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One of the most common justifications for immigration restrictions is the claim that letting in too many of the wrong type of immigrants would undermine liberal democratic institutions. In the worst-case scenario, their flawed culture, values, or political ideologies could "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" that attracted immigrants in the first place, and turn the receiving nation into a cesspool of despotism. Such concerns should be taken seriously, and I devote a large part of Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom to addressing them. Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell's just-published Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions undertakes the same task in much greater depth, and is likely to become the most authoritative treatment of the subject.

But, as Nowrasteh points out in a recent blog post, the focus on immigrants as a threat to American institutions leads many to overlook the much greater danger posed by nativist nationaliststhe people most hostile to immigration. Recent events highlight the severity of that threat:

Benjamin Powell and Iwrote our book Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions to address the argument that liberalized immigration will undermine the very American institutions that created economic prosperity that attracted immigrants here in the first place. Immigrants generally come from countries with political, cultural, and economic institutions that are less conducive to economic growth than those in the developed world. The fear is that they'd bring those antigrowth institutions with them. Thus, as their argument goes, immigrants could actually kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

As we assiduously document, immigrants do not bring those institutions with them and there is even evidence that immigrants improve institutions after they immigrate.

It's ironic that the immigration restrictionists most worried about immigrants degrading Americaninstitutions are attacking those very institutions at every level. After President Trump lost his reelection bid, the most nativistic members of his party have embarked on aquest to reverse theelection. Adozen Republican Senators, mostly those supportive of cutting legal immigration, plan to object to the certification of Biden's win over Trump. Over 100 representatives could join in too. President Trump cut legal immigration more than any other president and he recently threatened Georgia election officials.

Immigration restrictionists have also attacked the institution of private property. The Trump administration has seized or is trying to seize 5,275acres of privately owned land to build aborder wall, most of it in Texas. Trump even diverted Congressionally appropriated funds from the military to build the border wall.

Many in Trump's orbit are also conspiracy theorists or work with them at every opportunity. Making up stories to tarnish your opponents and believing in nutty conspiracy theories bothbreak down trust in institutions, which is exactly what some nativists claim immigration does to the United States.

Alex's post was published on January 5, the day before the attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. But the events of that awful day further demonstrate his point. While we do not have detailed demographic data on them, it is highly likely that the rioters were overwhelmingly native-born whitesand (much more importantly) strong supporters of Trump's nationalist, anti-immigration agenda.

Political scientists and survey researchers find that white ethnic nationalism and hostility to immigration are among the strongest predictors of support for Trump and his agenda. Those who fear that immigrants are a menace to American culture and institutions also tend to be most likely to tolerate and make excuse for Trump's authoritarian tendencies.

Some of the awful events of the last few weeks are the result of Trump's distinctive personality and behavior, and of idiosyncratic characteristics of the American political system. But many are common characteristics of ethno-nationalist anti-immigration movements around the world. Over the last century, it has been extremely common for nationalist movements hostile to immigrants and ethnic minorities to subvert democratic institutions, often eventually installing brutal dictatorships.

The Nazis are, of course, the most notorious example. But the same was true of other early-20th century fascist movements in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. More recently, nationalist movements have destroyed or severely undermined democracy in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, India, and elsewhere. In each of these cases, authoritarian nationalists claimed to represent the true will of the peopledefined as those of the majority ethnicity, religion, or culture.

Such claims also naturally lead to the idea the election victories by the opposition must be illegitimate, because only the nationalists represent "real" Americans, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, or Indians (defined, again, as members of the majority ethnic or culture group, free of "foreign" influence). Nationalist movements also commonly promote conspiracy theories. If they alone represent the will of the people, any political setbacks must be due to the machinations of shadowy, nefarious forces, such as foreigners, "globalist" elites, international bankers, Jews, and so on.

Trump's conspiracy-mongering about the 2020 election, complete with claims that the vote was falsified by illegal immigrant voters, foreign agents, and others, is of a piece with similar conspiracy-mongering by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and other nationalist leaders in Europe and elsewhere.

The US is not as far-gone as Russia, Hungary and other nations that have succumbed to authoritarian nationalism, and our democratic institutions are (so far) stronger than theirs. But we would be foolish to ignore the parallels between these movements and Trumpism, and even more foolish to ignore the risks of letting such movements grow. Trump and his allies themselves recognize the similarities, and have embraced Orban, Putin, and other similar leaders and movements (including ethno-nationalists in Western Europe), as ideological soulmates.

