Pro-Migration Groups Slam Trump for Ending Catch-and-Release

Catch and Release Policy
David McNew/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Pro-migration groups are bitterly denouncing President Donald Trump’s new “Remain in Mexico” policy to end catch-and-release for most asylum-seeking migrants.

“Trump couldn’t get his border wall, so he’s building an invisible wall to stop asylum seekers,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer and advocate at the immigration industry’s American Immigration Council group.

“The ‘Remain in Mexico’ plan will be a catastrophe for the US immigration courts, Mexican border cities, and the migrants themselves,” said a Tweet from an immigration firm, Al Otro Lado. “Migrants are regularly exploited and killed in Mexico, this plan will make them sitting ducks on the border.”

“Seriously GTFO,” tweeted David Bier, a pro-migration advocate at the open-border Cato Institute.

The policy was first dubbed the “Remain in Mexico” plan, but it is now officially called the “Migrant Protection Protocols.”

The plan provides a legal way for border officials to send economic migrants back to Mexico, even after they walk across the border and ask for asylum. Pro-American groups cheered the reform:

The policy was explained in a Thursday statement from the Department of Homeland Security:

In FY17, CBP apprehended 94,285 family units from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (Northern Triangle) at the Southern border. Of those 94,285 Central American family units apprehended at the border last year, 99% remain in the country today.

Misguided court decisions and outdated laws have made it easier for illegal aliens to enter and remain in the U.S. if they are adults who arrive with children, are unaccompanied alien children, or are individuals who fraudulently claim asylum. As a result, DHS continues to see increased numbers of illegal migrants and a dramatic shift in the demographics of aliens traveling to the border, both in terms of nationality and type of aliens- from a demographic who could be quickly removed when they had no legal right to stay to one that cannot be detained and timely removed.

…

Section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) addresses the inspection of aliens seeking to be admitted into the U.S. and provides specific procedures regarding the treatment of those not clearly entitled to admission, including applicants for asylum. Section 235(b)(2)(C) provides that “in the case of an alien . . . who is arriving on land (whether or not at a designated port of arrival) from a foreign territory contiguous to the U.S.,” the Secretary of Homeland Security “may return the alien to that territory pending a [removal] proceeding under § 240” of the INA.” The U.S. has notified the Government of Mexico that it is implementing these procedures under U.S. law

The policy will not apply to youths or children who cross the border, and not to people who make a persuasive case that they will be in danger if they must return to Mexico, the policy says. The process will be tested at the San Ysidro gate in California.

The policy may have a huge impact by crippling the cartels’ labor trafficking business.

Currently, migrants and their children are legally allowed to walk up to the Ports of Entry on the border, ask for asylum, and then get released to legally find jobs until their asylum claims are heard in court, sometimes two years in the future.

Few of the asylum claims are subsequently approved by judges — but the catch-and-release process allows migrants to legally earn money, pay their debts to the coyotes, re-hire coyotes to smuggle their family members over the border, and then evade immigration enforcement once they lose their asylum claim.

But the new policy would reduce the number of migrants who get released into the United States to find jobs. If the migrants cannot get U.S. jobs, they cannot pay fees and the cartels have little incentive to smuggle the migrants up to the border.

But pro-migration advocates and immigration lawyers want to preserve the current migration system which generates funds for the cartels, the immigration lawyers, the employers who hire illegals, and companies which provide autos, groceries, apartments and much else to the migrant customers.

Pro-migration advocates say migrants will not be able to get legal services if they remain in Mexico. However, some progressives provide free legal aid to migrants in Mexico, and the legal industry will likely be able to provide legal services via online chat.

Nationwide, the bipartisan establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor of blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices, pricing poor U.S. whites, Latinos, and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.

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