Fewer than 10% of ‘unaccompanied’ teens sponsored by legal immigrants

Who ever said crime doesn’t pay?

President Trump promised to end chain migration, which is the process through which legal immigrants bring in other relatives, instead of a merit-based system that benefits America as a whole. Not only has that problem not been rectified, but we now have a growing trend of illegal immigrant chain migration, whereby the American people pay for the rope to hang ourselves by allowing illegal aliens to break into the country, pay smugglers and cartels billions of dollars to smuggle in their teenage children or relatives from Central America, and have our government reunite them at our expense without deporting them, thus empowering the cartels to unleash upon us more drugs and crime.

According to new data obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies from Senate Homeland Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., fewer than 10 percent of those sponsoring the Central American teens resettled under the “unaccompanied alien child” (UAC) program have full legal status themselves. According to the tally, from July 2018 to January 2019, 23,445 UACs were released from HHS facilities to sponsors within the country. Yet just 8.3 percent of them were either citizens or full legal permanent residents. The rest were either confirmed illegal aliens, likely illegal aliens, or were originally illegal aliens, but got into parole, temporary protected status, or other quasi-amnesty programs that have been manipulated against the letter and intent of law. In total, Art Arthur of the CIS observes that 81.5 percent of the sponsors are currently on the hook for some form of deportation.

Thus, our laws have been twisted so far that people who should have been deported long ago were able to use years’ worth of malfeasance and lax enforcement to remain here, pay smugglers to bring in their illegal relatives, and have them resettled with them, thereby shielding both of them from deportation.

Arthur, himself a former immigration judge, cites Judge Andrew Hanen’s order from 2013 I wrote about several weeks ago, in which he accused the DHS of completing the “goal of the conspiracy” of drug smugglers to smuggle people over the border on behalf of parents “at significant expense” to taxpayers. At the time, Hanen noted that in the cases he saw, the “parent initiated the conspiracy to smuggle the minors into the country illegally” and “also funded the conspiracy.” “In each case, the DHS completed the criminal conspiracy, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, by delivering the minors into the custody of the parent living illegally in the United States.”

As I’ve observed before, the fact that illegal alien relatives are paying to smuggle these children makes it clear that they should not be eligible for refugee resettlement under the UAC program because they are not unaccompanied and they are not victims of “a severe form of trafficking.” Rather, they are self-smuggled. Both they and their parents or relatives should be deported. Yet our government has now spent billions of dollars resettling those who are often MS-13 members or vulnerable to joining gangs and has drained hundreds of millions of dollars from health care programs in HHS designed for Americans. Now, even after those cash transfers, HHS will run out of money for the program by June, according to a new letter from acting OMB Director Russ Vought.

As Judge Hanen noted, nothing in law compels this outcome, and in fact, our laws were designed to prevent it. Unfortunately, rather than fixing the problem, the president agreed to sign a law in February that had a major policy provision snuck in to a full-year appropriations bill without any transparency or a democratic process that actually made it harder for ICE to deport these people.

As I warned in February, and as Arthur explains in his article, section 224(a) of the omnibus gives extra protection to these illegal families seeking to engage in a cartel smuggling conspiracy. It prohibits ICE from using information obtained from HHS "to place in detention, remove, refer for a decision whether to initiate removal proceedings, or initiate removal proceedings against a sponsor, potential sponsor, or member of a household of a sponsor or potential sponsor of" a UAC.

To be clear, there is nothing stopping ICE from using its own resources to go after these people and deport them on their own, but the army of immigration lawyers will tie them up in court by accusing them of obtaining the information about their whereabouts from HHS’ address book of UAC sponsors, even if they found them on their own.

This is a provision that Trump must demand be stripped from the September budget bill. At that point, he must begin deporting those engaging in this criminal conspiracy, not delivering to them the product of their crime, thereby fueling this circuitous cycle of illegal immigration chain migration and cartel smuggling. Moreover, an invocation of 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) to shut off all immigration should have the effect of suspending the UAC program, as it would the asylum program.

Let us not forget that the UAC aspect of this invasion is more severe than any other misreading of our immigration laws. Other aliens can eventually be deported, but those resettled as UACs become legal permanent residents with a pathway to citizenship. Even before they obtain citizenship, they can only be deported if they are convicted of a crime above a certain threshold. Many of them are involved in MS-13 activity and need to be deported, but ICE cannot do so without solid convictions, which are often difficult to get before they commit major mayhem.

Who will be the lawyer for the American sovereign people, to enforce our laws and protect Americans from crime, drugs, diseases, and public charge, as required over and over again in statute? Trump is the only one in position to be that man, and time is running short.

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