Saturday, July 27, 2019

After 23 Years, the Trump Administration is Implementing Key Immigration Law

Michael Reynolds/Bloomberg/Getty Images
“The order of deportation is not a punishment for crime. It is not a ‘banishment,’ in the sense in which that word is often applied to the expulsion of a citizen from his country by way of punishment. It is but a method of enforcing the return to his own country of an alien who has not complied with the conditions upon the performance of which the government of the nation, acting within its constitutional authority and through the proper departments, has determined that his continuing to reside here shall depend. He has not, therefore, been deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process or law, and the provisions of the Constitution securing the right of trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments have no application.” ~Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 1893
It’s better late than never. Twenty-three years after Congress nearly unanimously passed the toughest sovereignty law ever, the Trump administration is looking into finally implementing it. No new laws are needed.
How is it that, in 1954, President Eisenhower directly and indirectly removed over one million illegal aliens in just a few months without any lawfare, yet now every deportation gets litigated?
In 1996, after the number of illegal aliens in the country became intolerable (following the failed 1986 amnesty), there was a bipartisan consensus in Congress that we couldn’t adjudicate ourselves out of an invasion. Unlike in criminal cases, illegal aliens are not entitled to any due process to remain in the country if all we want to do is deport them rather than criminally prosecute them. Therefore Congress passed a law mandating that all illegal aliens be deported without any review by an immigration judge unless the illegal immigrant can prove to the “satisfaction of an immigration officer” that he has resided here for two consecutive years (8 CFR § 235.3(b)(1)(ii)).
As I noted before, the Clinton and Bush administrations never implemented the law. They only authorized expedited removal for those caught within two weeks of infiltration and only within 100 miles of the border. And even then, it was practically only used in a small percentage of cases. Millions of illegal aliens have been accorded a degree of due process explicitly denied by a consensus of Congress. The Trump administration is now looking into implementing the full extent of the law – anywhere in the U.S. within two years of entry.
The law requires the DHS to publish an official notice in the Federal Register for such a change. It has already filed notice to do so. The key point is that Trump is not inventing anything new; he is merely implementing the law that his predecessors ignored.
This decision, which I called for in April, will have a dramatic effect on protecting the American people both at the border and in the interior.
Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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