Border crackdown
President might sign executive order before caravan arrives at U.S.
President Donald Trump is considering executive orders to fortify the border before a caravan of asylum-seekers from Central America reaches it.
President Donald Trump is considering a major speech Tuesday to announce a broad crackdown on the southern border, administration officials said Friday, making a significant play to energize his anti-immigrant base one week before midterm congressional elections where Republican control of Congress is at stake.
Trump is expected to use the remarks to outline his plans to fortify the border, including executive actions he is considering to deny entry to Central American migrants and asylum-seekers, and the deployment of hundreds of U.S. Army troops to aid in the effort.
Is it legal?
A bid to slash financial aid to Central American countries whose citizens are making their way north toward the border also is under discussion, according to people briefed on the discussions.
Even as the president’s advisers met Friday to nail down the details of the multipronged border operation, human rights groups raised concerns about Trump’s plans, calling them politically motivated and potentially in violation of U.S. and international law.
The biggest source of worry is executive action that Trump is weighing to essentially make it impossible for a large group of Central American migrants trekking north through Mexico to be able to seek refuge in the U.S.
The plan, according to people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity, would include a change in the rules governing asylum eligibility along with a presidential proclamation characterizing the so-called caravan as a national emergency and barring its participants from entering the country.
It is not clear that such a presidential directive would be legal either under U.S. immigration law or international law, both of which contain obligations to evaluate the individual claims of people who present themselves to authorities and ask for asylum.
In addition, Trump would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that the caravan — a group currently estimated at 6,000 or fewer people and largely women and children, and is roughly 1,000 miles south of the border — constitutes a national emergency. Given the legal issues involved, it could take months or even years for the plan to actually remove would-be immigrants from the U.S.
Still, in considering the strategy, Trump appeared to be betting that the political impact would be more immediate. He has called the caravan a “blessing in disguise” for Republicans in the runup to the Nov. 6 elections, as he seeks to demonize its participants and tie them to Democrats and progressive groups.
“This is much more about the optics before the election than the legality of the president’s action,” said Jennifer Quigley, a refugee specialist at Human Rights First. “The caravan represents such a minuscule number of people coming toward our border that it just strains credulity to say that this is a national emergency that demands immediate action.”
Under the plan, which is still under discussion and could change, the Homeland Security and Justice departments would jointly issue new rules that would disqualify migrants who cross the border in between ports of entry from claiming asylum, according to people familiar with the discussions but who were not authorized to discuss the planning. Exceptions would be made for people facing torture at home.
‘Huge moral failure’
Trump would then invoke broad presidential powers to bar foreigners from entering the country for national security reasons — under the same section of immigration law that underpinned the travel ban — to issue a proclamation blocking migrants from crossing the southern border, according to the plans under discussion. It was not clear how broad the directive would be, including whether it would apply only to people from certain countries or those arriving within a certain period of time.
Several refugee advocacy groups condemned the proposal and said they would consider legal action to block it if Trump followed through.
Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said it was “disgraceful” that Trump would even consider such moves.
“It would mean refusing to protect people who can prove they are fleeing persecution,” Jadwat said. “That would be a huge moral failure, and any plan along these lines will be subject to intense legal scrutiny.”