The former executive director of an anti-immigrant group is reportedly in the running to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Politico reports. Lee Francis Cissna is still the agency’s director, but his days left in the job could be in the single digits, “as President Donald Trump and aide Stephen Miller continue their purge of top Homeland Security officials.” Waiting in the wings, “sources familiar with the matter” tell Politico, is Julie Kirchner.
Kirchner currently serves as USCIS ombudsman, but she once led the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant group founded by ophthalmologist and eugenicist John Tanton, whose writings have “warned of a ‘Latin onslaught,’ and an ‘explosion’ as ‘[w]hites see their power and control over their lives declining,’” the ADL said. That’s some hateful shit that has morphed into the hateful “we’re full” shit we’re hearing from Trump today.
Keep in mind that Miller is reportedly crafting other plans to attack asylum-seekers, by putting border agents in charge of their interviews. “Currently, asylum-seekers are interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers and only need to express a fear of persecution in their home country in order to pass the first step in the process.”
There’s a lot of ifs in the Politico report, considering Cissna seems to be doing a pretty good job already of Trumping up USCIS, removing “a nation of immigrants” from the agency’s mission statement and announcing that dozens of international USCIS offices are being shut down, a move that one former Refugee Affairs Division official said “will be a great blow to the quality and integrity of the legal immigration system.”
“Remember that tweet I had pinned for a couple of years trying to warn about how eugenics groups were being put in charge of American immigration policy?” tweeted reporter Brooke Binkowski. It’s what we’ve been seeing over the past two years. Should Cissna be ousted and Kirchner selected as his replacement by President Miller—er, Trump, her nomination would require a Senate vote, providing an opportunity to take a closer look at the actions of her former group.