THE BORDER REPORT

One year. By the time it is all said and done, the new Special Agent in Charge of ICE in Arizona put in almost exactly one year as the top immigration boss in this state. Alonzo Peña, who came to our beleaguered state to quell Gov. Janet Napolitano's contrived anger over the last SAC's failure to do anything about illegal immigration in Phoenix, will be stepping down in January.

The announcement was quietly made among ICE offices recently. I expect the agency will make an official announcement in the next few weeks.

This is, I believe, the sixth agency head ICE has placed in Arizona since 2003. We just can't seem to keep one in place for very long.

The last one, Roberto Medina, became the political target of Napolitano and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, both of whom spent their time complaining that Medina wasn't responding to illegal immigrants picked up by state and county law enforcement.

The first bureau chief ICE brought in, Tom DeRouchey, ended up killing himself on the way to a press conference in Tucson in 2004. He always seemed the most accessible of the ICE jefes; picking up his cellphone and answering questions frankly.

Still another, ICE resident agent in charge of the Sells office, Robert Gaddison, was arrested on domestic assault charges in summer 2006. He was quietly transferred back to Washington, D.C., after that incident. As far as I know, he remains there today.

Peña was different from Medina, he always carried the reputation of a peacemaker, even when he headed the San Antonio office before coming to Phoenix.

It also helped that he was former U.S. Customs Service, an agency seen as the upper echelons of border enforcement among its own officers.

Still, Peña was unable to staunch the depletion of his ranks. By last June, five high level ICE officials in Nogales and Tucson had stepped down, or rather, over. They all transferred to Customs and Border Protection, the agency charged with port inspections and Border Patrol. Then two more jumped ship.

ICE has had tremendous problems since its inception. Sometimes it's an identity crisis as its leaders resist becoming the deportation arm for Border Patrol. Other times it's done its job too well; when ICE first began the agency had almost as many foreign bureaus and open terror cases as FBI. You can imagine how that went over.

Nowadays there is a lot of fighting with DEA; I'm still not clear what the fight is.

Peña should have stayed awhile longer. His agents actually liked him and he was bringing back some badly-needed credibility to ICE in Arizona. Now the agency has two months to scramble around and find a replacement. Hopefully, it'll be an adequate replacement.