The head of the Transportation Security Administration said on Thursday that "under 1,000" illegal immigrants have been allowed to board planes using warrants as identification this calendar year -- as he faced a grilling on the matter from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
Hawley asked TSA Administrator David Pekoske at a Senate hearing about a TSA policy that allows illegal immigrants to use warrants, which represent civil immigration enforcement and are not criminal arrest warrants, as an alternative form of identification. "How many individuals have presented TSA with arrest warrants or deportation notices and been allowed to travel this calendar year?" Hawley asked. "Under 1,000 sir," Pekoske replied. Hawley had written to Pekoske earlier this year about the policy, which he called "unacceptable" but had not received a response. Pekoske said he would be receiving one on Friday. "For noncitizens and non-U.S. nationals who do not otherwise have acceptable forms of ID for presentation at security checkpoints, TSA may also accept certain DHS-issued forms, including ICE Form I-200," a TSA spokesperson told Fox News earlier this year. That refers to a civil immigration arrest warrant. The agency added that the document will then be validated via an "alien identification number" that involves personally identifiable information being checked against a number of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) databases, including the CBP One mobile application and TSA’s National Transportation Vetting Center (NTVC). On Thursday, Pekoske said that the presentation of a warrant marked the beginning of a further verification process. "These individuals who have these arrest warrants, these arrest warrants were issued by Border Patrol or a customs officer, and they serve as a beginning of our identity verification process so you can't walk up to a checkpoint, wave that form and then go right through into screening," he said. While Pekoske said those use who warrants as ID also received enhanced screening, Hawley asked if they were given an in-person interview by a federal security director -- to which Pekoske said they were only interviewed by officers present at the checkpoint. The lack of a shared set of facts about immigration makes it easy for accusatory and often false messages to echo loudly in the run-up to the midterm elections. J.D. Vance, a leading Republican candidate for Ohio’s open Senate seat, claimed in a recent advertisement that “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona has described immigration as “full scale invasion.” Tucker Carlson of Fox News told a guest on his show in 2017: “Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine, or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer. It’s become poorer. That’s real.”
A new book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success,” by two economists, Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton, should undercut some of the fearmongering. They linked census records to pull together what they call “the first set of truly big data about immigration.” Using the data set, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan were able to compare the income trajectories of immigrants’ children with those of people whose parents were born in the United States. The economists found that on average, the children of immigrants were exceptionally good at moving up the economic ladder. Immigrants and their children are assimilating into the United States as quickly now as in the past, the economists found. That’s in line with recent research into the effects of immigration. While “first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born,” according to a 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the “second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.” Second-generation-immigrant success stories have long been a part of America’s history. Looking at census records from 1880, the researchers found that men whose fathers were low-income immigrants made more money as adults than the sons of low-income men born in the United States. (They focused on sons because it was harder to track women from one census to the next, since so many adopted their husbands’ names at marriage.) Because of privacy restrictions, they had access to individual data only through the 1940 census. They used other sources for subsequent years. Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan observed the same pattern a century later. Children born around 1980 to men from Mexico, India, Brazil and almost every other country outearned the children of U.S.-born men. “America really does have golden streets that allow immigrants to quickly make more than they could have earned at home,” they write. But, they add, “moving up the economic ladder in America — and catching up to the U.S.-born — takes time.” Once Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan found abundant evidence of second-generation immigrants’ upward mobility, they tried to figure out why those children did so well. They arrived at two answers. First, the children had an easy time outdoing parents whose careers were inhibited by poor language skills or a lack of professional credentials. The classic example is an immigrant doctor who winds up driving a cab in the United States. Second, immigrants tended to settle in parts of the country experiencing strong job growth. That gave them an edge over native-born Americans who were firmly rooted in places with faltering economies. Immigrants are good at doing something difficult: leaving behind relatives, friends and the familiarity of home in search of prosperity. The economists found that native-born Americans who do what immigrants do — move toward opportunity — have children who are just as upwardly mobile as the children of immigrants. Federal authorities arrested three people Tuesday in connection with a human smuggling incident on San Antonio’s Southwest Side that left 51 migrants dead — making it one of the deadliest such episodes in recent history.
