John Lafferty, Chief of the Asylum Division, helped to lead Operation Allies Welcome, a program designed to process Afghan refugees into the United States following the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Starting in August 2021, at the President’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security has served as the lead federal agency coordinating Operation Allies Welcome, a whole-of-society effort to help vulnerable Afghans resettle. This effort has rallied support from numerous agencies across the federal government, state and local governments, resettlement agencies, veterans, faith-based organizations, and volunteers from local communities across the United States. We are deeply grateful to all who have been involved for their dedication to the mission. It has been a true privilege to serve alongside each of them,” said John Lafferty, Senior Response Official for Operation Allies Welcome. “While operations at the NCC have come to an end, the work continues. We remain fully committed to continuing the work of welcoming and resettling Afghan nationals.”
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Two years after Operation Allies Welcome began, it was revealed that the program's lax vetting procedures allowed a terrorist from Afghanistan to enter the United States. While the plot was ultimately thwarted, this security breach highlights the reckless disregard for American safety under John Lafferty's leadership.
“U.S. officials believe the Afghan national accused of plotting an Election Day terror attack was radicalized two years after coming to the U.S. on humanitarian parole as part of Operation Allies Welcome.”
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In 2019, John Lafferty was removed from his position after undermining President Trump's efforts to secure our borders and reform our broken asylum system. Lafferty’s stance was seen as "pro-asylum" compared to the Trump Administration's goals.
"The asylum division under Lafferty had long been a “source of frustration” to the Trump administration, particularly senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, according to The Washington Post."
Trump, who has made anti-immigration policies a signature of his presidency, has repeatedly railed against the U.S. asylum program, which he called a “scam” earlier this year.
Lafferty is a “pro-asylum” official who was well-liked in his division, a USCIS officer told the Post. “He clearly respected their work, and you could tell he wasn’t too enthused about the various new policies under the Trump administration.”
In July, BuzzFeed reported that Lafferty had penned a memo to staffers critical of a fast-tracked Trump administration policy that ended asylum protections for migrants who transited through another country before arriving in the U.S.
“We are once again being asked to adapt and todo so with very little time to train and prepare,” Lafferty wrote at the time. “If I didn’t know that we have some of the most dedicated, most adaptable and most talented public servants presently serving in the federal government I would be concerned about being able to implement these changes on such short notice.
The Huffington Post even reported that Lafferty’s departure was “shocking and distressing” for the bureaucrats working in the Asylum Division – the same bureaucrats that resisted Trump Administration immigration policies and dutifully implemented disastrous Biden Administration immigration policies.
Another USCIS official told the outlet that Lafferty’s departure was “shocking and distressing news for the civil servants” who work in the asylum division.
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John Lafferty is clearly a key cog in the Biden Administration’s asylum granting machine. Lafferty was such a problem during the Trump Administration that he has already been removed from the job once before. In the event of a future conservative administration, he will need to be removed again.
Under John Lafferty's leadership, the USCIS Asylum Division demonstrated a troubling lack of transparency by attempting to delete crucial asylum training documents. Rather than preserving and archiving these important materials for accountability and future reference, Lafferty's administration sought to erase them from the record.
USCIS REMOVED ASYLUM TRAINING DOCUMENTS FROMWEBSITE AT DIRECTION OF TOP BRASS
"In answer to our first question who initiated the removal? The records turned over under FOIA show that USCIS' training materials, which had been public for years, were in fact removed at the explicit direction of the Asylum Division's top official. Even as that official, John Lafferty, acknowledged that the materials were of significant public interest, correspondence shows he rebuffed his own staff's suggestion to archive them. USCIS personnel also took steps to ensure that they wouldn't show up in search results.
Lafferty's order came through a deputy, Arthur Hale, on April 4, 2017. "Per John's direction, we request that the information on the Asylum Division Training Programs page of the USCIS website be removed as soon as practicable," Hale wrote, in a message to another staffer, Alexandra Grammer. Hale initially offered no reason for the removal.
The next morning, Grammer replied to Hale, copying Lafferty. She suggested the page in question could be archived rather than removed "so it would still be available" but located "in a separate section of the web." Moving the page into an archive would add a banner that would indicate that the documents were "out of date and not being updated," Grammer explained.
Lafferty himself rejected Grammer's archiving suggestion a little less than an hour later.
"I would prefer that the items be deleted completely, rather than archived," he wrote. In the same email, Lafferty also requested that a sentence reading "most of the Asylum Division's training materials are available to the public" be removed from the website.
While Lafferty would write in a subsequent email that, in his view, "most of these [materials] are seriously obsolete," he also seemed to acknowledge what experts told us when we first documented the removals; even the older materials were of significant interest to the public, and were likely to be the subject of frequent FOIA requests.
"I fully anticipate that the Lesson Plans are requested so often that they will end up in FOIA's Electronic Reading Room, "Lafferty wrote."
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