Comprehensive Impacts of Trump’s Second Year: Immigration
Editor’s Note: One of the reasons why this series has taken me so long to write is my trying to avoid writing this article. At the time these horrors came to light, I had an infant and a toddler, and all the hormones and emotions that go along with that. Most of the articles that are cited here were put into the database without my having read them because I couldn’t get past the headline without breaking down. They are still hard to read. This is probably one of the hardest things I’ve written, but also one of the most important. And definitely one of the longest. These atrocities must be recorded and remembered. Seeing all of this in one place makes it so easy to see the rising xenophobia-based fascism. It truly is terrifying.
This publication is meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of the Trump administration. There are many things that happened during the campaign that are not included. For this series covering the second year, impacts from about January 20, 2018, to January 31, 2019, are included. An introduction to this year’s series is here.
You can read the complete series on the first year of the administration here.
There are sure to be things missing, but I have done my best to record these impacts. The impacts are compiled under 19 different categories, or articles:
1. Cabinet and Other Appointments;
3. Women & Families;
4. LBGT;
6. Ethics;
7. Targeting free press/free speech/Privacy;
8. Health & Safety;
10. Education;
11. Transportation/Infrastructure/Housing;
12. Immigration;
13. Social Contract;
14. Business/Economy/Budget;
15. Military/Defense/Police;
16. World;
17. General Governance;
18. Character; and
19. Some good news. Because there is always some good news.
Since this series takes a long time to write, I will publish each section as I complete it. This article is on Trump’s impacts on immigration. And it’s a doozy.
Immigration
This moment in history is particularly shameful and can be summed up with one headline: Department of Homeland Security Separating Families At The Border. Let’s look at that again: The United States of America has assisted asylum seekers, who, by the way, are taking the proper and legal steps to apply for asylum by coming to the border, by taking their children from them and putting them in concentration camps for the sole purpose of “discouraging immigration.” At these concentration camps, children are held in cages in locked warehouses left to sleep under foil blankets on the floor and with soiled diapers for hours as older children were expected to change the diapers of younger children. Reports indicate that lights are kept on for 24 hours a day and agents are not permitted to tell anyone what time it is. In addition, these children being ripped away from their parents also have their toys and all personal things taken from them, including any shoelaces they have under the guise of being “potentially lethal.” There doesn’t appear to be any guarantee of having items returned. Worse still, the federal government held children down and forcibly injected them with psychiatric drugs to subdue them by making them dizzy, listless, obese, and incapacitated. Some were told “they would not be released or see their parents unless they took medication and that they only were receiving vitamins.”
The Trump administration then argued before the Ninth circuit Court of Appeals that they (the government) are not required to give soap or toothbrushes to the children and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells since those things aren’t necessary for “safe and sanitary facilities,” which a previous court settlement required. Amy Siskand pointed out, “Generations from now will mark this [time] as the moment Americans realized we were losing our country as we have known it.”
As of mid-2018, more than 700 children, including children under the age of four, had been taken from their parents and detained separately. That quickly became at least 5,000 family separations at the border. By the Fall of 2018, almost 13,000 children had been separated and detained, and by the end of the year that number was more than 14,000, the highest number ever. Once children are separated from their parents, it’s a legal quagmire to get them reunited since children and adults are on completely separate legal tracks with varying requirements and restrictions. John Sandweg, activing director of ICE under President Obama, noted “Reunification becomes particularly difficult when a parent is deported without the child and is no longer on American soil; in those cases, “there is a very high risk that parents and children will be permanently separated.” And writer Jonathan Blitzer detailed the evidence suggesting that the “government has no plan for reuniting the immigrant families it is tearing apart.” In fact, Trump administration officials admitted that they have no clear plan for reuniting families. Trump even went so far as to circumvent case law restricting the amount of time and the treatment of people to keep them detained for indefinite periods of time in horrid conditions.
If that wasn’t atrocious enough, the Department of Homeland Security, in the process of tearing children away from their parents, sometimes still in diapers right from their arms, lost — yes lost — almost 3,000 children after moving them out of shelters. In addition, the government placed more than a dozen immigrant children in the custody of human traffickers after it failed to conduct background checks of caregivers.
Parents are being deported before getting their children back or even having a chance to talk with them, wondering whether they’ll ever see or talk to their children again. Sometimes this happens when ICE officials tell parents that if they self-deport they’ll get their children back. Sometimes, children are adopted by Americans before or after their parents are deported without even seeing them.
