When immigration agents begin to implement President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty for an estimated five million illegal immigrants, the potential for fraud may increase as officials who are already pressured to rubber-stamp applications may be pushed to approve even more in a shorter amount of time.
According to a Politico report, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) “may have to double its capacity for applications very quickly,” which critics have said increases the “potential for fraud,” while wait time for legal immigrants trying to follow the law “could dramatically increase.”
Under Obama’s first executive amnesty for certain DREAMers, wait times for legal immigrants who were playing by the rules increased threefold, and those wait times may drastically increase once USCIS starts processing millions of executive amnesty applications. On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who, along with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), has called on Congress to prohibit Obama from implementing his executive amnesty, said Obama is essentially ordering the “counterfeiting immigration papers” while hurting legal immigrants who are following the rule of law.
As Breitbart News has noted, USCIS agents have been “pressured to rubber stamp applications instead of conducting diligent case review and investigation.” And Kenneth Palinkas, the head of the union that represents USCIS agents, has said that “USCIS has been turned into an ‘approval machine.'”
“The culture at USCIS encourages all applications to be approved, discouraging proper investigation into red flags and discouraging the denial of any applications,” Palinkas said.
USCIS agents may get pressured even more as pro-amnesty activists, many of whom believe Obama’s executive amnesty did not go far enough, will demand tangible results as soon as possible.
A former federal immigration official who was involved with planning the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program expressed concerns to Politico that doubling the number of petitions that the agency processes will not only strain the agency but tempt agents to “cut corners” because “there will be a lot of pressure on the administration to ensure that people start seeing visible, tangible results of this announcement quickly–so that it feels real.”
The White House is reportedly more concerned that illegal immigrants do not experience the same difficulties that Americans trying to buy new healthcare plans experienced during the Obamacare rollout than about the potential for massive fraud.
White House officials are reportedly concerned about the “logistical and practical execution problems that made the roll-out of Healthcare.gov such a debacle.” They have reportedly had meetings with officials from the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Homeland Security “since February or March of this year to make sure USCIS has a workable plan to handle the onslaught of forms, supporting documents and queries the new immigration actions are likely to produce,” according to the report.
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