Trump outdoing Obama on 'DREAMers,' continuing catch and release
When it comes to immigration, Trump's policies are not very different from Obama's.
1) The Trump administration has processed more "DREAMers" than Obama had during the same time period in the latter's presidency.
According to newly published data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Trump administration has issued 17,275 initial amnesty cards and over 107,500 renewals of existing status.
This surpasses the 122,000 level of amnesty cards issued during the final quarter of Obama's presidency (Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2016), which means the Trump administration is not even slowing down the pace! And although the first 20 days of this quarter were still under Obama's tenure, the Trump amnesty is likely close to 200,000 by now, when extrapolating in the number of presumed cards issued during April and May.
Thus, while Trump's own lawful immigration order lies in ruins from tyrannical courts – with no effort to fight back through Congress – Obama's patently unconstitutional DACA order remains in full force even after his presidency.
The jarring thing here is that Trump could fulfill a core campaign promise simply by refusing to renew existing DACA cards. We are not talking about a balanced budget or entitlement reform – just a simple display of inaction. Even Marco Rubio said the president should only decline to retroactively strip DACA, but should follow through with the promise not to renew the amnesty.
This is correct. Trump does not need congressional approval to discontinue the DREAMer program. But instead of stopping it, he has expanded it.
2) Trump is continuing "catch and release" with illegals:
The apprehension of illegal border crossers by Border Patrol agents jumped 31 percent in May from the previous month. The jump follows a six-month decline in apprehensions after the election of President Donald Trump. The increase comes as Border Patrol agents report "catch and release" programs are quietly continuing.
"Obama's catch and release is definitely continuing and our government is releasing illegal aliens into U.S. communities," Border Patrol agent Brandon Judd told Breitbart Texas in his capacity as president of the National Border Patrol Council.
Agents previously expressed feeling betrayed by the new president's administration after Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly appointed Kevin McAleenan as head of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the U.S. Border Patrol.
"He nominated this guy .. the problem is that this guy was hired by Barack Obama and was made deputy of [CBP] and all of the things we fought against on the border happened under this guy's watch and he would have been the one responsible for implementing them. That's DACA, DAPA and Catch and Release." Darby said in a Pursuit of Happiness interview referring to some programs started under the Obama Administration.
"This is the guy who was picked by Barack Obama to enact Barack Obama's open border policies," Darby explained. "This guy for some reason has been picked by Trump to be the boss of the border patrol agents who did so much and believed so much in Donald Trump."
So Trump has a picked an Obama appointee to carry out Obama-era policies.
3) Trump is admitting more Syrian refugees than ever:
A total of 3,957 refugees were admitted into the United States in May, a 19.3 percent increase over April's figures ... with the largest contingents coming from the DRC (2,683), Burma (2,216), Iraq (1,696), Somalia(1,655) and Syria (1,603).
No court ruling requires him to admit individual refugees from these countries. Only low-information voters think otherwise.
4) Trump has agreed to zero funding of his "border wall" in the first year of his presidency. In the second year of his presidency, he has requested only $1.6 billion, which is not enough to fund a substantial portion of it.
5) Trump has refused to defund sanctuary cities. He has proposed ending grants to sanctuary cities from one small Justice Department grant program, keeping 99% of all grants to sanctuary cities intact. That's not keeping a campaign promises; that's tokenism.
I think, rhetoric aside, that Trump's immigration and border security policies are very much like Barack Obama's, and if Hillary Clinton had been elected president, we would have seen the exact same thing – more DREAMers, more Muslim refugees, and no border wall.
On this issue, President Trump is Hillary Clinton with a jacket and a tie.
Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.