DHS Agency Allowed Employees to Stay in Cleared Positions for Years After Being Denied Eligibility

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its mission is to process and vet applications for foreign nationals who want to live, work, or study in the United States. Findings published in a recent Office of the Inspector General report indicated that USCIS disregarded personnel security adjudicative determinations that denied employees eligibility for placement into national security positions and allowed them to remain in their jobs despite not having a security clearance.

The OIG documented there were at least 14 asylum, adjudication, or immigration officers that were denied Top Secret security clearances for things such as lying on their SF-86, viewing pornographic material on government computers, failing to pay federal income taxes, unauthorized use of IT systems for personal use, and failure to disclose dual citizenship and foreign contacts. These officers were allowed to continue working in sensitive positions for years without the required clearance eligibility.

USCIS leadership claimed that the employees were approved to work in non-sensitive duties while they worked through the appeal process, but they never followed through. In any other agency, these employees would have been put on administrative leave for a month or two while going through the Statement of Reasons/denial process and then let go. The OIG found that USCIS failed to clearly define who was responsible for making the final decision to remove or reassign employees who were denied eligibility.

The USCIS Office of Security and Integrity’s Personnel Security Division disagreed with many of the findings, stating the OIG improperly applied the criteria used to make the clearance determinations, however, they concurred on the OIG recommendations to address the deficiencies. In my opinion, the offenses that led to the denials were egregious enough that I would not want someone like that in any government position, regardless of whether it required a security clearance or not. You can read the entire OIG report here.