In other cases, some children who are reunited don’t recognize their own mothers anymore or tell their fathers, “I don’t love you Daddy, you left me alone,” or are afraid of them.
Yet Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen shamelessly defended the “zero tolerance” separation policy, suggesting that what they’re doing is the same as when a parent commits a major crime. And White House Chief of Staff John Kelly shrugged off the policy as a “tough deterrent,” stating, “The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.” And then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to defend the policies by citing a bible passage used by American slaveholders to defend slavery and rarely used since the Civil War.
Even the United Nation’s high commissioner for human rights called out Trump’s policies as inhumane, stating, “there is nothing normal about detaining children.” In fact, the UN specifically stated that Trump’s separation policy is a violation of the immigrants’ rights and international law and urged the administration to stop. In response, Trump blasted the “ignorant attack” by the “hypocritical” UN. Writer Liz Goodwin noted that this policy is a “brand of justice that seems un-American to many, unrecognizable in its deliberate cruelty.” The last living prosecutor of the Nuremburg trials also called what Trump is doing a “crime against humanity,” stating, “We list crimes against humanity in the Statute of the International Criminal Court. We have ‘other inhumane acts designed to cause great suffering’. What could cause more great suffering than what they did in the name of immigration law?”
True to form, Trump tried blaming Democrats for his policy decisions to separate families at the border. Like most things, the problem isn’t that Trump will lie and mislead — that’s a given. Rather, the problem is that his cult followers will take his word as gospel, even when all evidence points to the contrary. And spoiler alert: Just this week as of this writing, an investigative report found that Trump himself was driving the decision to take children from their families, telling Jeff Sessions to force the issue within the Department of Justice, even as federal prosecutors recoiled. In addition, Trump himself admitted that he was using these families and children as a negotiating tool to “get Democrats to cave on his immigration demands,” including funding his border wall. Further, we learned later that Trump planned on separating families soon after his inauguration. He also planned for this separation policy to be permanent. In addition, the administration actually targeted families rather than individual adults crossing the border alone. A leaked memo also revealed that Trump in fact intended to “traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border,” as Senator Jeff Merkley described. He “wanted to deport children more quickly by denying them asylum hearings after taking them away from their parents.”
Another to keep in mind is the financial incentives for detaining so many people: Operating facilities related to immigration detention is now a billion (with a b) dollar business. Private, for-profit prisons have been very successful under Trump since so many more people are commodities. As journalist Clyde Haberman reported, these facilities often scrimp, “with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards, and hiring shortages.” There are also many reports of abuses abounding at these facilities, from freezing holding facilities to racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and homophobic behavior from staff to physical abuse, sexual harassment, and denial of access to resources. Two main companies dominate: CoreCivic and GEO Group, both of which have long histories with members of the administration and have given Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars. As one example, these two organizations gave $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. In exchange, they have gotten more than $1 billion in contracts from the Trump administration. The GEO Group’s lobbyist is registered to lobby about “immigration regulation.” (Shocking to no one, these two private prison organizations are bankrolling Trump’s re-election campaign.) In fact, GEO’s PAC (because what kind of “justice” facility would you be without a PAC) is also the top donor to at least three Republican Texas Congress members.
Private facilities aren’t the only ones gaining under Trump. The Texas nonprofit organization Southwest Key Programs was paid almost $500 million to detain immigrant children. The president of this nonprofit had a salary of almost $800,000. These detention centers also make money by charging exorbitant fees to for parents to make phone calls to their children, which often make the phone calls impossible. And to help pay for all of these detention centers for children, Trump diverted funding from the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Cancer Institute, Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Spoiler alert: Those latter agencies would be especially important come 2020.)
They have been detaining so many and separating so many families that Trump began to hold children even as young as one year old at military bases. The military made plans to build “austere” tent cities to house 25,000 immigrants at abandoned air fields. Later, some of these tent cities were found to have poisoned water, and by the Fall the size of the tent camps had tripled. Yet no public or press were allowed any information or access to them. Eventually, the CEO of the organization running the tent camp closed the camp because he refused the government’s request to detain more children, stating, “The children were coming in but never leaving. . . . You can’t keep taking children in and not releasing them.” When he refused, Trump’s director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement told him that if he didn’t keep it open and expanding, “new children detained would be kept in Border Patrol jail cells instead.” In fact, Director Scott Lloyd insisted that he’d have to personally sign off before any kids could be released from any detention site.
