Transcripts For CSPAN3 Janet Napolitano Discusses Trump Admi

This is way back when when i was a graduate student at the university of california berkeley where secretary napolitano runs these days, we learned about wedge issues. Wedge issues were those things that really divided the electorate, got everyone excited, everyone had an opinion about. Well, immigration has become a wedge issue. Wedge issues kind of come and go, and depending upon the year, and clearly since 2015 when President Trump started to run for office, immigration has been at the forefront in terms of one of the wedge issues. It divides not just democrats and republicans, it divides republicans. In fact, there is an nbc wall street journal poll out today that has fascinating divides within the Republican Party between Trump Supporters and people who were call themselves more or less traditional republicans. So, this is a big issue. This is an issue that everyone has an opinion about as opposed to many of the other issues we talk about here at brookings, telecommunications and things like that. Really, people dont normal people dont have strong opinions about those issues. This is one where people do have strong opinions and, therefore, it is of interest to everyone. The issue also runs the gamut from what i call a heart issue to a head issue. In other words, people have very strong opinions about what this means for our country, what kind of country we ought to have, and we get emotional about it. But it also goes to more, very practical issues. So, john hudak, my colleague who will be moderating this panel, and i, we just a couple months ago took a look at the practical side, okay. Is it possible to do what the president wants to do and in theory was elected to do . And we came up with some pretty interesting answers which i think will be brought out in the course of the discussion. And finally, one of the things about a political issue that becomes so hot is that often it is not exactly fact based. Remember, i think it was senator money han, the late senator moynahan, everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not everyone is entitled to their own facts. And, so, in thiS Immigration debate, we have been treated to a series of statements, some from the president , from his team, we simply dont have anything to do with reality. And well talk about that, im sure, too. So, thank you very much for joining us today. Were going to have our panel open up and give some statements, give some have some discussion. And then we will open it up to you in the audience and we will also open it up to people who are online. Okay . So, again, thank you very much, and would our panel please come up . [ applause ] all right, good morning, everybody. Welcome to brookings. My name is john hudak. Im the senior fellow of studies and public management. It is my honor to moderate this panel and to introduce all of you to our panelists to discuss what is a critically important issue as elaine mentioned broadly, but in the current political environment. Before i begin id like to thank the Carnegie Corporation for their support for our research and for the event today. Id like to welcome our viewers who are tuned in via a live webcast from the brookings website as well as the viewers on cspan watching this live. Any of you who want to engage us on social media, you can use Us Immigration to get into the conversation. Now on to our panelists. Immediately to my left, Janet Napolitano is currently the president of the university of california system, a post shes held since 2013. Prior to becoming president of u. C. She served as the third secretary of the department of Homeland Security during the first term of president obama and a little bit into his second term. Prior to that she served as the attorney general of arizona, and then the governor of arizona. Immediately to her left is carlos guevara, senior policy advisor, previously larasa. He leads the advocacy. Previously he served in the Obama Administration from 2014 to 2017 where he focused on developing and implementing immigration policy for the administration. And last but not least on the end, doris misner, senior fellow and director of the u. S. Immigration policy program at the migration policy institute. From 1993 to 2000 she served as commissioner of the immigration and naturalization service. And throughout a storeyed career she served under five president s. Id like to thank our panelists for what i hope will be an engaging conversation. Im going to start with my first question to president napolitano. Recently you joined a lawsuit over the president s decision to rescind daca as president of the university of california. The president s decision to repeal this in a sixmonth window with the hope that congress will step in and codify daca into law has made for a lot of controversy throughout the United States and in a lot of policy circles. You oversee a system with 4,000 students who are undocumented, many of whom have applied for daca protection. Can you talk a little bit about what this policy means broadly and what it means for your University System and for your students . Well, i certainly can. Im very familiar with daca. We did daca when i was the secretary of Homeland Security. And we did it out of a recognition that there was there were a whole host of individuals who had been brought here as children, had been raised in the country. And from any kind of Immigration Enforcement perspective should be able to stay in the country without fear of deportation. And, so, deferred action for childhood arrivals, daca, was the resulting program that we initiated. And it is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Each applicant is reviewed individually. They have to have a clean criminal record. They have to meet a whole host of other requirements to qualify. And at the university