were taped with Blum by Justice, and who Jackowski viewed to have no useful information, were in fact placed before a grand jury by the New York District Attorney, to provide the testimony they had originally offered the Justice Department.
That testimony became part of the record on which the grand jury then voted to indict BCCI on July 29, The Subcommittee finds Jackowski's testimony not merely unconvincing, but given the severity of the charges, malicious. The Subcommittee believes Jackowski's testimony may stem from a personal dislike of Blum, who has not only been critical of the Justice Department, but who garnered significant media attention for having broken open the case when Jackowski had labored long and hard for months as the principal Justice Department official dedicated to Operation C-Chase.
Jackowski deserves significant credit for his work, but not for his testimony. Notably, in response to questions from Senator Brown, Jackowski acknowledged that the tape recordings made by the U. As Jackowski acknowledged:. The tapes, sir, contained information with respect to First American, that is correct.
They contained information relative to NBG, that is correct. They contained information relative to Independence. With respect to Independence, the first witness said that he had in fact gone to a law firm because he suspected that Independence Bank might be owned by BCCI through Ghaith Pharaon. Because the witness did not have what Jackowski regarded as sufficient first hand information concerning these issues, Jackowski and the other Tampa prosecutors considered the information offered to be of little value, and shrugged off the witnesses Blum had believed to be so important.
Inexplicably, at times in the investigation the Justice Department has provided halting or reluctant cooperation with other law enforcement and regulatory bodies. In some instances the cooperation was non-existent, and in others, the Subcommittee has concluded that the Justice Department actually tried to frustrate or delay the provision of witnesses and documents to other law enforcement.
In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, the General Counsel of the Federal Reserve, Virgil Mattingly, described to Senator Kerry the cooperation that his office was receiving from law enforcement:.
Senator Kerry. What kind of cooperation have you received from the Justice Department? We have cooperated fully with the Justice department. We have given them everything we have on this matter. What Mattingly did not state in his public testimony is that over the past year, the Justice Department had actually been refusing to provide assistance to the Federal Reserve, and to some extent, had actually mislead the Federal Reserve about the existence of important information.
On February 7, , the Federal Reserve had sent investigators to Tampa to meet with federal prosecutors, who were at the time in the midst of the trial of five BCCI officers who had been indicted in the Tampa case. The agents told the Federal Reserve that they wrote a report to the grand jury setting out the facts, which they would be glad to provide to the Federal Reserve, and that they had an informant who could also provide further information on the issue. Following the meeting, the Federal Reserve investigator was told by a Tampa prosecutor that the report contained no relevant information, and therefore would not be provided.
The Federal Reserve persisted in requesting the report, and the Tampa prosecutor, for reasons not explained, continued to refuse to cooperate by providing it.
In the meantime, the investigator tried repeatedly to talk to the informant, and was told by the informant's wife that the informant was out of the country. At the time of Mattingly's testimony, the Federal Reserve had yet to be obtain the report it had been requesting from the Justice Department for 18 months.
During that same hearing District Attorney Morgenthau spoke directly to some of the problems that his office was having in working with the Justice Department.
The District Attorney stated, "We've had a number of meetings with senior people in the fraud section of the Justice Department, and I think that their position is that they would rather go it alone. District Attorney Morgenthau also testified that he had sought documents from the US Attorney's office in Tampa and that those documents had not been provided. According to Morgenthau,.
I've never had a response to that letter. We were told that it had to be cleared by main Justice and a name was given to us.
We called that lawyer three or four times on the phone, and he didn't answer his phone. I'm sure they are all very busy down there. As the New York District Attorney's case continued to develop, the tapes that had been created by Blum became of significant concern to the office.
Given their assessment of the importance of the information they had been provided by Blum's witnesses, the New York prosecutors wanted to be sure they had told Justice the same thing, and that the stories had not changed. Initially, his assistants were advised by the U. Attorney for Tampa's office that no such tapes existed. Later, the U. Attorney acknowledged their existence, but refused to provide them to the Manhattan District Attorney on the ground that to do so would threaten to reveal a source -- the BCCI official who Blum had been taped with, with whom the Justice Department had had no contact since March , and whose identity was already known to the Manhattan District Attorney.
I have heard through the grapevine as we have been investigating this of an instance or instances in which the Justice Department has access to or custody of a witness with material information regarding this case, which your office would like to interview but they have refused to provide your office with access to such a witness. Is that accurate? With this correction.
