An investigative report by the Washington Post of May 14, 2008 found that during the 2007 fiscal year 53 deportees without any psychiatric history or history of violence were given psychiatric drugs to sedate them. After the cases of Raymond Soeoth, a Christian minister from Indonesia seeking asylum, and Amadou Diouf, a student who married an American, were publicized by the ACLU, ICE changed its policy in a June 21, 2007 memo (shortly before it settled with Soeoth and Diouf) to require a court order for the involuntary administration of these drugs. However in August 2007 Maher Ayoub was drugged involuntarily without court order and sent back to Egypt.

On February 22, 2008, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, the most incompetent man in Washington, accepted a $20 million Boeing built prototype 28 mile “virtual fence” known as Project 28 southwest of Tucson. Less than a week later on February 28, 2008, a GAO report noted that it did not do what it was supposed to do. In particular, the extended time between when motion was detected and an image was transmitted made it of little use to border patrol officials. On April 22, 2008, the project was scrapped.

As Chertoff builds his “fence”, a May 27, 2008 New York Times article reported that smugglers are increasingly finding it simpler to bribe Border Patrol and customs agents. Investigations of the Homeland Security Inspector General have gone up from 31 in 2003 to 79 in 2007. From 2003 to April 2008, there were 125 cases against border guards in California, 45 in Arizona, 14 in New Mexico, and 157 in Texas. Internal affairs units and the FBI also have ongoing investigations.

At ICE, she has sponsored aggressive, high profile, and controversial raids against illegal immigrants. The irony of someone whose success is based not on hard work but on connection imprisoning those who are hard working but without connection is I suspect lost upon her.

On March 6, 2007, the US Immigration and Customs Service arrested 361 undocumented workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The raid was widely criticized because there had been little coordination with Social Services to see that children of those detained would be taken care of.

On May 12, 2008, ICE conducted another mass raid in Postville, Iowa against a kosher meat processing plant Agriprocessors with a history of worker safety and environmental violations in which 389 undocumented workers were arrested. In the Postville case, denied access to immigration attorneys (other court appointed attorneys were provided) and threatened with felony convictions with a mandatory two year minimum, 270 (within 2 weeks of their arrest) accepted a plea bargain of 5 months in prison followed by immediate deportation. While ICE was eager to rush prosecutions of the workers, no manager at Agriprocessors has yet been charged with anything.

In California ICE raids over 3 weeks beginning May 5, 2008 targeted against those who had not obeyed deportation orders led to the arrest of 905. 410 of these were incidental arrests for immigration violations during searches for members of the first group. About half of the 905 were quickly deported.

Such raids don’t actually reduce the number of “illegal aliens” in the country in any significant way. They are sensationalist gestures for the benefit of anti-immigration groups to show that something is being done when in fact very little is. They are also meant to terrorize and demoralize undocumented workers not so much to encourage them to leave but to further disempower them.

On October 30, 2008, the CEO of the Postville Agriprocessors plant, the son of the owner, Sholom Rubashkin was arrested. The federal complaint alleges that he had advanced knowledge of the ICE raid and had sought to obtain fraudulent IDs for his workers.