Homeland security deceived Congress: a Department of Homeland Security official admits his agency deceived Congress; congressman says DHS "lied" about Border Patrol agents.

Former Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos and their families and supporters had hoped for a presidential pardon. They had hoped that these two law enforcement officers with distinguished records and young families would not be sent to prison on the word of a veteran drug smuggler, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, who stood to gain $5 million for giving false testimony against them. They had hoped that President Bush would issue a pardon for the two men to rectify one of the most monumental travesties of justice in recent times. That didn't happen.

During his Christmas pardon spree the president did give pardons to 18 felons, including five drug dealers. But he turned a deaf ear to the pleas of dozens of members of Congress and hundreds of thousands of American citizens who urged him to pardon the Border Patrol agents. Agents Ramos and Compean had hoped they might at least get reprieves on their sentences (11 and 12 years, respectively) so they might remain outside of prison with their families while they appealed their convictions. Again their hopes were dashed. On January 17, the two former Border Patrolmen, accompanied by tearful and bitter supporters, surrendered to federal authorities and began serving their prison sentences. Ignacio Ramos is at the Federal Correctional Institution at Yazoo City, Mississippi, while Jose Compean is at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio.

Ramos Severely Beaten by Inmates

However, a series of developments during the first week of February have given the national effort to "Free Ramos and Compean" a major boost and have put increasing pressure on the White House and Congress over this matter. Unfortunately, it took a possible life-threatening attack on agent Ramps in prison to awaken some members of Congress. Most of the major media are still oblivious to this story--or are purposely ignoring or misreporting and misrepresenting it.

While he was sleeping on Saturday night, February 3, agent Ramps was jumped by several Mexican inmates who beat him and kicked him severely with their steel-toed prison-issued boots, while cursing him in Spanish and yelling "Kill la Migra." ("Migra" is Spanish slang for a Border Patrol or immigration officer.) No guards came to his rescue. According to Ramps' family, Ignacio was not given any medical attention until more than 24 hours after he had reported the attack to prison authorities, despite his requests for medical aid and pain-relief medication. Ramps told his wife, Monica, that the attackers "got me pretty good," and had kicked him repeatedly in the head and all over his body. "You really need to get me out of here," Ramps told his wife.

The prison authorities attempted to play down the attack, claiming that Ramps' injuries were "minor in nature." However, Members of Congress pointed out that it was "inexcusable" that Ramps had been put in a prison situation where he had been left vulnerable to attack in the first place.

Exasperated Congressmen Speak Out

"There is no excuse" for what happened to agent Ramps, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) told THE NEW AMERICAN in a February 7 interview. "You know, I was a judge in Texas for 22 years. I know a lot about prisons; I sent a lot of people to prison. And the people in the prison system know how to protect inmates from each other ... they're experts at this, at keeping inmates from committing harm against each other." This is especially the case, he pointed out, when it comes to law enforcement officers, who are at much higher risk when incarcerated than the normal inmate. The situation with agent Ramos is very suspicious, he says, because "when he's in the general population, he's assaulted and nobody knows about it until Ramos reports it! It's not like some guard caught these guys beating him up. They [the prison guards] didn't even know about it. So who's watching the inmates there?"

As in every other aspect of this case, says Rep. Poe, the amount of obfuscation and stonewalling by the executive branch has been exasperating. He would like to know why Ramps was moved in the first place, from the safer minimum-security facility to the Mississippi prison, where he was placed with dangerous felons, including illegal-alien drug smugglers, perhaps some of whom Ramps may even have arrested. "We have not received a satisfactory answer to that," Rep. Poe said. "We've asked for the official prison report on Ramps being assaulted, but have not received it. We will continue to demand answers to the many troubling aspects of this case."

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) wrote to President Bush on February 6 calling for the dismissal of Bureau of Prisons Director Harley Lappin. In the letter, Rep. Hunter noted that on January 17, the day agents Ramps and Compean reported for prison, he had called the Bureau of Prisons to obtain assurance that they would not be placed in the general prison population, a standard precaution to protect law enforcement officers from the obvious danger they would face from inmates.

Rep. Hunter pointed out that he had also written to Bureau of Prisons Director Harley Lappin in January urging that the agents be segregated from the general prison population for their safety. He received a letter from Director Lappin's assistant assuring him that all measures would be taken to assure their safety. In his letter to President Bush, Rep. Hunter stated:

   I was assured by the Bureau of Prisons
   staff that, subsequent to my letter,
   agents Compean and Ramos had been
   segregated from the general prison
   population and close attention was
   being paid to their personal safety.
   Yesterday, I was informed that agent
   Ramos was assaulted by inmates
   within the general population.

