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Kate's Law is named after a San Francisco woman who was killed by a man with a long record and multiple deportations. Huber cited the case of Millard County Deputy Josie Greathouse Fox, who was killed in 2012 by Roberto Miramontes Roman, who was deported three times before killing Fox.

"Stiffer penalties for re-entry offenders make sense," Huber said. "The status quo is just not deterring the criminals from returning."

The "No Sanctuary for Criminals Act" limits federal funding to cities who declare themselves "sanctuaries" for illegal immigrants. On that bill, Huber said, "removing unnatural impediments between local and federal law enforcement will enable the coordination we need in this country to keep our neighborhoods safe."

Huber doesn't have any sanctuary cities in his state, but Utah does have police agencies, including some of the largest, that have resisted enforcing federal immigration laws in the course of doing their jobs. That is because it interferes with the course of doing their jobs. Residents without documents won't call the police, even when they need them, if they think it will get them deported.

And Huber seems to understand that.

In a 2014 Tribune story about prosecuting a crime involving immigrant victims, Huber, then a prosecutor in the office he now runs, talked about catching the offenders, not the victims. "What motivates a prosecutor is when you have a vulnerable community with predators amongst them taking advantage of them."

So 2014 Huber hit it straight on the nail. We all want violent criminals caught, but extending immigration enforcement to every person without documentation ends up making communities less safe, not more.

Versions of the two House bills have been kicking around for a while, and they are just two bills of many that show Congress' lack of resolve to truly tackle immigration at scale. Enforcement and local police roles could be better defined in a comprehensive approach that includes border security, visa reform and a path to legality for law-abiding immigrants. Pulling at one or two strings won't unwind the knot. It will take a patient, productive legislative body and a president who wants it to happen.

In the meantime, the White House sticks to its xenophobia, and Utah's U.S. Attorney is one of the few Obama appointees to squeeze through the sieve to work for the Trump administration.

John Huber is in a delicate position.

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Tribune Editorial: Don't piecemeal immigration reform - Salt Lake Tribune

Dennis Nixon has a whole lot to say and a lot of people to convince. So, dont be surprised if you find yourself trying to get in a word edgewise with the Laredo businessman, as I did on a couple of recent occasions.

Nixon, you see, is a man on a mission hes passionate about immigration reform and he thinks its time we stop yapping about it and do something. All the obsession with border security, immigration crackdowns, Senate Bill 4, building a wall, deporting 11 million people all of it, he says is just burying our heads in the sand to deny something America needs to come to grips with: our country needs immigrant labor.

Right about now, some of you might be saying Nixon is just another one of those out-of-touch liberals. In fact, Nixon, a Republican at heart though hes supported candidates in both parties over the years is the chief executive of International Bancshares Corp. and International Bank of Commerce in Laredo. He also served as Texas finance chair for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign. Thats right Donald Trump, the chief proponent of immigration crackdowns, a border wall and mass deportations.

COMMENTARY: How the U.S. can achieve fact-based immigration reform.

I thought of Nixon the other day while reading news reports about Texas companies struggling to find workers in construction and other industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor, a large segment of the states workforce that includes many people who are in the country illegally. The Austin-based Workers Defense Project estimates that about half of all construction workers in Texas are in the U.S. illegally.

Business owners tie the shortages to immigrants who are spooked by a new one-two punch: the federal crackdown by the Trump administration, and Senate Bill 4, the new Texas law that bans so-called sanctuary cities. Opponents call it the show me your papers law because it allows police to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop. Critics warn it will lead to profiling.

Experts agree its too early to quantify the effect of worker shortages, though business are rattled just the same.

Everyones on pins and needles, Craig Regelbrugge, a horticulture industry spokesman, told the AP. The farms that produce the food Americans eat need more workers to harvest the crops, he said.

Frank Fuentes, chairman of the U.S. Hispanic Contractors Association in Austin, told me that immigrant workers are leaving Texas jobs at construction sites, hotels, restaurants and farms for what they perceive to be friendlier states, such as California. But Fuentes said he fields calls daily from other states, too. They ask me, Hey, whats happening? Were losing our folks?

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Even before the latest reports, Nixon said agriculture and service industries were already hurting from worker shortages. Immigration crackdowns are the wrong remedy, he told me earlier this month.

