The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) top attorney and Stephen Miller ally couldn’t really rebut a government watchdog’s official conclusion last week that both of the department’s top leaders were unlawfully appointed because they were in fact unlawfully appointed, so the administration’s official response to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report was to instead launch a wild, personal attack on an agency staffer who helped draft it.
“This staffer appears to have limited experience practicing law—having graduated from law school only three years ago,” DHS General Counsel Chad Mizelle wrote in defending a fellow Chad, acting DHS Sec. Chad Wolf, and his acting deputy, anti-immigrant goofball Ken Cuccinelli. This GAO staffer, Mizelle continued, “also previously worked on a Democratic campaign and the partisan Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee.”
“This is beyond insulting, especially given the circumstances,” noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel with the American Immigration Council. He notes that not only is Mizelle himself in an acting position like the unlawfully appointed Wolf and Cuccinelli he’s defending, he also “graduated law school in 2013.” Immigration attorney Aaron Hall pointed out one word salad of a paragraph that reads all the more ridiculously when remembering it’s part of an official response to the administration’s criminality:
While experts noted last week that the GAO’s finding doesn’t boot the unconfirmed Chad and Cuccinelli out of office, it could have significant implications for policies under their watch. “The administration is likely to ignore the GAO's decision, but this is a potentially HUGE blow to the legality of every single thing that done at DHS” in recent years, Reichlin-Melnick noted. Advocates are in fact already calling for a review, The Texas Tribune reported.
”United We Dream, an advocacy group pushing for immigration reform, said the GAO’s conclusion calls into question the latest guidance from the DHS on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that was initiated in 2012,” the report said. That memo, which bears unconfirmed Chad’s signature, cruelly and unlawfully blocks new applicants from the program and slashes protections in half for current beneficiaries.
“What’s clear today from the Government Accountability Office is that Chad Wolf did not have the authority to issue this memo in the first place,” United We Dream executive director Greisa Martínez Rosas tells The Tribune. There was also loud outcry for resignations from legislators who had called for an investigation into unconfirmed Chad and Cuccinelli’s appointments following the GAO’s report, including from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC).
“The Trump administration went around Congress to make invalid appointments of anti-immigrant white nationalists in violation of the law," CHC chair Joaquin Castro of Texas said in The Tribune. “From dismantling the immigration system to tear-gassing peaceful protestors, their authority is illegitimate. In light of this GAO decision, both Wolf and Cuccinelli must resign in disgrace or be removed from their positions immediately.”
“The people who wrote this letter and this press release have no shame,” Reichlin-Melnick tweeted. “They have fully taken control of @DHSgov and have bludgeoned the agency into doing everything they ever wanted.This press release is how authoritarian governments speak. For shame.”
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