A top official in the Department of Homeland Security may have acted inappropriately on immigration issues after being lobbied by powerful Democratic politicians, a report released this week from the department’s inspector general has claimed.
Alejandro Mayorkas, currently the second in command at the DHS, may have engaged in political favoritism when he ran US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within the DHS that handles immigration and naturalization.
The report cited several cases in which Mayorkas was pressured by three different powerful Democrats, two of whom, the former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe (who has since been elected governor of Virginia), are close allies of the Clinton family. The third was the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who announced on Friday he would not seek re-election in 2016.
According to the report, Mayorkas inserted himself into three application cases relating to the EB-5 visa, a rather obscure and controversial federal program that allows foreign investors in the United States to gain citizenship.
Investors have to be willing to put up $1m of their own money in a business that creates jobs (in a poor or rural area, this threshold is reduced to $500,000).
USCIS has to approve applications for these visas and ensure that their investments make sense and will create the jobs necessary for investors to receive green cards.
The report states that the “number and variety” of witnesses willing to talk about Mayorkas to the inspector general’s investigation was “highly unusual”.
“It is also quite unusual that a significant percentage of the witnesses we interviewed would talk to us only after being assured that their identities would remain confidential,” it states.
The report notes that “being a whistleblower is seen to be hazardous in the federal government, and a typical investigation would have one or perhaps two. That so many individuals were willing to step forward and tell us what happened is evidence of deep resentment about Mr Mayorkas’ actions related to the EB-5 program.”
In all three cases – which involved investments in movie production, a Las Vegas hotel and casino, and an electric car company partially owned by McAuliffe – Mayorkas’s intervention helped lead USCIS to eventually approve the visa applications after early hesitation.
In prepared testimony before the House homeland security committee on Thursday, John Roth, the DHS inspector general, said “in each of these three instances, but for Mr Mayorkas’ intervention, the matter would have been decided differently”.
In a statement afterwards, the Texas Republican Mike McCaul, the committee’s chair, said he found the report to be “extremely concerning”.
Nothing Mayorkas did was illegal. While he potentially violated standards that he set up to streamline the EB-5 program, the worst Roth could say in the hearing on Thursday was that Mayorkas “violated an ethical canon”.
In a written statement provided as an addendum to the inspector general’s report, Mayorkas insisted that “allegations I provided preferential treatment and created an appearance of impropriety are entirely unfounded”.
He went on to insist that while “there may be pressure in cases such as this, where the allegations have become a matter of public controversy, to find something to criticize. To take such an approach in this case would be fundamentally unfair. I did not engage in any conduct that is properly subject to such criticism.”
Mayorkas went on to highlight his role in overhauling the EB-5 program, which he described as presenting “a magnitude of problems” when he took over as head of USCIS in 2009 and insisted he only became involved in a case when it presented “a broader legal, policy, or process issue”.
The House homeland security committee has asked Mayorkas to testify before it and it is likely he will appear before it sometime after Congress’s two-week recess ends in mid-April.
