If the president truly wants to make America safer, he should target actual dangerous criminals.
In this time of alternative facts, consider an alternative path President Trump might have chosen for cracking down on immigration, one that would have delivered the poll-obsessed president a reality far more to his liking.
The Trump administration’s initial travel ban — which ensnared legal green card holders and targeted seven Muslim- majority countries whose citizens have demonstrably not been the source of our terrorism problems here — was a mess. The new ban (which a federal judge in Hawaii put on hold on Wednesday) isn’t a whole lot better. Rather than completely rethink the policy after the courts rejected it, the Trump team merely tinkered with it, such as removing Iraq from the list of covered countries. The smarter approach would be to focus on deporting people who have already proved themselves dangerous criminals. And the good news is we already know who they are.
Trump bragged after the election that he was going to deport up to 3 million criminal undocumented immigrants. To experts like Boston College Law School professor Daniel Kanstroom, Trump’s boast was preposterously high, at least if “criminal” means a violent or dangerous offender. That’s largely because President Obama, a man Trump accused of being soft on immigration, actually presided over a massive deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Kanstroom had criticized Obama for being too aggressive, since the criminal offenses of many people who were kicked out were minor, such as traffic violations. For others, their only criminal offense was immigration-related. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor, but crossing again after having been deported is a felony.
While it seems unlikely that the number of actual dangerous criminal immigrants is anywhere near 3 million, or even 1 million, the truth is we don’t know because immigration arrests are secret. However, the number is not zero.
Readers of the Globe know this thanks to the dogged work of my former colleague Maria Sacchetti. Her 2012 investigation was packed with cases of illegal immigrants who had been convicted here of murder, rape, or other heinous crimes, but who were then quietly released, often with no notice given to victims. Many of them went on to commit new crimes.
US officials had released these criminals because they felt they had no choice: The US Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the government cannot imprison criminal immigrants indefinitely if their home countries refused to take them back.
The fallout could be catastrophic. Take the case of a 46-year-old New York woman named Qian Wu. She thought the undocumented immigrant from China who had been convicted of brutally attacking her was out of her life for good. Three years later, he reappeared, bashing her head with a hammer and cutting out her heart and a lung with a knife.
Shining a light on a shadowy system, the Globe noted that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency had over four years freed thousands of immigrants convicted of heinous crimes. Many of them had been given shorter sentences in expectation of deportation that never happened. When the Department of Homeland Security refused to reveal the names of those who’d been released, the Globe went to court and eventually won.
The reporting drew the attention of Congress, which demanded additional figures from ICE. Last year, US Senator Chuck Grassley wrote to the FBI to express his disgust that 121 criminal undocumented immigrants released between 2010 and 2014 were subsequently charged with 135 homicides. “In addition,” the Iowa Republican wrote, “of the 36,007 criminal aliens released from ICE custody in FY 2013, 1,000 have been re-convicted of additional crimes.”
But which countries were the biggest offenders in refusing to take back these criminals? They’re actually nowhere to be found on Trump’s travel ban.
Consider Vietnam. Between 2012 and early 2016, the United States released 1,564 criminal immigrants after Vietnam wouldn’t take them back. That’s more than double the combined total from all seven Muslim-majority countries covered by Trump’s initial ban. If you take the total from those seven Muslim nations and combine it with the number from Trump’s other bogeyman, Mexico, it’s roughly comparable to the 1,121 released felons just from Laos. Cuba was the jackpot, refusing during that period to take back 4,550 criminals who were later released onto US streets.
And Syria? In that same period, the US government released exactly eight Syrians because their home country would not take them back. That figure, incidentally, is less than many countries the Trump administration seems to view as friends, from Israel (17) to the United Kingdom (23) to Vladimir Putin’s Russia (55). The dirty little secret about dangerous immigrant criminals is that sometimes our friends are as unhelpful as our enemies.
Now imagine that, instead of fear-mongering, Trump and his team had simply taken the list of released immigrants that the Globe went to court to get and started rounding up every violent felon on it. The administration could have then put the screws to all their home countries — friend and foe alike — holding up the papers their diplomats need to enter the United States until they changed their minds. (An early executive order seemed headed in this direction, before the administration turned its focus to the scapegoating travel ban.) I bet most of these nations would have responded to the pressure — amplified by a certain verified Twitter account — and agreed to take back their criminal nationals. Surely, the president’s poll numbers would have surged north. Trump might even have added to the pressure by getting Congress to let him use Guantanamo Bay to hold the worst offenders until their home countries came around.
Juliette Kayyem, a senior Homeland Security official under Obama who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says it’s important for pro-immigrant groups to admit that there are some dangerous felons who need to be removed. But she argues that Trump’s approach — which fails to distinguish between violent immigrants and immigrants who pose no threat to others — will only make this country less safe. With limited government resources and a new, understandable reluctance by peaceful immigrants to help law enforcement find the bad actors hiding in their communities, Kayyem says that “what you’re actually going to see is the pool of violent criminals here will expand.”
If that happens, the president will have a lot more than poll numbers to worry about.
