Six on Border "Crisis": Trump’s prime-time address on the border wall shutdown, annotated; There is no security crisis at the
panaritisp
"President Trump delivered his first prime-time Oval Office address as president on Tuesday. It was a speech about 10 minutes long in which he addressed his demand for border wall funding that has led to a partial shutdown of the U.S. government for more than two weeks.
Below is the full transcript, with fact checks and annotations in yellow."
"The president laid out a false premise Monday when he tweeted his plan to address the nation about “the Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border.” There is no national security crisis — thousands of would-be immigrants seeking asylum do not constitute an invading army, and Trump has never backed up his assertions that the group is rife with terrorists. And while there is a humanitarian crisis, it’s one Trump could solve himself by expanding the nation’s capacity to handle asylum requests, rather than forcing migrants to spend weeks in squalid camps near ports of entry. It’s not as if the border is being overrun — detentions last year were roughly 75% lower than they were in 2000. Perhaps Trump will see that for himself when he visits the border Thursday.
|
|
The president has broad power to declare emergencies to address natural disasters, epidemics and other exigencies. The fight over the wall, however, is no such thing. It’s an easily foreseen political battle between Trump and Congress — congressional Democrats in particular. Trump’s fixation on the wall has pinned him in a corner. He shouldn’t abuse the limits of his authority to engineer a way out."
|
"Aside from demanding five billion dollars to build a wall, the Administration has also tried to force Mexico to house U.S.-bound asylum seekers indefinitely while their cases move through the backlogged American immigration courts. The plan, known as Remain in Mexico, will likely be challenged in U.S. federal court, but not before it upends the precarious political landscape in Mexico. “The U.S. can’t just dump people into Mexico,” Tonatiuh Guillén López, the head of the country’s immigration authority, said last week. “We’ve asked for more answers, but the U.S. government is shut down, so I guess they’ll answer when they figure that out. It’s all up in the air.”
What would it look like if the Trump Administration were actually trying to solve this problem? For one thing, it would not have rolled back programs implemented at the end of the Obama era that were calibrated to the new reality at the border. In August, 2017, the State Department cancelled the Central American Minors program, which, though relatively small, vetted children for refugee status in their home countries to prevent them from making the overland journey to the U.S. border alone. That same summer, the Department of Homeland Security ended a pilot project called the Family Case Management Program; designed as an alternative to family detention, it allowed a thousand families in five American cities to live temporarily in the U.S. under supervision while awaiting their asylum hearings before an immigration judge. Ninety-nine per cent of the enrollees attended their mandatory check-ins with ice and eventually showed up for their court dates. The population in ice detention has spiked under Trump, and, in response, D.H.S. has redirected funds to ice from other agencies, with massive increases in detention funding in the last two years from the Republican Congress. “The additional detention beds are the result of Trump’s harsh enforcement practices against adults, but family detention hasn’t increased,” Kevin Landy, the director of ice’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning under President Obama, told me. “Additional funding for alternatives to detention—and less detention—would better address the family influx, and it would also be a more humane approach for adults who pose no threat to public safety.”
|
"Is there a national security crisis at the border?
The White House has described the Mexican border as a “crisis situation,” but Border Patrol statistics tell a different story.
The number of people caught crossing the border illegally has plummeted 75 per cent since its peak in 2000. Last year, border agents apprehended 396,000 people, up 30 per cent from the previous year – when border arrests hit a 46-year low.
Agents have also gotten better at policing the border. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the number of people believed to have slipped into the U.S. undetected plunged 93 per cent between 2006 and 2016.
What has changed, however, is who is trying to cross the border. The number of families and unaccompanied children from Central America has soared in recent years, now making up more than half of those detained at the border. The majority have come to seek asylum in the U.S., a process that can take years to wind its way through the courts.
White House officials cited the threat of terrorism as a reason to build a wall, saying that border agents have stopped thousands people from countries that harbour terrorist groups from entering the United States through Mexico. The claim contradicts reports from the U.S. State Department last year that found “there was no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico, worked with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States.”
|
