You may have read about Homeland Security hiring an ex-spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization to be an Immigration and Citizenship adjudicator in the Department of Homeland Security. I thought of writing about it at the time but got distracted and didn’t have enough information to say anything more than others had.

The House Homeland Security Committee has the same questions I do: How did this happen? Don’t they do background checks at Homeland Security these days?

The Daily Wire first reported on the story 5 days ago, after Nejwa Ali posted pro-Hamas propaganda on Facebook. It was striking enough that the Department of Homeland Security had hired a former spokesperson for the PLO–a terrorist organization–but even more so that she was empowered to adjudicate asylum claims that decided whether potential terrorists could enter the United States.

Ali was hired in 2019 at Homeland Security as an Asylum Officer–so before Biden came into office. She was promoted to become an Adjudication Officer earlier this year. Neither should have happened, and the House Homeland Security Committee wants to know how and why it happened.

The U.S. immigration enforcement agency hired a former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and put her in a position to determine who gets to come into the country as an immigrant or “asylum seeker.” Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officer is repeatedly posting pictures of Hamas terrorists parachuting in with guns and writing, “F*** Israel and any Jew who supports Israel,” a Daily Wire investigation found.

Nejwa Ali worked in 2016 and 2017 as a public affairs officer for the Palestinian Delegation to the U.S., which according to its own website, served as the “PLO office in D.C.” That office was expelled from the country by the Trump administration, but Ali landed on her feet, according to a screenshot of her LinkedIn profile, securing a job at DHS as an “Asylum Officer,” where she was tasked with “applying immigration laws and regulations to asylum applications.”

This January, she moved over to being an Adjudication Officer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). People with that job, according to the agency, “analyze new or amended legislation and policy, prepare written reports of findings, and review and make determinations on cases for immigration benefits.”

Though Ali’s job at DHS included vetting people to make sure they were not a threat to the country before letting them in, it’s not clear that anyone from the agency vetted her. That her primary allegiance was to the Palestinians, not the United States, was evident from her social media profiles, where she posts as “Falastine Mi Amor.”

Clearly, there was a serious breakdown in judgment at Homeland Security. It would be convenient politically to lay this at the feet of the Biden Administration, but the problem clearly runs deeper than the political leanings of any one administration. The people making the hiring decisions at this level are almost certainly not political appointees.

Clearly Homeland Security not only doesn’t have a problem with hostility to Muslims or Middle Easterners; it appears to have the opposite problem. I think we can all agree that somebody who worked for a designated terrorist organization shouldn’t be adjudicating whether somebody should be given asylum in the US.

Certainly, somebody who applauds Hamas’ terrorist attacks shouldn’t be anywhere near the decision-making process.

Ali has been suspended pending an investigation.

House GOP launches probe into Homeland Security’s hiring of ex-PLO operativehttps://t.co/cOTjmUeY8y pic.twitter.com/BcggGE76n7

— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) October 23, 2023

The House Homeland Security Committee has opened an investigation into how the Department of Homeland Security came to hire a woman who previously worked for a terrorist organization and who espouses virulently anti-Israel views.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services placed the employee, Nejwa Ali, on leave this week after her history was exposed, but the agency has not answered questions about whether it knew at the time she was hired that she had worked less than two years earlier at the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in the U.S.

Rep. Mark Green, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, demanded Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas get to the bottom of Ms. Ali’s hiring and how she was allowed to remain on the job as an asylum officer and immigration adjudicator, all while attacking Israel and in recent days celebrating Hamas in social media posts.

“It should go without saying that former spokespeople for groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government shouldn’t be working in our Department of Homeland Security,” said Mr. Green, Tennessee Republican. “We’re demanding answers from Secretary Mayorkas as to why Ali, who also publicly espoused pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic beliefs, was allowed to maintain her role as an asylum officer.”

What were they thinking?