Have USCIS and CBP Hackers Caused Government Shutdown since 2012?

According to San Antonio Current, on January 20, 2018, the United States government shuttered, and Senate Democrats wouldn't vote on a bill that didn't include a solution to the pending end to Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that offers deportation protections to 800,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived in the states as children.

On February 9, the federal government shuttered again in three weeks.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is a fee-based agency which means that its budget comes from the filing fees which immigrants pay.  It has been reported that USCIS online application website has been hacked since 2012 but USCIS has continued to process online applications and petitions for the immigration including the period of this shutdown.

In 2014, Pierluigi Paganini, who is a member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security), member of Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group, member of Cyber G7 Workgroup of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Director of the Master in Cyber Security at the Link Campus University, an editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", uncovered a serious fact that security issues have been found in USCIS RFID Card production including permanent resident cards and the OIG recently conducted an audit of the system used for the production of those cards, discovering numerous security issues.

While the USCIS agency is aware that legal immigrants’ id cards will be stolen again, USCIS still does not announce this problem to the public or does not solve the problem since USCIS has no incentives to correct the problem when it can double the income by requesting more filing fees to everyone who lost their cards in mail to the hackers.

This situation is like the situation where children are “illegally” abducted “without warrant” by local government agencies to collect the child support from those parents who lost their children without good cause to the agencies such as Department of Children and Family Services or Child Protection Services.   It was reported in 2012 that 570 children had been killed or died in an 18-month period at the time when they had been placed without good cause in a foster care system in the County of Los Angeles. See the video uploaded on this page.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in 2013, the U.S. issued green cards to nearly 1 million applicants. Let’s suppose that 50% of those applicants are online applicants and lost their id cards in mail. Imagine what will happen to the societies where 500,000 illegal people are using legal residents’ id cards.

On January 20, 2018, an immigration lawyer Jim Hacking reported that processing delays are likely because certain USCIS employees will be told to stay home and it is unclear whether the USCIS asylum offices will continue processing cases as there are no filing fees associated with a new asylum application.

In December 2017, FBI, IC3 and the congressman in California, Steve Knight received a report of this hacking problem by a mother who lost her new permanent resident card in mail.  She complained, “I received a suspicious email that appears as USCIS but the original sender is not USCIS. I received the phishing message immediately after I contacted the USCIS and CBP.  The email from the hacker included identical contents which were sent to the USCIS and CBP which means that the hackers have accessed my USCIS online account and CBP website.   It also means that the hackers have stolen the scanned images of all of my id cards such as my passport, drive license card, permanent resident card, and social security number”.

On January 20, 2018, a staff of the Associated Press reported that replacements for lost Social Security cards are on hold as well.

I can conclude that obviously the shutdown decision made by the government is pointing to one fact that there is a serious security issue.  It is possible that Senate Democrats’ disagreement may not be the direct cause of government shutdown as published on January 20, 2018.  It is very possible that the hackers, who have stolen id cards, may be among those 800,000 undocumented immigrants  in order to avoid the deportation in the Trump-era.  No government will want to announce that the entire government websites have been hacked for 6 years and cannot find the hackers or solutions.