In keeping with President Trump’s promises to secure the borders of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published two memoranda on Tuesday detailing how the Trump administration will enforce existing immigration laws both along the border and in the interior.
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly addressed the memos, dated February 20, to the heads of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as the acting general counsel, acting assistant secretary for international affairs, and acting undersecretary for management. The memos detail the ways in which the administration will prosecute illegal immigrants and criminal immigrants, as well as allow local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws. Under Trump’s immigration policy, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will not be barred from pursuing illegal immigrants, as they were under Obama’s policy. As White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in Tuesday’s press conference at the White House:
The President has said multiple times that we’ve got to look at this issue on a very, very holistic way. And the number-one priority when you look at the scope of how many people are in the country illegally, the number-one priority is making sure that people who pose a threat to this country are immediately dealt with. And this is not a small group of people; we’re talking close to a million people who have already been adjudicated and had their status processed through a formal due process system.
And so what we need to do now is to make sure that we focus the resources and the efforts on those people going first and foremost. And the factsheet and the information that we put out lays out very, very clearly what is being done. But for so long, [Border Patrol and ICE agents] had their hands cuffed behind them. And when they were going to deal with the mission of their job, the last administration had so many carve-outs for who could be and who couldn’t be adjudicated that it made it very difficult for the customs and enforcement people to do their job and enforce the laws of this country.
But right now, what we’ve done is to make sure that they have the ability and the guidance and the resources to do what their mission is. And that’s it, plain and simple. And the President is consistent with his priority of making sure that those people who pose a threat to this country are the first ones to go.
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To that end, each memo makes it clear that it is based on — and is designed to facilitate the implementation of — executive orders already issued by President Trump.
The first memo, “Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies,” begins:
This memorandum implements the Executive Order entitled “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” issued by the President on January 25, 2017, which establishes the President’s policy regarding effective border security and immigration enforcement through faithful execution of the laws of the United States. It implements new policies designed to stem illegal immigration and facilitate the detection, apprehension, detention, and removal of aliens who have no lawful basis to enter or remain in the United States. It constitutes guidance to all Department personnel, and supersedes all existing conflicting policy, directives, memoranda, and other guidance regarding this subject matter — to the extent of the conflict — except as otherwise expressly stated in this memorandum.
The second memo, “Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest,” similarly begins:
This memorandum implements the Executive Order entitled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” issued by the President on January 25, 2017. It constitutes guidance for all Department personnel regarding the enforcement of the immigration laws of the United States, and is applicable to the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). As such, it should inform enforcement and removal activities, detention decisions, administrative litigation, budget requests and execution, and strategic planning.
The section of the introduction in the first memo saying that this memo “supersedes all existing conflicting policy, directives, memoranda, and other guidance regarding this subject matter” is a direct reference to the Obama policy to ignore the “faithful execution of the laws of the United States” regarding illegal immigration to which Spicer referred in the above quote from Tuesday’s press conference — because the reality is that Obama was derelict in his duty and unfaithful to his oath of office. He allowed — even encouraged — increasing levels of illegal immigration throughout his detrimental presidency.
What Obama ignored by executive order, Trump is implementing by executive order.
These memos — born of the executive orders President Trump signed on January 25 — are the first steps in dialing back the insanity of those eight years of lawlessness where illegal immigration is concerned.
It’s about time.
While the liberal mainstream media will certainly seize on this to attack President Trump for “targeting” immigrants, a distinction must be made between those who played by the rules to come here legally and those who merely ran, jumped, and swam to come here illegally. And — to put in the for-what-it’s-worth column — being here illegally is, after all, illegal. As Spicer told the press while answering a question in Tuesday’s press conference:
Remember, everybody who is here illegally is subject to removal at any time. That is consistent with every country — not just ours. If you’re in this country in an illegal manner, [then] obviously there’s a provision that could ensure that you be removed.
He then clarified that the plan — at least at this point — is not to focus on removing every illegal alien, because “there has to be a system of priority” and that “the priority that the President has laid forward and the priority that ICE is putting forward through DHS’s guidance is to make sure that the people who have committed a crime or pose a threat to our public safety are the priority of their efforts, first and foremost.”
While much of what President Trump has to focus on is undoing the damage done by his predecessor, these new policies are a great start where the security of the nation is concerned.
