The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review last week included a blog post from an anti-immigrant hate site in its daily news briefing to immigration court employees—and it was no accident: BuzzFeed News reports it has done this several times over the past year. It hasn’t been just the DOJ, either. “In addition, similar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyperpartisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.” Among the sites have been Western Journal and Epoch Times, two sites that have spread birther and QAnon nonsense.
But a good chunk of this egregious behavior has come from the Justice Department, which has distributed links from VDARE, a white supremacist site popular with anti-Semites and other shits, at least six times since last September. In the most recent incident last week, the Justice Department shared a VDARE post that attacked immigration judges by name and “with racial and ethnically tinged slurs,” said National Association of Immigration Judges Union President Ashley Tabaddor. “If I had sent this,” she commented, “I would be facing serious disciplinary action.”
The Justice Department tried to squirm its way out of this by pointing a finger at an outside company, claiming the email roundups are “compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included.” But “’that’s absolutely incorrect,’ said TechMIS CEO Steven Mains, adding that EOIR was the most specific and particular of the company’s clients. The agency’s staff would review its work ‘down to misspellings’ if there was anything wrong before sending, he said.”
VDARE apparently was included in the briefings, Mains said, because “TechMIS uses a combination of automated systems and human editors to find stories around certain keywords that are relevant to each agency.” EOIR, however, reviewed those clippings and kept them. It was no mistake. Plus, “one immigration court employee told BuzzFeed News they perceived a shift in the news sources included in their emailed media briefings after Trump took office.” But rather than take any action to rectify this, the Justice Department is instead just ending the daily email briefings, rather than kicking out the white supremacists in the department.