Back in December of 2024, in the last weeks before President Donald Trump took over the government, Rep. Andy Biggs took a hammer to a Biden Administration immigration official, hammering her for fraud in the parole program, which Republicans argued was creating an illegal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
That immigration official that Rep. Biggs took a hammer to was U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ur Jaddou, and the hearing in which Jaddou was destroyed by Reps. Biggs, Jim Jordan, Tom McClintock, and others took place in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
In a video of the back-and-forth feud in Congress that went viral, Rep. Biggs noted that Jaddou wasn’t answering his questions, and pressed her on fraud in the system, “Do you agree that the same Social Security number was used on at least 20 different . . . supporter applications?” Jaddou refused to give a straight answer, and Biggs demanded that she give him a “yes” or “no” answer.
Then, when Biggs noted that the same Social Security number had been used on multiple applications “at least 3200 times,” Jaddou again temporized, telling him, “I don’t have the exact numbers.” He then noted that those numbers came “according to DHS’s report”. He asked, “Do you dispute the DHS report?” She admitted, “No, I absolutely will not.”
She kept saying she wouldn’t disagree, but then kept trying to dodge the questions, leading to Biggs snapping, “So you would deflect and ramble around. You don’t disagree with that number. You don’t think I’m deliberately cherry picking numbers and just saying, ‘Oh, just throwing this stuff out.’ I’m giving you the numbers from the report. You trust me on that? Do you at least trust me that far?”
He admitted, “Yes, I agree with that number.” He then noted, giving another example of fraud in the immigration system, “The same email address was used on at least 20 different supporter applications, nearly 2000 times.” She again tried to deflect when he asked her if she agreed with that number, saying, “If, if there is a situation where we have okay here, concerns of fraud and integrity, we take action CIS,”
Slamming her, Rep. Biggs noted, “Okay. So let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s clarify here. So I’m laying foundation and and you don’t really want to admit that these there’s this much rampant fraud here. You’re trying to tell me that when you find fraud, we hear it, yet…” He then went off to rattle off a huge number of examples of fraud.
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Then, after listing off a huge number of examples, he said, “That is the program that you are administering. That’s the section that you’re administering. That’s the supporters. I’m not talking the aliens. I’m not getting into the the violation of law of the US Code 1182, when the use of parole is supposed to be on a case by case basis, where Secretary Mayorkas himself has sat here and under oath, said it’s supposed to be on a case by case basis. I’m not getting into that.”
He continued, “What I’m getting into is a program the side that USC CIS supposed to actually administer, and that is the supporter applications. And the fraud was so rapid you closed down the program, but you didn’t fix it. It’s still ongoing. We’re waiting for the next report to confirm that these things are still going on because it wasn’t fixed.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video