WASHINGTON,
Jan. 24, 2015
/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Wednesday, the House
Homeland Security committee rubber-stamped Rep. Michael McCaul's flawed border security bill
(HR399) without meaningful improvements.
The barely-tweaked bill reportedly is scheduled to be considered by
the full House next Wednesday, January
28. In its current form, according to the Center for
Immigration Studies, the bill will preserve the current
catch-and-release policies, which were expanded even further by the
executive actions announced in late November, rendering pointless
much of the new spending and metrics-crunching mandated in this
bill.
The main change to the bill made in the committee mark-up
process was to increase the number of miles of new double fencing
from 27 to 48, adding an additional ten miles in the Del Rio sector
and another mile in the Tucson sector. This would bring the total
length of double fencing up to 84 miles (over 600 miles less than
the 700 miles mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006).
The amended product is still obsessed with attaining full
Situational Awareness and Operational Control in five years, and
oblivious to the fact that the current catch-and-release policies
and newly expanded "prosecutorial discretion" policies that spare
most illegal aliens from deportation would remain in place. Not
only that, it gives oversight authority to an appointed commission
that has little accountability to anyone.
To address catch-and-release, the bill should have heeded
the recommendations of career Border Patrol and ICE personnel to
specify and toughen the penalties that should generally ensue for
illegal border crossers – and authorize the tools, such as
detention space, to enable this to be implemented. But the bill is
silent on what kinds of consequences illegal crossers should
face.
At a minimum, it would have been easy for the committee to
tack on language from the Carter-Aderholt bill passed by the House
last summer to address the border surge (analyzed by
my colleague Dan Cadman here). GOP leaders seem to
have completely forgotten this successful exercise in sound
policymaking and party unification in response to a crisis. That
was good governing that was well received by the public, and should
have been a no-brainer to resurrect, along with the
Goodlatte-Chaffetz bill on asylum reform.
In addition, the bill should have included among the
dozens of metrics that DHS agencies will be required to collect at
least one or two metrics that would reveal to the public how it is
handling new illegal arrivals – such as information on case
disposition, whether the alien is detained or released, whether the
new illegal arrival appears for court hearings, and whether the new
arrival is granted a work permit.
In fact, the bill should prohibit the issuance of a work
permit to new illegal arrivals, or anyone in deportation
proceedings.
The bill should restore and expand Operation Streamline, a
highly effective program that significantly reduced illegal
crossings in certain sectors by efficiently detaining and
prosecuting new illegal arrivals for the criminal offense of entry
without inspection.
The Homeland Security Committee accepted this weakening of
the mandate that DHS establish a biometric entry-exit system, which
has been on the laundry list of must-do national security
improvements since the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993.
For example, the bill's loose language calls for biometrics to be
collected at land ports of entry, but fails to specify that
biometrics should be collected from all foreign visitors who enter
at the land ports of entry.
And, it fails to synchronize the deportation process for
legal entry overstays with the way illegal border crossers are
treated – both are recent illegal arrivals, and there is no good
reason that overstays should be harder to deport than those who
came over the land border.
Finally, in the section that supposedly intends to give
the Border Patrol access to federal land within 100 miles of the
border, from which it is currently blocked, the language of the
bill appears to actually reverse a critical provision in current
law that provides agents with the authority to access and patrol on
public and private lands within 25 miles of the border (Section
13(e)(2). This could be a drafting error, but it urgently needs to
be examined.
The pace at which this bill is being rammed through the
House suggests that the leadership is eager to pass a token bill
and then inform the public that the border problem has been solved,
while leaving the president's executive amnesty intact and his
abuse of authority unchallenged. If the rest of Congress goes
along, they will have squandered the political momentum gained from
their response to the border surge crisis – not to mention wasting
an opportunity to restore some integrity to our immigration laws
and their sole authority to craft them. Not only would this fulfill
a key campaign promise, it would begin to ameliorate the fiscal and
security burden that the current policies have imposed on American
communities. But it doesn't look like that's going to
happen.
Media Contact: Marguerite
Telford, 202-466-8185, mrt@cis.org
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SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies