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Sky-High Deductibles Broke the U.S. Health Insurance System
Employers are questioning a system they say costs patients too much.
Bloomberg: When Carla Jordan and her husband were hit with a cascade of serious medical issues, she knew that at least her family had health insurance through her job. What she didn’t realize was that even with that coverage, a constant stream of medical bills would soon push the family to the edge of financial collapse.
The Jordans, both 40, were once solidly in the middle class, but ever since the 2008 financial crisis, money has been tight at best. Then calamity hit. In 2016, Carla needed a gallbladder operation. Her husband John suffered a seizure the same year, followed by an unrelated infection that sent him to the emergency room. Toward the end of the year, Carla was diagnosed with diabetes. Even after paying $501 a month for medical insurance, they ended the year owing $8,000 to 18 different providers, with creditors threatening to garnish John’s wages.
Health plans similar to the Jordans’ that put patients on the hook for many thousands of dollars are widespread and growing, but some employers are beginning to have second thoughts. “Why did we design a health plan that has the ability to deliver a $1,000 surprise to employees?” Shawn Leavitt, a senior human resources executive at Comcast Corp., said at a conference in May. “That’s kind of stupid.” A handful of companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and CVS Health Corp., have recently announced plans to reduce deductibles or cover more care before workers are exposed to the cost.
Yet it’s still the reality for a growing share of Americans. Today, 39 percent of large employers offer only high-deductible plans, up from 7 percent in 2009, according to a survey by the National Business Group on Health. Half of all workers now have health insurance with a deductible of at least $1,000 for an individual, up from 22 percent in 2009, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. About 41 percent say they can’t pay a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or selling something, according to the Federal Reserve. The bottom line: People like the Jordans simply can’t afford to get sick.
Deductibles Keep Rising
About 40 percent of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense, according to the Federal Reserve.
***
The family had an Anthem Inc. insurance policy through Carla’s job as a public school teacher in Stafford County, Virginia. But the monthly premium barely covered any of their bills before paying a $2,000 deductible. And by the end of 2016, the Jordans were deep in the hole to doctors, hospitals, an anesthesiologist, urgent care, and various labs and testing centers. Their doctors sent collections notices. Some dropped them as patients until they paid up.
“I actually dreaded going to the mailbox,” Carla recalled. “I feel like I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.” And yet, she said, sickness pushed the family “right over the brink.”
Since the early 2000s, employers have mostly embraced high-deductible health plans. The thinking has been that requiring workers to shoulder more of the cost of care will also encourage them to cut back on unnecessary spending. But it didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many families were hard-pressed to meet their soaring health-insurance deductibles. At the same time, studies show that many put off routine care or skipped medication to save money. That can mean illnesses that might have been caught early can go undiagnosed, becoming potentially life-threatening and enormously costly for the medical system.
Patients Exposed
The share of Americans under 65 enrolled in high deductible plans is rising
The family had an Anthem Inc. insurance policy through Carla’s job as a public school teacher in Stafford County, Virginia. But the monthly premium barely covered any of their bills before paying a $2,000 deductible. And by the end of 2016, the Jordans were deep in the hole to doctors, hospitals, an anesthesiologist, urgent care, and various labs and testing centers. Their doctors sent collections notices. Some dropped them as patients until they paid up.
“I actually dreaded going to the mailbox,” Carla recalled. “I feel like I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.” And yet, she said, sickness pushed the family “right over the brink.”
Since the early 2000s, employers have mostly embraced high-deductible health plans. The thinking has been that requiring workers to shoulder more of the cost of care will also encourage them to cut back on unnecessary spending. But it didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many families were hard-pressed to meet their soaring health-insurance deductibles. At the same time, studies show that many put off routine care or skipped medication to save money. That can mean illnesses that might have been caught early can go undiagnosed, becoming potentially life-threatening and enormously costly for the medical system.
Patients Exposed
The share of Americans under 65 enrolled in high deductible plans is rising.
***
How the U.S. insurance system came to stick its customers with increasingly onerous medical bills is a 15-year-long story of miscalculations and missed opportunities. It started in 2003 when President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans passed a change to the tax code that encouraged employers to experiment with high-deductible plans, which ask patients to pay out of pocket for care — sometimes thousands of dollars — before insurance coverage kicks in. The trend got a push when the financial crisis hit: As the economy stalled and employers shed nearly 9 million jobs over three years, companies desperate to slash costs turned to high-deductible plans to save money. The next wave came with the arrival of Obamacare in 2010. Millions who were previously uninsured could now get coverage, but many of them took on deductibles of $1,000 or higher.