Source: Bostonglobe
Keywords:
trump immigration bantrump immigration order
trump immigration policy
trump immigration executive order
trump immigration reform
trump immigration h1b
trump immigration news
trump immigration ban countries
trump immigration speech
trump immigration executive order text
trump immigration
trump immigration advisor
trump immigration agenda
trump immigration act
trump immigration amnesty
trump immigration article
trump immigration appointment
trump immigration action
trump immigration appeal
trump immigration asylum
trump immigration announcement
trump immigration bill
trump immigration ban executive order
trump immigration ban news
trump immigration ban explained
trump immigration ban text
trump immigration ban poll
trump immigration ban wiki
trump immigration ban date
trump immigration changes
trump immigration cnn
trump immigration court
trump immigration cartoon
trump immigration california
trump immigration crackdown
trump immigration constitution
trump immigration cabinet
trump immigration citizenship
trump immigration court ruling
trump immigration daca
trump immigration deportation
trump immigration draft
trump immigration decision
trump immigration deportation plan
trump immigration day
trump immigration date
trump immigration dream act
trump immigration dapa
trump immigration detention
trump immigration executive action
trump immigration enforcement
trump immigration executive order full text
trump immigration executive order explained
trump immigration executive order pdf
trump immigration eb2
trump immigration executive order fox
trump immigration executive order h1b
trump immigration fox news
trump immigration fox
trump immigration family
trump immigration f1
trump immigration facts
trump immigration first 100 days
trump immigration force
trump immigration federal judge
trump immigration family based
trump immigration f1 visa
trump immigration green card
trump immigration green card plan
trump immigration good
trump immigration germany
trump immigration guy
trump immigration guardian
trump immigration going well
trump immigration google
trump immigration green card india
trump immigration green card application
trump immigration h4 ead
trump immigration h1
trump immigration high skilled
trump immigration halt
trump immigration head
trump immigration hold
trump immigration h4
trump immigration haiti
trump immigration h1b news
trump immigration india
trump immigration illegal
trump immigration interview
trump immigration issues
trump immigration international students
trump immigration indian
trump immigration injunction
trump immigration iran
trump immigration iraq
trump immigration israel
trump immigration judge
trump immigration jobs
trump immigration joke
trump immigration january
trump immigration jamaica
trump immigration january 2017
trump immigration judge ruling
trump immigration jan 25
trump immigration j1
trump immigration jan 2017
donald j trump immigration
trump immigration korea
trump immigration k1
trump immigration kansas
trump immigration kobach
trump immigration kenya
trump immigration kelly
trump immigration k1 visa
trump immigration law
trump visa kort
trump immigration legal
trump immigration latest news
trump immigration latest
trump immigration lawsuit
trump immigration legislation
trump immigration list
trump immigration los angeles
trump immigration lawyer
trump immigration live
trump immigration meme
trump immigration mexico
trump immigration marriage
trump immigration memo
trump immigration moratorium
trump immigration muslim countries
trump immigration miami
trump immigration merit
trump immigration marriage visa
trump immigration map
trump immigration news today
trump immigration news h1b
trump immigration new york times
trump immigration news daca
trump immigration nytimes
trump immigration new york
trump immigration nominee
trump immigration news india
trump immigration numbers
trump immigration order text
trump immigration order countries
trump immigration order full text
trump immigration order wiki
trump immigration on h1b
trump immigration order news
trump immigration order blocked
trump immigration opt
trump immigration order constitutional
trump immigration protest
trump immigration plan 2017
trump immigration political cartoon
trump immigration priorities
trump immigration plan h1b
trump immigration pick
trump immigration police
trump immigration polls
trump immigration policy h1b
trump immigration quotes
trump immigration quota
trump immigration quora
trump immigration questions
trump immigration reform plan
trump immigration ruling
trump immigration restriction
trump immigration reuters
trump immigration reform h1b
trump immigration reform news
trump immigration reform 2017
trump immigration refugees
trump immigration roundup
trump immigration supreme court
trump immigration stance
trump immigration speech text
trump immigration speech arizona
trump immigration students
trump immigration secretary
trump immigration silicon valley
trump immigration suspension
trump immigration student visa
trump immigration today
trump immigration tweets
trump immigration travel
trump immigration team
trump immigration tps
trump immigration travel ban
trump immigration twitter
trump immigration timeline
trump immigration today news
trump immigration tech
trump immigration update
trump immigration unconstitutional
trump immigration univision
trump immigration undocumented
trump immigration usa today
trump immigration uscis
trump immigration ukraine
trump immigration us code
trump immigration university
trump immigration uk
trump immigration visa
trump immigration vs obama
trump immigration video
trump immigration views
trump immigration vox
trump immigration visa policy
trump immigration venezuela
trump immigration vetting
trump immigration vietnam
trump immigration wall
trump immigration washington post
trump immigration welfare
trump immigration wsj
trump immigration work visa
trump immigration website
trump immigration wiki
trump immigration white house
trump immigration waiver
trump immigration wife
trump immigration xo
trump immigration youtube
trump immigration yahoo
trump immigration yemen
trump immigration yahoo news
trump immigration yesterday
trump immigration yates
trump immigration zuckerberg
trump immigration zimbabwe
trump immigration 100 days
trump immigration 1965
trump immigration 10 point plan
trump immigration 120 days
trump immigration 11 million
trump immigration 1952
trump immigration 130k
trump immigration 1/25/17
trump immigration 1965 law
trump immigration 109
trump immigration 2017
trump immigration 2016
donald trump immigration 2015
donald trump illegal immigration 2015
trump immigration 30 days
trump immigration 38 countries
trump immigration 485
trump immigration 407
trump immigration 50000
trump immigration 5 countries
trump immigration 60 minutes
trump immigration 6 countries
trump immigration 7 countries
trump immigration 7 countries obama
trump immigration 7 things ajc
trump immigration 7 nations
trump immigration 7 muslim countries
trump immigration 7 countries ban
trump immigration 8 countries
trump immigration 9th circuit
trump immigration 90 days
trump immigration 9/11
trump immigration 9 countries
trump immigration 9th circuit court
trump immigration 9th circuit decision
trump immigration 90 day ban