Immigration Enforcement: How Trump Got Control of the Border | National Review
The key insight of the administration s immigration hawks, though, was that the statutory authority already existed to establish order at the border. It was just that the laws providing crucial enforcement tools had never been used, or become encrusted over time with regulatory practices and judicial decisions that made the system balky and ultimately unworkable.
A former official familiar with the issue explains, If you actually look at and read and understand our immigration laws, they provide for a fair amount of enforcement. These laws were passed, a lot of them in the Nineties; several of the significant bills and laws we relied upon were signed into law by Bill Clinton or supported in a bipartisan way.
The administration s hawks undertook a constant interrogation of the standard operating procedure: Why are we doing it this way? Is there a law? If not, why can t we change? And if there are practical obstacles, what are ways to solve them?
What they usually found is that at the bottom of some suboptimal practice was a regulation, or agency guidance, or court edict, or unwritten rule, but very rarely a law.
A basic question that constantly came up was: Why could the U.S. send back migrants from Mexico with relative ease, yet basically couldn t return migrants from countries a little farther south?
The administration found a way to effectively close the loopholes that accounted for this disparity and, in so doing, got the border under control even before the onset of the pandemic.
The former senior administration official says, We took the tools that Congress gave us that had never been used, and we used them. Then we took the regulations and rules that agencies had created that muddied, diluted, or denuded Congress s rules, and we fixed them.
Rich Lowry.