Thread: Obama reinstates ‘catch-and-release’ policy for illegal immigrants

Obama reinstates ‘catch-and-release’ policy for illegal immigrants


Newly arrived people who were caught in Arizona by the U.S. Border Patrol are initially processed at Tucson Sector U.S. Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, Ariz., on Aug. 9, 2012. (Associated Press) **FILE** more >

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times -
Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Obama administration has revived the maligned illegal immigrant “catch-and-release” policy of the Bush years, ordering Border Patrol agents not to even bother arresting and deporting many new illegal immigrants, the head of the agents’ labor union told Congress on Thursday.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said Homeland Security was embarrassed by the number of illegal immigrants not showing up for their deportation hearings, but instead of cracking down on the immigrants, the department ordered agents not to arrest them in the first place — meaning they no longer need to show up in court in the first place.

Mr. Judd said the releases are part of President Obama’s “priorities” program, which says he’s only worried about illegal immigrants who came across after Jan. 1, 2014. Mr. Judd said illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions on their record only have to claim they came before 2014 — without even needing to show proof — in order to be released without ever being arrested.
“Immigration laws today appear to be mere suggestions,” Mr. Judd testified to the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee. “That fact is well known in other countries.”

Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, did not have an immediate comment on Mr. Judd’s testimony. The White House also declined to comment, with spokesman Josh Earnest saying he hadn’t seen the testimony.

Mr. Judd and Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said criminal cartels are particularly astute at exploiting the Obama administration’s policies, and have specifically recruited and sent tens of thousands of children to flood the border in order to distract agents and create new chances to smuggle drugs across.

Tens of thousands of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children from Central America, and tens of thousands more families traveling together, have surged to the southwestern border in the last few years, overwhelming the administration’s ability to handle them.
The cause, however, remains heatedly debated.

Immigrant-rights advocates said the children and mothers are fleeing horrific violence, and should be considered asylum-seekers, not illegal immigrants. The advocates point to spiking murder rates in El Salvador, which leads the western hemisphere with 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras is third-worst with a rate of 57 homicides, and Guatemala is fifth-worst with 30 per 100,000 people.

San Pedro Sula in Honduras recorded 885 murders out of a population of just less than 800,000 people in 2015, according to a Mexican nongovernmental organization that tracks the statistics. San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador, recorded 1,918 murders among its 1.8 million people — a rate of 109 per 100,000.

By contrast, the most murderous city in the U.S., St. Louis, recorded a rate of 59 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which handles cases of children applying for protection in the U.S. detailed horrific stories of young children being enslaved by gangs, tracked down if they tried to leave, and being murdered as retribution for crossing the gangs.

She recounted the story of one 14-year-old girl who was abducted by a gang, gang-raped for four days, and escaped. Her family fled to another location inside the country, but the gang tracked her down, and her family sent her north to the U.S.

“These children are doing the only thing they can — they are running for their lives,” Ms. Young said.

Mr. Judd, though, said if the children wanted to claim asylum, they could arrive at a border entry point and present themselves to Customs and Border Protection officers. Instead, the cartels deliver them to some of the remote parts of the border before sending them to find Border Patrol agents, keeping the agents tied up while the cartels smuggle their goods, the agent said.

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