We should be finding a way to build an immigration stream into our country, not try to impede it, Nixon said. He thinks America needs an immigration policy that addresses a need for about 600,000 to 650,000 low-skilled workers every year to keep the economy growing.

Millennials arent interested in filling low-skill jobs, Nixon said, echoing the business owner who told the AP that the Americans he hires for construction jobs dont last more than half a day. Immigration is an obsession now, Nixon added, but the greater threat to prosperity and security is a declining U.S. birth rate below replacement level. With 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, we have a demographic crisis he said.

With its emphasis on illegal immigration crackdowns, the current political climate is out of touch with reality along the Rio Grande, where Nixon has lived for nearly half a century. The flow of immigrants who illegally enter the country, for example, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, from about 1.6 million to about 400,000, he said, citing federal figures.

But thats not the picture Trump painted when he announced his run for the presidency. He described a border overrun by Mexican criminals and rapists and promised a border wall that Mexico would pay for. Theyre not.

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Nixon thinks the wall is an expensive, stupid alternative.

So, how does he square his thoughts on the wall with his support for the president?

Well, lets say he thinks cooler heads will prevail. No serious person, he said, thinks you can build a wall from El Paso to Brownsville with any kind of reasonable expectation it will be successful.

Quick, someone get that message to the president.

Castillo is the Viewpoints editor.

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Castillo: Why talk of immigration reform also has employers on edge - MyStatesman.com

The issue of immigration and border security is more complex than the political debate in Washington and on cable television would lead the public to believe. It is also easier and far less costly to solve than many of the plans introduced by leading politicians and pundits.

The current reality on the Texas-Mexican border as well as much of the border outside of Texas is that the flow of immigrants who illegally enter the United States has declined sharply in recent decades, from 1.6 million to about 400,000.

Today, the border is still faced with an illegal entry problem from individuals mostly from Central America coming to the United States in the hope of participating in the American Dream. These economic migrants are basically law-abiding people who are seeking work because their country of origin has not given them a chance to succeed.

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While immigration is a national obsession, theres a much greater and more real threat to American prosperity and national security: The U.S. birth rate is now 1.9 births per female, well below replacement level. And with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, the demographic outlook is bleak.

Future GDP growth above 2 percent on a sustained basis will be an enormous challenge in the face of the demographic winter that will have a huge impact on the world over the next several decades. We need an immigration policy that addresses Americas need for workers about 600,000 to 650,000 low-skilled workers every year to keep our economy growing.

In addition to fact-based immigration reform, there are two things the U.S. Border Patrol seeks along the Texas-Mexico border: visibility of the river and access to the river. Both can be easily achieved simply by cleaning up the riverbank along the Rio Grande. The salt cedar and Carrizo cane are invasive plants that are not native to Texas. Their density becomes a hiding place for immigrants and criminals who illegally enter the United States.

Once these invasive plants have been eradicated, an all-weather river road should be built to provide U.S. Border Patrol Agents access to patrol the riverbank. Coupled with modern technology such as motion detectors and infrared sensors, this enhanced natural buffer zone is a far more effective barrier to entry than a tremendously expensive man-made barrier.

Yes, more can be done to smartly and cost effectively improve border security. However, the reward for enhancing apprehension is only as good as the legal process supporting it; otherwise, the process only becomes a catch-and-release program.

VIEWPOINTS: The Statesmans editorial writers tackle local and national issues.

Today, with the rapid decline in illegal immigration, the problem squarely rests on an inadequate judicial system. Simply said, we need more immigration courts. Through October 2016, more than a half-million cases were awaiting adjudication in U.S. immigration courts. Border Patrol executives put the wait time at 1,000 days. In order to clear the backlog of these half-million cases by 2023, Congress would need to double the number of immigration judges.

To solve the border security problem, we must look to reasonable and commonsense solutions that benefit the United States and Mexico. We must support a border security plan with Mexico our third-largest trading partner that continues to foster economic development and our good neighbor policies that have been in place for generations.

Nixon is CEO and chairman of the board of International Bancshares Corp. and International Bank of Commerce.