They have said that he may be available in a year. Not at this time. I don't want you to think that they have refused to let us see him. Morgenthau went on to say that his office had offered to exchange information with the Justice Department, but that they had rejected the offer.
The District Attorney told the Subcommittee that he had run many collaborative investigations in the past and that the actions of the Justice Department in the BCCI case represented the "exception, not the rule. In response to Morgenthau's criticisms, US Attorney Genzman argued that "all sorts of problems crop up" in cooperative efforts and he specifically noted that "because of the differing systems of immunity, giving up information [to a county DA] might taint the Federal investigation.
Indeed, the US Attorney's September indictment closely mirrored that of District Attorney Morgenthau, although it trailed the local prosecutor by nearly six weeks. As a result, for the first time, a grand jury was sworn in to hear evidence concerning BCCI's secret ownership of First American on January 16, At that point, the New York District Attorney had been investigation these issues for about 18 months, and the Federal Reserve was in the initial stages of what would soon became a very significant investigatory effort to sort out who had participated in violating the Bank Holding Company Act and other banking statutes.
After the collapse of the bank on July 6, , and the impending indictments by the District Attorney in Manhattan, the Justice Department in Washington moved swiftly to broaden its investigation. According to Dexter Lehtinen:. Of course, they knew all about us because of our efforts to enforce the subpoenas, but [they] surveyed everyone with respect to what they were doing on any of these issues that Morgenthau had dealt with and what did they need?
As Lehtinen put it, "There was substantially more interest after [Morgenthau's] indictment. On September 5, , the US Attorney in Tampa returned an indictment alleging racketeering and additional money laundering charges.
And on November 15, the Department of Justice in Washington issued BCCI related indictments alleging racketeering and other offenses based on the secret acquisition and control of Independence Bank and the parking of securities in Centrust.
According to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, "It was only in May of this year [] that we received a referral from the Federal Reserve on this bank In testimony before the Subcommittee, Mueller described the importance which the Justice attached to the BCCI case after the worldwide collapse of the bank.
He stated that:. It is conducting investigations through a Washington based task force, and in a number of US Attorneys' offices. At present 37 Federal prosecutors, supported by dozens of agents and supervisory and support personnel, are conducting or supporting investigations nationwide The Washington task force alone has interviewed dozens of witnesses and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of records.
Clearly, at least as of the time that Attorney General Barr was confirmed at Justice, many of the problems that had surfaced between the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies had been worked through by the end of , and a clear effort was being made to collaborate effectively on investigating and prosecuting BCCI. From early on, the CIA possessed and disseminate to other governmental agencies detailed and important information about BCCI's plans in the United States, and its secret ownership of First American.
That information was made available initially to the Treasury and to the Comptroller of the Currency, neither of which passed the information on to anyone else. In , a broader group of agencies received the same information. Undercover Customs agent Mazur testified that during Operation C-Chase he never received any information from his superiors "about information the CIA might have.
Assistant Attorney General Mueller told the Subcommittee that while the CIA may have known about BCCI's criminality and illegal ownership of First American dating as far back as , "regrettably, the Justice Department was not on the CIA's dissemination list until and therefore the Department never received this report at the time it was disseminated.
At no time, to my knowledge, has anyone from the CIA, or any agency, attempted to obstruct or interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation and prosecution of BCCI. For the record, assistant US Attorney Mark Jackowski, who oversaw the undercover operation and prosecuted the case, has provided a variety of answers on this subject.
When asked by a journalist whether he had uncovered any CIA involvement in BCCI or whether the agency had ever interfered with Operation C-Chase or the ensuing prosecution, Jackowski responded "no comment.
Let's leave it at that. Through much of the Subcommittee's four year investigation into BCCI, the Justice Department treated the Subcommittee's investigation with visible disdain, at times bordering on contempt.
As Jackowski testified, the Tampa prosecutors viewed the principal Subcommittee investigator of BCCI in and , Jack Blum, to be unreliable at best, someone who wished to trade his information for money, and who had produced little of real value for them. In interviews with Senate staff in the fall of , Jackowski characterized Blum as a "wacko," who had done little more than provide him with "bullshit.
