1. Right now, one single person – the President of the United States – can turn off the enforcement of our immigration laws unilaterally. For real.
2. And that’s just what President Obama has done. Since he’s the boss of federal immigration enforcement officers, he’s told them to stop enforcing our immigration laws.
3. The problem is that when our immigration laws aren’t enforced, it encourages more illegal immigration and causes the system to implode. Not cool.
4. As we move forward to make our immigration system work better, we need innovative solutions that guarantee our immigration laws will be enforced in the future.
5. And Republicans in the House of Representatives are doing just that. They are taking a step-by-step approach to fix our immigration system, starting with enforcement first.
6. House Republicans have introduced a bill that prevents the President from unilaterally shutting down the enforcement of our immigration laws. It does so by allowing state and local governments to enforce federal immigration law.
7. Right now, there are only 5,000 federal immigration enforcement officers across the United States. But there are more than 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers. We need both federal and local law enforcement officers to work together.
8. We trust state and local law enforcement officers to
enforce every other category of law. So if we trust them to do all that,
we should give them a role in enforcing our immigration laws. This just
makes sense.
9. By allowing hundreds of thousands of local law enforcement officers to enforce our immigration laws, we keep immigration enforcement up and operating, even when a president tries to unlawfully refuse to enforce our laws.
10. That way, we preserve the rule of law and protect the integrity of our generous immigration system no matter who is in the White House.
Learn more about this bill and other important bills that would strengthening the interior enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.