"The US has a ‘thirst’ for immigrant workers. Why do so many struggle to get legal status?" PBS NewsHour 5/20/2021
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SUMMARY: President Joe Biden has said that changing immigration law remains an important piece of his agenda. But the path to new legislation is complex and hardly clear. One of the biggest flashpoints in this debate are questions about undocumented workers and their role in the economy. Paul Solman dives into those questions for his latest report for "Making $ense."
"Supreme Court reviews Trump effort to change census data on immigrants" PBS NewsHour 11/30/2020
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SUMMARY: President Trump’s immigration policies and the U.S. census were back at the Supreme Court on Monday. As John Yang reports, the issues at stake in the case have the potential of shaping congressional and presidential politics for years to come.
SUMMARY: Amid growing unrest in Greece, the government there is temporarily halting construction of permanent detention centers for asylum seekers. Tens of thousands of migrants have been stranded in the country for more than four years, since its border with Macedonia was sealed and the European Union failed to find enough alternative destinations. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.
SUMMARY: Five years into Europe's migration crisis, the conditions in the notorious Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos are hellish. Refugee children are especially vulnerable, facing hunger, bad sanitation and the threat of violence. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports that angry local residents are demanding a solution.
SUMMARY: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus join William Brangham to discuss the week’s news, including the anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the politics of racially charged rhetoric, the implications of Tuesday’s close elections, the EPA moving away from global climate change efforts, and more.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Now we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus. That’s New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus. Mark Shields is away.
Welcome to you both.
So, we — as we were just hearing, this weekend is the one-year anniversary of the spasm of racism that we saw in Charlottesville.
David, I’m curious. The President, we saw what his reaction was a year ago. And since then, he’s continued a steady stream of racially charged rhetoric, criticizing immigrants, linking them with crime and MS-13, criticizing NFL players.
In this past year, is it your sense that anything has changed in that regard?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: No, not with Donald Trump.
White identity politics has been his calling card for a long, long time, maybe stretching back generations of the Trump family.
The Institute for Family Studies did this study asking how many people, how many Americans actually sympathize with what the alt-right stood for, what the people in Charlottesville stood for. And they identified three core beliefs.
The first was, do you have a strong sense of white identity, [1] do you have a belief in the importance of white solidarity, [2] that all white people should stick together, and [3] you have a sense of white victimization, that whites are often the victim of discrimination?
And 6 percent of Americans share those three beliefs. And so that’s pretty much a core set of people who have high — one would say, a high degree of white identity, verging into racism.
And so that’s a group of people who can be whipped up. And then there’s a large group that share one of those things.
But, to me, Donald Trump’s main failure is constantly whipping up that sense of white identity. Not many even Republicans 20 years ago thought that being white was a strong part of their identity. But now it’s like 55 percent. And so he has stirred that up.
And then the second problem is, you just can’t have a party that’s basically all white, because when you overlay our racial problems with our political problems, you get instant poison.
And so the failure to do anything about that is by itself a gigantic problem.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Ruth, do you see any good news in that, in that just 6 percent — I know it is — does seem like an enormous number of people identifying with white supremacy — but maybe there’s a silver lining there?
RUTH MARCUS, Washington Post: Well, I do see some good news in the response of the American people in the last year.
The first good news was the response to Charlottesville and to the President’s response to Charlottesville, where almost — most people, in fact, many people in his administration, some publicly, recoiled at the President’s assertion that there were fine people on both sides.
I think we have seen in recent months a kind of slow-motion version of Charlottesville, as people have recoiled from the family separation policy and its racial overtones.
We are better as a people, even despite that 6 percent, than our President. The bad news is that, as David said, the President has not been chastened — and, as you mentioned — the President has not been chastened in the last year. He has just continued to do what he has done all along.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You mean he hasn’t suffered political repercussions?
RUTH MARCUS: He hasn’t suffered political repercussions. And he has gone on his merry, very ugly way.
