Layers of Constantinia are added to existing barrier infrastructure along the U.S. – Mexico border near Nogales, AZ. (Photo: Robert Bushell)
Despite Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s bluster and threats over the border, the courts have already shut down any plans he might have should he be elected president.
The cornerstone of his 2024 election campaign — to deport 10 million legal and illegal immigrants from concentration camps — would cost as much as $350 billion, face a thicket of lawsuits and never get off the ground.
Trump’s motives for demonizing immigrants can’t be clearer. It’s racism.
In a Jan. 2018 meeting, he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” referring to Haiti, El Salvador and countries in Africa. The country “should have more people from Norway,” he said.
It’s fair to say he was referring to “white” immigrants. Norway is 91.5 percent Caucasian, according to worldpopulationreview.
The fact is, families escaping violence and persecution in their home countries make up most of those arriving at the southern border these days. Many are fleeing unprecedented and growing humanitarian crises in Latin America, the Caribbean, Afghanistan and parts of Africa. Most new applications came from Venezuela, Colombia, Syria, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
At the end of last year, 6.9 million immigrants in the United States were awaiting hearings on their asylum requests. a 26% increase over the previous year.
“Without migration, US economic growth would have been roughly 15 percentage points lower than it actually has been. Or to put it another way: ‘While not quite putting the US in recession, this is enough to cancel out the majority of post crisis gains,” according to economic research by Citigroup and Oxford University.
“But the lack of understanding probably doesn’t stop there. The study, ‘Migration and the Economy,’ goes to great length in explaining the unappreciated beneficial impact from the global movement of our fellow humans.”
In 2020, Trump’s then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged the fallacy of Trump’s policies, but he had to go out of the country to speak candidly.
He told a crowd at a private gathering at Oxford University in England, that the Trump administration needs to encourage “more immigrants” for the U.S. economy to continue growing, according to an audio recording obtained by The Washington Post.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”
His emphatic plea is not something the Trump administration wants to hear. It’s waged a war against both legal and illegal immigration.
RELATED: Trump Immigration Policy Threatening Economy, Even White House Chief Alarmed
The right to seek asylum was incorporated into international law following the atrocities of World War II. Congress adopted key provisions of the Geneva Refugee Convention into U.S. immigration law when it passed the Refugee Act of 1980.
Under the law, people arriving at the U.S. border have the right to request asylum without being criminalized, turned back, used for political stunts, or separated from their children no matter how they arrive here, including walking over the border.
No president has the power to block asylum seekers under current law.
Today, 98% of those who arrive at the border ask to seek political asylum and turn themselves into border guards. They must be let in.
Trump has campaigned, claiming he closed the border and sharply restricted immigrants from entering during his administration The claim is false. Trump never “closed” the border.
The current border crisis has its roots in 2014, when rival gangs in Central America forced families and unaccompanied kids to flee during Obama’s second term at unprecedented levels.
Trump’s administration was hit with a surge on the southern border in 2018 and 2019.
In November 2018, when reports emerged that a large immigrant “caravan” was nearing the border, Trump issued a proclamation barring migrants unless they entered at ports of entry.
RELATED: Graham Defies Trump on Immigration: Keep Your Hands Off Children!
The same day, the administration issued new regulations making those who entered the United States between ports of entry ineligible for asylum.
Trump’s proclamation largely relied on Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA), the same section cited by House Speaker Mike Johnson, arguing that President Biden already has the authority to “close” the southern border.
The courts, however, blocked Trump’s effort. A federal District Court judge in California ruled that barring migrants who enter outside of designated ports of entry from seeking asylum violated federal immigration law, international law, and “the expressed intent of Congress.”
“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” the judge wrote.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision in December 2018, denied the Trump administration’s emergency motion for a stay of the District Court’s order.
The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but its motion to stay the District Court ruling blocking enforcement of the policy was denied.