By contrast with the long record of nationalists subverting democracy, there are no modern instances of a democracy collapsing or even significantly degenerating because of the political influence of immigrants with illiberal ideologies. In their book, Nowrasteh and Powell document how liberal democracies such as the US and Israel have coped well with large-scale immigration from repressive, undemocratic societies. That is partly because most immigrants from such nations don't actually support the ideologies of the regimes they are fleeing (that is a key reason why many fled in the first place), and partly because liberal societies have strong capacity to absorb and assimilate people.

A more sophisticated variant of the claim that immigrants are a threat to democratic institutions is the idea that the problem is not the immigrants themselves, but rather the political backlash they generate. Excessive immigration, it is said, bolsters the political fortunes of authoritarian nationalists (including Trump!), who in turn undermine democratic institutions when they come to power. Thus, we must restrict immigration to protect ourselves against native nationalists.

One flaw in this argument is that survey data consistently shows that most people in both the US and Europe consistently overestimate the true amount of immigration, and those most opposed to immigration overestimate the most. Given such widespread ignorance, we cannot assume that, say, a 10% reduction in immigration will lead to a parallel reduction in ethno-nationalist sentiment. Indeed, most nationalist voters might not even notice the difference.

It is also worth noting that hostility to immigration among natives often tends to be greatest in parts of the US and other countries that have the fewest immigrants. Indeed, it is striking that anti-immigrant nationalist movements came to power in Hungary and Poland, countries with very few immigrants (no more than 4.6% of the population at any time in the last 30 years, in the case of Hungary; no more than 3% in the case of Poland, and much lower in the last 20 years). This too weakens claims that we can reduce support for illiberal nationalist movements simply by cutting back on immigration at the margin.

Efficacy aside, the idea that we must restrict immigration in order to protect against native-born nationalists is morally perverse. It suggests we severely restrict the liberty and opportunity of innocent people in order to protect against wrongdoing by others. The innocent people in question include natives, as well as potential immigrants, since immigration restrictions also impose severe burdens on many of the former.

The backlash-prevention rationale for immigration restrictions is similar to nineteenth-century claims that we must allow southern whites to impose racial segregation on blacks in order to prevent the former from continuing to engage in violence and otherwise pose an ongoing threat to the Union. And, indeed, immigration restrictions have many similarities to domestic racial segregation, as both impose severe constraints on liberty and opportunity based on arbitrary circumstances of birth, and often based on the desire to maintain the dominance of a given racial or ethnic group.

If we must restrict liberty in order to protect ourselves against illiberal nationalists, the most appropriate people to target should be the nationalists themselves. But I hasten to add that I do not believe the US and other Western nations should actually go down this path, so long as there is any other plausible alternative. There should be a strong presumption against any constraints on civil libertieseven including those of people who have little respect for liberal values, themselves.

We cannot completely rule out the possibility that there are cases where illiberal immigrants pose a threat to democratic institutions. In my book, I describe potential extreme situations where that could be a real threat. But, in the vast majority of cases, the far greater menace to democracy is that posed by nativist nationalism.

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Nationalists, not Immigrants, are the Real Threat to Liberal Democratic Institutions - Reason

At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but its clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. We will have no fun at all, he deadpans.

McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started barrelling down the two-lane state road, says Owen.

Once work on President Donald Trumps border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. I dont think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall, Owen says.

The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couples house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.

That was already a pretty good barrier, McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trumps wall creeps up over the mountains west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.

In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.

Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.

In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.

For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.

They started working nights six weeks ago, says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. Its been nonstop ever since.

Verlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono Oodham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. Its not about protecting America. Its about protecting his own interests.

When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end, says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip a patch of dirt just off the road whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.

***

After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, its easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trumps hardline approach to immigration and his purported America First ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, bad hombres, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border.

Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trumps barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.

According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes many enacted specifically to protect the nations most treasured cultural and ecological sites in order to expedite construction.

Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands, says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.

Nicol believes the walls charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because thats where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands, says Nicol.

According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.

On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.

When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border, he said. We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.

Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact, says Donatti. In a race to construct, the administration is building where its easier as opposed to where most people cross.

And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. You can always go over, he says.

You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with yellow, handheld angle grinders cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards, says Kurc. Then they just go in and out.

Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you dont need any barrier at all. In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure thats the wrong solution.

***

Thats not to say Trumps wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that, says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground in order to mix concrete for the border walls foundations.

Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. Thats our water thats what we depend on, says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.

Myles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trumps wall the single most damaging project to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.

We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadnt happened since the 1930s, says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the worlds 38 wild cat species.

If this border wall hadnt started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again, adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalysts executive director.

The jaguar is one of numerous species such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, 93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off.

Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.

Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous El Jefe jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. We havent seen signs of any jaguars since construction began, he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yooko, once roamed.

Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: Border Patrol always welcome. Owens two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses the best, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. I dont want it to go back to then, she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. No one wants a secure border more than I, she says. But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. Its a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.

During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. Its estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.

Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all, said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.

Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall, he says.

Donatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration, he says.

One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizonas rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas, says Donatti.

Its a humanitarian disaster, agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. We do what we can, Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. But people keep dying. The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.

***

Its hard for people to understand what this means to us, as Oodham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land, says Verlon Jose.

When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono Oodham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. It was like, Tell me where your grandparents live, and Ill put a wall through there, says Jose.

In certain areas, we wont be able to continue our traditional practices, says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why dont we invest it in our border cities and towns?

According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the walls $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the countys most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.

We had more deaths in the region than the entire state, says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, its senseless.

According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. Its this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either youre inside, or youre out, he says.

That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Jurez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.

Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.

Verlon Jose of the Tohono Oodham has a sliver of hope that some of the walls will come down. I believe Biden will not build another inch, he adds.

Others are not so sure. Optimism? No, says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. He hasnt committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.

John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments, he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. We have a lot of work to do.

Read more:
'My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters': the race to complete Trump's wall - The Guardian

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty)

We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted indignantly on June 17, 2018. Which was true, but only in the most literal sense. What DHS and the Justice Department did have was a policy to arrest virtually everyone who tried to enter the country between border stations, automatically rendering any children apprehended unaccompanied and forcing them into state custody.

I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. Its that simple, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on May 7, 2018. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.

Which might have left the public with the impression that this was a measure meant to combat human trafficking. But later that month on a phone call with U.S. Attorneys, the AG was more clear. We need to take away children, he said, leaving no doubt that his intention was to disincentivize immigration with the threat of seizing migrant children.

Yesterday the Justice Departments Inspector General released a scathing report on the family separation policy officially in place between April 6 and June 7, 2018. Prior to that, U.S. Attorneys had endeavored not to arrest adults crossing the border with minors, and there was no preparation for an abrupt policy shift that would necessitate taking thousands of children into government custody.

DOJ leadership, and the OAG in particular, did not effectively coordinate with the Southwest border USAOs, the USMS, HHS, or the federal courts prior to DHS implementing the new practice of referring family unit adults for criminal prosecution as part of the zero tolerance policy. We further found that the OAGs expectations for how the family separation process would work significantly underestimated its complexities and demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children. We concluded that the Departments single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations.

The DOJ ignored the warnings from the Western District of Texas, where a similar zero tolerance program in 2017 encountered difficulty reuniting families, and instead the AG focused solely on the increase in illegal entry prosecutions resulting from the El Paso Initiative and did not seek readily available information that would have identified for them the serious issues that arose as a result of the prosecutions of family unit adults and the corresponding child separations.

Today, there are 611 childrenstill not reunited with their families an outcome which was entirely predictable based on information known to the DOJ and DHS before the family separation policy was implemented nationwide.

Jeff Sessions, who refused to cooperate with the inquiry, comes off second only to Stephen Miller in his fanatical zeal to inflict pain on migrants. But Sessions deputies at the DOJ look pretty awful, too.

Justice Department attorney Gene Hamilton, a close ally of White House Counselor Stephen Miller, blamed Homeland Security for the policy, telling the IG, If Secretary Nielsen and DHS did not want to refer people with minors, with children, then we wouldnt have prosecuted them because they wouldnt have referred them. And ultimatelythat decision would be between Secretary Nielsen and the president. Which conveniently ignores the fact that Sessions was the driving force behind the policy, and that Nielsen told the president it would be logistically impossible and maybe illegal.

