This week, President Joe Biden plans to nominate Tucson, Arizona, police chief Chris Magnus to serve as commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection and Ur Jaddou to serve as director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to CNN. The White House also announced several additional Department of Homeland Security nominations, including Jon Meyer for general counsel, Rob Silvers for under secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans and John Tien as deputy secretary. Jaddou has been widely speculated as the incoming head of USCIS, which oversees the US legal immigration system. She was formerly chief counsel at the agency under President Barack Obama and led the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security transition review team. The announcements come days after Roberta S. Jacobson, a special assistant to the President announced plans to leave at the end of April.
New Appointments at CBP and USCIS……
If confirmed, Magnus will lead the largest law enforcement agency and the second-largest revenue-collecting source in the federal government. He also served for 10 years as police chief for Richmond, California, and prior to that as police chief in Fargo, North Dakota, according to the department’s biography. As police chief in 2017, Magnus wrote a New York Times opinion piece criticizing the Trump administration’s campaign against “sanctuary cities,” writing that “Washington is trying to retaliate against them by withholding funding for things like crime prevention, drug treatment and mental health programs.” Career official Troy Miller has led CBP, which has more than 60,000 employees, in an acting capacity since Biden took office in January. CPB hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since Kevin McAleenan, who was tapped from the agency to serve as acting Homeland Security Secretary and eventually left the Trump administration. Similarly, under the Trump administration USCIS was led by several acting officials after L. Francis Cissna left in 2019.
