Thread: Trump unveils new strict 70-point immigration enforcement plan

Trump unveils new strict 70-point immigration enforcement plan


Foreign nationals being arrested this week during a targeted enforcement operation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens in Los Angeles. The White House submitted a 70-point enforcement plan to ... more >

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Updated: 7:09 p.m. on Sunday, October 8, 2017

Determined to finally solve illegal immigration, the White House submitted a 70-point enforcement plan to Congress Sunday proposing the stiffest reforms ever offered by an administration — including a massive rewrite of the law in order to eliminate loopholes illegal immigrants have exploited to gain a foothold in the U.S.

The plans, seen by The Washington Times, include President Trump’s calls for a border wall, more deportation agents, a crackdown on sanctuary cities and stricter limits to chain migration — all issues the White House says need to be part of any bill Congress passes to legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era deportation amnesty known as DACA.

But the plans break serious new ground on the legal front, giving federal agents more leeway to deny illegal immigrants at the border, to arrest and hold them when they’re spotted in the interior, and to deport them more speedily. The goal, the White House said, is to ensure major changes to border security, interior enforcement and the legal immigration system.

“Anything that is done addressing the status of DACA recipients needs to include these three reforms and solve these three problems,” a senior White House official told The Times. “If you don’t solve these problems then you’re not going to have a secure border, you’re not going to have a lawful immigration system and you’re not going to be able to protect American workers.”

All told, the list includes 27 different suggestions on border security, 39 improvements to interior enforcement and four major changes to the legal immigration system.

The White House said the list was built from the ground up, with input from the Justice, State and Labor Departments and the three main immigration agencies at Homeland Security, each of whom was asked what tools they needed to finally get a handle on illegal immigration.

Ideas poured in, ranging cracking down on sanctuary cities that shield illegal immigrants — a long-running battle — to new proposals, such as doling out assistance to other in the Western Hemisphere, enlisting them as partners in the effort to stop illegal immigrants heading north.

The running theme of the list, though, is closing loopholes that illegal immigrants have exploited:
• Lax asylum standards, which illegal immigrants have learned to game through saying “magic words” that earn them instant protections, would be stiffened.
• The Unaccompanied Alien Children — or UAC — who streamed to the U.S. under President Obama would have to prove they really are without parents and are fleeing abuse, in order to access generous humanitarian protections.
• Visitors who come legally but overstay their visas — perhaps now an even larger group of illegal immigrants than those who jump the border — would, for the first time, face a misdemeanor penalty.
• A 2001 Supreme Court decision that has forced the release of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, including murderers, would be curtailed.
• The ability of federal, state and local authorities to detain illegal immigrants would be fully enshrined in law, helping settle a long-running question that’s fueled some sanctuary cities.

Also on the list are proposals that have been included in past immigration bills that garnered bipartisan support such as canceling the annual visa lottery that doles out 50,000 green cards at random, and requiring all businesses to use E-Verify, the government’s currently voluntary system for checking to make sure new hires are legally eligible to work.

Immigrant-rights advocates had feared the move, saying they believed Mr. Trump was giving in to hard-liners in his administration, including senior adviser Stephen Miller.

“President Trump and Members of Congress need to decide – do they want to resolve this crisis, or do they want to fall prey to Stephen Miller et al’s strategy to kill legislation and expose all 800,000 DACA beneficiaries to deportation?” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, said in a statement last week in anticipation of the announcement.

Many of the items on the president’s list have drawn bipartisan support in the past, including more fencing, a massive boost in Border Patrol agents, the end to the diversity visa lottery and mandatory use of E-Verify.

Each of those was, in fact, part of the 2013 immigration bill the Senate approved, with the support of every single Democrat in the chamber.

But Democrats say they only supported those measures at the time as part of a broad compromise that offered legal status to some 8 million of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country at that point. They said a smaller legalization for Dreamers can’t be coupled with that broad an enforcement surge.

