The agency established in 2002, with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to confer immigration benefits on deserving foreign citizens—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—has been essentially leaderless for the last year and a half. From March 13, 2008, with the resignation of its last director, Emilio González, to the Aug. 12, 2009, swearing-in of Obama appointee, Alejandro Mayorkas (who, like his predecessor, immigrated from Cuba), USCIS has been an agency in continuous chaos. Mr. Mayorkas will soon learn the facts on the ground at USCIS—intractable backlogs, opaque procedures, and a doubting-Thomas bureaucracy still mired in a century-old system of paper-based petitions, applications, form letters and boilerplate responses despite many failed efforts at automation.1
Mr. Mayorkas will clearly have his hands full, not the least because USCIS officers, enmeshed in a culture of “no,” are more focused on detecting fraud than interpreting the law with commonsense notions of fairness and justice.2 An unconscionable case in point is that of Ben Neufeld, a Canadian religious worker who serves as music director and youth pastor of a church in Gardner, Kansas. Even the most zealous supporters of a restrictive immigration policy should be asking themselves whether the administration of our immigration laws ought to be entrusted to an agency so heartless or brainless as to separate a pastor from his family over a minor technicality that immigration officers, by statute and regulation, are allowed to forgive.
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