Department of Homeland Security, Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Department/Agency: Department of Homeland Security

Position:

Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Executive Schedule: Executive Level III - Presidential Appointment with Senate Confirmation

Major Responsibilities:

Oversee permanent residency procedures
Process employment authorization and job-related immigration applications
Direct inter-country adoption processes
Set asylum and refugee status
Oversee documentation for immigrants and foreign students

Key Competencies and Preferred Qualifications:

Management experience
Background in international law

Insight:

The Diector of the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) manages some 17,000 employees and a budget of roughly $2 billion to field some 6 million (and growing) citizenship, residency and legal review applications each year.

To cope with the sheer volume of applications, USCIS raised fees effective July 2007 and invested in new technologies. Digitization of more records and an expansion of the E-Verify system, which employers use to check the immigration status of workers, has helped the department run more efficiently.

Technology is also generating new ways to connect immigration officials with applicants and the greater public. The bureau’s Web site features an online journal, which is a blog-like space where USCIS officials post comments and respond to questions. The online space became a forum for robust debate following the publication of a New York Times editorial in March 2008 that was highly critical of the outgoing USCIS director's handling of the spike in applications just before the fee hike went into effect.

“The director of the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, Emilio Gonzalez, is stepping down next month, leaving behind a gummed-up bureaucracy and perhaps a million empty promises,” the Times wrote. “That’s about how many people are stuck waiting to have their citizenship petitions approved by the agency, which was swamped last summer by a flood of applications that it failed to predict or prepare for.”

Gonzalez used the online journal space to rebut those charges.

“The fact is, last year we anticipated an application surge, and dedicated USCIS employees at our Service Centers worked hard and long hours to process the increased number of applications received before fees were raised in July,” Gonzalez wrote. “As a result of their dedication, nearly 750,000 applications were processed in a record amount of time. Instead of commending this effort, the New York Times degraded it, suggesting ‘intentional disenfranchisement’ of Latino voters. That is both absurd and an insult to our workforce.”

New acting director Jonathan “Jock” Scharfen is credited by some observers with significantly denting the backlog he inherited, which totaled 3.4 million cases as of the end of 2003. Scharfen increased his staff, a move that coincided with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's own staffing increases in the division responsible for running the background checks on immigration applicants.

"I can't say it enough that the leadership of Scharfen has really changed the direction of this agency and he's to be credited with some of these tremendous changes," Prakash Khatri, a former USCIS ombudsman, told Government Executive in September 2008. "He recognized some of the things our office and others were saying and actually listened and made the changes that were necessary."

The next director of the Bureau of Citizen and Immigration Services must continue to make inroads into the backlog, while still maintaining high security standards.

Key Relationships – Within the Department or Agency:

Secretary of Homeland Security
Military Adviser
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Office of the Executive Secretariat

Key Relationships – Within the Government:

Social Security Administration
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Department of State
Congressional homeland security committees

Key Relationships – Outside the Government:

Foreign governments
Employers
Immigrants
Foreign students

Nomination Referred to:

Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Current Position Profile:

1. Alejandro N. Mayorkas (Confirmed: August 7, 2009). Former United States Attorney, California - Central District, Executive Office for United States Attorneys, United States Department of Justice, William J. Clinton Administration. Member, Policy Committee, O'Melveny & Myers LLP.

Recent Position Profiles:

2. Jonathan “Jock” Scharfen, J.D. (Acting Director, 2008-2009). Deputy director of USCIS. Former chief counsel and deputy staff director of the House International Relations Committee. Retired Marine trial counsel and staff judge advocate. Served on the National Security Council.

3. Emilio T. Gonzalez, Ph.D. (2005-2008). Lawyer at the international law firm Tew Cardenas. Former director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council. Served in the Army and as military attache to embassies in El Salvador and Mexico. Taught at West Point.