According to a report from ProPublica, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of an anti-immigrant hate group, has been tapped to serve as the new ombudsman of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, meaning she’s tasked with providing “assistance to immigrants who run into trouble with the agency, such as immigration applications that take too long to process or applications that may have been improperly rejected.” Seriously, what could ever go wrong here?
As the nation’s immigration agency, USCIS handles a wide range of legal immigration matters, including applications for citizenship and green cards. The agency can also grant legal status to those in extreme circumstances, such as refugees and asylum seekers. In addition, the agency is in charge of adjudicating applications from undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, sometimes referred to as “dreamers” or DACA recipients.
In other words, this is a paper-pushing, application-processing agency. It’s not supposed to be political, but good god, Kirchner’s appointment makes it exactly that—and more. Just look at her group’s record.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—an organization that tracks hate activity across the nation, and has drawn ire from racists and extremists for doing so— for gross ties to white supremacists, Nazis, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and just about any other deplorable you can imagine:
FAIR was founded in 1979 by a man named John Tanton and received significant financial backing for many years from an organization called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund, which is still around, finances “research” into white genetic superiority; Tanton is a crank Michigan doctor who is infamous for having written in 1986 that “whites” should not go “quietly into the night” as their control over society declines. Tanton remains on FAIR's board of advisers, while its current president is a man named Dan Stein who has complained that the U.S.’s immigration policy is a plot to undermine “Anglo-Saxon dominance” and who once defended the practices of infanticide, forced abortion, and government-imposed selective breeding in a Wall Street Journal interview with Tucker Carlson. In 2004, Stein represented FAIR at the American Renaissance conference—a biannual gathering of white-power KKK types at which fellow speakers discussed themes such as “white revolt,” “unqualified blacks in positions of authority,” “homosexual and Jewish activism,” and the possibility that “Oriental immigrants are forming a fifth column in Canada.”
“During her tenure in that role, the group helped create Arizona's SB170 immigration bill,” the infamous “show me your papers” law that ended up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars in bad publicity. Extremists have been emboldened by the white supremacy of the Trump administration, with Texas now attempting to pass a similar bill that will almost certainly be signed into law. Now Trump wants to bring that extremism into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
“This is putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” said immigrant rights leader Lynn Tramonte. “The USCIS Ombudsman is supposed to help immigrants and American citizens resolve issues with the bureaucracy. As someone who has spent her career demonizing immigrants and immigration, Kirchner is certainly not qualified for this position. Only in the radical world of the Trump Administration could this appointment take place."
In a statement, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris said Kirchner’s work with an “anti-immigrant hate group should disqualify her from leading an office that supports immigrants in need.” The former ombudsman under the Obama administration told TPM Kirchner is an “ill fit” and “poor match”:
“The statute that guides the work of that office makes it very clear that whoever is in that position should be someone who has immigration knowledge and a background in customer service, which I don’t believe Ms. Kirchner has.”
Kirchner certainly lacks the skills to advocate for that legal immigration Republicans keep claiming to love, but she certainly has the anti-immigrant credentials Donald Trump prefers.