Judge rules Cuccinelli appointment to top immigration post was unlawful, voiding some asylum orders

Washington — A federal judge on Sunday ruled that Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to a top immigration post in the Trump administration, invalidating some of his directives to restrict the access asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border have to lawyers.

In his 55-page order, Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said Cuccinelli was "not lawfully" appointed last year as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that administers and vets benefits for non-citizens like refugees, asylum-seekers and green card holders applying for U.S. citizenship.

Moss said the June 2019 appointment of Cuccinelli, a vocal proponent of President Trump's hardline immigration agenda, violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998. The federal judge, an appointee of President Obama, held that Cuccinelli was not eligible to become acting USCIS director last year because the position of principal deputy he initially assumed was not a "first assistant" job, as defined by the 1998 law.

"Under that commonsense understanding of the meaning of the default provision, Cuccinelli does not qualify as a 'first assistant' because he was assigned the role of principal on day-one and, by design, he never has served and never will serve "in a subordinate capacity" to any other official at USCIS," Moss wrote in his order.

Same for Chad Wolf.

"Chad Wolf did not have the authority to restrict DACA program, federal judge rules"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chad-wolf-no-authority-daca-ruling/

President Trump's top homeland security official, Chad Wolf, did not have the legal authority to restrict an Obama administration program that protects hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors from deportation, a federal judge ruled Saturday.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn found that Wolf was "not lawfully serving" as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when he issued a memo limiting the protections of more than 640,000 current Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries and indefinitely closing the program to new applicants.

Garaufis said he found Wolf's appointment to be unlawful because it violated the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Other federal judges have also raised questions about the legality of Wolf's appointment — which Congress' investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, determined to be invalid in August.

Aka "hatchet men".
[Post edited by Hoo TV at 01/24/2024 09:25AM]