Trump delays ICE deportation raids to see if Congress will work out solution to border crisis

Donald Trump has delayed a planned round-up of illegal immigrants for two weeks so that Democrats and Republicans can work out a solution to the border crisis that has been going on for months.

The US president declared that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would start catching and deporting millions of illegal immigrants earlier this week. On Saturday, he tweeted that Democrats had asked him to put this process on hold, so he gave it two weeks to see if the parties “can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

Lawmakers have been at loggerheads over how to solve the situation at the border with Mexico, which turned into a humanitarian crisis as thousands of people from Central American countries came seeking asylum. Trump is insisting on tougher measures to stop the inflow of immigrants, and is planning to build a wall at the border. Democrats have been decrying his policy, with liberal cities resisting ICE raids. However, attempts to find common ground have failed so far and the political showdown even led to the longest shutdown in US history last winter.

Almost 600,000 people have been apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection since October last year, and the detention facilities are overcrowded. The courts that are supposed to deal with immigration cases are backlogged for months. Horrific accounts of the conditions in which immigrants, and children in particular, are  appearing in US liberal media on a daily basis, prompting more anger against the administration, even though the same facilities were operational under Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, conservative media and politicians often talk about incidents in which illegal immigrants committed crimes and returned to the US after being deported. ICE insists that their main focus is on removing those illegal immigrants “who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.”

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While US lawmakers have been unable to find a solution to the immigration crisis, the White House has been pressuring Mexico to stop the flow of people by threatening to impose tariffs. Washington also cut aid packages to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, from which most of the immigrants come running from poverty, high crime rates and oppression at the hands of governments largely supported by the US.

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