MIAMI IMMIGRATION CHIEF REASSIGNED TO ROME POST

Miami Herald, The (FL) - Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Author: ALFONSO CHARDY, achardy@herald.com

Jack Bulger, who helped steer the Miami immigration office through the Elián González controversy, the post-9/11 terrorist investigation and the agency's absorption into the Department of Homeland Security, is leaving for Rome soon - but he's not retiring.

Bulger, 57, will serve as the Homeland Security attaché and Rome district director overseeing 11 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.

Though Bulger either led the Miami district office or served as its second in command through many traumatic times, his chief legacy is designing InfoPass - an Internet-based appointment system that eliminated long lines outside immigration offices here and across the nation.

``The line used to ring the building,'' said Michael Bander , a longtime Miami immigration attorney, referring to the immigration service office at Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast 79th Street.

``It was the bane of district directors.''

People used to stand in line from the night before for a chance to get inside the building sometime the next day and get immigration documents or information.

AWARDED FOR WORK

After InfoPass was launched in June 2003, it allowed people to go online - www.infopass.uscis.gov - to schedule an appointment without having to wait in line.

Bulger's bosses in Washington recognized his contribution and in December gave him the Secretary of Homeland Security's Excellence Award.

``Professionals like Jack Bulger are hard to come by,'' said Eduardo Aguirre, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director in Washington who was recently nominated as ambassador to Spain. ``It has been a privilege and a pleasure to see him develop a great body of work in a district as challenging and complex as Florida.''

Unlike previous local immigration service managers, who were generally distrusted by refugee advocates, Bulger earned the confidence of some of the office's harshest critics.

`ONE OF THE BEST'

``I thought he was one of the best district directors they've had in South Florida and probably one of the best in the country,'' said Ira Kurzban, a veteran Miami immigration attorney who often criticizes the immigration service.

In a recent interview, Bulger recalled some of the toughest challenges during his nine-year tenure as director or deputy director of one of the nation's busiest immigration offices.

One of the most difficult cases involved Elián González, the Cuban rafter child who became the center of a local, national and international furor. It began when Elián was rescued off the Broward County coast on Thanksgiving Day 1999 after his mother and others drowned during a voyage from Cuba.

The case quickly turned into a foreign-policy crisis when Cuban leader Fidel Castro supported Elián's father's demand that his son be returned to the island. But Miami's exile community backed the child's Little Havana relatives in their struggle to keep the boy.

The flash point came when armed immigration agents raided the relative's Little Havana home, seized Elián and reunited him with his father.

Bulger said the local Immigration and Naturalization Service office was as divided as the community and the nation.

``They were as torn by the Elián situation as everybody else here,'' he said.

Divisions at the INS office became an embarrassment when Hispanic employees claimed several non-Cuban immigration service officers adopted anti-exile attitudes.

Three INS agents who took part in the Elián raid testified at a 2002 administrative hearing in Miami that there was anti-Cuban paraphernalia in the Miami INS district office, and that some managers tolerated the display of anti-exile items including cup holders bearing the image of a Cuban flag with a line slashed across it.

Though several managers were named in the hearing, Bulger was not among them.

30-YEAR VETERAN

Bulger, whose career began 30 years ago when he was hired as a part-time immigration inspector at the Canadian border, became the first district director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one of three agencies that replaced the INS. Bulger's branch deals with immigration benefits, from asylum to green cards to naturalization.

Bulger was acting Miami district director when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred - an event that led to the demise of the INS.

Like everyone else, Bulger was stunned to learn that three of the hijacker pilots - Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah - received pilot training in Florida after being admitted to the country on visitor visas.

The INS came under severe criticism after the attacks, though investigators ultimately concluded that the INS was less liable for failing to detect the hijackers than the CIA, which knew that two suspects were in the country.

POST-9/11 ASSESSMENT

Bulger said he personally did a post-9/11 assessment on what his office might have done differently that could have helped disrupt the conspiracy. He concluded there was little that could have been done.

``I think everybody in the organization second-guessed themselves on whether they could have done something else,'' Bulger said.

Bulger said the INS obtained information on the hijackers' travel records in agency databases that helped investigators piece together the plot afterward.

His first Miami assignment was as ``site coordinator'' for Citizenship USA, a Clinton administration initiative to expedite naturalizations.

The program ran into trouble when it was discovered that dozens of applicants became citizens despite criminal records.

However, investigators praised the Miami office, saying that of all the sites examined, it naturalized the least number of people with criminal backgrounds and had stricter standards in place.
Caption: photo: Jack Bulger (a) TIM CHAPMAN/HERALD STAFF ON THE MOVE: Jack Bulger, 57, will serve as the Homeland Security attaché and Rome district director overseeing 11 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices.