Report: Biden’s DHS May Give Work Permits to Afghans Before Vetting Them
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may issue work permits to the tens of thousands of Afghans arriving weekly to the United States before completing their vetting.
As part of Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, he is hoping to resettle about 95,000 Afghans in total across the U.S. over the next 12 months. Already, more than 48,000 Afghans have been flown to the U.S. for permanent resettlement.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans arriving in the U.S. every day do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) or even refugee status. Instead, Afghans are arriving in the hopes of getting “humanitarian parole” and are allowed to land in the U.S. without having completed their immigration processing.
Robert Law with the Center for Immigration Studies writes this week that sources inside the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency have said that top DHS officials are reviewing plans to issue work permits to Afghans before their vetting process is completed.
“Multiple [USCIS] sources tell me that agency leadership (i.e., Biden political appointees) are on the verge of ordering adjudicators to issue work permits first and ‘resolve’ vetting issues later,” Law writes:
If Director Ur Jaddou signs off on this policy, it is even more reckless than it appears. For starters, none of these Afghans have established addresses in the United States, so the work permits are either being handed to them upon release from the military bases they are temporarily being housed in or are being mailed to the advocacy groups who are sponsoring them. When derogatory information comes up, how helpful do you expect these groups to be in tracking down these aliens? And my sources tell me that the agency has already discovered numerous instances of national security or Department of Defense flags on these aliens, but they too will get work permits and be released from temporary custody. [Emphasis added]
This policy, if implemented, would tie the hands of adjudicators by requiring them to approve work permits with incomplete information and removing their discretionary authority to deny. Just days away from the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Biden administration is considering actions that would make the country less safe, and using career immigration adjudicators to do it. [Emphasis added]
Biden, this week, asked Congress to approve $6.4 billion in American taxpayer money to help resettle Afghans across the U.S.
Over the last 20 years, nearly a million refugees have been resettled in the nation — more than double that of residents living in Miami, Florida, and it would be the equivalent of annually adding the population of Pensacola, Florida.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to research, and each refugee costs taxpayers about $133,000 over the course of their lifetime. Within five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Iran Attacks Kurdish Militants in Iraq
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the theocracy-controlled wing of the Iranian military and a designated terrorist organization, launched rocket and drone attacks across the border into Iraq on Thursday, targeting Kurdish militant groups Iran claims are a threat to its security.
“In this operation, the headquarters of those conspiring against Iran’s national security was destroyed,” the IRGC declared through Iranian state media on Thursday.
One of the Kurdish groups in question, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), countered by claiming there were no casualties from the strikes and said it was able to capture one of the six Iranian drones employed in the attack.
The mayor of Choman, one of the towns that came under attack, also said there were no casualties.
Kurdish news service Rudaw reported the Iranian attack began around 6:00 a.m. and targeted multiple locations in the Chiman, Haji Omran, and Sidakan regions of Erbil province, using a combination of drones, artillery, and warplanes. The attack came three years to the day after an Iranian missile strike hit KDPI headquarters and killed at least 16 people.
The KDPI has ties to the Kurdistan Democracy Party (KDP), the governing party in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and also to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a violent separatist group considered a severe security threat by Turkey. Turkey launches sporadic attacks over the Iraqi border to hit PKK positions.
The KRG and its armed forces, known as the peshmerga, were vital U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq. ISIS remains a threat in Iraq and is attacking the KRG with increasing frequency.
Peshmerga fighters inspect the remains of a car, bearing an image of the trademark jihadist flag, which belonged to Islamic State (IS) militants after it was targeted by an American air strike in the village of Baqufa, north of Mosul, on August 18,2014. Kurdish peshmerga fighters backed by federal forces and US warplanes pressed a counter-offensive Monday against jihadists after retaking Iraq’s largest dam, as the United States and Britain stepped up their military involvement. AFP PHOTO/AHMAD AL-RUBAYE
IRGC ground forces commander Gen. Mohammad Pakpour on Tuesday threatened the KRG with a “decisive and harsh response” if “terrorists” continue to operate out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
“The current situation is no longer tolerable,” Pakpour said, referring to clashes between Kurdish militants and IRGC forces along the mountainous Iran-Iraq border.
Pakpour suggested KRG leadership should not risk their “friendly ties” with Iran by allowing “terrorists who have built dens” in their territory to remain a threat.
“Terrorist and counterrevolutionary groups affiliated with the global arrogance and foreign espionage services have been using the territory of northern Iraq for many years to undermine security and peace in border areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran and harass the inhabitants of these regions,” Pakpour thundered.
“In this regard, the Iraqi government and the officials of the northern region of Iraq have been given the necessary warnings,” he said ominously.
Al-Monitor described Pakpour’s “amped-up rhetoric” as a significant escalation of Iranian tensions with the Kurds. Iranian military officials and lawmakers have been increasingly strident in threatening the KRG since Supreme National Security Council Secretary Adm. Ali Shamkhani demanded last month the Kurdistan government must expel all separatist and militant groups or face “pre-emptive” action.
The PDKI shot back that Iran’s airstrikes and artillery barrage constituted a “terrorist” assault on the peshmerga:
A KRG military spokesman responded to Iran’s threats by declaring “Iraq is one” and promising not to “allow anyone to threaten its security and safety.”
The KDPI is one of many Kurdish organizations across the region that longs for greater autonomy from host governments for the stateless Kurdish people, or for outright separation from those governments so a greater Kurdish state can be formed. None of the countries that currently own the territory that would be absorbed into a prospective Greater Kurdistan is terribly enthusiastic about the idea.
KDPI fighters have been scrapping with the Iranian regime since 1989 when KDPI leader Abdol Rahman Ghassemlu was assassinated in Vienna by suspected Iranian agents. Ghassemlu had been targeted as an “enemy of Allah” by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the current Iranian regime, who declared “holy war” against the KDPI.
Several other KDPI leaders have been assassinated over the years, most recently Mousa Babakhani, a senior official in a splinter party called KDP-I who was abducted, tortured, and killed from a hotel in Erbil in July. The KDP-I accused Iranian agents of murdering Babakhani.
July marked the 32nd anniversary of Ghassemlu’s assassination. Several Iraqi Kurdish party leaders commemorated the occasion by warning the international community to be cautious when dealing with Iran and its new President Ebrahim Raisi, who is notorious for “crimes and massacres” according to an inter-party Kurdish statement. The Kurdish leaders also criticized Austria for failing to bring Ghassemlu’s killers to justice.
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