And it’s not the 6 percent that I worry about. It’s the people who do not think of themselves as racists, people who think of themselves as decent people, wouldn’t subscribe to those extreme views. But there’s a way in which the President’s rhetoric about S-hole countries, about animals, and his actions, like family separation, just legitimize and kind of encourage a belief in some people as lesser than others, and allowing comments like Laura Ingraham’s comments just the other day about immigrants to be viewed as somehow more acceptable than they were before Donald Trump.
And one last thing. The numbers bear it out. There was a recent poll; 57 percent of people thought race relations have got — think race relations have gotten worse under Donald Trump.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gotten worse.
RUTH MARCUS: Fifty-seven percent.
Need to point out, 37 percent thought they got worse under Barack Obama as well, but…
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Right.
Yes. Well, I certainly think they have gotten worse. Even measuring by segregation levels in the schools, we’re much more segregated at schools, residentially, and then the political thing that’s tearing — on the Laura Ingraham comment…
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This was Laura, the FOX News host who basically went on a diatribe the other day, saying that it is undeniable that America is changing, and it’s largely due to demographics, and that these open borders, and the Democrats seem to celebrate it, and it’s a catastrophe for the country.
DAVID BROOKS: And nobody asked us. And she said it’s legal immigration and illegal immigration.
So it was a pure play of, we used to be white, and now we’re less so. That — basically, that…
RUTH MARCUS: It’s not too subtle.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes.
And so I suppose I’m perfectly willing to have a debate about immigration, but when it’s constantly accompanied by racial superiority and race — and us/them thinking, and racial cries, you can’t even have that debate.
Separating children from their parents at the southwest border ignited a broad emotional outcry not often seen in the country’s long-running immigration debate. After weeks of defending the policy both as a deterrent and necessary to make the border legally meaningful, President Donald Trump and his administration reversed course.
The policy switch was itself a rarity for Trump, and it prompted the host of NBC’s Meet the Press Chuck Todd to ask the guests on his June 24 show, "Is this more of a refugee crisis than an immigration crisis?"
There is no definitive answer, but to frame the issue in terms of refugees instead of immigration redefines the problem.
"It becomes more of a humanitarian problem, than a jobs or economic one," said Sarah Pierce, an immigration analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.
We looked at what the data have to say.
It’s all about the Northern Triangle
For decades, the bulk of people crossing the southwest border without permission were Mexican. They worked on American farms, built American homes, processed American pigs, beef and chickens, and did other manual work.
The people showing up at the border today are more likely to come from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, a cluster known as the Northern Triangle. In 2017, non-Mexicans stopped at the southwest border outnumbered Mexicans by 50,000.
Not only are those nations poor, they are also particularly violent. The highest murder rates in the world are found in El Salvador and Honduras.
As the places people came from changed, so did the demographics of who was caught at the border.
Between 2013 and 2017, the number of families apprehended by Customs and Border Patrol agents rose five-fold, from 14,855 to 75,622.
Minors (anyone under 18) went from 7 percent of all people stopped at the border in 2011 to 27 percent in 2017 – nearly a four-fold increase. In the same period, the fraction of females, both children and adults, doubled from 13 percent of all apprehensions to 26 percent.
"The recent crisis brings very different immigrants from those who were undocumented and came in the 1990s," said economist Giovanni Peri at University of California, Davis. "They are younger, more vulnerable and more similar to refugees."
Peri, along with most researchers, emphasizes that migrants have a blend of motivations. In the case of the Northern Triangle countries, escaping poverty and fleeing violence go hand in hand.
Teasing out the relative weight of each is tricky.
Fortunately for us, one economist took a stab at it.
The violence-migration connection
Around 2012, a surge of teenagers without their parents began arriving at the southwest border. By 2013, for the first time, the unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras outnumbered those from Mexico. In 2014, they accounted for 75 percent of arrivals at the border.
U.S. authorities ended up collecting detailed information on 178,825 minors. Critically, that data included the towns and cities they had left behind.
Economist Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development took that location data and ran it against the homicide data specific to those places. Violence, Clemens noted, isn’t spread evenly. It concentrates in hot spots.
He also folded in figures for local unemployment, income, poverty and school enrollment.
