Top immigration official lost job over anti-Muslim posts on Facebook: report

A U.S. Army director who was recently offered a top position with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will reportedly no longer take the post after BuzzFeed unearthed his previous Facebook posts.

Guy Sands-Pingot, a brigadier general, was slated to start as a new USCIS deputy director in September, BuzzFeed News reported late Friday.

But the news outlet unearthed some of his Facebook posts from more than two years ago that showed he reposted anti-Muslim articles and compared Islam to the Nazi party.

When BuzzFeed asked USCIS about the posts, a spokesman said the candidate would no longer be hired.

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The posts are no longer available publicly.

Sands-Pingot allegedly bashed Muslim intellectuals and the “political axis” for describing terrorists attacks as solitary acts of violence rather than a result of Islamic beliefs.

“It would undermine their fantasy of their not being an islamic threat to the non-islamic world and peoples,” Sands-Pingot wrote two years ago, according to BuzzFeed. “This is similar to saying crimes committed by nazi storm troopers had nothing to do with the Nazi Party even though every propoganda point of the Nazi Party political and social platform clearly spelled out what they would do and why they would do it, and to whom they would do it to.”

Sands-Pingot also commented on or shared several anti-Muslim Facebook posts, BuzzFeed reported.

Sands-Pingot allegedly shared an article in 2015 from gopthedailydose.com with the headline, “If you wipe your butt with your bare hand but consider bacon to be unclean, you may be Muslim.” 

In addition to those posts, Sands-Pingot reportedly “liked” a post expressing a strong stance on immigration amid the summer’s controversy over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

One post Sands-Pingot allegedly liked read in all-caps: “Immigrants do not have a right to come into this country and make demands.”

BuzzFeed noted that his role at the USCIS would have included overseeing a recently created denaturalization unit.

The unit would be tasked with identifying naturalized immigrants who lied on their applications in order to revoke their legal status.

When the outlet asked the USCIS about Sands-Pingot’s anti-Muslim posts, spokesman Michael Bars said the new hire would not be coming to the agency after all.

“After conducting a full and open competition in compliance with all Office of Personnel Management guidance for career vacancies in the Senior Executive Service, including assembling resume review and interview panels as part of the standard hiring process, a candidate was selected for the position of Deputy Director and a tentative job offer was extended, expected to commence mid-September,” Bars told BuzzFeed.

“At this point, however, the candidate is no longer slated to commence employment at USCIS,” he continued. “USCIS is committed to equal employment opportunity, adherence to merit principles, and fair treatment for all employees.”

Sands-Pingot did not return BuzzFeed News’s request for comment.

He previously served in the U.S. Army for more than 28 years and was also the previous director of human capital at the Army Reserve chief’s office, BuzzFeed reported, according to biographies available online.