The Jordan family never expected to become a casualty of the trend. Little more than a decade ago, they were making more than $100,000 a year. John Jordan had a carpentry business that did well during the housing boom. Carla’s job teaching computer science classes at a local high school gave them steady income and health benefits. When their children, now teenagers, were first born, she recalls paying $500 for her maternity stays in the hospital.
“That was the biggest bill we ever got,” she said.
Since then, Carla’s salary has barely increased and John’s business never recovered after the crash. With student loans, car notes and a house worth less than their mortgage, the Jordans filed for bankruptcy in 2013, allowing them to discharge some debts. But their income never fully bounced back.
They were ill-prepared to deal with sharply escalating health-care bills: Carla’s gallstone, her diabetes diagnoses, John’s seizures, followed by a serious campylobacter infection. The family couldn’t afford the $1,000 it would cost for Carla’s six-week diabetes class. Instead, she got a 40-minute crash course. They shelled out $125 for five pills to treat John’s infection. Still, the bills were piling up. Early in 2017, Carla took a day off from work to go through the stacks of paper, calling each office to negotiate. Few were willing to help.
“It did not really matter to them,” she said. “It was just, ‘When can you pay and how much can you pay?’”
By last year, the couple was making about $79,000, before taxes. They have no savings for retirement or for their children to go to college. “We both live paycheck-to-paycheck,” Carla said. They pay about $35 a month for medications for John’s blood pressure and acid reflux. Carla takes inexpensive metformin—just $3 a month—for diabetes, and doesn’t yet need insulin.
But her diabetes test strips and lancets cost $120 for a three-month supply. To stretch them as long as she can, she checks her blood sugar only when she feels dizzy or nauseous, rather than the standard three times a day. When she had the flu this past winter, she put off going to the doctor until her fever hit 105.
The Jordans’ response to spiraling family medical costs is repeated in families across the country, studies suggest. When one large employer switched all its employees to high-deductible plans, medical spending dropped by 12 percent to 14 percent, according to an analysis by economists at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard. But the workers weren’t learning to shop more effectively for health care. They simply reduced the amount of medical care they used, including preventative care. In high-deductible plans, women are more likely to delay follow-up tests after mammograms, including imaging, biopsies and early-stage diagnoses that could detect tumors when they’re easiest to treat, according to research in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“High-deductible plans do reduce health-care costs, but they don’t seem to be doing it in smart ways,” said Neeraj Sood, director of research at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.
Some big companies are sitting up and taking notice. “We all thought high deductibles are going to drive people to get involved—‘skin in the game,’” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan, said in early June. Instead, “they didn’t get the surgery they needed, when they needed it, because they can’t afford the high deductible in one shot.” JPMorgan is effectively eliminating deductibles for workers making less than $60,000 a year.
Dimon has teamed up with the top executives of Amazon.com Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to improve the health care they provide for their workers. The incoming CEO of that venture, surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande, has also noticed the plight of such families as the Jordans. “I had one friend who was bankrupted with a health plan,” Gawande said at the Spotlight Health event in Aspen, Colorado, on Saturday. “He had a $3,000 deductible and couldn’t meet it.”
About five years ago, CVS switched all of its 200,000 employees and their families to health-insurance plans with high deductibles. As the company pushed more costs onto employees, some stopped taking their medications.
“Nobody in their right mind would think that it’s a smart thing to basically be keeping people away from taking their medications,” said Troy Brennan, the chief medical officer at CVS. The company had initially offered a limited selection of generic drugs for free to its workers. But evidence that people were skipping medications prompted CVS to broaden the list, including some brand-name treatments and insulins on the free-drug list, an approach it now recommends to its corporate customers.
The company is also studying a plan to allow employers to offer free, branded drugs to workers in cases where CVS has already negotiated deep discounts. The plan could be in place as soon as 2019.
