Trump administration announces new rule on housing families of illegal immigrants
To address the unprecedented flow of families across the Southwest border, the Trump administration on Wednesday announced regulations that will allow families to be detained together, pending disposition of their immigration hearings.
The goal is to end “catch and release.” Asylum-seeking families will no longer be released into the United States with a promise to appear in immigration court — promises that are mostly not kept, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan noted.
McAleenan told a news conference that in the first ten months of the current fiscal year, almost 475,000 families came to this country, most of them crossing illegally between ports of entry in quest of asylum.
Under the current interpretation of the Flores settlement, families with minor children must be released within 20 days, on a promise to appear for their hearings, which may take years to happen.
“The Flores settlement is operationally outdated and does not respond to the current immigration crisis,” McAleenan told the news conference.
He highlighted key elements of the new rule, including the new standards of care in custody for children and families. In fact, McAleenan spent a fair amount of time describing where illegal immigrants seeking asylum will be housed:
The facilities that we will be using to temporarily house families under this rule are appropriately fundamentally different than the facilities where migrants are processed following apprehension or encounter at the border. They are campus like settings with appropriate medical, education, recreational, dining and private housing facilities.
Cue the activists with court challenges.
And cue the cries of “concentration camps.”
What is the current bounty on Illegal Aliens with bench warrants for failure to appear?
Hysteria ensues.
Democrats complained loudly over the “separation”. So now the administration changes the rules to keep families together. So now Democrats complain loudly.
That Trump is such a racist xenophobe.
The only thing lacking is a quick DNA test.
President Trump keeps addressing their “concerns”–which the other side never seems to do–and painting then into a corner.
Meanwhile, detention may not be so palatable to illegal aliens. Winning.
I’m not sure why we’re not using fingerprinting at the border – for later identification of those who enter correctly, and to identify those who have probably been fingerprinted by legal authorities and deported prior to illegal re-entry. This is what I had in mind:
https://www.army.mil/article/4447/officer_hails_tremendous_success_of_iraqi_automated_id_system
I also think we should be fingerprinting the children for the same reason…since they’re being used and re-used for entry purposes.
Of course, I’m beginning to think we should also be using the purple ink on the finger thing for voting, but that would only work with on site voting, not vote by mail ballots. Or…horrors…we could go back to only allowing voting at the polls. Then the purple ink thing would work..! In combination with the fingerprint id thing, I think.
Whoever thought it would come to this.
I would applaud the administration for making available decent housing accomodations for families who break the law to cross our border, but this sounds like something better than most of our lower-economic-echelon citizens live in, and certainly better than any LEGAL immigrants can afford when they first arrive.
My own middle-class family and most of our friends didn’t have this many amenities in my youth, and my children (all employed and paying taxes) don’t live like this either.
Even the people most concerned about the homeless problems don’t usually advocate housing them this well.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/dhs-announces-new-rule-end-catch-and-release-asylum-seekers
Who wouldn’t want to come to America and live in a “concentration camp” here?
JFTR, I whole-heartedly support LEGAL immigrants and a RATIONAL immigration policy, but we are now living in the Twilight Zone of Topsy-Turvy Land.
RAB4: This could be a win-win approach, in that it defuses the “separation” weapon, and creates a large disincentive for the current practice of flooding the border with real or manufactured family units. A disincentive because it eliminates catch and release, and forces people to stay in custody while awaiting an asylum hearing. Unfortunately, it won’t succeed if the likes of the ACLU are able to get a court to shut down the policy. There’s also the issue of funding and resources. Current detention facilities were not designed to handle families. We don’t have enough of the proper type of facilities to handle the current population, and it will be an uphill battle to get funding approved to build more. So what happens to the people we can’t accommodate? Back to family separation?