Since President Donald Trump returned to the presidency and began reversing his predecessor’s immigration policies, advocates have complained that the current administration is denying “due process” to immigrants. Their real complaint is that for the first time in a long time, the Department of Homeland Security is deporting large numbers of aliens who have received due process and been ordered deported — not only because such removals are the natural consequence of violating the immigration laws, but because lawful deportations are essential to the credibility of our immigration system.
While it’s common to refer to the unauthorized population as “illegal aliens” or “undocumented noncitizens,” various categories of foreign nationals in the United States are subject to removal, including illegal entrants, temporary visitors (“nonimmigrants”) who violated or overstayed their entries, and lawful permanent residents (i.e., “green card holders”) who committed some act that rendered them removable.
Recommended Stories
In all except for a rare set of instances involving Mexican or Canadian nationals stopped at the borders and the ports, DHS must obtain removal orders to send any of those aliens home, and it’s in the course of those proceedings that removable aliens receive the “process” they are “due.”
And despite what you may hear, those proceedings are not perfunctory, nor are the outcomes always preordained.
READ RESTORING AMERICA’S THINK TANK SERIES, THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD: IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
DHS must prove by “clear and convincing evidence” that lawfully admitted aliens are removable, while aliens who have not been admitted must show they are “clearly and beyond doubt entitled to be admitted” and aren’t “inadmissible.”
“Removability” is just the first step, however, because deportable aliens may then seek “relief”, that is, one or more of a number of benefits and protections under the Immigration and Nationality Act and international treaties that could allow them to remain here permanently, most notably asylum.
After an immigration judge finds they are removable and denies them relief, aliens next have a right to appeal to a higher administrative tribunal, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and if unsuccessful there, to seek review from federal circuit courts.
All of that process and all of those procedures are purely for show, and the law is a dead letter if, at the end, DHS fails to deport those under final orders of removal, which was the case for 1.44 million aliens by the end of the Biden administration.
That’s why 31 years ago, Barbara Jordan — civil rights icon and then-chairman of President Clinton’s Commission on Immigration Reform — concluded that:
Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.
Millions of migrants poured illegally into the U.S. under the Biden administration because they knew our immigration system lacked credibility and had all of the trappings of enforcement without any true impacts at the end.
A secure border is unattainable when there is no threat of deportation for illegal entry, departure at the end of a temporary admission becomes optional for any nonimmigrant who faces no real prospect of removal, and — given that recidivism is the rule, not the exception, among those released from criminal incarceration, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics has documented — alien felons are free to continue to prey when DHS doesn’t send them home after their sentences end.
Simply put, without deportation, DHS is at best an endless benefits machine for any alien with the resources and inclination to come here, legally or otherwise, and any true sense of U.S. sovereignty, public safety, and national security is gone.
THE 14TH AMENDMENT’S AUTHOR WOULDN’T ACCEPT THE SUPREME COURT’S INTERPRETATION
And deportation of the illegal population is the main reason voters returned Trump to the White House.
Our immigration system isn’t broken, as many contend, but for years it lacked the crucial element to make it work as Congress intended: the deportation of those with no right to be here. Now that Trump is making such deportations a reality, you’ll be surprised at how quickly that “broken” system gets “fixed.”
Andrew “Art” Arthur, an internationally recognized national security and immigration expert, is the Center of Immigration Studies’ resident fellow in law and policy.