The organization the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council is led by its president Kenneth Palinkas. He said the union never was approached by the bipartisan lawmakers who crafted the sweeping immigration reforms that are now being considered by Congress.

Palinkas claims the lawmakers drafted the legislation with special interests’ in mind and does not address many of the most serious immigration concerns the USCIS Council currently has about the system.

The union members are officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is responsible for processing different visas and other paperwork regarding immigration.

The union leader said the legislation does not address pressures he claims are placed upon the adjudication officers to rubber stamp the application rather than conducting case reviews for each. He also said more had to be done to address the overstays on student visas.

Earlier in May, the National ICE Council, a union representing over 7,000 agents sent Congress a letter criticizing the new proposed immigration reform legislation saying they would not support it. Three major unions represent the immigration agents and officers in the country.

President Obama remains optimistic that the strategy in the Senate using the bipartisan approach is the best.

The Group of Eight Senators is scheduled to hit the floor in the Senate in June. In the House, a bipartisan group this week agreed on a large bill in principle that will be outlined for all sometime in June.

However, there are many major hurdles to pass before the final immigration reform reaches the desk of President Barack Obama. The biggest hurdle of them all is the House, which is controlled by the GOP.

At this point, the bill in the Senate has a zero chance of reaching the floor of the House. Senators key in the making of the Senate bill John McCain a Republican from Arizona and Chuck Schumer a Democrat from New York, both stressed their bill would have to have close to 70 votes in the Senate to put pressure on the House. However, GOP negotiators in the House have flatly said the vote in the Senate does not matter at all, regardless of what the margin is.

Republican Rep. John Carter from Texas said he does not think the legislation will pass in the House. He said he thought the bill the House was finalizing would have a better chance of being approved in the House, than the Senate legislation would. He called the Senate bill too broad and full of holes.

The GOP says the path to citizenship in the Senate bill is too short, the guest worker program is too generous for labor unions and the security measures at the border are not strong enough.

The Office of the Inspector General released a summary of its findings that found many deficiencies and vulnerability in national security arising from how the witness protection program was managed.

The program, known by the letters WITSEC, had been a way to shield witnesses in cases of high profile notably the World Trade Center attack of 1993, the Oklahoma City bomb attack of 1995 and the attacks on U.S. embassies in 1998 in East Africa.

However, the report from the OIG found that the office of the U.S. Marshals Service failed to locate two people with ties to known terror groups that were enrolled in WITSEC.

In July of 2012, the Marshals Service stated it could not locate two former participants in WITSEC identified as suspected or known terrorists, the OIG report revealed.

The report added that its investigators had concluded that one of the individuals was living outside the U.S., while the second individual was thought to be living outside the U.S.

The OIG warned that the Department of Justice failed to pass along information about the new identities of the participants in the program, leaving them the ability to fly commercial flights within the U.S. despite their terrorist background.

The report continued by saying the Department of Justice could not say definitively the number of suspected or known terrorists who had been admitted to the WITSEC program.

In the report, three Council on Foreign Relations researchers also explained that the falloff in the amount of illegal immigration is just partly the result of border security being tougher.

However, two-thirds of the reason for the drop is due to economic changes taking place in both the U.S. and Mexico that have made the migration north for Mexicans less attractive than before.

The authors wrote it was surprising how little is known regarding the actual border security and how small an effort the current administration and Washington lawmakers have made in attempting to make the security stronger, especially at a time when the new immigration bill depends upon improved border security.

Regardless of the efforts of the Border Patrol, some immigrants are going to make it into the U.S. from Mexico unseen. However, the report shows that border security has increased in the past 10 years and the likelihood of some crossing illegally and being caught is between 50% and 60%, which is an increase from 2000, when it was between 30% and 45%.

The Senate’s Judiciary Committee started last week working through the immigration bill that is 867 pages in length. They already closed out the section on border security after making just minor changes.

The committee shot down the repeated efforts of Republicans to stiffen security measures at the border or to insist on the borders being secure prior to giving legal status to current undocumented immigrants.

Those two measures were defeated 12-6 with all 10 Democrats and 2 Republicans voting in opposition.

Issa also said that there are others, if they can overcome the fear of retaliation by superiors, who could also testify.

Issa named just three witnesses scheduled for Wednesday’s hearing. The hearing, promised Issa, will highlight the discrepancies between White House administration and others that have knowledge about the action the U.S. took part in before, during and just after the attack in Benghazi.

The White House has been attempting to put the ongoing scrutiny to rest. President Obama has denied that whistle blowers have been discouraged to come forward.

The May 8 witnesses will include the State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism Mark Thompson; Eric Nordstrom a security officer with the State Department; and Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of the Libya mission.

Numerous other people have contacted the committee. These people have direct knowledge of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, but Issa said they are not prepared to come forward because they fear their employers could retaliate against them

Christopher Stephens, the Ambassador to Libya from the U.S. and three others from the U.S. died on the September 2011 attacks on the diplomatic mission of the U.S. in Benghazi.

At first, the President said the attack was caused by a video on Internet that was anti-Muslim. However, later on, Obama had to back away from that opinion.

Obama, at a press conference this week, said his priority since the terrorist attack in Iraq has been to determine what took place and bring to Justice the perpetrators.

