Photo Credit: PBS. President Trump is weighing executive actions that would essentially make it impossible for a large group of Central American migrants to be able to seek refuge in the United States.
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Gardiner Harris ~ NY Times ~ October 26, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump is considering a major speech on Tuesday to announce a broad crackdown on the southern border, administration officials said Friday, making a significant play to energize his anti-immigrant base one week before midterm congressional elections where Republican control of Congress is at stake.
Mr. Trump is expected to use the remarks to outline his plans for the deployment of hundreds of Army troops and to fortify the border, including executive actions he is considering to deny entry to Central American migrants and asylum seekers.
A bid to freeze or cut financial aid to Central American countries whose citizens are making their way north toward the United States is also under discussion, with proposals coming from both the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget, according to two Trump administration officials, who said a final decision would be reached by Tuesday.
Even as the president’s advisers met on Friday to nail down the details of the multipronged border operation, human rights groups raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s plans, calling them politically motivated and potentially in violation of United States and international law. And Democrats condemned what they called a blatant political ploy to distract voters before Election Day.
She blamed the president, who often lays responsibility for the country’s immigration problems at the feet of Democrats, for the failure to overhaul the system, saying he had “sabotaged multiple opportunities to reach a bipartisan consensus on immigration, including on border security.”
Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to essentially make it impossible for a large group of Central American migrants trekking north through Mexico to be able to seek refuge in the United States.
The plan, according to people familiar with it who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would include a change in the rules governing asylum eligibility along with a presidential proclamation characterizing the migrant caravan as a national emergency and barring its participants from entering the country.
It is not clear that such a presidential directive would be legal either under United States immigration law or international law, both of which contain obligations to evaluate the individual claims of people who present themselves and ask for asylum, claiming a credible fear of returning to their countries of origin.
In addition, Mr. Trump would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that the caravan constitutes a national emergency. The group, which is roughly 1,000 miles south of the border, is currently estimated as having around 6,000 people and as consisting largely of women and children. Given the complex legal issues involved, it could take months or even years for the plan to actually remove would-be immigrants from the United States.
Photo Credit: Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
Migrants from Central America rested in Mexico as they made their way toward the United States border.
Still, in considering the strategy, Mr. Trump appeared to be betting that the political impact would be more immediate. He has called the caravan a “blessing in disguise” for Republicans in the run-up to the Nov. 6 midterms, as he seeks to demonize its participants and tie them to Democrats and to progressive groups.
“This is much more about the optics before the election than the legality of the president’s action,” said Jennifer Quigley, a refugee specialist at Human Rights First. “The caravan represents such a minuscule number of people coming toward our border that it just strains credulity to say that this is a national emergency that demands immediate action.”
The distinction could be important because the strategy the president is weighing involves circumventing the normal federal rule-making process to impose an immediate change to the rules governing asylum claims, something that can be done only when the government has “good cause,” such as a national emergency, to do so.
Under the plan, which is still under discussion and could change, the Homeland Security and Justice Departments would jointly issue new rules that would disqualify migrants who cross the border in between ports of entry from claiming asylum, according to people familiar with the discussions but who were not authorized to discuss the planning. Exceptions would be made for people facing torture at home.
Mr. Trump would then invoke broad presidential powers to bar foreigners from entering the country for national security reasons — under the same section of immigration law that underpinned the travel ban — to issue a proclamation blocking migrants from crossing the southern border, according to the plans under discussion. It was not clear how broad the directive would be, including whether it would apply only to people from certain countries or those arriving within a certain period of time.
Several refugee advocacy groups condemned the proposal and said they would consider legal action to block it if Mr. Trump followed through.
Omar Jadwat, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said it was “disgraceful” that Mr. Trump would even consider such moves.
“It would mean refusing to protect people who can prove they are fleeing persecution,” Mr. Jadwat said. “That would be a huge moral failure, and any plan along these lines will be subject to intense legal scrutiny.”
Mr. Trump has grown angry and frustrated about the caravan and demanded in recent weeks that his advisers deliver him significant, attention-grabbing options for responding.
On Wednesday, officials at the Defense Department were racing to produce military options to satisfy the president’s Twitter demand that the military secure the border.
On Thursday, the White House instructed the Department of Homeland Security to speed up asylum rule changes that were expected to be submitted in December so that Mr. Trump could issue his proclamation barring Central Americans, including asylum seekers, in the coming days.
Photo Credit: Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Border Patrol agents apprehended a man crossing the border from Mexico into the United States near McAllen, Tex.
And on Friday, officials met at the White House to discuss how to execute on the president’s threat to revoke aid to Central American countries whose citizens are part of the migrant group.
Aid to Central America last year amounted to $615 million, split evenly between programs intended to spur economic growth and those that crack down on lawlessness. The objective of the aid, much of which is distributed to nongovernmental organizations, is to reduce or eliminate the underlying reasons that migrants make the dangerous trek to the United States border.
Mr. Trump’s sudden call to halt it prompted dismay among diplomats and nongovernmental organizations, who regard the move as what one official described as kicking the plumber out of a house just as the pipes are bursting.
But the Trump administration has significant discretion to cut aid to the countries because Congress mandated a ceiling on aid, but not a floor. The law providing the money also allows the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to suspend its distribution if he decides governments in Central America have not done enough to meet various conditions of aid, although many of the necessary certifications for this year were made in August.
Mr. Trump’s advisers and those who share his restrictive views on immigration argue that it is well within the president’s executive authority to shut down the border to a certain group.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said there was precedent for the United States government to put in place contingency plans to block certain foreigners from entering the country, as it did in 1981 after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when thousands of Cubans had arrived on American shores.
While there are sure to be legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s exercise of such power, Mr. Krikorian said, “It might be useful in moving the political ball forward and getting these laws changed to have a judge prevent the president from enforcing the border.
“It’s a way of focusing attention on what the real problem is.”
The Pentagon announced Friday that Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, had approved a request from the Department of Homeland Security to provide support to Customs and Border Protection along the southwestern border. It said the help would include engineering for temporary barriers, barricades and fencing; fixed- and rotary-wing aviation support to move personnel; medical teams; temporary housing; and protective equipment.
A senior Defense Department official said the Pentagon had already begun identifying active-duty troops to meet the request, with a goal of getting an initial deployment to the border by next week. It is currently slated to end on Dec. 15, added the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official did not have authorization to detail the plans.
The military aspect of the plan, too, drew criticism from human rights groups.
Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said with migration numbers at historic lows, the government should devote its resources into processing what would probably be a “modest number of children and families who have fled one of the world’s most violent regions in search of protection.”
“There is no precedent in U.S. history for the use of U.S. military personnel, on U.S. soil, to stop unarmed people from asking for asylum in our country,” Mr. Isacson said
Source: Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Gardiner Harris ~ NY Times ~ October 26, 2018
