White House backs House bill to break up INS

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has decided to support a House bill that would abolish the Immigration and Naturalization Service and divide its responsibilities between two new agencies, officials said Wednesday.

Until now, the administration had been pushing its own plan to restructure the troubled agency and leave it under the authority of the INS commissioner. It had not taken a position on the House bill.

But House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, announced at a news conference Wednesday that the administration had changed course. The shift was confirmed by administration sources.

With bipartisan momentum building on Capitol Hill for the House plan, sources said the Justice Department "saw the handwriting on the wall."

"They did a vote count. They saw there was overwhelming support," said an administration source, suggesting that the Justice Department decided it was not worth fighting against a majority of the House.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is expected to announce the decision at a news conference Thursday morning, just hours before the House votes on the measure. He had been expected to make the announcement Wednesday at the news conference with Sensenbrenner, but he did not appear.

Sources said Ashcroft was not at the news conference because key senators and INS Commissioner James Ziglar had not been briefed on the administration's shift in policy.

Under the bill, the INS as it now exists would be dismantled. Two new bureaus -- one responsible for enforcing immigration laws and another that provides services to immigrants -- would be put in its place.

Lawmakers said the change would make the customer service side of the agency more responsive to the needs of legal immigrants and make the law enforcement side better equipped to deal with heightened border security concerns in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Both agencies would report to a new associate attorney general for immigration affairs at the Justice Department.

While offering support for the House plan, however, the administration will call for some changes in it, including language to make sure the new associate attorney general has authority over day-to-day operations, sources said.

As described to CNN, a draft of the administration's policy position reads: "The bill needs to be improved in certain important respects."

Sensenbrenner, the architect of the House bill, praised the administration's decision to support the dismantling the IRS rather than relying on an internal restructuring.

"We on the Judiciary Committee are fed up with the INS's excuses," Sensenbrenner said at Wednesday's press conference.

"We have seen one reorganization after another take place internally. Things have gotten worse over at the INS -- both in terms of enforcement and adjudicating petitions for legal aliens."

Mohammed Atta, 33, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, received student visas six months after September 11.

"We are going to be representing our constituents by abolishing this agency and creating two more functional agencies," he said.

Sensenbrenner said the pivotal event that accelerated the urgency of reforming the INS was the receipt by a Florida flight school of student visa paperwork for two of the September 11 hijackers -- six months to the day after the attacks.

Mohammed Atta, 33, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, learned to fly at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, in July 2000 and were aboard separate flights that struck the World Trade Center towers.

That, along with the actual events of September 11, built momentum on Capitol Hill for Sensenbrenner's bill, which is expected to pass the House easily with bipartisan support.

Under the legislation, both of the new agencies would submit independent budget requests to Congress. Sensenbrenner said the enforcement branch now gets priority, and money meant to help the INS process applications for green cards is often shifted to enforcement efforts.

Sensenbrenner said the bill also would required automation of all applications for INS services so that "one day, they can simply go online and find out whether their files are complete."

He said he hoped that three or four years from now there would be no long lines at INS facilities, as there are now.