Lee Francis Cissna is the multilingual son of a Peruvian immigrant and son-in-law of a refugee from Palestine. He is also the Director of US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), and has overseen some of the Trump administration’s toughest immigration policy changes. Politico interviewed a selection of Cissna’s current and former co-workers, classmates, and friends, in order to obtain a better understanding of the man involved with many of the harsh Trump administration policy changes, including the recent “zero-tolerance” policy which resulted in thousands of family separations. “We’re pretty stunned that a guy who is compassionate, funny, proud of his immigrant mother from Latin America, that he would now be one of the key architects of the seemingly heartless policy of separating families,” Dan Manatt, a documentary filmmaker and former classmate of Cissna’s at Georgetown Law School, tells Politico.
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