Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman has canceled a Biden-era policy that blocked agents and officers from arresting unauthorized immigrants near “sensitive” locations such as hospitals, schools, parks and day care centers.
Mr. Huffman said rather than have a firm rule, agents and officers can now use “common sense” to decide where to make arrests.
“This action empowers the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens — including murders and rapists — who have illegally come into our country,” Mr. Huffman said.
He also said his department has shut down what he called abuses of immigration “parole,” which is supposed to be used for select urgent cases but which the Biden administration used to catch and release 1.5 million migrants.
“This was all stopped on Day 1 of the Trump administration. This action will return the humanitarian parole program to its original purpose of looking at migrants on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
The changes began minutes after Mr. Trump was sworn in.
At Customs and Border Protection, CBP One, a smartphone app that allows visitors to schedule their entries, a notice now says that “undocumented aliens” are no longer able to use it. It’s not taking new appointments and existing appointments have been canceled.
At U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which allowed unauthorized migrants from those countries to fly directly into U.S. airports and claim “parole,” is now deemed “archived.”
“That’s fantastic,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project, who has spent decades pushing for stiffer immigration enforcement.
Mr. Trump’s big pronouncements and executive orders declaring a national emergency at the border and attempting to limit birthright citizenship drew most of the attention Monday.
But his operatives on the ground were moving quickly to assert control at Homeland Security and begin to unravel the apparatus that fueled the largest migrant surge in the nation’s history on President Biden’s watch.
Homeland Security said it had also restarted the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Mr. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
MPP allowed Border Patrol agents to usher illegal border crossers quickly back into Mexico to await their immigration proceedings, rather than releasing them into the U.S. Its use helped solve the 2019 migrant surge.
The Biden administration tried to end MPP but got bogged down in a legal battle. Still, the previous administration limited its use, saying that it was “impossible” to restart the program.
With Mr. Trump now at the helm, the department reversed itself Tuesday.
“The situation at the border has changed and the facts on the ground are favorable to resuming implementation of the 2019 MPP policy,” the department said.
Changing the arrest policy for sensitive locations was a major ask for deportation officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said they were blocked from making arrests because a migrant’s home was too close to a sensitive location.
Some cases reported to The Washington Times included migrants accused of sexual assault or crimes against children.
ICE has long had some rules about where arrests could be made. Churches and schools were usually considered off-limits, for example.
But the Biden policy, written by then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vastly expanded the no-go areas to include parks, school bus stops, food banks, homeless shelters, day care centers, offices of community-based organizations, and public gatherings such as marches, rallies, parades, funerals and weddings. The policy applied to the areas “near” those locations, too.
The result was a network of, effectively, sanctuary areas in major cities.
In the District of Columbia, for example, The Washington Times plotted those locations on a map using 500 feet as the no-go zone near them, and concluded that most of the city was out of bounds for arrests.
Immigrant-rights groups have long defended the sensitive locations policy as an important nod to humane treatment of migrants.
When reports that Mr. Trump was considering a change surfaced after the election, leaders of those groups called the idea “cruelty.”
“Targeting immigrants for arrests and deportation is destructive and diverts resources away from initiatives that actually promote safety and well-being,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.