A senior army official who posted anti-Muslim comments on Facebook has been taken out of contention for a top job at a US immigration agency.
Guy Sands-Pingot was set to take over in mid-September at deputy director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency scuttled those plans after a BuzzFeed News report late Friday revealed anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, sexist, and transphobic comments Sands-Pingot made on Facebook.
“If you wipe your butt with your bare hand but consider bacon to be unclean, you may be Muslim,” read the headline of an article from gopthedailydose.com that Sands-Pingot shared in October 2015.
Sands-Pingot is currently the director of human capital in the U.S. Army Reserves Office of the Chief, according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously served as a brigadier general in the Army’s 353rd Civil Affairs Command and deputy inspector general for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, among other posts.
Sands-Pingot was NATO’s Deputy Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan for a period last year, according to two photos posted online (here and here).
In a statement, USCIS spokesperson Michael Bars said Sands-Pingot will no longer be moving to the agency.
“[T]he candidate is no longer slated to commence employment at USCIS,” Bars told BuzzFeed News. “USCIS is committed to equal employment opportunity, adherence to merit principles, and fair treatment for all employees.”
It’s unclear whether Sands-Pingot will continue in his role with the US Army. He declined to comment to BuzzFeed News. His Facebook page was no longer visible Saturday.
In one Facebook post from Dec. 16, 2015, published by BuzzFeed News, Sands-Pingot lit into Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, whom he described as “the ‘posterperson’ for all delusional leftist who think she is the face and body of a fictional ‘moderate’ islam.”
“She was shot in the head by ‘normal’ conservatives that used the koran [sic] not only to justify their action, but to demand if be compulsory for other moslem females [sic] who dare to think they should receive an education,” Sands-Pingot wrote.
“We are all in the ‘Age of Pat,'” he wrote on Oct. 27, 2013, in a reference to an androgynous Saturday Night Live character, as he railed against “multi-gender access for ‘transgendered’ 10-18 year olds to bathrooms in all California schools,” adding, “Why can’t ‘Pat’ be a ‘Marine’??”
In July, Sands-Pingot reportedly liked a post with the headline “Immigrants Do Not Have a Right to Come Into This County and Make Demands,” according to BuzzFeed News.
The news comes as the Trump administration continues its crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration in what many say are policies motivated by racial and ethnic prejudice.
President Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants “rapists.” He went on to call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once in office, Trump signed a series of hastily written executive orders aimed at blocking people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
Trump surrogate and lawyer Rudolph Giuliani later admitted the travel bans were meant to make good on Trump’s campaign promise to stop Muslims entering the country.
“I’ll tell you the whole history of it,” Giuliani told Fox News in January 2017. “So when [Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'”
USCIS created a new office this year to identify naturalized citizens who may have lied on their citizenship applications and target them for denaturalization. It also removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement earlier this year.