Tag: Trump immigration policy

Biden plans to spurn Trump immigration restrictions, but risk of new border crisis looms

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President-elect Joe Biden will take office under pressure to repudiate and rescind many, if not most, of the more than 400 executive actions President Trump has used to tighten the U.S. immigration system. But Biden also will start his term in a bind that could make such changes difficult to accomplish in short order.

Biden’s administration will inherit an enforcement system cracking under the strains of the coronavirus pandemic, a crippling immigration court backlog and a demoralized workforce at the Department of Homeland Security, where leadership instability and administrative chaos have been signatures of Trump’s tenure.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, tens of thousands of migrants with pending asylum claims are waiting to enter the United States, some in squalid tent cities that resemble refugee camps. U.S. border agents have been making arrests at a soaring rate — more than 2,000 per day in recent weeks — as the economic fallout from the pandemic and devastating hurricanes in Central America threaten to trigger a new wave of illegal migration to the United States. Continue reading.

ICE expelled group of children under Stephen Miller policy just minutes after judge blocked it

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A federal judge’s ruling earlier this month blocking the Stephen Miller-led public health policy that the Trump administration has used to quickly kick out children should have immediately stopped the expulsion of a group of 33 kids who sat on a flight bound for Central America that same day. Should have. Instead, officials continued on with the flight.

BuzzFeed News reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims that agents didn’t know about the ruling, which came shortly before the flight took off for Guatemala. It’s hard to believe that ICE wasn’t aware of an impactful decision stopping a policy that’s already expelled children at least 13,000 times, or that a ruling was coming. I guess they don’t carry phones or walkie talkies. It’s also hard to believe ICE when it has a history of lying to both the courts and us.

ICE claims that agents became aware of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s ruling only after they’d landed in Guatemala, but instead of keeping these children in custody and turning right back around for the U.S., they left them, BuzzFeed News continues. “It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” Migration Policy Institute analyst Sarah Pierce said in the report. Continue reading.

Behind Trump’s final push to limit immigration

Since Election Day, staffers have pushed through changes to visa processing and the citizenship test. Some aides even urged Trump to go after birthright citizenship.

Donald Trump is not done with immigration yet. 

Since Election Day, the president’s staffers have pushed through changes that make it easier to deny visas to immigrants, lengthened the citizenship test and appointed new members to an immigration policy board.

Some aides even urged Trump to sign an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, said two people familiar with the discussions — a legally dubious tactic given that birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution. A third person said the idea had recently been dismissed. Continue reading.

U.S. border officials close Texas warehouse where chain-link ‘cages’ for migrants became a symbol of mistreatment

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have shut down the South Texas warehouse where chain-link enclosures were deplored as “cages” during the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrant families and children. The facility will undergo renovations until 2022, CBP officials said.

The chain-link partitions will be removed, and the warehouse will be redesigned to provide detained migrants with more humane conditions, CBP officials said. The renovations will take 18 months or longer, leaving border agents without a large-volume facility if a new migration surge occurs next year.

“The new design will allow for updated accommodations, which will greatly improve the operating efficiency of the center as well as the welfare of individuals being processed,” Thomas Gresback, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, told The Washington Post. Continue reading.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller reveals aggressive second-term immigration agenda

The immigration hardliner says the president would fight to limit asylum, target “sanctuary cities,” expand the “travel ban” and cut work visas.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump‘s senior adviser Stephen Miller has fleshed out plans to rev up Trump’s restrictive immigration agenda if he wins re-election next week, offering a stark contrast to the platform of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

In a 30-minute phone interview Thursday with NBC News, Miller outlined four major priorities: limiting asylum grants, punishing and outlawing “sanctuary cities,” expanding the so-called travel ban with tougher screening for visa applicants and slapping new limits on work visas.

The objective, he said, is “raising and enhancing the standard for entry” to the United States. Continue reading.

Detention Facilities For Immigrants Fast-Tracked For Deportation Were Rife With Problems, Inspectors Find

Federal inspectors also found that families were held in Border Patrol custody for longer than a week, well beyond the 72-hour standard for detention.

Two controversial pilot programs that sought to quickly deport Mexican and Central American asylum-seekers at the southern border were rife with issues, including migrant families forced to remain in custody longer than what was appropriate, juvenile girls stuck in the same detention space with unrelated adult men, and toilets in facilities that had limited privacy.

The details come from a draft report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General that was obtained by BuzzFeed News. The two pilot programs instituted last fall — the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP) and Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) — were part of the Trump administration’s efforts to quickly screen and potentially remove asylum-seekers at the border.

Under HARP, Mexican asylum-seekers detained by Border Patrol agents were given an initial screening called a credible fear interview by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum officers within 48 hours, and the decision on the screening was expected to go quicker than usual. The other program, PACR, was similarly organized but aimed at Central Americans who traveled through Mexico to arrive at the US border. Continue reading.

Trump Says Immigrant Children He Orphaned Are ’So Well Taken Care Of’

Donald Trump on Thursday night defended his administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families with no way of reuniting them, claiming they are “so well taken care of.”

Asked at the final presidential debate about the 545 detained immigrant kids taken forcibly from their parents at the southern U.S. border under his administration’s zero-tolerance policy, whose families the Trump administration has been unable to locate, Trump first suggested without proof that some had been brought into the country by “coyotes.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden quickly refuted that argument, noting that the kids in question had come over with their families before being separated by border officials. Continue reading.

‘We Need To Take Away Children’: Former Administration Officials Were ‘Driving Force’ Behind Family Separation Policy

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Under the current administration, children were taken away from their parents and detained at the border in cages without soap, blankets, or even toothbrushes. A recent New York Times article found that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod. J. Rosenstein, were the “driving force” behind this family separation policy.

Here are some of those children’s stories in their own words. It’s time to end inhumane immigration policies.

View the post here.

Let’s not mince words. The Trump administration kidnapped children.

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THE TRUMP administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their families by U.S. government officials with no plan or mechanism ever to reunite them, remain separated.

That is the case despite years of efforts to track down parents who were, in many cases, deported after their children were seized and placed with family sponsors in the United States. For all intents and purposes, these children were kidnapped by the U.S. government.

In fact, it has not even been the U.S. government that has tried to reunite these sundered families. That has been the work of a court-appointed body organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, a nongovernmental organization. The ACLU, in effect, was put in charge of trying to fix what the Trump administration shattered — the lives of hundreds of children and families. Even now, the parents of 545 separated children cannot be located, despite the efforts of lawyers and advocates, according to a new court filing. Continue reading.

Lawyers say they can’t find the parents of 545 migrant children separated by Trump administration

About two-thirds of the 1,000-plus parents separated from their kids under a 2017 pilot program were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be found.

WASHINGTON — Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration instituted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.

Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found. Continue reading.