Trump really does not want to give unauthorized immigrants seeking asylum due process

President Donald Trump still wants to deny due process to unauthorized immigrants crossing the United States border, sending a pair of Monday morning tweets criticizing the idea of hiring more immigration judges to process cases faster.

“Hiring manythousands [sic] of judge, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go - will always be disfunctional [sic],” Trump tweeted, instead advocating for immigrants to be sent back en masse.

The president’s June 25 tweets followed a series of tweets over the weekend in which he characterized unauthorized immigrants as people trying to “invade” and “break into” the United States.

“People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally. Children brought back to their country.” Trump tweeted. “If this is done, illegal immigration will be stopped in it’s [sic] tracks - and at very little, by comparison, cost.”

In response to the Trump administration’s prior policy of separating families at the border, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently introduced legislation to allow for the hiring of many more immigration judges. Cruz’s bill, the “Protect Kids and Parents Act,” would double the number of immigration judges from 375 to 750 so it would be possible for cases to be processed faster.

Cruz is proposing to speed up the process for reviewing asylum cases to 14 days, which many experts say is not nearly enough time. But even though the immigration court system has been backlogged with cases for years in part because of a shortage of judges, Trump apparently doesn’t think this is a problem.

In fact, he doesn’t think unauthorized immigrants should have the right to present their cases to immigration judges at all.

The president is continuing his hardline immigration rhetoric during the same week that House Republicans are set to vote on a comprehensive immigration bill that addresses the family separation issue (although the House bill does not increase the number of immigration judges as Cruz’s would).

Trump often blames congressional Democrats for “weak” immigration laws, but he’s also in complete disagreement with members of his own party on how to solve the problem. This is no accident, as Vox’s Dylan Scott wrote:

The Trump administration has come under fire from humanitarian groups, Democrats, and even many Republicans as the border crisis has become the biggest story in the country. But there is a belief among senior White House officials, including longtime adviser Stephen Miller, that fostering this controversy is a winning strategy for them and that it will galvanize conservative voters ahead of the November elections, as Politico reported.

And so at the same time that Trump wrongly claims Congress must act in order for family separation to end, he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to actually agree with a plan that would do the job.

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