According to an internal memo exclusively obtained by the Washington Times, the Department of Homeland Security has begun circulating a plan to allow naturalized "citizens" who garnered that title through lies and fraud - to keep their citizenship status!
The draft memo, viewed by The Washington Times (W.T.), was written by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and sent to the head of the three immigration agencies that the Department encompasses - Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The W.T. reports that Mayorkas's reasoning for letting citizens keep their fraudulent status is that the denaturalization process may diminish the number of immigrants applying for citizenship because they may worry about losing the highly sought-after status in the future because the committed fraud in order to obtain it. The memo stated:
Naturalized citizens deserve finality and security in their rights as citizens. Department policies should not cause a chilling effect or barriers for lawful permanent residents seeking to naturalize.
Mayorkas does not even acknowledge the issue at hand: naturalized citizens who lied or provided fraudulent information to become naturalized - instead of following the confines of U.S. immigration law, which provides a legal process to revoke fraudulent citizenship, Mayorkas appears to be preparing to reward fraudsters, liars, and other immigration scofflaws.
However, this comes as no surprise given the Secretary's history - what some would call fraud. In 2015, Mayorkas, then under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was the subject of a scathing inspector general report that found he had unduly used his appointed position to help grant EB-5 visas to foreign investors with connections to top Democrats.
The inspector general found that Alejandro Mayorkas acted "outside the normal adjudicatory process... In ways that benefited the stakeholders." The I.G. report concluded that the cases would have been "decided differently" if not for Mayorkas's interference.
The I.G. report highlighted three individual EB-5 cases where Mayorkas unduly intervened. In the first, Mr. Mayorkas "pressured staff" to expedite the review of an investment at the then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's request. In the second, Mayorkas performed an "unprecedented" intervention to help a company chaired by former DNC Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe [Democrat candidate for Governor of Virginia] and Tony Rodham, the late brother of Hillary Clinton. In the third and most egregious, Mayorkas ordered USCIS to reverse a decision to deny EB-5 funding for Sony after receiving communications from Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
In the memo obtained by the W.T., Mayorkas says that the Department should limit its "denaturalization" cases just to "national security threats," "major felons," and only cases of fraud "with aggravating factors." Denaturalization is part of Federal law; it typically stems from criminal or civil cases where the alien was determined to have lied or otherwise committed fraud to obtain U.S. citizenship, were perpetrators of other crimes, or were granted the status by an error on the part of the government.
Director of Regulatory Affairs and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies and former policy chief at USCIS, Robert Law, argued that if this memo becomes practice at DHS:
No one will be pursuing civil denaturalization cases. By this policy, Mayorkas is saying that citizenship really is meaningless and that immigration fraud is rewarded.
The W.T. adds: "Homeland Security didn't respond to messages seeking comment this week. The undated memo is marked 'DRAFT' and 'FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.'"
Another inspector general report, this time in 2016, identified hundreds of naturalized "citizens" who had been deported from the United States but illegally snuck back across the border and eventually acquired citizenship under fraudulent identities.
According to the report, USCIS did not highlight or flag the cases because the fingerprint cards "were in paper form and weren't being checked," the W.T. reports. However, after the I.G. report, USCIS conducted a deeper review and found hundreds of similar cases. The number grew so substantially that in 2018 a special task force was created in L.A., California. The task force director explained at the time that he expected to uncover "potentially a few thousand cases."
The number of fraud cases uncovered continued to climb so much that in 2020, the Department of Justice announced an entirely new section of the Department to denaturalize cases where aliens lied to, mislead, or submitted otherwise fraudulent information to the Federal government to acquire citizenship.
The Washington Times reached out to USCIS for comment about the status of the task force but received no response.
For the complete story, please visit the Washington Times.
