WASHINGTON (Diya TV) — The Department of Homeland Security Tuesday laid out President Trump’s plans for an aggressive enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, including a potentially massive expansion of the number of people detained and deported.
President Trump emphasized that his administration will not touch DACA — former President Barack Obama’s protections for so-called DREAMers — even if the new rules strike down protections for undocumented migrants overall.
DHS officials said Tuesday that while the guidance memos expand the federal government’s powers to employ state and local law enforcement agencies as immigration officers, no National Guard troops will be deployed to enforce the order. Regardless, the shift in U.S. policy will likely continue to provoke fear in America’s immigrant communities.
Officials said the policies mostly enforce existing law and won’t lead to an immediate round-up of undocumented immigrants.
“We’re not going to start changing this today, it’s not going to start happening tomorrow,” the official said told CNN. “You will not see folks rounded up or anything of the sort.”
While DHS officials said the agency will use its limited resources to target “criminals,” as Trump has said, they also acknowledged that people who were not targeted for deportation under Obama could be eligible in this administration. The Trump administration has set new enforcement priorities that could apply to virtually every undocumented immigrant in the US, whereas the Obama administration had focused on serious and violent criminals.
The new plan vastly grows the number of individuals who can be deported using “expedited removal” procedures, which affords immigrants almost no court proceedings.
Under the new policy, if a migrant can’t prove they’ve been living in the US continuously for two years, he or she could now be eligible for expedited removal from the country. Previously, this was limited in practice to people apprehended within 100 miles of the border and who had arrived within the past two weeks.
In further tightening of protections that allow more leniency to certain immigrants, the administration is also looking to limit protections for unaccompanied minors that seek to enter the US.
