New immigration policy has familiar old ring
SAN DIEGO » The U.S. immigration debate is a house of lies. And some policy changes can be terribly deceptive.
Last week, the Biden administration unveiled a modified immigration enforcement plan. Frontline Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who hunt for undocumented immigrants in the interior — and by extension, also Border Patrol agents who patrol a frontera have been told to stand down by their boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
More precisely, U.S. immigration agents have been encouraged to not aggressively pursue, detain and arrest those undocumented immigrants who do not pose a danger. Instead — in Mayorkas’ words — agents “focus on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.”
Agents are also supposed to take note of how long someone has lived in the United States and concentrate on removing those who entered in the last year.
To some Americans, this policy will seem like a commonsense allocation of resources. To others, it will come across as anarchy and open borders.
It’s tough to argue that the borders are open when the
Biden deportation-industrial complex just removed more than 7,000 Haitians in less than three weeks. The border doesn’t get any more closed than that.
The resources argument is stronger. America can’t deport her way out of the immigration predicament. It’s our nation’s prerogative to remove individuals who are in the country illegally. But, as a practical matter, not everyone can be apprehended, processed and removed. Besides, many of those who are removed are likely to return, especially if their families remain on this side of the border.
Yet I worry that the new policy is just a distraction away from the human rights catastrophe with the Haitians. In the end, not much will change.
Because rank-and-file border patrol agents won’t let it change. The underlings are union-protected civil servants who often aren’t keen on following orders, and who needn’t worry about being fired if they don’t.
Law enforcement officers enforce the law. That’s what they do, and it’s all they do. Having imagination is not a job requirement.
The first person to get me to see the limits of immigration enforcement was, ironically, someone tasked with enforcing immigration laws. Having spent time in the Peace Corps between college and law school, he had a great imagination.
John T. Morton was director of ICE during the first term of the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013. At the beginning, Obama was racking up 1,000 deportations per day and telling detractors that he could not stop the removals because the president is “not a King.” When Morton attended strategy meetings on immigration at the White House, his voice was reportedly one of the loudest in favor of immigration reform.
Morton’s solution was to issue, in March 2011, a six-page internal memorandum — what became known by reporters and immigration observers as the “Morton memo” — to all ICE field office directors, frontline field agents, and the chief legal counsel.
In the document, Morton advised that the bureaucrats “may” exercise discretion and show leniency toward some illegal immigrants by weighing certain factors, including the length of time the person had lived in the United States and whether he or she had a criminal record.
Sound familiar? The Mayorkas memo is the Morton memo, Part II.
However well-intentioned, Morton’s policy directive was largely ignored by ICE personnel. It was a big waste of time. I’m afraid that — perhaps one day soon — we’ll conclude the same about its successor.