Counterterrorism Blog

It was the late 1970s and I was a rookie INS agent working the streets of Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of D.C. Jimmy Carter was President. His Immigration Commissioner was a political crony from Texas named Leonel Castillo. Castillo, like all modern-day INS Commissioners and even their current ICE Assistant Secretary variants, had virtually no law enforcement and no immigration law experience. Castillo had supervised a human resources development program for a neighborhood day care association in Houston. He directed a jobs program there and also was a director of the Catholic Council on Community Relations. He later became the Houston city controller and treasurer of the Texas state Democratic Party. He was clearly “qualified” for the position of the Nation’s top Immigration Cop? He was highly qualified in the eyes of the Carter Administration.

Enforcing U.S. immigration and nationality laws was never easy in the twenty-five years I did it. In those early years of my INS career during the Carter Administration, it was particularly challenging. One particular reason was a directive that came from Commissioner Castillo. The policy memo directed all INS personnel to no longer refer to illegal aliens as illegal aliens. Illegal aliens were to be called “undocumented” aliens or, better still, undocumented workers or persons. Never mind the fact that “alien” was a completely non-pejorative legal term codified in U.S. law. The point was not to offend illegal aliens. We were to be the kinder and gentler Immigration Police by speaking with softer words.

Castillo’s Orwellian language directive went further. It told those of us in the GS-1811 (Criminal Investigator) career job series within the INS...the Special Agents within the Investigations Division...that we were not to refer to ourselves as “Criminal Investigators” when dealing with the public, especially the “undocumented worker” public. We did not want to make the undocumented persons believe they were in any way possibly criminals; even, perhaps, if they were...since a notable portion of that population had, in fact, committed criminal violations, including chargeable felonies such as fraud (including document fraud by those "undocumented" persons), smuggling and reentry after deportation cognizable under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Needless to say, the rank and file Immigration cops at the time mostly laughed at and ignored Castillo’s nutty directive. We began identifying ourselves as “Criminal Investigators” a lot more often than we did before.

What reminds me of this bit of historical immigration nonsense is the just announced U.S. Government directive to its current counter-terrorism and diplomatic corps to refrain from using certain terms that might be misinterpreted in the Muslim world or might offend “moderate” Muslims. Jeff Breinholt just wrote about this below. The IPT has an excellent piece covering the topic. Having lived through one effort by the Feds to change operational process via linguistic manipulation of its employees, I will suggest that the results will only be similar to what they were with Commissioner Castillo’s. Stupid is as stupid does.