Trump vows to sign asylum crackdown order
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he plans to sign an order next week that could lead to the largescale detention of migrants crossing the southern border and bar anyone caught crossing illegally from claiming asylum — two legally dubious proposals that mark his latest election-season barrage against illegal immigration.
“This is an invasion,” Trump declared as he has previously on a subject that has been shown to resonate strongly with his base of Republican supporters. He made his comments at the White House in a speech that was billed as a response to groups of migrants walking toward the U.S. border.
He then left for a political rally in Missouri, the latest in a daily series he has scheduled leading up to Tuesday’s elections for control of Congress.
U.S. immigration laws make clear that migrants seeking asylum may do so either at or between border crossings. But Trump said he would limit that to official crossing points. The U.S. also doesn’t have space at the border to manage the large-scale detention of migrants, with most facilities at capacity. But Trump said the government would erect “massive tents.”
“We’re stopping people at the border,” he said.
Trump also said that he had told the U.S. military mobilizing at the Southwest border that if U.S. troops face rock-throwing migrants, they should react as though the rocks were “rifles.”
The exact rules for the use of force by military police and other soldiers who will be operating
near the border have not been disclosed, but in all cases troops have the right of self-defense.
Mark Hertling, a retired Army general, wrote on Twitter after Trump’s speech that no military officer would allow a soldier to shoot an individual throwing a rock. “It would be an unlawful order,” he wrote, citing the Law of Land Warfare.
The president announced Wednesday that he was considering deploying up to 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border in response to the still far-off caravans — roughly double the number the Pentagon said it plans for a mission whose dimensions are shifting daily.
Trump said Thursday that, under his order, any migrants who do manage to enter the country illegally will be housed in “massive tent cities” he plans to build while their cases are processed.
“We’re not releasing them into our country anymore,” he said. “We have thousands of tents.”
Under current protocol, many asylum seekers are released while their cases make their way through back-logged courts — a process that can take years.
Trump and other administration officials have long demanded that those seeking asylum come through legal ports of entry. But many migrants are unaware of that guidance, and official border crossings have grown increasingly clogged.
Immigration officials have turned away asylum-seekers at ports of entry because of overcrowding, telling them to return at a later date. Backlogs have grown especially bad in recent months at crossings in California, Arizona and Texas, with people generally waiting five weeks to try to claim asylum at San Diego’s main crossing and sleeping out in the open for days at a time.
The administration has also been ramping up security at ports of entry this week. In McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, workers were seen installing additional gates and fences along a walkway on a bridge between the U.S. and Mexico, according to The Monitor newspaper of McAllen.
Migrants who cross illegally are generally arrested and often seek asylum or some other form of protection. There is a backlog of more than 800,000 cases pending in immigration court. Generally, only about 20 percent of applicants are approved.