But in some sense, you know what youre getting with avowed xenophobes and dinosaurs from a bygone era, already shuffling toward the exit. Its former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who knows its wrong but still marches loyally forward doing this horrible shit, who breaks your heart.

Here he is defending his complete indifference to DHSs capacity to take care of the children in its custody and eventually reunite them with their parents, because My approach was to trust them and presume that their folks were going to administer it as they should, and I thought it was not for me to micromanage someone elses business.

You would expect DHS and HHS to be able to manage the children who were entrusted to them. I think thats something they should have considered. They should have said, Hey, theres problems if we do this, were going to lose track of the kids and were not going to be able to reunify the kids. Thats an issue that they should have flagged. I just dont see that as a DOJ equity.

Heres John Bash, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, explaining in an email to his staff that he just got off the horn with Rosenstein, who ordered him to take babies into custody no matter how young.

I just spoke with the DAG. He instructed that, per the [Attorney Generals] policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child. In other words, our directive is that if [the Border Patrol] refers a single parent of a child of any age to us (or both parents of a child of any age), we should not decline prosecution absent case-specific special circumstances (e.g., the child is seriously ill, the child speaks only a native language, etc.). I had understood that [the Border Patrol] itself had a policy of not referring parents to us when doing so would separate children under 5 from the parents. But apparently [the Border Patrol] did so yesterday in El Paso in two cases, and we declined per our understanding of the policy. Under the directive I just received from the DAG, however, those two cases should not have been declined.

Rosenstein professed to be shocked that Bash would have interpreted this as curtailing his discretion not to prosecute parents if it would involve the government taking custody of young children, or non-Spanish speaking youths who would have no way of communicating with their caregivers.

If somebody got the idea that they were supposed to be just like a soldier, prosecuting every case without regards to the facts, that didnt come from me, and if you look at Bashs emails, he says, consider case-based circumstances, he told the IG.

Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy, Rosenstein said in a statement released yesterday. It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.

Mistakes, it seems, were made. This policy should never have been implemented. By whom? Well, Rod Rosenstein cannot say. But he thinks about it a lot and wonders what, if anything, someone, somewhere could have done differently.

Justice officials respond to report on family separation by blaming Trump, expressing regret [NBC]Review of the Department of Justices Planning and Implementation of Its Zero Tolerance Policy and Its Coordination with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services

Elizabeth Dyelives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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Rod Rosenstein Is Real Sorry About All Those Kids Separated From Their Parents. Oopsies! - Above the Law

Others include videos of Christmas Day celebrations with a turkey, Jack Daniels, liqueurs and cocktails in crystal glasses with a twist of lemon, as well as film of a training session in north London involving an Albanian amateur boxer.

A Home Office spokesman said the information had been passed to Border Force and police with a view to tracking him down and deporting him again.

The disclosure follows a series of deportation scandals where attempts to fly foreign national criminals back to their home countries have been disrupted or blocked by legal challenges over human rights and even claims of modern slavery.

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) last year said the Home Office had no idea how many illegal immigrants were in the UK, noting its last official estimate of 430,000 was 15 years old. A former head of immigration enforcement, David Wood, has put it at closer to one million.

The NAO also said the Home Office was deporting fewer illegal immigrants largely due to successful legal challenges. At the same time the number of attempts by migrants to secretly enter the UK and detected by the Border Force rose by 12 per cent to 46,900 in the year to October 2019.

The Home Office spokesman said: Foreign criminals who violate our laws and abuse our hospitality have no place in the UK. Knowingly entering the UK without leave is a criminal offence and anyone who has committed such an offence should be prepared to face prosecution and removal.

We continue to strengthen our borders to stop people reaching the UK through illegally-facilitated routes, and we have established the Clandestine Threat Command to better coordinate Government and law enforcement agencies to stop people coming to the UK who have no right to be here.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, will shortly unveil a Sovereign Borders Bill aimed at increasing deportations and tightening Britains broken asylum system by constricting the grounds on which it can be claimed and shortening the time for appeals.

