The Trump administration is reinstating a long-dormant practice of conducting “neighborhood checks” to vet immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship, expanding its efforts to aggressively scrutinize immigration applications, according to a government memo obtained by CBS News.
The neighborhood checks would involve on-the-ground investigations by officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that could include interviews with the neighbors and coworkers of citizenship applicants.
The government investigations would be conducted to determine if applicants satisfy the requirements for American citizenship, which include showing good moral character, adhering to the U.S. Constitution and being “well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.”
To qualify for American citizenship in the first place, applicants typically must have lived in the U.S. for three or five years as legal permanent residents. They must also not have any serious criminal records, and pass a civics and English test. The process is known as naturalization.
The Trump administration’s memo upends a decades-old U.S. government policy. While the neighborhood investigations for citizenship cases are outlined in U.S. law, they can also be waived, which the U.S. government has done since 1991, government records show. Since then, the government has relied mainly on background and criminal checks by the FBI to vet citizenship applicants.
The USCIS memo immediately terminated the “general waiver” for neighborhood checks, directing officers to determine whether such investigations are warranted based on the information, or lack thereof, submitted by citizenship applicants. Officers retain the ability to waive the checks, according to the memo.
The directive said USCIS officers will decide whether to carry out a neighborhood investigation by requesting and reviewing testimonial letters from neighbors, employers, coworkers and business associates who know the person applying for U.S. citizenship.
The memo suggested that citizenship applicants should “proactively” submit testimonial letters, to avoid receiving requests for more evidence. The agency said failure or refusal to comply with a request for evidence could lead to a neighborhood investigation and “impact” applicants’ ability to show they qualify for U.S. citizenship.
While the Trump administration’s campaign to expand arrests of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally is frequently touted by the president and his top officials, its effort to tighten access to the legal immigration system has been implemented with less fanfare.
Over several months, the second Trump administration has frozen the refugee admissions program, ended Biden-era policies that allowed some migrants to enter or stay in the U.S. legally and added additional layers of vetting for legal immigrants requesting immigration benefits like green cards and U.S. citizenship.
In August alone, USCIS said it would more heavily scrutinize the “good moral character” requirement for U.S. citizenship and probe “anti-American” views and activities of those applying for green cards, work permits and other immigration benefits.
The Trump administration has argued the changes are needed to combat fraud and shore up U.S. immigration procedures that it believes became too lax and generous under Democratic administrations.
USCIS Director Joe Edlow, who was confirmed by the Senate earlier this year, said the new memo will “ensure that only the most qualified applicants receive American citizenship.”
“Americans should be comforted knowing that USCIS is taking seriously its responsibility to ensure aliens are being properly vetted and are of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States,” Edlow said in a statement to CBS News.
But pro-immigrant advocates and critics of the Trump administration said its policies are sending a chilling effect to immigrants across the country, legal and illegal alike.
“It sounds to me like the idea is to create a more intimidating atmosphere that discourages people from pursuing naturalization,” said Doris Meissner, who oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration.
The now-defunct INS adjudicated citizenship requests until USCIS was created in 2003. Meissner said the government had largely discontinued neighborhood checks when she became INS commissioner in the 1990s because they were labor intensive and seldom yielded useful information from neighborhoods or other sources. She also said there are other guardrails in place to prevent bad actors from becoming citizens, including background checks.
“It was viewed as one of those anachronistic processes,” Meissner added.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/neighborhood-checks-citizenship-applications
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-pushes-baseless-autism-claim/vi-AA1LgS75
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/could-tariffs-ruin-christmas/vi-AA1DdJvl
The president of George Mason University said he will not comply with a demand by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to apologize for alleged discriminatory hiring practices.
The Department of Education accused the university’s first Black president, Gregory Washington, of implementing “unlawful DEI policies” at the institution.
Douglas Gansler, an attorney representing Washington, is accusing the Education Department of carrying out a shoddy investigation. He said in a letter to GMU’s board that the OCR investigators only spoke to two university deans before coming to the conclusion that discriminatory hiring practices were taking place at the school.
“OCR’s letter contains gross mischaracterizations of statements made by Dr. Washington and outright omission,” Gansler wrote in the letter.
He also accused the OCR investigators of selectively interpreting comments made by Washington, Inside Higher Ed reports.
