A top government accountability group will send a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Selective Service System (SSS) for data on illegal immigrants who did not register for the draft and therefore committed a felony.
Oversight Project executive director Mike Howell – whose group is filing the action – underlined the move is not an illustration of any support for illegal immigrants serving in the military.
By law, all U.S. males aged 18-26 must register with the SSS under penalty of felony conviction and $250,000 fine under the Military Selective Service Act of 1917, Howell’s group noted in their filing.
Additionally, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 makes failure to register with the SSS a deportable offense, and the SSS website clearly states undocumented aliens are required to sign up for the draft, Howell noted.
However, the Oversight Project’s filing also cites a passage on the SSS website saying the agency does not share or collect information on a man’s immigration status and has “no authority to collect such information, has no use for it, and it is irrelevant to the registration requirement.”
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Given that discrepancy, the letter goes on to cite a 2023 SSS report to Congress cataloging 23,249 registrations from USCIS – the federal agency responsible for overseeing legal immigration – but no data from ICE, the Office of Refugee Resettlement or other agencies engaged in handling illegal immigration and asylees.
In a Thursday interview, Howell and attorney Kyle Brosnan said SSS registration has been flat during the Biden administration as far as it relates to the obvious uptick in “military-aged males” crossing the border and being “caught-and-released” by federal immigration authorities.
“The absence of such a surge indicates that there is widespread criminal non-compliance by such aliens,” they wrote in their FOIA request.
“There should be a large increase in [SSS registration] with 10 million illegals that have come over the border in the last four years,” Brosnan said.
“Former Secretary Mayorkas went on the Hill and talked about how good [Biden’s DHS] was at processing people – well, how didn’t that processing lead to an increase in registrations for Selective Service?”
“What we are really looking at now is whether the Selective Service under the Biden administration took this into account and they purposely avoided this issue for political reasons.”
“If you look at their website… they go out of their way to assure illegal aliens like we’re not going to share information with ICE… So I want, you know, whether those people have any culpability for failing to register the biggest population surge of military age males in U.S. history when their job is to register military.”
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Howell said the FOIA request’s results could go beyond the scope of just determining whether undocumented residents of the U.S. may have attempted to avoid the draft – but also potentially offer an additional avenue for Border Czar Thomas Homan’s mass deportation plans.
With failure to register with SSS being a felony and a deportable offense, Howell said that if the threads are pulled further on this situation, it could provide simplified legal grounds for the mass deportation plans of the Trump administration.
“Now that this little quirk has been figured out, how can ICE and other entities in the federal government use this new authority to drastically scale-up immigration enforcement?”
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“You can turn a class of individuals into potential criminals overnight. What it also means is you don’t need ICE necessarily to do it. [Alleged SSS violators] would be prosecuted by DOJ. That means they’re in other beds that aren’t ICE beds. So you’re looking at all of them being in federal prison potentially, as opposed to taking up space in ICE custody,” Howell said.
“All of these things open up the aperture for immigration enforcement in a huge way.”
The Oversight Project went on to formally request at least a dozen data points from SSS in hopes of ascertaining how many asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are violating the law twofold with their avoidance of the draft.
Copies of the letter will also be sent to Homan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
