Watch: Mayorkas Stonewalls Senate on HAMAS-Backing Asylum Officer

Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas belligerently refused to answer questions about the agency’s appointment of a HAMAS supporter to an office that he created to fast-track citizenship approvals for migrants.

“Has she been fired?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) asked Mayorkas during a hearing at the Senate Homeland Secure and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Mayorkas refused to explain his department’s treatment of Nejwa Ali, the asylum officer who was placed on leave after she used social media to celebrate Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7 that murdered more than 1,400 people.

“I am not in a position to speak to an ongoing personnel matter,” Mayorkas insisted, before suggesting that Hawley was smearing all agency officials as HAMAS supporters.

But Mayorkas also refused to explain his hiring process for new Asylum Officers, or his decision to expand the power of low-level Asylum Officers to fast-track migrants into citizenship.

Hawley asked:

How many cases did she adjudicate? … Did she adjudicate any cases involving Israelis seeking asylum in this country? All Let me just point you to what else she posted on social media where she drew attention to the fact that she is an immigration and asylum officer, [saying] “#immigrants, #asylum seekers, #Palestine, $RefugeesWelcome.” This is on her LinkedIn post where she has her professional affiliation posted.

So I think the American people deserve to know: Has Has she admitted, contrary to law, individuals who should not be in this country? Or denied Jewish refugees — whose genocide she’s advocating — [the] asylum that they deserve an answer.

The scandal highlights the conflict in Mayorkas’s sincere and simultaneous policies of accelerating worldwide migration into the United States while also guarding Americans from attacks by those migrants.

This high-risk policy has been starkly exposed since Hamas’s attack on October 7, as many migrants — and sympathetic “woke” Americans — are denouncing Israel’s hard-nosed self-defense policies in the Gaza strip.

Mayorkas responded after Hawley’s time was used up, saying:

Senator Hawley takes an adversarial approach to me in this question, and perhaps he doesn’t know my own background. Perhaps he does not know that I am the child of a Holocaust survivor. Perhaps he does not know that my mother lost almost all her family at the hands of the Nazis, and so I find his adversarial tone to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful of me and my heritage. And I do not expect an apology. But I did want to say what I just articulated.

A DHS asylum & immigration officer posted support for the genocide of Israelis. She’s still on DHS payroll.@SecMayorkas won’t comment on whether that warrants her termination, or on her asylum decisions, which may have been influenced by her support for terrorists.@HawleyMO pic.twitter.com/F4tzGL0gbG

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) October 31, 2023

There is little trust among GOP Senators of Mayorkas. In many prior Hill hearings, Mayorkas has stalled GOP questioners and even argued that the border is secure.

Shortly after the Hawley exchange, for example, Mayorkas tried to blame his mass migration on an “unprecedented level of migration in the hemisphere.”

Sen. Mitt Romney(R-UT) responded, tartly:

What led to that unprecedented level of immigration illegally into the country happens to coincide with your becoming Secretary of the Department that is responsible for border security and President Biden becoming president. The key factor that has changed here is your administration.

House GOP legislators have launched an investigation into the appointment.

Given the scandal over the asylum officer, Congress should use Mayorkas’s own civil rights office to investigate the hiring and the role of the office, said Jon Feere, a former immigration official under President Donald Trump.

“Has she engaged in practices that violate the civil liberties of applicants?” Feere asked Breitbart News.

“Has she engaged in practices that violate the civil rights of American citizens” to enforcement of Congress’s border laws”, he asked.

“This is why Capitol Hill needs to manage DHS more than it does,” he said. “Why not use the bureaucratic [agency] tools that Congress created?”

Congress also needs to shut down Mayorkas’s fast-track asylum process, said Andrew Andrew, a former immigration judge, who now works with Feere at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Congress needs to step in and reverse this senseless policy,” Arthur said.

The asylum processing rule is [giving] virtually unfettered, unreviewed authority to [solitary] asylum officers to grant asylum to border migrants and put them on a path to citizenship …

When I was an immigration judge, I went through more background investigations than I could count. I’d gone to law school and I had to practice law for seven years.

This [new office] basically allows any person who has a bachelor’s degree, who can get a job as an asylum officer, to have the power to put aliens who have no right to be in the United States on the path to citizenship … There’s no government attorney [to be skeptical about asylum requests] and there’s no-one to appeal these decisions once they are made by a [Mayorkas] asylum officer.

Unfortunately, corruption is real when it comes to granting adjudication benefits. It always has been. There have been cases in the past where adjudicators were paid off. It happened a couple of times when I was in San Francisco — at least once. Unfortunately, there’s such little oversight and so few checks on that rule that Mayorkas has created that the possibility for abuse is almost overwhelming.

Mayorkas’s creation of the office is facing a legal review in Louisiana because of a lawsuit by elected GOP officeholders.