While alarmed Americans watched the steady politicization of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appointees turned against the country they were charged to protect.

Created after 9/11 to secure the homeland, today DHS is run by open borders fanatics.  To stop the bleeding, in January our new president should declare a national migration moratorium and resume border wall construction.  He should send active duty and national guard troops to seal the border with rules of engagement that include the use of force.  DHS should be instructed to resume and accelerate border violator deportations.  The new president should proclaim a right to preemptive self-defense against foreign governments enabling illegal migration or obstructing U.S. efforts to reverse it.

To subdue the asylum fraud monster we created for ourselves, the president should repudiate the 1967 UN Refugee Protocol and its disastrous “non-return” parole doctrine.  Thereafter, the sole avenue for U.S. asylum-like relief should be offshore mechanisms akin to the Migrant Protection Protocols or post-Vietnam War orderly departure program.

The staggering cost to unwilling Americans of maintaining and removing millions of border violators should be billed to the source countries.  Untaxed billions wired out of our country to those countries should be tapped.  Foreign embassies and consulates here must be held financially responsible for U.S. maintenance of their border violator citizens.

On Inauguration Day, 2025, Biden prosecutorial discretion schemes to erase the border and suspend removals must be canceled.  The new president should abandon Biden lawsuits against states fighting to protect themselves from border violators.  The president should invite states to team with federal authorities on detection, detention, and removal of border violators. U.S. Attorneys must step-up prosecution and imprisonment of border violators for unlawful entry.  American employers must be free to “hire American” without DOJ harassment.

DHS lawfare against Americans must end.  Judicial settlements, consent decrees, and DHS policies that wantonly undermined the president’s immigration enforcement authorities should be repudiated and forbidden. The Executive should recognize no court order touching immigration enforcement beyond the geographic limits of the court that enters it.

The Executive must also challenge judicial and administrative erasure of immigration enforcement against alien criminals.  The court-concocted “categorical matching” doctrine and criminal-friendly prosecutors shield thousands of violent alien criminals from deportation.  Madness.

Recently DHS leaders marked Arab American Recognition Month by identifying U.S. Representative and Hamas apologist Rashida Tlaib as an Arab American “notable”.  The lesson:  headquarters personnel at DHS and all DHS agencies must be replaced.  New DHS leaders can easily be found who grasp that Hamas is a Jew-hating proxy for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and mortal enemy of the United States.

Under current DHS leadership, the U.S. became an enabler of child abduction, human trafficking, and fraud.  Foreign children and putative victims of uncorroborated U.S. crime are battering rams against our border.  State courts and local police must no longer be leveraged to enable immigration fraud.

Any person — including a parent — who brings or induces a child to cross our border illegally should be prosecuted for endangerment.  Any border violator — including a parent — who fails to appear at the border when his or her child is encountered by the Border Patrol should be prosecuted for abandonment.  Any person bringing children into the U.S. with no foreign custody order should be screened for child abduction.  Universal DNA testing to establish parentage is critical.

The new president’s transition teams should produce an interagency strategy to insulate our border and budget from government and private organizations enabling human trafficking.  The strategy should include prompt return of unaccompanied children to authorities in the home countries.

Violating our border or overstaying lawful admission should trigger unwaivable ineligibility for any immigration benefit, including asylum, parole, work permits, visas, adjustment of status, inclusion in the eVerify database, and naturalization.  Persons granted cancellation of removal should be obliged to go abroad for consular processing.  Temporary Protected Status (TPS) must be repealed, and no current or past TPS beneficiary should receive lawful permanent residence except through consular processing.

Today, while 93-year-old American widows fret over quarterly tax filings, border violators ignore internal revenue laws with impunity.  Every border violator with a dollar of U.S. earnings, past or present, who fails to report those earnings to the IRS should be permanently barred from an immigrant visa, adjustment of status, and work authorization.  No border violator should be eligible for tax credits for any non-citizen child.

Restoring the rule of law at DHS won’t be easy, but it is vital to begin.  January can’t come soon enough.

Richard J. Douglas, a former U.S. Senate lawyer and Navy veteran of submarines and Iraq, has nearly four decades of immigration experience.

Image: Public domain.