Monday, November 30, 2020

BARBRA STREISAND - NEUROTIC, SELF-ABSORBED AND SUFFERING A SEVERE CASE OF FETISH FOR HER OWN HANDS SAYS BIDEN WILL 'BRING BACK DIGNITY' - THEN BABS SAYS JOE NEEDS TO STOP SNIFFING HER HAIR!

 JOE BIDEN: A DEDICATED SERVANT OF WALL STREET, THE RICH, AND BANKSTERS…. 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/lawyer-joe-bidens-kleptocracy-joe-and.html

The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C. DANIEL GREENFILED, FELLOW, SHILLMAN JOURNALISM, FREEDOM CENTER

The Hunter Biden laptop unrolls two ragged threads. One is the descent of Joe Biden’s son into new depths of depravity and the other are the foreign investors who bought into Joe Biden Inc.

If they can buy an election for Biden, the theory is, they can buy it for anyone.

Oligarchies always have lots of money even when workers go hungry and lose their homes. And they get that money by seizing the centers of power and consuming the wealth of nations.

Barbra Streisand Gushes: Biden Will ‘Bring Back Dignity, Honesty, Intelligence, and Compassion’

PHILADELPHIA, PA - OCTOBER 8: Barbra Streisand performs on the opening night of her 'Back To Brooklyn' tour at the Wells Fargo Center on October 8, 2012 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images)
Jeff Fusco/Getty Images
3:28

Barbra Streisand is “exhilarated” about the prospect of Joe Biden becoming president, saying that Biden will “bring back dignity, honesty, intelligence and compassion to the Oval Office.”

The Oscar-winning Hollywood leftist also bashed President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times, calling him a liar and blaming him for the loss of “thousands of lives.” The accusation is one that Streisand has repeatedly made on social media, having previously claimed that President Trump’s “incompetence and lies” are responsible for thousands of coronavirus fatalities.

In her talk with the Time’s T style magazine, Barbra Streisand expressed her thrill at the possibility of Joe Biden, who recently broke his foot, taking office. “I’m exhilarated … [He] will bring back dignity, honesty, intelligence and compassion to the Oval Office. I look forward to that.”

Neither Streisand nor the Times reporter brought up the Hunter Biden scandal or Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against the presidential hopeful.The singer-actress was a major supporter of Biden’s campaign, participating in several Hollywood fundraisers for the Democratic candidate.

“What do I hate most about Trump? He lies every day,” she told the Times. “He has the compulsion to lie, even when the facts say something different. The worst lie was about the pandemic. Why not face facts? Why not tell the truth? People are stronger than you think — they can handle the truth. It would have saved thousands of lives.”

Streisand didn’t clarify her allegation claiming that the president has lied about the pandemic. She also omitted the fact the President Trump initiated Operation Warp Speed, which fast-tracked a public-private partnership with drug makers to develop a coronavirus vaccine. The project has yielded vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that are expected to start reaching the public in December.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) added her praise for Streisand to the article, lauding the Hollywood celebrity for her political activism that started before it became fashionable.

“It took real courage back then to get involved because the entertainment industry believed there’d be a backlash,” Pelosi told the Times. Streisand in fundraising mode “is dazzling to behold,” Pelosi added. “It’s not just because she’s a celebrity. She knows the issues. She’s studied. She can explain why she supports what she does. That’s what’s persuasive.”

Pelosi continued: “She doesn’t have to do this… She does it out of patriotism. She loves our country.”

Streisand also told the Times that she reached out to the daughter of George Floyd shortly after he died while in Minneapolis policy custody, setting off race riots around the country.

Streisand said she sent six-year-old Gianna some shares of Disney stock, along with a letter in which she recounted how she also lost her father at a young age.

“I think our dads watch over us forever,” Streisand wrote, according to the Times. “When you get older and have a decision to make … just close your eyes and ask him for help. And if you listen very carefully, he will lead you to the right choice. I promise!”

Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com


Alejandro Mayorkas: A Portrait of the Intended Nominee for DHS Secretary

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-promises-employers-of-cheap.html

 

Will a Senate confirmation hearing recall troubling integrity scandals and heavy-handed re-direction on immigration law and fraud enforcement?

Feds: Plants that Hired Illegal Aliens Paid Unlawful Wages, Hired a Child…open borders…it’s all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost to middle America

 

Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.

 

Joe Biden's pick to run the DHS immigration agency – Alejandro Mayorkas – is a political gift for the GOP, says Jessica Vaughan at CIS: "Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration issue." https://t.co/859b16NhN4

 

OPERATION OBOMB: Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their bankster paymasters plan coup.

Barack Obama was famous not wanting to leave office when his term was done and well known for projecting a sense of entitlement to power.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/lawyer-barack-obama-and-his-attack-dog.html

Biden positions, after doing nothing, save for the end, at best, to help Biden's presidential campaign, suggesting that the hollow-victory Biden administration is just a placeholder for the return of an Obama third term.  It's a sign that Obama éminence grise is more than a little active, behind the scenes as she always is.

“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”

Biden is bringing the warmongers back to the White House

 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-war-monger-why-do-you-think.html

 

Leftists have now become the party of war. They are incredibly pleased that Biden will bring the military-industrial complex and pointless wars back to the forefront of American politics (EVEN AS BIDEN LEAVES U.S. BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX UNDEFENDED). Paul Joseph Watson, with his usual acumen, points out what Obama did to the world and what Biden promises to do. It’s ugly. AND WAR PROFITEER AND OBAMA – BIDEN DONOR SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS NOW SNIFFING OUT MONEY TO TUCK INTO HER PIMP HUSBAND’S POCKETS.

YOU WONDERED WHY BIDEN HAS VOTED FOR EVERY WAR FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS???

JOE BIDEN'S GLOBAL WAR MACHINE TO BE RUN BY WALL STREET CRONIES

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-names-national-security-team-of.html

Biden names national security team of right-wing militarists

This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.

Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.

Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team

 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html

 

Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.

Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.

 


HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES CRAWL UP AMERICA'S ASS

  JOE BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET!

“Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.” 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html

“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.”

“He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.”

