Friday, July 19, 2019

Trump's immigration deal with Mexico is working

So reports Jan Brewer (Republican Governor of Arizona from 2009 to 2015) at The Washington Examiner:
"Some even argued that the bilateral immigration deal with Mexico was a pipe dream to begin with. They predicted that Trump’s effort to pressure our southern neighbor with tariffs would backfire.

“President Trump has a habit of talking tough and then retreating, because his policies often can’t be implemented or don’t make sense,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said in early June. He was implying that there would be no immigration deal with Mexico because Donald Trump’s tariffs were an empty threat.

After just four weeks, though, we now have concrete proof that Trump knew what he was doing all along. Thanks to Mexico’s deployment of National Guard troops to intercept migrants on their way to the U.S. border, the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border declined significantly in June after remaining at abnormally high levels throughout the first half of the year. According to the latest figures from Homeland Security, the number of border apprehensions declined from 132,880 in May to 94,897 in June, a 29% drop in the space of just a few weeks. The improvement was even more dramatic for family units and unaccompanied minors, two categories that have accounted for an unusually large share of the recent flood of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the expanded “Remain in Mexico” policy that was put in place under the agreement is easing the pressure on our immigration enforcement agencies, which have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people caught illegally crossing the border.

Before Trump negotiated the deal with Mexico, Homeland Security had to release more than 1,200 illegal immigrants into the U.S. interior every single day because Congress had not allocated enough resources to process and care for the huge number of detainees in custody. Now that asylum-seekers have to wait in Mexico until their cases are adjudicated, rather than being released into American communities to await their hearings, fewer than 200 illegal immigrants are being released each day, an 85% decrease."