President Donald Trump’s administration has come up with a new scheme that will gut due process for asylum applicants.
Officers at the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, or FDNS, have been reassigned to two other immigration projects, undermining training for the agency’s asylum program, The Guardian reported Monday.
Immigration officers have been reassigned to two supposedly “high-priority” initiatives: screening South African refugees and “unlawful” voters, according to internal correspondence obtained by the publication. As a result, the FDNS will not be able to assign personnel to train the asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS.
FDNS’s main functions are to investigate immigration-related fraud, establish guidance for vetting and adjudicating asylum cases, and implement screening policies and procedures.
These new initiatives are clearly inspired by two Trump administration priorities that can best be described as seeking to fix something entirely nonexistent: the first, cracking down on phantasmal voter fraud; the second, supporting the immigration of Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch colonizers in South Africa, who are fleeing an equally imaginary white genocide.
Any disruption in training asylum officers will further slow down the processing of asylum cases—which have already come to a screeching halt under the Trump administration.
Last month, the USCIS proposed a new rule that would refer asylum applicants for deportation without offering them an interview or hearing. The move is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to transform the agency into yet another arm of the president’s mass deportation machine.
Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Maine to stump for Republican Senator Susan Collins as her midterm election against Democrat Troy Jackson approaches. Yet Collins has been a no-show for each visit, leading to speculation that she is deliberately avoiding the vice president and the greater Trump administration.
In his latest visit to Maine on Monday, Vance heaped praise on Collins during a rally at defense technology manufacturer Compotech.
“Whenever I’m in the great state of Maine … I gotta give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vance said at the rally. “Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder. But she makes it harder because she is coming to work every single day and fighting not for a political party…. She fights for the great people of Maine.”
Vance also mentioned that Collins had been to his house about six times.
Vance: "The second shout out I gotta give is to my dear friend Susan Collins, the senator from Maine. Thank you!…She has been to my house probably a half dozen times, the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory." pic.twitter.com/JOipfRFFCA
It’s no surprise Collins didn’t show up to the rally. President Trump has a nearly 60 percent disapproval rating among Mainers as of last month, and nothing indicates any future improvement. The vast majority of Mainers don’t think their state is affordable, and Maine business has suffered significantly due to the most recent 50 percent tariff trade war the Trump administration started with Canada.
Collins has made a point to distance herself from Trump on his new tariffs threat against Canada, saying that they would be a “mistake.” She also drew a line in the sand against the administration’s attack on mail-in ballots, which she called “very important to the people of Maine,” particularly seniors.
Collins was called out by Jackson the morning of the rally.
