Trump team widens net for immigrant deportation
22 Feb 2017 4:53 PM GMT
The Trump administration has issued tough guidelines to widen the net for deporting illegal immigrants from the US, and speed up their removal.
Documents released on Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed the broad scope of the President's ambitions: to publicise crimes by undocumented immigrants, strip such immigrants of privacy protections, enlist local police officers as enforcers, erect new detention facilities, discourage asylum seekers, and, ultimately, speed up deportations, the New York Times reported.
Undocumented immigrants arrested for traffic violations or shop-lifting will be targeted along with those convicted of more serious crimes.
Major steps outlined in the papers included hiring more Customs and Border Protection agents, expanding a programme that gives DHS Secretary John Kelly more power in directing field operations, initiating a wall along the US-Mexican border, and stepping up the effort to "return aliens to contiguous countries".
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the new guidelines would not usher in mass deportations, but were designed to empower agents to enforce laws already on the books. "The President wanted to take the shackles off individuals in these agencies," Spicer said.
"The message from this White House and the Department of Homeland Security is that those people who are in this country, who pose a threat to our safety, or who have committed a crime, will be the first to go," he said.
The guidelines revealed sweeping changes from the approach taken by former President Obama. The only Obama policy that survived was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a programme that allowed people who entered the country illegally as children to stay, usually for work or school, reported the Hill magazine.
But the White House said that even ÂDACA could be ultimately eliminated, as President Trump seeks a tough approach.DHS officials told reporters that while the guidance memos expand the federal government's ability to empower state and local law enforcement agencies to perform the functions of immigration officers, no National Guard troops will be deployed to round up immigrants in the US. The officials said the policies mostly enforce existing law and won't lead to an massive round-ups of undocumented immigrants.
Trump's immigration plans could impact three lakh Indian-Americans
Nearly 300,000 Indian-Americans are likely to be impacted by the Trump administration's sweeping plans that put the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation.
President Donald Trump has laid the groundwork for potentially deporting millions of undocumented immigrants by issuing new guidance that drastically broadens the ways in which federal immigration laws should be enforced.
"The Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in an enforcement memo.
"Department personnel have full authority to arrest or apprehend an alien whom an immigration officer has probable cause to believe is in violation of the immigration laws," it said.
The Department of Homeland Security has issued two enforcement memos, which among other things, tightens deportation of illegal immigrants.
The emphasis is on criminal aliens, though, but opens up the door for others too.
Indian-Americans as per unofficial figures account for nearly 300,000 illegal aliens.
According to the memo, the DHS Secretary has the authority to apply expedited removal provisions to aliens who have not been admitted or paroled into the US, who are inadmissible, and who have not been continuously physically present in the US for the two-year period immediately prior to the determination of their inadmissibility, so that such aliens are immediately removed unless the alien is an unaccompanied minor, intends to apply for asylum or has a fear of persecution or torture in their home country, or claims to have lawful immigration status.
The memorandum said when illegal aliens apprehended do not pose a risk of a subsequent illegal entry, returning them to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived, pending the outcome of removal proceedings.
It saves the government detention and adjudication resources for other priority aliens.
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