Homeland Security’s face, and its irritant
WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump moved to wrap up his unlikely Republican nomination for the presidency, a senior adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, laced into the front-runner in March 2016, in a last-ditch effort to swing the contest to Cruz, the more traditionally conservative candidate.
The target? Trump’s soft stand on immigrant workers.
“He uses the immigrants in ways that advantage him monetarily but disadvantage American citizens,” Ken Cuccinelli said of Trump’s hiring of temporary foreign employees for Trump resorts from Florida to New Jersey. “He says it’s wrong,” Cuccinelli told a radio interviewer, “but he still does it.”
Three years later, the president and Cuccinelli have put aside their differences to make common cause in a pursuit of the fiercest anti-immigration agenda in generations. As the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Cuccinelli now oversees legal immigration, including the visa program that he once criticized and Trump made rich use of in staffing resorts such as Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
From that seemingly narrow perch, he has roiled the Department of Homeland Security, peppering other senior officials with pointed email demands, encroaching on Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and generally appointing himself spokesman for all things immigration in the Trump administration.
In three weeks, one fact has become clear: In Cuccinelli, Trump has found someone to his right on immigration but perfectly in line with his streetfighting skills.
“He has many critics,” said L. Preston Bryant, a Republican who served in the Virginia House of Delegates when Cuccinelli was a state senator, “but they underestimate Ken Cuccinelli at their own peril.”
Cuccinelli, a descendant of Italian immigrants who sought sanctuary at Ellis Island, was recruited initially as the administration’s immigration czar, with the broadest possible portfolio. Within days, though, he was redirected to head Citizenship and Immigration Services. The more limited job description has not hindered Cuccinelli. If White House adviser Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s effort to restrict both legal and illegal immigration, Cuccinelli has emerged as its public face.
He has aggressively pushed immigration policies with little concern for legal constraints. His tendency to make light of sensitive policies has incensed senior homeland security officials, including the acting secretary, Kevin McAleenan, and the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Matthew Albence, according to administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the rising tension among officials.
Signature Cuccinelli initiatives include efforts to speed up asylum screenings, to make it harder for children of some active service members born abroad to obtain citizenship and to force immigrants facing life-threatening health crises to return to their home countries (the administration recently announced that it would reconsider that decision).
His agency also put in place a rule that would deny legal status to immigrants deemed likely to use government benefit programs.