The ongoing Department of Homeland Security leadership shake-up is intended to unleash a wave of immigration-restricting regulations, a senior administration official told reporters at the White House Tuesday.
The regulations could deny work permits to asylum-seekers, restrict their ability to send money home, and make it more difficult to gain entry into the United States by claiming “credible fear” of persecution.
Most controversially, the Trump administration is considering how to craft a regulation that would cue up a new court battle over detaining migrant families with children longer than 20 days, currently forbidden by the 1997 Flores settlement agreement.
The outline of a regulation-driven policy agenda flows from President Trump’s frustrations with Capitol Hill, with the Democrat-controlled House balking at new restrictions amid a surge in Central American families seeking asylum.
The plan coincides with Trump denying, to a different group of reporters, nearly at the same time, that he was “cleaning house” at the department, where this week Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles resigned.
“DHS has not been able to get a regulation across the finish line — there have been no major immigration regulations completed by DHS in the past 2 years and 3 months,” the official said.
The senior official said the leadership changes reflected a desire for stronger management that could implement regulations: “The biggest bottleneck by far is at USCIS where there has been shockingly little affirmative regulation.”
This called into question the fate of Lee Cissna, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“I think we understand when we are talking about concerns in the legal shop at DHS and concerns with USCIS, what inferences can be drawn. That’s not to say situations can’t be rehabilitated,” the official said, declining to comment on Cissna’s future. But the official then went on to detail a litany of problems with the agency Cissna heads.
The primary focus of the Trump administration will be regulations that reduce “pull” factors for migrants who claim asylum.
[Opinion: The perfect crime: Claim asylum, say the magic words, and bring a child]
“The biggest area where USCIS dropped the ball is with the border crisis, because they oversee the asylum division, which oversees all grants of credible fear,” the official said. “It was meant to prevent this very sort of crisis, [but] because the granting of credible fear has been so astronomical at USCIS, it has mightily contributed to it.”
To limit admission of people claiming fear of persecution in their home countries, the White House is pushing cross-referencing of migrants with recent reports from their country, and consideration of whether they can be relocated internally within their own country.
“For at least six months we’ve been trying to get USCIS to cross-reference credible fear claims against country condition reports and they haven’t done so,” the official said.
The official also blasted USCIS for granting work permits to those who are released into the U.S. pending adjudication of their asylum claims, contending most claims won’t be granted, and that the work permits attract further migration.
“USCIS still issues employment authorization documents when an individual merely applies for asylum, including those who enter illegally. What this does is that individuals get here, and they use social media to report back home that not only did the assertion of a credible fear claim get them released into the country, but now I actually have a work permit,” the official said. “That helps create a giant magnet factor.”
Not all of the action on regulations would restrict immigration.
“The individuals that are bottle-necking a lot of these priorities are those who express the most public agreement with them but are unable to get their bureaucracies to delivery. One of the best examples of this is how slow the USCIS has been on issues of skilled immigration reform, upscaling guest worker visas like the H1B visa, the first regulation on that should have been completed before the first lottery in 2017,” the official said.
Allowing for lengthier family-unit detentions is on the horizon, but not an immediate priority of the administration.
“Resource issues make any family detention policy inherently complicated,” the official said. But he also said: “One way to make that issue ripe again and create a vehicle for reconsideration is to do a regulation that establishes a program for following the custody and care requirements but also being able to detain families beyond 28 days … it would be a live issue before the Supreme Court on favorable … grounds”
Reflecting the axiom that personnel is policy, the senior official said Trump was looking for DHS leaders willing to make unpopular decisions — resulting, they said, in internal opposition and “obviously not being able to go out to a restaurant in Washington, D.C.”
Future personnel decisions are in the hands of acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, the official said.
