Alejandro Mayorkas, the nation’s border security chief, used his White House press conference on Friday to tell migrants how to get through the Title 42 coronavirus emergency rules.
Federal law allows border officers to exclude migrants because of the Title 42 emergency rules for the coronavirus epidemic.
But Mayorkas spotlighted some of the Title 42 exceptions that he grants — including the little-known exception for people who claim to be afraid of torture in their home country.
Number one [exception] is if an individual has an acute vulnerability, such as an urgent medical care. And [number] two, if, in fact, our operational capacity is such that we are not able to execute the Title 42 authority … I should also say that there is a [third] Convention Against Torture exception if someone claims torture.
In case any cellphone-linked migrants do not hear the torture exception, Mayorkas repeated it:
If someone is not subject to Title 42 expulsion for the three reasons that I explained — acute vulnerability, operational capacity limitations, or a Convention Against Torture exception — then the individual is placed in immigration proceedings. That means they [can stay and work in the United States] until [they] go before an immigration judge in an immigration court.
Mayorkas’ advice will be a useful guide to the many economic migrants from Chile, Brazil, and other stable countries who are trying to get Americans’ jobs and housing.
Under Mayorkas, migrants do not need to persuade a judge that their fear of torture is true. Merely making the claim to Mayorkas’s officers gives them the opportunity to walk through the Title 42 barrier, get jobs, and stay in the United States.
Once in the United States, migrants also do not need to persuade the judge that their claim is valid because Mayorkas has barred enforcement officers from deporting migrants who do not commit violent crimes.
The key issue is the level of credibility that Mayorkas sets for the torture claim to be accepted by the border officers, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.
If the burden of proof is too low, many migrants will claim torture to get through the Title 42 rule, he said. “Depending on how little has to be done to trigger the [torture] exception [at the border], the exception will swallow the [Title 42] rule,” he told Breitbart News.
Few migrants actually win their torture claims. In 2000, judges granted just 529 requests from 12,452 people who applied for Convention Against Torture protections. In 2019, judges approved just 1,157 requests after 66,000 people applied.
“Everyone’s dream is to know the United States,” a migrant from the Dominican Republic, Salvador Pena, told the Houston Chronicle, which added “He said the tough, life-threatening and expensive journey is worth it.”
Mayorkas, a child refugee from Cuba, has already helped at least 12,400 of the 30,000 migrants who crossed the border at Del Rio stay in the United States.
Mayorkas told the reporters on Friday that he had admitted 12,400 migrants, nearly all of whom have already been released to get jobs and housing in the United States.
He released the economic migrants despite the widespread homelessness, drug addiction, and joblessness among the Americans who are not needed anymore by cost-cutting employers — or diversity-seeking journalists — amid the large flow of Mayorkas’s desperate, hard-working, cheap migrants.
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Another 5,000 migrants are waiting to hear if they will be released or sent out of the United States, Mayorkas said on Friday.
Only about 2,000 of the economic migrants have been sent home to the terrible conditions in the Haitians’ own country.
Roughly 8,000 migrants retreated from the Del Rio landing back into Mexico because they were afraid they could not get through the loopholes that Mayorkas has cut in the Title 42 barrier. Roughly two-thirds of the deported migrants are single adults.
Mayorkas has also cut a major loophole in the Title 42 barrier for people with an “acute vulnerability.”
This term applies to most migrants who bring children or claim to be pregnant. For example, most of the Del Rio migrants released into the United States arrived with children. Officials have not said if they investigated whether the adult migrants are the parents of the children they bring to the border.
However, many of the people with “acute vulnerability” come from safe countries, but choose to travel through the Darien Gap in Panama’s southern jungle. That Hunger Games trek kills many migrants who start on their journey after recognizing Mayorkas’s dangled offers of work in the United States.
For example, the BBC reported the case of Haitian Fiterson Janvier who migrated from his safe home in Chile with the three-year-old child who may take him through Mayorkas’s loopholes:
As he took his young family across the Darien Gap, seven days through the dense jungle between Colombia and Panama, Mr Janvier says he saw the dead bodies of other Haitian and Cuban migrants.
