Glitches in the Trump Immigration Proposal

pass legislation. Here's Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, well, I think it's obviously just a start, but rather than have these debates over how do we compromise between border security and and immigration, uh, you know, benefits, I think it's a clear statement of what our immigration policy should be. Joining me is Leon Fresco, a partner at hollanden Night and the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office

of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department. Leon. Under Trump's proposal, green card applicants would be evaluated on this new points system, with a two step process beginning with the Civics test and a background check. How would this work? Well, the the quite frankly, would be very very difficult to administer because at the end of the day. What happens is, in a lot of these countries that use point systems, you would normally have to reach a certain threshold the points,

and then you'd come into that country. But here you'd have to first go through the civics and background tests. Then you'd have to start giving all of these different credentials and proving you have them, like that you have a work offer, that you have a degree that qualifies

that your age is your age, etcetera. That would all be given a certain amount of points, and then you'd be ranked amongst other people also applying for a limited set of green cards, and then every six months or so they'd have a sort of okay, let's take the top fifties thousand people who are ranked for this six

month period. And the point is from beginning to end, that will actually end up taking two to three years before someone who actually started this process would be able to get a green card from this process, so it's actually almost impossible to administer today. A federal appeals court ruled against Trump ending the DOCKER program, saying the administration acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, but there is

no plan for the Dreamers in Trump's current proposal. What kind of a gap does that leave, Well, it leads a huge gap, because at the end of the day, it has always been very, very difficult to get bipartisan consensus on immigration unless you have basically three elements. You need to have something on enforcement, something that makes it for better for the economy, for the business community, and

something for the compassionate side of the immigration equation. And those are the only bills that I've ever actually either passed in the House or the Senate, the ones that have something in each of those areas. And if you try, I believe, one of those critical areas out of immigration legislation,

it never passes. Is there any proposal in this legislation for what the Trump administration Republicans have complained about, what they call catch and release, Well, they're certainly trying to In all of these Republican bills, including this proposal, they're trying to get at two or three things. Number One, that families who are apprehended at the border can be detained together, regardless of how much the length of time is until their case is decided. Right now it's limited

to twenty days. And the other main one that they try to do is that unaccompanied miners who are currently not able to be removed on an expedited basis would be re permitted, so the law would return to what it was before two thousand and eight, to be removed on an expedited basis, meaning within ten days or so if they cannot clearly articulate an asylum claim. Looking at

a recent poll, this surprised me. According to the poll by a animist you gov that was released earlier this month, Americans that immigration was the most important issue for them that trails only healthcare among the top priorities. Does that mean that President Trump has succeeded in bringing it to national attention across the board? Absolutely? Uh. I tell people this all the time, which is, this is the first president in my lifetime that's actually had immigration as their

most important issue. And this is since the internet. This is the first president that's had immigration as an Internet page issue on the White House website. And so certainly, when the president talks about something constantly, it's going to

become a top issue in certain people's minds. But I think even amongst those people's minds, well, they look at it and they say, well, what's actually been done on this issue in the last two years, and people start to realize that whether you take a compassion only or enforcement only solution, it won't work. Just why the enforcement only approach so far has led to more people being

apprehended as opposed to less people being apprehended. There was a series of tweets from Trump after his speech suggesting new actions to crack down on illegal immigrants. In one tweet, he said, please do not make yourselves too comfortable. You will be leaving soon, and a White House spokesman left open the possibility that Trump might use an arcane law called the Insurrection Act to allow him to use the

military to remove illegal immigrants. Is that even doable? So for hundreds of years, we've had this concept called post commentatives, which is that you cannot use the military to enforce US domestic laws. And secondly, we have statutes in plays that when someone is coming to the United States to seek asylum that certain processes have to be followed until

that person can be moved. And so by using an alien and Insurrection Act, unless you've actually seen evidence that some significant group of people are trying to actually overthrow the government of the United States by pours, then that

would not work. In fact, we've had threats much worse than this during the Cold War and no such actions were used, and so there would be no basis, No judge worth any law degree would ever actually allow alien and insurrection laws to be used during this period when it's just people are seeking asylum. Leon, we've seen a term where the Supreme Court has evaded a lot of controversial issues. Are they likely to take up data well, if there ends up being a circuit split on DOCCA,

I think for sure. But even if the administration says that this is so important to the government you have to take it up, then still it's highly highly likely

they will take it up. But the only thing is by the time DOCCA gets decided, which would be sometime in either June of or later, then there will basically be a referendum on this issue as part of the general elections, and so at the end of the day we won't really know the fate of DOCCA until the next presidential all right, thanks so much, Leon, As always, it's great to have you on. That's Leon Fresco. He's

partner at Holland and Nightne. He was the former Deputy Assistant A G. For the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg