Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

International

The FBI’s “immigration relief dangle”

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The FBI has long used immigration as both a carrot and stick to induce people to become informants.  See this story from BuzzFeed last year: Welcome to America, Now Spy on Your Friends.  Now the Intercept has published this article: When Informants Are No Longer Useful, the FBI Can Help Deport Them. It includes new information from  the FBI’s “Confidential Human Source Police Guide”–its manual for handling informants–which uses the phrase “immigration relief dangle” to describe the dynamic.  FBI agents coordinate with immigration officials to identify and pressure potential informants, and then help ICE locate them for deportation when they are no longer useful.  From the article:

“It’s been clear for a decade that the FBI works with ICE to keep informants in the country. What we didn’t know was that the assistance is often contingent and temporary, and that the FBI actively assists ICE in locating informants who are no longer useful so that they may be deported.”

“’This creates a perverse incentive structure, because informants are incentivized to keep themselves valuable,’ said [immigration expert and Stanford lecturer Diala] Shamas. ‘It will further incentivize them to create investigations when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. In the traditional criminal context, the law enforcement community is conscious of the risk that coercing informants increases the likelihood of getting bad intelligence. But in the counterterrorism and intelligence context, this caution has been thrown out the window.'”

The article is by Trevor Aaronson, author of the Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.

Following a terrorism informant in real time

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In this Sundance award-winning documentary, (T)error, filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe follow a local professional informant as he collects information about his target for his FBI handlers.  The New York Times Magazine, which published “The Informant and the Filmmakers” today, describes the film as follows:

   “By some counts, nearly half of the 500-plus terrorism-related convictions in federal court since the Sept. 11 attacks have involved informants. Before ‘‘(T)error,’’ most of what was known of their work came from indictments and snippets of wiretapped dialogue, served up by prosecutors and neatly presented for the courtroom. Filmed without the F.B.I.’s cooperation and apparently without its knowledge, ‘‘(T)error’’ shows how an informant puts a case together from its raw ingredients.”

The article relies on Trevor Aaronson’s book “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” which criticizes the phenomenon of terrorism informants more broadly.   Interested readers should also take a look at Wadie Said’s recent book “Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions,” which argues that the federal legal system has become distorted in response to terrorism prosecutions in general, and the use of informants in particular.  Click here for links to both books.

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.

DEA found liable for failing to protect its informant

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In an unusual case, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims has held the DEA liable for over $1 million in damages for failing to protect its informant, the “Princess.”  The Court held that the DEA “breached an implied-in-fact contract and its duty of good faith and fair dealing” when it compromised the informant’s identity which led to her kidnapping and the worsening of a severe medical condition.   Opinion here.

Professor Stephen Carter wrote about the case in this article:  How the DEA Ditched an Informant, and he writes: “It was the DEA’s repeated bungling that essentially blew her cover. Then, after her release, she developed a chronic medical condition that would require increasingly expensive care. The DEA refused to help out. She therefore brought an action claiming breach of contract. In particular, she argued that the DEA, in hiring her as an informant, had agreed to protect her.  It broke that promise.”

It’s an important decision because courts often find that the government does not have a duty to protect its informants.  See this post.

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).