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Public Charge: Supreme Court says yes to Trump policy to deny immigrants who use welfare

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Photo: Washington Times

 

January 27, 2020 from the WASHINGTON TIMES. Steven Dinan reporting

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Trump administration can move ahead with its “public charge” regulation that could block immigrants who wind up on the public dole from earning a pathway to citizenship.

It marks another significant victory for President Trump, giving him a tentative go-ahead on one of his key policies aimed at putting Americans’ needs first in the immigration system.

The 5-4 decision stays a lower court injunction, allowing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to move ahead with examining would-be immigrants’ history of access to public programs such as food stamps, many forms of Medicaid, public housing assistance, welfare cash payments and Supplemental Security Income benefits. Read the rest here.

Appellate Court: Not lawfully present, illegal aliens with DACA are illegal aliens – Georgia issuing public benefits based on disputed status

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Image: Istockphoto.com

Ruling likely will lead to additional legal action on public benefits

DACA recipients are “inadmissible and thus removable” under federal law.

Illegal aliens who have been awarded deferred action on deportation proceedings through the DACA amnesty by both the Obama and Trump administrations are illegal aliens and do not have “lawful presence” says the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision was handed down March 6, 2019.

The ruling was in response to a suit brought by several illegal aliens in Georgia who are challenging the Board of Regents policy that requires lawful presence for instate tuition purposes and admittance to some USG universities.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than is Arizona. Statistics from the Washington DC – based Migration Policy Institute highlighted by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute indicate that Georgia has more illegal aliens than green card holders.

Image: GBPI.org

A group of DACA recipients sued the leaders of the Georgia higher education system in 2016, which bars aliens who are not “lawfully present” from enrolling in some Georgia colleges and universities, even if they would academically qualify for admission. “The students argued that they were lawfully present under federal law, which preempted  state law. They also claimed that the admissions bar violated their right to equal protection, as Georgia treats aliens who are paroled into the U.S. or granted asylum as “lawfully present,” reported the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

The Eleventh Circuit rejected all of the students’ claims. The court noted that  “lawfully present” is not a standalone immigration classification, and it is not defined anywhere in the (Immigration and Nationality) Act” *(opinion here).

The ruling is consistent with an official October 2017 statement to this writer from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that “current law does not grant any legal status for the class of individuals who are current recipients of DACA. Recipients of DACA are currently unlawfully present in the U.S. with their removal deferred.”

Decision may lead to additional legal action on access to public benefits

The court’s decision likely portends more legal action. Georgia’s public benefits law, OCGA 50-36-1, requires “lawful presence” for non-citizens to access a host of public benefits, including drivers licenses, official ID Cards, health benefits, food stamps, insurance licenses and unemployment benefits. While it goes largely unreported by the Georgia media, various official agencies have been quietly issuing these benefits to DACA recipients since 2012 based on the applicant’s oath on affidavits that they are a “qualified alien.”

The monetary cost to Georgia taxpayers for benefits to the illegal aliens with deferred action on deportation, both in and outside of DACA is unknown.

Updated, 4:50PM March 8, 2019. Updated July 26, 2020 with addition of link to affidavit. Updated July 30, 2020 with link to “qualified alien.”

Skipping Court: U.S. Immigration Courts & Aliens Who Disappear Before Trial

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Image: CIS.org

CIS.org

By Mark Metcalf on January 24, 2019

Download a PDF of this Backgrounder.

Mark H. Metcalf formerly served in appointed positions at the Justice and Defense Departments in the administration of George W. Bush. He served as a judge on the Miami Immigration Court from 2005 to 2008. He is a Kentucky prosecutor and a veteran of Iraq.

Skipping Court

U.S. Immigration Courts & Aliens Who Disappear Before Trial

Key Takeaways

  • 43 percent of all aliens free pending trial failed to appear for court in 2017.
  • Since 1996, 37 percent of all aliens free before trial disappeared from court.
  • Aliens abscond from court more often today than they did before 9/11.
  • Deportation orders for failing to appear in court exceed deportation orders from cases that were tried by 306 percent.
  • 46 percent of all unaccompanied children disappeared from U.S. immigration courts from 2013 through 2017.
  • 49 percent of unaccompanied children failed to appear in U.S. immigration courts in 2017.

Introduction

U.S. immigration courts recently released their numbers to Congress for fiscal year 2017. Hoped-for improvements are largely absent and problems that have defined the courts since their beginning persist. Most persistent of all is the failure of aliens to appear for their trials. These no-shows remain high, with 43 percent of all those free before trial — 41,302 aliens out of 95,342 — disappearing from court in 2017.1 More to the point, these numbers add up.

