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The Trump administrations attempts to translate the presidents hard-line campaign rhetoric on immigration into reality have run into two major roadblocks: the complexity of reshaping a sprawling immigration system and a president who has not been clear about how he wants to change it.

In his first four weeks in office, President Trump has sought to use his executive powers to punch through Washingtons legislative and bureaucratic hurdles and make quick progress on pledges to crack down on illegal immigrants and tighten border control.

But Trump has been vague about his goals and how to achieve them and his aides have struggled to interpret his orders.

The resulting turmoil has included a successful legal challenge halting his immigration travel ban, fears among congressional Republicans over the White Houses more extreme measures and widespread anxiety among immigrant communities across the country.

The latest flash point erupted Friday over reports that the Department of Homeland Security was considering mobilizing 100,000 National Guard troops to help round up millions of unauthorized immigrants in 11 states, including some such as Colorado and Oregon far from the southern border.

The disclosure surprised state officials who oversee the troops and rattled immigrant rights advocates, who have accused federal authorities of exploiting fuzzy White House edicts to frighten vulnerable populations. Trump aides quickly distanced the White House from a memo that federal authorities called a very early draft of an implementation plan for Trumps early executive orders that had not been seen or approved by DHS Secretary John Kelly.

That is 100% not true, press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters. There is no effort at all ... to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants.

[Trump calls the news media the enemy of the American people]

Some immigration hard-liners viewed the leak of the memo to the Associated Press, which first reported on it, as evidence that anonymous bureaucrats were intent on undermining the administration.

Trump has faced pockets of resistance within the government to his immigration orders, including the ill-fated travel ban on all refugees and on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries that former acting attorney general Sally Yates said she would not defend in court. Although Trump fired her, the order was later suspended by a federal judge.

Trump has promised to put forward a new travel ban order next week.

To border control hawks, the presidents bumpy start has fostered a sense that a White House stocked heavily with political newcomers is learning the hard way just how difficult amending immigration policies can be. Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations unsuccessfully pursued sweeping comprehensive reform legislation that failed to win congressional approval.

Despite his Archie Bunkerisms that he was deporting everyone during the campaign, Trump and his aides are still getting their sea legs on immigration, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for lower immigration levels. Theyre starting to realize that it takes time to turn an aircraft carrier around.

On the other side, immigrant rights advocates pointed to a series of episodes as evidence that federal agents are overstepping their bounds to accommodate the wishes of a president who at one point campaigned on plans for a nationwide deportation force.

In one recent case, an undocumented woman seeking a protective order from an abusive boyfriend was arrested by immigration agents at a Texas courthouse.

Among Trumps earliest executive orders were measures to vastly expand the pool of immigrants who were priorities for deportation and a move to revive a program started by the George W. Bush administration that would deputize local police with immigration enforcement powers.

There are clear signs that this administration is, in fact, going on a manhunt, said Marielena Hincapi, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She called the administrations tactics deeply troubling we believe unlawful.

[Federal immigration raids net many without criminal records, sowing fear]

Within the West Wing there is a sharp ideological split among the presidents senior advisers over just how far to go on enforcement measures. Strategist Stephen K. Bannon, policy director Stephen Miller and other hard-liners have advocated for forceful restrictionist policies in keeping with Trumps campaign rhetoric, while others such as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus remain wary of the potential political fallout from the most severe measures.

Preibus, the former Republican National Committee chairman, oversaw a 2013 report that said the party must embrace comprehensive immigration reform that included legalization measures to make inroads within the fast-growing Latino population.

Their disagreements over how to proceed have been accentuated by indecision from Trump himself. The president who vowed to get them all out! during the campaign has equivocated on a promise to immediately terminate an Obama administration program that has granted work permits to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the country illegally as children.

Trump had derided the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which President Obama created through executive authority in 2012, as an unconstitutional executive amnesty.

But at a news conference Thursday, Trump called the fate of the program one of the most difficult subjects I have and vowed to show great heart as he deliberates over the programs fate.

I have to deal with a lot of people, dont forget. And I have to convince them what Im saying is right, Trump said. I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do and, you know, the laws rough.... Its very, very rough.

[Trump lashes out at so-called judge who temporarily blocked travel ban]

One of the people Trump will have to persuade is Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a conservative on immigration who was one of his earliest campaign supporters. King praised some of the presidents early moves to ramp up enforcement raids, but he said hes been meeting regularly with like-minded rule-of-law conservatives to discuss Trumps delays on ending DACA.

Trumps presidency pivots on whether he keeps this promise, King said. So that means you simply cannot legalize people that are here illegally and you cannot ratify an edict of President Obama that is blatantly unconstitutional.