Following Blum's departure, other Senate staff efforts were treated equally cavalierly. In the fall of , the Subcommittee sought to depose a Colombian money-launderer who was also cooperating with the Tampa prosecutors, and who had used BCCI in Panama. The Tampa prosector's office and the Justice Department, without prior notification to Subcommittee staff, began making telephone calls to other Senate offices, not involved in the investigation, in an effort to prevent the deposition.
The Justice Department told these offices, and Subcommittee staff that even staff interviews with the witness would inevitably prejudice the federal prosecution of BCCI and of Manuel Noriega, and that the government could be forced to provide to the defendants any material the Colombian provided to the Subcommittee.
Staff advised the Justice Department that the deposition would be held Committee confidential, and was in any case constitutionally protected against disclosure. However, because of the level of concern the Justice Department expressed, and the implicit threat by Justice that the Subcommittee would be blamed if something did go wrong with the Noriega prosecution in connection with the Colombian, the deposition was halted.
As a result, the important information possessed by the witness concerning BCCI's criminal activity in Panama was never provided to the Subcommittee on the record. To make matters worse, the communications by Justice seeking to stop the deposition with other Senate offices not involved in the investigation resulted in a leak that the Colombian was cooperating with the government, imperiling his family and property in Colombia.
As a result of this leak, generated through incautious actions by Justice, the Colombian refused to cooperate further with the Subcommittee.
Ironically, the Colombian, far from being essential to the government's criminal cases against BCCI and Noriega, was never used by the government in either trial. During the spring of , when the Subcommittee was seeking to obtain documents from BCCI directly, lawyers for BCCI took the position that they would gladly provide documents they were making available to the Justice Department from overseas if the Justice Department would in turn provide copies to BCCI's lawyers in the United States.
In response, Justice attorneys advised the BCCI lawyers on May 25, , that the Subcommittee staff should contact Justice directly for the documents involved, which came from Panama.
Subcommittee staff contacted federal prosecutors in Tampa and Miami about the documents, who did not return telephone calls or reply to letters for many weeks. In early July, a prosecutor from Tampa advised the Subcommittee staff to ask main Justice in Washington for its position regarding the documents. Following repeated telephone calls, the Justice Department finally advised the Subcommittee in mid-July, , that it could not provide the Subcommittee any documents whatsoever from any location whatsoever, other than the materials entered into the record in the BCCI trial in Tampa.
The decision was made by Justice following a meeting between Subcommittee staff and Chuck Saphos, the head of Justice's narcotics section who had six months earlier written the state regulators to recommend that BCCI be kept open. In the meeting with the Subcommittee, Saphos took the position that any question the Subcommittee might ask about BCCI would inevitably prejudice ongoing matters at the Justice Department.
Saphos told staff that there was no matter pertaining to BCCI that could be discussed without prejudicing the Noriega trial. Accordingly, the Justice Department could not consent to testify concerning any aspect of the BCCI case, nor would it provide any information concerning any aspect of the BCCI case apart from what was on the public record in the Tampa trial.
Your questions about the nature of BCCI's cooperation under the plea, BCCI's potential involvement in the handling of assets of Antonio Noriega and the possibility of further investigative efforts by the United States concern matters upon which the Department can not comment without jeopardizing any future prosecutions that might be undertaken. Many of the specific questions you have raised may be addressed by BCCI itself. The Department simply can not testify on matters which are under investigation or subject to pending litigation.
As is now made clear by the record, this was during a period in which law enforcement had taken an acknowledged "time-out" from its investigation. As the Customs Service is an agency of the US Treasury -- not the Justice Department -- it would have been the Treasury's decision as to whether to release them.
Treasury had no objection to their release. However, after conferring with Justice, Treasury explained to the Subcommittee that it would not release them without Justice's permission, and that permission had not been granted by Justice. The Subcommittee then asked Justice to explain its refusal to release the documents. The reason provided by the Department was that the memoranda contained information that would jeopardize ongoing investigations.
After considerable wrangling, and after the Justice Department was advised that any additional delays in providing the documents could result in equal delays in a Senate vote on confirmation Acting Attorney General Barr in a permanent position, Subcommittee staff were allowed to review the memoranda in an unredacted form. When the documents had been produced, few revealed anything about ongoing investigations. Many referred to embarrassing criticisms by Customs agents of the handling of the BCCI investigation, including the lack of resources that had been devoted to Operation C-Chase, internal discussions concerning the advisability of bringing a RICO case and the advisability of pursuing a plea agreement with the bank.
