ICE Plans ‘Humane, Dignified’ Deportations for Hundreds of Illegal Migrants

Immigration officials will try next week to repatriate several hundred illegal immigrants who have recently been ordered home by judges, via a “humane, dignified” process.

The deportations are “going to send a strong message to those individuals contemplating coming here illegally not to do so,” said Mark Morgan, who was nominated recently to run the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “Not only will we be enforcing the law, maintaining the integrity of the system, but we’re also going to send a powerful message to individuals in the northern triangle countries: Do not come, do not risk it,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The migrants slated for deportation are part of a select group of roughly 2,000 recent arrivals who were ushered quickly through the asylum process, lost their asylum cases, and have been ordered home.

“We’re looking at this from a simplistic viewpoint,” Morgan told Fox News:

If you are here illegally in violation of federal immigration law. If you’ve received due process, there should be consequences, including families. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure that we apply the law and we enforce the law across the board … We’re not going to exempt a certain demographic. We need to make sure that everybody that has been here in violation of the law has consequences.

…

What I’m asking these individuals that have these final orders [is] ‘Come to ICE. Work with ICE in a humane, dignified manner to return you to your country of origin as it’s been ordered.’ That’s what I hope we can do here.

“It is serious, no question, they intend to do it, and they’re doing because they think it will help the border crisis,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The repatriation effort is intended to complement other enforcement programs, she said. The programs include the Remain in Mexico program which sends adult migrants and their children back to Mexico until officials can schedule a day for the migrants to plead in court for asylum. The programs will also be aided by the new security measures implemented by Mexico.

U.S. officials “know full well that is not going to be easy, but they know that if they can start sending some people home, it will send the message that it is getting riskier” to make the expensive trip up to the U.S. border, she said.

Pro-migration advocates are already smearing enforcement as political theater, and hope to block the deportations with additional lawsuits. Buzzfeed said:

One former ICE official said the focus on family units was discouraging.

“This administration is no longer focused on the actual dangerous criminals threatening our national security,” the former official told BuzzFeed News. “They’re completely focused on winning in 2020. They have begun utilizing every apparatus available to them to target, separate, and terrify small children in order to claim a ‘win’ on immigration.”

In recent days, attorneys and civil rights organizations have sent out notices that they would be prepared to help immigrants caught up in any operation and have reminded individuals that they are not legally required to open the door to ICE officers.

Progressives — many of whom insist they do not support open borders  — hope to portray the implementation of a judge’s order as cruel to children. Buzzfeed, for example, quoted Kevin Landy, a former head of detention policy office in ICE  under President Barack Obama:

“There are all kinds of difficulties to arresting families, it’s why traditionally ICE is reluctant to do it. It is going to be very traumatic for the children and their parents,” he said, noting that the uniformed officers will arrive with various firearms.

“What it will look like is a police raid to arrest young kids, who are not criminals, not juvenile delinquents and need to be arrested, but young kids who were brought here by their parents.”

Trump's decision to begin mass deportations will push people into the shadows and sow fear and danger in communities across this country. It's outrageous. pic.twitter.com/IIpUG49S2q

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 19, 2019

ICE is trying to minimize the political risk for the administration created by progressives’ massive resistance to the nation’s popular immigration laws. Morgan, for example, told Fox News that enforcement officials are trying to persuade the 2,000 illegal migrants to cooperate with their deportation:

We have a demographic that has had an enormous amount of due process. They’ve had access to attorneys. They’ve had access to interpreters. They’ve received a final order of removal from a judge We’ve even sent them letters, saying, ‘You’ve received an order. Come to ICE. We’ll work with you. We’ll give you 30 days to get your affairs in order, and we’ll help you return you to your country.’ Those have been ignored. Those people in those categories, over 90 percent haven’t showed up, and they’ve ignored the order. What I’m trying to tell them, … is ‘Look, as ICE, I don’t want to come to your door. I don’t want to come to your home. I don’t want to come to your workplace.’ What I’m asking these individuals that have these final orders [is] ‘Come to ICE. Work with ICE in a humane, dignified manner to return you to your country of origin as it’s been ordered.’ That’s what I hope we can do here.

 

Immigration by the Numbers

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

Flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.