When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joe Edlow returned for another stint in the Trump administration, he expected to wrangle with a mess left by the Biden administration’s border crisis.
Soon, however, Edlow would be met with a surprise. Not only was USCIS forced to tackle a record-setting pile of asylum cases, but he was tasked with leading an agency that, for 4 years, did very little to address immigration fraud. The director has since buckled down on asylum fraud, identifying discrepancies in immigration programs and tightening election integrity.
“What I didn’t know was what some of our backlogs turned into,” Edlow said to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Nominated by President Donald Trump in March and officially sworn into the position in July, Edlow took the reins of an agency put to the brink amid following 8.5 million migrant encounters along the southern border during the Biden era. Although largely unfazed by what he uncovered, the immigration chief says he was still taken aback by his predecessors’ sheer apathy for weeding out fraud.
Prior to leading the agency, Edlow had served as chief counsel and deputy director of USCIS during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. In July, he returned to a backlog of asylum cases that dwarfed the numbers he previously dealt with.
“We had about 450,000 cases that were pending on the asylum active docket,” Edlow said of the end of Trump’s first term. “When I got back, there were over 1.5 million cases.”
“Does anything surprise on me what they were doing? Yeah, what surprised me is they weren’t doing much,” he continued. “We already knew that there was a misalignment of priorities and resources, but that became painfully obvious that really USCIS was acting as kind of the the arm of the administration to help maneuver the parole programs, to do what they could on credible fear and to ultimately try to address the growing border crisis that the Bidens have created.”
Americans are painfully aware of the illegal immigration crisis that raged during most of President Joe Biden’s tenure.
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Author: Dillon B
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