Clemens found that murders drive migration, but it wasn’t as simple as people fleeing the areas with the highest murder rates. What mattered most was a rise in homicides.
Clemens determined that on average, an increase of 1.08 homicides per year over four years in a community led to one additional minor from that community at the American border each year. To further complicate the picture, a jump in murders had a snowball effect, driving migration numbers up for several years going forward, even if the violence leveled off.
Clemens also found that poverty alone didn’t drive migration. Teenagers – and it was mainly 16-and-17-year-olds – tended not to come from the poorest places, but from places where there was enough money to pay smugglers to shepard minors through Mexico and across the U.S. border.
At the same time, there was a strong connection between sustained poverty and migration.
At the end of the day, Clemens gave about equal weight to violence and economic drivers.
The impact of "short-term increases in violence is roughly equal to the explanatory power of long-term economic characteristics like average income and poverty," Clemens wrote.
Put another way, the surge of minors at the U.S.-Mexico border is both an immigration and refugee issue.
A key caveat to Clemens’ work is that it looked only at unaccompanied minors, and it’s possible that the picture would change if adults and families were included. But based on studies of family migrants, Clemens said it likely would look the same.
"The decision for movement by unaccompanied children is one of safety and opportunity for children, and that is also heavily in the minds of family units," Clemens said. "The two kinds don’t self-report substantially different motives."
Clemens also noted that in the 2011-16 period, changes in U.S. policy had little impact on migration trends from the Northern Triangle.
The end of a rule of thumb
For decades, a simple correlation tied illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States.
"When the U.S. unemployment rate went down, migration went up," said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at Pew Research. "If the unemployment rate went up, migration went down."
That held true through 2010. Then, the pattern stopped.
"After 2010, the unemployment rate dropped dramatically," Passel said. "If this model had held, Mexican migration would have gone up. Instead, Mexican migration went down."
Passel said the rise in numbers from other Central American countries, mainly the Northern Triangle group, is not a simple swap of one group for another. The demographic mix is entirely different.
"There’s something else going on that’s causing the Central American increase," Passel said. "The economy plays a role but it’s not solely determinative."
Passel and other researchers point to several reasons for the breakdown in the traditional pattern of illegal migration. Studies show a drop in the number of young men in Mexico, a group that was always the main source of border crossers. In some areas of Mexico, jobs are more available. And importantly, American border security has gone steadily up since about 2005.
"Just about everybody gets caught now," said Passel. "That seemed to work as a deterrent of Mexican migration, but those same factors don’t seem to be affecting Central American migration."
Peri, the UC Davis economist, suggested that the hardening of the border itself changed the mix of people caught trying to enter illegally.
"The very strict enforcement keeps away people who are motivated mainly by jobs, and selects only very desperate Central Americans, including many kids."
To the extent that dynamic is at work, then the primary solution to an immigration problem fueled a humanitarian one.
Not your typical refugee
Legally, American laws and regulations count someone as a refugee by granting them asylum on the grounds that their personal safety is at risk if they stayed in their home country. As we’ve reported, the number of asylum requests has skyrocketed, but the fraction granted has held steady at about 20 percent.
"If they do not qualify for asylum either then they are not ‘refugees’ in the border sense of someone fleeing for their life and in need of resettlement," said the director of the Center for Immigration Studies Steven Camarota. The center promotes lower and more selective immigration.
"If someone has gone 1,500 miles through Mexico, and did not apply for asylum there, then it implies that they are not so much fleeing for their life, which is suppose to be the case for an asylee, but rather they are looking for a better life in the United States," Camarota said.
Passel at Pew Research noted that ties to family and friends play a large role when migrants pick a destination. Many people stopped at the border have an immediate or extended family member already in the United States. Migrants aim for places where community connections will help them once they arrive.
"Safety is one thing, but you have to live, too," Passel said.
SUMMARY: Hassan al Kontar, a Syrian national, has been living in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur airport for more than 60 days, stuck in legal limbo over his immigration status. The PBS NewsHour’s Rhana Natour reports.
A death. A cover-up. An immigrant meets a terrible end in the Bronx.