For the Jordans, such changes are late in coming. On New Year’s Day, 2017, Carla Jordan sat down with her laptop at her kitchen table to write a 20-page letter railing against insurance companies and high medical costs, replete with tables showing their expenses and eight pages of references. She pointed out that health insurance companies’ stock prices, not to mention industry executive salaries, were both soaring, while the thousands of dollars in premiums she paid protected neither her family’s health nor its finances.
“This is an urgent situation, with dire consequences,” she wrote. “Please take action immediately.” She sent the letter to then-President Barack Obama, President-Elect Donald Trump and 220 members of Congress. Only four responded. Seven months later—and for the second time in four years—the couple filed for bankruptcy.
There are an estimated 5 million government employees in 24 States. Mark Janus is a Illinois State employee that has been forced to pay $600 per year to the public sector union known as AFSCME. In a 5-4 ruling with the opinion written by Justice Alito, no more forced dues are required even when not a member of a union. Of course, Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion stating that ‘its crusade by the majority is turning the First Amendment into a sword’.
AFSCME President Lee Saunders had argued that strong labor unions are needed because they give “the strength in numbers [workers] need to fight for the freedoms they deserve,” including retirement plans and health care.
The repercussions could affect unions nationwide. Union membership nationwide is less than 11 percent of the American workforce, but about a third of government employees are members. More here.
As a condition of employment, a person is forced to pay up to keep their job while they have no voice in lobby efforts, where money is spent or in collective bargaining.
The Janus case started in the 7th circuit and the union fee case has been going on for an estimated 40 years. Janus was represented by Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The basis of the argument is being forced to pay union fees of any sort is coerced political speech. Part of the Alito decision includes:
Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they
find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional
command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be
universally condemned. Suppose, for example, that the
State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document
expressing support for a particular set of positions on
controversial public issues—say, the platform of one of the
major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously
argue that the First Amendment permits this.
Perhaps because such compulsion so plainly violates the
Constitution, most of our free speech cases have involved
restrictions on what can be said, rather than laws compel
ling speech. But measures compelling speech are at least
as threatening.
When speech is compelled, however, additional damage
is done. In that situation, individuals are coerced into
betraying their convictions. Forcing free and independent
individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is
always demeaning, and for this reason, one of our land
mark free speech cases said that a law commanding “in
voluntary affirmation” of objected-to beliefs would require
“even more immediate and urgent grounds” than a law
Open Secrets, a site for money in government published this in part:
2018
$13,352,634
80%
19%
That number above represents union money to legislators where 80% went to Democrats and 19% went to Republicans.
Since 1989, public sector unions have contributed $385 million to federal elections, and Democrats have received the vast majority of that money. In the 2016 election those groups pumped $63.8 million into races, 90 percent of which went to Democrats. So far in the 2018 cycle, $13.4 million has gone toward races, with 80 percent benefiting Democrats.
The top 20 politicians to receive money from public sectors since 1989 have been Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.
In the past 10 years, public sector unions also spent nearly $160 million on lobbying.
Overall, 28 states have passed so-called “right-to-work” laws, which ban requirements for union membership or fees. The states include Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, former union strongholds where average hourly wages and union memberships have slipped since the laws passed.
A dip in union membership would likely bring a significant drop in funding for big union political spenders like AFSCME, which has spent $114 million on federal elections since 1989.
It is not really a new phenomenon, actually there is slavery going on too. Hello, Kamala Harris, you out there? Hey Corey Booker? Wasn’t it Senator Booker that claimed we don’t love enough? Never mind, he was just referring to America. Anyone on the Senate side? What about that famous United Nations Human Rights Council?
We are in a full modern day humanitarian crisis and where is the United Nations? Ever notice that no other countries step up either when it comes to failed nations? The key is preventing failed nations, then there would be no migrant/illegal immigration insurgency.
Algeria expels thousands of migrants in forced Sahara march
ASSAMAKA, Niger (AP) — From this isolated frontier post deep in the sands of the Sahara, the expelled migrants can be seen coming over the horizon by the hundreds. They look like specks in the distance, trudging miserably across some of the world’s most unforgiving terrain in the blistering sun.
They are the ones who made it out alive.
Here in the desert, Algeria has abandoned more than 13,000 people in the past 14 months, including pregnant women and children, stranding them without food or water and forcing them to walk, sometimes at gunpoint, under temperatures of up to 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit).