The administration has also held children at empty Wal-Marts (one Wal-Mart held 1,500 children!) and hotels — and even moving them under the cover of darkness to a tent city — before rushing them through a court process they don’t understand alone and deporting them. Trump set up “tender age” shelters for babies and toddler, and those babies and toddlers are being taken into court to defend themselves before an immigration judge. Just imagine for a moment a one-year-old with a bottle or sippy cup being carried into a courtroom and asked by a judge if he understands the proceedings against him. Ninety percent of these children without lawyers are deported to their home countries.
This article covers some impacts of Trump’s travel ban, as well as all of the impacts of Trump’s immigration policies, including his travel ban, general atrocities, atrocities aimed at children and families, abuses within the system, and unethical and immoral deportations.
Trump’s Travel Ban
· Journalist Sabrina Siddiqui noted how immigration advocates report a pattern emerging “in which the Trump administration has attempted to cut back legal immigration by gutting existing programs and making citizenship much less obtainable.”
· The xenophobic travel ban impacted many people’s lives:
o A US citizen from Yemen was unable to get a visa for his wife and three children, including one with severe mental and physical disabilities that have been exacerbated by Yemen’s civil war.
o With visa applications being wrongfully denied or stalled by the government’s failure to grant case-by-case waivers, a pregnant woman was left to raise her child by herself after her husband was unable to return from Somalia when the travel ban went into effect.
· The travel ban also upended the country’s refugee program, slamming the door on tens of thousands of refugees from around the world:
o The mother and siblings of a Somali refugee who had lived in a refugee camp for a decade before arriving in the US were continually denied entry and had to remain in the refugee camp. The man was granted entry to the US right before Trump was sworn in, but his family didn’t make it in time and have been in limbo.
o A translator for the US military in Iraq was granted refugee status in the US after fleeing to Egypt when his life was threatened by Iraqis. After Trump came to power, that status was put in limbo, even while he fears being deported from Egypt.
o Trump capped the number of refugees allowed into the US at 30,000, the lowest number since the program began in 1980.
General Atrocities
· Speaking volumes, Trump appointed Andrew Veprek’s as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which is meant to “provide aid and sustainable solutions for refugees, victims of conflict, and stateless people around the world through repatriation, local integration, and resettlement in the United States.” Veprek was influential in Trump’s withdrawal from international talks on a nonbinding global pact on migration issues and has argued in favor of dramatically lowering the nation’s annual cap on refugee admissions. His appointment has been described by current and former officials as a blow to an already-embattled refugee bureau, suggesting that he strongly believes “that fewer refugees should admitted into the United States and that international migration is something to be stopped, not managed.”
· The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report showing that DHS “failed to adequately track separated families, held children in short-term detention for longer than the law generally allows, and may have encouraged asylum-seekers to cross the border illegally by forcing people to wait at official ports of entry. The report also states that some families may have been separated so that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials could fill out less paperwork.”
· Another writer similarly detailed how the US is actually creating a serious border crisis by stalling asylum cases.
· Part of the stalling tactics was to force asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while waiting for their asylum hearing, a policy that attorney and writer Bea Bischoff described as “designed to make seeking asylum so arduous, so difficult, and so hopeless that migrants give up on attempting to seek refuge at all.”
· In stalling the cases, hundreds of people have been forced to wait their turn at the bridges connecting Mexico to Texas. They — adults and children — wait with their identifying number etched in black marker on the inside of their arms.
· Harkening back to Hitler calling Jews “rats,” Rwandan Hutu calling Tutsis “cockroaches,” and slave owners calling slaves “animals,” Trump added to the dehumanization of human beings by referring to deported immigrants as animals.
· Knowing how many Americans respond to the kind of hateful and dangerous rhetoric so reminiscent of 1933 Germany, Trump capitalized on that xenophobia to mislead and blow out of proportion a caravan of refugees fleeing horrible violence heading to the US border, grossly exaggerating the potential threat and peddling conspiracy theories and baseless claims to drum up support in the midterm elections.
· Thousands of families scrambled after Trump rescinded a rule by President Obama allowing spouses of skilled workers to also work. He revoked the work permits of spouses of skilled immigrant workers, which left spouses — mostly women who followed their husbands here for a job — unable to keep their own job.