RELATED: Top White House Aide Joins Economists Shredding Trump Immigration Policy
“The president does not have the authority to close the border under 212(f),” noted Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
On Dec 20, 2018, Trump announced his “Remain in Mexico” program. Immigrants were turned back into Mexico, often into the hands of cartels, and became victims of violent crimes, including kidnapping, rape, torture, and assault. After a two-year legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled in Biden v. Texas that the Biden administration had the authority to end the policy. In February 2023, Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected any further efforts to reinstate the policy for asylum-seekers.
In March 2020, as the COVID pandemic surged, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued a public health order known as Title 42. It authorized the rapid expulsion of unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers for public health reasons.
The measure was challenged in court, and upheld, but in Feb. 2021, Mexico stopped accepting families with children under the program. Nonetheless, thousands of migrants continued to pour over the border.
One upshot of Title 42 was a dramatic increase in illegal border crossings. Those crossings hit record levels between 2021 and 2023, averaging around 2 million people per year.
In December 2021, Anne Schuchat, the second-highest official at the CDC, testified before Congress that the expulsions under Title 42 lacked a sufficient public health rationale.
The Biden administration continued Title 42 expulsions, but in 2022 granted exceptions, notably to Venezuelans and Ukrainians. Both countries were experiencing high levels of violence.
In the meantime, the issue bounced back and forth in federal courts, resulting in competing rulings. Finally, the Supreme Court upheld the ban in a 5-4 decision.
But once the COVID lockdown was declared over, Biden was compelled to let Title 42 expire and resumed allowing immigrants to enter the country. It expired on May 11, 2023.
Crossings dropped sharply this spring and summer after the Biden administration tightened border controls and closed off migrants’ access to the asylum system. Still, apprehensions exceeded 1.3 million during the first nine months of the 2024 fiscal year, according to The Washington Post.
The American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) of Northern California and two other advocacy groups immediately sued the Biden administration’s new asylum ban.
The ban largely mimics two Trump-era policies — known as the “entry” and “transit” bans — which were blocked by the courts, according to the ACLU.
We’ve been down this road before with Trump,” said Katrina Eiland, managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, in a release.
“The asylum bans were cruel and illegal then, and nothing has changed now.”
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is still pending. Plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment in June. Several states have also sued to block Biden’s policy, claiming it is too lenient.
So far, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has noted a near 70 percent drop in illegal entries since early May. The Biden administration appears to have better control over the southern border than at any point since early 2021, according to The Post.
Still, tens of thousands of migrants are entering the United States legally each month, using a mobile app called “CBP One.” Deportations and tougher penalties face those who don’t use it.
The app has reportedly eased pressure on border agents who were overwhelmed when the number of migrants seeking asylum spiked.
Despite the latest efforts, the so-called “border crisis” is still not solved. To do that, Congress has to enact legislation to amend the current law to match today’s conditions and increase resources. So far, it has failed to do either.
To handle the surge, the border needs more resources, but Republicans have blocked every effort to do so.
Under U.S. law, that means there is no other choice but to release immigrants until their asylum hearings can be held. That now takes years in many cases.
Republicans manufactured the border crisis to help Trump get elected. It would take an act of Congress to change the law. Republicans are blocking a bipartisan bill that would do that, too.
Republicans in Congress and a following of right-wing Trump sycophants on social media have tried to demonize the bi-partisan bill, but their arguments are largely baseless.
In one of the biggest political misrepresenations, leadin up to the vote, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the bill “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.”
Those comments are false, according to FactCheck.org, an information monitoring site.
The number is just the threshold that would activate temporary border emergency authority under the Department of Homeland Security secretary
“It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous,” said Republican Sen. James Lankford who worked on the bipartisan bill. “The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”
“The reason we’re doing that [providing emergency authority] is because we want to be able to shut down the system when it gets overloaded, so we have enough time to process those asylum claims,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who helped craft the bill, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Feb. 4.
Credits: Apprehensions chart by RCraig09; Non-Citizens chart by DHS; Ice Chart by DHS; Gotaway Chart by David J. Bier, Cato Institute. Images on this page licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.