DHS Admits to Approving Gang Members’ Asylum Claims

FAIR Take | October 2024
Two news stories last week struck an all-too familiar chord. In their zeal to expedite mass illegal immigration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to release poorly vetted migrants into the country, while making feeble efforts to rectify problems that could and should have been avoided in the first place.
First, the Washington Times revealed how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had approved asylum applications for members of Tren de Aragua, the notorious and deadly Venezuelan gang. In internal USCIS emails, Kevin Grigsby, who is in charge of the agency’s refugee operations, chastised staff members for failing to observe evidence of gang affiliation that was literally stamped all over their bodies. “Unfortunately, we did not ask about the tattoos during our adjudication or did not identify that the tattoos asked about were consistent with gang membership,” he wrote in one of the emails last month. USCIS has not said how many TdA gang members had been initially approved to enter the country as asylum-seekers.
Fortunately, the Times wrote, a “different agency” took note of the tattoos when this group of “asylum-seekers” arrived at the border and blocked them from entry. However, as Emilio Gonzalez, who served as director of USCIS in the George W. Bush administration, cautioned, there is no way of knowing how many other TdA members (or other security threats) posing as asylum-seekers may have been allowed to enter the country.
Gonzalez’s successor at the helm of USCIS was Alejandro Mayorkas, who was reported to have pressured staff to “get to yes,” even when petitions for immigration benefits were highly questionable, and banished agency personnel who did not comply with his edicts to other positions. Mayorkas, of course, now runs the entire Department of Homeland Security. His record in that position clearly indicates that greenlighting the entry of inadmissible aliens continues to take precedence over nearly every other consideration, including the safety of the American people and his sworn oath to uphold the law, resulting in his impeachment by the House of Representatives last February.
No sooner had the Washington Times revealed the government had granted asylum to TdA members than a second headline on NBC News’ website informed readers, “DHS is seeking more than 600 migrants for possible ties to Venezuelan gang.” Unreassuringly, “seeking” is not the same thing as finding, apprehending, incarcerating or removing members of the violent Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang that is terrorizing people all across the country.
Nor is 600 likely an accurate measure of the number of TdA gang members who have been allowed to enter under the Biden-Harris administration. According to Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit, “The [600] figure is disturbingly low. It should be higher,” he told NBC News.
Indeed, in just one hotel in El Paso, Texas, last month, “more than 100 TdA members were arrested” by the Texas Department of Public Safety, while Gov. Greg Abbott asserts that more than 3,000 Venezuelan illegal aliens have been arrested statewide since 2021 (although not all of them have been confirmed to be TdA members). Meanwhile, Aurora, Colo. City Councilwoman, Danielle Jurinsky, revealed that local police are aware of “over 200 people working for [TdA] in that city alone.
Given the chaos that has resulted in some 10 million illegal entries to the United States over the past three and half years, effectively vetting anyone who shows up poses a monumental challenge. It is all the more difficult to screen illegal migrants from countries like Venezuela, where the regime in power is openly hostile to the United States. Some 800,000 Venezuelan nationals have illegally entered the United States since 2021.
The inability to properly screen asylum-seekers or would-be parolees is a glaring problem, as DHS’s Inspector General (IG) acknowledged last June. “The Department of Homeland Security’s technology, procedures, and coordination were not fully effective to screen and vet noncitizens applying for admission into the United States or asylum seekers whose asylum applications were pending for an extended period,” states the opening sentence of that report.
The IG goes on to warn that “without a dedicated technology capability and resources to conduct interim screenings, USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] may not promptly identify asylum seekers with derogatory information who remain in the country for extended periods of time while awaiting an asylum decision. Until the Department addresses these challenges, DHS will remain at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country or enabling asylum seekers who may pose significant threats to public safety and national security to continue to reside in the United States.”
While DHS acknowledged the deficiencies identified by the IG, it appears that very little has changed during the ensuing months. In what seems to be yet another effort to cover up departmental failures, in August, FAIR exposed a DHS report revealing large-scale fraud in the CHNV parole program.
Given the magnitude of the damage already done, the effort to track down and remove 600 suspected TdA gang members, who should never have been allowed to enter the country, must be seen for what it is: a transparent attempt to convince the American public that they are taking this very dangerous threat seriously, with just weeks to go before the elections.
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