This story was co-published with Voice of America.
The body of the young man lay in the middle of Jerome Avenue beneath the elevated train tracks, the scene lit by the neon blue sign above the shuttered El Caribe restaurant. A garbage truck sat mid-turn at the otherwise deserted intersection in the Bronx.
Emergency medical personnel arrived, records show, and pronounced the young man dead at 5:08 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2017.
The police came, too. Officers taped off the scene, and interviewed the truck driver and his assistant, according to records and interviews. The driver and helper, according to the police report, said the dead man was a stranger who had inexplicably jumped on the truck’s passenger side running board, lost his grip and was run over. The initial police report left blank the spot for the young man’s name.
Within hours, a Bronx News12 reporter said neighbors thought the victim was “a homeless man that they’ve seen in the area.” By afternoon, he was “a daredevil homeless man” in the Daily News.
The garbage truck belonged to Sanitation Salvage, among the largest commercial trash haulers in the city. A company supervisor eventually came to retrieve the truck and take it back to the company yard. Then, according to workers told about the night’s events, it was promptly sent back out without so much as a cleaning.
Two miles south of the accident, in a Bronx apartment off the Grand Concourse, a mother waited for her son. Hadiatou Barry, a Guinean immigrant, had come to the Bronx for a better life for her family. Her eldest son, Mouctar Diallo, 21, had a bed in the living room of their apartment. The young man often worked nights, and with the sun coming up should have been home asleep. But his bed remained empty.
Soon enough, Hadiatou Barry got the worst sort of news, a double-barreled blow of devastation and insult.
Mouctar Diallo's nighttime job had been as an informal helper on garbage trucks owned by Sanitation Salvage, and the truck he’d been working on that night had killed him. Then, she learned, the truck’s driver and main helper — men who’d known him for more than a year and paid him off-the-books for his help hauling trash to the curb — had claimed not to know him. The rest of the city now knew her son only as a homeless person.
“He is my son, and I want the truth for him,” Hadiatou Barry said in a recent interview. “In order for it to not happen to somebody else.”
The truth of Mouctar Diallo's death is that the authorities investigating the accident did not learn that he was a worker on the truck for at least two months, and that when they did, they took no action against the driver and helper who had lied to police. The Business Integrity Commission, the New York City agency charged with oversight of the commercial garbage industry, allowed both the driver and main helper to keep working. The police and Bronx prosecutors closed their investigation with no criminal charges.
Last Friday, Sean Spence, the Sanitation Salvage driver who authorities say ran over Diallo and lied about it, struck and killed another man, 72–year-old Leo Clarke. Clarke, walking with a cane, was crossing in the middle of a Bronx block Friday evening when he was crushed by the 40-ton truck. A police investigation is underway, and Spence now has been suspended from driving for Sanitation Salvage.
“Oh my God,” Hadiatou Barry said when told of Spence’s involvement in the second fatality.
The New York Police Department said lying to the police was not a crime. The department maintains it did a thorough investigation, collecting witness statements, 911 calls and videotape from the scene. The police, a spokesman said, had no authority to investigate the operations of a private sanitation company.
A spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney said the Business Integrity Commission had made no criminal referral to prosecutors about the conduct of Sanitation Salvage’s employees and thus prosecutors had no cause to investigate further.
The Business Integrity Commission’s spokesperson said the commission was alerted to the possibility that the November death involved a worker in early January, during a meeting with labor advocates about conditions at Sanitation Salvage. The fact that it was Diallo who had been killed had been an open secret among the workers for months. Commission officials said they then confronted Spence and his chief helper, Chris Bourke, and that the two men confessed to having invented the tale of an unknown pedestrian jumping on the truck.
The commission spokesperson said the agency lacked the power to suspend the driver on its own. It said Spence was suspended after the second death because the commission asked the company to do so, and Sanitation Salvage complied.
Asked why the commission did not make that kind of request immediately after finding that a driver in a fatal accident had lied to police, a spokesperson declined to comment.
Several attempts to contact Spence were not successful.
Sanitation Salvage did not respond to multiple requests for comment over several weeks.
