Agency expands orders on who can be deported
Homeland Security chief wants expedited removals
McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has drafted new orders to agency heads that would considerably expand the number of immigrants who can be detained and deported under new executive orders President Donald Trump signed last month.
Under the proposed orders, which were contained in two memorandums written for distribution to agency heads and dated Friday, hundreds of thousands more immigrants in the United States illegally would be subject to what’s known as expedited removal proceedings to quickly get them out of the country.
But a White House official said the memos were not yet final, that White House lawyers had objected to some provisions, and while the memos were DHS’s “final cut” at implementing Mr. Trump’s orders, they had not yet received White House approval.
“The White House has the final say,” said the official, who declined to be identified by name.
Mr. Kelly also said Saturday that Mr. Trump’s revised executive order on immigration will be “more streamlined” than its predecessor.
It’s a “good assumption” that the new executive order won’t affect people holding valid visas or green cards and will be phased in “to make sure that there’s no one in a sense caught in the system of moving from overseas to our airports, which happened on our first release,” Mr. Kelly told a panel at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday.
Mr. Trump, at a press conference on Thursday, said he planned to issue a new decree “tailored” to address the concerns raised by the San Francisco-based appellate court, which he maintains issued a “very very bad decision.” Justice Department lawyers later confirmed those plans in a court filing abandoning a U.S. bid to rehear the case.
The revised executive order will be issued in the coming week, Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Kelly’s draft orders would affect thousands of children who arrived in the United States as “unaccompanied minors” and were subsequently reunited with a parent living in the country illegally. Those children would no longer be protected against deportation, and their parents would be subject to criminal prosecution if they had paid human traffickers to bring their children across the border — a common scenario now.
One of the memos said 155,000 unaccompanied children have been detained in the past three years, and that 60 percent of them were later reunited with a parent inside the United States.
“The surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States,” Mr. Kelly wrote in the memorandums, copies of which were made available to McClatchy Saturday.
Both memorandums bear Mr. Kelly’s signature and indicate they were to be distributed to the heads of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others.
The White House official did not specify what parts of the memos had been questioned by White House lawyers.
The memos were intended to implement two of Mr. Trump’s executive orders on enforcement of immigration laws inside the United States, but would go farther by wiping away several orders President Barack Obama issued to protect those in the United States who had not committed criminal acts beyond entering the country without permission.
“These memorandums represent a significant attempt to expand the enforcement authority of the administration in areas that have been heavily litigated,” said Leon Fresco, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation under Obama.
Mr. Fresco predicted quick legal challenges from immigrant groups if the memos were implemented and foresaw a large percentage of Mr. Kelly’s orders being enjoined by the courts.
The first memorandum specifically would exempt from enforcement so-called “dreamers,” the young immigrants who currently are protected under Mr. Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program intended to protect people who were brought into the country illegally as children by their undocumented parents. But a later passage in the memo dismisses the idea of any protected classes of immigrants.
That memo also would expand the definition of who is considered a criminal to include not only those who have been convicted of a crime but those who have been charged or even thought to have “committed acts which constitute a chargeable criminal offense.”