Executive Order 13767: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements

One of the main goals of the Trump campaign was to prevent undocumented immigration; during his campaign announcement, Trump made the central promise of his campaign to build a wall along the Southern border. Though he promised that Mexico would pay for it, Mexican officials stated during the campaign that the Mexican government would never, ever do that; Trump made this promise with the knowledge that it could never happen. Section 4 of Executive Order 13767 ordered the construction of the border wall with American government funds, which Trump demanded from Congress so that the order could go into effect. When the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, refused, Trump refused to pass that year’s federal budget, causing the longest government shutdown in U.S. history; Trump stated in an on-camera meeting with leaders in Congress, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security.”   Trump soon allowed the shutdown to end without funding for his border wall, then declared the number of immigrants crossing over the border a national emergency so that he could use money allotted by Congress to the Department of Defense to build the wall; specifically, he took 3.8 billion dollars from the DoD, much of it meant to buy equipment for National Guard units. The wall, which is currently under construction, is forecasted to have major negative environmental impact, especially since projects by Homeland Security do not have to conform to environmental standards (due to a law passed after 9/11).

It’s not totally clear what the effect of section 5 was; though section 5 discusses the construction of detention facilities on the border, the Trump administration has relied pretty heavily on private detention facilities to detain immigrants. ICE has worked with a variety of private companies to build new facilities. Private prison companies have been criticized due to a vast set of human rights concerns.

In section 6, Executive Order 13767 requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to “immediately take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings or their removal from the country to the extent permitted by law.”  Subsequently, ICE closed a program which connected immigrant families with case managers and allowed them to stay in the U.S. without being detained, under which 99 percent of involved families appeared at immigration court; the CEO overseeing it stated that “families have thrived” within the program.

It’s important to mention that there is an ongoing crisis of human rights violations at the border; we will be discussing this when discussing various executive orders related to it, but it’s bad. Six children have died in the custody of Border Patrol and had their deaths reported in the custody of Border Patrol during this administration, while the actual number is unclear; I am forced to consider them unreliable because, at one point during the administration, Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan testified before Congress three days after one of these deaths and did not report it to them. There were more than 5,800 complaints of abuse of migrant children in U.S. custody (such as molestation of children by staff) between 2014 and 2018. Recently, a whistleblower filed a complaint about forced sterilizations of immigrant women in an ICE facility. These human rights abuses urgently need to be addressed.

Section 8 of this order asks the Secretary of Homeland Security to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents. Last time the U.S. did this, it lowered hiring standards significantly. This may be why Border Patrol officials are arrested at 5 times the rate of other law enforcement officers, and why complaints of abuse are so rampant. Internal memos of the Trump administration have stated an intent to lower the hiring standards again. This provision may result in an increase in Border Patrol capacity, but lowering Border Patrol hiring standards will certainly have human consequences.

In addition, it should be noted that Trump deployed Border Patrol agents to Portland (a city in Oregon within 50 miles of the U.S. border) when largely peaceful protests against police brutality broke out in 2020. Trump stated outright that he would crack down on these protests, whom he called “violent anarchists”, with great force, and Border Patrol agents tear-gassed crowds of people, beat up protestors, and abducted people in unmarked cars before releasing them after it turned out they had committed no crime. The Border Patrol hiring surge gives Trump a heavily militarized police force without the oversight of the military or federal police.

Section 11 of this order is striking: “It is the policy of the executive branch to end the abuse of parole and asylum provisions currently used to prevent the lawful removal of removable aliens.”  It states that the Secretary of Homeland Security “shall immediately take all appropriate action to ensure that the parole and asylum provisions of Federal immigration law are not illegally exploited to prevent the removal of otherwise removable aliens.”  Of course, the asylum process set out by federal law requires only that immigrants come to this country and, after arriving, apply for asylum; any person applying for asylum is not a “removable alien”, but is allowed to live in the U.S. It’s unclear what Trump was asking the Secretary of Homeland Security to do, though it certainly appears that the illegal family separation of asylum seekers is related to this policy. (The specific family separation policy I’m referring to here began after this executive order, but this executive order set out policy directives.  See Executive Order 13841.)

Section 13 asks federal prosecutors to focus on cases in close proximity to the southern border; specifically, this seems to imply a focus on crimes committed by Latin American immigrants, while not specifically stating it. This provision does not target undocumented immigrants specifically.