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DHS Officials Confirm Plan to Increase Deportation Force; Send Migrants Who Enter From Mexico Back There, Even if Not Mexicans
A provision of the Trump administration’s plan to increase deportation of undocumented immigrants grants authority for federal agents to deport to Mexico anyone caught crossing the southern border, regardless of where they are from. For example, the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Presently these individuals are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum. Two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers.
The ideas aren’t new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a 1996 law that policy makers and law enforcement agents had disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd. The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic ‘No,’” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official.
The new directives seek to hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, and broaden expedited deportations, currently limited to those in the country two weeks or less, to those who have been in the country for up to two years. In addition, the plans call for the expansion of a George W. Bush program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. Some of the country’s largest police departments have refused to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect.
Trump took a hard line against illegal immigration during his campaign, at times suggesting he would seek to create a nationwide “deportation force” to expel as many of the nation’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants as possible.
The new DHS deportation rules make no distinction between being charged with a crime versus being convicted.
[Homeland Security Secretary John] Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of undocumented immigrants prioritized for removal, including those who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.”
Democrats and human rights groups blasted the administration. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called the policies “xenophobic” and suggested they could lead to racial profiling of minorities.
In direct contradiction to false statements by Trump during the campaign and included in these executive orders and policy directives, undocumented and documented immigrants are LESS likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.
Analyses of census data from 1980 through 2010 show that among men ages 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States..... Several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime. “
"There’s no way I can mess with the numbers to get a different conclusion,” said Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. Nowrasteh said he had analyzed the available figures and concluded that undocumented immigrants had crime rates somewhat higher than those here legally, but much lower than those of citizens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigrants-crime.html