· Trump also abruptly canceled the temporary residency permits of about 9,000 immigrants from Nepal after they had previously been granted temporary protected status after a 7.8 earthquake devastated their country.
· In addition, he launched a task force whose goal is to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship under the guise of discouraging cheating (for which, of course, there is zero evidence), even analyzing decades-old fingerprints.
· The Trump administration used Operation Janus and Operation Second Look to use tactics used during the early 1900s through the cold war in order to denaturalize and deport nonwhite immigrants.
· Related, many US citizens have been denied passports because the government believes their birth certificates and other documentations are fake. (Not surprising considering how much effort Trump put into the birther conspiracy theory.) This is especially happening in Southern Texas to people with Spanish-sounding names.
· Trump left almost 4,000 refugees stranded in limbo when he decided to simply stop conducting interviews for the Central American Minors program, thereby ending the program. This program helped Central Americans already legally living in the US to bring their children here. The applicants stranded were mostly children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, “three of the countries with the highest murder rates in the world.”
· Trump signed a proclamation banning migrants who enter the country between official ports of entry from seeking asylum in the US.
· Trump’s Department of Homeland Security also created a rule to use credit scores as a required part of the application process for legal resident status, a purpose for which credit scores were “never built for and are not suited for.”
· Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric continued even on Easter, when he threatened to end DACA if he didn’t get his way in negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
· But DACA remained at risk. Spoiler alert: In 2019 and 2020 Trump has continually tried to end DACA, even after the Supreme Court struck down his first attempt.
· Regardless of DACA, Trump began deporting DREAMERs, people who were supposed to be protected from deportation because they were brought to the US as children. One young man who has lived in the US since he was nine was deported after being officially protected under DACA. Upon being approached by ICE on the street, he was not allowed to retrieve his wallet that was in a car and then deported to Mexico within three hours!
· Trump tried putting a citizenship question the US Census. Gratefully, he was struck down by the Supreme Court.
· In a slap in the face, Melania Trump sponsored her parents to get a green card and then become citizens, a process that Trump is trying to make illegal for everyone else.
· Trump also tried to end birthright citizenship via executive order so that the children of immigrants would not automatically get citizenship. (Spoiler alert: You can’t change the Constitution of the United States of America with an executive order, you fucking dolt.)
· Indian detainees went a hunger strike to call attention to inhumane conditions, repeated threats of deportation, and a lack of information about their impending asylum cases. They were force fed through nose tubes and IVs, a process that is painful.
· Trump also issued a new order to detain pregnant women, reversing a long-standing practice of automatically releasing pregnant women from detention. Pregnant women have been found to be at higher risk for miscarriage while in detention. Legal advocate Katie Shepherd pointed out that the new policy shows that the Trump administration is “continuing its barbaric policy of detaining pregnant women despite substantial evidence that detention of this particularly vulnerable population has been linked to serious health implications to the mother and unborn child and also constitutes a significant barrier to receiving a meaningful day in court.”
· Trump’s rhetoric also sparked atrocities at the state level. As one example, Louisiana effectually barred immigrants from getting married in the state.
Atrocities Aimed at Children and Families
· Trump’s order to separate families at the border resulted in exactly what you might imagine and worse. HE SEPARATED FAMILIES AT THE BORDER. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, an immigrant herself, was one of few elected officials allowed into a detention center and spoke with almost 200 women:
Thirty to 40 percent of these women came with children who had been forcibly taken away from them. None got a chance to say goodbye to their children — they were forcibly taken away. One said she was deceived, because they were in detention together. Then the CBP officers told her she was going out to get her photograph taken. When she came back, she was put in a different room, and she never got to see the child again. Some of them said they could hear their children screaming for them in the next room. The children ranged anywhere from one to teenagers.
· In many other examples, and reminiscent of a dark time in history, parents talked about being told their children are being taken to be bathed or cleaned up, and they don’t see them again.
· Many women talked about being pressured and coerced by immigration officials, often misleadingly, to waive reunification rights, including not being given only a few minutes to decide whether to leave their children in the US while in a courtroom with at least 50 other people.
