MCALLEN, TEXAS – The current migration crisis at the southern border has become an all-too-familiar issue for U.S. border officials following three major upticks over the past four years.
Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the country’s top border official and tasked with responding to the current surge. But McAleenan is also fixated on finding a permanent solution that doesn’t land his agency’s 60,000 personnel in the same position in the near-future, as he explained during a meeting at the McAllen Border Patrol Station in the Rio Grande Valley this week.
However, McAleenan’s efforts have been derailed as a result of the White House and Justice Department’s on-again, off-again policies of prosecuting all illegal entrants.
In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he had ordered “zero tolerance” for any person who illegally entered the United States, including adults in family units who entered for the first time.
CBP has not referred first-time illegal entrants accompanied by children for prosecution for a few years since a court decision related to the Flores Settlement mandated they be released after 20 days in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security agency to which immigration cases are handed following the initial apprehension.
Whereas the Obama administration had been able to detain entire family units for more than three weeks, the Trump administration was playing by a new set of rules.
“Because of the requirements to have an immigration hearing and process, there was no ability then to complete the immigration proceedings, determine whether somebody warranted protection, was allowed to stay in the U.S., or was subject to removal,” McAleenan said. “So the ability to create a deterrent was taken away and these families had to be released. And they’re on non-detained dockets on the immigration courts that can extend three to five years and beyond. That was the big change in the dynamic between 14 and 16.”
By early May, the decision to refer parents for prosecution was beginning to draw national outrage as children roughly between the ages of six and 17 were separated and cared for by the Department of Health and Human Services while their parents went through the legal system.
In mid-June, the White House threw in the hat and Trump issued an executive order that said parents should not be separated from their kids. McAleenan explained to reporters that he instructed his agency to stop referring for prosecution family unit adults, essentially suspending the zero tolerance policy.
“In accordance of the executive order, I diverted the temporary suspension of prosecution for families in that category while we work through a process with DOJ while we can maintain family unity while empowering protection efforts,” McAleenan said.
He is now back in all-too-familiar territory of not referring most family unit adults to the Justice Department and releasing them into the U.S. as they wait one to two years for immigration hearings.
But McAleenan told the Washington Examiner he has a multifaceted plan to finally deal with a crisis he has watched his predecessors try to handle.
The top border official said DHS is now working with Justice officials to determine how to prosecute family unit adults without separating them from their children, and is also taking a new approach to working with leaders from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to create obtain long-term solutions.
Almost half of all illegal immigrant apprehensions over the past five years have taken place in just one of Border Patrol’s nine southwest sectors: the Rio Grande Sector.
But for the eight other sectors — where caseloads from ICE, prosecutors, and immigration judges are lighter — McAleenan believes lies a way to prosecute family unit adults without taking them away from their child for more than a few hours.
“Since the executive order, we have prosecuted adults that came across with children. but we are not doing that widely because the guidance in the executive order to maintain a family unit. So we’re working through with DOJ to see how we can potentially expedite that process,” the commissioner said.
“There are a lot of districts that have a very streamlined prosecution processes where we might be able to have the parent prosecuted while still having only a few hours apart from the child, but that’s something we’re working through right now to ensure that we implement the intent of the executive order,” he added.
Many family unit adults have been referred for prosecution, charged, but have received “time served,” which means they are not required to spend up to six months in jail. But McAleenan said it is critical that family unit adults be prosecuted even if they will not spend time in jail because if they illegally enter the country a second time, they will be charged with a felony based on their first charge.
McAleenan’s immediate focus on referring all illegal entrants is just one notch on his tool belt to solve the border crisis after apprehensions hit 50,000 people for a third month in a row in May.
The commissioner, on his third trip to the Rio Grande Valley in four and a half weeks, said the national media understandably has become focused in recent weeks with this stretch of the border and with good reason as border officials continue to see the highest family unit apprehension rates.
In 2014, primarily single male adults from Mexico made up illegal border-crossers. Now, the majority come from south of Mexico — an area referred to as the Northern Triangle because of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador’s northern placement in the Central American region.
“That’s a complex situation that requires sophisticated strategies both in the original countries, and partnering with Mexico as a transit country where there’s significant issues with transnational criminal organizations taking advantage of, enticing vulnerable populations into the smuggling cycle — and then taking advantage of them — extortion, murder, assault, sexual assault — even on young people as they come up here,” he said.
[ABC News crew runs into human smuggler on camera at US-Mexico border]
McAleenan has met with members of all three countries governments over the past week and a half and said the seeds have been planted to bring about long-term change by helping those nations with security, governance, and economic development.
He pointed to an “unprecedented” June 2017 conference in Miami where Northern Triangle presidents, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-DHS Secretary John Kelly, Mexican government officials, and other regional leaders met. They were joined by international business developers and talked about creating major industrial projects in the region as a way to bring business to the region and turn around a dire economy that so many migrants have attempted to flee as transnational criminal organizations grow there.
“What we’re trying to do is take that forward with an even renewed sense of urgency given the continued challenging conditions there,” McAleenan said.
The commissioner said CBP is beginning to see fewer Salvadoran people migrating to the U.S., an indicator that a year later, things are starting to improve in their home country.
“If you look at the numbers, El Salvador is much lower. It used to be a higher percentage doing the crossings. I met with the ambassador of El Salvador last week. She mentioned the investment strategies and their security strategies starting to pay dividends in terms of the economic prosperity and the safety of different municipalities in El Salvador,” he said.
It’s a small but positive step forward that the agency wants to mirror in Honduras and Guatemala. Later this summer, McAleenan will travel to the other countries to show security officials how CBP carries out those efforts, but also its system for customs operations.
“How can we help them make sure that their system is modern, it has integrity, they’re able to collect taxes and duties in an efficient way to increase government revenue that they can then reinvest in those communities. I think we have a lot to offer there and really the challenge is regional,” he said.
The U.S. is also working with the Catholic Bishops in the heavily Catholic region to persuade locals against trying to migrate and trusting smugglers with their lives.
“We’re going to keep working on this on all angles. it’s just not a border issue, it’s a regional migration phenomenon,” he added. “We’ve got to partner with other governments to address it.”
