Illegal Aliens Arrested Working at Chemical Weapons Depot

By Bill West

On February 10, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that agents from its Salt Lake City, Utah field office had arrested nine suspected illegal aliens from Mexico working for a contractor on the Dugway Proving Ground located some 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Dugway Proving Ground serves as a chemical and biological weapons testing facility for the Department of Defense. The arrests were part of ICE�s Project Shield America, which seeks to identify illegal aliens working at locations and for employers involved in national security matters, to include those wherein unlawful acquisition or export of sensitive technology and weaponry may be a factor.

These latest arrests demonstrate that immigration law enforcement efforts, at least to some extent, are being focused rightfully on homeland security matters. While nine Mexican construction workers may have posed no direct national security threat, their mere presence on such a supposedly secure military facility and their ability to gain access there raise considerable concern about the security procedures at that base. ICE and military security officials have indicated investigative efforts continue in this case.

This is nothing new. As a rookie INS agent in the late 1970s, I arrested illegal aliens working for contractors on military installations in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. INS Special Agents would occasionally work jointly with military investigators on such cases. Recognizing the potential security threat, even then, for espionage and sabotage infiltration, we (the INS and military agents) would prepare investigative reports and send those reports through our respective chains-of-command. Unfortunately, no one at any senior policy-making level took any of this seriously. And, by the way, among those illegal aliens I arrested in the late 1970s were not Mexicans but East-Europeans...at a time when the Former Soviet Union was still considered a viable strategic threat to the US. Yet, no one really cared. The FBI barely even batted an eye. They were, after all, �just illegal aliens� working at blue collar jobs.

Just like the 9/11 terrorist hijackers were �just foreign students and visitors� who blended into the background of America�s diverse ethnic alien population, legal and illegal; those illegal aliens who find their way onto America�s most secure infrastructure facilities should be aggressively identified, arrested, prosecuted and removed. Our limited immigration enforcement resources should be prioritized to focus on the most significant potential security threats. The kind of operation just completed at Dugway is a good example of what ICE should continue doing in an expanded way.

TrackBack