(WN)The homeland security secretary, John Kelly,
issued a remarkable pair of memos on Tuesday. They are the battle plan for the
“deportation force” President Trump promised in the campaign.
They are remarkable for how completely they
turn sensible immigration policies upside down and backward. For how they seek
to make the deportation machinery more extreme and frightening (and expensive),
to the detriment of deeply held American values.
A quick flashback: The Obama administration
recognized that millions of unauthorized immigrants, especially those with
citizen children and strong ties to their communities and this country,
deserved a chance to stay and get right with the law. It tried to focus on
deporting dangerous criminals, national-security threats and recent border
crossers.
Mr. Kelly has swept away those notions. He
makes practically every deportable person a deportation priority. He wants
everybody, starting with those who have been convicted of any crime, no matter
how petty or old. Proportionality, discretion, the idea that some convictions
are unjust, the principles behind criminal-justice reform these concepts do not
apply.
The targets now don’t even have to be
criminals. They could simply have been accused of a crime (that is, still
presumed “innocent”) or have done something that makes an immigration agent
believe that they might possibly face charges.
Mr. Kelly included a catchall provision
allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or Border Patrol agents or
local police officers or sheriff’s deputies to take in anyone they think could
be “a risk to public safety or national security.” That is a recipe for
policing abuses and racial profiling, a possibility that Mr. Kelly will vastly
expand if Congress gives him the huge sums required to hire 10,000 ICE officers
and 5,000 Border Patrol agents.
He wants to “surge,” his verb, the hiring of
immigration judges and asylum officers. He wants to add processing and
detention centers, which surely has the private-prison industry salivating at
the profits to come.
He wants to ramp up programs deputizing state
and local law enforcement officers as immigration enforcers. He calls them “a
highly successful force multiplier,” which is true if you want a dragnet. It’s
not true if you want to fight crime effectively and keep communities safe. When
every local law enforcement encounter can be a prelude to deportation,
unauthorized immigrants will fear and avoid the police. And when state and
local officers untrained in immigration law suddenly get to decide who stays
and who goes, the risk of injustice is profound.
So is the danger to due process. Current
procedure allows for swiftly deporting, without a hearing, immigrants who are
caught near the border and who entered very recently. But Mr. Kelly notes that
the law allows him to fast-track the removal of immigrants caught anywhere in
the country who cannot prove they have been here “continuously” for at least
two years. He’s keeping his options open about whether to short-circuit due
process with a coast to coast show me your papers policy.
He plans to publish data on crimes committed
by unauthorized immigrants, and to identify state and local jurisdictions that
release immigrants from custody. Why? To promote the false idea, as Mr. Trump
has shamefully done, that immigrants pose particular safety risks and to punish
so-called sanctuary cities that, for reasons of public order and decency, are
trying to disconnect themselves from ICE.
This is how Mr. Trump’s rantings about “bad
hombres” and alien rapist terrorists have now been weaponized, in cold
bureaucratic language.
Mr. Kelly promised before his confirmation to
be a reasonable enforcer of defensible policies. But immigrants have reason to
be frightened by his sudden alignment with Mr. Trump’s nativism. So does every
American who believes that the country is, or should be, committed to the
sensible, proportionate application of laws, welcoming to immigrants, and
respectful of the facts.
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