Left Freaks Out at Obama-Era Plan to Fix Immigration Fraud: ‘Sadism, Racism, Brutality’

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Neil Munro

Pro-amnesty activists are claiming sadism, racism, and brutality as President Donald Trump’s immigration agency implements an anti-fraud plan drafted under former President Barack Obama.

The 2016 anti-fraud plan uses recently computerized fingerprints to check if migrants created false identities to get green cards or citizenship.

Since then, a task force at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has identified roughly 3,000 suspected cases of fraud in the huge immigrant population of roughly 20 million immigrants accepted since the 1990s.

“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” L. Francis Cissna, the director of USCIS, told the Associated Press in early June 2018. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

The plan was launched by a September 2016 report by an Obama-appointed Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security. The report revealed that:

U.S. citizenship [was given] to at least 858 individuals ordered deported or removed under another identity when, during the naturalization process, their digital fingerprint records were not available …

To date, and with assistance from [Office of Operations Coordination ] and USCIS, ICE has identified and prioritized 120 individuals to refer to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution and denaturalization …

DHS has established a team to review the records of the 858 aliens with final deportation orders who were naturalized under a different identity …

As of November 2015, [the Office of Operations Coordination ] had identified 953 more individuals who had final deportation orders under another identity and had been naturalized; some of these individuals were from special interest countries or neighboring countries with high rates of fraud.

Since 2017, the Justice Department has moved to strip citizenship from an al Qaeda operative, a fake family of diversity-lottery winners, a child-molester and a migrant who defrauded other migrants.

The alarm was set off on June 18 by Masha Gessen, an open-borders writer, and advocate at the New Yorker, and is now being quickly spread by pro-migration lawyers, Obama’s former deputies, political advocates, and open-borders activists.

She  first admitted that the anti-fraud effort emerged from the Obama administration:

Like many of the Trump Administration’s sadistic immigration innovations, the new task force doesn’t reflect a change in the law. In fact, like a number of practices, including mass deportations, it builds on the legacy of the Obama Administration, which set in motion the process of reëxamining old naturalization files …

But Gessen then argues that Trump’s implementation of the Obama’s policy is dangerous:

It’s the apparent underlying premise that makes this new effort so troublesome: the idea that America is under attack by malevolent immigrants who cause dangerous harm by finding ways to live here …

The conceit of naturalization is that it makes an immigrant not only equal to natural-born citizens but indistinguishable from them. So denaturalization, much like the process of stripping a natural-born American of citizenship, has been an extraordinary procedure reserved for very serious cases, mostly those of war criminals …

Indeed, the creation of the task force itself is undoing the naturalization of the more than twenty million naturalized citizens in the American population by taking away their assumption of permanence.

Gessen wrote her alarm as other pro-migration advocates created an extraordinary media and activist outrage over the White House’s policy of prosecuting all border crossers, including those who bring their children to exploit the Flores loophole which allows them to get jobs in the United States. The adults’ prosecution requires they be kept in jails, and their children must be sheltered elsewhere, which allows activists and media outlets to declare a “child separation” furor.

Gessen’s alarm is being spread by the former head of Obama’s domestic policy council, Cecilia Muñoz, who also ran the La Raza ethnic advocacy group before her White House appointment:

The former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association suggested that citizens would not be safe from the administration’s “brutal assault on immigrants & children.”

Gessen started the alarm after she wrote about the first case where fraud was cited to invalidate a migrant’s citizenship. The Department of Justice said about the first case:

Baljinder Singh aka Davinder Singh, 43, a native of India, arrived at San Francisco International Airport on Sept. 25, 1991, without any travel documents or proof of identity. He claimed his name was Davinder Singh. He was placed in exclusion proceedings, but failed to appear for his immigration court hearing and was ordered excluded and deported on Jan. 7, 1992. Four weeks later, on Feb. 6, 1992, he filed an asylum application under the name Baljinder Singh. He claimed to be an Indian who entered the United States without inspection. Singh abandoned that application after he married a U.S. citizen, who filed a visa petition on his behalf. Singh naturalized under the name Baljinder Singh on July 28, 2006. Singh has been residing in Carteret, New Jersey.

In contrast, Gessen suggested fraudsters should be allowed to keep citizenship, and only criminals should be sent home:

Singh was not a war criminal, or any other kind of criminal, but his immigration process had been a mess, and may have involved the intentional fudging of his first name.