“During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.”

Microsoft’s new “Productivity Score” helps employers spy on workers

Microsoft has expanded the analytics provided with its Office 365 suite of productivity applications into a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool” according to privacy advocates.

The tool, called Productivity Score, allows employers to know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams over the previous four weeks and on what type of device.

The software gives managers access to 73 pieces of granular data about employee behaviors, all of which is associated with employees by name. Microsoft denies the software is workplace surveillance, but privacy advocates say it most certainly is.

Vienna-based researcher Wolfie Christl tweeted a screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard, writing that “Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.”

“A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into a full-fledged workplace surveillance tool,” Christl added.

Microsoft claims that the software is not designed as a tool to monitor employee work output activities. A September blog post by Anthony Smith, introducing the product, claimed, “we safeguard against this type of use by not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time. Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using the productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.”

In an email to The Register Christl refuted the software giant’s claim, saying the system “does clearly monitor employee activities.” He referenced Microsoft’s own promotional video which shows a list of clearly identifiable users. Posting the video on Twitter, Christl wrote: “Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”

Screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard

While Productivity Score is not enabled by default, when companies enable it, the software automatically shows data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or opt out of using user-level data at all, but managers have to manually change the settings. Employees have no control over this whatsoever.

The software dashboard provides a so-called peer benchmark, which measures the company against other companies for each metric collected, meaning companies using the product are sending analytics data back to Microsoft.

The documentation for Productivity Score shows the extent of workplace surveillance the software allows. “Person metrics” include data such as the number of hours a person spent in meetings and on email outside of working hours and the number of emails sent. The system also monitors “low-quality meeting hours” which is defined as, the “Number of meeting hours in which an attendee multitasked, attended a conflicting meeting, or attended a meeting that exhibits Redundancy (organizational).”

Employees are assigned an “influence” score “that indicates how well connected a person is within the company. A higher score means that the person is better connected and has greater potential to drive change.” The product documentation states. The software also has a “Diverse tie score” indicating how varied and broad a person’s connections are and a “Strong tie score” recording how many “strong and tight engagements a person has had.”

J.S. Nelson is an associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. She told Forbes the software is “horrendous.” “Why are they monitoring people this way and what is that telling people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending?” she asked.

More invasive employee monitoring tools such as Teramind can capture any user activity, including screen recordings, live views of employee computers, and track emails, keystrokes and even video sessions. These are specialized products and regarded as overly intrusive by many workers.

Computerworld article from October this year examined how COVID-19 and the move to remote working has spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring software by companies seeking to boost productivity and spy on workers outside of the office.

The article quotes Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “When COVID-19 hit, we found that within the first month, 16 percent of companies put new tracking software on the laptops of remote employees,” Kropp said. By July that number had risen to 26 percent of companies.

Kropp said that even before the pandemic, companies were moving in the direction of “passively monitoring our employees, listening to them and watching them, and asking them less and less.”

“What the pandemic has done is just accelerate the speed at which that is happening. ... They were going to get there eventually; the pandemic has just accelerated the future into the present,” Kropp said.

The development of Productivity Score now gives companies similar tools without the need to roll out new software. The near-ubiquitous presence of Office 365 in the workplace gives employers ready-made surveillance of their employees.

While the office suite market is dominated by Google with 59.41 percent, Microsoft Office 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide with close to 600,000 companies in the US alone. Under conditions of a global pandemic that has forced the closure of offices around the world and enforced remote working from home, Microsoft is giving corporations the tools to drive up productivity and monitor workers’ activity 24 hours a day.

The metrics provided by Productivity Score will be used by corporations to identify low scoring employees and facilitate more layoffs with increased exploitation of those remaining, under an ever-present pressure to improve their scores.


OLIGARCHY – BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND BAILOUTS

Biden’s Chief of Staff Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html

 

“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.

Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors. 

THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!

"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-

 

collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that

 

salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does not want to know." 

 

TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA

 

Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES – BIDEN CRONIES

JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES

ExxonMobil THEY ALL KISS BIG OIL’S ASS

Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES

British American Tobacco

Dow Chemical

DuPont

Bayer

Microsoft

Google CLINTON CRONIES,  BIDEN CRONIES

Facebook OBAMA CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES

Amazon BIDEN CRONIES

Walmart


Amazon Joins Your Alexa Devices Together with Your Neighbors in a ‘Shared Network’ HIvemind

Jeff Bezos arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday, March 4, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
3:32

E-commerce giant Amazon is facing a privacy backlash over its new “Sidewalk” feature which joins together Alexa-powered smart devices within your home with those belonging to neighbors. The company claims the “shared network” will help “devices work better.” One cybersecurity expert called Amazon’s new service “deeply problematic from a privacy perspective,” noting that “No one rides on my WiFi for free, especially a giant corporation with billions of dollars.”

MSN reports that e-commerce giant Amazon is facing backlash for its new Sidewalk feature which automatically turns Alexa-powered smart devices into shared networks. Amazon customers are automatically entered into the Sidewalk program which will connect Alex devices to other nearby devices, even those owned by someone else. Users can disable the feature from their Alexa app.

The Sidewalk program uses Alexa devices including Echo and Ring video doorbells to create a “shared network” aimed at helping “devices work better.” Amazon told users in a recent email that the program allows nearby devices to use a portion of a neighbor’s WiFi bandwidth so devices can have more range.

On a launch page, Amazon stated: “These Bridge devices share a small portion of your internet bandwidth which is pooled together to provide these services to you and your neighbors. And when more neighbors participate, the network becomes even stronger.”

Amazon also published a research paper detailing the technology behind Sidewalk in anticipation of privacy concerns. The paper includes the steps taken by Amazon to keep users’ data private and concluded that privacy was one of the “foundational principles” of Sidewalk’s design.

The report’s authors stated: “By sharing a small portion of their home network bandwidth, neighbors give a little – but get a lot in return.” However, many are skeptical as to whether a network system such as Sidewalk could realistically keep user data private.

Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey specializing in cybersecurity, told BBC News in an interview that Sidewalk should be an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out feature as it currently is, adding, “It feels wrong not knowing what your device is connected to.”

