The Department of Homeland Security has quietly terminated the investor visa center run by Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham.
Rodham’s Virginia Center for Foreign Investment and Job Creation, run out of a small office in McLean, was shut down on Sept. 29 without any fanfare.
USCIS states two reasons a regional visa center can be closed: first, if the center doesn’t submit the required documentation, and second, if the center does not promote economic growth. It’s unclear exactly why the center has been terminated. USCIS did not respond to a request for comment from Law360.
The center shared the same address as Gulf Coast Funds Management, which Rodham used to funnel EB-5 investment to GreenTech Automotive. Rodham used his political clout to email then-director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to fast-track EB-5 visas for GreenTech, a company run by now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Rodham. McAuliffe resigned shortly before he became the governor in 2013. The EB-5 program offers green cards to foreign investors who pour a certain amount of money into job-creating companies in the United States.
Although designed to produce electric cars, GreenTech has only manufactured 25 of them and not sold a single unit, even though the company has taken huge investment from China and promised to produce 30,000 cars every year since 2014 and after. The car made by GreenTech, named MyCar, can’t travel faster than 25 miles an hour.
DHS Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was caught fast-tracking EB-5 visas for Rodham while he was director of USCIS, resigned last Wednesday, following a investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The report revealed that neither DHS, nor the Office of Government Ethics, moved to initiate further ethics investigations into Mayorkas’ activities, which is likely a violation of federal ethics law, even after a damning 2015 DHS inspector general report showed he was improperly involved in the visa process.
Mayorkas reportedly threw a fit when an administrative judge refused to provide the decision on the EB-5 application for GreenTech that Mayorkas wanted.
“Give it to me, I’ll write the f***ing thing myself,” Mayorkas apparently said during an EB-5 financing round in 2011.
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