Immigration lawyers said they are uncertain about what to advise their clients. Although DHS continues to process DACA applications, advocates were jolted by the reports this week that a 23-year-old Mexican man in Seattle who is covered by the program was arrested during an enforcement raid.

The detention came after enforcement actions in several cities netted 683 immigrants. The mans lawyers have denied allegations from authorities that he has gang ties.

Im going to watch it carefully, and Im also going to see if other DACA recipients are targets, said Patrick Taurel, an immigration lawyer in Washington with clients in the program. If that happens, it could be death by thousand cuts. Rather than issue a new executive order terminating a very popular program and a very sympathetic program, he could effectively end it by creating fear.

To Stuart Anderson, executive director of the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, the Trump administrations early missteps threaten to erode its credibility on the presidents signature issue.

It makes people highly suspect of even more reasonable measures that might be able to get more support, Anderson said. It basically starts to make all their policies on immigration radioactive.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Ed OKeefe and Sandhya Somashekhar contributed to this report.

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Trump's hardline immigration rhetoric runs into obstacles including Trump - Washington Post

Colorado has an unusually fast-paced economy. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, our states economy has recently been growing consistently at about twice the rate of the rest of the nation. Thats great news but it means we face some unusual challenges, too, like making sure that our employment pipeline is full of qualified workers. Because the different sectors of the economy are so tightly linked, workforce shortages in one field could lead to problems all across the economic chain.

Of course, there is a simple solution to filling these workforce shortages: immigrants. For decades we have failed to overhaul an immigration system that has not evolved with a changing global economy. Americas needs have shifted and we need immigration laws that match the economic realities of 2016.

Fortunately, Colorado benefits from the presence of a large immigrant population. Most immigrants come to the United States to work, which means that while a large share of Americans are aging into retirement, many immigrants are ready to enter the workforce. Compared with the native-born population, foreign-born Coloradans in the 6th Congressional District are over 20 percent more likely to be of working age than natural born citizens, according to data from the New American Economy (NAE), a bipartisan organization that supports immigration reform benefitingthe American economy. Immigrants fill the vital positions in our economy that move us forward.

Its true that immigrants are major contributors to some of the sectors you might think of first. The 6th Congressional Districts agriculture sector depends on immigration it supplies about 21 percent of its workforce. But immigrants are also critical to our growing advanced-technology sector. Close to 10 percent of workers in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields in Colorado are immigrants.

Yet, our farmers dont have a functional H-2A visa program to bring in the labor they need, and for many of those talented Ph.D. students, there is no clear path to stay after graduation. We need an immigration system that helps our economy grow, not one that sends people home after theyve trained at our universities and fails to provide the workforce that our industries need.

In addition to filling workforce needs, Colorados immigrants are big economic contributors as well. According to NAE, immigrant-led households in our district earned more than $3.3 billion in 2014. That same year, these same individuals contributed more than $240 million in state and local taxes, money that gets reinvested into our schools and roads. This is on top of the close to $544 million they paid in federal taxes, contributing to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

So, while immigration reform is a moral imperative for many, it is an economic necessity for all. We need deliberate, thoughtful policies that address the whole spectrum of immigration issues from ensuring that our businesses can attract and retain the talent they need to grow to providing our farmers the workforce they need to put food on our tables. We should embrace the moment, and I encourage you to visit NewAmericanEconomy.org to learn more about the contributions of immigrants in Colorado. Together, we can realize the new American economy.

Robert Golden is president and CEO of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.

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GOLDEN: Immigration reform a moral imperative for many, an ... - Aurora Sentinel

Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a regular contributor to Reason magazine and Real Clear Politics.

Controversy over President Donald Trumps immigration policies has flared up with reports of raids and deportations of people in the country illegally.

While liberals and progressives denounce the inhumanity of these actions, many conservatives see them as proper law enforcement and fulfillment of campaign promises. They also cry double standard, claiming that President Barack Obama was deporting just as many people.

Whos right and what should be done?

Conservative arguments contain something of a paradox: One moment Obama was soft on people here illegally, the next he was just as tough as Trump. This paradox was evident when candidate Trump addressed crowds vowing to end lax Obama policies that let thousands of criminal aliens roam our streets, then complained that he was being demonized for promising deportations when Obama had moved millions of people out and nobody talks about it.

Obama indeed deported more such people than any other president, though some conservatives have said that the numbers were inflated by counting people caught right after crossing the border. It is not quite true that no progressives complained; some immigrant advocates dubbed Obama deporter in chief.

