Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
By now, Americans are well acquainted with the most notorious agencies at the Department of Homeland Security: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. But a major part of the Trump Administration’s political agenda depends on a third agency that most people have never heard of. Called U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is responsible for maintaining the country’s legal-immigration system.
The agency’s work is bureaucratic, technical, and undramatic—the institutional opposite of masked agents making violent arrests on the streets of American cities. This is by design. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants applying each year for citizenship, green cards, visas, and work permits have to go through U.S.C.I.S. Since its creation, more than two decades ago, it has been a benefits agency, not an enforcement body. And when people say that immigrants should come to the country “the right way,” they’re referring, whether they know it or not, to the procedures and paperwork of U.S.C.I.S.
But in the last year, the Administration has transformed the agency’s mission and work into something unrecognizable. As I report in my latest piece, which is out today, U.S.C.I.S. is now a central part of the President’s immigration crackdown. Permanent-residency applications from more than seventy countries have been frozen, naturalization ceremonies cancelled. When spouses of U.S. citizens have shown up for routine green-card interviews, they’ve been arrested; others in the middle of applying for their legal status are getting detained and, in some cases, deported outright. The agency is beginning a sweeping campaign to denaturalize large numbers of citizens, aiming to strip them of their legal status; officials have monthly quotas for how many cases they must flag for review. As one former senior official told me, “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.”
For the past several months, I’ve been speaking with current and former U.S.C.I.S. officials as well as with immigrants whose lives have been upended as a result of the agency’s existential shift. U.S.C.I.S. is at the center of two simultaneous ideological obsessions raging inside the Administration: restricting immigration in all forms and demoralizing the federal workforce. Eighteen hundred U.S.C.I.S. officials left their jobs last year. Inside the agency, career civil servants were threatened if they raised legal or substantive objections to the Administration’s most aggressive policies.
Job postings at the agency no longer emphasize the provision of government services, and have instead advertised such positions as “Homeland Defenders,” whose responsibilities include “defend your culture.” For years, the staunchest border hawks and hard-liners justified their positions in terms of stopping unlawful immigration. That pretense has fallen away. Blocking immigration in all forms is the new order of the day.
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