Sleazy.An arm of the Justice Department regularly sent summaries and links to articles from an online white nationalist publication over the last year, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. In addition, similar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyperpartisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.
In daily bulletins about media coverage for the department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the nation’s immigration courts, a government contractor sometimes included links to VDare, an anti-Semitic and racist site whose editor has claimed that American culture is under threat from nonwhite peoples. That contractor, a Dade City, Florida–based company called TechMIS, also compiles newsletters for other agencies, including the Department of Labor, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Housing and Urban Development.
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[A]n EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] press secretary said that the Department of Justice “condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms” and that the post should not have been included. A former senior DOJ official said that the email in question was “generated by a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings for staff. It is not reviewed or approved by staff before it is transmitted.” “That’s absolutely incorrect,” said TechMIS CEO Steven Mains, adding that EOIR was the most specific and particular of the company’s clients. The agency’s staff would review its work “down to misspellings” if there was anything wrong before sending, he said.
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“It shows an increasing effort to politically charge the perspective of immigration judges who are being tasked with being neutral judges who apply the law,” said the employee, who was not authorized to speak on the matter publicly. “The administration has been taking steps to make the court a political weapon in various ways, some big, some small, this is just one example.”
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On Friday afternoon, immigration court employees were informed that they would no longer receive the briefing and were told to subscribe to a DOJ-wide briefing if they were interested. This instruction was sent hours after BuzzFeed News reached out to DOJ officials for comment on the discovery of the additional VDare links.
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In a story posted on New American and circulated to ICE staffers earlier this month, an author references an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. “Border patrol officials have said as much for months, but House and Senate Democrats, who hope to keep illegals coming in to swell the ranks of the party, have ignored them,” the post read.
Shawn Neudauer, a spokesperson for ICE, said the agency sends the clippings to a subset of its employees. The news briefing is delivered through an email service to the employees after the agency receives the brief from the contractor. He said the agency scans the briefings, which also include links to mainstream news outlets, as a way to understand how they are being written about online.
“Most federal agencies monitor news and clipping services capture headlines from web-published stories,” he said in an email. “It says absolutely nothing about the value of the material received — only noting whatever source said whatever ‘thing’ — which happens to be fairly useful in combating false narratives about the critical work our special agents and officers do every day.”
Buzzfeed
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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