Gessen is an immigrant from Russia and is also an open-border advocate, writing June 22 that:

Outside the political mainstream, activists and academics have questioned the certainty that borders must be protected, or that those who live within the borders are automatically entitled to enforce them …

opposition to Trump’s war on immigrants does not rest on the defense of open borders. But thoughtful opposition should include at least questioning the facile dichotomies and the unchallenged premises that undergird the current immigration conversation.

Gessen’s decision to downplay fraud in the American immigration system comes as Department of Justice reports several examples of citizenship fraud:

Parvez Manzoor Khan aka Mohammad Akhtar and Jaweed Khan, 60, a native of Pakistan, arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Dec. 7, 1991, bearing a Pakistani passport in the name of Mohammad Akhtar. Immigration officials determined that the photo in the passport had been altered. Khan then applied for asylum, claiming his true name was Jaweed Khan. Khan failed to appear in immigration court and was ordered excluded and deported on Feb. 26, 1992. He subsequently failed to surrender for deportation. After having married a U.S. citizen, Khan, using the alias Parvez Manzoor Khan, was granted permanent resident status in 2001. He naturalized on July 3, 2006. Khan has been residing in Branford, Florida.

Iyman Faris, a native of Pakistan, is currently serving a criminal sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois for conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, namely, al Qaeda, and for providing material support to al Qaeda. In October 2003, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia sentenced Faris to 20 years in prison. The civil complaint alleges that Faris entered the United States fraudulently by using another’s passport that he willfully misrepresented the circumstances under which he entered the United States on subsequent applications for immigration benefits, and that he twice testified falsely to obtain immigration benefits. Additionally, the complaint alleges Faris lacked the required attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution at the time of his naturalization, as proven by his 2003 federal conviction for providing material support to al Qaeda, a designated terrorist organization. Faris was naturalized as a U.S. citizen on Dec. 16, 1999.

Jose Arizmendi, 54, a native of Mexico, pleaded guilty in April 1996 to aggravated sexual assault of a child in the District Court of Harris County, Texas … When the Department of Justice filed a complaint in federal court to initiate denaturalization proceedings in February 2015, Arizmendi was serving an 18-year prison sentence in Mexico for a separate sex offense of rape that he committed in that country.

Araceli Martinez aka Maria Araceli Ramos de Martinez, 53, a native of Mexico, pleaded guilty in September 2012 to Obtaining Money, Labor or Property by False Pretense in violation of California Penal Code § 532(a) in the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles. Between June 2011 and March 2012, Martinez engaged in a scheme in which she impersonated a U.S. immigration officer.

Fosia Abdi Adan, 51, a native of Somalia, applied for and received a diversity visa from the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, under the Diversity Visa (DV) Program on Jan. 10, 2001, and used her visa to unlawfully obtain beneficiary visas for the below individuals who were ineligible to be beneficiaries. Adan arrived and was admitted to the United States on Jan. 29, 2001, on her diversity immigrant visa as a permanent resident. Throughout the diversity visa application process, Adan fraudulently claimed that she was married to Jama Solob Kayre, the fictitious identity used by Ahmed Mohamed Warsame, and that she and Kayre had three children together.  Such children included Mohamed Jama Solob, the fictitious identity used by Mustaf Abdi Adan, and Mobarak Jama Solob, the fictitious identity used by Faysal Jama Mire.

The Gessen alarm has been picked up by various pro-migration advocates, including Alida Garcia, an organizer employed by FWD.us, which seeks to boost the supply of cheap white-collar workers to Silicon Valley:

A writer for Slate magazine claimed:

Under the Trump administration, even naturalized citizens are now a target. The government agency that oversees immigration applications is hiring lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants suspected of obtaining citizenship through fake identities or other false information on their applications. Cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, where offenders could lose their citizenship or legal status.

The small scale of this effort belies its significance. As a country, the United States makes few distinctions between naturalized citizens and their native-born counterparts. The naturalization process, which includes long-term residents with deep ties to the U.S., is assumed to be permanent. This new task force on denaturalization throws that permanence into question, bringing suspicion on anyone who received their citizenship through means other than birth.

The move to denaturalize some citizens is just the latest in a larger drive by Republicans—led by key figures in the Trump White House—to preserve a white majority in American politics.

Pro-amnesty groups and activists are spreading the claim:

 

 

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