Failures to Appear in Court

American immigration courts consistently have the highest failure to appear (FTA) rates of any state or federal courts in the country.2From 1996 through 2017, 37 percent of all aliens free pending trial disappeared. From the 2,680,598 foreign nationals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released on their own recognizance, 1,320,000, received deportation orders, 75 percent of them (993,593) for failure to appear. Only 25 percent of this group — some 324,402 people altogether — actually tried their cases.3 This dynamic, first reported at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 17, 2010, eventually prompted heated denial by the Obama Justice Department4 but it is not solely a problem of Democrat administrations. Administrations of both parties have failed to effectively address it.5

Immigration trial courts issued three times more deportation orders for failure to appear in court than deportation orders for cases that were actually tried (993,593 ÷ 324,402) over the last 22 fiscal years. (See Figure 1.) On average, more than 45,000 people each year disappeared from court since 1996, making failures to appear the single greatest source of deportation orders in the immigration court system.6  

Read the rest here.

Image: CIS.org

Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board: ‘An Example of What Not to Do’: Where Immigration Law Is Enforced – Usually Not Enforced – by Political Appointees Granted the Power of Courts

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Image: Bensbiltong.com
Originally published in Pew’s Stateline, the below is from the influential Governing Magazine” From our eight years of personal experience with the IERB, we will have plenty to add soon, but a “parody of a Kangaroo Court” is a good start.

An Example of What Not to Do’: The State Where Immigration Law Is Enforced by Political Appointees Granted the Power of Courts

BY | JANUARY 4, 2019 AT 7:14 AM

Over the past few years, statehouses around the country have tried to rein in cities deemed too friendly to undocumented immigrants. But Georgia is the only state that’s created an independent board with one specific mission: Punishing cities that aren’t doing enough to crack down on illegal immigration.

Typically, that responsibility falls to state attorneys general. But in Georgia, residents can file a complaint against any city or county they judge to be breaking state immigration law.

Until a recent case against the small liberal town of Decatur, though, all but one of the complaints had come from one private citizen, an avowed anti-illegal immigration activist who’s made this his life’s calling.

Then the lieutenant governor, Republican Casey Cagle, filed a complaint accusing Decatur of violating state immigration law last year as he was running for governor. And on Facebook, he threatened to yank its state funding.

“Liberal politicians in the City of Decatur are trying to put the interests of criminal illegal aliens ahead of our safety — and I will not allow it!” Cagle wrote. (He did not respond to repeated requests from Stateline for comment.)

Few locals have heard of it, but Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board was created seven years ago, when the state passed one of the nation’s strictest immigration laws. Trying to keep track of the legal comings and goings of the IERB, as the board is known, can be dizzying.

Most of its members are not attorneys or immigration experts. All are volunteers — and all are political appointees, which in this red state, makes it a majority Republican board.

And while technically not a court, the board has been given many of the powers of a court: It investigates alleged wrongdoing, subpoenas witnesses and hears testimony.

The board has the power to recommend sanctions against municipalities found to be in the wrong — and ultimately, withhold millions in state funding from them as punishment.

So far, though, it has levied just one lasting fine, for $1,000 against Atlanta. A handful of small cities, though, have been forced to spend time and money defending themselves against accusations.

Two of the immigration board members refused to step down years after their terms ended, and did so only in 2018, when they were sued by a Decatur resident and accused of violating Georgia law.

“The Georgia board is an example of what not to do, rather than a model for something effective,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a national research and advocacy group that favors limited immigration to the United States.

“It’s troubling,” Vaughan said, “to have that authority go to a politically appointed group that lacks expertise in the subject matter.”

The city of Decatur has filed two lawsuits against the board, saying it has violated public meetings and public records laws; the Georgia First Amendment Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center joined one of the suits in December. (Under James Balli’s tenure as chair, he has made efforts to make the board more transparent, including releasing records to a reporter.)

Balli, said it is just complying with state immigration law in its work, and until that law is changed, it’ll continue with its charge.

The 2011 law the board is focused on, HB 87, permits law enforcement officers to stop anyone they deem to be “suspicious” and ask for their papers. The law also requires cities and counties, and many businesses, to use E-Verify to ensure workers are in the country legally; and punishes those who use fake identification to get work.

“The goal is compliance, not punishment,” Balli said.

