By Todd Bensman as published January 29, 2020 by the Center for Immigration Studies
Officials high and low say that extra-continental migrants from the Middle East and everywhere else are exempt from the stew of new policies President Donald Trump has implemented mainly to deter Central Americans.
Senior and lower-ranking DHS officials confirm that President Trump’s much-credited “Wait in Mexico” and “Safe Third Country” policies, requiring push-backs from the American border to Mexico and other countries, are not applied to extra-continental migrants.
One early 2019, phasing-out and legally contested policy called “metering,” by which a few extra-continentals at a time last year were let over from Mexican camps, did delay some entries, to keep things orderly during the migration crisis. But are extra-continentals being pushed back to Mexico or other countries to claim asylum as a deterrent, as are Central Americans?
“Nope,” one U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services officer in a border asylum office answered when I asked. “We wave ‘em all through, every last one of them.”
A senior DHS policy official not authorized to speak on record confirmed the broad Trump policy exemption for extra-continentals.
Failing to apply push-back policies to extra-continentals presents a profound missed opportunity for the United States to use new immigration-control tools to reduce risks that some of these migrants might be deployed terrorists, unreformed war criminals, or violent militia fighters with blood on their hands and predisposed to victimizing American citizens.
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