The chief information security officer at Cyjax, Ian Thornton-Trump, told Forbes that the launch was “deeply problematic from a privacy perspective.” He added: “The ‘on by default’ approach is not consumer-friendly. No one rides on my WiFi for free, especially a giant corporation with billions of dollars.”

An Amazon representative confirmed in a statement that the program was automatically enabled for existing customers, stating: “But well before Sidewalk launches, we will notify existing customers with eligible Bridge devices so they can consider the benefits of Sidewalk before deciding if they want to change their preferences. After all existing customers are notified, all customers setting up a Sidewalk Bridge for the first time will have the opportunity to enable Sidewalk during device setup. All customers will have the option to change their Sidewalk preferences anytime in their Alexa app or Ring Control Center settings.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

JOE BIDEN PROMISES EMPLOYERS OF 'CHEAP' LABOR ILLEGALS NO E-VERIFY, NO BORDERS, NO ENFOCEMENT AND AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION MEX FLAG WAVERS MAY LEGALLY BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO

Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.

 GOP, says Jessica Vaughan at CIS: 

"Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, 

and the immigration 

issue."https://t.co/859b16NhN4

OPEN BORDERS AND A NATION FLOODED WITH ‘CHEAP’ LABOR

Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-keeps-promise-to-narcomex-picks.html


Joe Biden’s Allies Warn of 


Blue-Collar Migrant Invasion


Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images
6:17

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s pro-migration policies are inviting another blue-collar migration flood across the southern border, say his Democrat allies.

Biden has promised to reverse many of President Donald Trump’s pro-American policies, but “if Biden hits reverse too hard, it could cost him politically,” read a November 24 column by Noah Smith, a pro-migration columnist for Bloomberg:

In economic terms, a few hundred thousand Central American migrants will do little to hurt the U.S., but their presence will rile up law-and-order voters who bristle at the notion of people crossing the border illegally or skipping out on asylum hearings. That could hurt Biden with constituencies like Hispanic voters who live in the Texas border counties that swung hard to Trump in 2020.

“There are very real risks that sudden changes in policy could generate a surge of unauthorized migration: Recent experience has taught us that changing U.S. policies sends powerful signals to would-be migrants — and to their smugglers,” says a November 17 article by Andrew Selee, the president of the pro-migration Migration Policy Institute.

“I don’t think they’re going to be able to stop that,” said Jessica Vaughan, at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors curbs on migration.

For example, she said, Biden has selected Alejandro Mayorkas to run the immigration system, despite Mayorkas’ role under President Barack Obama in welcoming migrants and triggering Obama’s huge Latin American migration that Trump finally stopped in early 2020.

Mayorkas will have a hard time deterring migration because millions of migrants — and their coyotes — know he wants to let them into jobs in the United States, Vaughan told Breitbart News on November 23. For example, Mayorkas pressured immigration officials to ignore fraud and to rubber-stamp migrants’ applications, she said, adding, “He said that [immigration] officers who refused applicants have black spots on their hearts and that they’re doing something wrong, and should be approving all these applications.”

The migration pressure will grow once coronavirus vaccinations allow Mexico and other regional countries to permit movement, warned Joseph Chamie, a population expert and a former director of the United Nations Population Division. He wrote on November 19 in TheHill.com:

Whether you’re for it, against it or indifferent about it, the migration surge is coming. Millions of men, women and children in developing countries are desperately seeking to emigrate to escape poverty, hunger, unemployment, violence, crime, human rights abuse, and environmental crises.

With the incoming government’s proposed changes to immigration policies, especially with respect to asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, migrating families and unaccompanied minors, a big migration inflow along the U.S southern border should not come as a surprise.

The coming surge of migrants can be expected to overwhelm immigration systems, including border control, security vetting, the courts, legal representation, medical clearance, shelter and quarantine facilities and operating costs. Particularly challenging for the authorities is deciding on how best to deal with migrating family units, unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers.

Biden will try to chart a course between his many pro-migration allies — including the many millions of foreigners who want to get into the United States — and millions of worried swing-voters, according to Smith.

Smith — who accepts the claim that Biden sincerely tried to exclude migrants when he was serving as vice-president — wrote November 24 that Biden:

will probably try to accept asylum seekers from Central America at a slow and ordered pace. Detention will probably persist, in a much more humane form. And Biden may even negotiate new, though less rigid, agreements to keep some asylum seekers at home as the administration tries to improve living conditions in those countries.

But the Democrats are eager to welcome more migrants, said Vaughan, and they know how to hide that unpopular welcome under loud promises to fix a “broken immigration system”:

Many people like to complain about an immigration system that is supposedly “broken,” but it’s not broken at all when someone like Mayorkas is at the helm and can [annually] wave in more than a million legal immigrants, nearly a million guest workers, and crank out a million work permits. That’s not broken — that’s working pretty well if what you want is unlimited immigration.

Under Obama and Biden, administration officials carefully opened many small and hard-to-see loopholes in the border — and disarmed border agencies with many other regulations. That covert policy gradually and deliberately let millions of blue-collar Latin Americans into the United States, so boosting business allies.

But the inevitable pressure from millions of would-be migrants flooded their stealthy pro-migration policies, causing a popular pushback in 2014 that set the stage for Trump’s surprise jump into presidential politics.

Like other white-collar pro-migration activists, Selee’s favored solution to the migration problem is to make it legal, regardless of the predictable impact on blue-collar Americans.

He would expand the legal inflow of foreign workers, asylum seekers, and refugees that will cut blue-collar wages and raise blue-collar housing prices, saying:

First and foremost, this new [migration] architecture needs to include some sort of labor pathway for Central Americans to do seasonal work in the United States.

identifying those in danger in their home countries either for protection in-country or for resettlement as refugees in the United States and other countries, efforts that are done on a small scale already but could be vastly expanded with the right attention and resources.

“[A] Biden administration can transition towards a new migration management architecture that creates opportunities for seasonal work and humanitarian protection, while investing in a better future for the region as a whole,” Selee concluded.