· As of this writing there have been almost 70,000 children detained away from their families — a record number and higher than in any other country on earth. Here are just some examples:
o A mother and her 7-year-old daughter fleeing violence in Democratic Republic of Congo were separated by 2000 miles in separate detention centers and only able to communicate by an occasional phone call. After four days in detention together when they arrived, ICE agents came in a took her daughter away with no explanation. When they were initially separated, the woman could hear her daughter in the next room screaming, “Mommy, don’t let them take me!”
o A Brazilian woman and her son were arrested upon entering the country to seek asylum (not illegal). She was ultimately sent to a detention center in Texas. Upon entering the country, the boy was transferred to a facility in Chicago. They’ve only been able to speak a handful of times.
o A mother fleeing violence in Honduras followed the proper procedures for seeking asylum at the border and was arrested. Her 18-month-old son was taken from her without any opportunity for her to comfort him or say goodbye and kept in a separate detention center more than 100 miles away.
o Another mother fleeing violence in El Salvador was given five minutes to say goodbye to her 4 and 10 year-old children before they were ushered away crying. The mother later believed that her children were separated and sent to two different foster homes.
o A Mexican woman following proper procedures to seek asylum had her four-year-old and blind six-year-old children taken from her when she arrived at the border.
o Federal agents took an infant while she was breastfeeding from her mother. When the mother resisted, she was handcuffed.
o A five-year-old girl was forcibly taken from her grandmother, who was threatened with deportation if she didn’t let her go. After the grandmother was released, the little girl was lost in the system and then given to a foster home. Ultimately, after months, she was released to her grandmother and mother, and they realized that she — the five-year-old — had been given a document to sign waiving her rights to see a judge. The form, filled out with assistance from officials, included a checked box to withdraw a previous request for a Flores bond hearing. “Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters.” When she was returned, she believed that her family abandoned her and had, understandably, behavior problems.
· One Honduran man who was separated from his wife and whose son was taken from them at the border killed himself while in his own detention center.
· Even long after a judge ruled children to be reunited, more than 700 children were likely not going to be reunited. As the deadline approached, about half of children under the age of five were able to be reunified with parents.
· Some parents were being charged between $700 and $800 for DNA tests to prove they were the child’s parent.
· In addition, Trump issued a rule adding many things to the “public charge rule,” allowing a green card or visa renewals to be denied if a family had enrolled in or used Head Start, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), any subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, food stamps, WIC assistance, housing benefits such as Section 8, low-income home energy assistance programs, and transit vouchers.
Abuses Within the System
· As of mid-2018 there had been more than 1,200 complaints from detainees about physical abuse, sexual abuse, harassment, and rape, more than half of those complaints about ICE employees.
· A Texas sheriff’s deputy sexually assaulted a four-year-old girl and then threatened her mother with deportation if she told anyone.
· In Virginia, at least one facility handcuffed, shackled, and beat children, as well as stripped them of their clothes and locked them in solitary confinement, sometimes strapped to chairs with bags over their heads. State investigators concluded that none of this met the state’s legal threshold of abuse or neglect.
· At least one child died after being detained by ICE in unsanitary conditions.
· Another seven-year-old girl from Guatemala separated from her father died in custody from dehydration and shock after having seizures.
· An eight-year-old boy, also from Guatemala, died of unknown causes while in custody of ICE.
· A report produced by the American Civil Liberties Union in conjunction with the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School revealed serious abuse and neglect of children by US officials while held in detention without their parents. Documents examined showed “numerous cases involving federal officials’ verbal, physical and sexual abuse of migrant children; the denial of clean drinking water and adequate food; failure to provide necessary medical care; detention in freezing, unsanitary facilities; and other violations of federal law and policy and international law. The documents provide evidence that U.S. officials were aware of these abuses as they occurred, but failed to properly investigate, much less to remedy, these abuses.” The report went on to detail specific examples of abuse and neglect which are, to be blunt, disgusting and atrocious:
o Punched a child’s head three times
o Kicked a child in the ribs
o Used a stun gun on a boy, causing him to fall to the ground, shaking, with his eyes rolling back in his head
o Ran over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle and then punched him several times
o Verbally abused detained children, calling them dogs and “other ugly things”
o Denied detained children permission to stand or move freely for days and threatened children who stood up with transfer to solitary confinement in a small, freezing room
o Denied a pregnant minor medical attention when she reported pain, which preceded a stillbirth
o Subjected a 16-year-old girl to a search in which they “forcefully spread her legs and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed”
o Left a 4-pound premature baby and her minor mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick people, against medical advice
o Threw out a child’s birth certificate and threatened him with sexual abuse by an adult male detainee.
· When asked about these abuses, Trump brushed it aside, stating that they [the CHILDREN, including babies] were “not innocent” and claiming that they are “nothing more than criminals in the future.”
