My colleague Jessica Vaughan got hold of a letter that Sen. Charles Grassley sent to DHS last week inquiring about reports that career officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are being pressured to approve immigration applications regardless of fraud concerns. Some of the incidents Grassley writes about:
During a recent visit to the CSC [California Service Center], Director Mayorkas [of USCIS] became “visibly agitated” when advised that the employees were interested in learning more about fraud detection efforts. Mayorkas asked, “Why would you be focusing on that instead of approvals.”
What? You think he’d at least pretend to be concerned about fraud. And this:
Following a presentation by Director Mayorkas at a management conference in February, Deputy Chief Counsel Doug Craig said that Mayorkas had directed him to “get to yes.” At the same event, Chief Counsel Roxana Bacon said that Mayorkas says that all the time and that he had said it recently at a town hall meeting.
“Get to yes” — like we’re selling used cars instead of carefully vetting foreign applicants for residence in the United States. (Roxanna Bacon, by the way, is the one who wrote the infamous administrative-amnesty memo.)
This item from Grassley’s letter might be my favorite:
At a conference in Landsdowne, Virginia, Director Mayorkas said that there are some “managers with black spots on their hearts” who can’t see their way to grant benefits. He said, “I am dealing with some of these managers.”
Apparently one of the people with “black spots on their hearts” was the USCIS chief of staff in Miami, who became a whistleblower and has paid a price for it. According to the intrepid Jerry Seper of the Washington Times:
The Office of Special Counsel is investigating the involuntary transfer of a top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who reported suspected “gross negligence and mishandling” of more than 600 certificates of citizenship and naturalization. …
Maria Aran, the immigration service’s chief of staff in Miami, had been reassigned as a supervisory adjudications officer in Tampa, Fla., after reporting that hundreds of certificates of citizenship and naturalization had been voided without due cause, were unaccounted for, had not been verified as issued, were issued as duplicates, or were routinely left unsecured.
But who cares about a little gross negligence and mishandling of U.S. citizenship certificates? It’s not like anyone would lie, cheat, or steal to enter or remain in the United States.