President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, defended himself from Senate Republicans’ questions about allegations that he abused his power while at the DHS during the Obama administration.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, opened the hearing with questions into multiple findings by the DHS inspector general that he said were “concerning.”
The DHS inspector general found that in three incidents, Mayorkas communicated with applicants or their sponsors in a way that was not normal and “intervened” in career United States Citizenship and Immigration Services staff’s reviews of applications, Portman said.
The report stated that Mayorkas did not follow normal procedures for deciding the cases and personally redecided cases that had been decided unfavorably. When asked by Republicans about the three incidents, Mayorkas admitted to getting involved in “hundreds” of cases that had been denied. He later said he looked over “dozens and dozens” of denied cases.
“The case that you mentioned and three cases that are cited in the inspector general’s report are three of hundreds and hundreds of cases that I became involved in at the request of senators and members of the House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle,” Mayorkas said. “I must say, senator, [I] take issue with the use of the term ‘intervene.’ It is my job to become involved.”
Mayorkas, 61, was USCIS director from 2009 to 2013 and then DHS deputy director until resigning in 2016. While there, the DHS Office of Inspector General accused Mayorkas of creating the appearance of “favoritism and special access” by ordering staff to fast-track visa applications that benefited Democratic sponsors, including former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, and Hillary Clinton’s brother Anthony. Mayorkas stepped down from his post in October 2016, months shy of former President Barack Obama’s departure.
The EB-5 program was created in 1990 to give immigrants a pathway to citizenship if they agree to create 10 full-time jobs for U.S. workers. The investor, as well as his or her immediate family, is eligible for a green card, which allows him or her to reside permanently in the country for several years before applying for citizenship. The program is overseen by the USCIS within the DHS. Portman inquired why Mayorkas had created a review board to reconsider certain cases that had been denied by agency staff.
“This board did not previously exist and was never used again after it voted to reverse the adjudicators’ proposed denials,” Portman said. “Remarkably, there’s no record of the proceedings of this board.”
“When the agency made a decision in an EB-5 investor visa case and millions and millions of dollars of investor capital and the creation of jobs for U.S. workers was dependent upon that decision, was it fair for the agency to, later in the adjudicative process, change its mind and kill the business development?” Mayorkas replied. “I created the deference review board as one fix to the many problems that we encountered in that agency.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, was unsatisfied with Mayorkas’s repeated statements that he had “learned” from the incident.
“I would have anticipated that when Sen. Portman asked you what have you learned from this process, that you might say, ‘I have learned from the process that when something appears to be political, I should recuse myself.’ Is that not a lesson you learned?” Romney asked.
Mayorkas said he “prided himself” in his “responsiveness” when working one-on-one with lawmakers who referred cases to him and that USCIS established “guardrails” to protect “against the appearance of favoritism,” though he did not reveal those procedures.
Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, was chairman in 2013 when Mayorkas was being considered by the same committee for DHS deputy secretary.
“I remember very well the effort to smear this man’s character based on the 2013 inspector general investigation, which was leaked to the press again before his confirmation here,” Carper said. “The claims made were fully investigated by a subsequent inspector general, and Mr. Mayorkas was found to be guilty of one thing: that’s creating an appearance of favoritism.”
Carper added that the government official who initiated the investigation was responsible for the leak, resigned under allegations of misconduct, and was charged last year with fraud.
Portman pushed back, stating that the third-largest federal department needed a person of the “utmost integrity” as its leader and that DHS whistleblowers had reported him for other problems.
“One witness stated that encounters with Mr. Mayorkas ‘were uncomfortable, aggressive, unusual, and unsettling,’” Portman said. “The [inspector general] noted that the variety of witnesses that came forward was unusual. Individuals who raised concerns were ‘throughout the ranks of USCIS in different locations engaged in different functions with different experience levels.’”