· To deal with this, ICE asked for permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs, regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities, and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. (Thankfully, public outcry quashed that request.)
· Speaking of reports, Trump rejected and refused to publish a Department of Health and Human Services study finding that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
Unethical and Immoral Arrests and Deportations
· Trump imposed quotas on immigration judges in an attempt to speed up deportations. This creates a system in which individual people and cases are disregarded to prioritize speed. Quantity over quality.
· One result of this was seen through a leaked photograph of 37 defendants in orange prison jumpsuits shackled at the hands and feet to be processed en masse.
· Before that, though, Trump called for immigrants and asylum seekers to be “sent back from where they came” with no legal or judicial process at all!
· After long threatening to overrule immigration judges for actually allowing some immigrants to stay and not deporting them, he finally did so, setting a horrifying precedent in the case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum. Castro-Tum came to the US in 2014 as an unaccompanied minor and was sent to live with relatives in Pennsylvania. When his immigration hearing came up, he didn’t show up. Everyone, including the judge, suspected that he never received the notice because the address they had on file didn’t seem correct. The judge eventually ordered an administrative closure, a relatively common practice that allows judges to put a case on hold indefinitely if a person wasn’t a priority to be deported, such as those who had no criminal history or were children, or if a person was already in the process of gaining residency or other legal status. Sessions inserted himself into this case, removed the judge from the case, and made sure that Tum was, in fact, deported in absentia. He then issued an order prohibiting judges from using administrative closure at all, removing judicial discretion that helped judges ensure fairness and efficiency in cases.
· A group of retired judges signed an open letter accusing the Department of Justice of inappropriate judicial interference in a court case after the Castro-Tum case.
· Justice department attorneys quit because of Trump’s treatment of immigration judges and judicial policies. One former attorney detailed “a series of demoralizing attacks on immigration judges” in his resignation letter, writing, “I couldn’t stand by, or be complicit in, a mean-spirited and unscrupulous campaign to undermine the everyday work of the Justice Department and the judges who serve in our immigration courts — a campaign that hurts many of my fellow immigrants in the process.”
· In the meantime, Trump’s Department of Justice suspended funding for a legal-advice program for detained immigrants as well as a telephone help line. These programs served 50,000 people in 38 detention centers across the country each year. Trump purposefully cut legal aid for minors in immigration court, telling attorneys to stop taking new cases just days after he began the family separation policy.
· There have been so many horrible stories about ICE arresting people. Many of them have similar stories in which a deportation was stayed or deemed not worthwhile by President Obama because the person contributes to our society and/or was brought here as a child, even if they don’t qualify for DACA. But Trump ramped up arrests for noncriminal immigrants. Here are just some examples:
o A professor with no criminal history and three children who are US citizens was arrested while taking his daughter to school, without being able to say goodbye to his family.
o ICE detained a doctor who has been in the US for 40 years since he was five years old and who has a green card.
o After 30 years in the US, but too old for DACA, a man had to say goodbye to his American wife and children as he was deported to Mexico, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was 10 years old.
o A man described as “pillar of the community” who had been in the US for nearly 40 years had to say goodbye to his American wife and children, 94-year old mother in a wheelchair, and his entire extended family as he was deported back to Jordan with the clothes on his back and $300 in his pocket.
o ICE denied requests for a stay for a 30-year-old man who was brought from Mexico when he was about 18 months old. His five-year-old (American) son was battling cancer in a hospital. (ICE eventually did grant a stay of deportation after a lot of media backlash.)
o A father of two American children and husband of an American who had been in the US for more than 20 years was detained and deported to Gambia in West Africa after checking in with federal authorities as he had been directed.
o After showing up without a warrant at a man’s house, ICE arrested him at his daughter’s school when he dropped her off, striking fear in the entire community.
o After suffering from PTSD after two tours in Afghanistan, a US Army veteran was deported to Mexico, where he hasn’t lived since he was eight years old. Senator Tammy Duckworth, his Senator, said of his case, “This case is a tragic example of what can happen when national immigration policies are based more in hate than on logic and ICE doesn’t feel accountable to anyone. At the very least, Miguel should have been able to exhaust all of his legal options before being rushed out of the country under a shroud of secrecy.”
o A man who was supposed to be marrying his high school sweetheart was instead arrested and detained when the judge who was going to marry them instead called ICE. The man was adopted and brought to the US when he was eight months old and had the proper identification, which the judge thought was fake.
