Solutions for Ending the Border Crisis and Creating an Effective Process for Removals from the Interior

Summary

More than a million migrants have been apprehended and released into the United States under the Biden administration. If got-aways - migrants who successfully evaded Border Patrol – and unaccompanied minors are added, the total is nearly two million. In today’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, experts discuss solutions to ending the border crisis and executing an effective interior enforcement plan.

Dan Vara, a former District/Chief Legal Counsel for the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Miami Division and a Center board member, shares his experiences with past operations that successfully dealt with mass migration situations, including the record breaking mass exodus of Nicaraguans from their home country to the United States in 1988 and 1989.

Vara describes how career personnel created the enforcement processes which then filtered up to the top for approval. The key was detention, judges and attorneys detailed to the border, quick decisions on asylum applications, and corresponding quick deportations. Are Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE officers’ ideas filtering up for consideration today? “Immigration is politics and politics is immigration”, says Vara. Today, “voices in the field are being stifled.”

The Biden administration is not interested in interrupting the flow, but rather more interested in accommodating and managing it. Eventually there will be the opportunity to return to the fundamentals – detention for those claiming asylum and location and more detention for those in the country illegally. Vara describes specific changes that would make removals easier, including providing free legal counsel for migrants claiming asylum, suggesting it would expedite cases and would reduce backlogs as counsel would be held liable for fraudulent cases and thus fewer cases would come before a judge.

In the closing commentary, Jessica Vaughan, the Center’s director of policy studies and the host of today’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, highlights the fallacy asserted by many on the left – more legal immigration employment opportunities would solve the illegal immigration problem. She highlights a recent human trafficking case uncovered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that occurred in the state of Georgia where a bait and switch employment scam brought Mexican engineers to the U.S. using the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) professional workers (TN) temporary worker visa. But the high skilled work required by the visa was non-existent; the engineers were placed in hard labor manual jobs. Vaughan states that this case is just the tip of the iceberg - fraud within the various temporary work visas programs have made them easy targets for trafficking.

Host

Jessica Vaughan is the Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Guest

Dan Vara is a former District/Chief Legal Counsel for the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a Center for Immigration Studies board member.

Related

‘A total lie’: Mexican engineers say they were misled into manual labor in Ga. factories

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Intro Montage

Voices in the opening montage:

• Sen. Barack Obama at a 2005 press conference.
• Sen. John McCain in a 2010 election ad.
• President Lyndon Johnson, upon signing the 1965 Immigration Act.
• Booker T. Washington, reading in 1908 from his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech.
• Laraine Newman as a "Conehead" on SNL in 1977.
• Hillary Clinton in a 2003 radio interview.
• Cesar Chavez in a 1974 interview.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaking to reporters in 2019.
• Prof. George Borjas in a 2016 C-SPAN appearance.
• Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2008 comments on the Senate floor.
• Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes".