“I ask you to have mercy. Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.”
Trump did not appear happy during the remarks and dismissed them when asked for a reaction later.
“Not too exciting,” he said about Budde’s sermon.
The executive orders Trump issued form part of his campaign promise to “fix the crisis” at the US-Mexico border, and there’s no doubt he has a mandate to do it.
In an Ipsos/New York Times poll released this week, more than 50 per cent of respondents expressed some desire to see Trump follow through on his threat to deport everyone living in the US without authorisation.
But whether he succeeds in fixing the broken system he inherited is far from certain.
For instance, Trump’s push to scrap birthright citizenship – which grants automatic citizenship to individuals born on US soil – is already facing lawsuits from a coalition of Democratic attorneys-general from 22 states, who argue the action is unconstitutional.
“The president cannot, with a stroke of a pen, write the 14th Amendment out of existence, period,” said New Jersey’s Attorney-General Matt Platkin. The US Constitution’s 14th Amendment states that anyone born or naturalised in the country are “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”.
Trump’s plan to revive the so-called “remain in Mexico” policy, which requires anyone seeking to enter the US through Mexico to wait there to be processed, has already had pushback from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and members of her cabinet.
“If they reinstate it, this is something we don’t agree with,” Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente said in a press conference this week. “We have a different focus. We want to adjust it.”
And Trump’s grand plan to deport undocumented immigrants also raised fundamental questions on how exactly he plans to carry out the largest law enforcement operation in history, given resources are already stretched.
Loading
There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America, but most are not violent criminals, contrary to the narrative that helped Trump get elected. Many have been here for years, working in sectors such as agriculture, construction and hospitality, and paying taxes.
To that end, what impact will removing them have on the economy? What happens to the millions of children who became American citizens at birth but live with an undocumented family member? If illegal immigrants are rounded up, where exactly will they go? What happens if a country of origin, or origin of their parents, refuses to take them in? Will mass detention centres be built to detain them before they are deported – and if so, what’s the price tag?
As someone who has spent time along the 3000-kilometre border that separates the US and Mexico, I can tell you first hand: America’s immigration system is a mess, thanks to the failures of successive governments over many years.
Figures show that authorities encountered more than 3 million people crossing the border in the last fiscal year – far more than the 1.9 million recorded in 2021, which was Biden’s first year in office.
However, most of those people are not criminals or potential terrorists but people hoping to apply for asylum after fleeing poverty, violence or authoritarian rule in their own country.
A large part of the problem is that immigration courts are so underfunded and backlogged that migrants entering the US pursuing the “great American dream” often have to wait years to obtain an asylum hearing.
As the numbers continue to surge, many have been sent to places such as New York, Chicago, Denver and my hometown of Washington – so-called “sanctuary cities” where every person in need of housing has a unique legal right to shelter. This, too, has become completely unsustainable.
But if Trump was serious about fixing the border he could have ordered congressional Republicans to support a deal that was brokered last year, which would have gone some way to tackling the crisis.
Had it been approved, it would have required the border to be closed if encounters reached a daily average of 5000 in a week or 8500 on a single day. It would have also accelerated the asylum process for people with valid claims and limited the use of parole to release migrants into the US.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was arguably the only substantial bipartisan border bill in years. Trump told his team to reject it so he could make the crisis the central feature of his election campaign.