Jon Feere

Advisor at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Jon Feere left Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), where he had been working since 2002, to take an advisory role at ICE in 2017. Feere routinely circulated extremist content on Twitter and once went as far as to grant an interview to an openly anti-Semitic tabloid. In 2012, Feere gave an interview to the anti-Semitic newspaper, American Free Press (AFP). AFP once promoted a book titled The Holocaust Hoax Exposed: Debunking the 20th Century’s Biggest Lie.

  • Jon Feere is an advisor at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and previously worked as a legal policy analyst for CIS, where he worked alongside Mark Krikorian, Jessica Vaughan, Steven Camarota, John Miano and Ronald Mortensen.
  • Before former Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan departed the agency, he recommended the family separation policy which the United Nations Human Rights Council said “may amount to torture.” Feere served as an advisor to Homan during this time.
  • Feere is one of a number of CIS and FAIR employees that have taken up positions within the Trump Administration, where they have worked to enact harsh immigration policies such as family separation at the border.
  • While at CIS, Feere authored reports and provided testimony to Congress advocating for abolishing the 14th Amendment, as well as harsh attrition through enforcement policies.
  • In a 2014 blog post Feere questioned the ability of Dreamers to serve faithfully in the military.
  • Included in an August 2019 New York Times profile on Stephen Miller’s influence over the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, is Feere’s depiction of Latinx people as a supposed electoral threat: “If four out of five Latinos are registering with the Democrats, perhaps less immigration would be in the interest of the Republican Party, no?”
  • In an August 2015 op-ed for The Hill, Feere proposed various avenues for Trump to end birthright citizenship, including a legislative option and executive action. President Trump has since proposed dismantling the 14th Amendment.
  • Feere has promoted the work of the racist site VDARE on his Twitter account.
  • Feere and CIS have for years pushed for harsh attrition through enforcement policies that are designed to shrink the total immigrant population in the U.S. and prevent future individuals from coming.
  • Like Feere’s former colleagues at CIS, the ICE advisor advocated for holding protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age hostage in exchange for harsh enforcement policies. In a blog for CIS, Feere suggested that deporting Dreamers’ parents should be a prerequisite in any deal which provided them legal status: “It would seem that the advocates would require the deportation of the parent as a prerequisite for the child receiving amnesty. Anything less would amount to the parent also receiving amnesty, rendering pointless the entire discussion about moral and legal culpability of the children.”