Here's a good basic summation from the New York Times of the Department of Homeland Security’s new deportation guidelines:
Documents released on Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security revealed the broad scope of the president’s ambitions: to publicize crimes by undocumented immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum seekers; and, ultimately, speed up deportations.
And here are at least five reasons Donald Trump's new sweeping anti-immigrant policies defy logic on every policy point imaginable:
1) If Trump's nativist base thinks undocumented immigrants are killing the economy, just wait until they quit contributing to it
Bloomberg Politics writes:
President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants will strain an already tight U.S. job market, with one study suggesting that removing all of them would cost the economy as much as $5 trillion over 10 years.
That represents the contribution of the millions of unauthorized workers to the world’s largest economy, about 3 percent of private-sector gross domestic product, according to a recent paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research. At an average of $500 billion in output a year, removing all such immigrants would be like lopping off the equivalent of Massachusetts from the U.S. economy, said study co-author Francesc Ortega.
2) Only in the delusional world inhabited by Trump and his rabid nativist supporters are immigrants more dangerous than native-born Americans.
The NYT writes: “Research shows lower levels of crime among immigrants than among native-born Americans.”
And the Washington Post: "Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course." (Bianca Bersani, University of Massachusetts, 2014. Published in Justice Quarterly.)”
3) Stripping immigrants of basic privacy protections has not gone over well with judges
Dear Trump: Please note the use of "any person" in the 14th Amendment, something Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio failed to absorb while he was violating it.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
As the ACLU notes: Once here, "even undocumented immigrants have the right to freedom of speech and religion, the right to be treated fairly, the right to privacy, and the other fundamental rights U.S. citizens enjoy."
4) Hiring 15,000 new border agents is not quite as easy as it sounds
From an NPR interview with James Tomsheck, former head of internal affairs for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, who helped double the border force from 10,000 to about 21,000 between 2006 and 2012:
We received authorization to institute a polygraph screening program and ran those first exams in February of 2008, towards the end of the initial Border Patrol hiring. [...] The results were shocking. More than half of the applicants failed to clear the exam, with the overwhelming majority giving us detailed admissions as to why it was they failed the exam. It was what these applicants had done in their past that most concerned us. They included serious felony crimes, active involvement in smuggling activities and several confirmed infiltrators who actually were employed by drug trafficking organizations who had been directed to seek out positions within Customs and Border Protection to advance ongoing criminal conspiracies, essentially be spies in our midst. [...]
The reality is the hiring initiative, time and time again, visited southwest border communities over the course of those two years and four months that that initial hiring initiative moved forward. At some point in time, the quality of the applicant pool sharply declined. And yet, the mandate to double the size of the Border Patrol remained in progress.
Tomsheck essentially said that the only way to fill 15,000 positions quickly would be to lower standards and/or "dilute the effectiveness of the polygraph program or, in some instances, actually obtain waivers."
5) Good luck enlisting Mexico to hold asylum seekers within their borders until their claims can be reviewed by U.S. courts
Part of the new effort to "discourage asylum seekers" involves Mexican officials, out of the good of their hearts, holding people within Mexico until such time as their asylum claims can be processed by U.S. officials. White House press secretary Sean Spicer has high hopes because U.S.-Mexico relations are just stellar.
LOL. Or another perspective from NPR's Carrie Kahn:
The cooperation and the coordination that you need from Mexico to pull this off would have to be great. And Mexico - I can just tell you that Mexico is not in any mood to help the U.S. lately, given the hostile relationships that they're having. And it's just something that's not going to go over well with Mexicans.
In sum, Trump’s deportation policies are wrong on the economy, wrong on safety, wrong on the Constitution, wrong on safety once again, and downright laughable on Mexico. Good luck with all that.