It seems clear that deportation priorities have shifted under Trump. Under Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents focused primarily on deporting people here illegally who had committed serious offenses. (In 2015, more than 90 percent of those deported had criminal records.) Trump, too, is prioritizing removal of criminals, but with instructions to include immigration-law violators. Even a Seattle man protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and lacking a criminal record may face deportation.

One case that has gotten a lot of attention is that of Guadalupe Garca de Rayos of Mesa, Arizona. The 35-year-old mother of two, brought here by her Mexican parents at 14, got a criminal record after she was arrested in a 2008 workplace raid and convicted of criminal impersonation for having a fake Social Security card. After that, she was deportable; however, after each annual check-in with the Phoenix immigration office, she was allowed to return to her family. (Her husband is also unauthorized; their American-born teen children are citizens.) Last week, despite protests, Garca de Rayos was sent back to Mexico.

For advocates for immigrants, the case symbolizes the heartlessness of deportations. Garca de Rayos is clearly not a danger, and separating her from her children seems pointlessly cruel. For many conservatives, its a simple matter: She was here illegally, and you dont selectively decide which laws to enforce.

In fact, laws are selectively enforced all the time, and tempering legality with humanity is a time-honored tradition. The immigration debate pits those who view illegal immigration as not only a legal but a moral offense an assault on Americas sovereignty against those who see it as a technicality akin to, say, working as a hairdresser without a license.

What seems clear is that the status quo with regard to people here illegally is leaving huge numbers in a bizarre legal limbo. They are known to the authorities, subject to deportation at any time, allowed to stay in the United States, but not allowed to seek gainful employment.

Polls show widespread support for reforms that would allow these people to obtain permanent residency or citizenship. In a saner world, Trump could use his image as an immigration hard-liner to push for such reforms in combination with tougher border enforcement. Unfortunately, so far, this administration gives little reason to hope that were in a better world.

Cathy Young is a regular contributor to Reason magazine and Real Clear Politics.

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Little hope for immigration reform from Donald Trump | Newsday - Newsday

Alexander Acosta, President Donald Trumps replacement choice to run the Department of Labor, advocated for easier immigration and amnesty for people who previously had come to the United States illegally.

Acosta, who served on the National Labor Relations Board in the George W. Bush administration, expressed his views at a 2012 forum sponsored by the Hispanic Leadership Network Conference. He called for comprehensive immigration solutions and lamented the failure of previous legislative efforts.

We need them here. They provide construction jobs. They provide agricultural jobs. We need to figure out a way to address that.

Part of that means figuring out what we do with all the individuals that are already in our nation, he said. We need them here. They provide construction jobs. They provide agricultural jobs. We need to figure out a way to address that. We need to figure out a way to then have a pathway to further, future legal immigration. And if we dont take it all at once, were not going to solve it. Because you cant solve part of it without solving the other part.

Immigration hawks expressed concern over those sentiments.

He essentially advocates for amnesty for the basis for immigration reform, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform. That kind of sounds like open borders.

Although the labor secretary is not as intimately involved in immigration enforcement as other Cabinet-level officials, experts say the Labor Department does conduct workplace inspections and help set overall labor policies.

William Gheen, founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the views Acosta expressed at the 2012 forum are disturbing.

Its very clear that this guy is from the amnesty side of the aisle, he said. Its very unfortunate that someone like that would ever be considered for any position in the Trump administration.

Gheen also expressed concern that Acosta has been backed in the past by the National Council of La Raza. The group, in 2003 testimony supporting Acostas bid to be an assistant attorney general, called him a bridge-builder, not only with the Latino community but with other ethnic and racial groups.

Acosta, who currently serves as dean of Florida International Universitys law school, would add diversity to the administration. The son of Cuban immigrants, he is the first Hispanic named to the Cabinet. Trump mentioned Acosta briefly during a combative news conference dominated by dueling with reporters pushing him on allegations that his presidential campaign was in constant contact with Russian officials.

He will be a tremendous secretary of labor, Trump said.

Rep. Bradley Bryne (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, praised the selection.

Alex Acosta has a clear record of protecting American workers and upholding the law, Byrne said in a statement. From his time on the National Labor Relations Board to his service as a U.S. attorney, he has the background and experience necessary to excel as secretary of labor.

Acosta also drew praise from the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

We are thrilled to work with Acosta on a host of economic and labor issues which directly affect our members and the Hispanic community as a whole, the groups president, Javier Palomarez, said in a statement.

After his stint on the National Labor Relations Board, Acosta became the first Hispanic to serve as an an assistant attorney general. After that, he became the U.S. attorney in Mimi, where he oversaw prosecutions of lobbyist Jack Abramoff on fraud charges and terrorism suspect Jose Padilla.

