Thanks for sending me a White House Press Release.
Trump doesn't need to change the law - he needs to enforce existing law.
Trump has just one quantifiable achievement on immigration - he reduced UN Refugees from 80,000 per year to 30,000, which is still the highest in the world.
On almost every other significant immigration metric, Trump is within plus or minus 10% of Obama’s numbers.
On several metrics, he is dramatically worse than Obama.
The number of backlogged immigration cases have increased by 200,000 under Trump.
And, Trump has expanded the OPT work visa (a surrogate for H-1B) from less than 250,000 to more than 300,000.
Among other sins, Trump never disclosed that his border policy was “Catch and Release” from Day One of his Presidency. If not for the Mexican Caravans, we still wouldn't know that was happening.
Trump's campaign promise to implement Universal E-Verify was utterly bogus. Nothing has been done, and Trump's DHS was performing fewer Form I-9 work place audits than Obama did, until the Mexican Caravans ripped the cover off that negligence, too.
Trump essentially begs the Democrat Party to file injunctions against his policies. When they do, Trump sends pro-immigration career DOJ lawyers into court to defend his case. Their pleadings are pitiful. No passion, no conviction, and no urgency. Everything - including the alleged Muslim ban - will still be in court when Trump leaves the White House.
The Constitution and Congressional statutes give Trump extraordinary powers and discretion on immigration issues.
But he refuses to use them or defend them.
Bottom Line....
80% of new immigrant citizens vote for the Democrat Party.
In a democracy, when you get out voted, nothing else matters.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Temperamentally, I tend to be (perhaps too) optimistic (I was constantly waiting for “Stealth Jeff” Sessions to drop the hammer), but we need to be on guard against being overly pessimistic as well.
Objectively, we should recognize that President Trump has made significant efforts, and instituted meaningful improvements, as well as the failures and challenges he has encountered. The enemy gets a vote in every battle - outcomes are the result of all the factors, not just President Trump’s commitment or competence.
Your implication seems to be that if you, or a like-minded person were President, the outcomes would be very different - that the legal restrictions and the actions of all others are relatively insignificant, and all blame for outcomes are essentially in the control of the single source of the President.
I would argue that on a case by case basis for each contributing factor, the President himself has been a strong force for the solution, rather than the problem.
The fundamental element of your position seems to be the bottom line metric of the current illegal immigration rate.
True, that is the bottom line ultimately, but the current rate is a snap shot of many factors, moving along different timelines. Building infrastructure is a multi-year effort, overcoming legal challenges runs about a year, getting legislation changed is totally unpredictable (unless the prediction is that there will be no change). President Trump has been consistently and aggressively pursuing the full spectrum of long and short term solutions to these many different causes of the problem.
“The number of backlogged immigration cases have increased” - because of a recent tactical change to exploit the asylum loophole, and the recruitment and support of caravans by the Left, the Governments of Venezuela and Mexico, and human trafficking cartels (new actions by others).
What could you have done to decrease the backlog? Hire more judges? Trump did that. Make it easier for them to do cases more quickly? He did that. Pressure Governments to withdraw their support to caravans? He did that (successfully). Task Law Enforcement (and the Intelligence Community) to target the traffickers, and grant them exceptional emergency powers? He did that. Claim that President Trump did nothing? Demonstrably false. His (and Jeff Sessions’) efforts before the caravan rush had started the backlog of cases downward, for the first time in over 20 years.
You say “Trump never disclosed that his border policy was “Catch and Release””, as if that was his preferred option, his chosen policy, despite his many efforts to change that. Any other President would have been bound by by the same legal and resource restrictions.
Would you have violated the courts, the law and treaty to order immediate deportation? That would be firm grounds for impeachment, which several Republican Senators would agree with on principle. Would you try to establish concentration camps for hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, without appropriations from Congress to pay for them? Any President would be forced to catch and release, until the legal restrictions are corrected.
President Trump has his people scrambling to address this with new measures. He has pressured and fired high profile figures who fail to effect change. Additional detention facilities are being built. DoD has been tasked to identify spaces for 5,000 unaccompanied children. The “wait in Mexico” policy is in effect, while the 9th Circuit reviews it, and some asylum claimants are being returned each day (the “muslim ban”, despite your unfounded denial, has been in effect since the Supreme Court ruling in December 2017). Emergency legislation has been requested specifically to address the Flores Settlement restriction of 20 day detention limit, asylum standards, and immediate deportation of unaccompanied children to all countries. It is on track to be proposed this month (HUMANE Act).
“Trump’s campaign promise to implement Universal E-Verify was utterly bogus.” That requires change to the law - by Congress. You call it (unfairly) his “Promise”, when it was his position. He is still in favor of it, and he will sign it, but Congress must do it.
“Trump essentially begs the Democrat Party to file injunctions against his policies.” Blaming Trump for the Democrat’s actions? Ridiculous. He has been consistently winning in court. It just takes a year or so to work through the Leftist lawsuits and the appeals. That is the nature of the business, and the Trump Administration has been steadily determined and steadily successful in changing the legal restrictions imposed by the courts.
“The Constitution and Congressional statutes give Trump extraordinary powers and discretion on immigration issues. But he refuses to use them or defend them.”
Obviously not true - just obviously. He has taken bold, exceptional, and innovative actions that have dominated headlines. You must willfully choose to ignore obvious facts, to make such claims The Government shutdown, the Emergency Declarations, the Military deployments, the Executive Orders, the diversion of billions of dollars are all extraordinary powers of the President that he has used, despite heated opposition.
What is the point of just ranting and complaining? If you resort to unreasonable claims, or unreasonably deny obvious contradictory facts, you sacrifice your credibility to persuade.
Results are disappointing in terms of current illegal immigration flows. The solution is not to get rid of President Trump. He is the best thing that we have going on that front, and there is no better alternative out there.