“To be clear, per OCR’s own findings, no job applicant has been discriminated against by GMU, nor has OCR attempted to name someone who has been discriminated against by GMU in any context. Therefore, it is a legal fiction for OCR to even assert or claim that there has been a Title VI or Title IX violation here,” he wrote.
As part of its findings, the Department of Education has demanded changes at the college and called on the university president to apologize.
“In 2020, University President Gregory Washington called for expunging the so-called ‘racist vestiges’ from GMU’s campus,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement last week. “Without a hint of self awareness, President Washington then waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race. You can’t make this up.”
Gansler argued that GMU has been responsive and quick to implement changes brought by President Donald Trump‘s executive orders, pointing out that at least 17 positions associated with diversity or inclusivity have been eliminated or restructured, and that several diversity-focused programs and initiatives have been shuttered since Trump took office.
“Well before the federal government turned its attention to GMU, the university, under Dr. Washington and the Board’s leadership, undertook a robust effort to stay ahead of the curve and make many of the changes now being demanded of universities,” Gansler wrote in the letter.
He said that if Washington were to apologize, it would undermine the school’s record of compliance.
“If the Board entertains OCR’s demand that Dr. Washington personally apologize for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, it will undermine GMU’s record of compliance,” he wrote. “An apology will amount to an admission that the university did something unlawful, opening GMU and the Board up to legal liability for conduct that did not occur under the Board’s watch.”
A pair of psychologists have claimed that Donald Trump has been displaying a “dead ringer telltale sign” of an uncommon brain disease as they say the symptom is getting “worse and worse”.
Clinical psychologists Dr John Gartner and Dr Harry Segal have sounded the alarm over the president’s psychomotor performance as they claim the 79-year-old is exhibiting clear signs of dementia.
Speaking on the latest episode of their Shrinking Trump show, Dr Gartner explained: “Some of the more evidence that we’ve been talking about recently has been his psychomotor performance, that we’re seeing a deterioration in his motor performance, which also goes with dementia because with dementia there’s a deterioration of all faculties, all functions.” It comes as Trump ‘desperately’ tries to hide the back of his hand as fears for the ‘thinned-out’ president’s health soar.
He continued: “The language and the verbal dysfunction is what we notice first and also what we notice in terms of his public behavior, but now his motor performance is starting to get worse and worse.”
Dr Gartner revealed it’s not just any type of dementia he believes Trump could be suffering from, as he claimed the president has recently been displaying a “telltale sign” of frontotemporal dementia. Frontotemporal dementia is an uncommon type of dementia that causes problems with behaviour and language.
It affects the front and sides of the brain, and like other types of dementia, it tends to develop slowly and get gradually worse over several years.
“One of the things that one of the neuropsychologists that we were working with last year pointed out that is almost a dead ringer telltale sign of frontotemporal dementia is something they call a wide-based gait, where you have a sort of one of your limbs, one of your legs, you kind of swing it in a semicircle,” Dr Gartner explained.
The psychologists then pointed to Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin earlier this month. They played two clips of Trump appearing to struggle to walk in a straight line as he made his way down a red carpet to greet the Russian leader.
“He’s weaving all along the carpet,” Dr Gartner notes. He continued: “His right foot is swinging and it’s pushing him to the left. So, as it’s swinging, he’s veering left and then he overcorrects and moves to the other side of the carpet and then it happens again.”
“I mean, if they pulled you over for a DUI and you walked that line, you know, you would fail,” Gartner said after playing a sped-up clip of Trump walking on the red carpet. Dr Segal revealed he’d noticed it too.
“It’s very odd, isn’t it? Because it doesn’t look like someone who’s drunk, but he’s drifting back and forth as if again as if he can’t control one of his legs,” Dr Segal noted.
The psychologists played a second clip, this time it hadn’t been sped up, to show more clearly what Trump was doing with his feet. “One step at a time, right?,” Dr Gartner notes.
“You can see it his sort of the leg swings and it moves him sort of one step to the side. And it was step after step after step and then he overcorrects,” he added. Despite mounting concerns, the president has bragged about his cognitive health.
Following his annual physical in April, Trump boasted that he “got the highest mark,” on his cognitive test, although both Dr Segal and Dr Gartner have previously noted that this should be easy to do. “President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” White House physician Dr Barbabella concluded.
“Overall, I felt I was in very good shape,” Trump said of the results. “A good heart, a good soul, a very good soul.”
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/psychologists-reveal-trump-showing-dead-1349597