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Exclusive: Albanian criminal twice deported from Britain boasts on social media about his return to the UK - Telegraph.co.uk

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to act quickly after taking office to improve conditions at the southern border for migrants seeking asylum in the United States, part of a broader strategy aimed at reversing Trump administration policies that separated families and led to a spike in detentions.

Biden is expected to sign executive orders after his inauguration that would end President Donald Trumps ban on travel from certain majority-Muslim countries, and protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation.

The steps would represent a clear break from Trump, and could have an immediate impact on the way migrants are treated at the U.S.-Mexico border. They would also signal a departure from Trumps anti-immigrant platform, which has sometimes included racist and xenophobic rhetoric that critics point to as helping to fuel a rise in hate crimes and tension within immigrant communities.

But immigration reform advocates, former immigration officials, attorneys and others said the planned changes wont lead to long-term improvements unless Biden overhauls the nations broken detention and immigration court system, which is currently overwhelmed with a backlog of more than 1 million pending asylum cases built up over multiple administrations.

Advocacy groups and unions are also pressuring Biden to push for a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Biden told NBC News after the election that in his first 100 days in office he would send a bill to the Senate that would provide a pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

But Bidens ability to enact sweeping legislation whether on immigration, climate change or anything else will depend on the balance of power in Congress. Republicans can block much of his agenda if they retain their Senate majority, which will come down to two runoff elections in Georgia in early January.

Can he completely re-envision the system overnight? I dont think so. Thats going to take some time.

With control of the Senate still up in the air, advocates are urging the Biden transition team to take a serious look at other measures beyond an initial flurry of executive orders that could have a long-term impact and might not require Congress to act starting with substantive changes to the ways asylum cases are processed through the immigration court system.

Signing executive orders that reverse some of Trumps policies will make it easier for migrants to apply for asylum, said Denise Gilman, the director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. But without longer-term fixes, many asylum seekers will still wind up in detention or become entangled in court proceedings that often take years to resolve, she said.

[Biden] can make some very positive impacts immediately by signing executive orders. But can he completely re-envision the system overnight? I dont think so, Gilman said. Thats going to take some time.

I dont think anyone is walking away from a need for comprehensive immigration reform, said Maria Echaveste, who worked on immigration policy as White House deputy chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton. But in the face of likely resistance from Republicans, under Biden there is an opportunity to do [other reforms] piece by piece.

Migrants in the Remain in Mexico program walk on the Paso del Norte International Bridge to reschedule their immigration hearings amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, April 20, 2020. REUTERS/Paul Ratje

Among changes that advocates said could jump-start the process is ending Trumps Remain in Mexico policy, formerly called the Migrant Protections Protocols. The policy requires migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed, regardless of what country theyre coming from. Critics argue the rule exposes migrants to violence, and a legal challenge is now before the Supreme Court. Biden has signaled plans to end the program, which Trump established by executive order.

Biden has also pledged to create a task force to work on reuniting the more than 500 families who remain separated as a result of the zero-tolerance policy the Trump administration put in place to prosecute immigrants caught entering the country illegally.

The Biden administration has to rebuild the structure to process asylum seekers in a human and orderly way, because its nonexistent at this point, said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the advocacy group Border Network for Human Rights. Under Trump, most of the resources were used to build a wall and deport immigrants.

One change eagerly sought by some immigration advocates is a return to an Obama-era policy prioritizing the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal records and those deemed a national security or public safety threat.

The approach, adopted after former President Barack Obama took office in 2009, was a shift away from the previous administrations focus on immigration enforcement in the interior of the country through workplace raids and other tactics. Obamas policy was formalized in a guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security in 2014. The agency also began to prioritize the deportation of people who had recently entered the country illegally.

As a result, while the number of deportations of people who did not pose a security threat or didnt have a serious criminal background declined, the percentage of undocumented immigrants removed from the interior of the country who had been convicted of serious crimes rose from 51 percent in 2009 to 94 percent during Obamas last year as president in 2016, according to DHS data included in an exit memo released by then-Secretary Jeh Johnson two weeks before Trump took office.

Obama set a record for those kinds of removals, leading critics on the left to label him the deporter-in-chief. But overall 5.2 million people were deported under Obama, compared to 10.3 million under former President George W. Bush and 12.2 million under former President Bill Clinton, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute.

