Trump Forces Migrants to Join Registry or Face Fines, Prison (1)

The Trump administration is planning to require undocumented immigrants to join a federal registry, threatening potential fines, prison time and deportation for anyone caught failing to comply.

Adding to President Donald Trump’s broad immigration crackdown, enforcement of the “Alien Registration Requirement” is rooted in a 1940 law intended to root out subversive activities and identify anyone trying to overthrow the US government.

“The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws — we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Tuesday.

Under the new requirement, any foreigner aged 14 or older who hasn’t previously been fingerprinted or registered by the US government must join the registry and update their current address if they’ve been in the country more than 30 days. Parents will be required to register children under 14.

There’s been previous attempts to use a registration system on a smaller scale. Former President George W. Bush started a requirement for some visa holders shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, known as NSEERS, targeted all males 16 and older from 25 countries, all but one of which had a Muslim majority.

Making the failure to vountarily register a crime could put more migrants at risk. The Trump administration has prioritized deporting undocumented migrants with criminal charges, and this new measure could widen that net, according to David Leopold, a lawyer who leads the immigration practice at Cleveland-based UB Greensfelder.

“It’s a convoluted way to criminalize people who are not in any way violating any criminal law,” Leopold said. “Their whole narrative is that undocumented people in the US are all criminals because that’s the only way they can justify this mass deportation plan.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging Trump’s immigration policies in federal court, also decried the effort.

“The Trump administration’s decision to resurrect a registration system, including for minors, could not be more antithetical to American values and harkens back to times that our country has tried to put behind us,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project.

In Trump’s current term, he has pledged to carry out the largest deportation effort in US history. During his first two weeks in office, authorities made about 10,000 arrests and used military planes to carry out deportations to Central and South America.

But the pace of arrests has slowed, prompting frustration within the administration and multiple leadership shakeups at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as details of some planned arrest operations have leaked and migrant advocates and others have launched campaigns to advise migrants of their rights.

(Updates with comment from legal expert from sixth paragraph.)

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Alicia A. Caldwell in Los Angeles at acaldwell54@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sarah McGregor at smcgregor5@bloomberg.net

Brendan Case

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