In an interview, Bourke, the main helper on the truck that killed Diallo, claimed not to know where the tale of the daredevil homeless man had come from. He said he only talked briefly to police, and couldn’t remember what he told them. Diallo, he said, “popped out of nowhere.”
To this day, Hadiatou Barry and former colleagues of Mouctar at Sanitation Salvage say they are not confident they know the truth about how Mouctar died. Helpers are not supposed to ride on the front running boards, workers say. They walk the street, haul trash to the curb and ride the back of the truck.
Every night in New York, an army of private garbage trucks from more than 250 sanitation companies sets out across the five boroughs picking up the trash from all manner of businesses. Racing to complete long and often circuitous routes, the trucks crisscross the city at breakneck speeds. The human toll is substantial: Since 2010, there have been 33 deaths attributed to private garbage trucks across the city.
Sanitation Salvage trucks, now involved in two deaths in six months, have failed federal safety inspections at a rate that’s four times the national average. A Department of Labor investigation found that the company had failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and that workers pulled 18-hour days. Drivers are so overtaxed that they hire additional helpers — often young men off the street — to try and complete their routes on time.
Mouctar Diallo was one of those, known at Sanitation Salvage as “third men.” It is unclear when Diallo arrived in the Bronx — the borough has one of greatest concentrations of Guinean immigrants in America — but he’d begun working for Sanitation Salvage in the late spring of 2016, according to interviews with co-workers. He first worked with a driver named Timothy Belgrave, and later with Vernando Smith. Diallo, nicknamed “Gotto,” was beloved for his intrepidness — he wasn’t afraid of rats — and the way he made everyone laugh. He’d been working with Spence and Bourke for over a year.
“Almost everybody there would know Gotto,” Smith, the former driver, said of workers and management at Sanitation Salvage. “They would see him on the truck. Maybe they didn’t know his name but they knew his face. He was the only African who worked for the company."
Such third men, according to interviews with 15 current and former workers, often got paid off the books, either directly by the company or out of the pockets of drivers and main helpers. The drivers and main helpers were then sometimes reimbursed by the company, according to current and former workers. Such informal payments were a testament to how impossibly long the routes were. A typical route at another company in the Bronx would be around 200 stops. At Sanitation Salvage, many routes had close to 1,000 stops, if not more.
Third men could make anywhere from $30 to $80 a night, for shifts as long as 18 or 20 hours, according to workers.
In 2015, after an investigation, the Department of Labor concluded that Sanitation Salvage owed workers $385,000 in unpaid overtime over the past three years. Sanitation Salvage refused to pay, claiming the workers were seeking to be paid for time actually spent hanging out with friends. When the department chose not to take the company to court, the issue ended.
Bourke, the helper who first recruited Diallo off the street, said of the long hours and demanding routes, “If you do the math, accidents will happen.” Waste and recycling work is the fifth-most fatal job in America.
“It’s not just about Gotto’s death,” Bourke said. “To work like this is unhuman. They’ll make you work like a slave. You can do 18 hours one day and, say, go home and get four hours of sleep and come back and do 12 hours.”
Voice of America and ProPublica sent Sanitation Salvage and its lawyers a detailed set of questions weeks ago — about Diallo’s death, the false account given by the driver and helper, the working conditions at the company, and its trouble with the Department of Labor. The company did not respond.
This week, the Business Integrity Commission said the second death and the accounts of dangerous working conditions had prompted an investigation that could result in halting the company’s operations or installing a monitor.
However, a coalition of labor, safe streets and Bronx community organizations are calling for an immediate suspension of Sanitation Salvage’s license.
“We take these workers’ allegations very seriously,” the commission said. “If the results of the investigation merit these actions or any others, they will be taken immediately.”
SUMMARY: On this Tax Day, while many Americans rush to file their income tax returns, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case on state sales taxes and online shopping. Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal joins Judy Woodruff to discuss what happened in the courtroom today, as well as a ruling that will make it harder for the Trump administration to deport some immigrants.
