Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop; DHS to Automatically Approve All Amnesty Applicants?

Whether the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies can efficiently process and approve the more than 1 million prosecutorial discretion applications soon to be submitted by illegal aliens age 16-30 is not the question. They cannot. Even the DHS realizes the futility of the task it faces.  As its first course of action, DHS immediately advised would be applicants that it will not accept requests until August 15.

If the DHS’s is sincere about its stated goal of doing due diligence on every candidate (and that’s a big “if”), the concern then becomes what the administration will do once it acknowledges that it’s bureaucratically impossible.

Obama’s announcement two weeks ago that DREAMers would not be deported gave little thought to the staggering list of nuts and bolts details necessary to carry out his grand amnesty.

U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, part of DHS, employs 18,000 and processes 5 million annual applications. In order to cope with one million additional deferred action requests from eligible aliens, USCIS would need to increase its staff by at least 3,000 to complete processing within one year. But with a federal hiring freeze in the works, adding to staff might be hard. And there’s no existing budget to cover the amnesty’s overhead. [House Plan Envisions Partial Hiring Freeze, by Eric Yoder, Washington Post, March 24, 2012]

Immigration lawyers suggest that DHS deputize 3,000 Customs and Border Patrol Agent and/or Transportation Security Administration personnel.

Great! That would mean that aliens would become work authorized faster while the border becomes less secure and air travelers have to wait in longer lines.

The instant the two month DHS application moratorium ends, the Hispanic lobby will put Obama under intense pressure to speed up the process. If you believe, as I do, that nothing immigration related is impossible under the Obama administration, doing away with the formalities of actual background checks could be waived or filed under “pending.” After all, as Obama is so fond of saying, “They’ve been American all their lives.”

Since it’s clear that Obama has cast his lot with what he mistakenly believes are “the crucial Hispanic voters,” the last thing he’d allow is for his prosecutorial discretion program to stagnate two months before the November election.