Homero Zamorano, 45, was arrested after officials say he abandoned the tractor-trailer in a desolate area near Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland and fled the scene. Zamorano has addresses in Houston and the Rio Grande Valley. “He was very high on meth when he was arrested nearby and had to be taken to the hospital,” a law enforcement officer said. After arresting Zamorano, authorities traced the semitruck to a home in the 100 block of Arnold in Bexar County. They put the house under surveillance and saw two men — Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez — leaving in a truck, sources said. When authorities stopped the truck, one of the men confessed to having a weapon in the vehicle. Officers obtained a search warrant and searched the home on Arnold, where they found more guns, according to court records. The two men were arrested on suspicion of possessing firearms while in the country illegally. They were detained without bail after a brief hearing in federal court. Zamorano may appear Wednesday in federal court on human smuggling charges. He has a long criminal history. Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, said the death toll from Monday’s human smuggling incident makes it “the worst one we’ve seen in the U.S.” “The (human smuggling) organizations are getting more violent — they don’t care about the people,” he said. “They don’t think of them as people. They think of them as commodities.” The 51 migrants from Mexico and Central America were found in the abandoned tractor-trailer, which could fit around 100 people. Eleven other people who were rescued from the trailer and were hospitalized, including an adolescent boy who was in critical condition at University Hospital. After 10 Years of DACA, Religious Leaders Call for Permanent Solutions and Immigration Reform6/20/2022
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program turned 10 years old this week but celebrations were tempered by calls for permanent solutions.
While DACA allows some of those who were brought to America by undocumented parents to stay in the country legally and work, religious leaders point out that the policy excludes many people in similar circumstances — sometimes even siblings. This situation leads to mixed-status families that live under threat of losing immediate family members to deportation, they say. Legal challenges to the program have left DACA recipients living “in constant fear and uncertainty,” said the Interfaith Immigration Coalition in a statement. Members of the coalition offered sharp critique of the government for leaving hundreds of thousands of young people in limbo. “No one should have to live in fear of their lives being suddenly turned upside down by abrupt policy changes,” said Barbara Weinstein, director of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, in the statement. DACA, which was put forth under President Barack Obama, currently doesn’t provide a path to citizenship nor allow holders to participate fully in American life. For example, while participants in the program, who are also known as “Dreamers,” can attend college or university, they are not eligible for federal financial aid. In some states, DACA holders cannot get driver’s licenses. They are also locked out of a handful of professions because their temporary status means they can’t meet certification standards. Critics of the policy say that it essentially keeps “Dreamers” in limbo for years on end. Religious leaders in this camp are continuing to call on the government for bipartisan solutions that will give DACA holders permanent status. “Most DACA recipients still face uncertainty about their future in this country, to say nothing of their families, including hundreds of thousands of U.S.-citizen children, employers and the communities that depend on them. For those confronted by this reality, the church remains committed to walking with you and seeing this injustice remedied,” said the Rev. Mario E. Dorsonville, the auxiliary bishop of Washington who is also the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on migration, in a statement. The Rev. Dorsonville called on Congress to come up with a “permanent solution for all “Dreamers” — one of many steps to address an immigration system in desperate need of reform.” Other religious leaders also say that the country needs to make wide scale immigration reform. And they point out that there is broad public support — including among religious Americans — for such measures. Asked about the potential for bipartisan efforts to “strengthen border security, create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and ensure a legal, reliable workforce for America’s farmers and ranchers,” 79% of Americans said they support such initiatives, according to a recent poll by the National Immigration Forum. Most of those surveyed — 72% — said they would like to see this happen before November 2022 midterm elections. The same survey found that 81% of white evangelicals – a group that is often depicted as hostile to immigration — said they would support work on a bipartisan package that addresses the three issues of DACA, border security and migrant farmworkers, the Evangelical Immigration Table noted. Almost the same number of evangelical Protestants support a bipartisan initiative for immigration reform. “It’s clear that it is past time for a permanent solution for “Dreamers” — one that only Congress can provide,” said the leaders of the Evangelical Immigration Table in a letter they sent to Congress this week. Good policy solutions for all these issues already exist, the organization’s national coordinator, Matthew Soerens, told the Deseret News. He pointed to the Dream Act — bipartisan legislation, the first version of which was introduced in 2001 by then-Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin — as well as the Farmwork Force Modernization Act of 2021 and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. John Cornyn’s Bipartisan Border Solutions Act. |