“We’re not anti-immigration,” Balli said, adding that his grandmother was an immigrant from Mexico. “We don’t want that to be the picture of this board.”

Atlanta’s Hippie Cousin

Decatur’s been described as a speck of blue in a sea of red, and that is true — up to a point. There have always been specks of blue in Georgia, and the state is increasingly trending purple. In November, Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost to Republican Brian Kemp in the race for governor.

But Decatur, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it, is “renowned as a bastion of Southern liberalism.” It’s Atlanta’s hippie cousin — population 23,800 — 4 square miles of bungalows, yoga studios and farm-to-table fare. In 2016, 86 percent of voters here cast their lot with Hillary Clinton.

Both Decatur and its next-door neighbor Atlanta issued directives in 2017 ordering local police not to detain immigrants, barring a court order. Decatur doesn’t even have a jail — and has few immigrants.

But for the past year, it is Decatur, not Atlanta, that has been in battle with the state, fighting accusations that it is a sanctuary city.

And even though the IERB has yet to yank state funding in any of the cases it’s heard, Decatur officials say they worry the city could lose millions in funding if the board tried to take action.

‘Kangaroo Court’

Many critics of the board, who fall on both sides of the immigration battle, have said it should be disbanded.

“It’s a court that operates in very strange, mostly nontransparent ways and yet has a tremendous amount of power,” said Naomi Tsu, who oversees the legal and advocacy work on behalf of immigrants in the Deep South for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The center has profiled the IERB on its “Hatewatch” blog.

Then there’s Marietta, Georgia, resident D.A. King, who’s filed 20 of the 22 complaints that have come before the board. He called the IERB a “parody of a kangaroo court.”

King, a Detroit native, describes himself as a nationalist “along the lines of a George Washington,” but says that he’s not a white supremacist. Nor is he against legal immigration. “My adopted sister is from Korea,” he said.

“I’m trying to educate people about immigration. It’s about the law and what’s good for America and Americans.” Read the rest of the report here.

Opinion: Kangaroo Court? Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board (IERB) calls a special meeting with agenda to be determined : It’s via telephone and if you want to hear it, you must go to downtown Atlanta and through security

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Image:Bensbiltong.com

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Email received from Audits and Accounts, December 31, 2018 at 3:38 PM:

Good Afternoon,

The Immigration Enforcement Review Board has scheduled a Special Called Meeting for Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 10:00.  The members will be holding this meeting via conference call.  A conference call line will be set up in Room 1-151 at the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts if you wish to hear the meeting in person.  The address for the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts is listed on the agenda.  The building is located at the corner of Trinity Avenue and Washington Street.  Please enter the building on the Trinity Avenue side.  You will need to go through security and show a valid ID to enter the building.  I have attached a tentative agenda, but will resend.

Thank you,

Carol Schwinne

Carol G. Schwinne| DirectorAdministrative Division

Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts

270 Washington Street, S.W., Suite 1-156

Atlanta, GA 30334

Office: 404.463-2670 | schwinne@audits.ga. gov
  audits.ga.gov  

 

 

mail.audits.ga.gov made the following annotations on 12/31/18:

NOTICE: This e-mail (including attachments) may contain information that is confidential and legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this document in error and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this in error, please notify us immediately and delete the message.

Thank you for your cooperation.

__

***Note: More on the IERB here and here.

Georgia Gets in Ballot Trouble with Rule Changes – IAG

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Photo: IAG

“Previously, the signature on the absentee ballot had to match the signature on eNet, a computer database that maintains Georgia’s voter registration and absentee ballot information. If the signature on the ballot didn’t match, it was thrown out.”

Insider Advantage Georgia

November 11, 2020

By Phil Kent

Criticism of poor management and decision-making by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger continues, coupled with GOP voter fraud lawsuits that have been filed or will be filed. The controversy and lawsuits are partially spurred by changes in state election laws. One change, agreed to by the Republican secretary of state last March, is especially stunning. And it leads to a big question: Why did he agree to a settlement that smuggled in a major change to mail-in voting?

John Daniel Davidson, writing in The Federalist, has researched and written about Raffensperger’s incredible cave-in involving a settlement in federal court with the Georgia Democratic Party, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee which had sued the state over for absentee voting rules.

