President Joe Biden’s border chief has hired a lawyer who champions civil rights for migrants — but who also urges officials to use the “magic answer [of] prosecutorial discretion” to negate the civil rights of Americans.
The lawyer, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, has been invited to work as the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer (CRCL) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to her employer, Penn State. The office uses Americans’ civil rights laws to help pull migrants into Americans’ society.
Wadhia won the job after repeatedly urging border officials to negate Americans’ immigration with “the magic answer [of] prosecutorial discretion,” as she told a UCLA interviewer in November 2020.
Her “magic answer” denies Americans their civil right to have effective and uniform enforcement of the immigration laws passed by Congress. Those denied civil rights laws, for example, protect Americans’ right to fairly compete for wages and jobs by barring employers from hiring lower-wage illegal migrants.
In July 2011, she described how the “prosecutorial discretion” policy could be used to open the border:
… prosecutorial discretion can be exercised by any branch of DHS in many forms and at many points in the enforcement process, a point reiterated by the Morton Memo on Prosecutorial Discretion … To illustrate, an officer may decide not to bring charges against someone who is out of status and is otherwise in the U.S. working. After an arrest, an officer may decide not to detain a person who does not appear to be a danger or a flight risk. Even after an arrest or detention, a DHS employee or attorney may decide not to serve the individual and the court with a Notice to Appear (charging papers) in removal proceedings because the person appears to be eligible for 4 a family benefit with the “services” side of immigration.
Watch: Joe Biden’s Pro-Migration DHS Lawyer Says “Magic Answer Is Prosecutorial Discretion”
Not using discretion, “will inevitably result in the continuation of enforcement practices that send asylum seekers back … and destabilize [migrant] families and communities,” Wadhia wrote in a 2021 letter to Biden’s pro-migration, Cuban-born homeland secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
This non-enforcement policy has largely been implemented by Biden and Mayorkas, who is reportedly hiring her.
Because of that policy, at least 3 million migrants have flooded over the U.S. southern border. Amid the rush, some Americans have been killed, and many more have lost jobs and wages.
Many additional foreigners have been killed, or have been trafficked into indentured service throughout the United States, because the administration refused to enforce migration laws.
Overall, Biden’s deputies “have effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand,” federal district court Judge T. Ken Wethelrell, wrote on March 8.
“By prioritizing ‘alternatives to detention’ over actual detention and by releasing more than a million aliens into the country—on ‘parole’ or pursuant to the exercise of ‘prosecutorial discretion,'” the judge said, Biden and Mayorkas have converted the United States border into “little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.”
“From what I can see, her entire worldview is based on limiting immigration enforcement,” said Jon Feere, a former DHS official who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. “I don’t see any analysis from her about the [economic or civic] impact.”
Feere said:
If [she] were to do her job properly, she’ll be questioning the civil rights and civil liberties impact of this administration’s [lax] immigration policy. What is the [civil rights] impact of massive increases in cheap foreign labor? What is the [civil rights] impact of choosing not to take custody of thousands of criminal illegal aliens?
These results will have profound impacts on American lives for decades to come, and yet her entire worldview seems aimed at less enforcement and more immigration by any means neccessary.
Pro-migration lawyers in universities “do not stand up for the civil rights of Americans,” said Christopher Hajec, the litigation director for the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
DHS did not respond to a Breitbart News request for information. Wadhia did not respond to emails.
Wadhia’s Worldview
Wadhia’s opposition to the civil rights of Americans is entwined with her immigrant-centered vision of the United States as a destination that should be open to almost anyone around the world.
Wadhia wrote in 2021:
Our outdated immigration system has also impacted so called “legal immigration,” including my family, and employment-based [visa worker] systems have not been updated in decades … I share with my students the analogy of a college or university where annual slots available remains the same for decades [but] without regard to demand, need, or talent.
This vision contradicts Americans’ view of their own country as a nation-state where ordinary citizens govern their bordered society.
Wadhia is the accomplished daughter of immigrant parents descended from a high-caste Indian family. She mines American history, culture, and law for apparent disparities that would justify the easy migration of vast numbers of diverse foreigners — including caste-afflicted Indian contract workers — into Americans’ European-origin society.
She argues that Americans’ immigration laws are outdated and harmful and that migration should be governed by elite-approved “values” — not by citizens’ laws.
“I have consulted or represented [as a lawyer]… survivors of an immigration system that is sorely in need of an update to align with American values and the 21st century,” she wrote in 2021.
Those overriding values include, she said, “hard work and perseverance.”
If that claim is accepted by judges, then illegal migrants could hire her to sue for citizenship after they had worked a low-wage job that would otherwise have gone to a better-paid American.
She endorses the 1950s’ “Nation of Immigrants” narrative created by pro-migration lobbies in the 1950s.
The narrative was created by business-backed lobbies to push back against 50 years of low immigration and high wages from 1925 to the 1970s. The low-immigration decades helped create a high-tech economy, and a middle-class society, and also freed blacks from the cotton economy.
