Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration has taken enormous steps to crack down on illegal aliens, ramping up deportations, sealing off the southern border, and reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy for those claiming asylum at the border. Now, the administration is taking it a step further and going after the lawyers who aid and abet illegals in their efforts to stay in the country. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to crack down on immigration attorneys who file fraudulent asylum claims on behalf of illegal aliens, or what some critics call Big Immigration's Legal Industrial Complex. DHS is giving ICE attorneys greater authority to enforce existing fraud law against these lawyers.
By ridding the system of illegitimate cases, and bringing in more of its own immigration judges, the Trump administration is finally making a small dent in the immigration case backlog, which is shrinking for the first time in 17 years. Still, that backlog is in the millions, creating what critics call de facto amnesty for the illegals who get to stay here while their case plays out.
That waiting game is the whole point, according to Mark H. Metcalf, former U.S. immigration judge who is now Kentucky Treasurer. He tells KTRH the goal of many of these asylum claims is just to drag out the case for as long as possible. "They'll tell the client if we delay your proceedings long enough, they'll forget about you...they'll bring you back to court, update your case, give you another court date, but never try the case," he says. "Then, they hope someone like Joe Biden will eventually be elected president, and they'll dismiss your case. Then you're turned loose into the United States."
Metcalf adds that he saw many of these fraudulent cases during his time on the federal bench under the George W. Bush administration. "We had fake marriages, we had asylum claims based on coming to the port and giving false credentials, then making up a story about why they were compelled to provide fraudulent credentials," he says. "We generally disposed of those cases pretty quickly...but under Obama and then Biden all of this (process) began to be lengthened."
"My impression was they believed if they delayed long enough, they would eventually---with the attorney's advice---be able to get them into the U.S., and get their cases dismissed."
All of this feels like chiseling away at a mountain after decades of neglect and abuse of the immigration system, but Metcalf is pleased to see things finally moving in the right direction. "The Trump administration is doing what it should be doing to push back against this idea of open borders and freely granting asylum," he says.
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