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Illegal immigrants should be living in fear of being deported, the chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday, pushing back against a growing sentiment among Democrats on Capitol Hill and activists across the country who have complained about agents enforcing the laws on the books.

Thomas D. Homan, acting director at ICE, said anyone in the country without authorization can be arrested and those who have been ordered deported by judges must be removed if laws are to have meaning.

His comments marked a major shift for an agency that President Obama forbade from enforcing the law when it came to more than 9 million of the countrys estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Unshackled from Mr. Obamas strictures, agents have dramatically increased the number of arrests.

Advocacy groups are enraged and demand leniency for traumatized immigrants.

Mr. Homan makes no apologies.

If youre in this country illegally and you committed a crime by being in this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder. You need to be worried, Mr. Homan testified to the House Appropriations Committee. No population is off the table.

The Trump administration is asking for significant boosts in spending for both border and interior enforcement, but it is meeting resistance from Democrats who oppose a crackdown.

Democrats will not accept a penny of funding for a new deportation force or a border wall, said Rep. Nita M. Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

Border Patrol acting Chief Carla Provost defended the 74 miles of fencing that President Trump wants to erect next year, saying the wall will plug holes where illegal activity is still a problem in San Diego and parts of Texas.

She said the southwestern border is at medium risk of penetration and needs the wall to assist. She said construction on the 74 miles would start in either March or April.

Mr. Homan, meanwhile, said he needs a major infusion of detention beds to hold the larger population of illegal immigrants, now that his agents have been unshackled from the restrictions under Mr. Obama.

He said the number of countries refusing to take back their deportees has been cut in half, while the number of jurisdictions looking to have their police and sheriffs deputies trained to process illegal immigrants in their jails has nearly doubled and will likely triple by the end of the year.

In addition, some 400,000 illegal immigrants ordered removed by judges but who were ignored under the Obama administration are now back on the list of priorities.

All of that means more illegal immigrants to be detained in preparation for deportation.

Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, Maryland Democrat, told Mr. Homan not to try deporting drunken drivers.

DWI or traffic is not really considered to be the type of people that are hurting our country, he said.

Mr. Homan, though, said drunken driving sounds like a public safety risk. They should be removed, he said.

Mr. Homan said anyone in the country without authorization is a target for enforcement.

We shouldnt wait for them to become a criminal, he said.

That angered immigrant rights advocates, who said it showed antipathy toward illegal immigrants.

Wow. How revealing, said Frank Sharry, executive director at Americas Voice. Homan makes it clear that the ICE strategy is to indiscriminately target the entire undocumented population in America and to intentionally spread fear throughout millions of deeply rooted families.

He called Mr. Homans testimony extremist.

Mr. Homan pushed back against such criticism. He said his agents are enforcing the laws as written and no other branch of law enforcement faces the abusive questions his employees do.

He said the illegal immigrants deserve the blame for separating families. When a U.S. citizen commits a crime and goes to jail, he said, the police who catch him arent blamed for keeping him from his family.

Mr. Homan said the increased risk of enforcement is part of the reason illegal immigration across the southwestern border is at its lowest level in decades.

Democrats, though, said his officers need to show more discretion.

Ms. Lowey raised the case of a 19-year-old man in New York who was arrested on the day of his high school prom, which she said sent the wrong signal.

She said the man had kept out of trouble and was arrested while waiting at a bus stop for school.

Mr. Homen defended the arrest as valid. He said the young man committed a crime when he sneaked across the border and ignored an immigration judges order to be removed.

He lost his case, and because we dont like the results of that case we forget about it? Mr. Homan asked Ms. Lowey. I dont know where else in the American justice system any other agency is told to ignore a judges ruling.

View original post here:
No apologies: ICE chief says illegal immigrants should live in fear of deportation - Washington Times

Illegal immigration across the southwest border appears to have jumped 27 percent in May, according to numbers released this week by Homeland Security, breaking a three-month streak of declines under President Trump and suggesting that the slump in migrants has bottomed out.

The Border Patrol nabbed 14,535 illegal immigrants in the southwest last month, up from just 11,129 in April. Analysts said that the number of people caught is a rough measure of the overall flow of people trying to sneak in.

The number of illegal immigrants showing up at ports of entry without authorization also ticked up, from 4,649 to 5,432.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol and the ports of entry, acknowledged the increase in crossings, but attributed it to a seasonal uptick.

CBP said it expects the uptick to continue through the summer months.

