Immigration Nightmare Continued

I've written previously that our immigration policies are seriously broken.  The laws are convoluted and do not help us maintain our sovereignty nor do they adequately address the need to accommodate the people who want to come here.  The laws are inconsistent in their application and different administrations (read that Presidential administrations) can and do apply the laws to their way of thinking.

President Trump has obviously made immigration a centerpiece of his administration.  He said from the first day of his candidacy that one of his most important issues was to stop illegal immigration.  There are a lot of facets to this goal, but stopping illegality is the centerpiece.  To do this he has focused on building a barrier (a wall, electronic surveillance, using geographic advantage, etc), targeting the most dangerous illegal aliens (i.e. MS-13 gang members), deporting those who have broken our laws, and returning those who cross the border illegally rather than apply Obama's catch and release policy.  The President also has proposed dealing with the illegal and unconstitutional issue of the "Dreamers" by providing a path to citizenship.  Unfortunately, the Congress has not been able to come up with a viable solution to the Dreamers dilemma.  But that is a recurring theme.

The latest dust-up over immigration is the issue of what to do with the children of those who cross the border illegally.  It is a complicated issue because of the status of the adults and the need to ensure the safety of the kids.  I've heard a lot of hysterical blathering about how Trump is ripping kids from the arms of their parents, putting them in cages, creating concentration camps, and blah, blah, blah.  The political cartoonists have gone wild and the open-border crowd who don't care about our borders or our laws are wailing.  The usual suspects in the media are apoplectic on how these poor innocent kids are being treated and how despondent the parents are.

Of course, like everything, there are two sides to every story.  And in this case probably many sides.  I saw an article that a friend posted over on FB from Rich Lowry in National Review that attempts to make sense of it all.  Now I know NR has a certain bent.  I know Lowry isn't going to be hired by MSNBC anytime soon.  But as I read this I thought that it was a balanced explanation of the situation as we see it today.  I'm sure there are some inaccuracies or some things might be viewed through the lens of Lowry's leanings, but all in all it's a pretty good, non-hysterical description of what's going on.

I've said previously both above and in other pieces that our immigration laws are shamefully broken.  The blame for this lays squarely at the feet of Congress.  They have refused to fix it.  Until they do, then whichever current administration is in power will try and deal with the problem in whatever way they believe is correct.  Some will hate it, some will like it.  But the ones caught in the middle are the people trying to do the right thing and immigrate legally and the poor souls who are so desparate that they will risk life and limb and their children to cross the border.

Here's the article:

The Truth about Separating Kids

By RICH LOWRY

May 28, 2018 

Some economic migrants are using children as chits, but the problem is fixable — if Congress acts.

The latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.

As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.

That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

A few points about all this:

1) Family units can go home quickly. The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

2) There’s a better way to claim asylum. Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.

Children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases.

Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.

3) There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border. There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them. 

Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.

In April, the New York Times reported:  Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.

According to azcentral.com, it is “common to have parents entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit.”

If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.

4) Congress can fix this. Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.

The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis