12 hours ago
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President Donald Trump and his team have been cracking down hard on border enforcement and on the worst illegal migrants still in the country — great.
But a longer-term fix — also of great use in speeding deportations now — requires cleaning up the mess of US “law” regarding the supposed rights of border-jumpers, as well as our obsolete asylum system.
Gridlocked not just on party lines but by ideologues and interest-group lobbying, Congress has failed for decades to update these laws; instead, activist judges and presidential decrees have created “legal” roadblocks to evicting people here illegally.
Consider the literal hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans that President Joe Biden invited unvetted into the country: Most of them weren’t living in Venezuela or Haiti before they came here, which means that they’re supposed to be legally ineligible for asylum.
Biden even extended their Temporary Protected Status to stop them getting the boot; Trump rescinded that protection — but courts have blocked deportations anyway, at least until the Supreme Court weighs in.
Witness the grand farce surrounding Team Trump’s deportation flights to El Salvador, for now blocked by DC Circuit Court Judge Jeb Boasberg to the cheers of the usual media suspects.
So humble is Boasberg that he tried to stop the initial flights midair, and even now resents that they didn’t get called back even though they were already out of his jurisdiction.
Essentially, his complaint is that ICE supposedly didn’t give the deportees proper due process — yet all of them were, indeed, illegal migrants.
“Y’all could’ve picked me up on Saturday and thrown me on a plane,” DC Circuit Judge Patricia Millett complained while hearing Team Trump’s appeal of Boasberg’s order; absolutely untrue, since she’s a citizen.
The marquee “mistake” that ICE supposedly made was in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an MS-13 border-jumper who was ordered deported years ago, then granted temporary leave to stay when he claimed to fear the wrath of another gang back home — a “right” under a Biden executive order that’s since been overruled by a Trump one.
(Plus, that gang has since been rounded up in El Salvador’s own crackdown.)
That is, Biden- and Obama-picked judges are choosing to privilege the executive orders of past presidents over those of the sitting prez, and then pontificating about the “rule of law.”
The Supreme Court may eventually clear up some of this, but other judge-made “law” of the last several decades likely needs legislation to reverse.
Indeed, the actual law needs updating to cover realities that didn’t exist before.
Congressional hearings on the vast abuses of the asylum system would be a good start, plus investigations into how activist nonprofits use taxpayer funds to deepen the migrant crisis, not least by working the courts.
The left’s relentless work has utterly wrecked the meaning of asylum, rendering it worse than useless for helping those it was originally intended to succor, namely those facing political or religious persecution at home.
One of the most trenchant recommendations here comes from a recent Heritage Foundation report: Amend the Refugee Act of 1980 to restrict asylum only to people who file for it on the basis of race, religion, political beliefs, and nationality and to get rid of a fifth category, “particular social group.”
That murky fifth category has been stretched to include almost anyone suffering bad conditions at home, and so help power the current abuses.
And to harden the law so that applicants must file for it in the first safe country they enter — no more country-shopping multi-stage journeys to the United States.
And to establish legal penalties for fraudulent claims and an annual cap on the overall number of asylum claims to prevent abuse.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will have to crack the whip to get any of that done before the 2026 midterms, but they must.
Even as they’ll have to face down baseless legal challenges from blue-state AGs like New York’s Tish James and California’s Rob Bonta, as well as the full might of the left’s protest-thug machine, backed by millions in progressive “dark money.”
None of it will be fast or easy; now is the time to start fixing this outdated system and so end its massive, wide-scale abuse forever.
English (US)