The Department of Homeland Security lacked answers Thursday to piercing questions about how a woman who worked for a designated terrorist organization and espoused virulent anti-Israel rules was hired to decide sensitive asylum cases — and senior former officials urged the department to review every case she handled to correct her bias.
The employee, Nejwa Ali, was put on leave late Wednesday by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the department’s legal immigration division, after her past work for the Palestine Liberation Organization and her anti-Israel social media posts were exposed.
Two men who ran USCIS in past administrations said the agency now needs to do some deeper soul-searching to cleanse itself of the shameful hiring of Ms. Ali.
“Given the seriousness of having a PLO asset and Hamas supporter adjudicating asylum and other immigration cases, I would think that a forensic review of all her cases is urgently needed,” said Emilio Gonzalez, who was director of USCIS in the Bush administration.
Ken Cuccinelli, who was acting director at USCIS and then acting deputy secretary at Homeland Security in the Trump administration, said Ms. Ali should be fired and her cases should be rechecked “with appropriate adjustments made to the outcomes, to the extent the law allows.”
He also said USCIS needs to answer for how it came to employ her in the first place.
“This shows an unbelievable lack of vetting on the part of the department and of USCIS,” he said. “Given the mission of managing legal immigration, this woman is clearly not qualified and should be immediately fired.”
The Washington Times has learned that the House Homeland Security Committee will probe both Ms. Ali’s hiring and her work on sensitive asylum cases.
Committee Chairman Mark Green said it was “unthinkable” that a USCIS employee was cheering Israel’s suffering amid the Hamas attack. He called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to personally get involved.
“Secretary Mayorkas must condemn her abhorrent statements, and he must work to ensure the department is properly screening out individuals like Ms. Ali, whose radical beliefs could very well compromise DHS’s mission to secure the homeland,” the Tennessee Republican said. “The committee will demand answers from the department on how a terrorist sympathizer held this position for years and examine DHS’s hiring practices. We are going to get the answers Americans deserve.”
The Daily Wire first reported on Ms. Ali and her history, including her now-cleansed LinkedIn page where said she had worked in 2016 and 2017 as a public affairs officer for the “Palestinian Delegation to the U.S.,” which was the PLO’s office in Washington.
Ms. Ali also had a lengthy history of anti-Israeli comments online, including cheering on Hamas’ savage invasion of Israel earlier this month.
Her posts in particular celebrated Hamas paragliders who were sent into Israel to secure spots in preparation for ground fighters’ incursion. As recently as Wednesday, Ms. Ali told the Daily Wire she “will abso-[EXPLETIVE]-lutely celebrate them,” according to audio the reporter posted on social media platform X.
Congress designated the PLO a terrorist organization in 1987, though it was granted a presidential waiver to continue to operate its office in Washington. The Trump administration withdrew that waiver and the office shuttered in 2018.
Experts said having Ms. Ali working asylum cases would be equivalent to having a member of the Irish Republican Army or a vitriolic white supremacist reviewing cases, which is why her work needs to be reviewed.
USCIS didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. But after the initial report about Ms. Ali in The Daily Wire, the agency denounced her comments.
“USCIS strongly condemns antisemitism and the use of violent rhetoric in any form,” spokesperson Matthew Bourke said Wednesday. “USCIS employees are held to high ethical standards both on and off duty, including their presence on social media. Any violation of these standards is taken seriously by the agency.”
Hours later, Mr. Bourke announced Ms. Ali was on leave.
Firing her will be much tougher, according to Rob Law, who served as the agency’s policy chief in the Trump administration and who said it could take up to a year to oust her because of civil service protections.
“USCIS absolutely needs to review all cases she handled given her clear animus,” said Mr. Law, who now runs the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute. “This situation is an indictment of the federal hiring process.”
Ms. Ali is the latest black eye for USCIS.
Two years ago federal prosecutors charged an employee with having lied on his naturalization documents. They said Karl Ifemembi first gained status in the U.S. in 2000 through a bogus asylum claim, then in 2010 gained citizenship under that identity. Three years later USCIS — the very agency he had defrauded — hired him under that same false identity.
Making matters worse, his wife worked at USCIS as an anti-fraud officer.
Authorities have also exposed a massive fraud ring being run with the help of two USCIS contractors who worked for the agency overseas, and who used their access to steal and sell deeply sensitive data on Iraqi refugee applicants.
That led to the Iraq program being shuttered for more than a year.
According to Ms. Ali’s LinkedIn page, she started working at USCIS in July 2019, during the Trump administration, less than two years after leaving the PLO’s office.
The agency’s asylum division at that time was run by John Lafferty. Mr. Cuccinelli would later remove Mr. Lafferty from the top asylum post, but he was reinstalled in the job last November by the Biden administration and current Director Ur Jaddou.
Mr. Lafferty did not respond to an email inquiry about Ms. Ali’s hiring.
The president of the labor union that represents USCIS’s rank-and-file immigration officers said he could not comment on personnel matters regarding individual members.
Ms. Ali told The Daily Wire that her personal views did not affect her job performance.
“That does not affect the ability to do my job at all. You can mind your own business,” she said, according to the news outlet, which also said she threatened to call the police if the reporter did not hang up on her.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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