Miguel Figueroa

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Miguel Figueroa III, who served as special assistant to Trump’s campaign manager, is now a senior adviser to the president’s Council on Environmental Quality. The new adviser has an interesting pedigree: In 2003, he was the assistant attorney for the office of immigration and naturalization — the office in charge of immigration matters such as citizenship applications — at the Justice Department. His background in immigration matters, and his experience negotiating immigration policy with other government agencies, explains why Trump is keeping his own transition team relatively small: “They are trying to minimize the number of people,” a second source told The Intercept. “It would make the transition a lot easier if they didn’t have to deal with the many positions and responsibilities that come with that [federal] government job.” Other than the assistant attorney for the immigrant services division, Trump’s transition team includes a few other legal staffers — including a solicitor, a senior adviser on immigration, and a counselor on the environment. A source close to the transition team cautioned that all of these positions are only temporary — the rest of the team is expected to keep working through the presidential election. “The whole team is dedicated to getting the president elected,” said the other source. “I’m just being honest about it — I’m not kidding about it.”

Trump’s transition team has not yet announced any members for top official positions or names for key positions at the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Commerce, but they have already named several. When the Obama administration disbanded the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2014, it gave the money to the National Endowment for the Humanities — a nonprofit organization. In 2012, Trump said in a radio interview that the Obama administration had taken the money and “sold it to the Harvard guys.”

Miguel Figueroa

Location: Yangon , Myanmar
Company: United Parcel Service

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