The Department of Homeland Security released new memos Tuesday outlining how popular vote loser Donald Trump’s administration plans to significantly ramp up deportation of undocumented immigrants, many of whom pose no actual threat to the nation's safety. The new guidance scraps the Obama administration's practice of prioritizing dangerous criminals and instead simply targets anyone with a criminal offense. It also streamlines the deportation proceedings in some cases. Tal Kopan writes:
For one, the implementation vastly grows the number of individuals who can be deported using "expedited removal" procedures, which affords immigrants almost no court proceedings. Under the new policy, if someone can't prove he or she has been living in the US continuously for two years, he or she could now be eligible for expedited removal. Previously, this was limited in practice to people apprehended within 100 miles of the border and who had arrived within the past two weeks.
The memos also make a series of changes as part of ending so-called "catch and release," where undocumented immigrants awaiting court proceedings are granted parole and leave to enter the country pending court dates that can be years in the future.
The memos amount to a mass deportation scheme. Naturally, all of these efforts to remove a bunch of people who pose no actual threat to Americans will require a significant increase in resources and personnel for the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, a deportation force is now in the works, writes the New York Times.
Tuesday, Feb 21, 2017 · 6:39:31 PM +00:00
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Kerry Eleveld
This is rich: DHS has now sent out a team of anonymous spokespeople to assuage fears about a deportation force. I thought Reince said we weren’t supposed to trust/use anonymous sources—that may actually be true in this case:
Federal officials cautioned that many of the changes detailed in a pair of memos signed by Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly will take time to implement and that other policies that grant agents and officers greater powers will be used with care and discretion.
The department is directed to begin the process of hiring 10,000 new immigration and customs agents, expanding the number of detention facilities and creating an office within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help families of those killed by undocumented immigrants. [...]
The directives would also instruct I.C.E., as well as Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, to begin reviving a program that recruits local police officers and sheriff’s deputies to help with deportation, effectively making them de facto immigration agents.
Reportedly, no official changes have been ordered to President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided some 750,000 young immigrants brought here as children with temporary work permits. But hey, sometimes agents just arrest them anyway and then find a justification for it later.
But make no mistake: the deportation force is underway and the DHS is now fully dedicated and empowered to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. There's an estimated 11 million-plus undocumented folks in the country, so the focus on raids that net mass deportations rather than targeted arrests of dangerous criminals is nothing but a showy and expensive display of force. This is exactly the type of thing Paul Ryan promised wouldn’t happen—yet he’s gladly standing behind everything Trump does. We knew someone was lying about the deportation force, either Trump or Ryan. And it turns out to be Ryan.
But hey, Trump can now tout this as a job creation program—funded by the taxpayers, of course. No private sector plan in sight.