President at Your Cost: Racist Trump to Build a $9 Billion Dollar Wall [to Lock You In] & Restore His [In]Secure Communities Program

From [HERE] and [HERE] As part of a series of executive orders aimed at attacking non-white immigrants and non-white immigrant communities, President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that going forward, his administration will order the mandatory detention of all those apprehended or arrested by immigration enforcement officials.

The U.S. already spends more on all immigration enforcement — nearly $20 billion a year — than on all other federal law enforcement combined, and currently detains more immigrants each day — more than 42,000 — than ever before. Summary removals and mandatory detention are at an all-time high. And the focus on removals has come at the cost of due process, placing vulnerable populations like asylum seekers at risk. The number of asylum seekers held in detention increased threefold from 2010 to 2014.

Making detention mandatory will only exacerbate these issues.

It will also be expensive. The mandatory detention of all immigrants apprehended or arrested will cost the U.S. an additional $902 million each year, for a total of $9 billion in new federal spending over the next decade.

Here’s how we got that estimate: In FY 2016, DHS personnel apprehended and arrested 530,250 people, and booked 352,882 people into detention. Under Trump’s new policy, the additional 177,368 people who were not booked into detention last year would now be subject to mandatory detention.

Given that it costs, on average, $164 per day to detain someone in immigrant detention, and that the average number of days people spend in immigrant detention is 31, that means that the total new costs per year (177,368 x $164 x 31) comes out to $901,738, 912 per year.

And these estimates are by their nature conservative. They don’t take into account potentially lengthened stays in detention under this executive order, nor any costs to DHS for rapidly building or acquiring more detention facilities and bed space to meet new needs.

Construction on the wall will begin "in months," Trump said in an interview with ABC News, adding that planning for the wall is starting immediately. The president also said the U.S. will be "reimbursed at a later date" by Mexico for the costs of building the wall — an idea that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto flatly rejected earlier this month.

The border wall is included in an executive action titled Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements. The action also calls for hiring more Border Patrol agents, expanding detention space and emphasizing prosecuting criminal offenses related to the Southern border. It will also expand detention space — a move that could increase the use of private for-profit prisons. 

The Justice Department had already beefed up border prosecutions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The new action suggests law enforcement will be more empowered to prosecute and remove those in the country illegally for minor offenses.

A second executive action, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, will direct the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities.

Trump will also restore the Secure Communities Program — which had ceased to operate in 2014 after being used by both the Bush and Obama administrations to force state and local governments to share fingerprints and other data to help federal officials identify undocumented immigrants. Several states and cities sought to opt out of that system, which was also criticized for sometimes resulting in cases of mistaken detention of U.S. citizens. In late 2011 four native-born citizens — all Latino — were held for days at a time. In one such case, Antonio Montejano was arrested after shopping with his family at Sears. He spent $600 but forgot to pay for a $10 bottle of perfume his daughter had asked for. After he plead guilty to petty theft, a judge dropped the fine against him and told the police to let him go. Instead, authorities kept him locked in an L.A. county jail for two more days, because a federal database had flagged him as a possible illegal immigrant. Montejano said, when he told that to his jailors he was a natural born citizen, again and again, they didn't believe him. [MORE]

The executive actions also seek to force other countries to take back criminal aliens by using leverage such as withholding U.S. visas. And it would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to more aggressively arrest, detain and remove people from the U.S.

The actions are to be officially unveiled during Trump's visit to the Department of Homeland Security, slated for 1:25 p.m. ET. They come one day after the president tweeted, "Among many other things, we will build the wall."

Construction of a border wall was a keystone of Trump's presidential campaign.

A law already exists that experts believe give him the authority to start building that wall. It is the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It was bipartisan; it was overwhelmingly supported. That envisions both physical barriers and more of the high-tech stuff, like sensors and cameras.

The 2006 law mentions a two-layer fence — but that fence was never built and the legislation didn't include money to pay for one. Ten years later, the process could begin in earnest.