 

Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …

Alejandro Mayorkas: A Portrait


of the Intended Nominee for 


DHS Secretary

Will a Senate confirmation hearing recall troubling integrity scandals and heavy-handed re-direction on immigration law and fraud enforcement?

By Todd Bensman on November 30, 2020


Alejandro Mayorkas

The man tapped to become U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, Cuba-born Alejandro "Ali" Mayorkas, would wear many hats running one of the country's largest bureaucracies. With some 240,000 employees, the DHS conglomeration created after 9/11 melds counterterrorism intelligence, emergency management, cybersecurity, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Secret Service. But the planned nomination also portends far-reaching impacts on all forms of legal and illegal immigration.

Already, the 61-year-old Mayorkas has shown early interest in an oversight role over U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the agency he once headed, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

But despite largely laudatory media reviews of a Mayorkas appointment, his public service legacy features serial ethical imbroglios, a pointed de-emphasis on immigration fraud and law enforcement, and strong-arm management tactics to spike acceptances of immigration and asylum applications in disregard of eligibility.

While media organizations may have trod lightly over these trouble spots, a Senate confirmation process required for a DHS secretary nomination likely won't, a public interest that argues for re-visitation and a more complete picture of how Mayorkas may manage this policy area.

The son of Jewish-Cuban refugees who fled the 1959 communist revolution, Mayorkas served President Bill Clinton as an appointed U.S. attorney in California from 1998 through 2001, President Barack Obama as head of USCIS from 2009-2013, and as deputy secretary for DHS from 2013-2016, before retiring to a blue-chip law firm in Washington, D.C. He served perhaps most controversially as head of USCIS, the huge immigration-benefits management agency that oversees asylum approval processes, a fraud detection corps, residency and visa application processes, the E-Verify and SAVE immigration status-checking systems, and the citizenship naturalization process.

In their initial coverage, Politicothe Washington Postthe New York TimesNational Public Radio, and other media organizations quoted former friends, colleagues, and Democratic figures praising Mayorkas for his experience and centrist politics. But the exuberant coverage largely tokenized several ethically questionable moments in Mayorkas's public service career dating to his California U.S. attorney days, leaving an incomplete portrait.

For instance, in its article about the prospective Mayorkas nomination, the Washington Post noted that only "Republicans" are likely to bring up a 2015 DHS Inspector General report that found Mayorkas inappropriately helped companies associated with powerful Democratic Party figures reverse employment visa denials for wealthy foreign nationals. The Post did not elaborate on its brief description of the scandal.

However, the public interest in that matter and others to be described, as well as Mayorkas's unconventional actions with regard to legal and illegal immigration, arguably extends beyond "Republicans" to everyone in Congress with a vote on the nomination, and to anyone who cares about corruption or how immigration and border security policy develops next.

Views on Immigrants and Immigration

Where Mayorkas stands on the core issues should not be hard to guess, given that Biden nominated him with a clear agenda. Biden has promised to reverse most Trump deterrence-focused policies for those likely to incentivize legal and illegal immigration. Biden, for instance, has promised to end deportations for his first 100 days, suspend construction on the southern border wall, reopen the severely abused asylum system to all comers, reduce detentions, and work toward amnesties for all of the illegally present.

As to where Mayorkas fits on the political spectrum, one tell is that no Republican voted to confirm him as DHS deputy secretary in 2013. A clue as to where on the open-borders spectrum to place him is that some of the biggest fans of a Mayorkas appointment are those who favor the lightest possible immigration enforcement touch, the most expansive application of asylum law, and the entrance of the greatest number of legal or illegal immigrants, press reporting and social media show.

Mayorkas was the architect of Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that legalized some 700,000 mostly adult "dreamers" who arrived in the United States illegally as minors. Back in civilian life, where he associated with pro-immigration groups like the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which celebrated the nomination announcement, Mayorkas continued to speak out in support of granting amnesty to dreamers.

Emblematic of the partisan divide certain to persist on immigration after a Mayorkas confirmation were other congratulatory endorsements by migrant advocate groups, such as a quote reflecting the joy of Janet Murguia, president of UnidosUS (originally the National Council of La Raza), which opposes what it terms "indiscriminate" immigration enforcement. She told the New York Times that "after four long, dark years" of the Trump administration and "a general contempt for Latinos from the highest office in the land, Mayorkas's nomination signals a new day for the Department of Homeland Security and for all our country."

In post-service civilian life, Mayorkas served as a board member for the refugee resettlement agency HIAS, which advocates for higher numbers and liberal application of asylum regulations and against detention. HIAS was among many groups that also congratulated Mayorkas for the pending appointment.

Mayorkas wasted no time telegraphing which part of the vast DHS portfolio interested him: immigration and asylum.

"When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge," Mayorkas wrote on Twitter following Biden's announcement about him. "Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones."

Later, he messaged his intention to further the department's work to "advance our proud history as a country of welcome."

While none of these policy attitudes should surprise Washington insiders, a record of unconventional past actions suggests the extent to which the next Mayorkas incarnation may emphasize opening the gates wider rather than scrupulously enforcing the letter of immigration law.

Pressuring Employees to "Get to Yes" on Visas Applications, Forget Fraud

In October 2010, about a year after Mayorkas's appointment to head USCIS, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) penned a complaint to then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Its contents, though a decade old now, raise questions about Mayorkas's fealty to immigration and asylum law enforcement.

The Grassley letter, citing anonymous employee allegations, accused the top USCIS official of laying heavy-handed pressure on career employees to squeeze out higher volumes of immigration application approvals for the agency's "customers", while undermining fraud and ineligibility detection efforts.

After receiving an "inadequate response" from Mayorkas, Grassley's office interviewed seven employees, examined hundreds of pages of supporting documents, and presented the results in the letter to Secretary Napolitano.

"Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Director Mayorkas is fostering an environment that pressures employees to approve as many applications as possible and condones retaliation against those who dissent," he wrote.

