Prince Harry’s immigration status could be severely challenged, as a conservative think tank has conjectured he may have lied on his visa filings, or he was given special treatment by the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security.
Citing the Freedom of Information Act, the Heritage Foundation is asking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for a copy of Prince Harry’s visa file, noting that a residency permit requires answering if the applicant has ever used illegal drugs — which can trigger a denial if the answer is “yes” — and Harry may have lied about his past.
“I think what happens with this FOIA request has a direct impact on what happens with Harry’s future in the U.S. if indeed he wants to become a permanent U.S. resident or a U.S. citizen,” Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Mail.
“The stakes are very high here,” he continued. “This issue of a visa application has major implications for his future in the United States.”
As far as the possibility that Harry argues the DHS documents should remain private, Gardiner stated, “Harry can talk all he likes about protecting privacy, but he’s just written a massive book outlining all of his drug use. I’d say this isn’t a very smart move.”
“No one should be above the law,” Gardiner declared. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the Royal Family, everyone should be treated the same.”
“I think it’s in the public interest to know whether or not Harry was completely transparent in documenting all of his drug use that he outlined in ‘Spare,’” Gardiner said. “I think that the public will be really outraged if he was admitted to the United States through a system of preference and privilege, or he got in without revealing the full information.”
In “Spare,” Harry admitted using cocaine and the psychedelic drug ayahuasca; the latter is illegal in the United States unless used for religious purposes.
Heritage Foundation attorney Samuel Dewey, who formerly supervised oversight and investigations on the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, warned that if DHS does not produce the records by April 12, the foundation will sue the federal government.
“Even if he came in through a visa, it still has to be cleared by DHS, because you also have to be admissible to the country,” Dewey claimed. “Our request concerns whether or not he’s admissible without a waiver, given his long history of narcotics use. Individuals in the past with that history have not been let into the country.”
“There’s a precedent for getting this immigration information from the immigration authorities,” Dewey stated. “The first question that a court will ask is, how much of a privacy interest is there here? And we think it’s as low as it can be. This is a public figure who’s been notoriously open for commercial gain. He has so aggressively put himself into the public for his commercial benefit that it’s a perfect storm of diminished privacy rights.”
“The second question the court will ask is what is the public interest?” Dewey continued. “We’ve got a serious problem with our immigration system in this country. And a big part of that problem is laws are not being enforced.”
“If they’re spending a lot of time giving a special unjustified preference to Prince Harry, how does that affect the common immigration applications where people have carefully dotted every I and crossed every T?” he asked.
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