Trumps Deportation Surge - WSJ Editorial
President Trump campaigned on enforcing immigration law, and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly plans to deliver. On Tuesday Mr. Kelly ordered a deportation surge that will cost billions of dollars and expand the size and intrusiveness of government in ways that should make conservatives wince.
In a pair of memos the Secretary fleshes out the Administration’s immigration priorities to protect public safety. By all means deport gangbangers and miscreants. But Mr. Kelly’s order is so sweeping that it could capture law-abiding immigrants whose only crime is using false documents to work. This policy may respond to the politics of the moment, but chasing down maids and meatpackers will not go down as America’s finest hour.
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One question is whether all this effort is needed. More than 90% of the 65,000 undocumented immigrants removed last year from the U.S. interior were convicted criminals, and about 2,000 were affiliated with gangs. This suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already targeting and removing as many bad guys as it can locate.
To assist with removals, the memos call for hiring an additional 5,000 border patrol and 10,000 ICE agents, which represent a roughly 25% and 50% increase in their respective workforces. The increase in the agencies’ operating budgets would cost about $4 billion annually.
Mr. Kelly has also ordered a plan to “surge the deployment of immigration judges and asylum officers,” and he’s going to need them. The backlog of cases in the Justice Department’s 58 immigration courts has already swelled to more than 540,000 from 325,000 in 2012. Some 250 immigration judges were assigned 200,000 cases in 2015. The average wait time for a case is 677 days and can hit five years at some locations.
More than 500 judges—who would each require an entourage of translators, paralegals and clerks—would need to be hired to eliminate the backlog within a year. Each full-time position costs about $200,000, so taxpayers could be billed more than a half billion dollars for this surge of government attorneys. Add all this to the cost of Mr. Trump’s border wall, and the bill rises into the tens of billions.
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Perhaps if Mr. Trump succeeds in reducing immigrant crime, the anti-immigration mood will ebb. Meantime, conservatives in Congress who care about fiscal probity should ask if Mr. Kelly really needs to make government so much bigger to expel genuine criminals.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-deportation-surge-1487808545
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