“Please do not put the burden on the Dreamers to accept every aspect of comprehensive immigration reform to get a chance to become citizens of the United States,” Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat who was part of the so-called “Gang of Eight” senators that wrote the 2013 bill, told top administration officials at a hearing last week. “That’s too much to ask.”

The senior White House official, though, said Mr. Durbin’s logic amounted to a “false pretense that the safety of the American people should be held hostage to some other goal.”

“Congress doesn’t need an excuse to pass laws that make our streets safer or our country safer or make our jobs more secure. It’s just the right thing to do,” the official said.

The administration’s new list is likely to irk Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who emerged from a meeting with Mr. Trump last month insisting they had the outlines of a Dream Act-style deal that would grant a pathway to citizenship to Dreamers in exchange for limited border security, such as technology, boosting the Coast Guard or adding more inspectors at ports of entry.

The two leaders said they had explicitly won an agreement not to couple the Dream Act with any new action on Mr. Trump’s proposed border wall.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/8/trump-send-70-point-immigration-enforcement-list-c/

Love the broad and multi-action plan but oppose any amnesty of any kind for any reason for anyone.

. . . all issues the White House says need to be part of any bill Congress passes to legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era deportation amnesty known as DACA . . .

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

. . . all issues the White House says need to be part of any bill Congress passes to legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era deportation amnesty known as DACA . . .

That ain't gonna happen.

Trump Set to Sabotage Own DACA Deal by Putting Stephen Miller in Charge

For Deal on ‘Dreamers,’ White House Will Demand Crackdown on Child Border Crossers

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR OCT. 8, 2017



The border wall between Tecate, Mexico and Tecate, Cal. last month.CreditPaul Buck/European Pressphoto Agency

WASHINGTON — The White House on Sunday demanded that lawmakers harden the border against thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America before President Trump will agree to any deal with Democrats that allows the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers to stay in the United States legally.

Administration officials said that Mr. Trump would seek to slam shut what they described as loopholes that encouraged 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.

The demand is included in a list of legislative priorities for tougher immigration enforcement that Mr. Trump and his advisers released on Sunday as they seek to establish their bargaining position in expected congressional negotiations later this year about the Dreamers, who were brought to the United States as small children and often have few ties to the countries of their birth.

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 legal work permits. If a deal is not reached by March, tens of thousands of the Dreamers will begin losing permission to work and protection from deportation.

In addition to a crackdown on unaccompanied children at the border, the document released on Sunday insisted that any deal to give the Dreamers a permanent legal status must include the construction of a wall across the southern border, aggressive efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants by deporting people who have stayed beyond the limits of their visas, and legislation to reduce legal immigration by creating a system that approves immigrants based on their skills, not their family connections.

Taken together, the proposals amount to a wish list for immigration hard-liners inside the White House, including Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, who has long advocated extremely aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack down on undocumented immigrants already here.

The White House immigration priorities — which will be delivered to Capitol Hill in the coming week — have the potential to scuttle the effort by Mr. Trump and Democrats to reach an agreement on protecting the Dreamers. Immigration activists have long opposed many of the White House proposals as draconian or even racist, and they would most likely urge Democratic leaders to refuse a deal that included them.

Democratic leaders in Congress reacted with alarm, saying the demands threatened to undermine the president’s own statements in which he pledged to work across the aisle to protect the Dreamers through legislation.

“The administration can’t be serious about compromise or helping the Dreamers if they begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers, to the immigrant community and to the vast majority of Americans,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, said in a joint statement.

Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi, who declared last month that they had reached a deal with Mr. Trump to protect Dreamers, denounced the president’s demands as failing to “represent any attempt at compromise.”

“If the president was serious about protecting the Dreamers, his staff has not made a good-faith effort to do so,” they added.
But immigration rights advocates are also under pressure to do something for the Dreamers, and privately, many advocates have acknowledged that a negotiated deal with the Republican president is likely to include some increases in security at the border and other immigration changes.

The possibility of a deal emerged shortly after the president ended the DACA program early last month. But even as Mr. 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.

“The president’s position has been that he’s called on Congress to come up with a permanent solution and a fix to this process,” Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said last week of the effort to help Dreamers.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump views Sunday’s list of immigration demands as absolute requirements for an agreement or the beginning of a negotiation.

But conservatives in Mr. Trump’s administration, many of whom were advocates of his hard-line immigration rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, are clearly maneuvering to ensure that any deal on the Dreamers also results in passage of the tough immigration enforcement measures and border security enhancements that they have been seeking in Congress for decades.

A key part of the administration’s demands is the insistence that something be done about 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. In 2014, about 60,000 children crossed 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 United States — must be turned back or quickly deported once they arrive. Under current law, many of them remain in the United States 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 United States legally. That could create a never-ending cycle in which illegal immigrants demand to be given a legal status, the officials say.

They argue that allowing the children to stay in the United States simply encourages more to make the journey, believing — accurately in many cases — that they will not be returned home.

The document released on Sunday endorsed specific ideas to accomplish the president’s goals: It called for new rules that say children are not considered “unaccompanied” at the border if they have a parent or guardian somewhere in the United States. Officials also proposed treating children from Central America the same way they do children from Mexico, who can be repatriated more quickly, with fewer rights to hearings.

Mr. Trump also called in the document for a surge in resources to pay for immigration judges and 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.

A court settlement and a bipartisan anti-trafficking federal law passed in 2008 give the children certain rights when they arrive and require the government to give immigrant children a court hearing to determine the validity of the dangers they are said to face at home. But a shortage of judges and other resources has created a years long backlog in those cases. In the meantime, most are eventually relocated to family members or foster homes in the United States while they await their hearings.

Groups that advocate on behalf of the children trying to cross the border say that many of them are not represented by lawyers as they seek to prove in court that their lives and welfare would be threatened if they returned home. Those who do have lawyers are often granted the right to stay permanently in the United States, and eventually apply for citizenship.

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.

Democrats and immigration activists are certain to assail the White House proposal on dealing with Central American children as something they cannot support and little more than a thinly veiled effort to scuttle negotiations between the president and the Democrats even before they begin.

“Promoting the protection of one group of young people at the expense of another is absolutely unacceptable and a nonstarter,” Ms. Young said in a statement.

Some activists have been pressing Democratic leaders not to make any concessions to Republicans. They are urging passage of a “clean” bill that would protect the young immigrants without accepting any new enforcement of immigration laws.

That appears unlikely to win support in the Republican-controlled Congress. But the White House call for an immigration crackdown could also split the Republican Party, where a handful of lawmakers are pushing for a compromise that would include only modest increases in immigration enforcement at the border in exchange for protecting the Dreamers.

Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, on Thursday proposed legislation that would protect the immigrants in exchange for much less aggressive enforcement efforts: $1.6 billion in funding for border security measures and new efforts to crack down on members of gangs like MS-13 for deportation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/u...ouse-daca.html

A crack down on central american "catch word" users should be done w/o any amnesty for dacas. Many are not disappearing, becoming illegal immigrants, but are receiving social services $$$ monthly, healthcare, schooling. How many tens of thousand did jeh johnson and obama ESCORT from the border to within our country, even place with an illegal alien and he asked for $1700 a month, not sure exactly what congress authorzed but they authorized more than any American can receive on welfare, SSI etc.

It is the ones that can't back up their stories at a hearing that disappear & know how to get fake/stolen SS#, drivers licenses etc. Unfortunately, many have committed serious crimes rape, murder, assault, dui, due to their common low level of life. So why should they be amongst us & on the dole or taking a job? Lets give our American youth the job experience instead - they spend their money here too.

Trump will demand RAISE Act & Interior Enforcement in exchange for DACA amnesty

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