US anti-fraud unit emptied to screen South African refugees and hunt 'unlawful' voters

Every immigration officer in the United States unit that detects fraud in immigration applications has been moved full-time onto two priorities: screening South African refugees and screening for people it calls unlawful voters. As The Guardian reported on 25 August 2026, the reassignment is set out in internal correspondence the outlet saw, and it leaves the unit with no officers available to train asylum officers for the near future.

The unit is the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, known as FDNS, which sits inside US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Its officers normally work alongside asylum offices, flagging cases that need investigation, referring matters to law enforcement and helping asylum officers spot fraud and other red flags. The internal message, sent on the Monday before publication, said all FDNS immigration officers had been reassigned full-time, and that the directorate would not be able to assign officers to the training portfolio.

Asked about the move, 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. That mission set, he said, includes a number of priorities, including election integrity and refugee screening.

The message deals only with 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 said it had not independently confirmed that. A disruption to training limits specialised instruction for asylum officers. A broader slowdown in casework screening would reach further, into applications already waiting.

The South African numbers in the same story are the ones a reader here will want to hold on to. The most recent refugee report from the US state department recorded that of 10 258 refugees admitted to the United States between 1 October 2025 and 31 July 2026, 10 255 came from South Africa. The remaining three were Afghans admitted in November. Ten months, and the refugee programme that admitted those 10 258 people was almost entirely a South African programme.

That is the context the refugee-screening priority sits in. The Trump administration has moved to curtail US refugee resettlement sharply while prioritising admissions of South Africans, primarily Afrikaners, on the position that they face racial discrimination in this country. US officials have used the term white genocide. The South African government has rejected that claim as unfounded and politically motivated. That disagreement is not a side issue to the reassignment. It is the reason the screening category exists, and it is the reason the officers were moved.

The second priority is separate and has its own record. Screening for what the correspondence calls unlawful voters forms part of a wider administration effort to find noncitizens said to have registered or voted in US elections. 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 agency’s Save database to state election officials, which fed investigations in several states.

Confirmed instances of noncitizen voting have been rare. A February review by the Center for Election Innovation and Research recorded roughly 35 confirmed cases in Iowa in the 2024 general election. In July, the homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said the department had identified over 250 000 potential noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It later emerged that the confirmed number was far lower.

The two initiatives are described in the correspondence as high-priority USCIS initiatives, and the officers are now assigned to them full-time. What the agency has not said, on the record, is how many officers are involved, how long the reassignment lasts, or what happens to the training pipeline when it ends. Those are the questions the correspondence leaves open rather than answers.

For a South African reading this, the practical effect is a queue. Anyone here with a pending asylum claim, an application or a family petition in the United States is now processed by an agency whose fraud-detection capacity has been committed elsewhere, and whose asylum officer training has been paused for want of instructors. The South African government has rejected the premise on which the refugee priority rests. It has not, in the material available, said anything about the reassignment itself, and no South African department has been asked to respond to it in this report.

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