U. S. net for illegals widens
Memos: Get shady ones and the risky
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration outlined a thorough crackdown on illegal aliens Tuesday, proclaiming that the government would seek to swiftly deport many more people without court hearings and target aliens charged with crimes or thought to be dangerous, not just convicts.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in a pair of memos describing the plan that, with few exceptions, the U.S .“no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” Immigration officers should seek to deport illegal aliens who have
engaged in fraud or “willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter before a governmental agency” or have “abused” any government benefit, in addition to criminals, Kelly wrote.
Immigration authorities also could seek to deport people on the basis of the authorities’ own judgment that those people represent a risk to public safety or national security, he said. 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 Jan. 25.
The contents of Kelly’s memos were leaked over the weekend, after they were distributed to Department of Homeland Security officials late last week.
The memos don’t cover Trump’s Jan. 27 ban on the entry of travelers 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.
Kelly said in one memo that the plan “implements new policies designed to stem illegal immigration and facilitate the detection, apprehension, detention and removal of aliens who have no lawful basis to enter or remain in the United States.”
The memos replace more narrow guidance focusing on aliens who have been convicted of serious crimes, are considered threats to national security or are recent border crossers.
Under the Obama administration guidance, people whose only violation was being in the country illegally were generally left alone. Those people fall into two categories: those who crossed the border without permission and those who overstayed their visas.
Crossing the border illegally is a criminal offense, and the new memos make clear that those who have done so are included in the broad list of enforcement priorities.
Overstaying a visa is a civil, not criminal, offense. Those who do so are not specifically included in the priority list, but, under the memos, they still are more likely to face deportation than they had been before.
Under a process created in 1996, such expedited removals previously have been applied in instances when an alien is caught within 100 miles of the U. S. border and within 14 days of entering the U. S.
Kelly’s memo removes the border- proximity requirement and would apply the policy to any alien who has been in the country for less than two years.
The memos also direct the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to begin hiring 10,000 agents and officers while the Customs and Border Protection agency hires 5,000 new agents.
A Homeland Security Department official who officially briefed reporters on the plan Tuesday said he wasn’t aware of how the new hires would be paid for but said the department is working on the funding. The official was joined in a conference call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions.
MORE JAIL SPACE
To enforce Trump’s pledge to end a policy known as “catch- and- release,” in which interdicted illegal aliens were released pending deportation proceedings, the memos call for a vast expansion of the use of detention centers to hold people caught by immigration authorities.
Currently the Homeland Security Department has money and space to jail 34,000 people at a time. It’s unclear how much an increase would cost, but Congress would have to approve any new spending.
Kelly’s enforcement plans also call for enforcing a long- standing but obscure provision of immigration law that allows the government to send some people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico regardless of where they are from.
Those foreigners would wait in that country for U. S. deportation proceedings to be complete. This would be used for people who aren’t considered a threat to cross the border illegally again, the memo says.
One of the Homeland Security Department officials on the conference call said the U. S. would work with Mexico before implementing this policy.
Historically, the U. S. has quickly repatriated Mexicans caught at the border but has detained travelers from other countries pending deportation proceedings that could take years.
One of the memos directs Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand a program that allows local law enforcement agencies partnering with the federal government “to perform the functions of an immigration
officer,” including “investigation, apprehension and detention.”
The program was scaled back by former President Barack Obama’s administration in 2012 over concerns about racial profiling and eroding trust between police and local communities.
The U. S. deported more than 2.7 million people during Obama’s eight- year term, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics.
The majority of those deported were convicted criminals, as the Obama administration focused on removing violent offenders from the U. S.
The new directives don’t affect so- called Dreamers, people brought to the U. S. illegally as children, who have obtained protection from deportation under Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an official said on the conference call.
Under the Obama administration, more than 100,000 children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, were caught at the border. Most were reunited with parents or relatives living in the United States, regardless of the adults’ immigration status.
Trump, who said during his campaign that he would cancel the program, has since changed his stance, calling those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, “incredible kids.”
“The DACA situation is a very, very — it’s a very difficult thing for me because you know, I love these kids,”
Trump said at a Thursday news conference. “I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do, and, you know, the law is rough.”
MEMOS ASSAILED
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 in a statement. “They fulfill the wish lists of the white nationalist and anti- immigrant movements and bring to life the worst of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.”
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. “President Trump does not have the last word here.”
Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, called the new regulations “mind- boggling” and predicted court challenges to a number of their provisions, including relaxing restrictions
on who can be deported immediately upon arrest, changes in the way asylum cases are to be treated and new guidelines on when an asylum seeker has a credible fear about being returned to his homeland.
However, U. S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, applauded the Trump effort, saying the memos “overturn dangerous” policies from the Obama administration.
The Trump administration sought to allay fears in immigrant communities over the new guidelines, saying the directives are not intended to produce mass deportations.
“We do not need a sense of panic in the communities,” a Homeland Security Department official said in the conference call with reporters.
“We do not have the personnel,
time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” the official said. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plan to travel to Mexico City today to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and other top officials. Pena Nieto canceled a meeting with Trump last month over disagreements about immigration and funding of a proposed border wall.