“A long sliver of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border that President Donald Trump is turning over to the Department of Defense would be controlled by the Army as part of a base, which could allow troops to detain any trespassers, including migrants, U.S. officials told The Associated Press.
The transfer of that border zone to military control — and making it part of an Army installation — is an attempt by the Trump administration to get around a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from being used in domestic law enforcement on American soil.
But if the troops are providing security for land that is part of an Army base, they can perform that function. However, at least one presidential powers expert said the move is likely to be challenged in the courts.”
The military should be focused on fighting and winning wars, not enforcing immigration policy.
His plans increase the deficit, which is inflationary.
Large and broad tariffs are inflationary.
A massive crackdown on illegal immigration will also be inflationary as without cheap labor, making products will be more expensive or won’t happen here at all–particularly agricultural goods and housing.
Trump wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been in favor of lower interest rates, which will increase inflation.
“Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan is going to be the “border czar” in the Trump administration, President-elect Donald Trump announced on Truth Social.
Homan, a staunch Trump supporter, will be in charge of the mass deportations that have been promised by Trump throughout his 2024 campaign.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote in his post on Sunday evening.
“Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin. Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job,” Trump added.
Homan oversaw ICE during the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” enforcement that separated parents from their children at the border.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimates there are anywhere from 500 to 1,000 families who have not been reunited.”
“The bill’s reforms aside, its restrictions would have made the border a much more dangerous and inaccessible place for people seeking protection. A similar border-buttoning authority during the pandemic didn’t prevent crossings, but it did lead to thousands of reported instances of kidnapping, torture, and rape suffered by asylum seekers who were returned to or stopped in Mexico. Fortifying the border against asylum seekers, as the bipartisan bill would’ve done and as President Joe Biden is now doing, keeps vulnerable migrants in danger.
Harris and Walz’s eagerness to defend the failed border bill is a sign of the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on immigration and border security this year. The legislation had no grand reform—no pathway to citizenship for undocumented longtime residents, no solution for Dreamers, no farm work visa improvements—to balance the significant asylum restrictions. But the border and immigration have increasingly become liabilities for Democrats (and top priorities for voters), so their messaging has gotten tougher and their appetite for restrictionism has grown.
Congress should work on immigration reform instead of relying on the president to patch up the broken system. As Walz said in yesterday’s debate, “You can’t just do this through the executive branch.” Questions of process aside, this year’s bipartisan bill wasn’t the silver bullet or the humane solution Democrats keep suggesting.”
“the vast majority of fentanyl brought into the U.S. is not carried by illegal immigrants or the result of porous borders: From 2019 to 2024, 80.2 percent of the people arrested at the border with fentanyl were U.S. citizens, according to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
And as NPR reported last year, “the vast majority of illicit fentanyl—close to 90%—is seized at official border crossings.””
“government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”
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“The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
How has immigration contributed to U.S. growth?
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Are immigrants taking native-born workers’ jobs?
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.
“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.
Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.”
“If you go to Tijuana, right up to the border wall, you can see a deportation in its final throes. At the edge of a Mexican freeway that runs along the border, there’s a nondescript metal door. On any given morning, a Mexican official will open the padlock on the Mexican side and an American immigration agent will open the padlock on the U.S. side. Then, dozens—sometimes hundreds — of people get pushed back into Mexico. Some wander to shelters; others end up camping just outside the door, as if staying close by might improve their chances of getting back in. That deportation door got plenty of use under Donald Trump. But perhaps no president has used it more than Joe Biden.
You wouldn’t have guessed that watching Trump’s 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, where Trump brutalized the Biden-Harris administration over Biden’s immigration record, accusing the president of throwing the border open.”
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” Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the country, and that’s allowed Trump to repeatedly — almost gleefully — claim he’ll deport “millions” of people every year if he takes back the White House, something he says Biden is too feckless to do. It plays into his narrative that Biden is decrepit. If deportations are a gas pedal, Trump has portrayed Biden as a lethargic octogenarian, too impaired to drive over 10 mph. In reality, Biden has that gas pedal pushed almost all the way to the floor. Under Biden, migrants have been removed from the U.S. at a blistering pace, pushing the country’s deportation infrastructure to its limit. And it’s not clear how Trump could top him if he takes back the White House next year.
