Well before he took office for a second term, Donald Trump vowed to make illegal immigration one of his signature issues upon returning to the White House, and he shows no sign of backing away from that promise.
As Breitbart reports, the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has decided to call an end to the Biden-era policy of “quiet amnesty” for illegal migrants.
The Trump administration’s reversal of the aforementioned Biden-era policy will facilitate the reopening of hundreds of thousands of deportation cases that were administratively closed in recent years.
Under the prior president, immigration judges were urged to dismiss or close cases instead of adjudicating the underlying asylum claims.
The problem, according to the Trump administration, is that the vast majority of such claims tend to be invalid once subjected to scrutiny.
Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, addressed the shift in policy, declaring, “Biden chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including criminals, into the country and used prosecutorial discretion to indefinitely delay their cases and allow them to illegally remain in the United States.”
“Now,” she continued, President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem are following the law and resuming these illegal aliens' removal proceedings and ensuring their cases are heard by a judge.”
Last fall, the House Judiciary panel’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement issued a report on the harm done by the Biden administration’s policy, which was titled “Quiet Amnesty: How the Biden-Harris Administration Uses the Nation’s Immigration Courts to Advance An Open-Borders Agenda.”
A press release on the report’s findings emerged, suggesting that the prior administration’s stance resulted in upwards of 1 million illegal arrivals remaining in the country on an indefinite basis.
The report added that the Biden DOJ and DHS “caused the immigration court backlog to skyrocket, adding over 3.7 million new cases since fiscal year 2021, with over 1.5 million originating just in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2024.
With only a small number of cases resulting in grants of asylum, the Biden administration sought the abandonment, dismissal, termination, or administrative closure of hundreds of thousands of cases, allowing illegal arrivals to remain in the U.S. without facing any immigration consequences.
“This quiet amnesty,” the press release noted, “has become a hallmark of the Biden-Harris Administration’s immigration courts,” but it now appears that the practice will be coming to an end.
The Trump administration’s move to reopen cases that were previously closed or dismissed is likely to result in a dramatic change in circumstances for migrants who believed themselves safe from detention or removal, a misapprehension sadly fostered by the Biden administration.
As tumultuous as that experience may be for some, the Trump administration is determined to enforce immigration law to the best of its ability, in keeping with the president’s persistent theme of “promises made, promises kept.”
