Grift for the Mill

Haunted by the story of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is where the Justice Department's immigration policy is administered from, and thus the employer of the nation's 400 immigration judges, and sends all its employees a near-daily bloggy compilation of memos and news clippings and the like:

But on Monday, tucked between stories from The Washington Post and a public radio station, the briefing included a summary of and a link to a blog post from what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “Hate Group”: Vdare.com, a frequent platform for white nationalists espousing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Vdare post singles out immigration judges by name, uses their photos and refers to them with an anti-Semitic slur. 

Coming the same week, as Reis Thebault notes at the Washington Post, as Trump scolded American Jews for being "disloyal" when they vote for Democrats and singled out the fanatical Jew-hater Henry Ford for praise, and a growing recognition that the White House may have an anti-Semitism problem. As the president of the judges' union, Ashley Tabbador, explained in a letter to the EOIR director James McHenry, the post was creating a hostile work environment:

EOIR quickly issued a statement agreeing that the thing shouldn't have happened, blaming it on an unnamed "contractor" who produces the newsletter, and announcing that "The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms," but not saying whether the contractor was going to be disciplined or offering the formal apology Tabbador had requested for her members.

The thing is, the Post article goes on to say, this is not an isolated incident: immigration lawyer Matthew Hoppock, who has FOIA'd the entire run of the newsletter since it started in September 2018, notes that it constantly promotes rightwing sources close enought to white nationalism that they tumble over the line fairly often:

Rather than just aggregate what the news is saying, these repeatedly include slanted and biased articles from publications like “Breitbart News,” which is otherwise famous for reporting about topics such as “Black Crime.” 

In an October edition, the second article under the heading “Legal News” is an opinion piece from Kris Kobach claiming there is no right to ask for asylum in the United States: 

Kobach is a former Bush administration employee who was too radical to be elected governor of far-right Kansas, with a history of taking political donations from folks aligned with white supremacist groups. He is also wrong; the federal immigration statute plainly gives “any” immigrant the right to at least ask for asylum. 

This “news aggregation” report regularly has the feel of propaganda, as the agency appears to select news pieces that don’t actually reflect the news of the day but instead a political agenda contrary to the law. 

Another oddity: these “morning briefings” appear to be written by a third party called “TechMIS” which I assume is a contractor.

I think Dr. Google has a theory about that, as a matter of fact: TechMIS (Technology Management Innovative Solutions LLC) is a company located in Dade City, Florida that

uses new algorithms to deliver a product rated more highly by customers at lower cost.  The result has been growth for TechMIS at the expense of old-line companies.

Although a new approach to the media monitoring and analysis sector, reliance on advanced search algorithms has empowered Wall Street and micro-segment marketing.  But the answer is not just technology.  Powerful algorithms augment expert human editors who evaluate and classify data based on client priorities.  The result is a tailored report on the client's schedule, usually as most people are waking up. 

including "Media Monitoring". And which has done a lot of work for the government since late 2016 and mostly since early 2017, including $282,000 for EOIR:

Via GovTribe.

So it takes "powerful algorithms" to produce what Roy Edroso calls the Hardcore (subscription) your demented uncle gets in the email

and that smells a little like very high-quality grift to me. But what's clear is that somebody in EOIR wants the product to be the way it is, and I want to see that bigot's ass fired. I hope this isn't the end of the story.