The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) touted the lowest illegal border crossing level on record when it released end-of-year Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics Dec. 5.
ICE and CBP numbers provided a glimpse of Donald Trump’s first year in office and set markers for the future on how the administration will uphold its cornerstone campaign pledge to combat illegal immigration.
Outside of DHS, immigration observers who spoke with Homeland411 had a number of varying perspectives on the meaning of the DHS statistics and their import moving into 2018.
“What I tend to focus on is interior enforcement, because that is one area that we saw a very dramatic decline under the Obama administration,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It’s also the kind of enforcement that affects American communities directly, because it’s addressing the settled illegal alien population and people who have arrived in communities—not just the border traffic.”
She noted the number of interior removals which saw a 25 percent increase for the whole year—and 37 percent increase since Trump’s inauguration. While 25 percent is a significant increase, Vaughan added that the number is an increase from a very low number to begin with.
Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at CATO Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, said he was kind of shocked at how low the 2017 interior removal numbers were.
“It’s pretty easy for the government to ramp up interior deportations,” he said. “There are basically 17,000 over 2016, [which] tells me that they’ve already picked up a lot of the low-hanging fruit in terms of whose easy to deport, and they did that during the Obama administration.”
Nowrasteh also addressed the border.
“I think everyone’s realized the president’s bark is a lot worse than his bite, at least in terms of the border,” he said. “It’s a lot harder to boost—to ramp up—interior deportations [than] people thought.”
Nowrasteh said the reduction in people crossing the border is a trend that’s been going on for years, so that’s of little surprise.
Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, on the other hand, said the record-low cross-border numbers are most interesting.
“Part of that is increased enforcement, increased emphasis on actually enforcing immigration laws,” he said. “But I think also a lot of this is through the massive publicity that clearly went throughout the world—particularly to our southern neighbor—that there was a new president in town and this president tended to enforce the law.”
Though crossings were down at the beginning of the year, von Spakovsky noted a spike midyear of unaccompanied minors entering the country.
“I wonder whether that’s because of the subsequent publicity, which again was broadcast throughout the Latin American world, south of the border, of the resistance being put up by sanctuary cities all over the U.S., and saying that ‘anybody that gets to our city is going to be safe, we’re not going to turn you over to immigration authorities,’” he said.
Nowrasteh said sanctuary policies definitely have had an impact, particularly on local law enforcement.
“About 80 percent or so of all those who are removed from the United States are identified first by local law enforcement, so if you have local communities who do not cooperate fully with federal immigration enforcement, then it seriously limits their ability—ICE’s ability—to identify and remove people,” he said. “The fact that California, as well as almost every major metropolitan area in the United States, doesn’t cooperate fully, means that we probably won’t get back to the big numbers that we had in the early Obama administration.”
Vaughan also noted the connection between low deportation numbers and sanctuary policies, but suggested that they will eventually be on their way out.
“I do think that some of these initial court decisions by district judges are artificially extending the life of some of these sanctuary policies,” she said. “Once the courts sort out and affirm the federal government’s authority … to have people detained and arrested and affirm the authority of local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with ICE, that some of these sanctuary jurisdictions are going to reverse their policies, because that will open the door for [the Department of Justice] to penalize them even more than has already happened.”
She also believes voters in these jurisdictions will eventually lose patience with sanctuary policies.
As for the future, von Spakovsky said he would like to see a focus on employers.
“What I hope to see next year is finally the vigorous enforcement of the employer provisions in federal law that make it illegal for an employer to knowingly hire someone who’s not in the country legally,” he said. “If it becomes difficult for illegal aliens to get jobs, to get employment, you will see large numbers of them self deport.”
Editor’s note: Homeland411 also reached out to the American Immigration Council for comment but received no response.
© 2017 Homeland411