How Trump can make his immigration pause survive courts and deliver real reform

President Donald Trump has vowed to stop Third World immigration. Here’s how to survive inevitable court challenges.

First, the president must exercise his authority under 8 USC 1182(f), but there is a twist. This law gives the president the authority to suspend the entry of “all aliens or any class of aliens” if he determines that their entry would be “prejudicial to the interests of the United States.” Plain language is quite broad and covers not only national security but also economic and social interests. Every president since Ronald Reagan has used this. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2018, stating that the statute “shows respect for the President.”

But targeting specific countries brings unnecessary challenges: national origin discrimination, demands for statistical justification, searching for details about how the target list was developed. Courts can endlessly pick apart country-by-country distinctions.

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A universal pause eliminates all this, and there is a compelling reason for this.

Admitting more immigrants is “detrimental” to America’s interests when our mechanisms for filtering welfare cases and asylum fraud are so broken. It might not be so bad if we could fix the mistakes quickly, but now it takes forever to deport anyone.

Request asylum. A DHS study found that 70 percent of asylum applications involve fraud or suspected fraud. It was so shocking that the Obama administration refused to release it until a whistleblower testified to Congress. Even the New York Times admits this is a problem. More than 1 million asylum applications were made in 2023 alone; This means approximately 700,000 fake applications.

Then there is the disaster of public impeachment. Since 1882, immigration law has expressly prohibited the admission of persons “who are at any time likely to become a public figure.” The logic is simple. There is no point in importing welfare cases. However, 54% of immigrant-headed households receive at least one form of public assistance. That’s because bureaucrats are perverting Congress’ intent by interpreting the bar to mean that it applies only if the alien is “primarily dependent” on assistance and payment is made in cash, meaning that Medicaid, public housing, or food stamps do not count. Efforts to restore the original meaning are being tied up in court by activists. Today, more than 11% of social benefits are claimed by immigrants, who are clearly assumed to never claim benefits. This costs taxpayers $109 billion annually.

And that doesn’t even include outright fraud. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota recently charged members of the Somali community with massive fraud schemes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in child nutrition programs, housing services and autism treatment. Law enforcement sources confirmed that millions of stolen funds were sent back to Somalia, where some of them “possibly ended up in the hands of Al-Shabaab, a terrorist group.”

When the screening mechanism cannot prevent welfare dependency and detect fraud on an industrial scale, despite clear legal prohibitions, continued mass adoption is clearly detrimental to the national interest.

The administration’s second line of defense is precautionary measures. Federal law requires plaintiffs seeking pretrial relief to post bail. The bond must be in an amount “appropriate to compensate for the costs and damages incurred” by any defendant wrongfully enjoined. Given the welfare spending involved, eligible bonds would have to be in the tens of millions of dollars. The district courts held that adequate guarantees were a “condition precedent” to granting preliminary injunctions and that their absence was “reversible error.” The Department should insist on the provision of adequate safeguards in all cases that challenge these immigration restrictions and take action to override measures without safeguards.

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Third, while legal battles continue in court, a strong defense strategy must be waged behind the scenes: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should revoke her immigration clearance powers. Congress gave the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to issue green cards, work permits, and other benefits. 8 USC 1255 states that the status of an alien ” [DHS Secretary]Even cases handled at consulates begin at DHS. In practice, the secretary has delegated this authority to immigration officers dispersed throughout USCIS field offices. If he revokes those authorizations, applications for green cards and other elected benefits would require his personal signature, gradually slowing down processing. This is not a workaround; The Secretary exercises the full authority given to him by Congress.

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More modest fixes have failed for decades. It’s time to end the immigration debate with decisive action.

It is a welcome development that the president called for stricter measures against immigrants in his last post, but we have heard such rhetoric before. The MAGA base has lost faith in the president’s team’s ability to follow up on his statements. They need to think creatively and act with a sense of urgency to make the President’s Truths a reality.