On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said that we can’t have comprehensive immigration reform until we get the numbers of people crossing the border down from the current levels that are “much bigger now” than they were “five, six, seven, eight years ago” and the discussion has to start with enforcing the law, “then you can have the debate about comprehensive immigration reform and all of the things that need to be done in between.”
Johnson stated that there should be legislation on getting DACA and getting more judges and faster hearings, “as long as we have numbers like you see on the screen now of 200,000, 150,000 a month crossing our border, it becomes a flash point, it makes it impossible politically to accomplish any form of comprehensive immigration reform. We’ve got to deal with the numbers. The problem is much bigger now than it was five, six, seven, eight years ago when I was dealing with it, plainly.”
He continued, “But one key to this, illegal immigration is a very information-sensitive phenomenon. It reacts sharply to information about perceived changes in enforcement policy in the United States. That’s one of the reasons why I, continually, while I was in office, kept making the point, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values, eleven words, and repeated it constantly and showed people in Central America that we were sending people back, we were deporting people, to the point where I’d actually go to Central America, greet the planes coming back, bring the news organizations in Central America with me so that people see that we actually are enforcing our laws, trying our best to do so in a lawful and humane manner. So, that has to be a starting point for this debate, and then you can have the debate about comprehensive immigration reform and all of the things that need to be done in between. At the very least, we have to protect the DACA recipients.”
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