DOJ Manages to Stay Racist Even Though Attorney General No Longer Named After Confederates

By Caitlin Cruz  |  August 22, 2019 | 10:07pm
Trump Administration

Who needs an attorney general named after multiple Confederates to be racist? Apparently not Trump’s Department of Justice, which is managing its rate of racism just fine under Attorney General William Barr, thank you very much!

Earlier this week, the Justice Department sent an email to all immigration court employees that included a link to a blog post from the white nationalist website VDare that “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs,” according to a letter published by BuzzFeed News.

The weekday email sent to immigration court employees is similar to a daily newsletter. The email with the anti-semitic link was sent Monday, according to a letter from a representative of the immigration judges union.

Ashley Tabaddor, the immigration judges union chief, sent a letter to DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) director James McHenry condemning the email link to the post, which included names and pictures of judges and the word “kritarch.”

Union members have (rightly) been complaining. “NAIJ has received numerous complaints from judges across the nation who found the blog offensive and equated having it on the official EOIR web site to working in a hostile work environment,” Tabaddor wrote in the letter, published in a tweet by BuzzFeed’s Hamed Aleaziz.

The letter went on to explain how the linked post promoted anti-semitic tropes, in case the EOIR wasn’t getting it. “The reference to Kritarch in a negative tone is deeply offensive and Anti-Semitic,” Tabaddor wrote of the reference to the Old Testament. “VDare’s use of the term in a pejorative manner casts Jewish history in a negative light as an Anti-Semitic trope of Jews seeking power and control.”

A spokesperson for the EOIR said the daily email is “compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included,” according to a statement to BuzzFeed News. Also, the statement from assistant press secretary Kathryn Mattingly stated that the DOJ condemns anti-semitism.

 
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