READ MORE: Under Trump, higher immigration bonds mean longer family separations

Trump abandoned Obamas approach by signing executive orders in 2017 and 2018 that gave immigration enforcement officials greater leeway to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants who did not have criminal records. The changes led to a 30 percent increase in fiscal year 2017 in the number of arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the interior of the country, a Pew Research Center study found. Interior arrests increased again in fiscal 2018 but fell in fiscal 2019 as more enforcement officers were called to work on apprehensions along the border, which ICE said compromised their ability to conduct enforcement elsewhere.

Arrests along the southern border have increased during Trumps presidency as well, driven by the zero-tolerance policy that led to family separations and other measures aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

According to the Pew study, the Trump administration apprehended 851,508 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2019 alone the highest number in more than a decade and more than double that of the previous year.

President Donald Trump arrives to participate in a Thanksgiving video teleconference with members of the military forces at the White House in Washington, on November 26, 2020. Photo by REUTERS/Erin Scott

Once Biden takes office, I would expect an immediate shift back to the Obama strategy and especially the 2014 guidelines that focused on deporting undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records, said John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE under Obama.

Focusing enforcement efforts on people with serious criminal records, instead of law-abiding immigrants who have lived in the country for years, would yield immediate results, said Alfredo Lozano, an immigration attorney in San Antonio.

Why would you not want to first focus on those persons with a very bad criminal record, versus a 42-year-old mother that has been here for 15 years and has three children? Lozano asked.

Many of Bidens key immigration policy changes will be carried out by Alejandro Mayorkas, his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, served as DHS deputy secretary under Obama. He would also make history as the first Latino to lead the department.

Why would you not want to first focus on those persons with a very bad criminal record?

Mayorkas is well-known among senior immigration officials and has the experience to lead the agency, said Sandweg, a former colleague who praised the selection. But there are certainly going to be some advocates who probably get frustrated that the department isnt moving far enough or fast enough the Abolish ICE crowd, he said.

[Mayorkas] real background is in law enforcement. He brings a prosecutors sensibility, Sandweg added. Hes not coming in saying, Okay, we need to stop deportations. Alis coming in saying, Whats the best policy?

But instituting a culture change at DHS after four years of Trump could take time. Trump was endorsed by the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, the union that represents ICE officers, in 2016 and again this year. The union representing Border Patrol agents also endorsed Trump in both elections.

In 2010, the ICE union cast a vote of no confidence in then-director John Morton and another senior official, claiming the agency under Obama had shifted its focus from law enforcement to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty for immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

There is concern in the immigrant rights community that Mayorkas and other political appointees brought in by Biden could face similar resistance from rank-and-file ICE and border patrol agents who supported Trump and could remain loyal to him after he leaves office. This is very real resistance that wont disappear once Biden becomes president, Gilman said.

Immigration reformers are also closely watching who Biden nominates as attorney general. While Mayorkas will play a leading role in setting policy around the apprehension and detention of undocumented immigrants, any changes to the immigration court system would fall under the purview of the Department of Justice.

Federal immigration courts are overseen by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency within the Justice Department. Immigration reform advocates have long called for an independent court system that operates outside of the Justice Department, in order to shield immigration judges from carrying out policies created by political appointees who work in the Executive Branch and report to the president. But that would require legislative action from Congress, and the prospect of establishing a new court system under Biden would likely face significant opposition from Republicans in Washington.

Under Trump, judges have faced tremendous pressure to make sure that we work lock and step with the law enforcement priorities of the administration, said Ashley Tabaddor, a federal immigration judge.

A U.S. Border Patrol Agent closes one section of the border fence between U.S.-Mexico in El Paso, Texas, U.S May 15, 2019. Photo by Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

Immigration reform advocates said one of their top priorities under Biden will be reversing the executive order Trump signed in his first year in office that created a metric-based system for evaluating the performance of immigration judges.

The policy, which took effect in 2018 under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, required judges to complete 700 cases a year. In addition to that quota, the new system required judges to complete 95 percent of their cases at the first trial hearing, said Tabaddor, who agreed to an interview in her official capacity as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, the union that represents immigration judges.

The administration argued that the changes were intended to address the backlog in pending asylum cases. Critics said the policy was put in place to help implement Trump and Sessions hardline views on illegal immigration.

