White House officials may have suppressed information about a spike in illegal immigration that followed President Bush’s announcement last year that he would push for a massive amnesty of undocumented workers, according to documents released Tuesday.
Whether Bush’s proposal to legalize as many as 12 million immigrants has enticed more people to cross the border is a matter of hot contention in the debate about how to fix the U.S. immigration system.
On Tuesday, Judicial Watch, a Washington think tank, released the results of a survey given by U.S. Border Patrol agents to detained immigrants after the amnesty proposal’s announcement in January 2004. The survey found that most had heard of Bush’s proposal and 45 percent of the 880 respondents said it influenced their decision to come north.
But the survey lasted only three weeks, and the Judicial Watch report concedes it is statistically flawed.
Kristi Clemens, a Border Patrol spokeswoman in Washington, said that the survey was halted prematurely when its existence was leaked to the news media and that no conclusions can be drawn from incomplete data.
But the way the information was handled has provided critics with political ammunition.
“The timing of the survey’s start and early dismissal, and the (Department of Homeland Security’s) gag order … suggest that the administration is playing politics with border security data,” Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., wrote in a letter Tuesday to Homeland chief Michael Chertoff, demanding an investigation. The Border Patrol is part of that department.
Judicial Watch obtained an undated memo to spokesmen for the Border Patrol that warned them: “Do not talk about amnesty, increase in apprehensions, or give comparisons of past immigration reform proposals.”
Clemens said that officials had begun to see a spike in apprehensions in October, months before the Bush plan was announced, and that “they didn’t want to cloud the issue.” But she conceded: “The way it was written, it doesn’t sound so good.”
