MIA: The White House’s 10-Point Immigration Plan

Last month, the media said the president’s immigration executive action would come in the form of a 10-point plan. Then in a national address on November 20, Obama only discussed his belief that hardworking illegal immigrants deserved a chance to have a better life in America. FAIR explained why every sentence of his speech was flawed or irrelevant but could only critique what was shared that night and none of that included the promised 10-point list.

As the press quickly churned out analysis and overviews of the president’s speech in the following days, no one wrote about the nine other aspects of this 10-point plan. The lack of information was no casual oversight; that only 10 percent of the White House’s proposal was mentioned Nov. 20 is because the rest dismantles what is left of the nation’s constitutional immigration policies.

At least 5 million illegal aliens will be given a get out of jail free card that gives them permission to remain in the U.S. for three years while they are given work authorization and become eligible for certain public benefits. Here are the nine other reforms the Department of Homeland Security plans to implement (note: much of the below information is verbatim to the DHS memos).

1. DACA eligibility will be expanded to cover all illegal aliens who entered the U.S. before the age of 16, and not just those born after June 15, 1981. The relief (including work authorization) will now last for three years rather than two.
2. Included in the 5 million, are those who unlike in the 2012 DACA, are considered eligible for deferred action because they are not removal priorities. This extension goes beyond what the president mentioned Nov. 20 of only parents of birthright children and those who have resided in the U.S. for more than five years.
3. DHS will implement a new department-wide enforcement and removal policy that specifically notes it does not consider any illegal alien who arrived after January 1, 2014, even one who was convicted of a minor crime, to be worth removing.
4. DHS will end the Secure Communities program and replace it with the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) which will closely and clearly reflect DHS’s new top enforcement priorities (ignoring currently residing illegal immigrants). The new program will continue to rely on fingerprint-based biometric data submitted during bookings by state and local law enforcement agencies and will identify to law enforcement agencies the specific criteria for which we will seek an individual in their custody. This all comes despite state anti-detainer laws that allow law enforcement officials to release a wanted suspect before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials can take them into custody.
5. ICE officials will receive pay raises, as well as realignments in their positions in order to ensure they are working with law enforcement, despite anti-detainer state laws that make working together increasingly difficult.
6. DHS will implement a Southern Border and Approaches Campaign Strategy to fundamentally alter the way in which we marshal resources to the border. To accomplish this, DHS is commissioning three task forces of various law enforcement agencies to focus on the southern maritime border, southern land border and the West Coast, and a third that will focus on investigations to support the other two task forces.
7. The provisional waiver program for illegal alien spouses and children of citizens will be expanded to include the spouses and children of lawful permanent residents, as well as the adult children of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
8. DHS will begin rulemaking to identify the conditions under which talented entrepreneurs should be paroled into the United States, on the ground that their entry would yield a significant public economic benefit.  DHS will also support the military and its recruitment efforts by working with the Department of Defense to address the availability of parole-in-place and deferred action to spouses, parents, and children of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents who seek to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces.
9. DHS will take a number of administrative actions to better enable U.S. businesses to hire and retain highly skilled foreign-born workers and strengthen and expand opportunities for students to gain on-the-job training, not unemployed or underemployed Americans.

Read the memos in full here.