May 11, 2018 Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced an increase of cooperation. The stated goal is to “better detect and eliminate fraud, abuse and discrimination by employers bringing foreign visa workers to the United States”. This expands the cooperation that began in 2010 between two institutions, especially with DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Now, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) and the USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) will “collaborate to identify the types of information” relevant to each other’s investigations and “promptly share that information” with each other.
Their Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) facilitates information sharing between the organizations (FDNS and IER). One focus is on “an employer’s potential misuse of employment-based immigrant and non-immigrant visas programs to discriminate against US workers in favor of employment -based visa worker.”
The current administration initiated the program “By American, Hire American” in 2017. This changed the IER’s mission from protecting immigrants against employment discrimination to ensuring that US employers are protected. This cooperation will make easier for IER and FDNS to scrutinize employers for violations of the new policies. Now, employers face multiple agency’s review where, in the past, they dealt with only one.
Read the full MOU here: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports/MOU_5.11.2018.pdf
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