Washington Post: Feds to Reverse Biden’s ‘Catch and Release’ Strategy

President Donald Trump’s deputies have reversed the Democrats’ “catch and release” migration strategy and are now enforcing the federal law that requires migrants to be detained until their asylum claims are resolved.

Immigration “lawyers say the policy will apply to millions of immigrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border over the past few decades, including under the Biden administration,” says an unhappy article in the Washington Post.: 

In a July 8 memo, Todd M. Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told officers that such immigrants should be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” which can take months or years …

In the past, immigrants residing in the U.S. interior generally have been allowed [by Democratic Party appointees] to request a bond hearing [and release] before an immigration judge. But Lyons wrote that the Trump administration’s departments of Homeland Security and Justice had “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” and determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” In rare exceptions immigrants may be released on parole, but that decision will be up to an immigration officer, not a judge, he wrote.

The policy reversal is made possible by the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which provided almost $50 billion for detention facilities over the next four years. That flood of cash can be used for detention centers to detain many migrants as officials process their deportation papers, even if the migrants have not committed additional crimes unrelated to migration.

The new policy spotlights the far-reaching, determined, and detailed effort by Trump’s deputies to fulfill his campaign promises, end illegal migration, and help improve Americans’ jobs and wages.

The ” catch and release” policy was created by the 2010 “Morton Memos” in President Barack Obama’s administration.
The Obama policy flouted the federal law and allowed migrants to get jobs while they waited for their asylum hearings. The jobs allowed the migrants to pay off their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels, regardless of how weak their asylum claims.

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In turn, the policy greatly encouraged economic migration into Americans’ communities by reassuring would-be migrants that they would safely pay off the debts and upfront costs of hiring coyotes and cartels needed to get them into the United States.

The result was the creation of a gigantic conveyor belt that moved migrants north and moved their hard-earned cash south to the cartels, coyotes, and home countries. The economic force was largely ignored by establishment journalists, most of whom were hired to advertise the migrants’ concerns and worries.

This hidden economic process has allowed at least 15 million rational migrants to make their way into American jobs, communities, society, and politics since 2010. The government’s mass movement of migrants into the United States flatlined wages and spiked housing prices, and caused many murders and crimes. Those civic and personal disasters ensured Trump’s November victory.

The policy was led by Alejandro Mayorkas, who worked as a top official for Obama and President Joe Biden. In turn, Mayorkas worked in close cooperation with business groups, including the FWD.us lobby for West Coast consumer-economy investors.

Admittedly, the Democrats’ policy also caused the murder and rape of many thousands of migrants, but that cost was largely hidden by the compliant media in the United States.

Mayorkas and others defended the catch and release policy as an economic stimulant for businesses.

In his first term, Trump’s deputies were too few and inexperienced to reverse the disaster during his first term. Also,  Congress refused the needed funding for enforcement.

Amid the vast human, economic, and political wreckage caused by the federal government’s ruthless Extraction Migration strategy, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to enforce Congress’s “shall detain” law. In a June 2022 decision, a five-judge majority wrote in Biden vs Texas:

We need not and do not decide whether the detention requirement in section 1225(b)(2)(A) is subject to principles of law enforcement discretion, as the Government argues, or whether the Government’s current practices simply violate that provision.

Trump’s 2025 policy will be an economic disaster for the interst group that profits from the cartel-managed migration. The Washington Post reported:

Since the memos were issued last week, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said members had reported that immigrants were being denied bond hearings in more than a dozen immigration courts across the United States, including in New York, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia. The Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts.

“This is their way of putting in place nationwide a method of detaining even more people,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s requiring the detention of far more people without any real review of their individual circumstances.”