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Commentary: How the US can achieve fact-based immigration reform - MyStatesman.com

Increased immigration enforcement has been one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration, with federal agents directed to seek the deportation of just about anyone they find in the country illegally no matter how long the person might have lived here or how deep the ties to family and community. In the first 100 days after the presidents inauguration, immigration arrests climbed nearly 40% over the previous year, a pace that will almost certainly increase if Congress accedes to President Trumps request to hire an additional 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to be assigned to the nations interior, and another 5,000 Border Patrol agents to work within 100 miles of the border.

Those buying into Trumps view of illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers and job stealers have no doubt been cheered by the enforcement effort, and they probably arent bothered by the rush to expand detention space to house those facing deportation hearings. But even they should recognize that capturing and incarcerating people is only part of the equation.

While the government under President Obama and now Trump has been ramping up immigration enforcement and detention, it has not invested a parallel amount of money in expanding the immigration courts capacity to handle the cases. Spending on immigration courts increased only 74% from 2003-2015 while enforcement spending went up 105%. Trumps 2018 budget would increase the total number of judicial positions, but its not clear if that will become law and for the moment the backlog of cases is continuing to grow.

At the end of September, the number of pending immigration cases stood at 516,031, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By the end of May, that backlog had jumped to 598,943 cases, which have been pending for an average of 670 days each. New York City has the biggest backlog (78,670 cases), followed by Los Angeles (57,090).

Making matters worse, the Trump administration has temporarily reassigned judges to detention centers in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to handle cases primarily involving recent border-crossers. The problem with that is that fewer people are getting caught at the border these days, so moving judges there makes little sense. Why then is it happening? The answer: Optics. Sending judges to the border looks like a commitment to stronger and more serious enforcement, when in reality its a Potemkin effort that exacerbates backlogs in the courts from which the judges are transferred. At the same time, immigration lawyers say government attorneys have lately become tougher in their cases, taking harder lines with immigrants and reopening cases that had been suspended, adding more drag on the system.

This enormous backlog has real-life consequences. People in detention centers or jails are spending more time incarcerated as they await hearings on whether they will be allowed to remain in the country. For those with legitimate requests for asylum or other relief from deportation, the delays prolong uncertainty about whether they have found a sanctuary.

This should not make the anti-illegal immigration folks happy. If people arent getting deported but are just stuck in limbo in the immigration system, then Trumps ramped-up enforcement program is a chimera. Those immigrants who should be found ineligible to remain in the country because of criminal pasts or other disqualifications wind up, in effect, with open-ended reprieves.

The system is not working well for anybody except, perhaps, the operators of private prisons and local jails with ICE contracts that handle most of the detained immigrants. For a president who prides himself on his business and managerial acumen, this is a grotesquely failed approach to management.

Instead of taking this piecemeal approach to immigration enforcement, the administration should work with Congress to develop comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would create a path to citizenship for those who have established roots in our communities while tightening up enforcement at the border and tackling visa overstays. The Republican Party controls the White House and Congress. It has no excuses for not getting this done.

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Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement is overwhelming an already taxed court system - Los Angeles Times

President Donald Trump on Wednesday highlighted what he called the dangers posed by illegal immigrants ahead of an important House vote on two bills aimed at cracking down on those who commit crimes and cities that refuse to help deport them.

Appearing with families that were victimized by immigrants, Trump called on lawmakers to "honor grieving American families" by sending the "lifesaving measures" to his desk quickly. The House action marks the first major legislative test of tougher immigration laws under Trump, who has tried to impose sweeping executive orders to limit immigration and ramp up enforcement.

"You lost the people that you love because our government refused to enforce our nation's immigration laws," Trump told the families in the Cabinet Room. "For years, the pundits, journalists, politicians in Washington refused to hear your voices but on Election Day 2016 your voices were heard all across the entire world. No one died in vain I can tell you that."

The president's focus on immigration, a day after Republican leaders in the Senate postponed efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, illustrated the White House's eagerness to get back onto comfortable footing. Trump has consistently employed strong rhetoric to paint immigrants - both those in the country illegally and some who arrive through legal channels - as potentially dangerous.

"The president's involvement has brought the pace of this up, and we're doing it this week because he wants it to happen," said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a fierce advocate for strict immigration laws who co-sponsored the bills set to be passed Thursday. "The members are ready for it, too."