Other high-profile cases included founders of the Cali drug cartel and the son of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor. Charles Chuckie Taylor Jr. was convicted of leading a campaign of torture against his fathers political enemies.

But it is Acostas immigration comments that are likely to cause the most consternation among conservatives. Immigration hawks expressed similar concerns about Trumps first choice to run the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, who withdrew his name Wednesday amid mounting opposition over personal issues.

During the 2012 forum, Acosta told the story of a Haitian women who paid smugglers to come into the country and endured repeated rapes during the journey.

"The cost of illegal immigration is not simply exclusion, but it's the abuse of those individuals that are looking to our nation as beacons of freedom, and so we need to take it on, we need to figure out a way to address illegal immigration and give everyone a pathway to get here legally, in a transparent way, and in a fair way," he said.

Mehlman, the FAIR spokesman, said Acosta seems to view immigration through the same lens as Puzder.

"He seems to also advocate for an unlimited, or virtually unlimited, flow of immigrant labor," he said.

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Immigration Hawks Sweat Trump Labor Pick - LifeZette

Protestors hold signs during a protest against the Muslim immigration ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on January 28, 2017 in New York City. Stephanie Keith Getty Images

America is a nation of immigrants. Our diversity is our strength. And yet, President Donald Trump won the presidency, in part, because he attracted voters who believe immigrants are taking job opportunities away from U.S.-born citizens. For many Americans, this is a genuine source of frustration.

They may have a point. President Trump and his supporters correctly perceive that the current U.S. immigration system is broken and needs to be revised to support the nations labor market and grow the economy.

How can we do this? First, we must dispel two myths surrounding todays immigration debate.

Myth #1: Immigrants hurt economic growth

The birth rate in most developed countries is well below replacement, and it is especially low among western nations. Replacement requires 2,100 births for every 1,000 womena requirement America has not met since 1971. In 2015, there were only 1,843 births for every 1,000.

Immigrants play a key role in bringing in a new generation of workers to support the growing number of retirees. Thats why developed countries, such as Canada, where birth rates represent only one-third of population growth, actively encourage immigration. The same concern prompted China to dump its one-child policy in favor of a two-child policy.

In America, immigrants have played a critical role in growing the U.S. economy. Its success depends on the countrys ability to attract the best and brightest. Over half of U.S. startups now worth $1 billion or more were founded by immigrants. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their children. And all six of Americas 2016 Nobel Prize winners in science and economics were immigrants.

Myth 2: Immigrants steal American jobs

High-skilled immigrants expand the American job market. For every 100 immigrant STEM workers with postgraduate degrees, 262 jobs are created for native-born citizens. And for every 100 H-1B visas issued, 183 jobs are created for native-born citizens, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Of all self-employed workers in America, 19% are immigrants . And, according to a 2012 report by The Partnership for a New American Economy, one in every 10 American workers is employed at an immigrant-owned company.

Immigrants help make our country what it is a dedicated and diverse democracy. If we are to welcome them to our shores, we must tackle the challenges that face our system, particularly the employer-sponsored visa system. Although many high-tech corporations need the H-1B visa program to acquire top talent, some companies have abused the category. They send over large numbers of low-paid programmers, often from India , and cheat American workers out of a job. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California recently introduced a bill designed to limit this practice, but it will only address one fragment of our broken system.

The U.S. needs a new approach to immigration in America.

We must determine what skills and talents we need in the U.S., and then create a system that appropriately values those attributes. Australia, Canada and the UK use a points-based system to determine immigrant desirability and award the majority of visas to high-skilled workers, while still allowing for family and humanitarian visas. This is a thoughtful approach to immigration that would work well in the U.S.

As Congress and President Trump begin the reform process, I suggest they consider a points-based system, and in so doing consider factors, such as immigrants proficiency in English; whether they attend American universities and work on research which receives taxpayer funding; whether they are entrepreneurs; have been in a startup accelerator or have funding for a business idea; whether they have the skills we need to make U.S. companies stronger; whether they will fill jobs Americans are not interested in; whether they will burden our social benefits system; and whether they will embrace both the opportunities and the responsibilities that come with being citizens in our nation .

In the weeks and months to come, it is crucial that we do not give way to fear. Rejecting immigrants not only wrecks our economy, it betrays our values. We must embrace strategic immigration reform that boosts our industry without compromising our humanity. With smart policies, America can continue as the worlds leader in diversity, ingenuity and equality.

Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). He is also author of the books, Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses and The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream.

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What America Can Learn From Canada About Immigration Reform - Fortune