The settlement introduced “ballot curing” to Georgia law. Ballot curing, as Davidson describes it, is when voters whose mail-in ballots are rejected for some reason— the signature on the ballot doesn’t match the one on file, the ballot is missing certain voter information, etc.— are notified and given a chance to correct or “cure” their absentee ballot. “Under the settlement, state election officials agreed to contact voters whose ballots were rejected within three business days. If an absentee ballot is rejected in the 11 days before Election Day, officials agreed to contact the voter in the next business day,” Davidson writes.

But here’s where it gets worse. Because more than 8,000 absentee ballots were rejected in Georgia’s 2018 general election, this provision in the settlement got the most media play. Yet the most important one is a crucial change to the rules for accepting absentee ballots in the first place. Consider Davidson’s findings:

“Previously, the signature on the absentee ballot had to match the signature on eNet, a computer database that maintains Georgia’s voter registration and absentee ballot information. If the signature on the ballot didn’t match, it was thrown out.

“In a cleverly worded section of the settlement, Georgia election officials agreed to a subtle but profound change…, we hope you read the rest here.

 

Daniel Greenfield: American Coup

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Photo: Frontpagemag.com

Frontpagemag.com

Nov 9, 2020

Daniel Greenfield

This was not just voter fraud out of Philly. It’s a coup by the oligarchy

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The plan was simple.

Saturate the media with polls showing a blue wave and an inevitable victory. Discourage people from voting in person. And then, after tabulating the paltry votes of those who defied the media to vote in person, dump all the tampered, altered, and harvested ballots for Biden in key cities.

Even before Election Day, the Democrats knew their plan was going awry. Suddenly, instead of urging their base to use mail-in ballots they were, just as loudly, telling them to vote in person.

Why? Too few Republicans were voting by mail and too many were going to vote in person.

If the Election Day numbers tilted too decisively to President Trump before suddenly going Biden’s way, the election would look rigged, and there would be an outcry from Republicans.

Despite last minute efforts urging Democrats to vote in person, that’s exactly what happened.

Once again, Democrats had overreached, committed a massive crime, and have been left with no choice except to ride the tiger. That’s what happened last time when the Obama administration allied with the Clinton campaign to eavesdrop on its political opponents. And then doubled down with investigations and indictments, not of the perpetrators, but the victims.

Despite the blatant irregularities in key battleground states, they’re doubling down again.

The American Coup is underway. In classic Leninist fashion, its initial goal is to control the propaganda and the process. The media has declared Biden to be the winner while mass celebratory gatherings cheer the new order. Big Tech censors any skepticism about the election.

And the same faction that declared four years ago that casting doubt on an election was patriotic and the best defense of democracy now claims exactly it’s treason.

The only Democrat rule is that it’s patriotic when they do it and treason when their opponents do. That’s not how ‘democrats think. It’s how dictators rule.

All of this is a sideshow. What really matters is the process, not the propaganda. The propaganda is meant to divert attention from how implausible the media’s numbers are.

Republican turnout rose, instead of falling, in in-person voting, and the GOP also went into Election Day with clear leads in mail-in ballots in key battleground states, including Wisconsin and Michigan. The tide of Biden ballots that arrived during the night resulted in implausible turnout figures. The photos, videos, and whistleblower accounts of poll and postal workers tampering with ballots didn’t take long to show up. And just as quickly to be censored.

The odd numbers mostly came out of urban areas run by notoriously corrupt political machines. And the race between those trying to steal and unsteal the election began with a power struggle. In Philly and Detroit, efforts were made to keep Republican observers out of view.

In Philly, it took a court order to even get the observers within sight of the ballots, while the city continued to fight the ruling. In Detroit, windows were covered up with cardboard, and Republican observers were locked out. Potentially tens of thousands of ballots were illegally transposed with no Republican observers. In Pennsylvania, Democrat operatives had been illegally given access to rejected mail-in ballots so that they could arrange for provisionals. And back in Detroit, workers were told to backdate ballots that had arrived after the election.

In Wisconsin, thousands of witness statements may have been illegally altered.

Meanwhile the glitches, errors, and irregularities began piling up.

In Antrim County, Michigan, a “glitch” turned over a county that President Trump had won to Joe Biden. The glitch was only noticed because the results didn’t match past trends. More than half of the state’s counties use the same software.

“Just last night in Oakland County, we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel announced at a press conference.

Oakland had been one of three counties that were crucial to the state being called for Biden.

And then there were the voting dead who went on voting and being registered after death. That allegedly included a woman who voted a week after she died.

The voting dead are not a new problem in Philly. If the dead didn’t vote, few elections would go on as usual. And yet the same media that spent four years falsely claiming that Russians had somehow rigged the previous election with a few thousand dollars in Facebook ads, have declared that accusing the incorruptible City of Brotherly Love of corruption is an outrage.