The numbers suggest that while Mr. Trump appears to have changed the calculations of many border crossers, theres still a segment of the population particularly among Central Americans determined to make the journey.

Agents usually record an uptick from April to May, but the jump this year is the largest on record.

Still, its by far the lowest May total on record. For example, May 2016 saw more than 40,000 illegal immigrants caught at the border.

Illegal immigration from Cuba and Haiti had been a problem last year, but had dipped under the final months of President Obama and again under Mr. Trump.

Now, Cubans appear to be surging again, while Haitians remain low.

Two other special categories of migrants unaccompanied minors and families traveling together also saw increases last month, rising from a combined 2,117 nabbed by the Border Patrol in April to 3,070 in May.

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Illegal immigration across southwest border increased during May ... - Washington Times

Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been granted work permits by the Trump administration under an Obama-era deferred-action program that President Trump had promised to end on his first day in office, according to federaldata.

Trump had called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program an unconstitutional executive amnesty during his campaign. But statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released last week showed that more than 17,000 new DACA applicants were approved for the program in the first three months of 2017.

In addition, 107,000 immigrants already enrolled in DACA had their two-year work permits renewed during that time, which includes the final 20 days of President Barack Obamas tenure in January.

The new figures make clear that the deferred-action program for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children often known as dreamers has continued at a robust pace under Trump. This comes despite concerns from some immigrant advocates that the administration would start targeting work permit-holders for deportations.

Trump has waffled on DACA since taking office. In April, he told the Associated Press that dreamers should rest easy and not fear deportation. But his failure to follow through on a key pledge to voters has angered immigration hawks.

Its a violation of a campaign promise, said Dale Jackson, a conservative radio host in Huntsville, Ala., who asked White House press secretary Sean Spicer in February why Trump had not ended the program.

Jackson emphasized that unlike some of Trumps other promises, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act or building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the president could halt the issuance of work permits through executive decree without congressional approval.

This is completely within his singular power to do by himself, he said. Theres no rationalization I can come up with. The guy said one thing during the campaign and hes outright not doingit.

A White House spokesman did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Trump has touted successes in his efforts to get tougher on undocumented immigrants, including a significant drop in the number of people trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have ramped up arrests of illegal immigrants under new guidelines from the administration that broaden the pool of people identified as a priority for removal.

While we still welcome legal immigrants to tune of 1 million a year, we are no longer a friendly environment for illegal border-crossers, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly said during a Cabinet meeting with Trump at the White House onMonday.

But the DACA program, which Obama instituted through executive action in 2012, is popular among Latino and Asian communities and has presented a political conundrum for Trump.

More than 750,000 immigrants have participated, and Obama emphasized the programs value to Trump in a meeting at the White House after the election. Obama told reporters that he would speak out if the new administration attempted to deport dreamers.

Since then, there have been a handful of highly publicized arrests of dreamers that have raised fears among immigrant rights groups. In some cases, the immigrants had allowed their DACA standing to lapse before their arrests.

On Monday, a federal judge in Atlanta ordered that a Mexican woman living in Georgia, Jessica Colotl, be temporarily reinstated in DACA after the Trump administration attempted to place her in deportation proceedings because of a 2010 traffic stop.

Her attorney, Charles Kuck, said in an interview that he thinks cases such as hers are outliers and that it appears nothing has changed in the processing of DACA applications. He added that he has filed about 100 applications for clients trying to enroll in the program or renew their DACA standing since Trump took office.

Immigration hard-liners said Trump, with his inaction, now shares ownership of the deferred-action program with Obama. Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a group that advocates for lower immigration levels, said Trumps inaction is denying jobs to native-born workers.

This is not a symbolic thing; this has real consequences, said Beck, whose organization has more than 7 million followers on Facebook. Theres a sense that he believes its almost okay not to act. The trouble is, theres no neutral position in this.

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Trump administration grants work permits to thousands of illegal immigrants - Washington Post

I see that some churches are now providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

Their facilities are considered sensitive properties, not typically entered into for enforcement purposes, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. The churches plan to use that protection to frustrate enforcement of U.S. laws.

Isnt that nice of them?

Immigrants here illegally are here by their own decisions to migrate to the U. S. for primarily economic reasons.

Will the good church people also offer refuge to the millions of people in this country who are put out of work by the willingness of illegal immigrants to work for low- and sometimes off-the-books wages?

I also see that Amazon is providing Prime membership discounts to welfare recipients. Those in the electronic benefits transfer programs and supplemental nutrition assistance programs can use their electronic benefits cards to buy into the program at $5.99 per month.