In Niger, where the majority head, the lucky ones limp across a desolate 15-kilometer (9-mile) no-man’s-land to Assamaka, less a town than a collection of unsteady buildings sinking into drifts of sand. Others, disoriented and dehydrated, wander for days before a U.N. rescue squad can find them. Untold numbers perish along the way; nearly all the more than two dozen survivors interviewed by The Associated Press told of people in their groups who simply could not go on and vanished into the Sahara.
“Women were lying dead, men….. Other people got missing in the desert because they didn’t know the way,” said Janet Kamara, who was pregnant at the time. “Everybody was just on their own.”
Her body still aches from the dead baby she gave birth to during the trek and left behind in the Sahara, buried in a shallow grave in the molten sand. Blood streaked her legs for days afterward, and weeks later, her ankles are still swollen. Now in Arlit, Niger, she is reeling from the time she spent in what she calls “the wilderness,” sleeping in the sand.
Quietly, in a voice almost devoid of feeling, she recalled at least two nights in the open before her group was finally rescued, but said she lost track of time.
“I lost my son, my child,” said Kamara, a Liberian who ran her own home business selling drinks and food in Algeria and was expelled in May.
Another woman in her early twenties, who was expelled at the same time, also went into labor, she said. That baby didn’t make it either.
Algeria’s mass expulsions have picked up since October 2017, as the European Union renewed pressure on North African countries to head off migrants going north to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea or the barrier fences with Spain. These migrants from across sub-Saharan Africa — Mali, the Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and more — are part of the mass migration toward Europe, some fleeing violence, others just hoping to make a living.
A European Union spokesperson said the EU was aware of what Algeria was doing, but that “sovereign countries” can expel migrants as long as they comply with international law. Unlike Niger, Algeria takes none of the EU money intended to help with the migration crisis, although it did receive $111.3 million in aid from Europe between 2014 and 2017.
Algeria provides no figures for the expulsions. But the number of people crossing on foot to Niger has been increasing steadily since the International Organization for Migration started counting in May 2017, when 135 people were dropped at the crossing, to as high as 2,888 in April 2018. In all, according to the IOM, a total of 11,276 men, women and children survived the march.
Map depicts the paths that migrants take after they’ve been expelled from Algeria. (AP Animation/Peter Hamlin)
At least another 2,500 were forced on a similar trek this year through the Sahara into neighboring Mali, with an unknown number succumbing along the way.
The migrants the AP talked to described being rounded up hundreds at a time, crammed into open trucks headed southward for six to eight hours to what is known as Point Zero, then dropped in the desert and pointed in the direction of Niger. They are told to walk, sometimes at gunpoint. In early June, 217 men, women and children were dropped well before reaching Point Zero, fully 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the nearest source of water, according to the IOM.
Within seconds of setting foot on the sand, the heat pierces even the thickest shoes. Sweat dries upon the first touch of air, providing little relief from the beating sun overhead. Each inhalation is like breathing in an oven.
But there is no turning back.
“There were people who couldn’t take it. They sat down and we left them. They were suffering too much,” said Aliou Kande, an 18-year-old from Senegal.
Kande said nearly a dozen people simply gave up, collapsing in the sand. His group of 1,000 got lost and wandered from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m., he said. He never saw the missing people again. The word he returned to, over and over, was “suffering.”
Kande said the Algerian police stole everything he had earned when he was first detained — 40,000 dinars ($340) and a Samsung cell phone.
“They tossed us into the desert, without our telephones, without money. I couldn’t even describe it to you,” he said, still livid at the memory.
Aliou Kande, who has been on the move from his home in Dakar, Senegal, since he was 15, was expelled from Algeria. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
The migrants’ accounts are confirmed by multiple videos collected by the AP over months, which show hundreds of people stumbling away from lines of trucks and buses, spreading wider and wider through the desert. Two migrants told the AP gendarmes fired on the groups to force them to walk, and multiple videos seen by the AP showed armed, uniformed men standing guard near the trucks.
“They bring you to the end of Algeria, to the end in the middle of the desert, and they show you that this is Niger,” said Tamba Dennis, another Liberian who was in Algeria on an expired work visa. “If you can’t bring water, some people die on the road.” He said not everyone in his group made it, but couldn’t say how many fell behind.
Ju Dennis, another Liberian who is not related to Tamba, filmed his deportation with a cell phone he kept hidden on his body. It shows people crammed on the floor of an open truck, vainly trying to shade their bodies from the sun and hide from the gendarmes. He narrated every step of the way in a hushed voice.
