DOJ condemns white nationalist content sent to immigration court employees

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has acknowledged it made a mistake by sending a link to a white nationalist blog in an email sent to immigration court employees this week.

A spokesperson for the agency’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) said that the agency had included the link mistakenly. The link, which directed users to the website VDare, contained negative and anti-Semitic comments about sitting immigration judges.

The link came as part of the EOIR’s Monday news briefing, which is sent to all employees and contains links to news coverage about the agency, and was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

{mosads}“The daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included,” EOIR assistant press secretary Kathryn Mattingly told The Hill. “The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.”

A letter sent this week from a union representing immigration judges to the Justice Department said that the linked post contained “racial and ethnically tinged slurs” referring to sitting judges and urged the department to avoid sharing such information in the future.

“Publication and dissemination of a white supremacist, anti-Semitic website throughout the EOIR is antithetical to the goals and ideals of the Department of Justice,” the letter read.

A former DOJ official told BuzzFeed this week that the email containing the link was generated by “a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings,” and that it was not released directly by DOJ.