Washington – The Trump administration plans to direct immigration agents to greatly expand the categories of immigrants they target for deportation, according to drafts of two memos seen by Reuters and first reported by McClatchy news organization on Saturday.
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Two sources familiar with the plans told Reuters the documents have been approved by Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, but are under final review by the White House. They are expected to be released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) early next week.
Under the orders, hundreds of thousands of people would face expedited removal proceedings, including those that had not been prioritized for deportation under former President Barack Obama.
The memos are guidance to instruct agents in the field to implement two executive orders signed by Trump on Jan. 25 intended to deter future migration and drive out more illegal migrants from the United States.
One memo instructs ICE agents to ignore Obama’s memos on immigration priorities that targeted only recent arrivals and convicted criminal migrants for deportation. Instead, migrants who have been charged with crimes but not convicted would be prioritized for deportation. The guidance also allows ICE agents wide discretion in deciding who to deport and considers anyone in the United States illegally to be subject to deportation.
The guidance does leave in place Obama’s 2012 executive action that protected 750,000 people brought to the United States illegally by their parents. The fate of the policy, known as DACA, has been hotly debated within the White House, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Trump said in a news conference Friday that DACA was a “very difficult subject” for him.
The ICE memo also states that immigrants will not be afforded rights under U.S. privacy laws.
The second memo instructs CBP officers to crack down on illegal migration at the border by holding migrants in detention until a determination in their case is made.
The Department of Homeland Security did not deny any information contained in the draft memos but did not provide further detail.
A source familiar with the guidance said the memos were scheduled to be distributed on Friday but the White House made a last-minute request to review them. It is not known whether the White House may alter the guidance.
Kelly said in one of the memos that illegal immigration across the U.S. border with Mexico had “created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States.”
A little more than a month ago, the President swore before millions of people to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Our constitution provides for due process, whether he agrees with it or not. To subject an illegal alien to deportation who has been arrested but not yet tried on whatever charges is a blatant violation of due process. If this goes through as advertised, it will be challenged again and the challenges sustained in our court system, which thankfully is independent of the Executive Branch. I am dumbfounded by this man’s disregard of our legal underpinnings.
I thought that if a person has a green card he is entitled to due process and entitled to an attorney! I understand that people with green cards are being arrested simply because they were not born in this country. No due process.
I agree with #2 ; #1 , (Professor), get off cloud nine; aliens who break our laws have no constitutional rights of due process. Israel has over 50,000 Africans in detention camps right now, who have entered Israel illegally. Also, Mexico imprisons and deports illegal aliens from Central America. In 1986, Ronald Reagan, with his amnesty program, promised us that the problem of illegal aliens in this country would be solved. In fact, it has become much worse. I’m tired of hearing the excuse that “nobody would do the jobs that illegal aliens, perform.” If that was the case, who performed those jobs, before 13,000,000 illegal aliens resided in the USA?
1.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
In fact, ONLY USA CITIZENS are guaranteed their rights. There is no such thing as due process for immigrants ESPECIALLY those who are here illegally.
To all of the posters on this blog who erroneously state again and again that only citizens of the US are entitled to due process and equal protection under law,… you are WRONG! You don’t have to be a citizen or even be here legally. Those constitutional protections apply to all PERSONS,… regardless of citizenship or legal status. This has been decided numerous time by the courts, the citation below being only one noteworthy example.
“The Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas could not enforce a state law that prohibited illegally present children from attending grade schools, as all other Texas children were required to attend.
The court ruled in Plyler ((1982)that:
The illegal aliens who are … challenging the state may claim the benefit of the Equal Protection clause which provides that no state shall ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ Whatever his status under immigration laws, an alien is a ‘person’ in any ordinary sense of the term … the undocumented status of these children does not establish a sufficient rational basis for denying benefits that the state affords other residents.”