Among the inquiry's chief findings:

  • Mayorkas had become "visibly agitated" during a visit to USCIS's California offices when told employees there wanted to root out fraud. "Why would you be focusing on that instead of approvals?" he reputedly demanded. A witness said "his message was offensive to a lot of officers who are trained to detect fraud."
  • At a management conference, Mayorkas directed top officials to find ways always to "get to yes" regarding "customer" immigrants who filed visa applications. He told his subordinates to "look at petitions from the perspective of the customer" and that the goal was "zero complaints", implying that approvals were the means to that end.
  • At a conference in Landsdowne, Va., Mayorkas said there were some "managers with black spots on their hearts" who can't see their way to grant benefits and that he was "dealing" with them and also subordinates "too close" to them, with immediate involuntary re-assignments.
  • The California USCIS office was told to abandon an important anti-fraud measure that checked for high-risk applicants on a government database, and fraud specialists had to stop investigating such applications.

Perhaps as preemptive strike against any recollection of Grassley's 2010 letter, the latest media reporting about the Mayorkas DHS secretary nomination praises his ostensible track record of going after immigration fraud.

The Washington Post story allowed an unchallenged quote from John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director who served with Mayorkas, saying "One of the things Mayorkas was proudest of creating was the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate [FDNS], to emphasize that vetting was crucial in giving out immigration benefits."

In fact, the FDNS was created as a small unit in 2004 with the creation of USCIS after 9/11 exposed severe systemic flaws easily exploited by terrorists. Further, while he may have signed an order to upgrade FDNS from a unit to a directorate, Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports about rampant asylum fraud and lack of prosecution during the Mayorkas years beg to differ with claims that he was ever interested in effectively vetting applications.

A damning December 2015 GAO report found that FDNS asylum fraud prosecutions rarely, if ever, occurred during the Mayorkas years. It found that half of the eight USCIS field divisions had referred either one fraud case to U.S. attorney's offices from 2010 to 2014 or none at all. One office reported that not a single referral had been accepted in the prior two years. Another reported that its U.S. attorney had accepted no asylum fraud referrals since 2010.

Besides strong-arming USCIS employees to "get to yes" instead of valid denials or fraud investigations, another reason for this dismal showing during Mayorka's 2010-2013 USCIS years was that the very FDNS directorate heralded in the Post story was never allowed to refer cases to prosecutors, subpoena witnesses, or even carry guns.

Under a 2008 memorandum of understanding that Mayorkas would have freshly inherited, the FDNS asylum fraud unit was required always to refer fraud cases to ICE Homeland Security Investigations officers, making them subordinate to ICE's enforcement priorities and limited resources. In practice, asylum fraud cases had to compete with many more attention-getting types of cases, such as human smuggling and trafficking, transnational gangs, and intellectual property theft. Even had the FDNS officers been allowed to do their own asylum fraud investigation jobs, there were only 34 of the shackled officers by 2015 to cover eight field offices nationwide, which processed hundreds of thousands of cases annually, the GAO report found.

Contrary to any effort to pitch him today as an asylum fraud crusader, Mayorkas did little or nothing either to free the FDNS investigators, add to their ranks, or generate more fraud case referrals.

In his 2010 letter, Grassley asked for documents and data that would help verify the allegations, but nothing that came of the request stalled Mayorkas's fortunes. He served several more years, his standing among Democratic leaders serving him well through a far more serious ethics investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General.

The Inspector General's Investigation of Mayorkas

The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation centered around Mayorkas's alleged interference in the already fraud-riddled and abused EB-5 visa program by which wealthy foreigners can essentially achieve U.S. residency and eventual citizenship if they invest $500,000 (raised since his tenure to $900,000) in the U.S.

The OIG case launched in 2012 on the strength of "an extraordinary number of DHS employees" who came forward to report that Mayorkas was providing "special access and special favors" to a handful of EB-5 visa applicants who were wealthy foreign national associates of powerful U.S. Democratic figures and office-holders doing the asking.

Many of the investors seeking EB-5 visas were Chinese nationals hoping to sink millions into:

1.   Film projects with connections to former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, the mayor of Los Angeles, and Hollywood businessmen in late 2011.

2.   A hotel and casino project in Las Vegas that was being pushed by U.S. Democratic Sen. Harry Reid in 2013 on behalf of some law clients of the senator's son, Rory.

3.   An industrial investment fund's proposed hybrid vehicle factory in Virginia promoted by former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Hillary Clinton's brother, Anthony Rodham, from 2011 through 2013.

The OIG concluded that in these three cases Mayorkas "exerted improper influence in the normal processing and adjudication" of the visas, "inserted himself in unprecedented ways" in the adjudication process, and "intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that clearly benefited the stakeholders.

"In each of these three instances, but for Mr. Mayorkas's intervention", the report summary noted, "the matter would have been decided differently."

None of the visa applicants would ever consent to OIG interviews, nor were the investigators ever able to find Mayorkas's emails and internal communications.

Mayorkas has always disputed the findings of improper intervention, saying he took a hands-on approach in cases only to strengthen the program's integrity.

Commutation of a Drug Trafficker's Sentence

A 2001 episode from Mayorkas's last days as a U.S. attorney in the central California district has less to do with immigration, but is relevant in that it speaks to an apparent willingness to bend rules for the Democratic Party powerful.

Mayorkas allegedly used the weight of his office and access to the Clinton White House to request commutation of a convicted drug dealer's federal prison sentence. President Clinton followed through with the commutation of a 15-year cocaine-trafficking sentence in 1994 for Carlos Vignali, Jr.

The intervention happened after Vignali's Los Angeles real-estate developer father, Horacio, rounded up an array of powerful Democratic political and civic leaders to pressure Mayorkas to help the cause, a 2002 congressional investigative report concluded.

Among those the senior Vignali enlisted was another Hillary Clinton brother, Hugh Rodham, who received $204,000 to successfully connect White House staff to Vignali's network of Democratic leaders in Los Angeles.

"U.S. Attorney Alejandro Mayorkas provided critical support for the Vignali commutation that was inappropriate, given his position," the congressional report stated. "Mayorkas, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was asked by Horacio Vignali to call the White House in support of his son's clemency petition. Mayorkas then called the White House about the Vignali commutation" and later conceded that "his call conveyed support for the Vignali commutation ... despite his knowledge that the prosecutors responsible for the Vignali case opposed clemency."

