WaPo Editorial Board: Trump's latest immigration threat is yet another half-cooked plan
Source: Washington Post
Trump’s latest immigration threat is yet another half-cooked plan
By Editorial Board June 18 at 7:05 PM
PRESIDENT TRUMP, already famous for his premature annunciations, has again broadcast a plan that isn’t quite cooked.
By declaring on Monday that mass arrests of illegal immigrants would begin “next week,” the president not only caught his agents by surprise but also apparently tipped off a move still in the discussion stage. No great surprise there; it was just a few days ago that Mr. Trump proclaimed the appointment of Thomas D. Homan as his “border czar,” only to have Mr. Homan immediately demur, saying the announcement was “kind of premature.”
The president’s tweet previewing “the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States” combines menace and hyperbole. It is likely to induce anxiety and panic in some immigrant communities, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for deportations, lacks the officers, detention space and other resources to remove “millions” of migrants except possibly over the course of years.
More to the point, perhaps, doing so would necessarily entail shattering large numbers of families, including ones well established over a decade or more of residency and whose children, born in this country, are citizens. As Mr. Trump and his administration discovered a year ago, Americans are rightly appalled at the sight of government agents wrenching apart parents and their children; they would likely react just as badly to a rerun involving their neighbors as they did to the original iteration, in which agents focused on families who had recently crossed the border.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-latest-immigration-threat-is-yet-another-half-cooked-plan/2019/06/18/9633cd16-91fd-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