Even as he filmed, Ju Dennis knew what he wanted to tell the world what was happening.
“You’re facing deportation in Algeria — there is no mercy,” he said. “I want to expose them now…We are here, and we saw what they did. And we got proof.”
Algerian authorities refused to comment on the allegations raised by the AP. Algeria has denied criticism from the IOM and other organizations that it is committing human rights abuses by abandoning migrants in the desert, calling the allegations a “malicious campaign” intended to inflame neighboring countries.
Along with the migrants who make their way from Algeria to Niger on foot, thousands more Nigerien migrants are expelled directly home in convoys of trucks and buses. That’s because of a 2015 agreement between Niger and Algeria to deal with Nigeriens living illegally in their neighbor to the north.
***
Even then, there are reports of deaths, including one mother whose body was found inside the jammed bus at the end of the 450-kilometer (280-mile) journey from the border. Her two children, both sick with tuberculosis, were taken into custody, according to both the IOM and Ibrahim Diallo, a local journalist and activist.
The number of migrants sent home in convoys — nearly all of them Nigerien — has also shot up, to at least 14,446 since August 2017, compared with 9,290 for all of 2016.
The journey from Algeria to Niger is essentially the reverse of the path many in Africa took north — expecting work in Algeria or Libya or hoping to make it to Europe. They bumped across the desert in Toyota Hilux pickups, 15 to 20 in the flatbed, grasping gnarled sticks for balance and praying the jugs of water they sat upon would last the trip.
The number of migrants going to Algeria may be increasing as an unintended side effect of Europe’s successful blocking of the Libyan crossing, said Camille Le Coz, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Brussels.
But people die going both ways; the Sahara is a swift killer that leaves little evidence behind. The arid heat shrivels bodies, and blowing sand envelops the remains. The IOM has estimated that for every migrant known to have died crossing the Mediterranean, as many as two are lost in the desert — potentially upwards of 30,000 people since 2014.
The vast flow of migrants puts an enormous strain on all the points along the route. The first stop south is Assamaka, the only official border post in the 950-kilometer (590 mile) border Algeria shares with Niger.
Even in Assamaka, there are just two water wells — one that pumps only at night and the other, dating to French colonial times, that gives rusty water. The needs of each wave of expelled migrants overwhelm the village — food, water, medicine.
“They come by the thousands….I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Alhoussan Adouwal, an IOM official who has taken up residence in the village to send out the alert when a new group arrives. He then tries to arrange rescue for those still in the desert. “It’s a catastrophe.”
In Assamaka, the migrants settle into a depression in the dunes behind the border post until the IOM can get enough buses to fetch them. The IOM offers them a choice: Register with IOM to return eventually to their home countries or fend for themselves at the border.
Some decide to take their chances on another trip north, moving to The Dune, an otherworldly open-air market a few kilometers away, where macaroni and gasoline from Algeria are sold out of the back of pickups and donkey carts. From there, they will try again to return to Algeria, in hopes of regaining the lives and jobs they left behind. Trucks are leaving all the time, and they take their fare in Algerian dinars.
Migrants pay to head north into Algeria at the Assamaka border post in northern Niger. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
The rest will leave by bus for the town of Arlit, about 6 hours to the south through soft sand.
In Arlit, a sweltering transit center designed for a few hundred people lately has held upwards of 1,000 at a time for weeks on end.
“Our geographical position is such that today, we are directly in the path of all the expulsions of migrants,” said Arlit Mayor Abdourahman Mawli. Mawli said he had heard of deaths along the way from the migrants and also from the IOM. Others, he said, simply turned right round and tried to return to Algeria.
“So it becomes an endless cycle,” he said wearily.
One man at the center with scars on his hands and arms was so traumatized that he never spoke and didn’t leave. The other migrants assumed he had endured the unspeakable in Algeria, a place where many said they had been robbed and beaten by authorities. Despite knowing nothing about him, they washed and dressed him tenderly in clean clothes, and laid out food so he could eat. He embarked on an endless loop of the yard in the midday sun.
