I have sat across the table from a woman I will call Patricia. She came to this country eighteen months ago from Honduras with her two daughters. The men who killed her brother found her name on a list. Her asylum interview was scheduled for last March. It has been rescheduled four times. The reason it has been rescheduled four times is on the page in an internal message dated Monday this week: every immigration officer inside USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate has been pulled off the work the unit was built for and reassigned full-time to two “high-priority” initiatives — screening South African refugees and hunting “unlawful” voters. There is no one left to assign to her case. There may not be anyone left to assign for months.
The men who killed Patricia’s brother are not the men who reassigned the fraud officers. But the order that reached her lawyer’s office on Monday is the order that, two years from now, will let her case sit untouched in a queue. Whatever verdict the system eventually renders on Patricia’s claim, it will not be the verdict the system was built to render. It will be the verdict the system could render with no one assigned to it.
Between October 1, 2025 and July 31, 2026, the United States admitted 10,258 refugees. 10,255 were South Africans. The remaining three were Afghans admitted in November. Some of those 10,255 are Afrikaner families who did flee violence on farms in Free State and Limpopo; the violence is real, and the pain of leaving home is real. But refugee protection is a system built to serve people in flight from persecution, not a system built to serve one ethnic group at a time. The administration’s premise is that white South Africans face a “white genocide” the South African government has publicly rejected as invented, and the administration has raised the refugee cap for one ethnic group only and put every fraud officer in the country on the case.
The voter hunt tells you everything else. I have sat across the table from a woman I will call Angela. She has lived in this country for twenty-two years. She raised two daughters in the public schools of a town in central California. She became a permanent resident in 2014. In October 2024 a volunteer at her daughters’ school told her she could register to vote. She registered. She voted in the school-board election. In April of this year she received a letter from USCIS informing her that her name had been matched against a state voter-roll database and that her green card was being revoked. Angela is one of roughly 35 confirmed cases of noncitizen voting in the entire 2024 general election — 35, out of approximately 154 million ballots cast. The Department of Homeland Security’s own secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said in July that DHS had identified “over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote” in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The actual confirmed number is 35. Angela may not have known she was ineligible. The administration is treating her case as if the answer to that question should cost her the country she has lived in for twenty-two years.
So the entire fraud-detection apparatus of the federal immigration system has been redeployed to find thirty-five votes.
I name this from inside the tradition I was raised in, because the tradition I was raised in has names for what is being done, and because my own community has been hearing those names for fifty years and not obeying them. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,” Jesus says at the center of the final judgment in Matthew 25 — not as one item among many, but as the test by which everything else is measured. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt,” says Leviticus, and the commandment appears more than thirty times in the Hebrew scriptures. Pope Francis, off the coast of Lampedusa in 2013, named what happens when those commandments are ignored: “the globalization of indifference.” The teaching is not contested. The men who did this know the teaching, because their own bishops have read them the Lampedusa homily on Migration Sunday for years. We white Catholics — and I include myself — have heard our bishops read the homily and walked out of Mass into a politics that does the opposite. We have voted, in numbers large enough to decide elections, for the men who did this. We have stayed in the pews. The complicity is ours, and I will not write a column about cruelty done in our name without naming it.
And I have to name the engine that has been doing this work longer than this administration. The fusion of nativism with white-Christian identity politics has been the project of a particular American Christianity for forty years — the same fusion that frames Afrikaner admissions as a providential rescue of fellow Christians and frames a Honduran mother’s asylum case as a bureaucratic indulgence. What we are watching now is a religious-political instrument being used to license both halves of the same cruelty. On the refugee side, a fiction — that white South Africans are the victims of a “white genocide” the world has agreed does not exist — has been elevated to providential status and made the operating premise of a refugee program. On the voting side, a small and dwindling count of confirmed cases of noncitizen voting — 35 in 154 million — has been elevated to demonic status and made the operating premise of a denaturalization campaign. The same Christian-nationalist imagination that reads the Afrikaner as a kind of white Israel, deserving rescue, reads the noncitizen voter as a kind of demonic invader, deserving exile. Both readings use religious language to license what the religion the language claims does not in fact license. The Matthew 25 verdict falls on both. The Leviticus 19 commandment binds both. The Lampedusa homily names both. The men who run this administration have built a politics that selects for one of these readings and against the other, and they have called the selection God.
This is not a redeployment. It is a substitution. The administration has not added capacity; it has pulled every fraud officer off the cases that exist and pointed them at cases it wishes existed — South Africans who need to be let in faster, and voters who need to be found so the president can claim he won a fraud he did not lose. The asylum system, which had already largely ground to a halt, is being hollowed out further. People who fled here and asked for protection are now waiting on a process that has been deliberately denuded of the people qualified to run it. A pattern of pulling immigration machinery off its actual job and pointing it at the political moment’s current grievance runs through the rest of the year: airline workers declining to cooperate with ICE agents at gates, asylum officers told there is no one to train them, green-card holders facing denaturalization and deportation for registering to vote in good faith. A March 2025 executive order opened the SAVE database to state election officials, which is how a handful of officials in a handful of states are now feeding names into federal investigations. The administration’s bar is not whether someone voted illegally. The bar appears to be whether they voted.
I name this for what it is. It is the conversion of a fraud-detection unit into a campaign organ. It is the dismantling, in slow motion, of the fraud-detection backbone of a system that already processes asylum claims at a crawl. And it is done while the documentation is still on the page: the internal correspondence, dated Monday, the refugee admissions data published by the State Department, the Center for Election Innovation and Research review, the DHS secretary’s number and its quiet walk-back. These are not competing narratives. They are a single administrative record, and it shows, in plain numbers, that the unit charged with fraud detection has been repurposed for ethnic engineering and a voter hunt that does not exist at the scale claimed.
There are 10,255 South African refugees in the country this year because a president decided the program should serve them. There are 35 confirmed noncitizen voters in the entire 2024 election to find because the president decided the count was 250,000. Patricia’s interview has been rescheduled for the fourth time. Angela’s green card is on a desk somewhere being revoked. The federal government’s only dedicated anti-fraud immigration unit is now, full-time, in service of both of those decisions, and nothing else. Asylum applicants wait. Fraud goes unvetted. The country is told the threat is enormous, and the country’s only unit trained to investigate the threat has been sent to investigate something else entirely.
If the country wants an asylum system with integrity, an immigration-benefit process with integrity, and a refugee admissions program that is not a patronage scheme for one ethnic group, the answer is not a hearing. The answer is to put FDNS back on the work it was built for, and to stop pretending that 35 cases of noncitizen voting is a national emergency that justifies the reassignment of every fraud officer in the United States government. The men who made this decision can unmake it. The faith traditions they claim to honor — Catholic, evangelical, the rabbinic tradition, every tradition that has named the stranger as the test of faith — call them to unmake it. The door of return is open. The work is waiting.