Three days after arriving in Texas, Anna was interviewed by someone who told her that he was “in charge of immigration” and that they could “talk like they were friends.” According to a source with knowledge of the agency, the interviewer was likely an official at U.S.C.I.S. who worked in the fraud-detection unit. “He already knew everything about my story,” Anna told me. Yet his questions were confusingly disconnected. Did she want to be brought back to her home country? Why couldn’t she go home? Had she ever committed a crime? “I didn’t understand what these questions had to do with what was happening to me,” Anna said. “I was depressed. I was crying. What did I do to be here?”
The interview lasted three hours. Two days later, having still not received an explanation for why she was being detained, Anna was taken to the gate outside the facility and told she could go. It was up to her to figure out how to make it home to Minnesota. When we spoke, nearly two weeks later, she still didn’t have her immigration papers. The government had confiscated them.
Last year, approximately three hundred and fifty-two thousand civil servants left their jobs, fulfilling one of the Administration’s stated goals of dismantling the government bureaucracy and demoralizing the federal workforce. Roughly eighteen hundred of those employees were at U.S.C.I.S. “Re-engineering” the staff at the agency, five former officials recently wrote in a recent Newsweek op-ed, served “both as a goal in itself and as a means of reshaping the legal immigration system.”
It began, last February, with a seemingly mundane change. Since the pandemic, a large share of U.S.C.I.S. officials had been performing some configuration of hybrid or remote work. Within days of the President’s Inauguration, the agency’s staffers received the first of a series of directives instructing them to return to the office. But there was no accompanying plan to insure that everyone would have a place to work. “The agency had grown through telework that outpaced the agency’s footprint,” Kate Angustia, who worked in the chief counsel’s office, in Washington, told me. “There were lawyers with computers sitting on radiators and the floor, working in hallways and storage closets.” At an agency office in Chicago, the city fire marshal was called because of overcrowding. On February 13th, the agency’s networks crashed from overuse.
Edlow, the President’s pick to head the agency, was said to be skeptical of the back-to-office policy, but, because of the slow nomination process, it would be seven months before he officially took over. In the meantime, a group of ideologues inside the agency were elevated to the role of senior advisers in its top office. “Most of the people who were picked came from the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate,” Sarah Pierce, who worked in the agency’s Office of Policy and Strategy at the time, told me. Fraud Detection and National Security was one of U.S.C.I.S.’s seven internal divisions. During Trump’s first term, its budget grew substantially, doubling for fraud detection and tripling for national security. But it still had a reputation for being populated by people who, a former staffer said, “felt like they were not part of the agency and had a chip on their shoulder.”
In the past, the early months of a new Administration had been a period of transition at U.S.C.I.S. while personnel waited for a new director to be sworn in. This time, a rash of policies began immediately. Some of the activity was a consequence of the President signing a series of executive orders on the first day of his term to halt the refugee-resettlement program and suspend asylum at the southern border. Rob Law, a senior counsellor at the department, was closely aligned with Miller, who’d openly clashed with high-ranking U.S.C.I.S. personnel during Trump’s first term. “Miller’s turning U.S.C.I.S. into an enforcement arm is making it seem like the reason we have an immigration system is to keep people out,” a former senior agency official told me.
