The new ombudsman for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services was a longtime top executive at a group that actively lobbies for the elimination of the EB-5 program.
The appointee, Julie Kirchner, was for more than a decade the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a lobbying group that advocates for the end of EB-5, which has become a key fundraising vehicle for real estate developers.
As FAIR’s executive director from 2005 to 2015, Kirchner was a registered lobbyist.