More:Yes, There’s a Crisis on the Border. And It’s Trump’s Fault.
Instead of wasting his time on a wall, the president should fix the asylum system.
By ALAN BERSIN, NATE BRUGGEMAN and BEN ROHRBAUGH April 05, 2019
Alan Bersin served as the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and assistant secretary and chief diplomatic officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Nate Bruggeman held senior policy positions at the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection from 2009 to 2012. He is a partner in the consulting firm BorderWorks Advisers.
Ben Rohrbaugh was the director for enforcement and border security at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2016. He also served in senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Donald Trump has made border security and immigration enforcement a rallying cry of his campaign and the centerpiece of his presidency. But now, as the effects of his immigration policies have become measurable, it is clear to us—three people who have worked on the issue in previous administrations—that Trump is the worst president for border security in the last 30 years.
The border is currently overwhelmed with increasing numbers of migrants, in particular Central American asylum seekers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported that 66,450 persons were apprehended between the ports of entry in February, the highest monthly total in a decade. Projections for March are even worse—exceeding 100,000—with experts concerned that monthly totals could exceed 150,000 in the coming months.
CBP is reassigning officers from the ports of entry, which are critically understaffed, to help Border Patrol with the crush. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan has said the immigration system on the border is at “the breaking point.” In response, the president threatened to close the border altogether to legal crossings, a threat he walked back on Thursday and replaced with a “one-year warning” to Mexico.
Despite the administration’s attempts to shift blame for the chaos, make no mistake: It is Donald Trump himself who is responsible. Through misguided policies, political stunts and a failure of leadership, the president has created the conditions that allowed the asylum problem at the border to explode into a crisis. The solution to our current border troubles lies in reforming the U.S. asylum system and immigration courts and helping Central America address its challenges—not in a “big beautiful” wall or shutting down the border. Yet effective action on these issues has been missing. And the president has now so poisoned the political well with his approach that there is little hope of meaningful congressional action until after the next election. Unless the administration changes course, the immigration crisis will only continue to worsen.
In fiscal year 2017, the last year of the Obama administration and the first of Trump’s, 303,916 migrants were arrested by the Border Patrol. This was the lowest level in more than three decades. The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had worked hard to tackle the problem of illegal migration through substantial increases in border security staffing, improvements in technology, innovations in strategy and improved security coordination and assistance to Mexico. Coupled with improved economic conditions in Mexico, these administrations were hugely successful in deterring and breaking the cycle of illegal crossing: Unlawful Mexican economic immigration, which had historically been the primary immigration enforcement issue at the border, dropped nearly 90 percent between 2000 and 2016.
But the nature of undocumented immigration to the U.S. has changed. Today, it is primarily driven not by Mexican economic migrants—and not by a flood of criminals, as Trump claims—but rather by large numbers of families and minors from Central America who are seeking political asylum. Although this issue first rose to public attention in 2014, the influx then was only a fraction of what it is today.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that triple the number of 2017 apprehensions—more than 900,000—will occur at the southern border in 2019. Many of those will be migrants seeking asylum, and they will descend on a border and immigration court system ill-equipped to handle those claims.
Of course, the president did not create the conditions in Central America that have driven migrants north. But his obsession with the wall, along with a series of other misguided policies, have severely hampered the U.S. government’s response to this flood. The wall has become a profound distraction and waste of time for policymakers and agency leadership as other solutions that would prove far more useful to our real immigration problems have gone neglected.
Virtually all of the desperate families from Central America who seek asylum, whether entitled to protection or not, are permitted to remain indefinitely in the United Sates while awaiting formal adjudication of their claims. These claims cannot be processed fairly, quickly and efficiently, as the immigration courts face a backlog of nearly a million cases. In fiscal year 2018, less than 15 percent of applicants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were granted asylum, but only 1.5 percent of Central American family units apprehended in 2017 have been deported. The rest have, so far, stayed. In other words, Trump, a president fixated on stopping illegal immigration, has presided over a dramatic increase in the numbers of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ump-226573
Trump is handing the Democrats a winning way to run on the immigration issue on a silver platter if (a not inconsiderable "if"; as I said earlier I have every confidence that the Democrats are capable of nominating a candidate who can lose to Donald Trump...they've done it before...)
Instead of running as the party Trump can portray as being for "open borders" the party that wants to eliminate ICE and provide no more funding for DHS, the Democrats could take the immigration issue and shove it right in Il Boobce's orange mush...
By running on how his blustering, draconian policies and wall fetish have completely failed by his own metrics, and actually increased illegal immigration to the highest levels in decades...
They could run not as the party that has a blasé attitude towards illegal immigration and wants to dismantle the existing tools for immigration enforcement, (which will drive away legions of the voters that enabled them to retake the House in the midterms) but instead as the party of smart, humane and effective border enforcement...
The party that will replace the failed Trump policies that have exploded the flow of illegal immigrants into this country from a trickle to a raging river...
The party that will double down on those policies that have been proven to effective for stemming the tide of illegal immigration under prior administrations of both parties...(More immigration judges to reduce the time people ineligible for asylum are able to stay here, more assistance for economic development in the countries from which these immigrants come, the restoration of the orderly entry processes at ports of entry that Trump has deliberately sabotaged, etc.)
That would certainly be the politically smart way to go...(and also the best way from a policy perspective...the competition between many of the Democratic Presidential candidates to show who can be the weakest on border enforcement is neither...that approach just plays straight into Trump's hands...
)And Trump is doing everything he can to keep this approach available to the Dems, as he shows every sign of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling on the bluster, draconian policies and wall fetish policies that have produced this huge increase in illegal immigration...
As an example, he just fired Kristen Nielsen for not being cruel enough:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics ... index.htmlTrump says DHS Secretary Nielsen leaving
(CNN)Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security who has become a face of President Donald Trump's hardline immigration push, is leaving the administration, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Sunday afternoon.
"Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position, and I would like to thank her for her service," Trump said on Twitter.
"I am pleased to announce that Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary for @DHSgov. I have confidence that Kevin will do a great job!" Trump continued.
Nielsen did not resign willingly, a person close to her told CNN, but was under pressure to do so. Nielsen did not fight nor grovel to keep her job, the source said. Nielsen should be staying for a week of transition, another White House official said.
McAleenan is a holdover from the Obama administration. He was sworn in on March 20, 2018, as commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection. He is expected to serve as the acting secretary "in the short term," meaning he is not expected to be in the position for the long term, according to a White House official.
Senior administration officials told CNN that Nielsen had a 5 p.m., meeting at the White House with Trump where she was planning to discuss with him the immigration and border issues and a path forward. She had no intention of resigning, according to one of the sources, but rather was going there with an agenda.
Trump had grown increasingly frustrated with the situation at the border, which has seen an influx in migrants, predominantly from Northern Triangle countries.
In California on Friday, a senior administration official tells CNN, Trump told border agents he wanted them to stop letting people cross the border, despite the fact that Central American asylum seekers according to US law can do so. [In other words, Trump is issuing illegal orders to federal law enforcement agents; yet another blatantly impeachable offense.]
Nielsen "believed the situation was becoming untenable with the President becoming increasingly unhinged about the border crisis and making unreasonable and even impossible requests," a senior administration official tells CNN.
And thus Nielsen becomes yet the latest senior official of this administration to enter their job widely respected with an excellent reputation, only to leave it after they have completely shredded that reputation and then being dismissed by the person who humiliated them for months ...
