Homeland Security’s citizenship agency failed to spot derogatory information that could have sunk asylum applications in 40% of cases involving Afghans evacuated during the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan
The 40% error rate included failing to spot aliases, skipping required security checks and failing to complete documentation for the cases.
In two cases, the missed aliases involved people who might have been denied admission to the United States based on terrorism concerns, DHS’s inspector general said in the report, released Monday.
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In one of those instances, botched paperwork meant a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services supervisor’s approval was skipped. Another time, two supervisors signed the decision but failed to indicate whether they actually approved or disapproved.
“We identified errors in 40 percent of the applications within our sample,” the audit reported. “Although many of the errors we identified may have resulted from minor omissions, they still resulted in USCIS missing opportunities to identify potential matches between names the provided USCIS and derogatory information.”
Some USCIS employees had complained that a court settlement had pushed them to decide cases faster than was prudent.
The audit, though, said there was no noticeable increase in errors after the court settlement in Ahmed v. DHS.
The Afghans came to the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden administration’s belated attempt to help people who’d assisted the 20-year American war effort. The operation was presented as a way to help pro-American Afghans escape potential Taliban retaliation after the government fell to the Islamic fundamentalist movement in August 2021.
Previous investigations have said the government botched the airlift. That included allowing people with no ties to the U.S. effort to board planes, while denying seats to others who did assist the effort and are still trapped inside the country five years later.
DHS also flubbed the security checks, allowing potential security risks to reach American soil.
The migrants were generally brought to the U.S. under “parole,” a usually limited immigration power that the Biden administration turned into a major exception to the immigration system.
Once here, many of the Afghans applied for asylum. Nearly 14,000 of those cases had been completed by the time of the inspector general’s review.
Investigators picked out 678 of those files to review.
The audit said dictates for speedy processing of the applications, and the sheer number of aliases some Afghans used, the inspector general found one person with 124 aliases, means some may always slip through the cracks.
USCIS said just because administrative errors were made, it doesn’t mean a security risk was approved for asylum status.
Joseph Edlow, USCIS’s director, said in an official reply to the report that officers do make checks against a number of watchlist and law enforcement databases to try to block bad actors.
“The USCIS Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate’s Asylum Division’s screen, vetting and security check procedures are well-established and thorough,” he wrote.
He did agree with the five recommendations the inspector general made for improvements.
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