The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that the Obama administration appears to have accidentally violated part of a court order that prevents it from implementing President Obama’s executive action on immigration.
But the inspector general stressed it found no evidence that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “deliberately” violated that order.
Obama announced his controversial plan to ease immigration rules in November. That plan included an expansion of his Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which spares illegal immigrants from deportation and lets them work for two years.
Obama expanded that to a three-year work authorization, but in February, a federal judge issued an injunction against Obama’s move, and his immigration plans have since been locked in a court battle.
Soon after, however, the government admitted that 55 people received these three-year work cards, and then later admitted that about 2,000 others got the cards after the injunction was issued. That admission drew immediate criticism from conservatives who said the administration wasn’t respecting the court order.
The inspector general report acknowledged that the government shouldn’t have distributed the cards, but attributed it all to a series of errors and accidents.
Specifically, it said USCIS originally tried to stop production of the three-year employment cards. But when the normal two-year work cards were approved, “it was assumed the 3-year cards had been removed from the production queue.”
“That assumption was incorrect, however, and the allowable 2-year cards approved after the injunction were comingled with the unallowable 3-year cards being held,” the IG office said. “Thus, when the cards that had been halted were released for printing, USCIS staff did not realize that both 2- and 3-year employment cards would move forward to be printed and mailed.”
The IG also indicated that USCIS may have other problems with its operation. The IG report said that even after its investigation, it couldn’t determine exactly how many three-year cards were made. USCIS first said 2,128 cards were made, and 64 of those were made in mid-February.
It said the remaining 2,064 so-called Employment Authorization Documents, or EADs, were printed and mailed, but the IG said “we were unable to confirm this number.”
“In addition, USCIS continues to discover 3-year EADs produced and issued after the injunction that are not included in the originally identified 2,218,” the report said. “For these reasons, we conclude that USCIS’ data is unreliable and we cannot validate the number of 3-year EADs either produced or issued after the injunction.”
