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Voices from the 2,000 mile border

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So that's it. The wall on our southern border is going up. Our legislators tell us it's to keep the bad guys away. Potential terrorists. Those who want to destroy our way of life. Those poor laborers who want to take jobs away from Americans, who are standing in line to work as gardeners, lettuce pickers, busboys and cleaning ladies. A 700-mile-long fence is not only going to keep us safe, they say, but it's going to solve our immigration problem. Was that the best they could do? What a pity. Or better yet, what a pitiful solution.

Our Congress turned a crucial immigration issue into a security farce. And as it turns out, we didn't need to block the southern border to keep us safer and free of potential criminals; all we needed to do was take a deeper look inside our own immigration and border-patrol agencies to find some homegrown criminals.

Our Congress didn't do it. Our Homeland Security is doing it but not telling us about it. So, thank God for good journalists. The Associated Press reported at the end of September that in the past 12 months, dozens of immigration and customs employees across the country have been arrested or sentenced on corruption-related charges.

Officers were involved in everything from smuggling to drug trafficking to selling fake documents and issuing legal residency to those who did not qualify. At least nine immigration officers or Border Patrol agents have been linked to corruption on the California border, and 10 at the Texas border, according to the AP report. But the problem is a lot more widespread than that.

Here's a small glimpse of what's going on in our law-enforcement agencies:

Border Patrol agent David Duque faces up to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for legal documents. He sold fake passports, birth certificates and Social Security cards. He even received $5,000 to allow a cocaine shipment through the Texas border.

Also in Texas, customs agent Fabian Solis was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to allow the entrance of undocumented immigrants by smugglers. He allowed at least 219 immigrants to be smuggled and received $300 for each.

On the California border, Mike Gilliland was a bit more expensive. He allegedly charged $1,500 a head for immigrants smuggled across the border, with as many as four cars holding up to 10 passengers crossing through each night, according to the investigation.

In Tampa, Fla., customs agent Rafael Francisco Pacheco was sentenced to seven years behind bars for accepting almost $18,000 from a drug trafficker and writing a letter requesting visas for the drug trafficker's wife and daughter.

A little farther east, Robert Schofield, an immigration supervisor in Fairfax, Va., was accused of granting legal residency or citizenship to around 100 immigrants who did not qualify.

And in New York, immigration officer Phillip Browne was sentenced for fraud and money laundering in a scheme to stage fake marriages between U.S. citizens and foreigners.

Then there's the case of an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen whose background showed he had been trained by foreign intelligence agencies but nevertheless was hired to review asylum applications.

There are bad apples everywhere, you say? Sure there are. But these are not small, isolated incidents. According to the news reports, more than 600 criminal investigations of immigration employees nationwide have been launched this year alone.

It is not easy to weed out corruption at any level, whether it's corporate America, the halls of Congress or even our law-enforcement agencies. But when it's happening, the American people have a right to know about it, particularly when those who are supposed to protect the country are conspiring to break the law, motivated by greed alone. Immigrants are not asking to illegally buy their way into our country; what they want are fair laws that will allow them to legally be part of our society.

My opinion