A Department of Justice (DOJ) office confirmed Friday it will stop sending daily news briefings to immigration court employees after the agency reportedly sent an email to all workers that contained white nationalist content.
A spokeswoman for the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) told The Hill that the office “will no longer be distributing a daily news briefing to its staff.”
“After review of our daily news aggregation emails, we have determined that the sampling was over inclusive and contained non-news sources,” said EOIR spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly.
“EOIR strongly condemns anti-Semitism and white nationalism. Those hateful beliefs do not reflect the views of EOIR employees and the Department of Justice. EOIR is not renewing its contract with the private company that provided the news clipping service.”
The daily emails had been sent to court employees on weekdays and contained links to news clips about immigration.
BuzzFeed News, which first reported on the email that contained white nationalist content, reported that the department told immigration court staff on Friday that employees can choose to instead subscribe to an agency-wide news briefing going forward.
The news comes a day after BuzzFeed News reported that a union for immigration judges alleged the DOJ emailed all immigration court employees, as part of its Monday morning news briefing, a link to an article from a white nationalist website that “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs.”
The blog post from VDare, a white nationalist website, included reporting about the DOJ taking steps to decertify the immigration judges’ union, and included anti-Semitic references to judges.
An unnamed former senior DOJ official told BuzzFeed News that the email was “generated by a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings for staff.”
The department later acknowledged it mistakenly included the link, adding that it “condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.”