Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) blasts Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for keeping a Pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, Jew-hating Muslim on the DHS payroll

In a recent Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and slammed the Biden Administration for their employment of Nejwa Ali, a pro-Hamas adjudication officer.

Hawley.Senate.Gov “Mr. Secretary what is going on here? Is this typical of people who work at DHS? This is an Asylum and Immigration Officer who is posting these frankly pro-Jewish genocidal slogans and images on the day that Israelis are being slaughtered in their beds,” Senator Hawley said. “Has she been fired?”

Secretary Mayorkas declined to answer Senator Hawley’s question, claiming the individual is on administrative leave and that he will not speak on an internal personnel matter. Recent reporting reveals that Nejwa Ali has shared pictures glorifying Hamas terrorists and espoused other hateful, antisemitic rhetoric. 

“I am alarmed by reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) currently employs a former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as an officer charged with adjudicating U.S. immigration cases,” said Senator Hawley. “Ms. Ali’s reported statements make clear that she harbors intensely negative views against the State of Israel and supports the recent barbarism perpetrated against its citizens by Hamas terrorists.”

Ms. Ali’s troubling personal views apparently carry into her professional life—including her roles at DHS. She previously worked as a public affairs officer at the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. before that office was shut down by the Trump Administration.

Senator Hawley pushed for answers on how many immigration cases involving  Palestinians, Israelis, or other Jewish applicants Ms. Ali has reviewed, and what safeguards are in place in the asylum adjudication process to remediate any abuses committed by strongly prejudiced immigration officers.

The U.S. immigration enforcement agency hired Nejwa Ali, a Muslim former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and put her in a position to determine who gets to come into the country as an immigrant or “asylum seeker.” Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officer is repeatedly posting pictures of Hamas terrorists parachuting in with guns and writing, “Fuck Israel and any Jew who supports Israel,” a Daily Wire investigation found.

Though Ali’s job at DHS included vetting people to make sure they were not a threat to the country before letting them in, it’s not clear that anyone from the agency vetted her. That her primary allegiance was to the Palestinians, not the United States, was evident from her social media profiles, where she posts as “Falastine Mi Amor.”

Nejwa Ali worked in 2016 and 2017 as a public affairs officer for the Palestinian Delegation to the U.S., which according to its own website, served as the “PLO office in D.C.” That office was expelled from the country by the Trump administration, but Ali landed on her feet, according to a screenshot of her LinkedIn profile, securing a job at DHS as an “Asylum Officer,” where she was tasked with “applying immigration laws and regulations to asylum applications.”

Concerningly, Ms. Ali has explicitly linked her prejudicial views to her job. For instance, in one social media post associated with her name, she included the hashtags “#asylumseekers #palestine #refugeeswelcome”—suggesting that she may preference certain immigration cases over others at DHS.

This January, she moved over to being an Adjudication Officer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). People with that job, according to the agency, “analyze new or amended legislation and policy, prepare written reports of findings, and review and make determinations on cases for immigration benefits.”

She has posted extremist rhetoric continuously to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for years — rhetoric that intensified this month as Palestinian terrorists murdered over 1,000 Jews on October 7 and Ali cheered. “F*** Israel, the government, and its military. Are you ready for your downfall?” she wrote on Instagram after the attacks.

According to her social media profiles — which say she is “American born, Palestinian @ heart” — Ali is from Dearborn, Michigan, a hotbed of unassimilated immigrants where thousands reportedly took to the streets in support of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

Several of Ali’s posts glorifying the terrorist attacks include the statement, “Respect our existence, or expect resistance. Simple. No Apologies,” a suggestion that as long as Israel exists on what she considers occupied land, attacks on civilians are acceptable.

Jews seeking to come to America might have a hard time if Ali were their immigration officer. “Israeli, American privilege is disgusting. When Israelis acknowledge the government and military are solely responsible for the attack. Period,” she wrote. “I hold every Israeli accountable for their governments [sic] actions, IF they do not speak against Israel.”

On October 9, she posted to Facebook: “How Nejwa wakes up,” accompanied by a video captioned “F*** Israel and any Jew that supports Israel” and a photo that says “A nation that has nothing but Allah has everything it will ever need.” She also added an anti-Semitic cartoon of a Jewish nose.

She has also claimed that the media is pushing Israeli propaganda, mimicking a common anti-Semitic refrain that Jewish people control the press. “Palestine will be free one day. F*** APARTHEID Israel and any Israeli that supports that bulls***. F*** you, may Allah forgive you. and spare us the crocodile tears, I sure as hell give zero f***s,” she wrote on Instagram.

USCIS spokesman Matthew Bourke told The Daily Wire that “USCIS strongly condemns antisemitism and the use of violent rhetoric in any form.”

But a day after The Daily Wire asked the agency about Ali, she told The Daily Wire in a phone call that she still works for DHS, and was decidedly unchastened.

Asked if she disclosed her employment with the PLO to DHS, she said “That’s none of your f***ing business. Mind your business before I call the police. If I were you I’d respectfully hang up the phone right now.” Asked if her views on Israel impacted her ability to work as an American government official, she said, “That does not affect the ability to do my job at all. You can mind your own business.”

USCIS declined to say why it would hire someone who previously worked for a foreign quasi-government that was expelled from the United States and put them in position to determine who was allowed to come into the country.

It said, “applicants seeking employment with USCIS are thoroughly vetted and subject to extensive security and background checks before they can receive a permanent position with the agency.”

But it declined to shed light on the two apparent possibilities: that USCIS either knowingly hired a PLO employee who had demonstrated extremist views, or it was completely in the dark about its own employees’ recent employment and public records.

Ali has recently scrubbed her LinkedIn profile of her work with the PLO, as well as an internship with UNRWA, the United Nations agency tasked with helping Palestinians.

Ali’s extreme foreign policy views were evident long before she was hired by the government in 2019, during the Trump administration. Her clear animating force in life appears to be pushing the Islamic socialist message of the PLO.

During the Obama administration, on social media she lobbied for it to “BOYCOTT ISRAEL” and “End AID 2 ISRAEL,” and during the 2016 election, she complained that “Republicans OBSESS over Israel” and called for “decolonization.”

“F*** APARTHEID Israel and any Israeli that supports that bulls***. F*** you, may allah forgive you,” she wrote, alongside pictures of violent leftist Americans Assata Shakur and Malcolm X. In 2017, she posted a picture of herself grinning in front of a statute of Che Guevara, the murderous Communist militant.

The United States is facing pressure from the political Left to welcome Palestinian refugees into the country amid Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It is officers like Ali who would be tasked with advising the government whether or not it would be safe to grant entry to an applicant.