Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia also has a history of pushing for relaxed immigration laws.
A top Department of Homeland Security civil rights official has previously unreported ties to a Rutgers University think tank that congressional investigators are calling a “hotbed of radical antisemitic, anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-terrorist activity.”
Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia served as a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Law School Center for Security, Race, and Rights until she joined the Department of Homeland Security last year as officer for civil rights and civil liberties. In her current role, Wadhia advises DHS leadership on the civil rights ramifications of agency policies and leads investigations into civil rights and civil liberties complaints from members of the public.
But Wadhia’s affiliation with the Rutgers center could call her fitness for the job into question. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation this week into Rutgers’s failure to address anti-Semitic activities on campus. The investigation focuses on the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, which has come under scrutiny amid the confirmation process for Biden judicial nominee Adeel Mangi, who served on the center’s advisory board until last year.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said Wadhia’s “ties to pro-terrorist groups should be completely disqualifying.”
“Either the Administration isn’t vetting its employees and nominees, or it simply doesn’t care about their anti-Israel connections,” he told the Washington Free Beacon.
Months before Wadhia joined the center, it hosted an event, marking the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, that featured Sami al-Arian, who was convicted of providing material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group.
The center blamed Israel’s “colonial violence” and “decades of oppression” against Palestinians for the October 7 Hamas attack, which the center called “Hamas’s October 7th operation.” After the group’s 9/11 event with al-Arian in 2021, Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) called to “castigate and alienate” the think tank for providing a platform to speakers “with ties to militant terrorist organizations.”
That didn’t deter Wadhia, who joined the center in early 2022, according to an archived version of the center’s website.
Image - Shutterstock