Immigration staffers pressured to rush visas for wealthy investors
By Jeffrey Anderson and
Shaun Waterman-The Washington Times
Staff at a U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services field office in California were regularly pressured by senior officials to
fast-track visa applications from wealthy and well-connected foreign investors,
causing security concerns so severe that the program was moved to Washington this year.
Documents obtained by The
Washington Times and whistleblower accounts from inside the CIS Laguna Niguel
field office show that staffers, who said they were acting under orders from
senior officials, often rushed or skipped altogether economic reviews of
applicants to the EB-5 visa program, which doles out coveted green cards to
foreign investors who sink $500,000 or more into a U.S.-based business.
Emails from the Laguna
Niguel office show that the EB-5 vetting process was a daily struggle for
government analysts charged with, among other tasks, assessing the economic
viability of applicants’ investment plans. The internal documents detail
repeated violations of agency procedures that allowed foreign applicants to
bypass proper economic review.
Economic reviews of EB-5
applicants and their projects are needed, immigration analysts say, because of
the security risks posed by investors who have not been screened for links to
foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups or organized crime; or whose
funds come from, or flow to, unvetted sources.
The violations came to
public attention over the summer when Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican and
the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, revealed that CIS Director
Alejandro Mayorkas had become personally involved in the processing of an EB-5
application filed by Democratic heavy-hitter Terry McAuliffe, now Virginia’s
governor-elect, related to electric car company GreenTech Automotive.
Mr. Mayorkas has denied any
wrongdoing, saying he got involved in Mr. McAuliffe’s EB-5 application because
it raised an important issue about a point of law in the program.
Nonetheless, the program is
the subject of an audit by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland
Security, of which CIS is part.
Mr. Mayorkas, who is
President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of the troubled department, also
faces a criminal probe by the inspector general, according to documents
released by Mr. Grassley.
The FBI and the Securities
Exchange Commission are investigating a suspected Ponzi scheme in Texas involving an EB-5 applicant, and the FBI also is
looking into foreign business executives who bought into the program,
particularly Chinese nationals, who constitute the majority of the program’s
investors.
Suspicions of foreign
intelligence links of a Chinese investor was one of the factors holding up Mr.
McAuliffe’s EB-5 application before Mr. Mayorkas intervened. But that was far
from the only time when a case that raised national security red flags was
pushed through at the behest of senior officials, according to a federal
whistleblower complaint filed by an analyst on the program.
A May 3, 2012, memo that
the whistleblower sent to David Garner, chief performance and quality officer
for the CIS in Washington, warned of irregularities in processing an EB-5
application filed by an investor in CMB Exports LLC — a firm set up to bundle EB-5 money for an eligible
project.
The memo alleges that in
April 2012 a CIS manager who now serves as special assistant to the director of
the Laguna Niguel office took steps to “circumvent the established review
process as a means to expedite” the CMB application. Those steps, the memo states, included bypassing the
analyst’s required review and ignoring protocols regulating contact between
adjudicators and the contract economists reviewing applications.
A multimillion-dollar
contract between the Department of Homeland Security and ICF Inc. provided for
the economists to be available, on-site, to support the CIS office of fraud
detection and national security. That office was a key part of the plan to
tighten procedures for granting immigration benefits.
An April 4, 2012 , email stated that the manager should convey
information from EB-5 applicants to the analyst, “who will then determine
whether or not a full evaluation by one of the contract economists will be
required.”
But before the analyst
could make that determination regarding CMB Exports, the manager intervened. “Let me know who has this file,” the
manager wrote in an April 26, 2012 , email. “We received an expedite inquiry on this
and we need to move the case.” The email chain does not specify who issued the
expedite order.
The analyst, whose name The
Times is withholding because he fears that being identified might harm his
future employment prospects, said contract economists under his supervision had
noted “potential red flags” with the application.
The analyst said in an
email at the time that he found the application “suspicious” and called for
additional review of the foreign investors with assistance from “national
security agencies.”
But the emails show that,
far from being subject to additional review, the CMB application was routed directly to the manager for expedited
adjudication after she instructed a contract economist that the analyst’s
involvement in the process “was not necessary.”
The manager’s actions
“highlight that [the office’s] chain of command pays lip service to the notion
of rigor and due diligence,” while fast-tracking the process for the “benefit
of external political stakeholders acting on behalf of wealthy and politically
connected EB-5 applicants under review,” according to the analyst, who has
conducted internal audits for several other Cabinet-level federal agencies and
Fortune 500 companies.
The analyst told The Times
that EB-5 economic reviews of applicants were routinely rushed through the
process in four to five days during the months he worked there. Often, he said,
the application would arrive, as did the one from Mr. McAuliffe’s car company,
on a fast track with instructions from the manager that Mr. Mayorkas “needs
this fast.”
Sometimes, the analyst
said, the manager would invoke Donald Neufeld, associate director of field
operations, or Barbara Velarde, the No. 2 official in the CIS service centers
operation, both of whom are based in Washington .
In December, Mr. Mayorkas
announced he would be transferring the program from Laguna Niguel to Washington . Spokesman Christopher Bentley said the move was “a
direct reflection of CIS‘ continued prioritization of the program’s integrity,”
and the agency’s new focus on fraud detection and prevention.
“In recent years, the EB-5
program has grown steadily in both volume and complexity,” Mr. Bentley said,
adding the office in Washington was “staffed primarily with officers who have economic, business, and
legal backgrounds and expertise.
The move, completed in May,
also made it easier to tap the skills of federal police and intelligence
agencies, allowing CIS officials “to work directly and at a high level with our
law enforcement and security partners across the federal government.”
If you’re a USCIS employee (or former employee) who
can confirm or repudiate allegations similar to the ones made in this article, we
would love to hear from you. Contact us as insiders@insideins.com. Your anonymity
is guaranteed!
Ben Ferro
thnks for information
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