Tag: L. Francis Cissna

Trump’s Homeland Security purge claims another victim, head of citizenship agency

The latest head to roll in President Trump’s continued purge of top Homeland Security officials is that of Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Trump asked for Cissna’s resignation, which he submitted Friday, according to an email Cissna sent to agency personnel. He’ll leave the agency on June 1.

While not known as a flamethrower, Cissna courted controversy as he sought to implement Trump’s policies during his tenure at Citizenship and Immigration Services. He pursued the administration’s stated goal of reducing immigration, both legal and illegal. Citizenship and Immigration Services is tasked with processing immigration benefits, citizenship and, in a new focus under the Trump administration, denaturalization.

Cissna had a brief moment in headlines last year when he edited the beginning of Citizenship and Immigration Services’ mission statement, “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” to eliminate the phrase “nation of immigrants.” He told his staff the change clarified the agency’s role in “lawful immigration.” The change was seen by some as forecasting an inward turn.

But he apparently lacked enough zeal to please some of Trump’s hard-line advisors on immigration issues, leading to his ouster.

In his exit announcement, Cissna repeatedly emphasized the “rule of law,” writing that his 20-month tenure “laid the groundwork for many more, much-needed, lawful reforms to come in the near future.” He also hinted at the current upheaval at Homeland Security, describing his tenure as a “challenging time.”

“We are the government servants charged with lawfully, efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits, while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our nation’s values,” he wrote Friday in his email, obtained by The Times.

Underscoring the uncertainty at Homeland Security, the federal government’s third-largest department with roughly 240,000 employees, Cissna reportedly will be replaced by Ken Cuccinelli II — an immigration hardliner and cable news fixture whose name administration officials just days ago floated as a new “immigration czar.” Cuccinelli, however, has a strong enemy in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Neither McConnell’s office nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

In April, Trump forced out then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, naming Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan as her replacement. Nielsen spent her last days at the department announcing a cascade of exits for top officials, including U.S. Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles; Claire Grady, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary; and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Ronald D. Vitiello.

The purge at Homeland Security began a few days before Nielsen’s removal, when Trump blindsided her and many other officials by abruptly pulling Vitiello’s nomination to lead ICE on a permanent basis. At first, White House aides told congressional staffers the withdrawal notification had been sent in error. Then Trump told reporters he wanted to go in a “tougher” direction on immigration enforcement. The president also surprised officials when he announced in early May his pick to replace Vitiello, Mark Morgan, a Border Patrol chief under President Obama.

In his confirmation hearings, Cissna — whose mother immigrated to the U.S. from Peru — told lawmakers that he spoke Spanish exclusively at home with his children, explaining, “the immigrant experience has always been a fundamental part of my family life.”

Under his tenure, Citizenship and Immigration Services has directed more resources to reducing a ballooning immigration-case backlog — more than 890,000 pending immigration cases, with an average wait of more than two years — sometimes at the expense of other missions.

At the border and across the country, agency officers interview asylum seekers to help determine whether their cases will proceed or whether they will be removed from the U.S. Cissna took officers who conduct citizenship interviews and reassigned them to the southern border to interview asylum seekers. In the last two years, wait times for citizenship have doubled.

In recent weeks, Citizenship and Immigration Services also has begun to train Border Patrol agents to conduct initial interviews that asylum seekers go through to determine whether they have what U.S. law defines as a “credible fear” of being persecuted in their home country. The moves gave new power to the Border Patrol and took some discretion away from Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers, part of an effort to toughen the process for people seeking asylum.

In March, Cissna announced that his agency would close all of its international offices and prepare to shift its foreign operations to the State Department in order to focus on the backlog. Citizenship and Immigration Services had worked abroad to reunite families, oversee international adoptions, and process requests for U.S. travel for humanitarian emergencies, military members serving overseas and permanent residents seeking to return.

Cissna has also overseen new “public charge” rules penalizing immigrants who use public benefits — and their U.S.-citizen children. Those proposed changes drew hundreds of thousands of public comments, which the agency is required by law to review. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy advisor and an immigration hardliner, has been frustrated with Cissna for what he viewed as foot-dragging on implementing the public charge rule and other proposals.

As near-record numbers of asylum seekers and Central American families continue to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump critics and supporters alike fear that Miller may not yet be through with a kind of hit list to “clean house” at Homeland Security. The department, created to ensure domestic security, has dozens of leadership vacancies, in addition to the handful of top officials serving in an acting capacity.

Cissna avoided the first round of firings after key Republican senators came to his defense.

McConnell has made clear he will block Cuccinelli from any position requiring Senate confirmation.

In 2014, Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general, backed an effort to defeat GOP Senate incumbents and called for McConnell to step down. He also sought to peel delegates away from Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016, even throwing his ID badge on the convention floor to protest Trump’s nomination. At the time, he was working on behalf of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In announcing in March that USCIS would close its international offices, Cissna wrote in a memo to agency staffers obtained by The Times: “Change can be difficult and can cause consternation.”

[Los Angeles Times]

US launches bid to find citizenship cheaters

The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.

Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.

Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.

“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,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”

He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.

The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.

Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.

The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.

In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.

Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.

Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.

Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.

Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.

For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.

The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.

“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.

Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.

The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.

Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the U.S. government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.

“The people who are going to be targeted by this — they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”

[Associated Press]

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services drops ‘nation of immigrants’ from mission statement

Tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free need not apply.

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services no longer uses language that describes the country as “a nation of immigrants” in its official mission statement, an agency official said Thursday.

The USCIS, the federal agency tasked with granting visas and citizenship, has changed to a new statement that “clearly defines the agency’s role in our country’s lawful immigration system and the commitment we have to the American people,” according to a letter sent to employees by agency director L. Francis Cissna that was obtained by NBC News.

“The agency’s new mission statement was developed and debuted within the agency by USCIS Director Cissna during his first conference with USCIS senior leadership from around the world,” a USCIS public affairs officer said in a statement to NBC News. “It reflects the director’s guiding principles for the agency. This includes a focus on fairness, lawfulness and efficiency, protecting American workers, and safeguarding the homeland.”

The previous mission statement said the agency, “secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”

The new statement now reads:

“U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”

Cissna also said the new mission statement will also no longer refer to visa applicants as “customers” because the term “promotes an institutional culture that emphasizes the ultimate satisfaction of applicants and petitioners, rather than the correct adjudication of such applications and petitions according to the law.” He added that the term implied that the agency serves anyone other than “the American people.”

President Donald Trump’s pick, Cissna was sworn in as director of USCIS in October.

The wording change was not welcomed by some pro-immigration groups.

“Our nation is one built by immigrants — removing this language does nothing to change that fact, it only reveals the insidious racism harbored by those in this administration,” said Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at the Human Rights First, in a statement. “We cannot separate ‘immigrants’ from ‘Americans’ — we are intrinsically linked as children, parents, neighbors, and loved ones. By seeking to distinguish between the two, the administration is turning its back on our nation’s proud history and engaging in dangerous revisionism.”

[NBC News]