SUMMARY: In Canadian public schools, the children of new immigrants do as well as native-born children within three years of arriving. There kids don't just get language and academic support; their home cultures are celebrated as they are integrated into classes. And strong social services and healthy education funding help too. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): The United States a Canada have a lot in common. But when it comes to education outcomes, the two are very different.
Unlike the U.S., Canada is one of the top performing education systems in the world. It does a good job educating its English-language learners. Within three years of arriving in Canada’s public schools, children of new immigrants do as well as native-born children.
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Kavitha Cardoza, Education Week: Three-fourths of the 500 students at Islington Junior Middle School speak a language other than English at home, including Somali, Korean, and Russian.
It mirrors the diversity of Toronto, where almost half the population was born in a different country. Every afternoon, all English learners join regular classes. This intentional integration is meant to help them feel part of the larger school.
SUMMARY: Two dozen cities that shelter undocumented immigrants have been sent letters by the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena them over proof that they are complying with immigration rules. The news angered some mayors meeting in Washington for a conference. John Yang talks to Republican Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, and Democratic Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany, New York.
SUMMARY: A California high school is using song to examine a painful chapter in U.S. history. “In America” is an oratorio composed by students at Van Nuys High School, with help from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, that reflects on the experiences of Japanese-Americans who were forced to leave their homes for internment camps during World War II. Jeffrey Brown reports from Los Angeles.
SUMMARY: What does the word "refugee" mean to the author of a short story collection called "The Refugees?" They “are the unwanted," says Viet Thanh Nguyen, who claims his own identity among them. Nguyen joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss his stories about living between worlds and being haunted by the past.
The idea is part of a raft of immigration proposals signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly that are likely to spur international and legal challenges.
This article was co-published with Univision. (Spanish)
Update, Feb. 21, 2017:
In a call with reporters Tuesday morning, DHS officials confirmed they were working on a plan to send migrants who had entered the United States from Mexico back to Mexico, even if they were not citizens of that country.
Buried deep in the Trump administration's plans to round up undocumented immigrants is a provision certain to enrage Mexico — new authority for federal agents to deport anyone caught crossing the southern border to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.
If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum.
President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build.
“This would say if you want to make a claim for asylum or whatever we'll hear your case but you are going to wait in Mexico,” a DHS official said. “Those are details that are being worked out both within the department and between the US government and the government of Mexico … there are elements that still need to be worked out in detail.
Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Mexico later this week to meet with representatives of the Mexican government. It remains unclear if they will discuss this issue.
The new authority for immigration agents is among the dramatic, some would say untenable, tactics the Trump administration is preparing to deploy as it upends President Obama's policies on illegal immigration.
A pair of memos signed by John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, and publicly released on Tuesday outline the plans for what present and former government officials say will be a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants. Near final drafts of the memos had leaked over the weekend and had been first reported by McClatchy.
Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren't new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a 1996 law that policy makers and law enforcement agents had disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd.
“Most of these provisions of law have been there for decades,” the DHS official said. “We are simply trying to execute what Congress has asked us to do.”
Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS's budget, saying that it would, “save the Department's detention and adjudication resources for other priority aliens.”
However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic 'No,'” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official.
Whether viable or not, the Trump administration's deportation plans mark a dramatic departure from decades of policy and practice. Current and former immigration policy officials say that while the details of how the administration intends to carry out the plans remain unclear — if not insurmountable — the administration's overall message to enforcement agents across the country is clear: the limits have been lifted.
President Obama attempted to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, and on those who were caught while or shortly after illegally entering the country. Still, his administration deported record numbers of immigrants, most of whom had only been accused of minor crimes and immigration violations.
The Trump administration says it, too, is focused on deporting criminals, but it has redefined crimes to include any activity that might bring a conviction, including entering the U.S. without permission. Effectively, that makes virtually everyone in the U.S. without a proper visa subject to roundup at their workplace or home.
“If you are present in the U.S. without being admitted or paroled or having overstayed your visa, the immigration laws of the U.S. subject you to removal,” the DHS official said. “Everyone who is in violation of the laws is theoretically subject to enforcement. The Department has limited resources and we will, to the extent that we can, focus on folks who have committed serious crimes.”
