Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Immigration

FBI pressures Muslim immigrants to become informants

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This Buzzfeed article– Welcome to America–Now Spy on Your Friends — describes how the FBI routinely interferes with the immigration process in order to exert pressure on immigrants from Muslim countries to provide information.  As the article puts it, “[w]hen Muslim immigrants apply to become citizens, they often find the process delayed for years without explanation. Then, when they are at wit’s end, they get a visit from the FBI, with an offer they don’t dare refuse.”

See also this 2013 ACLU report, Muslims Need Not Apply.

HuffPost on DEA snitching debacles

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In a two-part series about “the sketchiest things the DEA has done while waging the war on drugs,” informant debacles take the lead in this Huffington Post article.  Here are a few of the headlines:

-The DEA once turned a teenager into a drug kingpin so he could act as an informant.

-The DEA allows informants to break the law, but have no records as to how often it happens.

-One of America’s most notorious terrorists once served as a DEA informant.

-The DEA strung one informant along for 20 years with the promise of citizenship. She still hasn’t received it.

S-visas: snitching to avoid deportation

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The federal government has 250 S-visas (sometimes called “snitch” visas) at its disposal to award to immigrants who provide information about crimes. See 18 U.S.C. s. 1101(a)(15). There has been increasing attention paid to abuses of immigrants under this program: visas promised but never awarded, immigrants who provide significant information but are deported anyway, sometimes at risk to their lives. For more information see the following sources: Andrew Becker, Retired Drug Informant Says he Was Burned, NPR (Feb. 13, 2010); Helen O’Neill, Informants for Feds Face Deportation, Associated Press (2/13/2010) ; Prerna Lal, Reforming a Visa to Snitch, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), (May 1, 2013).

Primetime: U.S. customs authorizes informant to import cocaine

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Another large-scale informant crime spree, this one courtesy of a Grits comment. In this story, ABC News Primetime documented how U.S. Customs authorized its informant, Rodney Matthews, to import tons of cocaine into the U.S., much of which ended up on the streets. Here’s the link to the Primetime transcript. Caught with a few hundred pounds of marijuana, Matthews became a Customs informant and starting importing cocaine with the government’s blessing. While all the Customs officials interviewed acknowledged that such deals are routine, they disputed whether the drugs were permitted by the government to hit the streets: Agent Tom Grieve said it wasn’t authorized, while Mark Conrad of Customs internal affairs concluded that Grieve was lying to cover up the debacle. From the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER (Primetime) Was there anything said, anything that could have been in your wildest imagination misinterpreted to mean that Rodney Matthews could bring in a load and let it hit the streets?

AGENT TOM GRIEVE No. Not hit the streets. No, no, no, no. No. See, that’s-no, no.

FORREST SAWYER Tom Grieve says that there was no carte blanche, nothing like carte blanche.

MARK CONRAD, US CUSTOMS INTERNAL AFFAIRS Tom Grieve is simply a liar.

FORREST SAWYER ( VO ) Mark Conrad runs internal affairs for Customs in Houston. A 27-year veteran, Conrad spoke to PrimeTime in New York over the objections of the Customs Service.

MARK CONRAD We got in bed with Rodney Matthews and the importation of a humongous amount of narcotics coming into the United States.

FORREST SAWYER And the reason wasn’t because they were dirty?

MARK CONRAD No. The reason is there’s a great deal of pressure on agents in the field to make cases, to make the big one. And the bigger, the better.

FORREST SAWYER ( VO ) In fact, more than a dozen agents and former drug enforcement officials told us that letting dope hit the streets is the cost of doing business, that while the Matthews case is extreme, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Matthews’ former partner Jimmy Ellard got an even more dramatic deal. He had fled to Colombia and became a top transporter for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. When he was caught in Florida, Ellard pled guilty to importing $6 billion [sic] worth of drugs into the U.S., and orchestrating a fatal airplane bombing. Ellard earned leniency by accusing several Customs officials of corruption. The officials were exonerated; Ellard served only six years in prison.

“Used, Abused and Tossed”: informants and immigration

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Here’s part 3 of the NPR series on informants–this one focuses on how ICE sometimes uses non-citizens as informants and then lets them be deported once they are no longer useful: Retired Drug Informant Says He Was Burned (NPR), and Informants can greatly aid US authories but still face deportation (LA Times). Deportation poses special dangers to informants, who may be killed upon returning to their home countries, in much the same way that domestic informants face special dangers in local jails and prisons or even on the streets. The government is under little legal obligation to protect its sources. For example, after he gave his FBI handler a tip, Charles Shuler was shot and paralyzed because the FBI blew his cover. A court dismissed Shuler’s lawsuit, ruling that the FBI did not owe him protection. Stories like these reflect the more general phenomenon that informants who lack counsel, education, or other resources are often vulnerable to official exploitation.