What Trump did to get control of the border

Politics
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This is from the National Review link

Once migrants were released into the country, they were unlikely ever to be deported, so the administration sought, as much as possible, to detain people until they were removed, which meant changing practices that, as it turned out, were largely discretionary.

Soon after Trump took office, in early 2017, the number of migrants dropped precipitously thanks to the so-called Trump effect, the belief south of the border that Trump would enforce the law so zealously that it would be pointless to try to come. Slowly but surely, though, everyone realized that the underlying rules hadn’t changed, and the numbers bounced back.

Mark Morgan, who became acting commissioner of CBP in July 2019, recalls that at its peak, roughly 150,000 migrants were apprehended in a month, with more than 5,000 on some days. Then, by February 2020, prior to the pandemic, the flow had been reduced by about 75 percent, and families and unaccompanied children dropped precipitously. “Our in-custody numbers had gone from 20,000 to just over 3,000,” he says. “Our daily flow had gone from the height of 5,000 to just over 1,200. And at one point, it actually dropped below 1,000, which is a significant goal.”

NOTICE IT SAYS PRIOR TO THE PANDEMIC!

THE SO-CALLED CREDIBLE FEAR ISSUE:

The administration updated the documents and training materials the asylum officers used in order to make the credible-fear standard more rational and more in keeping with a reasonable interpretation of the law.

It trained border agents, who didn’t share the overly accommodating institutional culture of the asylum officers, to conduct credible-fear interviews.

It did heat maps of the patterns of violence in Central American countries and got asylum officers to push migrants on why, if they allegedly feared to live in one city or locality in their home country, they couldn’t safely move to another.

It made asylum officers put into writing why a migrant couldn’t live anywhere in his home country, which entered more rigor into the process than the prior practice of checking a box.

For years, the positive-determination rate for credible-fear claims was over 70 percent, or as high as 90 percent, depending on how you count. This was a figure completely out of whack with the low rate of ultimate acceptance for asylum claims (many times, a migrant who passed the credible-fear test wouldn’t even actually apply for asylum). After the Trump changes, the rate fell below 30 percent.

This made a big difference. If a migrant got a negative determination, he would likely be removed within a matter of days, freeing up detention space for someone else to be held rather than released. And the more migrants were getting sent back home quickly, the less likely other potential migrants were to try to make the journey.

TO BE CONTINUED

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ESTABLISHMENT OF MPP

One of Trump’s early executive orders cited the authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act to make people stay in Mexico during their asylum proceedings.

The former DOJ official says, “There was a Board of Immigration Appeals decision in 1996 that said there was no clear authority for this practice, and so Congress came through the same year with new legislation and said, ‘Well, here’s the authority to do this if you want.’ Then no one used it in any meaningful way from 1996 all the way until 2017. Then the president comes through and says in his very first executive order on immigration, ‘I want you to start using this tool.’”

It was in the fall of 2018, with numbers at the border soaring and Trump apoplectic, that the push to launch a “remain in Mexico” program was seriously revived. Trump threatened and cajoled Mexico to the table.

The Mexicans ended up cooperating. “The Mexicans have a general interest in not wanting their country used for this purpose,” says the top former DHS official. “To traverse, to have millions of people traverse their southern border and go straight up to the northern border and amass over there in these ways. So for them, there was certainly an economic incentive and a public-safety incentive to want to work with us.”

Mark Morgan says we saw an “unprecedented increase in, not only their interior enforcement, but also enforcement along their southern border. You have, by the height in 2019, we’re seeing 40 to 50 large groups a month. By the time ’20 came around, none.”

Mark Morgan says of MPP, “That policy single-handedly ended catch and release. Because back then it is, you grab a kid, and you are, because of the Flores Settlement Agreement and TVPRA, boom, you’re in the United States.” He continues, “With MPP, we’re able to end that.”

