Migrants Racing Against Time to Become the Last Person Let Into the Country by Joe Biden

Migrants who left their home countries headed for the US border are racing against time. Their goal is to get across before Donald Trump is inaugurated because word has spread that after Jan. 20 it won’t be so easy.

after leaving her hometown of Siguatepeque, in Honduras’ central highlands, she learned that Donald Trump had won the US election touting a crackdown on immigration – one that she feared could shrink her chances of reaching the US after a nearly 3-month trip through central America and Mexico.

Speaking from a shelter in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in December, the 39-year-old told CNN she was racing against the clock to reach the US’s southern border with Mexico before Trump’s January 20 inauguration.

“We’ve been told that when Trump starts, he won’t let us in,” Altagracia, who asked CNN not to share her last name over fears it would impact her asylum claim in the US, said on a phone call…

“Everyone wants to arrive before [Trump] does,” another migrant, from Cuba, told CNN. “I hope Trump understands that many of us have degrees” that could benefit the US, he said.

CNN quotes an ACLU lawyer who tells them people in danger will “flee regardless of what they know or hear about US restrictions on asylum.” This may be true for some portion of migrants who are facing threats at home, but it’s well known at this point that most of the migrants coming across the border are coming for a new life and a better job. That’s why the majority of people who apply for asylum are rejected. Contrary to what the ACLU claims, these are mostly economic migrants and many of them might decide to stay home if it wasn’t so easy to game the US asylum system.

Meanwhile, we have lots of progressives on this side of the border arguing that once someone arrives they shouldn’t be sent back, not even if they commit a crime. Here’s Greg Sargent writing for the New Republic.

The Laken Riley Act, which has passed the House with 48 Democrats backing it, would require the Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented migrants accused of minor crimes like burglary, theft, larceny, and shoplifting, putting them on track to deportation. This is dubious policy: DHS already has the authority to detain such undocumented immigrants; the bill would merely require this…

What happened to Laken Riley—a nursing student murdered by undocumented migrant Jose Ibarra after he’d previously committed minor crimes—was a horror, and Ibarra has rightly received a life sentence for it. But as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, it’s extraordinarily rare for low-level offenders to go on to commit murder; now Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be required to detain every such offender, a potentially huge waste of resources that could be used to pursue more serious criminals. His case should not be the basis for such massive policy changes.

I always love hearing this argument, that fringe cases make bad law, from the same progressive corner of the Democratic party that supported defunding police over a handful of police interactions with black men over the past decade. Black Lives Matter’s whole purpose was to turn fringe cases into demands for radical new policy and even then they frequently got the facts wrong about those cases in order to justify their own crusade (remember Hands up, don’t shoot!). But when it comes to illegal immigrants murdering or raping Americans the same elements on the left caution us not to overreact.

Sargent isn’t done. He argues that Democrats have to take the bull by the horns and make the case that we should prevent criminals aliens from being deported unless their crimes are really serious.

Winning these arguments is hard. Riley’s story is horrific. In this environment, it is difficult to argue that migrants who have committed crimes (minor, but still) don’t merit this type of mandatory federal detention.

I sincerely hope Democrats embrace this approach. Let’s tell the world that you can lie to get in the door and then commit a few thefts on this side of the border and still Democrats will have your back. As a Republican, I love that approach because it will almost certainly guarantee that Dems continue to be out of touch with most Americans on this issue in the next election.

The sensible thing to do here is to discourage mass illegal migration so we don’t have the kind of influx of millions of people per year that we had under hapless Joe Biden. We can also make it clear that migrants who commit a crime will be dealt with swiftly. Ultimately, we can’t put an end to all migration to the US, but we can demand that migrants a) not game our asylum system and b) not break our laws while waiting to hear from an immigration judge. That’s not asking a lot. It’s really the bare minimum we should expect.