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Posted on Jan 9, 2009

‘Homeland Security USA’: The Outtakes

By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting

Note: G.W. Schulz is working on a project at the Center for Investigative

Reporting about homeland security in the United States, “America’s War
Within,” which can be found here.
The inaugural episode of ABC’s newest reality television series did exactly as
producer Arnold Shapiro told viewers it would: unabashedly celebrated the
Department of Homeland Security. It also failed in every conceivable way to
critically examine the largest reorganization of the federal government since
World War II.
“Homeland Security USA” is the latest iteration of reality TV that like the show
“Cops” romanticizes actual working police catching bad guys, except that now
the cops aren’t just snagging small-time drunks and corner crack dealers. They’re federal agents from the Department of
Homeland Security with far greater power using the latest technology to keep America safe from terrorists and stop
international organized criminals from trafficking massive quantities of narcotics into the United States.
Shapiro received full access with his camera teams to nearly every agency folded into the Department of Homeland Security
when it was created in 2003, from the Coast Guard to Customs and Border Protection, an access that no investigative journalist
ever could attain. But he made a deal with the devil in exchange that would cause any journalism ethics professor to blush in
embarrassment. Shapiro agreed to grant the department “pre-screening” rights over the series, according to The New York
Times.
Missing, then, from the Jan. 6 premiere—and presumably from future episodes—are allegations like those unearthed by
journalists and other watchdogs that some federal air marshals, for example, have accepted bribes, trafficked cocaine
themselves and even sought to have a woman killed in one stupefying instance. There is nothing like the reports of border
agents taking luxury cars as payment for secretly allowing illegal immigrants to cross into the United States. Not included either
is any reference to the innumerable accounts from government overseers of dubious multimillion-dollar technology
investments made by the department that were later abandoned after being deemed worthless.

