Alejandro Mayorkas, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), helped with a corporate merger that is leaving thousands of Americans laid off.
In 2018, multinational telecommunication conglomerates T-Mobile and Sprint sought approval from the federal government to merge in a $23 billion deal. The merger, union representatives warned, would result in more than 30,000 Americans losing their jobs and continue monopolistic trends of concentrated corporate power.
A year later, the Trump administration via the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. As a corporate lawyer with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, Mayorkas was part of a team to help implement the merger by April 1, 2020.
“WilmerHale called upon the deep experience of its lawyers knowledgeable in antitrust, congressional matters, trials, state attorneys general investigations, and federal regulatory agencies to help bring the merger to fruition,” a statement from the firm reads after the merger was completed in April 2020, citing Mayorkas’ involvement.
As union representatives expected, the merger is resulting in layoffs for Americans. When the merger was finalized with Mayorkas’s help, T-Mobile CEO John Legere claimed it would be “jobs positive from Day One and every day thereafter.”
Just three months after the merger’s finalization, though, it was projected that about 1,200 to 2,000 retail locations would be closed across the United States, resulting in at least 6,000 U.S. jobs. Likewise, about 4,500 Americans are losing their jobs at Sprint’s headquarters in Kansas and T-Mobile’s headquarters in Washington.
That same month, T-Mobile executives told 400 American workers over a conference call that they would be losing their jobs, according to audio of the call obtained by TechCrunch.
Mayorkas’s involvement with the merger is the latest in his resumé to come to light following the release of financial disclosure reports. Mayorkas also worked as a corporate attorney representing the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Cisco Systems, Intuit, and the Wall Street firm Blackstone.
Previously, Mayorkas served as deputy secretary at DHS under the Obama administration, where the Inspector General (IG) at the time unveiled that he had improperly helped secure EB-5 visas for well-connected wealthy foreign nationals.
In 2015, the IG noted that Mayorkas had been reported by multiple staffers at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency for intervening in three specific EB-5 visa cases where foreign investors had been denied visas. In each of the cases, Mayorkas intervened on behalf of the foreign investors in order to appeal the decisions and secure them visas.
Likewise, a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that Mayorkas ignored asylum fraud while heading USCIS, where oftentimes no asylum fraud cases were referred to the U.S. attorney’s office for years.
Biden is now seeking a fast-track Senate approval process for Mayorkas.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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