The White House and Department of Homeland Security are working together to craft legislation that would attempt to purge "loopholes" from the immigration system that entice foreign nationals to illegally immigrate to the U.S. and incentivise employers to illegally hire them. The legislative package includes reforms that will lessen legal limitations imposed on law enforcement that restrict who they can detain and the duration of time they can detain them.
Officials say that these restrictions are often exploited by well-informed smuggling organizations and encourage more illegal crossings into the U.S.
The legislative package will also offer solutions to the broken asylum process, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions has criticized as being rampant with "abuse and fraud." Overly broad interpretations of what actually qualifies a person to be granted asylum status has and continues to cause massive backlogs of cases in the immigration courts.
In addition to flaws in the asylum system and legal "loopholes" that perpetuate illegal border crossings, officials say that another factor contributing to illegal immigration and fraud is failure on Congress' part to end programs like DACA.
"What's creating these pull factors is the belief that there's going to be never-ending leniency from now until the end of time," a senior administration official said. "When Congress is debating a large grant of a generous immigration benefit, that tends to be a major pull factor for new people to come illegally."
A caravan of about 1,350 foreign nationals from Central American began a trip from the City of Tapachula on the Mexico-Guatemala border to the U.S. on March 25, with intentions to either apply for asylum or slip away from the group to cross into the U.S. illegally. Though these foreign nationals aren’t in any way eligible for DACA provisions, Pres. Trump says that amnesty legislation like DACA has served as a “magnet” that encourages migrants to cross into the U.S. illegally, in hopes that similar provisions like those in DACA will be extended to them.
"These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!" Trump tweeted Sunday in reference to the caravan.
For more information on this story, see the Washington Examiner.
