Donald Trump has laid the groundwork for potentially deporting millions of undocumented immigrants by issuing new guidance that drastically broadens the ways in which federal immigration laws should be enforced.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled two memos on Tuesday detailing wide-ranging directives focused on both interior enforcement and cracking down on security along the US-Mexico border.
The memorandums would enable federal authorities to more aggressively detain undocumented immigrants, expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal from the country, and restrict asylum claims by migrants.
The memos set out that any immigrant living in the US illegally who has been charged or convicted of any crime – and even those suspected of a crime – will now be an enforcement priority. That could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor traffic offenses.
“The surge of immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States,” the DHS secretary, John Kelly, states in the guidelines.
The new policies call for the hiring of thousands of additional federal agents, enlisting local law enforcement to expedite arrests, and deploying more immigration judges.
One of the documents released on Tuesday appears to be the final form of a draft memo that was leaked to the Associated Press last week. The draft included other extreme measures, including an instruction to mobilize national guard troops to assist with deportations, but this was not included in the final instruction. Although the White House last week denied this draft was an official document, the DHS memos released on Tuesday contained identical phrases to those in the leaked draft.
The White House denied the new guidance was intended to produce mass roundups or deportations, even though Trump vowed on the campaign trail to create a deportation force and frequently spoke of removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
“We don’t need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters, according to the Washington Post. “We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination. This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
The official added: “The president has been very clear on this issue that he wants to focus on criminals and convicted individuals and folks who pose public safety threats.”
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, echoed the official’s view that the guidelines would not result in mass deportations.
The memos, he told reporters on Tuesday, were about “prioritizing the people who are here who represent a threat to public safety or have a criminal record”.
“That’s it, plain and simple.”
But the memos provide Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents with the ability to effectively target any undocumented migrant who has either been convicted of any sort of crime, has simply been accused of a crime, has carried out minor fraud or is, in the assessment of an Ice officer, “a risk to public safety”. This expansion of deportation priorities is at odds with the Obama administration’s policy, which commenced in 2014, of targeting the removal only of those convicted of serious crimes.
The memo also instructs the department to restore partnerships with local and state law enforcement bodies that would allow them to carry out federal immigration enforcement themselves. These controversial agreements were phased out by the Obama administration after widespread criticism that they encouraged discriminatory policing, wasted local resources and had little effect in apprehending violent criminals.
The department will now be allowed to target any undocumented immigrant who has been in the country up to two years for “expedited removal” – meaning a removal that does not need to be authorized by the court. Under the Obama administration, such removals were only to be applied to those in the country for up to two weeks and who had been apprehended within 100 miles of the US border.
Grace Meng, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, argued this move in particular signaled “a desire to put the actions of immigration enforcement agents beyond the basic protections of due process”.
The guidance does, however, leave in place two of Barack Obama’s executive orders with respect to immigration: the 2012 policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Daca, which sought to protect so-called “Dreamers” who were brought to the US as children from the threat of deportation; and another order made in 2014, which has been held up in courts but allowed millions of parents of US citizens or permanent resident children to stay in the country despite entering illegally.
Trump told NBC News on Tuesday his administration would “try and take care of the Dreamers very, very much”, but did not elaborate further on his plans.
Immigration advocates said Daca recipients could still be targeted by the new guidelines, given their broad scope.
The memorandum also seeks to stem the surge of unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Mexico and Central America over the last three years. Under Trump’s new policy, parents found to have paid smugglers to bring their children across the border would be subject to prosecution. Thousands of those children would also no longer be protected from deportation.
Kelly’s memo also describes plans to enforce a longstanding but obscure provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the government to send some people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.
Some advocates suggested the new directives would result in prompt legal action. “These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the wellbeing of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project.
“However, President Trump does not have the last word here – the courts and the public will not allow this un-American dream to become reality.”
Despite the Trump administration’s emphasis on the criminal records of undocumented immigrants, studies have found that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than individuals born in the US. Analyses of US census data since 1980 concluded that immigrant males aged 18 to 39 were incarcerated at rates of one-fifth that of natives, with the gap widening each decade.
But Trump, while seeking to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiments among a faction of the American electorate, has routinely exaggerated the frequency of violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He infamously launched his presidential campaign in June of 2015 by falsely declaring of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump pledged to unite “a divided country” after making his first visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
The president was accompanied by Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate nominated by Trump to serve as his housing secretary, as well as South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who in 2014 became the first African American elected to the Senate from the south since Reconstruction.
Trump dubbed the one-hour tour of the museum, which opened last September amid great fanfare, “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry and hatred and intolerance”. At the same time, he used his remarks to praise his victory in the South Carolina Republican primary last March by “double, double, double digits”.
Trump also addressed recent threats targeting Jewish community centers across the US, following on the heels of criticism by both Jewish groups and Democrats over his refusal to explicitly condemn antisemitism.
“I think it’s terrible, I think it’s horrible, whether it’s antisemitism or racism or anything you want to think about having to do with the divide,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News.
“And you don’t know where it’s coming from but I certainly hope they catch the people,” he added. “But I will tell you that antisemitism is horrible and it’s going to stop and it has to stop.”
He added: “The antisemitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centres are horrible and are a painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”
Trump insisted he has condemned antisemitism whenever given the chance. But his White House stirred controversy last month for issuing a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that omitted any mention of Jews or antisemitism – and for defending its action by stating many other victims had also suffered and died in the Holocaust.
Last week, when the president was asked about antisemitism by a Jewish reporter, he dismissed the question as unfair and “insulting”.
“Number one, I am the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” he said. “Number two, racism, the least racist person.”
Asked about anti-Jewish attacks during a press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump talked about his electoral college victory before saying he would do everything he could to stop “long-simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on” and drawing attention to Jewish members of his family.
Steven Goldstein of the Anne Frank Center criticized Trump’s remarks on Tuesday as “too little, too late”.
“His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record,” Goldstein said. “Make no mistake: the antisemitism coming out of this administration is the worst we have ever seen from any administration.”
Spicer told reporters he wished the Ann Frank Center had instead “praised the president for his leadership in this area”.
“I think it’s ironic that no matter how many times he talks about this that it’s never good enough,” Spicer said at his daily press briefing.
“Today I think was an unbelievably forceful comment by the president as far as his denunciation of the actions that are currently targeted towards Jewish community centers. But I think that he has been very clear previous to this that he wants to be someone that brings this country together and not divide people, especially in those areas.”
