Trump is angry largely because he feels Sessions allowed the Democrats to launch the Mueller investigation. Trump told TheHill.com: But Sessions’ “Department of Justice is…
Trump is angry largely because he feels Sessions allowed the Democrats to launch the Mueller investigation. Trump told TheHill.com:
But Sessions’ “Department of Justice is absolutely critical to achieving Trump’s immigration agenda,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Sessions runs “the immigration courts and the prosecution of criminal aliens and other serious immigration violators,” she said. In contrast, DoJ officials under President George W. Bush deferred to the cheap-labor demands of business, she said.
“The other important reason the administration need Jeff Sessions as AG is that every serious move the administrations takes to restore integrity in the system is being challenged in courts,” she said. “We need Jeff Sessions and his team to understand the issues and how to defend the President’s agenda from these legal attacks, but also to pick the right people for defending them in court.”
Sessions is using his broad authority to implement Trump’s agenda amid passive opposition from the GOP, active hostility from Democrats, and desperate lobbying by business groups.
Elite Democrats portray themselves as nobly offering sanctuary to victims of foreign injustice while they also gain economically from cheap blue-collar workers, including waiters, fruit-pickers, gardeners and maids. Democrats also do gain politically whenever immigrants become voters and seek government aid in a high-immigration/low wage economy.
The business-first wing of the GOP loudly tells voters they oppose illegal migration, but they also quietly oppose any penalties for the Chamber of Commerce employers who invite and reward the migrating workers, consumers, and renters. Business lobbyists also demand more legal immigrants, and they persuade themselves and GOP politicians that foreign migrants who buy a house will vote Republican.
The two parties are eager to fuss over illegal migration because it helps them distract voters and politicians from the far-larger impact of legal immigration and visa-worker programs. Legal immigration does far more for business to force down blue-collar and white-collar wages — and so raise stock values for donors in both parties — because it has added 44.5 million immigrants (and 17 million of their children) to the potential labor pool.
So every reform proposed or implemented by Trump is met with lawsuits, emotional media complaints, and quiet opposition in Congress’ backrooms. The result is a grueling political and legal war of attrition, where gains and losses are measured by data about border crossers, border-wall construction, migrant crimes, employer penalties, and Americans’ wage levels.
Here are the top nine measures that President Donald Trump — aided by Jeff Sessions — is taking to shut down the beginning, middle, and end of the illegal migration pipeline.
Prosecution of Illegal Immigrants
Sessions has dramatically accelerated the prosecution of adult illegal immigrants, ensuring the rapid conviction of 30,000 illegal migrants by the end of July. Few of the adult migrants are kept in jail, but the convictions raise the deterrent because they ensure those repeat offenders can be detained for two years if they cross the border again.
The Marshall Project reported:
Still, lack of resources ensures that only half of the caught migrants are being processed by the legal system, while the other half are just sent back over the border. This year, Republicans in the House and Senate have again refused to fund prosecution for all the border-crossers even as they talk up possible funding for a wall.
Asylum Reform
Sessions has narrowed the pipeline entry by ending President Barack Obama’s offer of asylum to people who have a “credible fear” of criminal gangs and brutal spouses. The reform allows border officers to quickly send many migrants home after about 40 days of legal processing time.
Progressives are aghast at Sessions’ reform. One pro-immigraiton academic wrote in TheHill.com:
In response, the smuggling cartels are advising their asylum-seeking clients to bring their children up to the border to trigger the “catch-and-release” rules in the 2015 Flores decision imposed by liberal Judge Dolly Gee.
The Flores decision says children must be released from detention after 20 days — which means the adults are also released and are told to come back to court for a final deportation or asylum decision. But the courts are so backlogged by Obamas’ migrants that most migrants get a court date two years after they arrive. The two-year delay also means they get a work permit.
That legal advice is now spiking the inflow of so-called “Family Unit” migrants, consisting of a single adult with one or more children.
