Education

Trump Official’s Elite Alma Mater Urges Him To Trash Immigration Policies

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Rob Shimshock Education Reporter
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Graduates from a Trump official’s alma mater, Georgetown University, said that they want him to backtrack on the president’s immigration policies on Monday.

More than 20 graduates of Georgetown urged their former classmate and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna to distance himself from the president’s immigration policies, according to The Washington Post.

“From our time as students, we recall you as a sensitive, compassionate person — a far cry from one of the leaders of our government’s policies towards immigrants that have aptly been described by respected faith leaders as ‘immoral,’ ‘cruel’ and even ‘evil,'” the Georgetown classmates wrote in the petition they delivered to the Department of Homeland Security.

Georgetown alumni were not the only individuals to contact Cissna. More than 300 graduates of D.C. private academy Sidwell Friends School, attended by the immigration director, as well as the children of several U.S. presidents, also expressed their grievances in a separate letter. (RELATED: Princeton Defends Border Patrol Job Listing)

“As a key leader and architect of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, your actions, we believe, reflect the failure of persons other than you in the Administration — especially those who condemn refugees and immigrants as ‘animals’ who are ‘infesting’ America — to see in the faces of immigrants the Inner Light,” the Sidwell graduates said in their letter.

Cissna signed an April letter recommending that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen detain and prosecute parents who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, a recommendation which led to the administration’s separation of parents from children in some situations. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director also received backlash for removing “nation of immigrants” from his agency’s mission statement in February.

“We know that he knows better,” 1989 Sidwell alum Alexandra Tydings said. Tydings helped gather signatures for the letter. “I don’t understand how any human being can do this to another human being. … He is deep in there, he has the ear of the president. I think he has some power here to do something.”

The Sidwell and Georgetown letters will receive “due consideration,” a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman told WaPo.

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