o A woman with no criminal record who had been trying to gain asylum since 2000 was suddenly arrested and deported to Albania without having any opportunity to say goodbye to her American husband and children. They found out when she called them from Germany en route to Albania with ICE agents, who instructed her “not to make a fuss” when she was carted onto an airplane.
o A couple visiting their American daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren on an Army base for the fourth of July were arrested with their grandchild watching when the Army’s military police called ICE.
o Similarly, a restaurant delivery worker with no criminal history was arrested when delivering food to an Army garrison.
o A PhD student who enlisted in the U.S. Army as part of a special recruitment program offering immigrants in the country legally a path to citizenship was one of many who were abruptly discharged from the military and whose immigration status is now in limbo for no reason.
o A 41-year-old man who was adopted by American parents at the age of three was deported to South Korea because some paperwork wasn’t properly filled out 37 years ago.
o In a separate case, a South Korean teenager who was brought to the US and adopted by her aunt and uncle was deported because her official adoption date was delayed when her Army veteran uncle was serving in Afghanistan. The delay resulted in the formal date coming after the teen turned 16, the federal limit, which is different from their state’s limit.
o An American couple with an four-year-old adopted child from Peru was told that the Trump administration would not grant the child citizenship and would deport the four-year-old, who had been abandoned at birth.
o The wife of a Marine and Iraq combat veteran was deported to Mexico. She had been in the US for more than 20 years and her deportation forced the family to split apart with one child going with her to Mexico (where she’s never been) and another child staying here with her husband.
o A man was coerced by ICE to self-deport to Iraq, a country he hadn’t lived in since he was two years old. ICE did this to hundreds of Iraqi permanent residents. A judge censured the agency for rounding up Iraqis and misleading and coercing them into agreeing to deportation.
o A man was arrested at a gas station while driving his wife to the hospital for a scheduled cesarean to give birth to their child. The wife was left to drive herself to the hospital.
o Another man was arrested during the interview portion of his citizenship application with his American wife, an interview for which he waited three years.
o A four-year-old was put on a plane alone to be deported to Guatemala City. Her father, who lives 8 hours from Guatemala City and who was deported without her six months prior, was notified 30 minutes before the plane was to land. The four-year-old had to spend a night alone in a shelter in Guatemala City. (Apparently, there have been “several instances” in which parents were not properly notified by ICE about their child’s arrival.)
o An American citizen who is a Marine veteran with PTSD was arrested and held for days for deportation. ICE eventually allowed documentation to be submitted proving he was an American citizen.
· In another case, a man with an American wife and children who had been in the US since 1996 was ordered to be deported after his hearing for legal status. Since he met all of the qualifications, including having no criminal record, his status should have been granted. However, an ICE attorney forged his signature on a form claiming to accept voluntary deportation from 2000, which rendered him ineligible for legal status. This attorney received a sentence of 30 days in jail for this in a rare case in which a victim was allowed to sue.
· These deportations have serious consequences for people’s lives. In just one of many examples, a high school student who had been in the US since he was three years old was killed three weeks after he was deported to Mexico.
· On the rare occasion when detainees are released, ICE agents in Texas were dropping off men, women, and children with no plan in a park next to a bus terminal. This occurred over Christmas.
· It wasn’t only immigrants being arrested either. Reminiscent of people being arrested for hiding Jewish people, four aid workers were arrested — and convicted!! — for leaving water and food for migrants in the desert where so many immigrants die. Thankfully, more than a year later, a judge reversed their convictions.
· Journalist Melissa Baily also pointed out other collateral consequences of these deportations. Tens of thousands of immigrants have caregiving jobs, which allow elderly Americans and those with disabilities or serious illnesses to remain at home. If these caregivers are deported, these people could “find themselves with few options besides nursing homes.”
“Papers, Please”
· ICE conducted a nationwide sweep of almost 100 7–11 stores before dawn.
· In other cases, people were lured to a place by false promises of things such as food. In one of many examples, the promise of free food brought dozens of workers from the planting fields into the break room, where instead of food, there were 200 federal agents with guns and handcuffs. In just one community, more than 90 children are missing one parent and at least 20 are left with no parent at all.
· In another example, ICE set up a fake university as a sting in Michigan to attract students who wanted to extend their visas. Recruiters were paid thousands of dollars for connecting students to the fake school, and potentially hundreds of people enrolled could face charges or deportation.
