Katrina-ization of terror: A report released on Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a thinktank based at Syracuse University in New York, details the types of immigration cases filed by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2004. The results are startling:

[Out] of [814,073] cases filed in federal courts by the Department of Homeland Security since 2004, only 12 were related to terrorism. Another 112 cases were filed using national security charges…

[The] report found that 86.5 percent of all cases involved some sort of immigration violation, such as entering the United States without inspection, not having a valid immigrant visa or overstaying a student visa.

If this is true, DHS officials and the Bush administration have been lying to Congress and the public about what DHS has been up to:

[TRAC co-director David Burnham] said the agency continually sells itself as a central player in the war on terrorism.

“Despite the repeated statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters,” concluded the report.

According to calculations by another source, the 12 terror cases filed since 2004 show that only 0.0015 percent of DHS cases have been terror-related. Is it really the best use of precious resources to have routine immigration cases being filed by DHS?

This smacks of the sort of gross incompetence (and lying about it) we have come to expect from this administration, but much more alarming is the fact that DHS turned up missing in the investigations that thwarted a pair of high-profile terror attacks in this country over the past few weeks. The department’s glaring absence from these investigations appears to stem from the Bush administration’s other persistent bad habit: politicization.

In April, a rightwing terrorist was caught before he blew up a woman’s health clinic in Texas. Last week, a planned bomb attack on ultra-rightwing protesters at the funeral of Republican political agitator Rev. Jerry Falwell was uncovered and a militant rightwing student at Falwell’s Christian college was arrested. Both cases were handled primarily by local and state law enforcement, with minor assists by non-DHS feds.

What has politics got to do with DHS being AWOL in these investigations? It is in the interest of the Bush adminstration, whose base is dominated by Christian extremists, not to give the public the opportunity to connect the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists Bush uses as his bogeymen — and whom DHS was ostensibly set up to fight — with the domestic Christian fundamentalist terrorists in our midst, even though both Islamicists and Christianists have the same ultimate goal: the establishment of theocratic states.

In fact, the only high-profile arrest that has involved DHS to date was the capture last August in Thailand of John Mark Karr, the emotionally disturbed man who falsely claimed to have killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. DNA tests later excluded Karr as a suspect in the murder.

Capturing child predators is important work, but it’s hard to see how it falls under the purview of the agency tasked with protecting U.S. terrority from terror attacks.

It isn’t surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would also play politics with homeland security. After all, Bush appointed a prime political hack, Michael Chertoff — whose previous high-profile gig was as a Clinton-hating talking head in the 1990s — as its cabnet-level leader. So, unfortunately, it won’t be any less surprising if we find out the hard way that no one in the administration gave any thought to the downside of politicizing DHS.

If the unthinkable were to happen, and terrorists, foreign or domestic, successfully attacked the homeland while DHS was busy filing routine immigration cases or tracking pedophiles overseas, this situation could be transformed in an instant from a typical bureaucratic boondoggle into a tragedy of historic proportions.