One would be hard-pressed to utilize adjectival alarmism that could sufficiently describe the outright national crisis that is currently transpiring at our inundated southern border. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, over 144,000 aliens were apprehended between ports of entry or deemed admissible at points of entry in the month of May alone — thus representing a 32% month-over-month increase from the already-record-shattering April monthly tally. Looking solely at apprehensions between points of entry, May’s total of 132,887 was more than double the number of apprehensions from just February — the month when Trump declared the situation at the border so dire that he declared a national emergency to help allocate funding to construct a wall and begin the slow process of ameliorating the influx.
Uncharted. Unprecedented. Unsustainable. Bonkers. Full-on emergency. System-wide emergency. One can insert any phrase of choice, but no phrase can truly account for the magnitude of the current problem. Over 1% of the entire nation of Guatemala has entered — legally or (usually) illegally — the U.S. since September and, even more amazingly, one-third of the entire impoverished nation plans to immigrate to the U.S. at some point in the future! Along with unvetted bogus asylees coming from fellow “Northern Triangle” nations El Salvador and Honduras, the summation of this mass migrant influx is social transformation without republican representation that massively enriches Mexican transnational cartel syndicates and leads to exacerbated narcotic and crime epidemics in our nation’s interior.
Ideally, the Department of Homeland Security would begin by immediately acting to finish the job on its (inexplicably) aborted re-writing of the erroneous, sovereignty-infringing Flores consent decree that dominated so much of the immigration-related 2018 media cycle. But the reality is also that President Donald Trump has many unilateral, statutorily delegated, and/or constitutionally inherent powers at his disposal to quell, contain, and ultimately stop this influx. As Ryan Girdusky recently tweeted, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) tops the list:
If properly enforced, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) could single-handedly eliminate this Central American-originated, Mexican cartel-orchestrated, harrowingly physically dangerous assault on our nation’s collective sovereignty. Here is the relevant statutory text (emphasis added):
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
It does not take a lawyer to read 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) and conclude that it is a wildly deferential statutory enactment. Indeed, pursuant to the text, the president can “suspend the entry of … any class of aliens” by mere “proclamation” if he deems the entry of those aliens to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” (itself a non-justiciable legal standard that is necessarily solely within the ambit and discretionary judgment of the president). Congress could not have possibly made its deference to the president more emphatic. Indeed, in the “travel ban” U.S. Supreme Court case last term of Trump v. Hawaii, Chief Justice John Roberts said that § 1182(f) “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” Justice Clarence Thomas, furthermore, noted in a Hawaii concurrence that “Section 1182(f) does not set forth any judicially enforceable limits that constrain the President. … Nor could it, since the President has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country.”
That inherent constitutional power on the part of the president referenced by Justice Thomas, furthermore, has long had a firm and indelible place throughout Supreme Court case law. In 1892’s Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, Justice Horace Gray summarized well the plenary power doctrine of the political branches over immigration policy when he opined: “It is not within the province of the judiciary to order that foreigners who have never been naturalized, nor acquired any domicile or residence within the United States, nor even been admitted into the country pursuant to law, shall be permitted to enter, in opposition to the constitutional and lawful measures of the legislative and executive branches of the national government” (emphasis added). Furthermore, in 1950’s Knauff v. Shaughnessy, Justice Sherman Minton observed: “The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty. The right to do so stems not alone from legislative power but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation” (emphasis added). Justice Antonin Scalia echoed this sentiment in his epic dissent in 2012’s Arizona v. United States, wherein he properly described “the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there” as “the defining characteristic of sovereignty.”
Mr. President, you have abundant power to stop this migrant influx on your own. All it takes is the proper unilateral invocation of 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) and the issuance of a far-reaching proclamation pursuant thereto. You should not waste a minute’s more time.