He describes being robbed of what little he had by “bandits” … He said some of the women were raped, although his wife managed to hide with the child when the gang appeared.
Nicolas, a Haitian migrant, told Al Jazeera TV network: “It was really difficult — I saw a lot of us who died.”
Despite the Title 42 barrier, Mayorkas also releases the youths and adults who say they are aged 17 or younger.
Mayorkas also does not test and exclude the migrants for coronavirus.
Mayorkas also told the press conference that he plans to create more openings for migrants to enter America, alongside the annual inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants. He indicated he uses his regulatory power to expand the variety of people who can get asylum by being members of a “particular social group” that faces “credible fear” of being sent home.
Under current rules, he said:
The definition of a “particular social group” was significantly constrained — that’s an understatement — in the Trump administration. And there is a body of law that speaks to that definition, and that definition is currently under review.
Mayorkas is also rewriting regulations to give low-level officials the power to grant the huge prize of U.S. citizenship to migrants, without any intervention by judges who are responsible for enforcing Congress’s law.
Mayorkas did not mention that federal law requires that all migrants who ask for asylum be detained pending their court appearance.
The federal government stopped enforcing that law during President Barack Obama’s term under the claim that it could not house tens of thousands of migrants. That decision triggered a huge flood of at least three million migrants who knew they could work to repay their smuggling debts — and give birth to U.S. citizen children — while they wait several years for a judge to rule on their asylum request.
Mayorkas is the nation’s border security chief and is an immigration zealot.
In May, for example, he said the “highest priority” at his Department of Homeland Security is to reunite foreign families with the children they left behind in the United States when the adults were processed and deported during President Donald Trump’s term in office. “It’s not about righting the wrong of the past; it’s about restoring the conscience of our government,” Mayorkas said.
In June, he said his department will put the dignity of foreign migrants “foremost in our efforts.” Mayorkas described his “identity” as a champion for migrants in his speech to the 2021 American Constitutional Society (ACS) national convention:
The element of dignity [and] the rule of law. Those are two foundational guideposts as I seek to lead an agency, as we, as servants of the law, seek to bring justice in whatever we do. And here in the Department of Homeland Security, I think that must guide everything that we do.
Mayorkas also suggested his taxpayer-funded department exists to aid foreign nationals:
In the government, we have the privilege of seeking to make systemic change, to bring dignity, or I should say, to reflect in what we do, reflect the dignity of the people we serve on a very impactful and systemic basis. But we cannot forget that the rule of law, that the law as an instrument of delivering dignity, can bring that to the single individual. And we cannot understate the importance of doing so. And I think that sometimes the impact on one individual can reverberate throughout an entire institution and bring systemic change.
The emphasis on “people we serve” was added by the DHS transcript of the speech.
Mayorkas’ s2,100-word speech did not mention the lost dignity of the many millions of Americans who have lost income and wealth amid the inrush of poor migrants waived in by lax enforcement.
He did not mention the Americans victimized by un-deported migrant criminals or by the addictive drugs being loosed in communities by Mayorkas’s lax rules.
He did not mention the Americans cast aside by companies eager to exploit the cheap visa workers delivered by Mayorkas’s agency.
And Mayorkas did not suggest that he owes any debt of gratitude towards the children of the Americans who accepted him as a child migrant in 1960.
In contrast, Joe Biden, age 78, sometimes recognizes the dignity gained by Americans in a tight labor market. In a May 28 speech, Biden said:
Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract wrk. We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.
[…]
Well, wait until you see what happens when employers have to compete for workers. Companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and others — what do they have to do? They have to raise wages to attract workers. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
It’s the homeless crisis you don’t see, the working class American families left behind in this economy, creating an invisible class of homelessness.
Coming up on @CBSThisMorning, @MariaESalinas brings us the story of 2 of the nearly 250,000 homeless children in California. pic.twitter.com/QZS5vaUkwk
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 27, 2020
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