Intelligence chief nominee said to inflate role in raid
President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s intelligence community often cites a massive roundup of immigrant workers in the country illegally at poultry plants in 2008 as a highlight of his career. Rep. John Ratcliffe claims that as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas, he was the leader of the immigration crackdown, describing it as one of the largest cases of its kind.
“As a U.S. Attorney, I arrested over 300 illegal immigrants on a single day,” Ratcliffe, R-Texas, says on his congressional website.
But a closer look at the case shows that Ratcliffe’s claims conflict with the court record and the recollections of others who participated in the operation — at a time when he is under fire for embellishing his record.
Ratcliffe played a supporting role in the 2008 sweep, which involved U.S. attorneys’ offices in five states and was led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, according to a Justice Department news release. The effort targeted workers at poultry processor Pilgrim’s Pride who were suspected of using stolen Social Security numbers.
Only 45 workers were charged by prosecutors in Ratcliffe’s office, court documents show. Six of those cases were dismissed, two of them because the suspects turned out to be American citizens. One of those citizens, a 19year-old woman, was awakened in her home and hauled away by immigration agents, the woman said in an interview.
Two people involved in the planning or execution of the enforcement effort said they could not recall Ratcliffe playing a central role.
A.J. Irwin, a former immigration investigator who was involved in the early planning stages before retiring, said in an interview that the operation was a costly failure. Later, as a private immigration consultant, he advised the poultry processor after the sweep and gathered details about the woman who was arrested.
“At the end of the day, it did not deliver,” Irwin said. “It was the biggest waste of money and hype.”
A spokeswoman for Ratcliffe, Rachel Stephens, did not respond to questions about the operation but said in a statement that it grew out of a prior investigation and arrests in the Eastern District of Texas at the company’s national headquarters.
Ratcliffe’s background has come under scrutiny since Trump announced Sunday that he plans to nominate the lawmaker to be the next director of national intelligence, replacing Daniel Coats, a former longtime senator and diplomat who was often at odds with the president.
Ratcliffe has dialed back his earlier claims that he had won convictions in a high-profile terrorism case as a federal prosecutor. His planned nomination has drawn opposition from Senate Democrats and tepid support from key Republicans. Some current and former intelligence officials have said Ratcliffe is the least-qualified person ever nominated to oversee the country’s intelligence agencies — previous directors have been former diplomats, senior intelligence officials and military leaders — and questioned whether he would use the position to serve Trump’s political interests. The post was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to coordinate the 17 agencies of the nation’s intelligence community.
Ratcliffe has been a staunch defender of the president and has alleged anti-Trump bias at the FBI. Trump tweeted out his plan to nominate Ratcliffe several days after the lawmaker attacked former special counsel Robert Mueller during a hearing.
A native of Illinois, Ratcliffe and his family moved to the small city of Heath, an affluent suburb just east of Dallas, where he began a law practice.
In 2004, he was hired as an assistant federal prosecutor in the sprawling Eastern District of Texas and was named chief of antiterrorism in the office, despite an admitted lack of experience.
“My background isn’t in law enforcement, and I don’t have any real specialized training,” he said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in early 2005.
The same year he became a prosecutor, Ratcliffe was elected mayor of Heath, an unpaid post he would hold for eight years while working for the Justice Department. In his run later for the House, Ratcliffe cited his leadership of Heath — a wealthy lakeside community of 8,000 that has a yacht club and a private golf course — as an example of his government service and fiscal acumen.
He was named acting U.S. attorney in May 2007 to fill a vacancy for one year. He was never nominated by the president or confirmed by the Senate. The brief stint later became a cornerstone in Ratcliffe’s bid for Congress.
“During his tenure, John personally managed dozens of international and domestic terrorism investigations involving some of the nation’s most sensitive security matters,” his campaign website said during his first run for Congress in 2013.
In 2016, seeking re-election, he claimed a central role in a major federal terrorism case. “There are individuals that currently sit in prison because I prosecuted them for funneling money to terrorist groups,” he is quoted as saying in campaign literature.
Stephens, Ratcliffe’s spokeswoman, did not respond to questions about which cases Ratcliffe was referring to. But the same news release refers to a high-profile case from that time. “In 2008, Ratcliffe served by special appointment as the prosecutor in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, one of the nation’s largest terrorism financing cases,” it says.
Stephens acknowledged this week that Ratcliffe’s assignment was not to prosecute the case but rather “to investigate issues related to” why an initial prosecution of Holy Land Foundation resulted in a mistrial.
She said Justice Department policy prevents Ratcliffe from commenting on his work related to the case because it did not result in criminal charges. Without citing specific cases, she said that Justice records would confirm that Ratcliffe “opened, managed and supervised numerous domestic and international terrorism-related cases.”