Zulma Diaz
Washington Hispanic
A judge and lawyer specializing in immigration issues will head the United States Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), sources from the Biden administration announced Tuesday.
Considered a severe critic of Trump’s immigration policy, Ashley Tabaddor served as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
News outlets reported on the appointment, including the CNN news agency and the Washington correspondent for the newspaper. San Francisco Chronicle, Tal Kopan.
USCIS is the federal agency that operates under the command of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and that regulates legal immigration in the country. It is in charge of managing visas, residences, citizenships and asylum, the latter one of the policies hardest hit by the Donald Trump government within the framework of ‘zero tolerance’, a strategy that caused severe damage to the due process of immigration.
Kopan indicated on her Twitter account that Ashley Tabaddor sent an email to her colleagues at the Association announcing that she was leaving her job as a judge to assume leadership at DHS under the new Biden administration. “
Upon hearing the news, attorney Alex Gálvez, an immigration specialist practicing in Los Angeles (California), affirmed that “Judge Tabaddor is the ideal person to lead USCIS.”
“He has already proven it in the last four years. She risked her career by demanding that the Trump administration respect the discretion of judges and criticized anti-immigrant measures that affected, for example, asylum, “he explained.
The arrival of Tabaddor to the leadership of the USCIS adds to the appointment of Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of the DHS, who already digested both agencies during the Barack Obama administration. As of press time, Mayprkas was awaiting confirmation by the Senate, where some Republican members expressed opposition to his nomination.
In the past four years, USCIS has grown from an agency serving immigrants to being part of the Trump administration’s national deportation force.
Judge Tabaddor denounced that one of the greatest difficulties registered in the country was the lack of access of immigrants to legal representation, a serious problem that dramatically reduces the probability of obtaining asylum.
And at a hearing held at the House Judiciary Committee in February last year, he criticized the zero-tolerance policy and the impact it had on Immigration Court.
“The Department of Justice has transformed the immigration courts into a kind of assembly line for law enforcement,” said Tabaddor at the aforementioned hearing.
–