It’s no coincidence that the areas at the center of the vote fraud controversy, Philly, Detroit, and Atlanta, are also some of the most corrupt cities in the country with plenty of jailed officials. We hope you read the rest here on the Frontpagemag website and that you subscribe to their feed. It’s far undervalued at no-cost.

dak

 

FAST FACT: Almost 1.15 million aliens in the United States are seeking asylum — enough to make them the 43rd largest state

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Image: USCIS

Astounding Asylum Numbers in DOS Refugee Report for FY 2021

Center for Immigration Studies

October 28, 2020

Art Arthur

The Department of State (DOS) — with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — transmitted their Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2021 on September 30. My colleague Nayla Rush broke down that report, and the changes that the Biden-Harris ticket has proposed to the number of entries, in an October 6 post, but three statistics stick out therein: the number of aliens seeking asylum from DHS, the number seeking asylum as relief from removal from the immigration courts, and the credible fear grant rate in FY 2020.

Aliens who are present in the United States may seek what is called “affirmative asylum” from asylum officers (AOs) in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency in DHS. AOs may grant or deny those aliens asylum.

If an AO opts not to grant the alien asylum, and the alien is removable (as most are), the AO can refer the alien to immigration court (part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) within the Department of Justice (DOJ)), for the alien to renew that application as a defensive application (relief from removal) in removal proceedings.

In addition to adjudicating those affirmative asylum applications, AOs also consider “credible fear” claims for aliens in expedited removal proceedings under section 235(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Those AOs can find that the alien has credible fear (in which case the alien is referred to immigration court to file an asylum application before an immigration judge (IJ) in removal proceedings), or determine that the alien does not have credible fear (in which case the alien can ask an IJ to review the AO’s decision).

There were an average of 500 to 550 AOs at USCIS in recent years (USCIS is authorized for 745 AOs), but last year USCIS announced that it planned to hire 500 new employees in the asylum branch of the agency (half of whom would be AOs; the rest staff), and, as of October 2019, they were on track to meet that goal. In a February 2020 report, however, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was critical of USCIS’s efforts to train those AOs to perform credible fear screenings.

The number of such credible fear referrals skyrocketed in FY 2019, as almost one million aliens entered the United States illegally along the Southwest border or sought entry without proper documents at the ports of entry along that border. As GAO noted: “The number of referrals for credible fear screenings in the first two quarters of fiscal year 2019 alone was larger than the total number of referrals in each of fiscal years 2014 and 2015.”

In fact, AOs completed 5,523 credible fear cases in FY 2009, but in FY 2019, it completed 102,204 (out of 105,439 cases received) — a more than 1,750 percent increase. To help out, DHS assigned refugee officers, former AOs, and (in a controversial move), Border Patrol agents to handle interviews. A federal judge blocked that last effort in August.

All of which brings me back to the DOS report. As of August 31, according to the department, there were 598,692 asylum claims (in addition to credible fear claims) pending with USCIS. Assuming that there were the authorized 745 AOs on that date (the actual number — a moving target — is hard to find), that means that each AO is assigned almost 804 cases to adjudicate — not counting new cases that will be added.

In my experience, AOs generally take two hours to conduct interviews and complete about two per day, but USCIS’s statistics show a much lower completion rate. In September 2019, according to USCIS, AOs conducted 2,799 interviews and completed 6,286 cases. Assuming that there were 500 AOs at the time (likely on the low side), that means they each held 5.6 interviews each that month and completed 12.6 cases per capita — much fewer than one a day.

On top of the AOs’ asylum workload, according to DOS, there were 549,724 asylum claims (as of June 30) pending with the nation’s 520 IJs (the latter as of October — 20 new IJs were on-boarded on October 9, meaning that the number in June was actually closer to 500).

Again, that means that each IJ is assigned 1,057 asylum cases. As a former IJ, I generally completed one to two asylum cases per day, and at best IJs can hear approximately four (assuming that the alien shows up and is ready to go at the merits hearing date, which does not always happen). Consequently, as the Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse (TRAC) reported, in 2019 asylum applicants in immigration court on average waited almost three years for their cases to be decided, time that they will spend in the United States — and a timeframe that does not count appeals.

And, again, the DOS report does not count any new asylum cases that have been filed in the interim in immigration court.

