Jerry Heinauer is proud of the Lincoln Immigration Service Center's record in helping foreign-born soldiers serving with American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan become U.S. citizens.
ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, January 11, 2009 12:00 am
Jerry Heinauer is proud of the Lincoln Immigration Service Center’s record in helping foreign-born soldiers serving with American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan become U.S. citizens.
The same goes for high-priority efforts to help Iraqi and Afghan translators for those American units relocate to the U.S.
But as Heinauer looks ahead to 2009, he’s not just talking about the path to citizenship. He’s also calling attention to a growing immigration enforcement mission for a workforce that began 2008 with more than 700 full-time employees.
His base of operations near the Lincoln Airport, one of the country’s four regional service centers, now has about 90 people assigned to fraud detection or related national security duties.
And on Heinauer’s list of year-end achievements are pending investigations of “three large fraud schemes” that he expects will lead to the arrest of both employees and employers in the next few months.
“These future arrests would be some of the early successes that Citizenship and Immigration Services will have enjoyed,” Heinauer said, “especially when you consider that they are large fraud schemes.”
Heinauer said he can’t go into detail about the status of an enforcement job that also involves among others the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Department of Labor and a sister immigration agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE. However, “the emphasis is going to be with arresting employers.”
Among the happier endings for people on the receiving end of government immigration services dispensed from Lincoln in 2008 were 178,000 naturalization applications, 80 percent of which typically lead to citizenship.
The Lincoln office handled 7,800 such applications from the military and almost 1,500 translator petitions.
But Heinauer is also looking forward to racking up some numbers on the enforcement front. “The number one thing is the integrity of our operation,” he said. “We want to give the right benefit to the right person in the right time . . . but we do not want to grant benefits to people who are not eligible.”
Ineligibility and the pursuit of the ineligible has been much more the bailiwick of Tim Counts, Minneapolis-based spokesman for a five-state ICE service area that includes Nebraska.
Counts offered the latest evidence of an enforcement crackdown for the five states Friday. As the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents made more than 1,100 criminal arrests in Fiscal 2008 and almost 5,200 arrests for immigration violations.
That compares to just 72 criminal arrests and 445 administrative arrests in 2003, ICE’s first year of existence.
“We have increased deportations, it’s true,” Counts said.
ICE is also putting more emphasis on charging employers who knowingly hire people who are in the United States illegally, he said.
Many employers are duped by employees who appear to have authentic documents, he said. Others aren’t.
But for those in the complicit category, “you have to prove in federal court that management knew something was going on.”
One example of success on that front arose from the arrests of almost 1,300 employees of Swift meatpacking plants in six states, including the Grand Island plant, two years ago.
A human resources employee and a union official from Marshalltown, Iowa, were eventually added to the prosecution list.
Nationwide, according to an ICE update, more than 100 owners, managers, supervisors and human resources employees were charged in 2008.
Action by Lincoln immigration officials may soon contribute to that total, Counts said. “If they come up with evidence of fraud, you bet. They give us a call.”
Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or at ahovey@journalstar.com.