Until now, Donald Trump’s crude and insulting language may have overshadowed blunt truths he has spoken. On Sunday that changed with his release of a simple and straightforward policy position on immigration.
Trump released a three-part reform plan: To enforce border security, to enforce immigration laws and to ensure that immigration benefits native citizens first and foremost.
The blunt simplicity of Trump’s plan will strip bare the myth that the Obama administration is enforcing immigration laws in the slightest and its hypocrisy in claiming that it is.
The administration says it’s overwhelmed with a huge task, but it deported only 15,000 illegal immigrants for violating immigration law in 2014.
It claims that rounding up undocumented residents is an impossible challenge, but, at year-end 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintained a list of 1.9 million illegal immigrants who have been apprehended but not detained or deported. It is called the “non-detained docket.” Almost half of those on the docket are subject to a “final removal order,” meaning they’ve had their day in immigration court where the judge has ordered them deported.
On top of this, last November, President Obama sought to transform his de facto non-enforcement practice into official government policy with his executive order exempting five million illegal residents from immigration enforcement.
Until now, Trump hasn’t bothered with facts, but some of his supporters read the Justice Department’s legal opinion supporting the executive order. In it, Obama claimed to lack the resources to deport more than 400,000 illegal immigrants per year (vastly more than he is actually deporting). The readers know what’s missing is will, far more so than resources. Nevertheless, on Sunday, Trump proposed tripling the number of ICE officers under part two of his plan.
In March, in a marvel of obfuscation, the administration issued ICE statistics for 2014, claiming to have deported 316,000 undocumented immigrants. This included 214,000 “individuals apprehended by CBP Border Patrol agents and then processed, detained and removed by ICE.”
That is interdiction at the border, not deportation. Interdiction is a form of prevention that renders enforcement of immigration law unnecessary. That’s why Trump and his supporters want a wall on the southern border, the central proposal under part one of Trump’s plan.
Another 87,000 were deported for violation of criminal laws, not immigration law. Citizens are subject to the same criminal laws. The only difference is that citizens are thrown in jail, while illegal immigrants are thrown out of the country (unless shielded by sanctuary cities as in the case of Kate Steinle’s murderer).
Eliminating interdiction and deportation for violation of criminal law leaves only 15,000 deported for violation of immigration law.
Trump’s supporters are angry, but they’ve taken comfort from the January federal district court injunction barring implementation of Obama’s executive order and the subsequent appellate court decision supporting the injunction, which said the Obama administration “is unlikely to prevail on the merits.”
But the courts can’t change the administration’s unofficial policy of complete non-enforcement, and, currently, there are reports of increased illegal entry at the Southern border.
So, Trump held a protest rally at the Arizona border. Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, said that Trump “fired up the crazies.” Who’s crazy? Trump and his supporters, or a senator who ignores facts and court decisions?
Trump may blow himself up by spraying invective and insults left, right and center. But GOP presidential candidates should embrace the substance behind some of his pyrotechnics. Trump isn’t likely to win the GOP nomination, but neither are candidates who dismiss everything he says as complete nonsense.
Red Jahncke is president of the Townsend Group International, LLC. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
