Members-Only Article
As Nicole notes below, The Forward has a new article out based on the immigration files of George Santos’s mother, Fatima A.C.H. Devolder, who died in 2016. A researcher apparently got the file under a FOIA request and shared the documents with the reporter. The key point of the article, unsurprisingly, is that Santos is a huge ass liar. In this case, a big fat liar about 9/11.
His story about his mother dying as the result attack on the Twin Towers broke down somewhat when it turned out she died in 2016. He then claimed that she had been in the Towers on 9/11 and at Ground Zero on subsequent days. She developed cancer because of her exposure to the toxic fumes circulating in the air at the time. That is a very real issue. Numerous first responders and others who spent time at Ground Zero in the days and weeks after 9/11 later developed cancers and other illnesses. Since it’s hard to prove a negative, it’s been difficult for people to definitively state that Devolder was not working at the Towers on 9/11.
But now The Forward has the receipts. She wasn’t at the Towers on 9/11. In fact, she wasn’t even in the United States. According to the immigration files Devolder was out of the United States and living in Brazil from at least 1999 to 2003 and perhaps longer. We can say definitively that Devolder’s death had no connection to the 9/11 attacks whatsoever.
The article also goes over the other BS Santos told about his mom being a trailblazing Wall Street executive. That was a total fabrication. She worked as a home health aide and a cleaning person. But we’ve known that stuff was BS for a while.
That’s the main gist of the article. But down at the end there’s something that caught my attention. Reading through the article it’s clear that Devolder spent so much time out of the United States that it rekindled my curiosity about whether Santos is actually even a U.S. citizen. But here there may be some indications for once backing up Santos’s story. It’s this passage right at the end of the article.
The files also show that Santos is not lying about some aspects of his background. He speaks often of having grown up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and a medical form dated November, 1988, indeed lists Devolder’s address as a Jackson Heights basement on 85th Street, down the block from the elevated subway tracks. Santos had been born four months before.
But Devolder’s residency application suggests she soon moved to a second-floor apartment in another Queens neighborhood, Rego Park. Over the next 14 years, she would claim several modest addresses in western Queens, belying the rags-to-riches story Santos sold to voters.
The author of the story focuses on the story of growing up in a basement apartment. But if this medical record puts Devolder at an apartment in Queens four months after Santos was born, it seems pretty likely he was born in the U.S., as he claims. His mother was not a U.S. citizen. But that doesn’t matter. As long as he was born in the United States, he’s a citizen. End of story.
It’s certainly possible that she just arrived in the U.S. two months earlier and George was actually born in Brazil. But that seems unlikely. Indeed, the Devolder dossier probably makes clear whether Devolder was in the U.S. or not four months earlier.
Reporter Andrew Silverstein says the 90 pages of documents he consulted covered the period between 1988 and 2012. At first I thought, wait, did she just arrive in 1988? Maybe she did bring him here as an infant. But Silverstein says the immigration records say Devolder first came to the United States in 1985, three years before George was born. Put it all together and I’d say the evidence points strongly toward Citizen George.
Of course, assuming Santos was born in Queens as he claims, and as now seems likely, there’s a birth certificate on file at one of the hospitals in Queens. It would be easy enough to clear up this one, albeit rather significant, detail of Santos’s life story just by getting a copy of the birth certificate.
