SUMMARY
Deadline for Family Reunification Approaches
Days remain until Judge Dana Sabraw’s Thursday deadline for the government to reunite more than 2,500 children its “zero-tolerance” policy separated from their parents at the border. The Justice Department said Friday that the government had reunited 450.
On June 26, Sabraw ordered the government to reunite children under 5 with their parents within two weeks, and all other separated children under age 18 within a month. Following the administration’s failure to reunite all children under 5 before the July 10 deadline, Sabraw criticized the government’s lack of progress and issued a schedule to report on progress for reunification.
In a check-in last week, Sabraw praised the government’s progress, stating he was impressed with the good-faith effort to reunite all eligible children with their families — a lengthy process complicated by the government’s decision to separate families without any specific plan for how they would be reunited. The government has said 88 percent of eligible children are on track to be reunited by Thursday, but more than a third of the 2,551 children in detention have been deemed ineligible. After Thursday’s deadline passes, Sabraw said he will turn his attention back to the group of younger children who have yet to be brought back to their parents.
The Department of Health and Human Services reportedly has spent at least $40 million just in the past two months to care and reunify children separated from their families at the border, potentially diverting millions of dollars from medical research, rural health programs and other priorities. And the trauma of separation and detention has been detrimental to affected children, likely causing long-term damage to their health. Detaining families together has also been shown to cause possible permanent psychological harm to children.
House Bill Proposes Mandatory E-Verify
A bill introduced in the House last week includes immigration provisions that would profoundly impact the U.S. workforce and potentially cost businesses hundreds of thousands of employees.
The Ag and Legal Workforce Act, introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), would create a nonimmigrant H-2C work visa program for agricultural workers and make mandatory and permanent requirements relating to use of an electronic employment eligibility verification system (E-Verify).
Mandating E-Verify for all businesses without introducing broader immigration reform first would be deeply harmful to the U.S. economy and workforce, forcing businesses to devote valuable time and resources to verification despite flaws in the system that have delayed or cost half a million jobs for employees falsely designated ineligible, and could cost hundreds of thousands more.
Additionally, imposing E-Verify on all businesses would severely impact industries where unauthorized workers make up a vital part of the workforce and would exacerbate the nationwide labor shortage that immigrant workers are crucial to countering. Without broader immigration reforms needed to meet the country’s workforce needs, employers in industries where undocumented workers have an outsize impact would be forced to choose between breaking the law, facing dramatic labor shortages or outsourcing labor to other countries.
The bill is currently being reviewed by the Committee on the Judiciary, in addition to the committees on Education and the Workforce, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce.
LEGISLATIVE BULLETIN
Summary of immigration legislation introduced and government reports on immigration: https://immigrationforum.org/article/legislative-bulletin-friday-july-20-2018/
MUST READS:
WASHINGTON POST (Wydra Op-Ed): Those who deny birthright citizenship get the Constitution wrong
By Elizabeth Wydra
July 20, 2018
Since its ratification 150 years ago, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has guaranteed that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” With the ratification of this amendment — after hundreds of years of chattel slavery followed by a bloody Civil War that cost hundreds of thousands of lives — America’s Second Founders decided to bend the arc of our Constitution toward progress.
The 14th Amendment is perhaps the greatest provision of our Constitution, in part because of its profound guarantee of citizenship to all who are born on American soil. After the Civil War, when members of the Reconstruction Congress assembled to draft the amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, they were writing against a backdrop of prejudice not only against African Americans but also immigrant communities including the Chinese and Roma. Read more
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Parents wait by the phone hoping immigrant kids will call
By Morgan Lee and Claudia Torrens
July 20, 2018
An immigrant father from Guatemala dotes over his despondent teenage daughter during a weekly 10-minute phone call, while other parents wait weeks for the phone to ring.
A mother in Louisiana has phone video chats with her detained 5-year-old son in Texas, while a Honduran asylum-seeker had actual face time with his little girl, visiting her in person. He made sure to bring along a McDonald’s hamburger to share.
Immigrant parents who were separated from their children under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings are struggling to communicate by any means possible in the age of instant, international social media with sons and daughters kept in government-contracted facilities around the country. For most parents, phone calls have been the only connection to their children as the separations dragged on for weeks. Read more
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Watchdog, Enforcer, Coach: The Unusual Role of Judge Dana Sabraw
By Jacob Gershman
July 23, 2018
It’s a busy time for U.S. District Judge Dana Makoto Sabraw.
On Friday in San Diego, he presided over jury deliberations in a criminal case against a man trying to prove he isn’t an illegal alien from Mexico but a California-born American citizen. And on Monday, Judge Sabraw is overseeing jury selection in an Apple Inc. patent dispute.
Those matters come on top of what is by far the biggest case of his career: the legal effort to reunite thousands of migrant parents and their children.
Last month, Judge Sabraw made national headlines when he granted an injunctioncommanding the Trump administration to put an end to its practice of splitting up undocumented, asylum-seeking families streaming into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America. He gave immigration authorities 30 days to identify all the separated children living in federally run shelters and release them to their mothers and fathers after checking criminal records and verifying parentage. Read more
WASHINGTON POST: Immigration cop shortage and a caution against hiring too quickly
By Joe Davidson
July 23, 2018
With President Trump so tough on immigration, you’d think he’d have enough staff members to enforce his harsh policies.
Yet, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remains below authorized levels despite increasing the job applications received, cutting the time to hire and boosting the percentage of applicants employed.
If you’re an overworked employee, that needs to change.
If you’re an immigration advocate, hiring should proceed cautiously, and some current agents need to change their ways.
CBP is on the front lines of the nation’s heated — and at times shameful (as in Trump’s family separation meanness) — immigration controversy. Staff members include CBP officers in the Office of Field Operations who protect points of entry, Border Patrol agents who guard territory between and relatively near points of entry, and Air and Marine Operations agents who watch over air and sea borders. Read more