They used the backlog as a pretext to put in these quotas and deadlines. It hasnt gotten us anywhere, Tabaddor said.

The number of pending asylum cases has doubled under Trump, from roughly 600,000 when he took office to 1.2 million in 2020. The average number of days that cases have been waiting in court has also increased under Trump, from 691 days in fiscal year 2017 to 811 days in fiscal year 2020, according to TRAC Immigration, a database run by Syracuse University.

All of [Trumps] efforts to deter and discourage families from coming to the U.S. to seek asylum, they dont work. Its demonstrably shown that it just doesnt work, said Gilman, of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Biden could use his executive authority to unwind Trumps quota system, immigration attorneys said. Other policy changes would require the Justice Department to formally vacate, or rescind, decisions made by Sessions, who carried out much of Trumps early immigration agenda before he was fired by the president in late 2018.

As a candidate, Biden promised to hire more immigration court judges to reduce the backlog of asylum cases. But Tabaddor noted the number of immigration judges under Trump increased from roughly 280 when he took office to more than 500 today, and yet the court system is even more overwhelmed than it was at the start of his presidency. The growing backlog under Trump is widely attributed to the rise in apprehensions at the border, especially in late 2018 and 2019, when several hundred thousand additional arrests were made in response to a surge in migration from Central America.

Until you stop the bleeding you can keep adding more and more bandaids but it wont solve the problem, she said. Right now, the court system is suffering from a massive hemorrhage.

Biden could also face challenges securing funding from Congress for his immigration agenda.

Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the DHS annual budget is funded through discretionary spending appropriated by Congress. The rest consists of mandatory spending and other revenue streams, according to a report on the agencys most recent budget, released in January by the Congressional Research Service.

But the vast majority of the discretionary spending awarded to DHS each year goes to paying for employee salaries and operational expenses funding that cant easily be moved around to pay for a new program or policy priority.

DACA recipients and their supporters celebrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the court ruled in a 5-4 vote that President Donald Trumps 2017 move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was unlawful, in Washington, on June 18, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

In fiscal year 2020, for example, roughly 85 percent of CBPs $14.9 billion pot of discretionary spending went to salaries and expenses. There is even less wiggle room at ICE, where nearly all of the agencys $8 billion discretionary spending in fiscal year 2020 went to staff salaries and other expenses associated with running the agency.

Mayorkas may have some flexibility, especially around funding for enforcement and deportation operations, said Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE.

Theres probably some things that can be moved around a bit. But the question is, where are you pulling from? You cant just unilaterally lay off or furlough or fire ICE agents. They have civil service and statutory protections, said Sandweg, who held several senior roles at DHS under Obama, including acting general counsel.

The current DHS budget illustrates the obstacles that lay ahead for Biden and his team.

The appropriations bill included detailed provisions dictating how DHS could use federal funding to implement Trumps immigration priorities. It included $1.37 billion in border wall funding and, as part of an agreement with Democrats, allowed Trump to redirect defense spending to pay for the project. The bill contained other less high-profile provisions as well, such as one blocking federal funds from being used to pay for pedestrian fencing in historic cemeteries in some areas along the border.

Biden has said he plans to stop new border wall construction, a move that he could likely do on his own without approval from Congress by revoking the national emergency declaration Trump issued in order to free up defense spending for the border.

But Biden will be constrained by Congress on most matters related to government spending on immigration, regardless of which party controls the Senate come January. Congress has the power of the purse. Whenever they appropriate money, they tell you exactly how to spend it to a certain level of detail, Sandweg said.

Despite all the obstacles Biden faces on immigration, advocates said they remain optimistic. Simply ending the Remain in Mexico policy, protecting the DACA program and putting more effort into reunifying separated families would be a great start, said Garcia, of the Border Network for Human Rights.

But Biden must go further, he said, by making long-term improvements to the asylum process, while also maintaining momentum for a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Anything less would jeopardize Biden and the Democratic Partys relationship with the countrys rising Latino electorate, he added.

Biden owes Latinos. They are expecting Biden to do something immediately, Garcia said. He added, Latinos are recognizing their own political power. If the Biden administration fails to deliver, I think Democrats are going to be in trouble.

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The challenges Biden will face on immigration reform - PBS NewsHour