The House votes - coming six months into Trump's presidency - are also highlighting the limits of congressional action and the frustrations of conservatives who expected much more to have been done already.

Trump's executive actions have had limited success. His travel ban on refugees and immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries was held up in federal court until the Supreme Court ruled this week that some of the provisions could be enacted while the Justices prepare for a hearing on the ban in the fall.

Arrests of undocumented immigrants have spiked under Trump compared to the final couple of years under his predecessor, President Barack Obama, who had sought to shield more immigrants from deportations. Illegal border crossings have fallen significantly since Trump took office, which immigrant rights advocates have said could be an effect of Trump's harsh rhetoric about illegal immigrants.

But on the legislative front, there has been little activity. Trump had suggested in February that he would be open to a comprehensive immigration reform bill that eluded presidents George W. Bush and Obama, but gaining buy-in from Democrats, and even some moderate Republicans, is seen as unlikely unless Trump is willing to compromise by allowing many unauthorized immigrants to gain legal status.

The House bills, by contrast, aim to enact tougher enforcement policies. One bill known as "Kate's Law" is named after Kate Steinle, the 32-year-old woman who was shot and killed in 2015 by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times. The bill enhances penalties for convicted and deported criminals who reenter the United States illegally.

The other bill, called the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, would bar some federal grants from so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement authorities and allow victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants to sue those cities.

"This is about protecting law-abiding citizens and getting criminals off of our streets, plain and simple," House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday.

But several House conservatives - already frustrated that Trump has not acted more quickly to undo Obama's executive immigration actions - lamented it took so long into Trump's presidency to get any immigration bills onto the House floor. And they quietly questioned why a more far-reaching immigration bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee in March was not being voted on.

Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., who beat the sitting House majority leader in a 2014 GOP primary after campaigning on immigration, said leaders were more interested in "a couple of the name-brand messaging pieces" than pushing for a more thorough bill.

"I won on those issues. Trump won on those issues," Brat said. "Hello - only in D.C. can you not hear outside of the bubble."

Democrats, meanwhile, cast the bills as a mean-spirited attempt to rally Republicans around legislation that would mainly harm undocumented but otherwise law-abiding immigrants at a time when other major parts of the GOP agenda are foundering.

"They're going to have a hard time figuring out the budget. They're going to have a hard time figuring out their tax cuts. They're going to have a hard time figuring out health care. The one thing they don't have a hard time figuring out is being mean and nasty to immigrants," said Rep. Luis V. Gutirrez, D-Ill.

The House bills have little chance of success in the Senate, where Republicans have only 52 seats and need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. A version of Kate's Law introduced last year by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, failed on a 55-42 vote.

Still, the White House made the legislation a centerpiece of its message on Wednesday. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., a hard-liner who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, joined Trump in the immigration meeting.

At the daily White House press briefing, Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and John Huber, the lead federal law enforcement official in Utah, took the lectern to update reporters on the administration's efforts to arrest and deport immigrants.

Kate's Law, Huber said, would send a message that apprehending and punishing immigrants who repeatedly return to the country after being deported is a priority.

"It also sends a message to the judicial branch, to the judges that the more that these people commit crimes in their communities, the more often they come back, the more serious the penalties will be," Huber said.

Homan added that the other bill, focusing on sanctuary cities, would ban any municipal restrictions on cooperating with federal immigration agents or any restrictions on allowing law enforcement officers to inquire about a person's immigration status.

"If you enter this country illegally and violate the laws of this nation, you should not be comfortable," Homan said.

Some Democrat-controlled state legislatures and city governments, including in California, have vigorously opposed Trump's efforts to impose penalties on sanctuary cities. Some have passed statutes forbidding the jurisdictions from using public funds to support some federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have denounced such efforts. But a federal judge in April temporarily blocked the administration's effort to withhold federal grants from such cities, ruling that only Congress had such authority over spending matters.

An official with the American Civil Liberties Union said the House bills are "riddled with constitutional violations that completely disregard the civil and human rights of immigrants."

The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson contributed to this report.

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Trump immigration, sanctuary city policies face first big legislative test - Chicago Tribune