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Military spending bill provision reduces deportation risk for immigrant recruits
Source: Washington Post
Military spending bill provision reduces deportation risk for immigrant recruits
By Alex Horton December 12 at 5:55 PM
The defense authorization bill signed Tuesday by President Trump includes a measure to shield immigrant recruits from enlistment contract cancellations — and the specter of deportation — as they wait for drawn-out background checks to be completed, a positive development in the year-long effort by advocates and lawmakers to keep skilled noncitizens as a reliable recruiting pool.
The amendment, inserted by Sens. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) into the $700 billion spending bill, allows Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to give active-duty immigrant recruits one additional year to wait for background checks to be finalized before they leave for basic training.
Previous rules allowed for two years of waiting time, but a host of time-consuming and complicated security measures introduced in September 2016 slowed the verification process so severely that the Pentagon shuttered the program last December under a logjam of background screenings and concerns over foreign infiltrators.
The result: Recruits waited so long that more than 1,000 identified by the Pentagon in June lost legal immigration status and came under threat of deportation. Others proactively sought asylum. One Iraqi national sought refuge in Canada to avoid deportation and capture by the Islamic State, and others from countries with weak rule of law, such as Russia and China, feared jail time if they were banished to their home nations and discovered to have enlisted in the U.S. military.
-snip-
By Alex Horton December 12 at 5:55 PM
The defense authorization bill signed Tuesday by President Trump includes a measure to shield immigrant recruits from enlistment contract cancellations — and the specter of deportation — as they wait for drawn-out background checks to be completed, a positive development in the year-long effort by advocates and lawmakers to keep skilled noncitizens as a reliable recruiting pool.
The amendment, inserted by Sens. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) into the $700 billion spending bill, allows Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to give active-duty immigrant recruits one additional year to wait for background checks to be finalized before they leave for basic training.
Previous rules allowed for two years of waiting time, but a host of time-consuming and complicated security measures introduced in September 2016 slowed the verification process so severely that the Pentagon shuttered the program last December under a logjam of background screenings and concerns over foreign infiltrators.
The result: Recruits waited so long that more than 1,000 identified by the Pentagon in June lost legal immigration status and came under threat of deportation. Others proactively sought asylum. One Iraqi national sought refuge in Canada to avoid deportation and capture by the Islamic State, and others from countries with weak rule of law, such as Russia and China, feared jail time if they were banished to their home nations and discovered to have enlisted in the U.S. military.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/12/12/massive-military-spending-bill-provision-reduces-deportation-risk-for-immigrant-recruits/