Trump team aims to tighten deportation rules

Immigration enforcement tactics bolstered

WASHINGTON • Many more people living in the United States illegally could face rapid deportation — including people simply arrested for traffic violations — under the Trump administration’s sweeping rewrite of immigration enforcement policies announced Tuesday.

Any immigrant who is in the country illegally and is charged or convicted of any offence, or even suspected of a crime, will now be an enforcement priority, according to Homeland Security Department memos signed by Secretary John Kelly. That could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor offences. Immigration authorities also could seek to deport people based on their own judgment that the immigrants represent a risk to public safety or national security, Kelly wrote. He ordered the department to hire 15,000 more border patrol and immigration agents and to begin building a wall on the Mexican border to enact executive orders signed by the president on Jan. 25.

Kelly’s memos don’t cover President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 ban on the entry of foreign travellers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, which was halted by a federal appeals court.

A revised version of the travel ban will be issued “very soon,” Trump said in remarks at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, which he toured Tuesday morning.

The memos replace the Obama administration’s more narrow guidance focusing on immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, are considered threats to national security or are recent border crossers.

Kelly’s memos were decried by immigration advocates. “These memos lay out a detailed blueprint for the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants in America,” Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice Education Fund, said Tuesday.

“They fulfil the wish lists of the white nationalist and anti-immigrant movements and bring to life the worst of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.”

Kelly’s latest plans call for enforcing an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the government to send people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

That provision is almost certain to face opposition from civil libertarians and Mexican officials, and it’s unclear whether the United States has the authority to force Mexico to accept thirdcountry nationals. But the memo also calls for Homeland Security to provide an account of U.S. aid to Mexico, a possible signal that Trump plans to use that funding to get Mexico to accept the foreigners.

The memos do not change U.S. immigration laws, but take a far harder line toward enforcement.

One example involves broader use of a program that fast-tracks deportations. It will now be applied to immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the United States longer than two years.

Since at least 2002 that fast deportation effort has been used only for immigrants caught within 100 miles of the border, within two weeks of crossing illegally.

“That would be a breathtaking expansion of the ability to pick people up and remove people from the country without ever giving them a day in court,” said Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration at the Centre for American Progress.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it would challenge the directives.

“These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the well-being of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.