DOJ escalates attack on immigration judges by sending them anti-Semitic email

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) hostility towards its own immigration law judges is ratcheting up in a particularly ugly way.

On Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that the DOJ sent an email to all immigration court employees with a link to a white nationalist website. It’s the latest move from a Justice Department that isn’t being subtle about disrespecting immigrants and those who work in the immigration field.

The website, VDARE, is well known as a white supremacist, anti-semitic cesspool. With that, it would have been bad enough if the DOJ had just sent a generic link to the front page. Instead, it specifically linked to an article which “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs.” The link was included in an email briefing sent to court employees every day.

The head of the immigration law judges union, Ashley Tabaddor, wrote a letter to the director of the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EIOR), the division that sends out the email briefing. The letter said the link to the VDare post had angered many of the immigrant law judges.

That’s in part because the VDare post specifically addressed the DOJ’s recent move to break the immigration law judges union. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed a petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) as the first step to decertifying the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Immigration law judges have spoken up about how the policies of the DOJ under Trump are harming the immigration process and sounded the alarm about the trampling of due process rights for immigrants.

According to Buzzfeed, which viewed Tabaddor’s letter, the VDare post made anti-Semitic attacks on the judges, including pictures of the judges with the label “Kritarch.” Tabaddor noted the reference to Kritarch in this context is “deeply offensive and anti-Semitic” as it  “casts Jewish history in a negative light as an Anti-Semitic trope of Jews seeking power and control.”

This isn’t the first time VDare has popped up in Republican circles. Larry Kudlow, a key Trump economic adviser, invited white supremacist and VDARE Foundation head Peter Brimelow to his birthday party. Former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo also has ties to the group.

Thursday evening, the DOJ condemned the VDare article, blaming a contractor for its inclusion in the email briefing.

That blame-shifting might be more believable were the DOJ not part of an administration as is consistently and blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant as this one.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.