President Trump is pushing for new detention facilities along the border and an end to the Obama administration’s “catch-and-release” policy on illegal immigrants.
“We are sealing up our Southern Border. The people of our great country want Safety and Security,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “The Dems have been a disaster on this very important issue!”
An executive order issued by the White House Friday night told the Department of Homeland Security to end the policy that allows illegal border crossers to remain free in the U.S. as they await judicial hearings that could deport them.
Instead, under Trump’s order, DHS and other agencies must “allocate all legally available resources to construct, operate, control, or modify … facilities to detain aliens for violations of immigration law at or near the borders of the United States.”
Calling catch-and-release a “dangerous practice,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders hailed the new measures.
“The safety and security of the American people is the President’s highest priority, and he will keep his promise to protect our country and to ensure that our laws are respected,” she said Friday night.
The federal government currently uses 109 facilities across the country to hold about 40,000 immigrants threatened with deportation, including six in New Jersey and one in upstate Orange County.
More than a third of these centers — which include county jails, for-profit lockups run by private contractors, and ICE’s own facilities — are already clustered along the southern border in Texas, Arizona and California.
But they contain far too little space to house the more than 300,000 border crossers who were apprehended in the southwest in 2017 alone.
Trump’s order could add an unspecified number of additional holding areas. Some of them, the order said, may be created in modified or re-purposed military facilities.
The new rules were issued just hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new “zero tolerance” policy for illegal immigrants, stating that they will be “met with the full prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice.”
At the same time, Secretary of Defense James Mattis authorized the deployment of up to 4,000 National Guard troops to join border-patrol efforts already underway in Texas and Arizona. Trump has said he intends to station troops there until his promised border wall is complete.
The announcements came on the heels of days of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, who was angered last week by news of a caravan of migrants, mainly from Honduras, who had been traveling unimpeded through Mexico toward the U.S. border.
But the administration’s coordinated moves have drawn increasing pushback — even from some Republicans.
Nevada’s GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval on Friday joined the Democratic governors of Montana and Oregon in refusing to commit state National Guard members to the administration’s border patrol effort.