The only clear exception, according to the enforcement plan and the DHS briefing, is for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers.
“Anyone who complained about Obama as the deporter-in-chief,” said David Martin, formerly DHS's principal deputy general counsel, “is unfortunately going to get a taste of what it's like when someone is really gung-ho.”
Greg Chen, the policy director at AILA, said the Trump plan would “effectively unleash a massive deportation force with extremely broad authority to use detention as the default mechanism for anyone suspected of violating immigration law.”
The question looming over the proposals is how many of them, with all their legal and logistical obstacles, will the President actually be able to carry out.
The memos, for example, authorize the Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents, even though the force has never been able to fill the slots it has already been allotted. Some 60 percent of applicants to the Border Patrol fail the required polygraph, and those who pass take 18 months to get sent out into the field.
The Trump plan calls for the expansion of a George W. Bush-era program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. It was touted after 9/11 as a critical “force-multiplier.” But by 2010, some of the country's largest police departments were refusing to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect. Meanwhile, participating agencies, which foot the bill for the program, were suddenly saddled with new debts and hounded by accusations of racial profiling and other abuse, forcing the Obama administration to suspend expansion of the program.
Until now, the enforcement of summary deportation laws, known as “expedited removal,” have been limited to those apprehended within 14 days of illegally entering the country and within 100 miles of Canada or Mexico. The memos signed by Kelly would allow use of those laws anywhere in the country against anyone who entered illegally within the past two years.
Lucas Guttentag, a former DHS adviser and Stanford law professor, said this would “unleash chaos,” violate due process, and meet challenges in court, similar to those that scuttled the administration's travel ban.
There would also be aggressive challenges, lawyers said, to plans that would allow immigration agents to deport unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally, rather than uniting them with parents or other relatives in the U.S.
The reason for discussing unaccompanied minors is “ that they have been abandoned by their parents or legal guardians,” the DHS official said. If it is “determined that there is a parent or guardian in the U.S. that they can be handed over to, then DHS needs to take a hard look over whether that person is actually'' an unaccompanied minor.
“There will be a renewed focus on ensuring that folks don't abuse the system,” the DHS official added.
They also expect legal opposition to a proposal that would strip undocumented immigrants of existing privacy protections, allowing personal information such as asylum cases or immigration violations to be publicly disclosed.
“We want to ensure that our privacy policies are consistent with the law,” the DHS official said. “The Privacy Act applies by statute to citizens'' and green card holders. “The President has asked us to align our laws with what congress has directed.”
“The Trump people have clearly bought into the model of harsh enforcement. They apparently think, 'we'll be tough, and a lot of people will leave on their own,'” said Martin, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia. “They believe they'll win in the court of public opinion. I'm not sure about that. A lot of Americans know hard-working undocumented immigrants. The kind of enforcement Trump's people are talking about will visibly create many more sympathetic cases than unsympathetic ones.”
Some of the provisions explicitly acknowledge that it could take years before DHS has the manpower and money to pull off what the President has ordered. Immigration enforcement agents, however, have already begun filling the policy void by launching raids and deportations, including some that advocates worry are meant to test the limits. Meanwhile panic has taken hold in many immigrant communities.
“The level of fear is more than anything we've ever seen,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She said the plan's sweep, “sent a chill to my bones,” because it threatens to do irreparable harm to millions of families. She added, “This all seems aimed at changing who we are as a nation.”
SUMMARY: President Donald Trump's executive order concerning refugees and visa-holders has sparked protests and backlash across the nation and overseas. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright joins Judy Woodruff to share her rebuke of the White House ban, as well as controversial changes adding Stephen Bannon to the National Security Council.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, for more on the executive order on refugees and visa holders and changes the President to the makeup of the National Security Council, we turn first to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She served as the United States' top diplomat during the Clinton administration.
When we spoke a short time ago, I began by asking her reaction to the Trump White House ban on immigrants from seven countries.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, Former U.S. Secretary of State: Judy, I'm appalled, because it's done everything except keep America safer.