A young migrant who has been expelled from Algeria paces in a transit center in Arlit, Niger. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
With no name, no confirmed nationality and no one to claim him, the man had been in Arlit for more than a month. Nearly all of the rest would continue south mostly off-road to Agadez, the Nigerien city that has been a crossroads for African trade and migration for generations. Ultimately, they will return to their home countries on IOM-sponsored flights.
In Agadez, the IOM camps are also filling up with those expelled from Algeria. Both they and the mayor of Agadez are growing increasingly impatient with their fate.
“We want to keep our little bit of tranquility,” said the mayor, Rhissa Feltou. “Our hospitality is a threat to us.”
Even as these migrants move south, they cross paths with some who are making the trip north through Agadez.
Every Monday evening, dozens of pickup trucks filled with the hopeful pass through a military checkpoint at the edge of the city. They are fully loaded with water and people gripping sticks, their eyes firmly fixed on the future.
The USCIS is authorized to cancel any Certificate of Citizenship or Naturalization in cases where evidence provided to government documents is proven false.
Just 5 days ago: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) assisted in an investigation that led to U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington sentencing Enite Alindor, also known as Odette Dureland, to five months in federal prison. The 55-year-old woman was sentenced for making false statements in a matter relating to naturalization and citizenship and for procuring naturalization as a U.S. citizen. As part of her sentence, the court also entered an order de-naturalizing her, thus revoking her July 2012 naturalization as a U.S. citizen. A federal jury had found her guilty on March 1, 2018.
According to court documents, Alindor, a citizen of Haiti, applied for asylum with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Miami in 1997. After the INS denied that application, the United States Immigration Court ordered her to be removed from the United States. Shortly thereafter, Alindor presented herself to the INS as Odettte Dureland and filed for asylum protection under that new identity. She concealed the fact that she had previously applied for status in the United States as Enite Alindor, and she concealed the fact that she was under a final order for removal from the United States. USCIS personnel, unaware of the Alindor identity and order of removal, approved Dureland for citizenship in July 2012, and she was naturalized as a U.S. citizen under that name in July 2012.
Iyman Faris is set to be released from prison in 2020 after serving 17 years behind bars for terrorism-related charges stemming from a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time he gets out, American authorities hope, he will no longer be able to call the U.S. his home.
The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to try to strip the Pakistan-born Faris of his citizenship, which he obtained in 1999, saying it’s an affront to allow him to continue to be an American citizen.
It’s just the type of case authorities say they expect to pursue more frequently under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“The attorney general and the administration are focused on enforcing all immigration laws, especially when it comes to this pinnacle level of citizenship,” said one Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
AG Sessions is holding true to his mission on immigration.
(AP) — The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.
Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.
Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.
The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.
The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.
In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.
Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.
Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.
Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.
Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.
For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.
Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.
The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.
“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.
Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.
The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.
Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the U.S. government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.
“The people who are going to be targeted by this — they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”
It is long been a question of the point that a foreign hack for espionage and theft is an act of war with emphasis on our naval weapons programs or those of the Army or Air Force.
Cyber warfare is an issue few care about or have control over because data resides outside of our individual control but that is NOT the case when it comes to government. They are accountable for safeguarding networks and data.
Washington – After a hiatus of several years, Chinese state hackers are once again penetrating networks at a range of U.S. corporations in a campaign to steal secrets and leapfrog ahead in a race for global technology supremacy, cyber researchers say.
Companies in fields such as biomedicine, robotics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have all been hit by cyber intrusions originating in China, the researchers say.
“It’s definitely accelerating. The trend is up,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, cofounder and chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, a threat intelligence firm based in Sunnyvale, Calif.,
Chinese state hacking teams linked to the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security are becoming visible on U.S. networks again, although they are using new methods to remain undetected, researchers said.
“In the last few months, we’ve definitely seen … a reemergence of groups that had appeared to have gone dormant for a while,” said Cristiana Brafman Kittner, principal analyst at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm that has tracked China hacking extensively.
The activity comes after a sharp drop in Chinese hacking that began in September 2015, when former President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping reached an agreement to end the hacking theft of commercial secrets. The agreement quelled U.S. anger over its charge that China is the “world’s most active and persistent perpetrator of economic espionage.”
U.S. prosecutors in 2014 indicted five PLA officers for economic espionage for hacking into firms like Westinghouse, U.S. Steel and Alcoa. The 56-page indictment said the five men worked for Unit 61398 of the PLA’s Third Department in Shanghai. The highly detailed complaint entered into details that U.S. officials later said were meant to “name and shame” China for commercial hacking.
