Dem
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GOP
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CNN is claiming to have an exclusive report on Donald Trump's new plan to speed up the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. This is a huge step up from what he has been doing.
The plan is to go after all the people who entered the country illegally and then applied for asylum while in the country. That violates the asylum protocol. What asylum seekers are required to do is present themselves to a border patrol agent at a legal crossing point and apply for asylum on the spot. About a quarter of a million people filed for asylum after they were in the country. Since they did file paperwork, albeit too late, they are relatively easy to find. What Trump wants to do now is dismiss all their cases, round them up, and deport them all. At least here he has a legal leg to stand on, since they have admitted to a felony (entering the country illegally). In some cases, the immigrants have been in the U.S. for years and have not broken any other laws, but they are still likely to be deported.
Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, has argued for having all their cases heard before an immigration judge and letting the judge rule on each case based on the facts of that case. But Trump doesn't want to do that. He wants to dismiss all the cases en masse and deport all the immigrants who filed too late.
In related news, CBS also has an exclusive story on immigrants. It has discovered that ICE now has 59,000 immigrants in detention, and half of them have no criminal record. This refutes Trump's story that he is only deporting violent criminals, since half the detainees aren't criminals at all. ICE has a capacity of 41,000, so it has already arrested more people than it has beds for.
Yet another exclusive story, this one from NBC, adds another twist to this. Last September, ICE told Congress that 13,000 immigrants are known to have committed a murder. Yet only 752 of them (6%) have been arrested. If the goal were to go after violent criminals, surely murderers ought to be high on the list.
As far as storage capacity is concerned, ICE is working on converting some military bases, like Fort Bliss, TX, into holding pens. Another plan is to build a facility in the Everglades, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. The idea here is that if anyone escaped, the gators would take care of them. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has egged Florida on and is providing funds for it. Environmentalists are furious.
In any event, arrests are speeding up. In June they averaged 1,200/day, with some days over 2,000. ICE is getting increasingly indiscriminate in trying to reach Stephen Miller's goal of 3,000/day. What is new is that many of the detainees were picked up in the interior of the country rather than near the border, as has traditionally been the case. The new emphasis on states far from the border has been due to ICE agents desperately trying to make their daily quotas. (V)