Budget takes broad aim at unauthorized immigrants in U.S.

Proposals part of $4.1T blueprint released Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s first budget offers up dramatic policy shifts and hundreds of millions of dollars to clamp down on unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, denying them tax credits, jobs and haven while funding a deportation force and flights home for those being removed.

The proposals, part of the $4.1 trillion blueprint the White House released Tuesday, offer the clearest indication yet of how Trump, who campaigned on a promise to build a southern border wall to keep immigrants from illegally entering the United States and hunt down and banish those who are already here, intends to carry out his crackdown. In a budget marked by steep cuts to social safety net programs, it is one of the few areas besides the military where the president proposes to increase funding.

“In these dangerous times, our increased attention to public safety and national security sends a clear message to the world — a message of American strength and resolve,” Trump said in the message accompanying the document. “It follows through on my promise to focus on keeping Americans safe, keeping terrorists out of our nation, and putting violent offenders behind bars.”

To implement the changes, Trump has requested a $2.7 billion increase for border security and immigration enforcement, part of a nearly 7 percent increase for the Department of Homeland Security. But his targeting of immigrants reaches beyond spending freely to track and deport them.

The proposal also calls for new steps to bar unauthorized immigrants from receiving tax credits, including adding a new requirement that those claiming the child tax credit provide a verifiable Social Security number valid for employment, and tightening current rules that mandate that a Social Security number be furnished to claim the earned-income tax credit.

Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, said the change — which has long been sought by Republican immigration hard-liners in Congress — was in keeping with the administration’s determination to spare taxpayers from supporting people undeserving of federal help.

Mulvaney said he could “in good conscience” ask taxpayers to contribute some of their money to “this family who deserves” the two credits. “But I can’t do it to give the earned-income tax credit, which is designed to help folks who work, to give it to somebody who is in the country and working illegally. That’s just not fair.”

Immigrant advocacy groups argue that the proposal, like the rest of Trump’s budget, is less a considered attempt to promote security and safety than an effort to use every means at the president’s disposal to sow fear and create chaos for unauthorized immigrants and their communities.

“If your single goal is to make life as miserable as possible for those who are here without status, then it’s about as effective as you can get,” said Angela Maria Kelley, a former Obama White House immigration official who is the senior strategic adviser for immigration at the Open Society Foundations.

Of the tax credit changes, she said, “They’re ignoring the fact that these are also programs that benefit U.S. citizen children, and that this is much more likely to push people further underground than it is to push people out of the country.”