U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson joined NJTV News’ Mary Alice Williams to have an in-depth conversation about the state of security in the U.S. today. Find the rest of the series here.
The new Republican led Congress has already riled a New Jersey senator. They’ve tucked into a bill funding Homeland Security an amendment to overturn President Obama’s executive order shielding millions of immigrants from deportation. Sen. Robert Menendez calls that an “overreaching, anti-immigrant poison pill.” And he’s hosting a big immigration rally Friday night in Elizabeth. Implementation of the immigration order is, nonetheless, underway. U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson told NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams that he had issued a number of directives on immigration.
“What I issued and what I had a large role in drafting were a number of directives from the secretary of Homeland Security, made to various components of DHS directing certain things,” said Johnson. “Directing, for example, a realignment of our removal priorities, how we are going to focus our resources that we use to deport people to provide greater emphasis on deporting convicted criminals, national security threats, recent illegal arrivals into the country.”
Johnson said that DHS has realigned its removal priorities and created a program to permit people who have been in the shadows for years who’ve become integrated members of society and have committed no serious crimes to come forward and be held accountable. He said that he issued the directive to U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services in response to President Obama’s direction to fix the broken immigration system.
According to Johnson, about 68,000 unaccompanied children crossed the southwest border in fiscal year 2014. He said DHS is placing a greater emphasis on border security and returning people who come to the United States illegally in the future and who entered illegally within the last year.
Johnson said that resources have increased and that he was recently in Texas for the announcement of a new detention facility. According to Johnson, over the past summer more people were repatriated at a faster rate. He also said that a message needs to be sent about the U.S. borders.
“We really do need to send a message that our borders are not open to illegal migration,” said Johnson. “If you’ve been here a number of years, if you’ve been here five years, you have children who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents and you’ve committed no crimes or you’ve committed no serious crimes, you have the opportunity to come out of the shadows and be held accountable, but our borders are not open to future illegal migration. That is an important piece of our executive actions that I’m going to continue to emphasize.”
While processing people who enter the country illegally, Johnson said that DHS preserves their ability to assert a claim for asylum consistent with the law. He said that a number of immigrants are doing that and that those claims will be litigated in front of an immigration judge.
Johnson said that immigration judges have been added to the courts, along with a number of resources to make the process better. Johnson also said that the number of unaccompanied minors rose dramatically last spring.
“One thing I’d like to say, the numbers of unaccompanied kids and families in 2014 rose in the period March, April, May to an unprecedented level,” said Johnson. “It actually reached its peak on June 10, 2014. And then it declined very dramatically to the point now where the numbers are at their lowest level in almost two years. A lot of that is seasonal. Illegal migration tends to rise at the beginning of the year and then it peaks in early summer and then it drops off when it gets really hot. This decline we saw in the kids from last summer and the families was so sharp. I tend to believe that a number of the other things we did that we put in place — the surge of resources, turning people around faster — contributed to that as well and I believe that we need to keep those resources in place, which is one of the things we’ve asked Congress to support us in doing.”