Now they dont even have to go to the store to get their stuff, just order it from the comfort of their own couch.

Sorry, I am just having a bad day.

Joseph J. Hehir

Niskayuna

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No safe havens for illegal immigrants - The Daily Gazette

Former President Bill Clintons top pollster acknowledged that Democrats have been losing working-class voters of all races and backgroundsnot just solely white working-class votersbecause the partys elites support open borders, are soft on illegal immigration, and favor trade deals that screw American workers.

Stan Greenbergwho has written extensively about the importance of so-called Reagan Democrats in places like Macomb County, Michigandeclared that Democrats do not just have a white working-class problem. Writing in the American Prospect, Greenberg notes that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials because of the partys seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. In addition, he says Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nations growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over those of American citizens.

This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump, he says, noting that Democrats have failed to attack a political economy that works for the rich, big corporations, and the cultural elites, but not for average Americans.

Voters, Greenberg points out, are worried about the costs that come with massive immigration, with 60 percent believing that granting legal status to illegal immigrants would lead to greater competition for public services and more than half believe it would take jobs from American citizens. He points out that even a whopping 41 percent of Democrats think those immigrants would take jobs from U.S. citizens and half of Democrats believe granting legal status would be a drain on government services. In the 2016 election, Trump hammeredClinton among white working-class voters, winning their voters by nearly 40 percentage points.

Though white-working class men were most opposed to illegal immigration, Greenberg curiously reveals the inconvenient truth that Democrats should not assume that African Americans do not share some of those concerns for many in our focus groups raise anxieties about competition from new immigrants. In addition, he says, like the more conservative working-class whites, African American women place a high premium on faith in God and the need to put American citizens before immigrants.

During the 2016 election, Jamelle Bouie acknowledged that it would not be a bad play for Trump to appeal to black workers with an immigration agenda that favors American workers. And Hillary Clintons support for amnesty programs may have turned off enough black voters to make Trump president. According to the Census, black Americans showed the sharpest decline in voter turnout 7.1 percent since 2012. At 59.6 percent, it was the lowest black turnout rate since 2000.

Immigration may have also arguably been the reason that propelled trump to the GOP nomination. As Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak has pointed out, on July 10, 2015, nine days after an illegal immigrant murdered Kate Steinle in San Francisco, Trump met with victims of illegal immigrant crime. Trump was in seventh then, trailing former Florida Governor Jeb Bush by 10 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of the polls. Nine days later, Trump rocketed into first place in the RealClearPolitics average and never looked back.

Another Greenberg survey a month into Trumps presidency found how central concerns about immigration, borders, foreignness, and Islam were to white working-class Trump voters in Macomb County, Michigan who had previously voted for Obama. These voters were convinced that Clinton and todays Democrats wanted open borders, according to his surveys.

Democrats have also been losing working-class voters because of trade. Greenberg notes that separation grew wider with Obamas battle for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and with Trump making his opposition to it central to his vow to represent the forgotten Americans.

The Obama presidency produced a partisan realignment on trade, reinforcing the class and gender bases of the two parties that will disrupt the politics of both, if it hasnt already, he wrote. Before 2008, Republicans were more supportive of NAFTA than Democrats, but at the end of Obamas presidency, GOP support for NAFTA collapsed, pushed off the cliff by Trump. Democrats, on the other hand, became more favorably disposed to NAFTA.

His surveys have discovered that the white working class, who live amid the remains of the manufacturing sector in the industrial Midwest, strongly oppose these trade agreements with increasing ferocity, particularly the men who were disproportionately employed in manufacturing. During the 2016 campaign, Trump relentlessly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal and called out Clinton for waffling on it and never giving a clear answer about where she stood. One of Trumps first actions as president was signing an executive order formally withdrawing the United States from the TPP.

Greenberg also points out that working-class Americans of all backgrounds pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of Obamas insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary peoples incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially. Interestingly, according to Greenberg, Obamas embrace of policies favored by elites who live in the countrys wealthiest zip codes did the party no favors with minority voters, who have been left behind in liberal cities like San Francisco and New York.

That is why the simple embrace of metropolitan Americas liberal values and economic elite hurt Democrats with working-class voters in both the big cities and in rural America, he notes.

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Top Ex-Clinton Pollster: Dems Losing Working-Class Voters of ALL Races Due to Illegal Immigration, Trade - Breitbart News