Why China’s hackers may be getting back into the game is not readily clear. Renewed trade tensions may be a reason. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose $50 billion of tariffs on China-made products to cut the U.S. trade deficit of $375 billion with China.
Another factor may be the conclusion of a massive reorganization of China’s military, which began in late 2015 and under which various signals intelligence and cyber hacking units “were dissolved and absorbed into this one mega organization, called the Strategic Support Force,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, an expert on East Asia at Recorded Future, a cyber-threat intelligence firm based in Somerville, Mass.
China’s Xi has laid out ambitious goal of catching up with the United States and Europe in 10 key sectors, including aerospace, semiconductors and robotics, under its “Made in China 2025” program.
Moriuchi, who spent 12 years in the U.S. intelligence community, eventually leading the National Security Agency’s East Asia and Pacific cyber threats office, said China’s hackers are broadening tactics, burrowing into telecommunications networks even as they steal secrets to help party leaders achieve “Made in China 2025” goals.
“The sectors that they are going after are things like cloud computing, (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence, biomedicines, civilian space, alternative energy, robotics, rail, agricultural machinery, high-end medical devices,” Moriuchi said.
“There are companies in all of these sectors that have experienced intrusions over the past year from actors who are believed to be China state-sponsored,” she said.
Since early in the past decade, U.S. officials have alleged that Chinese state hackers were tasked with obtaining commercial secrets from Western corporations to help Chinese firms, many of them state-owned, overtake competitors to the global forefront in technology.
In a renewed warning alert for China, a March 22 report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on China’s trade actions said, “Beijing’s cyber espionage against U.S. companies persists and continues to evolve.
So as you read about the stolen data from the Navy by China consider this: Should the NSA get inside the Chinese networks now and infect and or re-steal our intelligence?
(Note: according to the Washington Post item below, the contractor is not named, however ‘Inside Defense’ in September of 2016 published an item that GD Electric Boat was awarded the $105.5 million contract modification moving it into the second phase.)
WaPo: Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare — including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials.
The breaches occurred in January and February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a military organization headquartered in Newport, R.I., that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry.
The officials did not identify the contractor.
Taken were 614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as Sea Dragon, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.
The Washington Post agreed to withhold certain details about the compromised missile project at the request of the Navy, which argued that their release could harm national security.
The data stolen was of a highly sensitive nature despite being housed on the contractor’s unclassified network. The officials said the material, when aggregated, could be considered classified, a fact that raises concerns about the Navy’s ability to oversee contractors tasked with developing cutting-edge weapons.
The breach is part of China’s long-running effort to blunt the U.S. advantage in military technology and become the preeminent power in east Asia. The news comes as the Trump administration is seeking to secure Beijing’s support in persuading North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, even as tensions persist between the United States and China over trade and defense matters.
The Navy is leading the investigation into the breach with the assistance of the FBI, officials said. The FBI declined to comment.
On Friday, the Pentagon inspector general’s office said that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had asked it to review contractor cybersecurity issues arising from The Post’s story.
Navy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said, “There are measures in place that require companies to notify the government when a ‘cyber incident’ has occurred that has actual or potential adverse effects on their networks that contain controlled unclassified information.”
Speaks said “it would be inappropriate to discuss further details at this time.”
Altogether, details on hundreds of mechanical and software systems were compromised — a significant breach in a critical area of warfare that China has identified as a priority, both for building its own capabilities and challenging those of the United States.
“It’s very disturbing,” said former Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.,) who is a member of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. “But it’s a of a piece with what the Chinese have been doing. They are completely focused on getting advanced weapons technology through all kinds of means. That includes stealing secrets from our defense contractors.” Talent had no independent knowledge of the breach.
Undersea priority
The Sea Dragon project is an initiative of a special Pentagon office stood up in 2012 to adapt existing U.S. military technologies to new applications. The Defense Department, citing classification levels, has released little information about Sea Dragon other than to say that it will introduce a “disruptive offensive capability” by “integrating an existing weapon system with an existing Navy platform.” The Pentagon has requested or used more than $300 million for the project since late 2015 and has said it plans to start underwater testing by September.
Military experts fear that China has developed capabilities that could complicate the Navy’s ability to defend U.S. allies in Asia in the event of a conflict with China.
