Tightening immigration law has been at the top of President Trump’s to-do list since he declared he was running for office. After he descended the elevator in Trump Tower, he gave an announcement speech that began to address immigration in the 7th paragraph:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me.But they’re killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Donald Trump, June 16, 2015, Trump Tower
Since then, restricting immigration has been the one constant in his policy goals — from his attempts to ban people from predominantly Muslim countries, to his efforts to build a wall on the Mexican border, to his insistence that Mexico stop refugees from Central America passing through their country to get to the U.S.
This weekend he fired his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen for not being tough enough in implementing his policies, even as many Americans thought she was too tough in enforcing policy which required caging children at the border and separating families. In fact, Trump began what some call a “purge” of officials in what one political scientist, Jonathan Bernstein, says is usually a sign of a presidents’s weak control over the executive branch.
This post describes where Trump wants to go and gives two sides of the firing, which are essentially about the same actions, from two perspectives: he thinks he has the power to be more restrictive and she thinks it pushes the law.
1 big thing: Trump’s hardline new border plan April 9, 2019 by Mike Allen
President Trump has directed top officials to execute the most aggressive changes in immigration policy since his inauguration, sources tell Jonathan Swan and me. Some officials consider the moves legally and politically dubious.
- The new policies, which the administration wants to impose using executive authority following the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, would be even more restrictive than those of his first two years.
- Asked whether to expect an acceleration in deportations, a senior administration official, familiar with internal deliberations, said: “Yes, that’s the critical part of restoring integrity to the system.”
The changes, outlined by the senior official:
1. Make regulatory changes to make it “more difficult for low-skilled immigrants … to gain admission” into the United States, “and easier for high-skilled immigrants who are likely to be self-sufficient.”
- The Trump administration has produced a draft regulation for this, but it hasn’t been finalized.
2. Make it more difficult for people to invoke their fear of returning to their home country in order to seek asylum in the U.S.
- The official said the new DHS would “apply greater rigor and scrutiny to these [asylum] claims rather than credulously accepting what’s said.”
- The official said the State Department could “produce an analysis” comparing an asylum-seeker’s claims “against the actual conditions in their home country.”
3. The official said the White House is frustrated by the granting of work permits to asylum seekers so soon after entering the country, describing the practice as “a major draw.”
- The official described previous U.S. practice as “charity toward all, malice toward none.”
4. The White House also wants to change rules to allow the government to detain migrant children for longer than the 20-day limit allowed under the so-called Flores agreement.
- The Trump administration has produced a draft regulation for this, but it hasn’t been finalized.
The planned policy changes will face enormous challenges, legally and politically.
- Reality check from Axios’ Stef Kight: Two of the biggest attempts by the Trump administration to implement policies to curb asylum — a proclamation to prevent anyone who crossed the border illegally from receiving asylum, and the “remain in Mexico” policy— were ultimately blocked in court.
Trump’s decision to oust Nielsen was born out of the president’s deep frustration with her reluctance to implement major policy changes, according to senior administration officials with knowledge of the president’s thinking.
- This included what Trump viewed as her failure to stop a large number of people from seeking asylum in the U.S., or to dramatically cut back on the number of poor and low-skilled migrants coming to the U.S.
- Trump was also frustrated at what he perceived to be the slow speed of deportation of people in the U.S. illegally.
- A second senior official added that part of Homeland Security’s problem was that it was “woefully understaffed” under Nielsen.
The other side: Sources close to Nielsen tell us that Trump and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller have called for changes that are legally dubious and would therefore be operationally ineffective.
- Nielsen has found Trump’s demands unreasonable, and he has privately described her as “weak on the border,” even though she oversaw actions that many viewed as the most brutal in recent memory — such as the “zero tolerance” policy that separated migrant parents from their children.
- These sources say that Trump’s desire to make it dramatically harder for people to seek asylum in the U.S. wouldn’t produce lasting changes because they would immediately lead to court challenges.
Capturing the view of people close to Nielsen, here’s a quote Thad Bingel, a senior homeland security official under George W. Bush, gave theN.Y. Times:“The so-called immigration hard-liners have flailed about since the beginning of the administration, giving bad advice to the president and misdirecting resources.
AmGov, Axios and the News 