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Despite White House and DHS Spin, Media Gets How the DHS Memos Declare Open Season on 11 Million Immigrants

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Washington, DC – The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implementation memos on immigration enforcement lay out the Trump Administration’s detailed blueprint for mass deportation. While White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer today attempted to deny and obfuscate this fact, leading media observers are seeing through Spicer’s attempt to throw sand in their faces.

Below are just a few of the media assessments of the Trump Administration’s immigration ugly approach toward dealing with the 11 million undocumented immigrants who work and live in America:

  • Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, “Trump’s mass deportations have arrived. But will Republicans pay for them?”: “Today I spoke about the implications of this with John Sandweg, who for a time under Obama was acting director of ICE and acting general counsel of DHS. Sandweg argues that vastly expanding the pool of targets for deportation is mostly about driving up the numbers of people being deported — by going after the lower-level offenders and longtime residents, or what he calls the ‘low-hanging fruit.’ But that, he says, would divert resources away from going after the serious criminals and recent border crossers. ‘A lot of this is designed to put up numbers — but in doing so, you diminish the impact on public safety,’ Sandweg says, adding that the new policies will ‘disproportionately impact non-criminals.’”
  • Alicia Caldwell of Associated Press, “New Trump memos outline his plans to deport millions of immigrants”: “The Trump administration is greatly expanding the number of people living in the U.S. illegally who are considered a priority for deportation, including people arrested for traffic violations, according to agency documents released Tuesday. The documents represent a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s immigration enforcement priorities.”
  • Ron Nixon and Michael Shear in the New York Times: “New Trump Deportation Rules Allow Far More Expulsions”:“[DHS] officials also made clear that the department intended to aggressively follow Mr. Trump’s promise that immigration laws be enforced to the maximum extent possible, marking a significant departure from the procedures in place under President Barack Obama. That promise has generated fear and anger in the immigrant community, and advocates for immigrants have warned that the new approach is a threat to many undocumented immigrants who had previously been in little danger of being deported.”
  • Alan Gomez of USA Today, “Homeland Security unveils sweeping plan to deport undocumented immigrants”: “The Department of Homeland Security issued a sweeping set of ordersTuesday that implement President Trump’s plan to increase immigration enforcement, placing the vast majority of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation. The memos instruct all agents — including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — to identify, capture and quickly deport every undocumented immigrant they encounter.”
  • Del Quentin Wilber and Brian Bennett in the Los Angeles Times,Sweeping new immigration guidelines emphasize more enforcement, deportations”: “Immigration enforcement officers are free to target any of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally for removal, the Trump administration said Tuesday, a vast expansion of the federal government’s deportation priorities as the president pursues his promised crackdown on illegal immigration.”
  • According to La Opinión, “Trump’s Government Marks Guidelines to Accelerate Mass Deportations (as translated by America’s Voice Education Fund En Español): “Trump’s Administration has published two new directives to intensify deportations. The new documents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) give agents more capacity to detain and deport immigrants, eliminate previous exemptions granted by the Obama administration, and accelerate the legal process by which undocumented immigrants are deported. These directives indicate that the agents will not only pursue undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions, but also those who ‘abuse’ public benefits and those who agents deem a risk to public or national safety. To accomplish their goal, the Administration will hire 15,000 new agents…. These documents will also toughen policies against parents who brought their children to the United States without proper documentation.”

America’s Voice Education Fund – Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform

@FrankSharry and @AmericasVoice

www.americasvoice.org

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