And let me just say, I kind of have looked at things thinking that they made this executive action without really understanding what it's all about. So, it was unprepared, I would say, because they didn't really see how the government works. They didn't really contact the various departments that are part of this homeland security, trying to figure out what would happen once you do something like this from the Oval Office.
So, unprepared. And then I think, also, part of the problem was, they didn't understand what I say the unintended consequences of this, because the truth is that the countries that have been designated are now reacting, creating more problems for us, and then banning people — our people from going there.
For instance, in Iraq, how do we protect our troops? What about the people that are interpreting? And then I think all of it is based on untrue facts. And so I think it is a very serious problem in terms of how the whole system works.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let me take a couple of those, one at a time.
What they're saying is if — they're saying, if they had let the rest of the government know what they were doing, that it would have leaked, and they said there would have been a flood of people trying to get in. And they also say that they're basically only following what the Obama administration had done a few years ago in listing countries that were the most for the United States to fear in terms of terrorism.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, the latter is true.
What was happened was, there was an incident where something was coming out of Iraq. They were concerned about what the facts really were. They wanted to re-vet some people. They didn't have enough manpower to do that, so things slowed down.
So there is nothing like that happened in the Obama administration. I think the excuse about not letting others know, first of all, they need to understand that the government, in fact, when people trust each other, doesn't leak out when it's an important issue.
But how can you not let the departments that have something to do with executing the order not know? Because I think that they were genuinely surprised by, you know how slow it was, what happened when they detained people, what happened then when there were demonstrations against it.
So I'm willing to say they were surprised at the reaction to it, but that's a sign of the fact they didn't understand what they were doing.
SUMMARY: President Donald Trump had promised a crackdown on immigration on the campaign trail. Now he's done it, following through with a ban on refugees that was popular with his supporters. Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Tamara Keith of NPR, join Judy Woodruff to discuss the political effects of the President's executive order restricting immigration and more.
SUMMARY: After seven years of working alongside the U.S. military, Abdul Hamid Abdul Ghani was set to move to live in the United States with his family next week. Now President Donald Trump's executive order has left their future uncertain. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports from Northern Iraq.
SUMMARY: Lawsuits have challenged President Donald Trump's executive order that temporarily prohibits immigrants and visitors from seven countries. Jonathan Turley a law professor at George Washington University, and Neal Katyal former Acting Solicitor General under President Obama, join Miles O'Brien to discuss whether Trump's policy violates the law or [U.S.] Constitution.
SUMMARY: Final deadlines for college applications are looming this week, and students who are first in their families to attend college are far less likely to have help navigating the application system. The College Advising Corps aims to change that by recruiting college graduates to advise first-generation applicants. Hari Sreenivasan visits two New York City high schools to see the Corps in action.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Final deadlines for college applications are looming this week, and students who are the first in their family to apply to college are the least likely to have had help navigating the complex process.
A group called the College Advising Corps is trying to turn that disparity around. It partners with high schools and universities to recruit and pay recent college grads to advise lower-income, first-generation students on getting into college.
Hari Sreenivasan visited two New York City high schools working with the corps.
VICTORIA DEL TORO, College Advising Corps: You bought two movie tickets. Your friend cancels.
What would you do?
STUDENT: I would call my other friend.
VICTORIA DEL TORO: You would call somebody else. What happens if that person doesn’t respond?
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Many students at Manhattan Academy for Arts and Language all still learning English. Most of them are recent immigrants. The idea of applying and going to college can feel totally foreign. That’s where Victoria Del Toro comes in.
VICTORIA DEL TORO: Are you going to lose out on that money?
STUDENTS: No.
VICTORIA DEL TORO: You call somebody else. So, colleges work the same way. So, when they e-mail you, they track who responds to what. And they want to know that you’re responsible, right?
HARI SREENIVASAN: This is her second full year at the school, as part of a program called College Advising Corps.
As the school’s only dedicated college counselor, her mission is to have all of the school’s nearly 400 students believe college is an option. It’s a mission that could be challenging in most American high schools.
But, at Manhattan Academy, few have any friends or relatives who have experience with American higher education.