      Placing these two Border Patrol
   agents in general population, especially
   when assuring Congress it
   would not happen, constitutes an
   enormous dereliction of duty by the
   Administrator of the Prisons Bureau.
   It is my recommendation that the assault
   against agent Ramos be investigated
   and should it be ascertained that
   the Bureau did place agent Ramos in
   the general population, thereby exposing
   him to danger, Prisons Bureau
   Director Harley Lappin should
   be discharged from his position.

DHS Official Admits Lies to Congress

Director Lappin at the Bureau of Prisons is not the only one whom Members of Congress are targeting for dismissal in the Ramos/Compean case; top officials in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are also in the cross hairs, and rightly so.

During a February 6 hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee, DHS Inspector General (IG) Richard L. Skinner admitted that his office had seriously deceived Congress about agents Ramos and Compean. Specifically, Mr. Skinner's immediate subordinates, the DHS Deputy IG and Assistant IG, had lied to Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) and three other Texas congressmen during a September 26, 2006 briefing on the Ramos/Compean case. The DHS officials defamed the two Border Patrol agents in their briefing, painting the agents as vicious, murderous, corrupt cops.

During the briefing to the congressmen, the DHS officials also promised that they would deliver evidence to the congressmen backing up these charges. However, they never did, despite repeated requests for the documentation from the congressmen over the past four months. When DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner was finally brought before the subcommittee on February 6 and put under oath, he confessed that DHS had no such evidence. However, Skinner tried to characterize the deception, lies, fabrication, and stonewalling as a "mistake."

An angry Rep. Culberson was not buying that. "You lied to me and you lied to all of us," he charged. On February 7, Rep. Culberson issued a statement calling for the resignation of Mr. Skinner. The statement said, in part:

   Richard Skinner admitted yesterday
   under oath that his top deputies gave
   Members of Congress false information
   painting Border Patrol Agents
   Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean
   as rogue cops who were not in fear
   for their lives and who were "out to
   shoot Mexicans."

      In my opinion, this false information
   was given to Members of Congress
   to throw us off the scent and
   cover up what appears to be an unjust
   criminal prosecution of two U.S.
   law enforcement officers whose job
   was protecting our country's borders
   from criminals and terrorists.

      Today I am calling for the resignation
   of the Inspector General of the
   Department of Homeland Security
   and the investigators who lied to us.

On the same day that Rep. Culberson called for the resignations of Skinner and his DHS lieutenants, the DHS finally released a heavily redacted (blacked out) version of its 77-page IG Report of Investigation on Ramos and Compean. The report was completed last November and Congress had been requesting it for months, but DHS only released the report after being forced to do so by public opinion and a Freedom Of Information Act effort by Rep. Ted Poe. The DHS IG report is filled with many falsehoods and deceptive entries, but it is very important, nevertheless, for impeaching many of the prosecution's main charges against the agents.

The DHS IG report, for one thing, shows the incredible lengths to which the DHS and the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) went to find Aldrete-Davila in Mexico, and then to recruit and coax him to come to the United States, with full immunity from prosecution, to testify against the agents (Compean and Ramos) whom he had resisted (one of whom--Compean--he had assaulted) and who had stopped him from bringing $1 million worth of drugs into the country. The DHS IG report also is a self-indictment of the government's repeated claim that it had no proof that Aldrete-Davila was the driver of the drug-filled van stopped by Compean and Ramos on February 17, 2005. On the very first page of the report we read that the DHS IG "investigation found that Aldrete-Davila had actually entered the United States (illegally) to drive a van loaded with 743 pounds of marijuana to a 'stash house.'" On page five of the report we read that Aldrete-Davila "had been smuggling marijuana on the day he was shot."

That is just the beginning. The report is filled with many other admissions against interest that will be detailed in a forthcoming analysis. Meanwhile, many other documents that the prosecution had hoped to keep sealed have been leaking out, and they are painting a very ugly picture of criminal activity on the part of federal authorities to railroad agents Compean and Ramos. It is this blatant and increasingly transparent injustice that is stirring so many Americans to demand a full and immediate pardon for them.

Readers are encouraged to write to their U.S. representative and senators and to President Bush asking that agents Ramos and Compean be pardoned. To send letters online, go to: http://capwiz.com/jbs/home/