All US anti-fraud immigration officers pulled off their jobs to screen South Africans

Every immigration officer in the United States unit that hunts fraud in immigration applications has been reassigned full-time to two projects: screening South African refugees and checking for voters who are not citizens.

As The Guardian reported on 25 August, internal correspondence from the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) records the move. The message, sent on a Monday, states that all FDNS immigration officers have been reassigned full-time to one of two high-priority United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) initiatives, and that because of this the agency will not be able to assign officers to its training portfolio for the near future.

USCIS sits inside the Department of Homeland Security. Asked about the reassignment, a USCIS spokesperson, Zach Kahler, said the directorate works on different vetting portfolios to combat fraud, maintain the integrity of the immigration system, and detect national security and public safety threats. Kahler said that mission set includes a number of priorities, including election integrity and refugee screening.

The FDNS is the USCIS unit that detects fraud and national security concerns in immigration benefit applications, asylum claims among them. Its officers work with asylum offices to flag cases needing further investigation, refer matters to law enforcement, and help asylum officers spot potential fraud and other red flags. The internal message addresses only the agency’s ability to supply officers for asylum officer training. It does not say whether routine FDNS screening of pending asylum applications has also slowed or stopped, and The Guardian states it has not independently confirmed whether that screening is affected.

What the numbers show is a refugee programme pointed almost entirely at one country. The most recent refugee report from the US state department records that of the 10,258 refugees admitted to the United States between 1 October 2025 and 31 July 2026, 10,255 were from South Africa. The remaining three were Afghans admitted in November.

That concentration is the visible result of an American policy choice. The Trump administration has moved to sharply curtail refugee resettlement overall while prioritising admissions of South Africans, primarily Afrikaners, on the argument that they face racial discrimination and what United States officials describe as white genocide. The South African government has rejected that characterisation as unfounded and politically motivated.

For South Africans watching from here, the practical effect is narrow and specific. A refugee route that was effectively closed to most of the world has been opened wide to a single nationality, and the American officers who would ordinarily spend their time on fraud detection across the whole immigration system are now spending it on that route and on voter checks. The training pipeline that produces asylum officers is the first documented casualty, because the officers who would deliver it are no longer available.

The second priority in the internal message is screening for unlawful voters. It sits inside a wider American effort to find noncitizens said to have registered or voted in United States elections. Experts have expressed scepticism about the scale of the problem. USCIS has already moved to bar naturalisation for green card holders who voted or registered to vote, and to pursue deportation proceedings against them. A March 2025 executive order opened the USCIS Save database to state election officials, which fed investigations in several states into noncitizens accused of casting ballots.

Confirmed cases are rare. A February review by the Center for Election Innovation and Research noted roughly 35 confirmed cases of noncitizen voting in Iowa in the 2024 general election. The Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said in July that the department had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. That figure later emerged to be far lower in confirmed terms.

None of this is a South African story in its origins. It is an American administration ordering its own agencies about, and the reassignment is documented in its own internal correspondence. What makes it matter here is that the South African passport is now the one moving through the pipeline in volume, and the machinery built to check immigration applications for fraud has been emptied of the officers who run it in order to do so.

The Guardian’s account is accurate on the record it cites, and it does the work of publishing the internal message. What a South African reader brings to it is the other half of the context: the 10,255 figure is not an accident of demand. It follows a deliberate decision in Washington to favour one group of South Africans over everyone else, a decision taken against the stated position of the government in Pretoria.

This paper will keep tracking what the American refugee route means for the South Africans who use it, and what the South African government says about a policy built on a claim it rejects.

Source: The Guardian, US immigration officers reassigned to screen South African refugees and find ‘unlawful’ voters.