Trump Getting Impatient On Border Security, Reveals Plans To Congress
Last Sunday, the White House delivered a strong message to Congress by delivering a list of demands that the administration wants included in legislative reform regarding immigration.
President Trump said that these principles “must be included” in any legislation that targets illegal immigrants who came over as children. This is obviously meant to guide Congress while they attempt to solidify the controversial Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that was created by executive order by the Obama administration back in 2012.
Trump has now offered Congress a clear deal if they want to legislate DACA: build the wall or DACA is gone.
Of course there were other demands. The list of “principles” includes:
- Building the border wall with Mexico
- Hiring 10,000 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 1,000 lawyers for the agency
- Hiring an extra 370 immigration judges and 300 federal prosecutors
- Stopping family unification for members outside of immediate family
- Penalizing “sanctuary cities”
- Having track illegal immigrants using an E-Verify program to stop them from getting jobs
The Trump administration’s legislative affairs director said these principles are “essential to mitigate the legal and economic consequences of any grant of status to DACA recipients.”
This builds off the news last week when the House Homeland Security Committee approved $10 billion for the wall, as well as an additional $5 billion to hire more border security.
The Trump administration is starting to ramp up the efforts to keep one of the President’s main campaign promises: immigration reform. The administration has already ended DACA and looks to be using it as a bargaining chip to force Congress’ hand in getting down to business on building the wall. Congress now has a time limit to solve illegal immigration.
But that’s not all. Over the summer Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue introduced the RAISE Act which would significantly limit legal immigration as well by ending chain migration and cut the number of legal immigrants in half.
As far as trading DACA for the wall this is not the best-case scenario. However, what is included in these demands are welcomed for a few reasons.
- The wall will work. Walls have blocked illegal immigration from Hungary to Israel. The wall would also save the US over $100 billion a year.
- Giving ICE more agents to work with is necessary to ramp up action on illegal immigrants. The more agents, the more aliens they can arrest and deport. Simple.
- More judges and federal prosecutors will be able to handle greater demand of legal actions taken by illegal immigrants as well as serve due process on those that feel they deserve it. This is a no-brainer. There is already a backlog of 610,524 Appeals at immigration courts across the country, which is putting a huge financial burden on taxpayers already.
- While the Trump administration has already put financial sanctions on “sanctuary cities” it would go a long way in deterrence if Congress were forced to enact new legislating explicitly outlining penalties for cities disobeying federal law.
And the list could go on.
If these demands are included in immigration reform, then President Trump would be well on his way to keeping arguably his biggest campaign promise by reducing illegal immigration. Considering that illegal immigration costs the United States $148 billion a year, America doesn’t have any time to waste in stopping it.