· ICE also arrested a mother and son at a domestic violence hearing in the courthouse.
· Another time, Immigration officers set traps to arrest undocumented immigrant spouses married to US citizens when they appeared at government offices to interview for legal status.
· ICE also began arresting undocumented parents and family members who came forward to take in undocumented children, risking leaving even more children in concentration camps as family members are too afraid to try to free them.
· All of these sweeps and deportations have created many negative consequences. Children and their parents are skipping doctor’s appointments and hospital visits because they are afraid of ICE showing up and arresting them or taking them from their children then and there. They are also abandoning public nutrition programs for fear of being deported, meaning their families are going hungry.
· The scope of immigration officials’ authority is also extreme as they can board vehicles and search for people without immigration documentation without a warrant “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States,” which has been defined as 100 miles from any boundary of the US. This means that about two-thirds of the US population is within this warrantless zone.
· Because the scope is so wide, agents are questioning and arresting even US citizens who (rightfully and legally) will not answer their questions. They’re also arresting and detaining American citizens — at least 1,400 of them — for weeks and even months, ignoring declarations that they are, in fact, citizens and not allowing proof to be presented. In one example, a 10-year-old American boy was held in a detention center for two months. Another American man was detained for three and a half years, and even after ICE recognized their error, federal attorneys refused to free him.
· Trump’s Supreme Court ruled that immigrants, even those with permanent legal status and asylum seekers, do not have the right to periodic bond hearings, so they could be detained indefinitely with no charges or charges as minor as “joyriding.”
· Trump’s Supreme Court, particularly Kavanaugh, unsurprisingly spoke in full defense of Trump’s policies.
· In another blow to all women, but especially immigrant women, Trump’s Supreme Court ruled that a teenager who had been placed in an immigrant detention center had no right to an abortion that she was seeking after learning she was pregnant after entering the US. The Trump regime stated that it “would not facilitate abortions for minors in federal custody.”
· In fact, Trump proposed in his budget a plan to not allow anyone in detention to have an abortion, even if they wanted to pay for it themselves.
· Trump wasn’t done harming people, though. He had Jeff Sessions instruct immigration judges across the country to stop granting asylum to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence. (Thankfully, a judge blocked that policy.)
· Sessions also instructed federal attorney’s offices across the country to use the term “illegal alien” rather than “undocumented immigrant.”
· Trump started arresting immigrant parents and relatives in the US who paid smugglers to bring their children across the border.
· Trump tried to ban all Chinese students from studying at American colleges and universities using the same exact arguments used to justify the Japanese interment camps.
· Lest anyone think that these policies are aimed at and only impacting those from Central America (whom Trump refers to blanketly as “Mexicans”), be assured that these policies are impacting immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from all over the world. As one example, the US had a longstanding humanitarian deal to protect Vietnamese who entered the US before 1995 from deportation, but Trump abruptly changed that, targeting Vietnamese communities whose families were refugees fleeing war, violence, communist “re-education camps” and other forms of political persecution and putting people in detention indefinitely as they wait for deportation hearings. This is impacting thousands, including children of American servicemen in Vietnam.
· Trump also increased tensions with Canada by adding additional security at the northern border, as well, using much stronger language than ever before.
· After Sessions blamed Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff for allowing “wanted aliens” to escape, ICE spokesperson James Schwab resigned, stating that he couldn’t stand by while the agency “flat-out lied” to the American people. While he was taping an interview about his resignation with CBS, agents from the Department of Homeland Security showed up and attempted to intimidate him to stop talking.
· In some good news, the Pentagon rejected Trump’s request to allow US troops to perform emergency law enforcement tasks along the border. But troops were still sent to the border to wait for the caravan of refugees, spending their time “playing cards and fulfilling basic organizational tasks” while missing Thanksgiving with their families to play into Trump’s conspiracy theories.
· When the caravan did arrive at the border, US military shot tear gas at them across the border, forcing parents with toddlers to flee while trying to shield their children’s red eyes and while “children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem.”
· Many Homeland Security experts and advisors resigned due to the “morally repugnant, counter-productive, and ill-considered” policies of the Trump administration.
As renowned journalist and humanitarian Nicholas Kristof wrote as Trump’s policies “veered from abhorrent to evil, “We as a nation should protect our borders. We must even more assiduously protect our soul.”
The next article will cover Trump’s impacts on the social contract.