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And this is why the Senate bill is so wrong. If/when Biden is replaced, the bill does not allow what it calls a “closed border” when migration is less than 4000 a day, and only for a limited number of days a year. It ties the hands of a future President from reinstating “remain in Mexico” much of the time.

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Only a complete retard gets caught trying to say this border is anywhere near anything resembling secure.

And, go.

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WORKING WITH CENTRAL AMERICA

The legal basis for the program was straightforward. Under federal law, an alien showing up at the U.S. may apply for asylum unless, pursuant to a safe-third-country agreement with the U.S., he or she can be removed to a country “in which the alien’s life or freedom would not be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and where the alien would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection.”

It’s terrible if someone genuinely fears for his or her life, but the official familiar with the issue says, “There is nothing in United States law that mandates that in a situation like that, that a person is entitled to resettle in the United States, as opposed to resettling in Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador or Honduras or any number of other countries.”

Mark Morgan calls the way asylum-seeking has worked “forum shopping.” Instead of seeking asylum in the first country they traveled through, which is the standard internationally, migrants waited to make their claim in the United States, because, by and large, they weren’t escaping persecution, but seeking better economic prospects.

With the agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, the administration could, per Morgan, “one, ensure a pathway for those who had legitimate claims could actually seek relief and get assistance as fast as possible. And second, we shut down forum shopping.”

Again, Trump’s willingness to play hardball made diplomatic progress possible. “His willingness to use negative tactics,” Ken Cuccinelli says, “like pulling foreign aid money from the Northern Triangle countries, was clearly critical in getting them to take seriously the need to engage in cooperative efforts with us. But they did.”

As the senior administration official explains, if a migrant from, say, Honduras said he had a credible fear of returning home, it would be explained that he could be sent immediately to Guatemala to make his asylum claim. At which point, the migrant would almost always think better of it and say he preferred simply to go back home to Honduras. (Usually, by the way, it is considered best practice to resettle an asylee in a country that is close to, and culturally similar to, his home country.)

THIS IS KEY TO DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM WE ARE SEEING AT THE BORDER

As far as I can tell there’s NOTHING in this proposed legislation (@tnt) to deal with this main issue. The current practice of "country shopping has turned asylum into an absolute joke, which has nothing to do with the actual intent of asylum.

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Note that the senate bill and illegal immigration advocates on this forum would have normalized that number…5000 a day (of course it really would have been more). As I remember back in 2019 the Trump administration was getting roasted by those hypocrites…

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The actions that Trump took along with the current legal powers of the Presidency are are actually better than this lousy bill that was just put forth. Lankford did an utterly pathetic job of negotiating.

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Agreed.

There have been millions of words invested in the border argument…thank you for the information you provided in this thread.

The reality is millions of words are not needed…a playbook that worked was laid out by the previous president…the current president tore up that playbook…the border is now beyond broken.

A smart leader would’ve put the old playbook back together.

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Libs are going to avoid this thread like herpes.

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Furthermore when you consider all these legal actions the Trump Administration took along with this power:

other statutes grant the executive branch broad authority to restrict the entry of aliens. INA § 212(f), which came to public attention when President Trump invoked it as authority for the “Travel Ban” executive orders and proclamation, confers exceptionally broad power on the President in this regard:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

Another statute, also cited in the Travel Ban orders and proclamation, allows the President to restrict the entry of aliens according to “such reasonable rules, regulations, and orders, and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe.” In Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the Travel Ban proclamation as a valid exercise of the President’s authority under INA § 212(f), the Supreme Court reasoned that the statute “exudes deference to the President” and “vests [him] with ‘ample power’ to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA.” The Court also emphasized that presidential determinations related to national security traditionally receive deference and declined to probe the national security justifications that the President gave for the proclamation’s entry restrictions on broad categories of nationals of seven countries.

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Here’s a good read on this issue here:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-the-absurd-democrat-border-con/ar-BB1i0rss?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=165aa7257fe3496ea2022fb4b472370a&ei=14