The 1950s high-migration narrative is strongly backed by businesses and progressives — such as DHS chief Mayorkas — but only has the support of less than one-third of Americans.
In 2020, she aided a lawsuit by business groups against President Donald Trump’s popular curb on the inflow of foreign contract workers. The lawsuit was filed despite the coronavirus epidemic and the spiking unemployment of Americans. Yet she wrote that Trump’s curbs should be struck down because it was “a purely domestic issue such as restricting employee access [only] to U.S. Citizens.”
Wadhia also offered her “magic answer” when saying that she had advised foreign contract workers — perhaps Indians — on ways to stay in U.S. jobs during the coronavirus crash.
Before moving to Penn State, she worked for the business-funded, pro-migration National Immigration Forum.
Unfortunately for her vision, roughly 80 percent of Americans want tighter border security.
By a factor of more than two to one, Americans agree that companies “should raise wages and try harder to recruit Americans even if it causes the prices of their products to rise,” said a July 2022 poll by YouGov.com.
Most Americans see Biden’s flood as illegitimate, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center, taxpayer-supported National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority includes 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats. Just 19 percent of all respondents — or one in five — said the term is false.
Wadhia acknowledges that her pro-migration preferences are unpopular, but she urges pro-migration factions to impose their will on Americans:
My experiences overall have taught me that the challenge to enact true immigration reform has rested more on political will than on a sound policy.
Wadhia also applauds the government’s use of obscure terms that hide unpopular policies from busy Americans. She wrote in January 2021:
Remarkably, the January 20 [2021] DHS memo is among the first to utilize the phrase “noncitizen” or “noncitizens,” dignifying those living in the United States without documentation and departing from earlier agency use of “alien” or “illegal alien” in similar documents. Words matter and by using terms that are more inclusive and humanizing, DHS has set a new tone that I hope transforms how the government talks about immigration and immigrants.
She uses the same tactic, for example by describing illegal and legal aliens in the United States — including contract workers — as “Americans-in-waiting.”
For Wadhia, current immigration policies must also act as reparations to compensate groups of foreigners for past policies that have reduced their power and status in comparison to ordinary Americans.
In a 2021 article for the Washington Post, Wadhia showed how progressives use “equity and inclusion” claims to oppose the popular immigration curbs that help ordinary Americans prosper amid a world of low-wage nations:
the Page Act of 1875 [was] one of the first laws passed by Congress to restrict immigration to the United States based on a combination of race and gender. The Page Act barred entry of Asian women immigrants on the premise that they were “lewd and immoral[.]” The language of the statute explicitly forbade “the importation of women for the purposes of prostitution.”
…
[So] Anti-Asian sentiment and stereotypes have underpinned U.S. law and policy for more than 150 years. Reducing the Atlanta killings to a single motivator — sex addiction — perpetuates a long history of discriminatory immigration laws and negative stereotypical representation that commodifies and objectifies Asian and Asian American women in the United States.
The article was headlined: “One year ago in Atlanta, historical exclusion and long-standing prejudices proved fatal.”
Wadhia argues that even race-blind immigration laws become racist and illegitimate when they exclude greater numbers of blacks and Asians than they exclude Europeans. In March 2022 testimony to a House committee, she argued for easy migration as a cure to the claimed racism:
Over and over, national security is used as a tool for immigration policies which explicitly discriminate based on race, religion or country of birth … History will continue to repeat itself unless we do something different. That requires a rejection of categorical exclusions, it requires changing course when immigration enforcement or discretion produces unequal [racial or ethnic] outcomes, and it requires envisioning an immigration policy that is truly inclusive and one that works for everyone [who wants to migrate].
Wadhia also cites “equities” to justify her opposition to the fast-track deportation of foreign criminals.
“I don’t know that any element of criminality should suffice to being a priority for enforcement, or even any felony for that matter,” she told her UCLA interviewer. “Part of that has to do with how I view the role of prosecutorial discretion and the importance of looking at the whole person and equities,” she added.
Her arguments for mass migration and for “equity” between Americans and foreigners echo prior statements by her new boss, DHS secretary Mayorkas.
In immigration debates, “equity” implies that foreigners have the same right to U.S. jobs and homes as Americans.
Biden’s immigration policy “is all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country,” Mayorkas declared at an April 2022 meeting hosted by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
In February 2023, Mayorkas subordinated federal law to the progressives’ vision of “values,” saying:
Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country.
Wadhia’s arguments are also a match for the nation’s post-1990s economic strategy. That strategy imports workers, renters, and consumers to help replace the American jobs and consumer spending that have been exported by Wall Street investors to cheap-labor countries.
“Her view is consistent with the open border crowd’s vision which is ‘There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with massive increases in immigration,” said Feere.
“American citizens have a sovereign right to decide who shall enter the United States,” Feere responded.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it encourages elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of the ordinary Americans whom they want to treat as an irredeemable caste.