The Department insisted that a member of the Justice Department be present in the interview, contending that any private interview between a Senator and a Department of Justice employee was precluded by "Attorney General Order ," which charges the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs "with the responsibility of coordinating all Department of Justice activities relating to the Congress. Senator Kerry therefore decided to simply request Mazur to testify publicly, without any prior debriefing of what he might to say to either the Senator or the Senator's staff.
Senator Kerry also decided to seek testimony from Mark Jackowski as the chief prosecutor in the Tampa case. On September 16, , September 18, , and October 16, , in response to a series of requests from the Subcommittee, the Justice Department expressed its refusal to accede to Subcommittee requests for the testimony of Jackowski and Mazur before the Subcommittee concerning BCCI.
At the time, neither of them were involved in further activities concerning BCCI. In the September 16, , the Justice Department suggested that the Subcommittee's requests would not only compromise ongoing cases, but put Mazur's personal safety at risk:.
Department's policy on provision of Departmental representatives for Congressional hearings is that line attorneys and investigative personnel do not represent the Department in Congressional hearings. After a devastating raid in Tennessee, the ripple effects spread across the region, with neighbors scrambling to care for children who had been left stranded without parents for hours and families sleeping in churches for days out of fear of ICE coming to their homes.
The day after the raid, children failed to show up to local schools. This kind of immigration enforcement has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the well-being of the children whose parents are unexpectedly torn from them, causing severe anxiety and depression, poor sleeping and eating habits, inability to focus in school, and constant fear of separation from other family members.
While HSI has engaged in criminal investigations of employers since its formation, the use of large-scale worksite raids to target workers for arrest and deportation was discontinued after due to the widely documented harms and the havoc these operations cause. If HSI were serious about curbing unlawful hiring and employment, it would focus its resources on pursuing employers who are suspected of criminal activity. Yet in the majority of recent raids, employers have not been charged criminally — in fact, saw the lowest number of federal indictments and convictions of managers for unlawful hiring offenses in the last 10 years.
In addition, of the criminal worksite arrests that HSI did make in , 85 percent were of workers and 15 percent were of employers.
As the graph above shows, in the last year HSI has expended far greater resources in pursuing criminal charges against workers — usually for nonviolent unlawful reentry charges unrelated to the criminal investigation that prompted the raid and only identified after HSI took the workers into custody and fingerprinted them see examples from the raids in Tennessee and in Sandusky and Canton , Ohio.
ICE has been sued repeatedly for constitutional violations committed during home raids , and it should be aware of the constitutional rights and protections that everyone in the U. Addressing human trafficking requires a comprehensive approach, including better enforcement of labor protections for vulnerable workers ; culturally and linguistically appropriate services for survivors of trafficking ; and investment in community-based organizations that meet the long-term needs of survivors.
Though DHS, through HSI, plays a role in enforcing federal trafficking laws, its central role in arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants makes many trafficking survivors afraid of turning to law enforcement for protection and assistance , especially given the consequences they fear they will face from DHS.
Survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking have repeatedly shared why collusion between DHS and local law enforcement keeps them from accessing safety and justice.
When DHS conducts immigration enforcement, especially in collusion with local police, it is an ineffective partner in fighting trafficking, particularly for low-wage immigrant workers who are among the most vulnerable to human trafficking. A common threat of abusive employers and traffickers is that they will arrange for the deportation of workers who complain about their working conditions.
Under Trump, DHS has exponentially grown efforts to entangle local policing with federal immigration enforcement, all while eliminating any exercise of prosecutorial discretion, leaving survivors even more afraid of interacting with any law enforcement agencies. HSI itself has recognized that it is perceived as a deportation force among law enforcement partners and communities and identified this perception as a barrier to achieving its stated mission.
In addition to the challenges inherent in being distrusted by survivors of trafficking and immigrant communities, HSI is also not well-positioned to identify trafficked persons and, as part of DHS, often fails in identifying all forms of trafficking, such as labor trafficking of domestic workers, agricultural workers, and others.
True solutions to human trafficking require investments in community-based organizations that are better equipped to identify trafficked persons and assist in meeting their long-term needs. Currently, HSI has approximately 6, enforcement officers and 6, special agents.
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