Robbing Democrats of 24/7 anti-Trump news coverage about the debacle on the Mexican border, President Donald Trump issued an executive order today stopping family separations. Prior to today, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement [ICE] agency jailed adult illegal immigrants and placed minors in government detention. Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielson created a media maelstrom insisting that ICE was implementing current immigration laws, separating children from their parents crossing the U.S. border. Democrats and their media friends accused Trump and Nielsen of Nazi-like tactics, holding children in detention centers when immigration law prevents their incarceration. Democrats did everything possible to turn the border crisis into a political football, hoping to ride the issue all the way to the November Midterm elections where they hope to take over Congress..
Trump’s signature today blocking ICE from separating children from their illegal immigrants parents only partially stops the problem. Without new legislation from Congress, Trump has no other choice but to instruct ICE to turn and blind eye, reverting back to the old Bush-43 and Obama border policy of letting illegal immigrants cross with impunity. Piling up more children in detention centers was clearly untenable, requiring ICE officials to reunite children with their law-breaking parents. Whether or not those same parents, totaling 1,940, want their children back is anyone’s guess. There’s been plenty of reports of parents dumping underage children at the U.S. border. Democrats and the press painted Trump and Nielsen as conducting the most cruel practices imaginable. Exploiting the border crisis for political gain, Democrats thought they had the right issue heading into November.
When you look at what really happened, ICE simply started enforcing U.S. border laws, requiring illegal border-crossers to be intercepted and detained. ICE didn’t consider what happens when you intercept illegal families, the government didn’t think of what to do with the children. Filling up a shuttered Walmart in Brownsville, Texas and building a tent city to handle the overflow created bad optics. If the practice continued, it wouldn’t take long for thousands of illegal parents and their children to pile up in makeshift detention centers. “We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” said Trump, admitting he didn’t like the “sight” or “feeling” of separating children from their families. Where border enforcement went kerflooey was not calculating the numbers of children that would require separate detention.
Without Congress working on new legislation, the White House is stuck with current immigration laws requiring ICE to detain anyone crossing the border illegally. With Bush-43 and Obama looking the other way, ICE wasn’t doing its job of enforcing the border. Now that Trump’s seen the problem of what to do with children, it requires more creative ways to enforce current border policy. Instead of separating children from their parents, ICE can simply detain everyone together, keeping families intact until a federal judge can issue an a bench order. Family by family, federal border judges can expedite to see that asylum or deportation cases move quickly. Without border enforcement, most illegal aliens make their way to relatives already in the states, destined to live, work and prosper like anyone else. Resolving the separation issue robs Democrats of their incendiary device.
When you look at new aggregate polling, Democrat’s “blue wave” doesn’t look like it’s materializing as promised. Democrats hoped if they could keep Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in the headlines, they could fuel a backlash against Trump and the Republican Party. With a recent Gallup poll showed Trump with his strongest approval ratings of his presidency at 45%, it now looks too good for Democrats heading into November. While anything could happen, including a stock market crash or geopolitical disaster, Republicans look poised to add votes to the Senate and hold on to the House, despite losing some seats. Trump’s border debacle was the perfect storm for Democrats hoping to gain traction heading into the Midterm elections. Trump’s recent summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un scored foreign policy points with prospective voters.
Trump found out the hard way there’s no easy fix to the border problem, unless he’s willing to look the other way like Bush-43 and Obama. Delivering on a campaign promise to shore up the borders, the ICE crackdown comes with a heavy price, witnessed by the extreme backlash from Democrats and press. If Trump and Nielsen anticipated the separations better, they could have avoided the controversy, keeping children with their illegal immigrant parents. Signing his executive order today to stop the separations, Trump decided he’d seen enough negative fallout on his White House. Separating children from their parents opened up a can of worms but doesn’t really address the border problem. Detaining parents and children together becomes the only way to satisfy Trump’s critics, who more than anything else, want to go back to the old border policy of doing nothing.
