Home Report A Brief History of Immigration Enforcement Guidelines and Restrictions
A Brief History of Immigration Enforcement Guidelines and Restrictions
“The immigration system . . . dysfunctional and flawed as it is, would work if properly implemented”
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 23, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump made increased immigration enforcement — both at the border and in the interior of the United States — a key point1 of his 2024 election campaign. To understand how the 47th president can make good on those promises, it’s crucial to understand how so-called “priorities” and “guidelines” have been used to hobble Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Border Patrol agents in their attempts to enforce the immigration laws.
What follows is a brief history of such non-enforcement “enforcement guidance”, going back five administrations.
Meissner Memo of November 17, 2000
For most of the time immigration laws have been enforced in the United States, ICE — and its predecessor the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — arrested, detained, and removed aliens who were excludable, deportable, or removable, without any particular focus on their own equities or whether they were criminals or not.
That changed, to a degree, on November 17, 2000, when then-INS Commissioner Doris Meissner issued a memo captioned “Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion”2 (Meissner memo).
Note that the Meissner memo was issued 10 days after the 2000 presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, but 24 days before the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bush v. Gore,3 which essentially decided the election in Bush’s favor. It was also issued shortly before Meissner resigned as commissioner.
https://cis.org/Report/Brief-History-Immigration-Enforcement-Guidelines-and-Restrictions
