How about partnering with State and local LE for enforcement of immigration laws. How about streamlining deportation to minimize court costs? How about instead of just letting illegal aliens stay, do something to reduce/stop the influx of illegal entery into the US.
You are correct that with a finite resources and funding choices have to be made. That happens all the time. Still does not make it right for those who break our immigration laws. Our system does need to be overhauled. We need a better migrant labor guest program. We need a swifter/more economical method to deport illegal aliens. Our legal system for handling many violations of law is way to costly.
I mostly agree with you. We need a better guest worker program and we need to make the whole process more efficient and we need to ramp up enforcement once we have a good guest worker program in place.
But, two thoughts. First off, ICE does work heavily with state and local law enforcement. The program that Arpaio was in, for example, empowers state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. Virtually all states and cities with significant numbers of undocumented immigrants are part of that program. The ONLY person who has ever been kicked out is Arpaio. So, where you happen to live I'm sure it seems like they don't work with state and local cops, but that's just because your local sheriff is a total nutjob that flagrantly violated the constitution over and over and had to be stripped of his powers. Elect somebody sane and they'll be right back in the program no problem.
Second, I don't disagree that we need to streamline deportation. But, a big word of caution on that. What we really need to do most of all is to establish more immigration courts and get more judges confirmed as fast as possible. That's the biggest part of the cost. The immigration courts are so backlogged that people have to wait up to a year for their first appearance. Often they are sitting in jail that whole time. That is extremely costly and it is horrifically, insanely, unfair for those folks who turn out to be here legally to lose a year of their lives just because of backlog in the courts. The Republicans filibustering of every judge that comes along needs to stop. Immediately. It is costing us hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars a year just on the immigration front alone.
But, when some people talk about streamlining the process what they mean is lowering the burden of proof for people accused of being here illegally. Whenever there is any crime that society is particuarly upset about, there starts to be pressure not just to increase the penalties, but to make it easier for the government to prove that they did the crime. IMO that is always a huge mistake. For example, we have done that with sex offenders and now in some trials against sex offenders some extremely shady evidence that would never be allowed in a normal trial has to be allowed. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt has to be the standard for every crime and the standard rules of evidence needs to remain in place for every crime IMO.
People kind of assume that in an immigration trial basically you just ask the guy for his ID or green card or whatever and if he doesn't have it, that's that. But I did some volunteer work once for a service that represents undocumented immigrants and I can tell you it is usually WAY more complicated than that. Somebody was here on a work visa and they submitted their application to extend it properly and on time, but ICE lost it, and then they followed up immediately, but before ICE fixed it, they land in immigration court after a speeding ticket. Or a woman met an American man in another country, came here on a visa, married him, and he told her that now she was a citizen and she didn't know enough about our laws to realize it wasn't true. In actuality just getting married doesn't do it (altough you would think it did from popular culture). You actually have to file a form with immigration as well and if the citizen didn't do that, she's not actually a citizen. Maybe the guy didn't realize that either and he's willing to sign the form immediately. Should she be deported and blacklisted so she can't get citizenship in the future just because of that? What if she's been here for 10 years and has 3 kids here? Or, and this sadly is very common, a non-citizen marries a citizen and he refuses to file the form to make her a citizen. Instead, after they have a kid, he holds it over her head that if she disobeys him, he will turn her in to ICE and she will be deported and he will get the kids. So then he starts beating her. The Violence Against Women Act has provisions to protect victims of domestic violence in that situation, but proving it is a full fledged trial and it is pretty tough because the victims usually have battered women's syndrome and on the flip side they have a good reason to make it up. So it requires a whole lot of investigation. And so on. Those are just a few examples, but there are many more. People who claim that their estranged father was a US citizen are very tough to resolve.
Anyways, my point is that the way to make it cheaper is to spend more up front on courts so that the detention costs drop, not to just start turning it into a rubber stamp injustice machine where people are basically getting deported whenever the whim hits the government to do so.
