Nick Miroff reports in the Washington Post:
“Despite President Trump’s push for tougher immigration enforcement, U.S. agents are on pace to deport fewer people in the government’s 2017 fiscal year than during the same period last year, the latest statistics show.
Trump took office pledging to round up as many as 3 million drug dealers, gang members and other criminals he said were living in the United States illegally. But the most recent figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate the government may be having a hard time finding enough eligible “bad hombres,” as the president described them, to quickly meet those targets.
As of Sept. 9, three weeks before the end of the 2017 fiscal year, ICE had deported 211,068 immigrants, according to the most recent figures provided by the agency. ICE removed 240,255 people during the government’s 2016 fiscal year.
The lower totals are not for lack of effort. According to ICE, its agents have made 43 percent more arrests since Trump took office versus the same period last year.
While ICE took into custody more immigrants with criminal records, the fastest-growing category of arrests since Trump’s inauguration are those facing no criminal charges. The agency arrested more than 28,000 “non-criminal immigration violators” between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, according to the agency’s records, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
With the border evidently under control, a shortage of criminals to remove, and overwhelmed US Immigration Courts, we obviously DO NOT NEED any additional DHS agents right now. DHS does, however, need better technology, much better management, and a rational enforcement strategy.
While it won’t happen with this Administration, here’s what a rational immigration plan would look like:
- Focus interior enforcement on migrants who have committed serious crimes or who are involved in criminal enterprises.
- Work with local authorities and communities to take criminals off the streets, break up gangs, and curb human trafficking operations, while not threatening undocumented individuals who are otherwise law abiding members of the community.
- Institute a robust prosecutorial discretion program to get cases of non-criminals off overcrowded Immigration Court dockets (its likely that at least 2/3 of the 600,000+ pending cases could be removed in this manner) pending a legislative proposal to give them some type of legal status and work authorization
- Devote time and resources to developing an independent Immigration Court that will be able to process the remaining cases in a reasonable manner while establishing realistic and consistent expectations for adjudication of new cases entering the system.
If the border really remains under control, and robust realistic levels of legal immigration eventually are set by Congress, there should be sufficient enforcement personnel available to apprehend those who penetrate the border and to place them in a functioning, due process focused Immigration Court system that will fairly, professionally, humanely, and timely determine who should remain (including fair, honest, and de-politicized decisions on asylum and other legal protections) and who must leave.
The above system would have two essentials that the current immigration system sorely lacks — integrity and credibility.
PWS
09-28-17