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Law enforcement bureaucrats featured in “Homeland Security USA” instead are cast as motivated not by the reliability of a
government paycheck and an otherwise limitless federal budget with which to purchase new toys that frequently fail but by a
simple desire to protect American families from the world’s ghastly horrors.
“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” Shapiro told The Hollywood Reporter in May. “This show is
heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”
By no means do the American people begrudge law enforcement officials doing their jobs. Quite the opposite. They want police
heroes to maintain the highest professional standards possible and for serious lawbreakers to be placed behind bars.
So it’s indeed disheartening to realize that what some of the best news stories published and aired in recent years showed was
the many ways in which the Department of Homeland Security has actually failed to protect America’s borders and keep
dangerous criminals off jet airliners, disconcerting truths that clash spectacularly with Shapiro’s own take on reality, which ABC
officials say will span 13 episodes.
For instance, a partnership between the journalism nonprofit ProPublica and USA Today published in November revealed that
the Air Marshal Service, dramatically expanded after 9/11, contained in its ranks at least 18 people charged with felonies.
One air marshal was hired despite at the time being under FBI investigation for skimming drug profits while working as a
sheriff’s deputy in Arkansas. Another allegedly sneaked cash and cocaine past airport security. Yet another allegedly tried to
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hire someone to murder his wife. Other marshals had been fired from past law enforcement positions for misconduct but were
hired by the Department of Homeland Security anyway.
According to the story: “Since 9/11, air marshals have taken bribes, committed bank fraud, hired an escort while on layover and
doctored hotel receipts to pad expenses, records show. They’ve been found sleeping on planes and lost the travel documents
of U.S. diplomats while on a whiskey-tasting trip in Scotland.”
The show’s first episode, titled “This Is Your Car on Drugs,” focuses on the exploits of Customs and Border Protection. In one
segment, a young woman arrives from Switzerland at the Los Angeles International Airport “with no working papers but a
suitcase full of titillating surprises!” ABC described it in advanced press copy sent out before the show aired. She had revealing
apparel in her suitcase, we learned during the Jan. 6 airing.
Meanwhile, the department’s inspector general discovered something else at LAX in October. Computer systems there
managed by homeland security officials are susceptible to cyber attack because they’re poorly guarded, according to a report.
One data system maintained by the Transportation Security Administration allowed anonymous access, which meant a hacker
could log on without proper credentials. In another incident, customs authorities installed high-speed wireless Internet access
at the airport for their use, but it was hampered by technical problems and no one could say after a full year whether it had
ever actually worked.
The report pointed to a 2007 incident in which customs officials suffered a major network outage at LAX that halted operations
for hours and disrupted the travel of thousands, stranded on the airport’s tarmac and elsewhere. An aging IT infrastructure
apparently exacerbated the problem.
In another segment of the show, Border Patrol officials inspect vehicles at the southwest border and execute a drug bust while
cameras are rolling. Multiple large packages of marijuana spill out of the spare tire and gas tank of the car as border agents grin
broadly nearby. Later at Washington state’s border with Canada, 77 pounds of cocaine are found stuffed inside baby diapers
after Shapiro’s protagonists grow suspicious of a Ford Explorer.
“The money that funds narcotics also funds terrorism, and the more of that we can stop, the better,” one agent tells America
following the seizure.
But when reporters Lowell Bergman and Andrew Becker teamed up for a project with Frontline/World and The New York Times
last May, they found that there were roughly 200 open corruption investigations at three major homeland security components
with border responsibilities: Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Citizenship and
Immigration Services.
The journalists (one a Center for Investigative Reporting co-founder and the other currently a staff reporter) profiled nine
customs officers and border agents who’d been arrested between 2005 and 2008. Two of them, brothers named Raul and Fidel
Villareal, disappeared for several months while under investigation before being captured in Tijuana last October and charged
with smuggling Mexicans and Brazilians into the United States, using a government-issued vehicle to transport illegals to San
Diego and laundering money.
Another man, Michael Gilliland, admitted receiving between $70,000 and $120,000 in bribes to wave cars piloted by smugglers
through his inspection lane unmolested. A former Marine who joined the Department of Homeland Security is believed to have
taken as much as $80,000 in such bribes. Others sprung detainees from ICE detention facilities.
One FBI agent told Becker and Bergman: “There’s more pressure on the other side of the border from the smuggling
organizations to elicit the help of a corrupt border official. The pool of individuals who are susceptible to corruption has grown.”
Becker then reported for the Times in November that police arrested a veteran customs inspector in Del Rio, Texas, for
allegedly helping to smuggle 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States over five years. Media outlets in Texas all but
missed the story because the press release announcing his indictment sent out by the regional U.S. attorney’s office neglected
to mention the man was an employee of the Department of Homeland Security. But a standard note at the bottom disclosing
that the department’s inspector general was involved in the probe provided a crucial tip. The customs officer also is accused of
accepting $30,000 to falsify a passport application.
As producer Shapiro resides in an editing room melding together rapid-fire segments of brilliant television that portrays law
enforcement technology as infallible and witless criminals and terrorists as sure to be caught, others have filed Freedom of
Information Act requests, studied little-noticed congressional reports and interviewed disenchanted whistle-blowers to show
that while the multibillion-dollar Department of Homeland Security does protect America from the world’s dark side, it also
persists as a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars and a revolving door for government executives who turn their civil service jaunts into
lucrative private-sector careers.
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U.S. News & World Report in 2005 described the seamless transition for top homeland security officials to corporate positions.
Just before Tom Ridge took over as head of the new agency, two of his top aides joined a lobbying firm that represents major
homeland security contractors, including Boeing and BearingPoint. At least six others with big titles at the department,
including Ridge himself, who eventually joined the board of a firm developing security technology, made similar moves.
We probably won’t learn it from “Homeland Security USA,” but the department is continually battered by corruption, including
reports in 2007 that former FEMA officials charged the federal government double what their private consulting firms paid for
subcontracted employees during the Hurricane Katrina cleanup, rates they insisted were “industry standard.”
In fact, the first episode didn’t touch the department’s heavy reliance on private contractors, which made up a whole 40
percent of its activities last year.
Then there are the department’s widespread problems with mismanagement. In one extraordinarily ironic case, homeland
security officials had to totally scrap a $52 million computer system that was supposed to better enable it to manage an annual
budget of approximately $50 billion. The department had originally intended to spend $229 million creating the failed eMerge2
program. There was “little to show for it” despite the amount already poured into the system, according to one Government
Accountability Office report.
Like the once wildly popular reality show “Cops,” Shapiro threatens to create the false impression that police are not vulnerable
to corruption or breaking the law to enforce it and that the law enforcement lobby in the United States always acts in the best
interests of the American people and their taxpayer dollars.
It would be equally false to assume that investigative journalism, which asks tough questions of the department, is intended to
disrespect those who work in law enforcement or to be sympathetic of criminals who illegally move dangerous weapons in and
out of the country, engage in human trafficking of sex victims or further destroy America’s inner cities with powerfully addictive
drugs.
The New York Times called “Homeland Security USA” a “recruitment video,” and The Washington Post piled on, dismissing it as
“a sorry excuse for a television show.”
Either way, the television medium won’t be used this time to share with the public a reality of the department’s many colossal
mistakes and stumbles. So details of them remain tucked away in mile-high stacks of reports from the GAO and inspector
general awaiting exposure by the more curious among us.

G.W. Schulz is working on a project at the Center for Investigative Reporting about homeland security in the United States,
“America’s War Within,” which can be found here