Sometimes the migrants bring other people’s children to get through the progressives’ Flores loophole:
In 2018, roughly 90,000 migrants and their children have passed through the border, as progressives and their media allies forced a sudden end to Trump’s short-lived “zero tolerance” policy.
That April-to-June zero-tolerance policy tried to close the Flores loophole by housing children at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services until their detained parents were ready for deportation. But the policy was ended when establishment journalists allied with progressives to portray the zero-tolerance policy as a vindictive punishment of vulnerable migrants.
Now Trump’s deputies have come up with a counter-strategy.
Flores Regulation
Guided by Sessions, Trump’s deputies have written a regulation to close the Flores loophole.
In September, Homeland Defense Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced a draft regulation to close the Flores loophole, which bars officials from holding children for more than 20 days. The regulation will take months to get through the formal legal process, and then will face intense opposition from pro-migration groups and some judges. Once operational, it will allow officials to detain migrants with children — dubbed “Family Units” — until their legal cases are completed in roughly 40 days.
Migrants are rational, and few will borrow $8,000 from the cartels for smugglers’ fees if they cannot get a job in the United States to pay off the debt. The pending regulation could close the entry to the “Family Unit” migrant pipeline.
Unaccompanied Alien Children
Roughly 32,000 “Unaccompanied Alien Children” from three Latin American countries have also come through the border since October 2017 to exploit a different set of loopholes.
Those loopholes are in the TVPRA, or the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.
Legislators in Congress passed the law, they said, to aid the small number of migrants who are transported for sex and labor. But Obama’s deputies widened their interpretation of the law to include almost every child or youth from Central America. Moreover, Obama began using federal agencies to transport the youths and children to their illegal-immigrant parents and relatives living in the United States.
In February 2018, a coalition of Democrats and business-first Republican Senators blocked Trump’s proposed TVPRA reform.
In response, Trump’s deputies at the DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services have reduced the Obama-era practice of handing the smuggled children to their illegal-immigrant parents. The New York Times reported Sept. 12:
On Sept. 18, officials told the Senate that DHS officers detained 41 illegal immigrants who sought to pick up children and youths from DHS shelters. The new enforcement policy may deter illegal-immigrants from trying to smuggle their “UAC” children into the United States.
Trump’s apparent refusal to complete delivery of the cartel-transported youths and children is causing a backlog in the child-delivery system. The number of youths and children at HHS centers has risen to 12,800, just a little below the system’s capacity of 13,800.
UAC Shelters
HHS is responding to the rising population of detained UACs by building a large-scale, military-style shelter in Texas, according to the Washington Post:
The rising number of UACs in the shelters will prompt another wave of media-magnified Democratic complaints. But that crisis will be muffled if the GOP in Congress funds additional housing so more migrant children can be sheltered until they are legally processed and sent home.
The Border Wall
Trump wants to build roughly 1,000 miles of border wall, at the cost of roughly $25 billion. Democrats hate the wall as a physical symbol of Trump’s America First policies, and business-first Republicans would prefer it not get built.
That political opposition means Trump has only gotten $3.2 billion for the wall, or enough to build roughly 200 miles of top-grade border fence.
The border fence will be useful, especially if Trump, Sessions, and Nielsen can also block the various legal loopholes which allow migrants to get asylum no matter how long or high the way may be built.
Yet Congress has also set rules to ensure the limited cannot be used to block some high-traffic border areas, such as the route through the Santa Ana Nature Reserve on the Texas border near McAllen.
Currently, GOP leaders promise Trump up to $5 billion to build more than 200 miles of wall in 2019, but they are pressuring him to approve the expansion of several cheap-labor programs which are used by companies to import foreign college-graduates and laborers. That trade is the goal favored by the business-first GOP — fewer legal foreign workers in exchange for more legal foreign visa-workers — because it cuts salary costs for companies without importing Latino voters for the Democrats.