The Chinese are investing in a range of platforms, including quieter submarines armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons and new sensors, Adm. Philip S. Davidson said during his April nomination hearing to lead U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. And what they cannot develop on their own, they steal — often through cyberspace, he said.
“One of the main concerns that we have,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “is cyber and penetration of the dot-com networks, exploiting technology from our defense contractors, in some instances.”
In February, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats testified that most of the detected Chinese cyber-operations against U.S. industry focus on defense contractors or tech firms supporting government networks.
In recent years, the United States has been scrambling to develop new weapons or systems that can counter a Chinese naval buildup that has targeted perceived weaknesses in the U.S. fleet. Key to the American advantage in any faceoff with China on the high seas in Asia will be its submarine fleet.
“U.S. naval forces are going to have a really hard time operating in that area, except for submarines, because the Chinese don’t have a lot of anti-submarine warfare capability,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The idea is that we are going to rely heavily on submarines in the early effort of any conflict with the Chinese.”
China has made closing the gap in undersea warfare one of its three top military priorities, and although the United States still leads the field, China is making a concerted effort to diminish U.S. superiority.
“So anything that degrades our comparative advantage in undersea warfare is of extreme significance if we ever had to execute our war plans for dealing with China,” said James Stavridis, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a retired admiral who served as supreme allied commander at NATO.
The U.S. military let its anti-ship weaponry languish after the Cold War ended because with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Navy no longer faced a peer competitor on the seas. But the rapid modernization and buildup of the Chinese navy in recent years, as well as Russia’s resurgent forces at sea, have prompted the Pentagon to renew heavy investment in technologies to sink enemy warships.
The introduction of a supersonic anti-ship missile on U.S. Navy submarines would make it more difficult for Chinese warships to maneuver. It would also augment a suite of other anti-ship weapons that the U.S. military has been developing in recent years.
Ongoing breaches
For years, Chinese government hackers have siphoned information on the U.S. military, underscoring the challenge the Pentagon faces in safeguarding details of its technological advances. Over the years, the Chinese have snatched designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the advanced Patriot PAC-3 missile system; the Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense; and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship, a small surface vessel designed for near-shore operations, according to previous reports prepared for the Pentagon.
In some cases, suspected Chinese breaches appear to have resulted in copycat technologies, such as the drones China has produced that mimic U.S. unmanned aircraft.
[Chinese cyberspies stole a long list of U.S. weapons designs]
Speaks, the Navy spokesman, said: “We treat the broader issue of cyber intrusion against our contractors very seriously. If such an intrusion were to occur, the appropriate parties would be looking at the specific incident, taking measures to protect current information, and mitigating the impacts that might result from any information that might have been compromised.”
The Pentagon’s Damage Assessment Management Office has conducted an assessment of the damage, according to the U.S. officials. The Office of the Secretary of Defense declined to comment.
Theft of an electronic warfare library, Stavridis said, could give the Chinese “a reasonable idea of what level of knowledge we have about their specific [radar] platforms, electronically and potentially acoustically, and that deeply reduces our level of comfort if we were in a close undersea combat situation with China.”
Signals and sensor data is also valuable in that it presents China with the opportunity to “know when we would know at what distance we would be able to detect their submarines” — again a key factor in undersea battles.
Investigators say the hack was carried out by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a civilian spy agency responsible for counterintelligence, foreign intelligence and domestic political security. The hackers operated out of an MSS division in the province of Guangdong, which houses a major foreign hacking department.
Although the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is far better-known than the MSS when it comes to hacking, the latter’s personnel are more skilled and much better at hiding their tracks, said Peter Mattis, a former analyst in the CIA counterintelligence center. The MSS, he said, hack for all forms of intelligence: foreign, military and commercial.
In September 2015, in a bid to avert economic sanctions, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to President Barack Obama that China would refrain from conducting commercial cyberespionage against the United States. Following the pact, China appeared to have curtailed much, although not all, of its hacking activity against U.S. firms, including by the People’s Liberation Army.
Both China and the United States consider spying on military technology to fall outside the pact. “The distinction we’ve always made is there’s a difference between conducting espionage in order to protect national security and conduct military operations, and the theft of intellectual property for the benefit of companies inside your country,” said Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator under Obama.