of california, you know, we estimate that we have around 4,000 undocumented students and the vast majority of them are in daca. Indeed, about a quarter of the 800,000 Daca Recipients in the country are in california. And these young people are, you know, theyre an important part of our University Community. They are by and large First Generation College students. They are and have done everything required of them academically to get into the university of california, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. You know, they have the brains, the energy, the initiative. Theyre exactly the kind of people we should want to stay in our country and contribute. So, the president s decision to rescind daca was wrong on a number of grounds, and one of the reasons the university sued was to seek and get judicial relief from the decision. Its wrong as a matter of law. Its wrong as a matter of Immigration Enforcement policy. And its inconsistent with our values as a country. Whether congress acts, who knows. You know, one can always hope. And we hear that there may have been a deal negotiated between the president and senator schumer and representative pelosi over chinese food and chocolate cake at the white house. But reducing that to legislation and legislation that will be brought to the floor and passed that the president will sign, and to get that all done in six months is why were going to advocate for it and believe strongly that congress can and should act. We also think as a matter of law the court should step in and protect, you know, these 800,000 young people. Sure. Well, thank you for those comments. Carlos, president napolitano talked a little bit about the University Community at u. C. And the Important Role Daca Recipients play in that community. Can you talk more broadly about immigrant communities nationwide, what daca has meant for those communities . And just as importantly, what this uncertainty that has stemmed from the president s announcement also means to those communities . John, thank you for the question and the opportunity to be here, and to my copanelists. Its an honor to be here with you both. Daca in many ways, i think back to where i began my legal career, once upon a time i was a line attorney doing a lot of these cases after the previously mentioned daca announcement. And i remember doing about 100 of these cases and thinking through the difficulty and the conversations that must have happened around the many kitchen tables across the country before coming to meet with me to do a consultation about what attaining daca may actually mean for a family and what doors might actually open. I mention this because, you know, Daca Recipients today by definition of the program have been here at least ten years. At the time the program was announced, there was a lot of uncertainty in the Community Even then about coming forward, submitting to criminal background checks, providing information about your residency excuse me, your residence, family members, and then oh, by the way, having to come up in many instances when youre a low income household with the money and take off the time to come and meet with someone like me to prepare your application. So, in many many ways what im trying to convey is the decision to apply to daca in the first instance took a lot of trust in the federal government. Those telling you, look, theres a small piece of the grand bargain here if you come forward youll have relief from deportation and have an opportunity to work and opportunities for your family. So, when we have the decision, john, about the rescission that the president took on september 5th, to put it mildly, the trust that was violated there and part of the deal, if you will, that was undertaken by many in the community was completely eroded. So, i think in this context we have to understand not only what we have ahead of us and what i believe truly to be a window and momentum to get to a legislative fix, but really have the empathy to consider what these families are going through right now. Even as we drive to get folks who are eligible between now and october 5th to come and meet with an attorney, to come to Community Meetings to learn about their rights and so forth. I was talking to some colleagues at American Immigration Lawyers Association recently that are reporting. We see ourselves in our own network. We have a network of 300 affiliates across the country including in california. Reporting that folks arent showing up for interviews or are not attending these opportunities to renew these clinics to renew their daca status, the foerks that are eligible. They are really concerned the environment, and well talk about this later, that has been created in the wake of this decision and the wake leading up to the election of the current president and since will have a Chilling Effect on folks coming out. We encourage strongly people do come out and we continue to create the momentum for a legislative fix through the congress. So, ill stop there. Great. Doris, youve worked under both democratic and republican president s on issues surrounding immigration. And i know recently youve done some work on president ial rhetoric around this issue. Could you talk a little bit about what the president s rhetoric both on the campaign trail and once hes been in office has meant for politics, what it has meant for voters, what its meant for advocacy communities around issues of immigration . Ill try. [ laughter ] thanks for the invitation. I think id like to take off from what elaine said about this being an area that is not exactly fact based, because what weve seen here is really new on immigration in the american experience, at least in modern times. And that is, a president ial candidacy fundamentally based on immigration as a top tier issue, that has never happened before. Others have tried