Perhaps more troubling, during his 2013 Senate hearing, Mayorkas provided lawmakers with an alternative set of facts when asked. He testified under oath that the Clinton White House initiated the phone call, not Mayorkas, and that "I informed them that I did not support the commutation."

Mayorkas declined interview requests for a 2015 Wall Street Journal story about the "conflicting versions" he provided different government overseers.

A More Complete Portrait

Mayorkas' total service need not be judged entirely by the blemishes on his public service record. His relatively unmarred three years as DHS's deputy secretary expanded Mayorkas's range of expertise beyond immigration to, for instance, cybersecurity and domestic counterterrorism, his particular interest in funneling security grants to combat anti-semitism much-praised.

But all indications so far show that Mayorkas would spend time and effort on his immigration portfolio if confirmed. Integrity and ethics issues like the unrelated Vigliano commutation episode when Mayorkas was a U.S. attorney still need to be taken into account because they transcend any particular policy area. The integrity problems and management tactics of Mayorkas's not-so-distant past demonstrate his problematic susceptibility to bend convention to external lobbying. Given the stakes invested in leadership of such a large and consequential public agency as DHS, these all ought to be properly recounted and assessed.

 

Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …

NOT ONE OF THESE OPERATIONS ILLEGALLY HIRING ILLEGALS WILL SEE JAIL TIME!

Feds: Plants that Hired Illegal Aliens Paid Unlawful Wages, Hired a Child

ICE

23 Nov 202075

2:53

Three food processing plants in Mississippi, raided by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency last year, were found to have also paid workers below the minimum wage and one plant hired a child.

In August 2019, ICE agents conducted the largest workplace raid in United States history across seven food processing plants in Mississippi, arresting 680 illegal aliens. That same day, though, ICE officials said they released about 300 of the illegal workers back into the U.S. on “humanitarian grounds,” while more than 200 had prior criminal records.

Three of the plants ICE raided — Peco Foods Inc., Koch Foods, and Pearl River Foods LLC — were hit with Labor Department violations for paying workers below the minimum wage and, in one case, hiring a child.

According to Labor Department officials, the three plants have paid nearly $48,000 in back wages to 129 workers as part of their settlement. At Pearl River Foods, officials said the plant made illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks.

At Koch Foods, the plant refused to provide many of its workers with bonuses for overtime work that resulted in their paychecks falling below the minimum wage. Koch Foods was also hit with a child labor requirement violation after they were found to have hired a 15-year-old minor to do meat processing work.

As Breitbart News has chronicled, the plants raided last year have faced little-to-no penalties for hiring hundreds of illegal aliens primarily from Mexico and Central America. Of the 680 illegal aliens arrested in the raids, fewer than 130 have been charged with crimes and less than 80 have been convicted thus far.

Likewise, only four managers from two of the plants have been charged with knowingly hiring illegal aliens. None of the executives at the seven total plants raided have been charged with a crime more than a year later.

ICE officials confirmed months ago that at least 400 American citizens had their identities stolen so that the hundreds of illegal aliens could fraudulently gain employment at the plants.

Federal affidavits, as Breitbart News noted, allege that the plant employers were fully aware that hundreds of their employees were illegally in the U.S., and in some cases, illegal aliens said they were not asked for work authorization documents.

Today, at least eight million illegal aliens hold American jobs in the U.S. economy that would have otherwise gone to Americans. In most cases, these illegal aliens obtain fraudulent work authorization documents or steal American citizens’ identities in order to take jobs.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …


Joe Biden Picks Pro-Migration Swamper for Top DHS Slot

Brad Barket/Getty Images for PEOPLE En Espanol

23 Nov 20201,090

4:25

Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.

Mayorkas “is a gift for Republicans who want to make an issue of Biden’s immigration policies,” said Jessica Vaughn, at the Center for Immigration Studies. She continued:

He is the exact kind of nominee that people didn’t want to see — someone in favor of corporate interests on immigration, of looking the other way on fraud, of rubber-stamping every [migration] application. This should be an easy softball for them to hit out of the park. This is something that’s going to be helpful to them in the Georgia Senate races — I mean, [Sen. David] Perdue [R-GA] and [Sen. Kelly] Loeffler [R-GA] should be commenting on this.

All of the stars align here — cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration issue.

Mayorkas is a Cuban immigrant who ran President Barack Obama’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2009 to 2014. The Senate approved him on a party-line vote to serve as deputy chief to DHS.

During his term in office, he won acclaim from pro-migration groups as he reduced fraud detection projects and maximized migration inflows.

But his open-door policy exploded in 2014 as a flood of 350,000 migrants — including 68,000 youths and children — from Latin America and Mexico arrived to accept the welcome offered by Mayorkas and Obama. For example, a July 2014 AP poll of 1,044 Americans showed 68 percent disapproval of Obama’s immigration policies, up eight points after March 2014. The “wrong track” number spiked to 72 percent, up ten points after March.

Obama’s policies imported more than 2 million migrants to compete for blue-collar jobs, reducing wages for lower-skilled Americans.

Many polls show the public likes individual immigrants and conditionally tolerates migration — providing it does not cost Americans jobs or money. Under President Donald Trump’s pro-American, lower-immigration policies, Americans’ median household income rose 7 percent in 2019. In 2020, many lower-skilled Americans — including many Latinos — voted for Trump to help prevent another flood of cheap labor.

Advocates for cheap labor applauded Mayorkas’s nomination.

Those of us who want to see a bigger, stronger, and better America are waiting to help you do the right thing. https://t.co/DBejYXp8eY

— David Bier (@David_J_Bier) November 23, 2020

Mayorkas’s focus on maximizing immigration into Americans’ neighborhoods and job markets was spotlighted by a November 2010 letter to DHS from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA):

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Director Mayorkas is fostering an environment that pressures employees to approve as many applications as possible and condones retaliation against those who dissent.