Combined, however, these statistics show that there were 1,148,416 pending asylum cases in the United States — at a minimum. If those applicants were a state, they would be the 43rd largest in the United States, ahead of Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, the Dakotas, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming.

Plus, as the foregoing shows, an asylum applicant denied by USCIS can renew his or her claim with the immigration court. In September 2019, for example, AOs approved 34 percent of the asylum claims they adjudicated (1,501), and referred (for one reason or another) 66 percent (2,901). Those cases — assuming that the aliens actually appear in immigration court — will end up on the IJs’ dockets.

This is a hole that the AOs and IJs will not be able to dig themselves out of without a massive increase in resources.

The Trump administration has, in fact, increased the total number of IJs by 70 percent and, as noted, has at least tried to increase the number of AOs by 50 percent. Joe Biden vows to double the number of IJs (as well as the number of EOIR staff and interpreters), but that hiring will take time and a significant increase in resources — resources Congress, which is stingy when it comes to immigration, may not fund. Much more here.

 

ICE Is To Fast-Track Deportations Across The Country

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Image: Dustin Inman Society

The new policy will give agents the ability to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants without a hearing in front of a judge

BuzzFeedNews

October 7, 202

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have started to implement a policy that allows officers to arrest and rapidly deport undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for less than two years, according to internal emails and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The Trump administration’s effort — to expand quick deportations to undocumented immigrants across the US who cannot prove they have been in the country continuously for two years before they are picked up — was blocked by a federal court judge soon after the policy was first announced in 2019. But in June, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit lifted the preliminary injunction, opening the door for ICE officers to use expedited removal across the country, a policy that will allow the agency to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants without a hearing in front of an immigration judge.

The previous policy only allowed officials to use expedited removal within 100 miles of the border and for those who have been in the country for up to two weeks.

Currently, officers typically arrest immigrants and place them into deportation proceedings. These include a hearing before an immigration judge — a process that can take years. In practical terms, the expanded policy gives ICE officers more power to determine who can be quickly deported, although it’s unclear exactly how fast the process will be.

The shift could allow the Trump administration to increase deportations while circumventing a court system that is severely backed up and short on resources, but advocates for immigrants have said it would destroy their due process rights…

More here.

 

Presidential election: Whatever Happened to Immigration?

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Photo: Reuters

Column: The issue driving the populist revolt has disappeared in 2020

Washington Free Beacon

Mathew Contineti – October 9, 2020

It is a sign of the times that immigration has not been mentioned in three hours of debate between the presidential tickets. A review of the transcripts of both the presidential and vice-presidential encounters finds no questions asked nor answers proffered about an issue that until only recently defined much of our politics and distinguished our two parties. Needless to say, both moderators wanted to know where the candidates stand on climate change, which routinely drifts toward the bottom of any list of public priorities.

Why the omission? It is tempting to say that immigration did not come up because the elites who manage the presidential debates are uncomfortable with the topic, are worried that the issue favors Republican border hawks, and are more interested in subjects relevant to their cultural coterie. But it is also true that presidential debates tend to focus on current events and pressing challenges, and that immigration just does not seem as great a concern today as the coronavirus, the economy, race relations and civil unrest, and California brushfires.

The apparent irrelevance of immigration and border security to the election might also be attributed to the achievements of the Trump administration. But these achievements are partial, tenuous, and dependent on events and relationships and court decisions. And they are easily reversed. What should worry the president is that the somnolence on the border deprives him of the very issue that propelled his rise to power, and that drove the populist revolt against the Washington establishment whose offshoots included the Ron Paul candidacies, the Tea Party, and Republican victories in 2014 and 2016. Immigration is next only to the economy and to the courts as a place where the president can contrast his record and agenda with Biden’s and appeal to national solidarity and historical tradition. His parlous electoral status may be related to the fact that immigration is not much of a factor in this most unusual campaign.

There is no gainsaying immigration’s importance to the Trump presidency. It was immigration that triggered the grassroots rebellion against the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and against congressional supporters of amnesty for illegal immigrants, culminating in Trump’s 2016 primary victory. Immigration became the touchstone of Trump’s campaign on day one and served as the cudgel by which he defeated Jeb Bush and other Republicans for whom the Bush-Obama approach to legalization was correct. The border wall was not only a rallying cry but also a symbol of how a Trump presidency would privilege American citizens above all else. And Trump fused immigration to economics, by opposing H-1B visas; to crime, by highlighting gang activity; and to national security, by enacting his travel ban against countries that sponsor terrorism.

Read the rest here.