AFL Lawsuit Against Biden DHS Exposes the Political Appointees Destroying America’s Immigration System, Including Those With Ties to Radical Open Borders Organizations

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, America First Legal (AFL) obtained employment records, including resumes, SF-50s, ethics pledges, and more from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detailing the appointees’ full names, salaries, titles, work histories, the agencies they worked for – together exposing critical information on the political appointees in the Biden Administration who are working behind closed doors to implement Joe Biden’s extremist immigration agenda.

AFL has previously exposed the far-left radicals running the Department of Justice and the media has taken interest in the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. In 2021, AFL launched an effort to obtain information. The Biden Administration stonewalled, forcing AFL to initiate a litigation blitz in order to obtain the documents to which it is legally entitled. 

Since President Biden took office, DHS has enacted policies resulting in a record number of crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. In December 2023 alone, there were 249,735 illegal border crossings for the month. Almost 47,000 of these illegal migrants were from Venezuela, and around 6,000 were Chinese nationals. Illegal immigrants commit serious crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens. Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan illegal migrant in February of this year. And she is not alone. Americans believe that immigration is the most important problem facing the nation. The issue leads the list of reasons for Biden’s dismal approval rating. 

The Biden Administration’s radical positions on immigration policy are reflected in the DHS political appointees’ work histories and affiliations, which—to name a few—include:

• American Immigration Council
• Amnesty International USA
• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)
• Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)
• Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC)
• L.A. Justice Fund
• Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA)
• National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC)
• National Immigration Law Center (NILC)
• National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA)
• Open Society Foundations
• UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza)
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

These are some of the highlights:

Felicia Escobar Carrillo is the Chief of Staff of USCIS. According to her resume, she was the Director of Immigration at The Beacon Fund before her appointment, where she seeks to integrate immigrants into American communities and reform immigration law. The Beacon Fund is an investment fund that supports women-owned businesses to combat gender bias in Private Equity and Venture Capital firms.

• Prior to joining USCIS, Escobar Carrillo sought to increase immigration legal representation rates as a consultant at the L.A. Justice Fund. The Fund provides counsel to illegal immigrants in deportation proceedings. She was also the special assistant to the President for Immigration Policy at the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama Administration.
• Escobar Carrillo began her career as a policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, which has been renamed UnidosUS. Over the years, La Raza has pushed immigration amnesty, opposed workplace enforcement, and fought against even the most basic voter integrity and national security proposals.
• Escobar Carrillo is also a member of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, a non-profit organization committed to advancing gender parity in national security and foreign policy decision-making. The organization provides a guide for implementing DEI into political appointments in the federal government. For example, the Council emphasizes that political departments should focus on recruiting candidates based on gender, race, and other immutable characteristics.

Bitta Mostofi is Senior Advisor to the Director at USCIS. According to her resume, she was Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs under Mayor Bill de Blasio. While in the Mayor’s Office, she spearheaded the Access NYC project, which provides taxpayer-funded legal help to illegal immigrants. She also led NYC’s efforts to combat the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, including defending DACA in federal court.

• In 2007, Mostofi was an attorney at the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), where she sought to eliminate discriminatory immigration barriers toward Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants. CAIR is a radical pro-Islamist organization that spoke in favor of Hamas’s October 7 war crimes. The FBI has documented the relationships between CAIR and terror groups. The White House recently distanced itself from the organization.

Avideh Moussavian is the Chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy at USCIS. During the Biden Administration, she worked on making it easier for Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to enter the United States.

• According to her resume, she was Director of Federal Advocacy for the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). At NILC, she challenged Trump’s immigration policies in court, including what she labeled Trump’s Muslim ban. Before joining the Biden Administration, she praised his actions easing immigration enforcement and signed onto a letter addressed to the Biden administration that called Trump’s administration policies “bigoted, racist, and discriminatory” and sought to redesignate Haiti with Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
• In 2020, she wrote an op-ed for the ACLU, calling the CARES Act “racist and xenophobic” because it did not give taxpayer money to illegal immigrants.

Amanda Baran was the previous USCIS Chief of Policy and Strategy. According to her resume, she has worked at DHS and USCIS in various roles since 2007. During the Obama Administration, she was Principal Director of Immigration Policy at DHS and advised the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on immigration and LGBT rights. 