it. Pete wilson tried it in the 1990s. Patrick buchanan tried it, its never been successful. This time it was successful. And, so, a result of that candidacy, of course, has been the rallying cry of build the wall, which characterized virtually every event that took place during the campaign. And an amazing drive as the president came into office to really pursue that agenda aggressively, quickly, initially through executive orders but with loots of other implications for budgets and possible legislation, including what has happened on daca, and daca is really the first issue thats come along in this agenda where theres been any rethinking whatsoever. Virtually Everything Else is straight out of the Campaign Play book, which is also quite extraordinary, you know, in our political experience. So, you have the build the wall rallying cry and of course the promise of aggressive enforcement, obey the law, enforce the law, everybody who is in the country illegally is subject to removal because they are in violation of the law. Well, the facts on the ground are incredibly different from that overall picture, and from that agenda. Because what we see just in two areas ill talk for a moment about border enforcement and then a moment about interior enforcement. In border enforcement, we are at a 40year, going on 50year lull in the numbers of apprehensions coming across the southwest border. Its an absolutely historic low. Weve come from a peak in 2000 of 1. 6 million apprehensions at the southwest border to an 88 drop by fiscal year 2016, and it will drop further when this year, fiscal 2017, numbers come in. 88 , that is an enormous percentage in any policy realm and certainly in Law Enforcement. And along with that weve come to a point where the original flows, mexican flows, have been supplanted by Central American flows. So, theres a real change in the character of what is taking place at the southwest border. And that change is it peaked in 2014. Weve been coming down since then. But even though it has supplanted the mexican flow, its had very much lower numbers than the mexican flow ever was and it is declining and it is a very different flow. Its what we call a mixed flow in immigration terms, in that it is made up of economic migration but also claims for protection, fleeing violence and persecution, with people in it that are, to some extent some of the them, eligible for Refugee Status in the United States. And dealing with that kind of a flow is a very different enforcement issue than dealing with the mexican flow because these are people that need to see judges and asylum officers and are wanting to turn themselves in to the government in order to pursue a possible claim for help rather than evading and trying to slip through the southwest border. So, if ever there is not a picture that looks for a wall as an answer, this is that kind of a picture. And even that Central American flow is now falling dramatically between since this administration came in office between then and now, weve seen a 40 drop even in the Central American flow. Again, a very significant percentage, particularly in light of the push factors for that flow. So, thats one set of numbers. The other set of numbers is in the interior where, of course, there is a much more muscular approach to enforcement, a very different philosophy of enforcement than you have just described that has to do with prosecutorial discretion and obviously things like Holding People like the Daca Recipients harmless. And this approach has created an enormous climate of fear, an enormous uncertainty in the country, and it is certainly true what we read in the press that the numbers of arrests are up and that the composition of the arrests are different. You have a larger share of noncriminals to criminals than was the case at the end of the obama years. But the shift is only over what we saw in the last two years. Its only over what was begun in 2014 with very strict guidelines that at the end of the Obama Administration were issued. If you look a little more broadly back to the earlier years in the obama adds Morgan Stanley Obama Administration, the record now falls short of what it was taking place between 2008 and 2012 and 13. So, whats currently happening is actually falling back to being on par or less than what it is that was taking place just a few years ago. And it is also resulting in less people actually being removed from the United States. 13 less people actually being sent back to their countries than had been the case under the prior administration, and thats because the border numbers are so low. There just are not that many people coming across the borders. So, the experience for countries that are source countries of immigration is less pressure of returns than had been the case earlier. Now, that is a huge gap between perception and reality, and it just seems to me i mean, there are lots of take aways from it, but the most straightforward take w straightforwa straightforward take away to me is what leadership tone matters, what the power is of the rhetoric and the message, because we now are in an era where immigration is being portrayed as a threat to the country, as a danger to the country, not as an asset to the country. And, you know, the result of that is that we are seeing changes in behavior on the ground because of the perceptions rather than what it is thats really happening. Thank you. What youve touched on, what each of you has touched on with regard to the daca rescission is that if congress doesnt act, 800,000 individuals, about 800,000 individuals are supposed to be deported. Now, each of you have worked in some capacity, in different capacities on issues of enforcement around immigration. So id like to hear from each of you something that a lot of people dont talk about, beyond the rhetoric, beyond a lot of what ends up in p