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Even as Donald Trump has turned the agencies of D.H.S. into something of a roving personal police force, his Administration has prosecuted a quieter but no less ambitious assault on legal immigration. Green cards and visas for people from dozens of countries have been frozen indefinitely, and the Administration has cancelled naturalization ceremonies. Immigrants and asylum seekers in the middle of the application process have been detained during routine interviews. Last April, Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who had a green card, was arrested during his citizenship interview, for which he’d waited a decade. “Is this a trap?” he recalled thinking, after U.S.C.I.S. called him in for an appointment; masked ICE agents took him away just after he’d signed the Pledge of Allegiance. The wife of a green-card applicant who was arrested in Salt Lake City said, “We’ve tried to do everything the right way. We have, and [now] he’s not here.”
In July, leadership at U.S.C.I.S. announced that the agency’s staff would soon have the power to make arrests and carry guns. New job postings no longer emphasized the provision of government services, but instead began advertising positions called Homeland Defenders, with responsibilities such as “defend your culture.” “It’s astonishing how swiftly the agency has shifted,” the former staffer told me. After Trump leaves office, another said, “there’s going to be some kind of bureaucratic husk called U.S.C.I.S., but that entity won’t have the ability to adjudicate requests for immigration benefits.”
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By law, a refugee has to wait a year before applying for a green card that confers permanent residency. The idea behind the operation was seemingly to impose a final roadblock; once someone has permanent residency it becomes much more difficult for the government to take it away. Around the time that the new operation was announced, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, ordered U.S.C.I.S. officials to draft a rule that would allow the Administration to cancel someone’s refugee status without providing the person with advance notice or an opportunity to respond. The agency’s director, Joe Edlow, was dispatched to Minnesota along with a deputy; almost three dozen other officers were being sent to the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, according to an internal agency document, to “conduct visits on employment-based immigration benefits” and “applications submitted by foreign students.”
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Last year, approximately three hundred and fifty-two thousand civil servants left their jobs, fulfilling one of the Administration’s stated goals of dismantling the government bureaucracy and demoralizing the federal workforce. Roughly eighteen hundred of those employees were at U.S.C.I.S. “Re-engineering” the staff at the agency, five former officials recently wrote in a recent Newsweek op-ed, served “both as a goal in itself and as a means of reshaping the legal immigration system.”
It began, last February, with a seemingly mundane change. Since the pandemic, a large share of U.S.C.I.S. officials had been performing some configuration of hybrid or remote work. Within days of the President’s Inauguration, the agency’s staffers received the first of a series of directives instructing them to return to the office. But there was no accompanying plan to insure that everyone would have a place to work. {snip}
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In the past, the early months of a new Administration had been a period of transition at U.S.C.I.S. while personnel waited for a new director to be sworn in. This time, a rash of policies began immediately. Some of the activity was a consequence of the President signing a series of executive orders on the first day of his term to halt the refugee-resettlement program and suspend asylum at the southern border. Rob Law, a senior counsellor at the department, was closely aligned with Miller, who’d openly clashed with high-ranking U.S.C.I.S. personnel during Trump’s first term. “Miller’s turning U.S.C.I.S. into an enforcement arm is making it seem like the reason we have an immigration system is to keep people out,” a former senior agency official told me.
Several policy priorities followed from Miller’s long-standing fixations, such as denying immigrants work authorization while their legal cases were pending and penalizing applicants who used public benefits. Pierce, whose portfolio included work on refugee and asylum services, was told that her office, by virtue of specializing in humanitarian relief, was undermining the President’s agenda. “I was asked to find data showing fraud in the asylum system—that most asylum cases are fraudulent or frivolous and that that’s why we shouldn’t be granting work authorization.” When her research contradicted the premise, she was chastised for failing to come up with enough evidence. “The referral and denial numbers for fraud alone were exceedingly low,” Pierce said. “This raised a significant red flag for the Office of Chief Counsel, since the entire premise of the regulatory changes was that fraud was high.” (An agency spokesperson said, “Immigration fraud represents an existential threat to our nation.”)
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A leaked field-office memo provided “instructions” for how U.S.C.I.S. officers should coordinate with ICE to entrap people. “Please provide an update approximately thirty minutes before the anticipated end of the interview,” it read. “ICE will be walked into your office, once you state that you are 5 minutes from concluding the interview.”
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At U.S.C.I.S., the targeting of specific nationalities wasn’t a matter of mere rhetoric but actual policy. Earlier this year, the Administration announced that it was indefinitely pausing green-card applications for people from seventy-five countries. By law, there are roughly two hundred and twenty-six thousand green cards issued each year to the adult children and siblings of current citizens as well as spouses and minor children of permanent residents; if these green cards aren’t used, they are reassigned to a different branch of the system tied to employment-based benefits. “The administration has always hated family-based immigration,” the former senior U.S.C.I.S. official told me. “Most employment-based green cards go to people who are already here.” It remains to be seen whether U.S.C.I.S. will apply the unused green cards to the employment side of the system this year. If it doesn’t, the green cards will be lost permanently. Whittling away the core functions of the agency has starved U.S.C.I.S. of the bureaucratic capacity it once had. “If they want, they can just be ‘unprepared to process’ ” the leftover green cards, the official said.
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The post How Legal Immigration Became a Deportation Trap appeared first on American Renaissance.
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