According to the USCIS employees:

During a recent visit to the CSC, Director Mayorkas became “visibly agitated” when advised that the employees were interested in learning more about fraud detection efforts. Mayorkas asked, “Why would you be focusing on that instead of approvals.” One witness stated that “his message was offensive to a lot of officers who are trained to detect fraud.”

Mexico's ambassador wants the US President to restart world migration into Americans' jobs.
The US needs amnesties, refugees, asylum seekers, and temporary workers, she says.
Besides, "we are seeing … building pressure" in Central America, she says. 
https://t.co/MVD619agXG

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) November 19, 2020

In 2015, a report by the DHS Inspector General (IG) said Mayorkas “intervened improperly” in several decisions involved the distribution of valuable visas:

In three matters pending before USCIS, however, Mr. Mayorkas communicated with stakeholders on substantive issues, outside of the normal adjudicatory process, and intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that benefited the stakeholders. In each of these three instances, but for Mr. Mayorkas’ intervention, the matter would have been decided differently.

We were unable to determine Mr. Mayorkas’ motives for his actions.

“An IG report found that he behaved that he acted improperly — and this was Obama’s IG report!” said Vaughan. “He’s a total transactional guy,” she added.

Once he finishes his term at DHS, “he will monetize his appointment for sure — maybe even while he’s there, considering how he behaved before.”

Labor Dept. says the visa-worker programs are “highly susceptible to fraud” – and have been for at least 17 years.
So that's a generation of American grads losing careers & income to corporate fraud.
Journalism grads entirely missed this fraud. 
#H1Bhttps://t.co/0gcM3YSJjz

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) November 21, 2020

 

Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …

Alejandro Mayorkas as Biden's pick to run Homeland Security

Caitlin Dickson

·Reporter

Tue, November 24, 2020, 5:47 PM PST

Immigration advocates celebrated the announcement that President-elect Joe Biden intends to nominate Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Mayorkas, who previously served as deputy secretary of DHS under President Barack Obama, is the son of Cuban Jews who fled Fidel Castro’s regime and arrived in the United States as refugees in 1960, less than a year after he was born. If confirmed, he would become the first immigrant and first Hispanic American to lead the sprawling department, which, among its various responsibilities, oversees the U.S. immigration system and border security.

“This nomination is not only smart, it is historic,” Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said in a statement issued Monday. “He will not only bring critical leadership but a set of life experiences that will animate the department’s work ahead.”

Johnson said that apart from Mayorkas’s personal background, he was reassured by his record on immigration issues during the Obama administration, especially his key role in creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which protects certain immigrants who were raised in the U.S. from deportation. Johnson said this was a hopeful sign that the incoming Biden administration may go even beyond Biden’s pledge to reverse the controversial immigration restrictions imposed under President Trump.

Prior to becoming deputy secretary of DHS in 2013, Mayorkas served as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, where he worked on a number of policy initiatives, including DACA, which, at its peak, provided protection from deportation for roughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents as young children.

Trump has sought to end the program.

“The news that Mayorkas will be nominated as DHS secretary is another hopeful sign for Dreamers and a signal that the Biden administration is ready to deliver on its commitments for Dreamers and to strengthen America in the process,” said Candy Marshall, president of TheDream.US, which provides college scholarships to DACA recipients, sometimes known as “Dreamers.”

Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer for RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to low-income immigrants, said in a statement, “We look forward to the immediate expansion of the DACA program and the dismantling of the detention and deportation machine that was created under Obama and expanded by Trump.

“Leading this department will be no easy task, but we hope that as the first Latino and someone who has advocated for immigrant rights, he will change the direction of DHS once and for all,” said Andiola.

Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at the Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

The news of Mayorkas’s forthcoming nomination was also praised by organizations that provide services to refugees and asylum seekers, whose access to protections in the U.S. has been curtailed by the Trump administration. HIAS, a Jewish American nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid to refugees, issued a statement Monday congratulating Mayorkas, who sits on the organization’s board of directors. Not only is Mayorkas himself a refugee, but his mother, a Romanian Jew, fled Nazi persecution to Cuba, where she met Mayorkas’s father, a Cuban native with Sephardic roots.

Mayorkas, who grew up in Los Angeles, spent 10 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Central District of California, where he specialized in prosecuting white-collar crimes, including the high-profile tax evasion and money laundering case against “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss. In 1998, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton as the United States attorney for the Central District of California, becoming at age 38 the youngest U.S. attorney in the country.

In his first public statement following the announcement, Mayorkas already seemed to strike a markedly different tone from the rotating cast of officials who’ve been installed (lawfully and otherwise) at the helm of DHS over the last four years.

“When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge,” Mayorkas tweeted Monday afternoon. “Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”

Though Trump’s DHS has largely been focused on carrying out the administration’s agenda of restricting immigration and toughening enforcement at the southern border, the department is also responsible for cybersecurity, combating terrorism, and disaster prevention and response.

The website for WilmerHale, an international law firm where Mayorkas has most recently been employed as a litigator, says Mayorkas “currently leads WilmerHale’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Task Force,” citing his “experience leading the US Department of Homeland Security’s response to Ebola and Zika.” The task force was created to help the firm’s corporate clients deal with various labor, worker safety and employment issues stemming from the pandemic.

Alejandro Mayorkas and then-Vice President Joe Biden attend a naturalization ceremony in Atlanta in 2013. (Chris McKay/WireImage)

Democratic leaders on both the House and Senate committees that oversee DHS also expressed their support for Biden’s pick.

“Our nation faces persistent threats, both longstanding and new, including foreign and domestic terrorism, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and now a pandemic,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “The Department of Homeland Security plays a critical role in addressing these threats and strengthening our national security, and it needs highly qualified, experienced and dedicated leaders, like Mr. Mayorkas — especially following years of chaos and mismanagement.”

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., who serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, also hailed Mayorkas as “a seasoned leader and veteran of DHS” whose experience “makes him uniquely qualified to build DHS back better after years of neglect and being used as a political weapon by President Trump.”

“Mr. Mayorkas will need our support with what will certainly be a full plate: from the rise of domestic terrorism and the coronavirus pandemic to cyber threats to our infrastructure and the fallout from the Trump Administration’s failed border and immigration policies,” Thompson said in a statement. “I urge the Senate to act expeditiously on this nomination as DHS has been without permanent leadership for over a year and a half.”

