Visiting the southwest border for the first time since becoming Attorney General, today Jeff Sessions delivered a campaign-style speech promising to bring the federal criminal justice system to bear against immigration law violators. Standing before Customs and Border Protection officials in Nogales, the Attorney General described beheadings, machete attacks, and gang violence. “Criminal aliens, and the coyotes and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration,” he claimed. In response, the Justice Department that he leads will “take our stand against this filth” [...]
Colorado Republicans target sanctuary cities—again—in pursuit of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda
By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch After suffering a party-line defeat in a state House committee last month, Republican state legislators in Colorado are once more attempting to coerce cities, counties, school districts, and law enforcement agencies to entangle themselves in immigration enforcement. The “Colorado Citizen Protection Against Sanctuary Policies Act” (Senate Bill 281), like the Republicans’ earlier failed bill, is a wrong-headed effort to solve a largely nonexistent problem. Perpetuating the myth of immigrant criminality Following the Trump [...]
Trump asks Congress for $3 billion in supplemental funding for FY 2017
Earlier today, President Trump asked Congress to find $3 billion in funding to pay for the president’s immigration executive orders through the end of September 2017. This request comes as an addition to the billions of dollars Congress has already given the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2017 operations. In particular, the White House requests supplemental funds to pay for the border wall, an expansion to ICE’s immigration detention system, and to prepare to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents. As the president’s most expensive immigration policing project, the [...]
Beyond Rhetoric: “Sanctuary” in Practice
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehended 680 people over the last week, pointing to the increased role of federal agencies in immigration detention under the Trump administration. While this is still a lower number than the weekly average detained under the Obama administration, it does represent a much larger share of detentions for ICE specifically. Three recent cases of ICE overreach stand out as examples: Guadalupe García de Rayos, an Arizona mother who had checked in with ICE regularly since 2013 to review her status, arrived for her scheduled meeting last week [...]
DHS issues border policing plans
In response to President Trump’s January 25 executive order on border policing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo with details about how it plans to carry out the president’s directives. The memo promises to further militarize the Mexican border, expand the nation’s already unprecedented immigration detention capacity, and skirt the immigration court system. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly signed the memo, titled “Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies,” on February 20, 2017. The memo consists of instructions [...]
ICE enforcement actions: Something old, something
ICE is in the streets. President Trump is tweeting away. And rumors are flying. None of this is surprising. On the campaign trail, President Trump turned his consistent demonization of migrants into a cornerstone of his victory. Since taking office, he has not relented. On Sunday, the President tweeted, “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!” Meanwhile, word-of-mouth reports and social media are supplying a stream of reports about immigration enforcement actions. Many turn out to be [...]
Executive orders on crime include plenty about immigration
President Trump issued three more executive orders on Thursday, this time focusing his attention squarely on crime. Immigration occupies a central position in this latest EO trilogy, illustrating the Trump Administration’s immigration mindset. I printed the orders at random and didn’t make it through the first section before “illegal immigration” made an appearance. The EO titled “Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety” states that it is the Trump Administration’s policy to “enforc[e] the law and develop[] policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, [...]
Recalcitrant countries and possible diplomatic riffs
Much has been written about the executive orders that President Trump signed last week. Missing from those discussions has been acknowledgment of the potential diplomatic fray President Trump seems willing to bring on by threatening immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to countries that don’t take back United States deportees as quickly as we would like. Section 12 of the executive order titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” provides, in full: The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of State shall cooperate to effectively implement the sanctions [...]