President Donald Trump is restarting the enforcement of a 1940 law that requires migrants to register their names and fingerprints with federal agencies, or else face criminal penalties that could accelerate their deportation and bar their legalization.
“The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws—we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce,” said a Department of Homeland Security statement. “We must know who is in our country for the safety and security of our homeland and all Americans.”
The DHS detailed the new policy, saying:
The INA requires that, with limited exceptions, all aliens 14 years of age or older who were not fingerprinted or registered when applying for a U.S. visa and who remain in the United States for 30 days or longer, must apply for registration and fingerprinting.
If found guilty, violators face up to six months in prison. The criminal law was passed in 1940 and publicly enforced until the 1960s, when the federal government restarted immigration inflows that had been curbed since 1924.
The law makes it clear that migrants are breaking criminal law if they don’t register, said Art Arthur, a former immigration judge who works with the Center for Immigration Studies.
If migrants do register, they can be easily found by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, he told Breitbart News.
But if the migrants do not register, their criminal violation will help state and local police forces detain them for later deportation, he added.
Also, because a refusal to register is a criminal violation of the law, federal agencies will gain a new tool against politicians who hide illegal immigrants in “sanctuary cities,” he said.
The policy covers at least 14 million illegal immigrants, including people who overstay their visas, such as former temporary workers and students. Under President Joe Biden, officials invited roughly nine million wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants across the southern border.
Each year, many illegal migrants are quietly legalized via “Adjustment of Status” loopholes in the nation’s migration laws. However, this registration requirement may allow officials to block their legalization process.
The DHS statement used the announcement to encourage illegal migrants to return home: “President Trump and Secretary Noem have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now. If you leave now, you may have the opportunity to return [legally] and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream.”.
Numerous lawsuits will likely delay the process. But “there’s nothing they can do … it is in the law,” said Arthur.
Pro-migration activists are aghast.
“We’re seeing an effort to expand arrests through any means possible, so this provision likely aims to create additional justifications to arrest and deport more individuals from the country,” pro-migration advocate Chris Ramon told The New York Times.
“I do not think they can do this without going through the proper legal processes,” Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University told the Washington Post. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go back and read the law that way.’ You have to explain why you’re changing it, why it’s legal.”
Immigration lawyers are alarmed:
The DHS plan “rests on a half-a-century-old law and is reminiscent of shameful historical examples of race- and nationality-based registry requirements in the United States,” complained the National Immigration Law Center. The complaint suggests the advocates will claim the law is illegal because it supposedly encourages racial discrimination.
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