Biden’s migrant removals started as soon as he took office. In the spring of 2021, deep in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in a camp in Tijuana, where some migrants were so hopeful the new president would let them in that they flew “BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” flags outside their tents. But most of them who crossed got a slap from reality: They were quickly frog-marched by U.S. Border Patrol back through the deportation doorway, back to the squalid camps in cartel turf. Others got rapidly loaded onto ICE planes and flown back to Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever. As the number of people crossing the border grew during Biden’s first two years in office, these expulsions reached a scorching pace. ICE charter flights bounced around the globe like Taylor Swift’s jet. According to data collected by Tom Cartwright, a researcher with the advocacy group Witness at the Border, there were more ICE flights in the air during the early Biden years than ever before.
Biden’s expulsion regime was made possible by the most radical shift in immigration policy of the last 50 years: Title 42. When Biden took office, he undid dozens of Trump’s immigration policies, but he kept in place Trump’s most consequential ban, the public health statute Title 42. Using the pandemic as pretext, Title 42 gave the president the power to rapidly expel migrants without the normal court process. During just his first two years in office, Biden used it to kick out over 2.8 million migrants. That’s a stunning number. In Trump’s entire time in the White House, his administration removed only 2 million people total.
There’s an important caveat here. Even though millions of migrants got expelled during Biden’s first years in office, the number of deportations actually shrunk. Though they’re both a form of removal, expulsion and deportations are different: Title 42 expulsions were a brand new phenomenon. They could happen rapidly, without a trial, and the subject was almost always arrested near the border. Deportations, on the other hand, only come after an immigration judge officially orders someone removed, and they often involve people arrested in the interior. During Biden’s first two years in office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported under 200,000 people total — less than any single year during the Trump era.
You might think that’s because Biden didn’t want to deport people. His administration may have been comfortable kicking out migrants who just arrived, but deporting immigrants who have been here a long time is, of course, a different story. That hesitation was likely part of the reason deportations shrunk during the early Biden years. But there’s another reason: ICE — along with all the country’s deportation infrastructure — had been surged to the border. To handle the huge number of new arrivals, the administration sent ICE agents to assist Border Patrol, and that took government workers away from arresting people in the interior. Meanwhile, ICE Air flights were filled to the brim with recent border crossers; they literally didn’t have room for other deportees.
As soon as Title 42 ended in May 2023, deportations immediately skyrocketed to historic numbers. According to data analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Biden “removed or returned” 775,000 unauthorized immigrants from May 2023 to May 2024. That’s more than any previous year since 2010. (For comparison, Trump’s record for removals in one year maxed out at under 612,000 — and that was with Title 42 in place.)
Maybe, if he takes office next year, Trump will be able to get a bit more juice out of the deportation system and get his numbers higher. However, there are indications that the country’s deportation system is at its redline. With the current manpower and equipment, it just might not be possible to deport that many more people.”
“In the months since President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared.
The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50% since June, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, have calmed.”
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“Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home. Unless the migrants raise such a fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation to their home countries.
It is difficult to know how many people with legitimate cases are turned back because they don’t know to “manifest fear,” as the practice is known. But critics of the new policy say it is deeply unfair to desperate people who have no idea how to seek help in America.”
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“The order mandates that only people who enter the country at an official port of entry with an appointment can be considered for asylum at the southern border, with only limited exceptions for unaccompanied children, victims of human trafficking and people facing serious medical emergencies or threats to their lives.
Before the new rules went into effect, migrants would cross the border illegally and seek out border agents to surrender, knowing that anyone who set foot on U.S. soil could ask for protection. Often, after an initial screening, they would be released into the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to come up.
Biden’s order changed that. Now, the majority of migrants are turned back quickly.”
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“An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the policy freely, said the new rules allow the agency to focus on migrants who are more likely to have legitimate claims. The person said more than 1,000 migrants a day can schedule an appointment to claim asylum at an official port of entry, so there is still a pathway for people seeking refuge.”
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“Biden’s executive order is not the only reason the numbers have dropped.
Mexico has ramped up enforcement, intercepting migrants en route to the border. And illegal crossings typically fall after a major policy change — only to rise again later — as migrants try to make sense of the new rules.
But it is clear that the restrictions are having a significant effect.
The number of people crossing into the United States has plummeted since Biden imposed the restrictions. In July, there were about 56,000 illegal crossings, the lowest monthly tally of the Biden administration. In December alone, that number was 250,000.
The number of people seeking asylum, in turn, also fell precipitously. Although the Department of Homeland Security did not give exact figures, the agency said in a court filing last week that asylum requests had dropped more than 50%.”