The strike was the second this year by Israel in Syria and the latest in its long running attempt to disrupt the quest by Hezbollah to increase its arsenal in order to build up an arsenal that is able to defend against the air force of Israel and spread its destruction inside the country.

The latest strike comes as officials in the U.S. are considering their response to intelligence indications that the regime in Syria might have used some of its arsenal of chemical weapons against rebels in the ongoing civil war.

President Obama described Syria’s use of such weapons as crossing the red line and the White House administration is now weighing what options it has, including military action.

Benjamin Netanyahu the Prime Minister of Israel repeatedly warned over the last few weeks that Israel was prepared to take its own military action if Syria used chemical weapons or other types of arms that might reach Hezbollah and throw out the balance of power.

Officials in Israel said the air attack took place early Friday and had been aimed at sophisticated weapons, but not ones that were chemical in nature. One Israeli official said it had targeted a shipment of long-range ground-to-ground missiles.

They would not say where they had attacked or if the air force had carried it out from airspace in Lebanon or Syria.

Schumer said the FBI has been very good in doing their job, and until Boston, it was not an accident that no successful terrorist events had taken place in the U.S. Schumer added that the FBI was good at tracking and listening, but something has happened that needs to be figured out.

Schumer plans to pursue an answer to his questions, as a member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Paul Bresson a spokesman for the FBI said it had briefed Congress and would continue to brief Washington lawmakers as is necessary.

In 2011, authorities in Russia recorded a telephone conversation between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother in which he discussed vaguely jihad with her.

Another conversation was recorded of his mother talking to a person in southern Russia who was being investigated by the FBI on an unrelated matter said FBI officials.

Either of the two conversations, if the FBI had known, could have been sufficient to start a thorough investigation of the whole Tsarnaev family. However, authorities in Russia told the FBI just the concerns they had that Tamerlan as well as his mother were extremists. Because the FBI did not receive any other information, a limited inquiry was completed and the case was closed in the middle of 2011.

Peter King a Republican from New York said a complete investigation by the FBI would have been done if Russia had told the FBI about the pair’s radicalization.

Following the bombings last week, in which there were three deaths and close to 300 injured, a small contingent of conservative senators, which includes Chuck Grassley the Republican senator from Iowa and Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, have questioned if the Senate should proceed with a comprehensive reform for immigration since the alleged bombers had been born on foreign soil.

These new calls for further review threaten to stop the longstanding, delicate bipartisan negotiations for the overhaul of the immigration system in the country. Democrats were quick to decry the Republican efforts to link the bombings with immigration reform.

Democrat Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont said that opponents of the immigration reform started exploiting the Boston Marathon and request there be restraint regarding that.

Nevertheless, Grassley continued to say at a second hearing over immigration that the Boston Marathon bombing should be considered a cautionary tale.

Grassley said the events in Boston should serve everyone as reminders that the immigration system in the U.S. is related directly to our national security matters and sovereignty.

The two suspects in the bombings, one who was killed and his younger brother who is recovering in a Boston Hospital, emigrated in the early 2000s from Russia. Following the bombings, questions have arisen about if the brothers, who are of Chechen descent but appear not to have ever lived in Chechnya, were ever affiliated with Chechens who are radicals.

On Friday, federal authorities announced that two brothers were suspected in the Boston bombings. The brothers are originally from Chechnya and came to the U.S. as refugees about a decade ago. The two had been living in Kyrgyzstan a republic in Central Asia and were not allowed to resettle in their war torn homeland.

The family was given visas for the U.S. under the provisions of protecting migrants from ethnic, religious or political persecution.

These revelations caused conservative critics of the immigration reform to cast a cloud of doubt over the sweeping reform bill of 844 pages.

On Friday, during a Judiciary Committee hearing, Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa questioned whether lawmakers were moving forward too quickly on the proposal.

Conservative radio hosts and bloggers made arguments of a similar nature after the authorities identified the two suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The older brother Tamerlan was killed in a gunfight early Friday morning and his brother was apprehended by police Friday evening.

One conservative radio talk show host said the Senate’s new amnesty plan was now dead on arrival. However, a number of Republican senators in support of the reform proposal acted quickly to rebut their conservative opponents.

The battle for this immigration reform proposal has just begun and will be debated for months to come on Capitol Hill.

On Tuesday afternoon, President Barack Obama made his first comments on the immigration proposal calling it a clear work of compromise. He cautioned that not everyone involved would get all they wanted included in the legislation and that included himself.

Following a briefing by two of the eight senators who authored the proposal, Obama said the contents were for the most part consistent with his principles for a comprehensive reform bill for immigration. The two senators who briefed the president were Republican John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Charles Schumer of New York.

The new proposal, said the president, would strengthen the U.S. borders with both Canada and Mexico and hold employers of immigrants more accountable if undocumented immigrants are hired knowingly. Obama also commented that the proposal provided the already 11 million undocumented immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship.

Both senators told reporters they were happy with the proposal since for the most part the President was supportive, even though Obama did have a reservation or two. The senators said this was just the beginning of the long process to bring immigration reform to the U.S. The senators commented that how there will be hearings on Capitol Hill, new amendments added to the proposal and debates held on the floor in the Senate.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said change was needed in the proposal since it excludes a number of undocumented immigrants from a path to citizenship due to minor crimes or because they cannot pay large fines.