Since President Trump took office in 2017, five people have served as the head of DHS, only two of whom were confirmed by the Senate. In November, a federal judge ruled that the current acting secretary, Chad Wolf, had been illegally appointed to that post.

Then-Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas with then-President Barack Obama at the White House in 2014. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Though a press release from the Biden transition team noted that Mayorkas has already been confirmed by the Senate for three previous positions, the Washington Post suggested that Mayorkas’s role in the development of DACA could hurt him with Republicans, who might also bring up a 2015 DHS Office of Inspector General report that found that he “exerted improper influence” in helping certain foreign investors in the EB-5 program, which offers employment visas and easier access to a green card for foreign nationals who make significant investments in U.S. businesses.

The report alleged that as USCIS director, Mayorkas acted “outside the normal adjudicatory process” to intervene in three specific EB-5 cases at the behest of high-ranking Democrats “in ways that benefited the stakeholders.” The cases involved companies with ties to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe, and Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.

In 2013, while the inspector general’s office was conducting its investigation into the allegations, Senate Republicans boycotted Mayorkas’s confirmation hearing for deputy DHS secretary, arguing that he should not be confirmed until the probe into his conduct was completed.

According to ABC News, during those confirmation hearings, which went forward without the Republican members, who then held a minority in the Senate, Mayorkas called the allegations “unequivocally false.” Mayorkas was confirmed for the deputy director role and he disputed the OIG’s findings when they were released in the report two years later.

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a statement defending Mayorkas at the time, as did Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, who called him “a man of impeccable integrity” and argued that “the inspector general’s office has squandered two and a half years on an investigation and couldn’t come up with something substantive and had to say something.” Fox News reported Tuesday that a Biden transition spokesperson said the OIG’s report did not find any legal wrongdoing by Mayorkas, and that his actions helped create and preserve American jobs.

_____

 

Aerial view of Honduran migrants heading in a caravan to the US, as the leave Arriaga on their way to San Pedro Tapanatepec, in southern Mexico on October 27, 2018. - Mexico on Friday announced it will offer Central American migrants medical care, education for their children and access to …


OPEN BORDERS AND A NATION FLOODED WITH ‘CHEAP’ LABOR

Former Vice President Joe Biden will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his role in creating huge Latin American migration and his involvement in several visas-for-sale scandals.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-keeps-promise-to-narcomex-picks.html


Pro-Amnesty Business Groups Tout Mayorkas for DHS Job

NEWARK, NJ - SEPTEMBER 06: Immigration activists protest the Trump administration's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on September 6, 2017. in Newark, New Jersey. The decision represents a blow to young undocumented immigrants, also known as 'dreamers,' who have been shielded from deportation under …
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
4:31

Business groups are already pushing GOP Senators to approve Alejandro Mayorkas as Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary.

The group is touting Mayorkas’ confirmation as support for “Dreamers” — the younger migrants illegally brought into the United States before 2007.

But if the GOP blocks Mayorkas from getting the top job at the Department of Homeland Security, the defeat will demonstrate broad opposition to the low-wage, high-profit economy favored by Mayorkas and his amnesty supporters, and by many of Biden’s deputies and pro-migration donors.

The November 30 letter by roughly 100 business groups and companies said:

This important and welcomed selection by President-elect Biden signals his commitment to protecting Dreamers, and we look forward to working with his administration on common sense proposals that will provide legal certainty for Dreamers and avoid significant disruptions to the American workforce and economy.

The pro-Mayorkas coalition describes itself as the “Coalition for the American Dream.” It includes many companies that have outsourced white-collar jobs to India’s visa workers, as well as companies that gain when a flood of migrant labor prevents a wage-boosting shortage of American workers.

The members include the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Marriott International, Amazon, Cisco, the National Milk Producers Federation, Microsoft, Ikea, Google, Facebook, Doordash, and the National Retail Federation.

The group is backed by FWD.us, an advocacy group created by Mark Zuckerberg and other investors. The group was founded in 2013 to expand the federal government’s economic policy of importing cheap immigrant labor and welfare-aided immigrant consumers.

The Democrats are backing Mayorkas, even though there is minimal public support — and declining Democratic support — for cheap labor immigration policies. Just 19 percent of all voters support the establishment’s preference for importing foreign workers, and 66 percent prefer the populist demand for “businesses to raise [Americans’] pay and try harder to recruit non-working Americans,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

Under Trump’s reduced immigration policies, median household income jumped seven percent in 2019. Also, Trump’s populist policies helped create a huge GOP turnout in 2020, so boosting GOP seats in the House and blocking Democrat gains in state legislatures.

The business groups know their cheap labor agenda is unpopular and a threat to politicians’ reelection.

So their three-cornered strategy is to rush the amnesty through Congress as an early win for Biden, to rationalize the amnesty as a quick boost for the national economy (but not for individual workers), and to stigmatize the public opposition by insisting the amnesty repays a moral debt to illegal migrants.

“One of the things we all experienced during [the tenure of President Barack Obama] was that immigration was pushed for later,” according to Alida Garcia, the vice president of advocacy for the investors at FWD.us. “The later you go, the harder everything gets because [legislators] people prioritize their own reelection,” she told CNN for a November 29 article.

“This is a must-prioritize now as both an economic driver for this nation that is dealing with a crisis. … And a moral driver after the harm that’s been done to immigrants by the Trump administration,” Garcia told CNN.

Mayorkas’ nomination will be reviewed by the Senate’s homeland defense committee, likely chaired by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

Portman is up for reelection in 2022. and voted against Mayorkas in 2013. The other GOP members include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.; James Lankford, R-Okla; Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah; Sen Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Rick Scott, R-Fla.; and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Mayorkas’ questionable record includes several visas-for-sale scandals, the disregard of migrant fraud, and his encouragement of the huge migration of Latin American migrants into U.S. jobs and neighborhoods.

 GOP, says Jessica Vaughan at CIS: 

"Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, 

and the immigration 

issue."https://t.co/859b16NhN4