White House demands tough policies for Dreamer deal
Hard-line measures include construction of wall, hiring of border agents, cutting funding for ‘sanctuary cities’
The White House on Sunday delivered to Congress a long list of hard-line immigration measures that President Donald Trump is demanding in exchange for any deal to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, imperiling a fledgling bipartisan push to reach a legislative solution.
Before agreeing to provide legal status for 800,000 young immigrants brought here illegally as children, Trump will insist on the construction of a wall across the southern border, the hiring of 10,000 immigration agents, tougher laws for those seeking asylum and denial of federal grants to “sanctuary cities,” officials said.
The White House is also demanding the use of the E-Verify program by companies to keep illegal immigrants from getting jobs, an end to people bringing their extended family into the U.S., and a hardening of the border against thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America. Such a move would shut down loopholes that encourage parents from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to send their children illegally into the United States, where many of them melt into American communities and become undocumented immigrants.
“Now is the time for Congress to adopt these immigration priorities,” Marc Short, the president’s legislative director, told
reporters during a conference call on Sunday night. Otherwise, he added, illegal immigration “will likely increase.”
The demands represented a concerted effort to broaden the expected congressional debate about the Dreamers to one about overhauling the entire American immigration system — on terms that hard-line conservatives have been pursuing for decades.
In a letter to lawmakers, Trump said his demands would address “dangerous loopholes, outdated laws and easily exploited vulnerabilities” in the immigration system, asserting that they were “reforms that must be included” in any deal to address the Dreamers.
Last month, the president abruptly ended an Obama-era policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in which former President Barack Obama had used his executive authority to protect about 800,000 of the young immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide them work permits.
Even as Trump kept his campaign promise to halt what he had described as “one of the most unconstitutional actions ever undertaken by a president,” he quickly added that he would work with Democrats in Congress to replace the executive policy with legislation, giving them six months to do so. But a White House official said on Sunday that Trump was not open to a deal that would eventually allow the Dreamers to become U.S. citizens.
On the president’s wish list is a longsought Republican goal of stopping American residents from sponsoring the arrival of extended family members. His demand would limit residents to bringing only spouses and children into the U.S.
Also central to the effort, officials said, are legal changes that would strip away the rights of illegal immigrants to claim asylum or make another case to stay in the U.S., allowing federal officials to more quickly deport them.
“We cannot have true border security if we don’t change federal laws to ensure that people who are apprehended are removed,” said Ron Vitiello, the acting deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection.
Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said a vast increase in the number of agents and other federal resources would allow for a crackdown on immigration violators that had been difficult in the past.
Another key part of that crackdown would be on tens of thousands of children who have surged across the border with Mexico during the past several years, many of them seeking to escape gang-related violence in Central American countries. This year, about 38,500 children have been apprehended at the border without their parents.
Administration officials say the children — many of whom are sent by their parents to live with a cousin, aunt, uncle or sibling who is already living in the U.S. — must be turned back or quickly deported once they arrive. Under current law, many of them remain in the U.S. for years during legal proceedings to evaluate their asylum or refugee claims.
If the children are not deported quickly, officials say, many will never leave, eventually becoming a new population of sympathetic young immigrants who seek amnesty to live and work in the U.S. legally. That could create lasting cycles in which illegal immigrants demand to be given a legal status, the officials say.
The president’s demands include new rules that say children are not considered “unaccompanied” at the border if they have a parent or guardian in the U.S. They also propose treating children from Central America the same way they do children from Mexico, who can be repatriated more quickly, with fewer rights to hearings.
Trump is also calling for a surge in resources to pay for 370 additional immigration judges, 1,000 government lawyers and more detention space so that children arriving at the border can be held, processed and quickly returned if they do not qualify to stay longer.
Critics say the focus on deporting unaccompanied children is heartless and impractical. They say many of the children were sent by their parents on long, dangerous treks across Mexico in the hopes of avoiding poverty, hunger, abuse or death by gangs in their home countries.
Advocates acknowledge that more resources are necessary to speed up those hearings. But they argue that White House efforts to demand quick decisions are likely to merely result in many children being sent back to places where they are raped, beaten or killed.
Sending the children back with just a cursory hearing is “a recipe for disaster in terms of returning people to danger,” said Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a group that aids young refugees.