Jim Sensenbrenner: “Mr. Chairman, it is beyond time to restructure one of the worst-run agencies in the Federal Government, the Immigration…”

“Mr. Chairman, it is beyond time to restructure one of the worst-run agencies in the Federal Government, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS has long been considered the undesirable and unwanted stepchild of the Justice Department. It carries out neither of its crucial missions well, enforcing our immigration laws and providing services to immigrants playing by the rules. Today, we must stop being enablers, stop giving more and more money to an agency as a reward for squandering the money we gave it the year before. We must practice tough love and abolish the INS. In its place, we need to create two separate immigration bureaus in the Justice Department, a Bureau of Immigration Enforcement and a Bureau of Citizen and Immigration Services. This is what the Barbara Jordan Immigration Reform and Accountability Act of 2002 is all about. I am proud of the work of the Committee on the Judiciary in crafting this legislation on a cooperative and bipartisan basis. Barbara Jordan, our distinguished former colleague, chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. The Commission came to the conclusion that the INS suffers from institutional schizophrenia, or mission overload. It explained that the INS must give equal weight to more priorities than any one agency can handle. Such a system is set up for failure, and with such failure, a loss of public confidence. That is exactly what has happened.…”