“The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms,” the spokesperson said.
The Justice Department on Thursday said an email sent to immigration court employees this week should not have included a link to a white nationalist website.
The email, which included links to daily stories involving immigration news, included a link to a blog post on VDare, a white nationalist site, Buzzfeed News reported.
The blog post “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs,” the immigration judges’ union complained in a letter to DOJ that was obtained by Buzzfeed. “Publication and dissemination of a white supremacist, anti-Semitic website throughout the EOIR is antithetical to the goals and ideals of the Department of Justice,” the letter said.
NBC News has not independently obtained the letter or the email, but the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review acknowledged there had been a mistake.
“The daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included,” EOIR assistant press secretary Kathryn Mattingly said in a statement to NBC. “The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.”
The report came one day after President Donald Trump invoked a dual loyalty trope widely viewed as anti-Semitic when he told reporters that Jews who vote for Democrats are “very disloyal to Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel.”