WASHINGTON — President Trump has
directed his administration to enforce the nation’s immigration laws more
aggressively, unleashing the full force of the federal government to find,
arrest and deport those in the country illegally, regardless of whether they
have committed serious crimes.
Documents released on Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security revealed the
broad scope of the president’s ambitions: to publicize crimes by undocumented
immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police
officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum
seekers; and, ultimately, speed up deportations.
The new enforcement policies put into
practice language that Mr. Trump used on the campaign trail, vastly expanding
the definition of “criminal aliens” and warning that such unauthorized
immigrants “routinely victimize Americans,” disregard the “rule of law and pose
a threat” to people in communities across the United States.
Despite those assertions in the new
documents, research shows lower levels of crime among
immigrants than among native-born Americans.
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The president’s new immigration
policies are likely to be welcomed by some law enforcement officials around the
country, who have called for a tougher crackdown on unauthorized immigrants,
and by some Republicans in Congress who have argued that lax enforcement
encourages a never-ending flow of unauthorized immigrants.
But taken together, the new policies
are a rejection of the sometimes more restrained efforts by former Presidents
Barack Obama and George W. Bush and their predecessors, who sought to balance
protecting the nation’s borders with fiscal, logistical and humanitarian limits
on the exercise of laws passed by Congress.
“The faithful execution of our
immigration laws is best achieved by using all these statutory authorities to
the greatest extent practicable,” John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland
security, wrote in one of two memorandums released on Tuesday. “Accordingly,
department personnel shall make full use of these authorities.”
For now, so-called Dreamers, who were brought to the
United States as young children, will not be targeted unless they commit
crimes, officials said on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump
has not yet said where he will get the billions of dollars needed to pay for
thousands of new border control agents, a network of detention facilities to
detain unauthorized immigrants and a wall along the entire southern border with
Mexico.
But
politically, Mr. Kelly’s actions on Tuesday serve to reinforce the president’s
standing among a core constituency — those who blame unauthorized immigrants
for taking jobs away from citizens, committing heinous crimes and being a
financial burden on federal, state and local governments.
And because
of the changes, millions of immigrants in the country illegally now face a far
greater likelihood of being discovered, arrested and eventually deported.
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