• Before that, she was a staff attorney for the Immigrant Women Program at Legal Momentum. Through her roles, she has specifically focused on issues involving women and minority immigrants as well as people under DACA. 
• In 2017, she wrote an article criticizing the Trump Administration’s treatment of female illegal immigrants, stating that “Undocumented women are the lifeblood of our workforce.”
• In 2019, she moderated a panel criticizing the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. The organization that hosted the panel, the Open Society Foundations, is a George Soros-funded philanthropic organization that provides grants to other far-left organizations.
• Previously, she was also an independent consultant for the Immigrant Legal Resource (ILRC) Center. This far-left immigration organization seeks to “dismantl[e] the arrest to deportation pipeline,” which it describes as racist. In that role, she filed a regulatory comment on behalf of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center advocating against the USCIS Tip Form because it causes “significant harm to immigrant communities” by “encourag[ing] the presumption of fraud in the immigration benefits process.” The organization describes itself as “abolitionist,” an ideology that seeks to eliminate prisons. It released a statement on “[d]ismantling anti-blackness and racism.”

Royce Bernstein Murray is the Chief Strategy Officer at USCIS. She was formerly a counselor to Mayorkas in DHS. She has been an active critic of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, criticizing his treatment of asylum seekers. According to her resume, she was heavily involved in leftist immigration policy institutes prior to joining DHS. She was the Managing Director of Programs at the American Immigration Council, Director of Policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), and a consultant for the National Immigration Forum, which advocates for “earned legalization for those among the eleven million who pose no threat to the public.”

Eva A. Millona is the Chief of Citizenship, Partnership, and Engagement at USCIS. Before that, she was the DHS Assistant Secretary for Partnership and Engagement. 

• According to her resume, she was President and CEO of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), where she sought to integrate immigrants into American society. MIRA has supported several pro-illegal immigration bills in the Massachusetts state legislature. These bills include the Safe Communities Act, which would prevent the state from assisting the federal government in deporting illegal immigrants, the Tuition Equity Act, which would provide in-state tuition for public universities to illegal immigrants, and finally, the Cover All Kids Act, which would provide state health insurance coverage to illegal children and young adults.
• She also chaired the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), which advocates for a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants, and she was a director for the Immigrant and Refugee Resettlement Program at Friendly House, Inc.

Afsaneh Ashley Tabaddor is the Chief Counsel of USCIS. According to her resume, she was previously an immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ). During the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice forced her to recuse from immigration cases involving people from Iran. She then further condemned the Trump Administration’s handling of immigration judges.

Blas Nunez-Neto is the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Border and Immigration Policy at DHS. He has been at the forefront of devising border policies for Biden’s DHS. According to his resume, he worked at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the Biden Administration and the Obama Administration.

• An Argentinian immigrant, he has lived in Washington, D.C. since age nine. He has described the Biden Administration’s immigration policies as “middle of the road.” He stated that the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas was “appalling.” He has repeated the Biden Administration’s false claim that DHS has no power to shut down the border. He has also criticized the right’s views on immigration as being “incendiary and verging on hateful.” His current position comes as a sharp change from several years ago, when he emphasized security at the border in 2018.

Charanya Krishnaswami is a counselor for immigration to the DHS Secretary. According to her resume, she began as a law student intern at the school’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School. Since then, her LinkedIn profile lists her work as a Refugee Status Determination Associate at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and as Americas Advocacy Director at Amnesty International USA.

• At Amnesty International, she led the organization’s efforts in challenging Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in court. In 2020, she criticized the government for awarding a data collection contract to Palantir Technologies solely because of the company’s business dealings with ICE.

Eric Hysen is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer for DHS. He has helped implement DHS’s AI Roadmap, which emphasizes the need to decrease bias in AI enforcement. He was previously a senior fellow at the National Conference on Citizenship.

• According to his resume, he worked for the Biden-Harris Transition Team and, in a previous role, he worked with the Penn Biden Center to issue recommendations for increasing refugee access to the United States.
• Between 2017 and 2020, he worked for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization. While there, he worked to advance immigration reform.

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Collectively, the Biden immigration team has aggressively enacted its policy goals of making illegal immigration as easy as possible. In addition to allowing millions of illegal immigrants into the country, the team has provided deportation protection for millions of illegals already in the country. The team has also created programs enticing refugees from Haiti and Venezuela. These programs intentionally coincide with disruptive domestic issues in these countries, like the gang takeover of Haiti that occurred during the Biden Administration.

In 2023, after fighting court battles to end Title 42, this COVID-era policy finally ended. By ending the policy, the Biden immigration team made it simpler for illegal immigrants to enter the country without any way to track whether these people have criminal records. However, the Biden team did not just put in place the pre-Title 42 policies. Instead, it used the opportunity to make illegal immigration even easier, especially for migrants from economically and politically turmoiled countries like Venezuela.

Biden’s immigration team at DHS has decades of experience advocating for progressive immigration policies. Their careers have revolved around streamlining the process for illegal immigrants to come to America and making it harder for the government to deport them. These are the people who are controlling immigration policy and intentionally leading to the current invasion at the border.

We have compiled a database of all of Biden’s political appointees on our Woke Wagon.

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