Internal DHS Memo Drafts Plan to Allow Immigration Fraudsters to Keep Citizenship

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 Terry McAuliffe [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. Washington Times.