Top immigration official defends new rule
At Austin event, Cuccinelli says Dilley center has room to hold migrant families, expand
AUSTIN — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Thursday there is space immediately available in an existing detention center to accommodate migrant families who will be held for as long as it takes for their cases to be resolved under a new rule being enacted by the Trump administration. The departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services have said they will issue a rule Friday backing out of the 1997 Flores settlement, which requires the government to detain children and families in the least restrictive settings and doesn’t allow families to be held more than 20 days. The rule will need approval from a federal judge.
At an event sponsored by the Austin-based conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, Cuccinelli said the restrictions of the Flores settlement are “major catalysts to the crisis at the border.”
“When you’re back in your home neighborhood in — pick a country — Honduras, you now know you can’t just come up with the kids and assume after 20 days you’re going to be released,” Cuccinelli said. “That assumption is gone as of yesterday. … It is a tremendous deterrent.”
Immigration advocates and Democrats in Congress have decried the withdrawal of the Flores settlement as cruel; they’ve also warned it will allow for worse detention conditions.
“Make no mistake: This rule will do nothing to deal with the issues pushing children and families to seek protections at our borders,” Philip E. Wolgin, managing director of immigration policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said in a statement. “And as we have calculated, the rule could cost up to an astronomical $1.3 billion each year. … The courts should step in immediately and stop this rule from being implemented.”
The rule is part of a wave of a new policies the Trump administration has unveiled as the crisis at the border worsens, fueled by the heavy flow of Central American migrants seeking asylum. U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended more than 760,000 migrants since October, up almost 140 percent from the same period last year.
Last week, Homeland Security announced a “public charge” rule that denies green cards to immigrants deemed likely to need government assistance, which has already drawn lawsuits.
Cuccinelli, appointed to his post June 10, was roundly criticized after a TV interview in which he recast the 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus cast on a plaque below the Statue of Liberty as “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”
In mid-July, the Trump administration issued a rule denying asylum to people who failed to request that protection in other countries en route to the United States. A federal appeals court last week allowed the law to stand in some border states, while a district judge’s stay will block it from applying in others.
President Donald Trump “has been, as you all know, very aggressive on the immigration issue,” said Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and senator. “He’s doing things and using tactics that none of his predecessors were willing to use, Republican or Democrat, and lo and behold, many of them are working.”
U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, RAustin, who also spoke at the event, joined Cuccinelli in chastising Congress for failing to pass meaningful immigration reform and said Democrats may be stalling because they don’t want to hand Trump a win before next year’s election.
“It’s not about the credit,” Williams said. “The world gets better when we have immigration reform, and we become the land of the law again. … I’m not confident that much will get done between now and then unless the president and director can get it done without Congress, and I hope that changes.”
Cuccinelli said federal officials plan to expand the country’s largest detention facility in Dilley and repurpose parts of it to hold more families as a result of the Flores withdrawal.
“It’s not full,” Cuccinelli said of the South Texas Family Residential Center, which can hold up to 2,400 people. “So they have capacity right now to expand the numbers, but they’re also, now that the rule is in place, are going to be looking at how to reallocate the space they already have.”
Cuccinelli added Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s goal, with the help of federal judges, is to detain families an average of 50 days, the same as the average detention time prior to a strengthening of the Flores settlement in 2015.
But Cucinelli put the burden on Congress to provide the funding and support to make that happen. After lawmakers funded $4.6 billion for aid at the border in June, much of which went toward children in detention, he said holding periods for children dropped.
“If they will take our advice on just the basics needed to handle the flow we’re facing, I promise the same thing will happen at the adult level,” Cuccinelli said. “We need Congress to be a partner here.”