No. of Recommendations: 6
If I'm smuggling people in the United States, I'm sending them over the border. I'm blending them in with groups of little kids. I'm thinking up ways to get into the country with the explicit purpose of exploiting this rotten asylum program that we have.
Why would you do that? There's no benefit to trying to "blend them in" with groups of little kids - they'll be separated away from the kids immediately as they all go into government detention and an interview with a federal DHS official. There's no blending at all. You want to blend them in with a plane full of ordinary tourists (also with a bunch of kids) that are just going through ordinary customs. The whole point is to not get detained by the government - starting off detained by the government. You're detained until you can have your credible fear interview, which is far more intensive than what Customs would ask you if you were just on a plane. And you have to be successful in bluffing your way through through the credible fear determination with no documentation, passport, fellow-travelers, or even a cover story - else you can be put into summary removal hearings. It's foolish to the extreme. The "rotten asylum program" is only rotten because it's under-equipped to deal with hundreds of thousands of people who need to have asylum hearings before an ILJ, not because you walk out of ICE the day after Border Patrol picks you up with no real examination.
Just the dumbest plan....you're better off just trying to cross the border in the dead of night, rather than turn yourself into the Border Patrol. And vastly better off just doing what every other person who is actually trying to come to the country with a meaningful plan to do harm on behalf of a foreign terrorist group or enemy intelligence agency - just get some travel documents and fly in, like a normal terrorist/spy.
Then you just...take your sweet time providing the tests.
Guess what that buys you? Leverage on Lopez Obrador. Big time.
How?
You can't make them take the test before they enter the country. Because we're catching all these people on the U.S. side of the border. Because you can't physically prevent them from crossing the border, for the reasons we've discussed. You just catch them literally immediately after (and they're usually just turning themselves in anyway).
Once they're here, you can't prevent them from making their asylum claim. The statute allows them to do it. You can delay processing it while you wait for a blood test. Or after the blood test. Or just delay it a lot - again, we're already doing that, to the tune of 4.5 years. But they're already in the U.S., and you can't summarily deport them.
So how does that put any leverage on Lopez Obrador? Or accomplish anything at all? Again, if you just want to detain them until their asylum hearing, you already have the legal ability to do that - you just don't have anywhere to house them or the money to feed and clothe and attend to their medical needs.
I literally don't understand what introducing a blood test into the equation actually accomplishes. Are you imagining that they would have to await their blood test in Mexico? There's no legal way for the Administration to do that - again, these are all people who are already physically present in the U.S.
