If “President-elect” Joe Biden gets his way, the next secretary of the Homeland Security Department will be a leftist refugee who helped illegal aliens escape into the country and abetted immigration fraud.
Alejandro Mayorkas, a 61-year-old Cuban, will run the agency responsible for border security, a frightening thought given his record during the Obama administration.
In the past, as The New American has reported, he has enthusiastically promoted illegal immigration and forbidden border agents to stop fraud in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Mayorkas conceived that unconstitutional amnesty.
But Tod Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies recently revealed something worse. Mayorkas aided and abetted asylum fraud as head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Left-wing Ideologue
Bensman’s report explains why Mayorkas is worrisome. Despite the GOP’s enthusiasm for importing cheap labor, not a single Republican voted to confirm him in 2013 when Obama proposed him for deputy secretary.
Reasons abound, including this:
Mayorkas was the architect of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that legalized some 700,000 mostly adult “dreamers” who arrived in the United States illegally as minors. Back in civilian life, where he associated with pro-immigration groups like the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which celebrated the nomination announcement, Mayorkas continued to speak out in support of granting amnesty to dreamers.
And here’s another: as USCIS chief, Mayorkas undermined immigration enforcement, Bensman reported.
In 2010, a letter from Senator Charles Grassley to DHS headmistress Janet Napolitano complained that Mayorkas, as head of USCIS, pressured employees to “squeeze out higher volumes of immigration application approvals for the agency’s ‘customers,’ while undermining fraud and ineligibility detection efforts.”
Grassley wasn’t happy with Napolitano’s answer, and so his office interviewed employees and studied documents, then sent her their findings:
201014.cis.org Sen Grassley LetterMayorkas had become “visibly agitated” during a visit to USCIS’s California offices when told employees there wanted to root out fraud. “Why would you be focusing on that instead of approvals?” he reputedly demanded. A witness said “his message was offensive to a lot of officers who are trained to detect fraud.”
At a management conference, Mayorkas directed top officials to find ways always to “get to yes” regarding “customer” immigrants who filed visa applications. He told his subordinates to “look at petitions from the perspective of the customer” and that the goal was “zero complaints,” implying that approvals were the means to that end.
Mayorkas also ignored, which means he abetted, asylum fraud, Bensman reported.
In 2015, the Government Accountability Office found that “half of the eight USCIS field divisions had referred either one fraud case to U.S. attorney’s offices from 2010 to 2014 or none at all.” One office didn’t report a single fraud case in two years; another reported zero in five years.
Inspector General
Such was Mayorkas’ open defiance of immigration law that the DHS inspector general investigated his “interference in the already fraud-riddled and abused EB-5 visa program by which wealthy foreigners can essentially achieve U.S. residency and eventual citizenship if they invest $500,000 (raised since his tenure to $900,000) in the U.S.”
To see report, go here.
Continued Bensman:
The OIG case launched in 2012 on the strength of “an extraordinary number of DHS employees” who came forward to report that Mayorkas was providing “special access and special favors” to a handful of EB-5 visa applicants who were wealthy foreign national associates of powerful U.S. Democratic figures and office-holders doing the asking.
Many of the investors seeking EB-5 visas were Chinese nationals hoping to sink millions into:
Film projects with connections to former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, the mayor of Los Angeles, and Hollywood businessmen in late 2011.
A hotel and casino project in Las Vegas that was being pushed by U.S. Democratic Sen. Harry Reid in 2013 on behalf of some law clients of the senator’s son, Rory.
An industrial investment fund’s proposed hybrid vehicle factory in Virginia promoted by former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham, from 2011 through 2013.
The OIG concluded that in these three cases Mayorkas “exerted improper influence in the normal processing and adjudication” of the visas, “inserted himself in unprecedented ways” in the adjudication process, and “intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that clearly benefited the stakeholders.
“In each of these three instances, but for Mr. Mayorkas’s intervention,” the report summary noted, “the matter would have been decided differently.”
None of the visa applicants would ever consent to OIG interviews, nor were the investigators ever able to find Mayorkas’s emails and internal communications.
There’s more. But you get the idea.
Earlier Reports
In 2016, TNA reported that the Obama administration released illegals into the country … still wet from crossing the Rio Grande. And Mayorkas told agents that placing the illegals in deportation proceedings was senseless because Obama would not deport them. In 2012, TNA reported Grassley’s concern that Mayorkas had no intention to investigate asylum fraud.
But Mayorkas’ subversion was predictable.
“I’m a political refugee,” he said at an immigration law conference at Georgetown University in 2016.
I was born in Cuba and my parents brought my sister and me to this country to flee the Communist takeover of Cuba … and my identity as a political refugee was extraordinarily important to my upbringing, and my parents were very focused on instilling in me a deep sense of what it means and what it meant to be a refugee, to be an individual displaced from one’s home and the country in which one’s parents dreamed of raising their children.
