Jason Flohrs: Heidi Heitkamp Brings Scandal-Plagued DHS Official To North Dakota

Today, Senator Heidi Heitkamp will welcome Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to North Dakota for a two-day trip focused on rail and public safety issues.

Or at least, that’s what Heitkamp wants people to be talking about. Here’s what’s really happening:

As the number two at DHS, Mayorkas is responsible for carrying out Obama’s unconstitutional executive actions on immigration, his critical role in which may explain why he wasn’t immediately sacked when the inspector general’s report was made public.

[mks_pullquote align=”right” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#000000″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]…Heitkamp has never had trouble saying one thing on the campaign trail or in public and then doing the exact opposite.t[/mks_pullquote]

Heitkamp insists that she is against those immigration actions, even though she filibustered the DHS bill that would have defunded them. She refused to back up her opposition to the President’s action then, and now, she has invited the very DHS official responsible for enforcing those policies to come visit North Dakota. A curious move for someone who has said they are “disappointed” in the executive action their guest will implement, and concerned it could “poison bipartisanship” in the new Senate.

But then again, Heitkamp has never had trouble saying one thing on the campaign trail or in public and then doing the exact opposite.

Just as troubling – if not more so – is that in his previous role as head of the U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Services, Mayorkas was accused by the DHS inspector general of giving “favorable treatment to high-ranking political officials in helping them secure special EB-5 visas.”

It’s a clear case of political payouts – and for some of the biggest names: then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; former Democrat Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell; Anthony Rodham, brother of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Terry McAuliffe, a former Clinton fundraiser who is now governor of Virginia, all received “special treatment”.

From green energy projects to immigration actions, the Obama administration has taken advantage of broken systems to pay back political favorites, leading to bloated federal bureaucracies, billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, and a dismantling of the U.S. Constitution. And Senator Heitkamp has done nothing to change that.

Mayorkas’ blatantly unethical actions should be reason enough to cancel the invitation – that’s not how we do business here in North Dakota. The fact that Heitkamp hasn’t cancelled raises a bigger question: how long will North Dakota voters believe her campaign-trail lip service of standing up to the President? It’s becoming quite clear that her actions – from her newfound embrace of filibusters to her public invitations to administration officials under investigation – speak much more loudly to her unwavering fealty to an Obama administration plagued by scandals and corruption.