Trump picks anti-immigration activist to head refugee agency

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has nominated a staunch antiimmigration activist to head the State Department agency that oversees refugee and immigration issues.

Ronald Mortensen, a former foreign service officer and longtime fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates against legal and illegal immigration, is Trump’s choice to be assistant secretary of state for the bureau of population, refugees and migration. The White House announced the nomination late Thursday.

As word spread Friday, Democrats and immigration advocates quickly objected. But Mortensen, who must be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, could face trouble among Republicans as well: His long trail of controversial writings and statements includes attacks not only against immigrants but against some Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and John McCain of Arizona.

Mortensen in 2015 called Rubio “exceptionally gullible or just plain dishonest” on immigration issues. In 2014, he said McCain had made the U.S. vulnerable to infiltration by the Islamic State through his “dogged support for illegal aliens and open borders.”

In February 2017, just after Trump took office, Mortensen praised his efforts to step up deportations of immigrants in the country illegally and to ban some legal arrivals. He wrote in a blog post that Trump had succeeded in destroying “the myth of the noble, law abiding illegal alien.”

The Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, where he’s a fellow, has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, a designation it rejects.

The State Department bureau that Mortensen would run is supposed to have a different aim. Its purpose is to “provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world,” according to its mission statement.

One of Mortensen’s favorite targets lately, according to his blog posts, has been the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era permit system that temporarily protected from deportation roughly 800,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.

In one post on March 10, 2017, Mortensen argued that DACA gives amnesty to “criminal illegal aliens” and “most” DACA recipients have committed “multiple felonies to get jobs.”

Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., said Mortensen’s “racist, vile and disparaging comments against immigrants” disqualified him for the post.

Efforts to reach Mortensen on Friday were unsuccessful.