TRUMP’S DAY ONE ‘SHOCK AND AWFUL’
The Trump administration’s day one announcements on immigration and the border were sweeping in scope and by design, part of a purposeful “shock and awful” effort that aims to overwhelm opposition by sheer volume. While experts continue to analyze the full implications, some key points are clear: 1) Trump’s emergency order and “invasion” assertion moves from dangerous rhetoric to substantive justification for draconian new powers; 2) Trump’s unconstitutional birthright citizenship order seeks to redefine who gets to be an American; 3) Actions such as terminating the CBP One app only create more chaos at the border; and 4) Trump’s pardons of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists throw cold water on his claims of supporting “law and order.” AV held several events to further react, including a Tuesday press call with leaders from Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Partnership for New Americans, Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights, Mí Familia Vota, and American Immigration Lawyers Association, and a Friday virtual press event (the first in a series of Friday press events) with leaders from American Immigration Council, International Refugee Assistance Project, and Justice Action Center. “It’s imperative to understand that the executive orders that Trump rolled out will harm all communities, not just immigrant communities. There are millions of mixed-status families in our country, including over five million kids who have undocumented parents—the human impact will be very real,” said Vanessa Cárdenas. “The policies that Trump is rolling out will lead to more chaos and dysfunction. It is not an effort towards solutions on how to have a better functioning immigration system that serves our needs and our values.” Read more here.
TRUMP IMMIGRATION RAID SWEEPS UP U.S. MILITARY VETERAN
Trump’s indiscriminate raids have started and as advocates have warned, workers and even American citizens are among those being swept up. A warrantless ICE raid on a Newark, NJ restaurant on Thursday led to the detention of a U.S. military veteran and is a troubling snapshot of the type of sweeps we fear he is seeking to turbocharge. As the restaurant owner told a local TV outlet, among the workers questioned was a Puerto Rican man and U.S. military veteran. “It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people — not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation or my American workers, Portuguese workers or white workers,” the business owner said. In his statement, Mayor Ras Baraka expressed outrage over the warrantless raid and called it “an egregious act” that is “in plain violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution … Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.” Trump’s removal of common sense enforcement priorities and fear-based campaign “is a recipe for overreach, cruelty, and chaos and virtually guaranteed to lead to the targeting of U.S. citizens, military veterans, and long-settled immigrants with deep roots and ties to this nation,” Cárdenas responded. “We fear the Newark raids are the proverbial canary in the coal mine and others should follow the lead of Mayor Baraka and local leaders and advocates who are sounding the alarm and pushing back against the chaos and cruelty and excess that is being teed up and already is on display.” Read more here.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BISHOP BUDDE’S SERMON
National Cathedral Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s powerful sermon this week directly urging Trump to “have mercy” on terrified American communities – and then Trump’s dismissive criticism of her after the fact – were an important rebuke to the Trump administration’s sweeping set of anti-immigrant announcements targeting families within our communities and at the border. “The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” Bishop Budde said. “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.” Bishop Budde further pleaded for the humane treatment of transgender Americans, who are also under fierce attack in this first week of the new administration. The bishop’s powerful admonition not only spoke truth to power, but exemplified that the “resistance” to Trump comes in many ways, as Cárdenas explained to Greg Sargent of The New Republic. She continued in a statement from AV: “President Trump won’t be able to escape the questions and concerns from regular Americans about his cruel policies and the effects these will have on communities across the country,” she said. “It is not only in the form of mass mobilization and marches, but can also be found in the solidarity of the majority of everyday Americans who reject Trump’s agenda.” Read more here.
TRUMP 2.0: TERROR AND CHAOS BEGINS
In her weekly column, America’s Voice consultant Maribel Hastings writes that Trump’s second swearing in on Monday was like a Category 5 hurricane, wasting no time activating his promised reign of terror against immigrants. Like any self-aspiring autocrat, he seeks to govern by decree and abuse his powers, she said. “For example, he declared a ‘national emergency’ at the border with Mexico in order to deploy soldiers to stop the ‘invasion’ of undocumented people, despite the sustained reduction of arrests at the southern border in recent months. He also initiated the process to deny birthright citizenship to babies born in the United States to undocumented parents. More than twenty states, cities, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued to stop the implementation of the order, calling it unconstitutional.” Other orders have reflected the priorities of Project 2025 – the right-wing agenda that Trump insisted during his campaign that he knew nothing of – targeting energy, education, labor rights, and civil rights. But the immigration extremism was just the tip of the iceberg, with Trump also releasing 1,500 violent individuals from the Jan. 6 insurrection back into our communities. “Like a major Category 5 Hurricane, Trump and his extremist policies promise severe damage that will test our resilience, our humanity, our Constitution, and the neutrality of our judicial system,” she concludes. Her column was also published in several outlets, including La Opinión, Radio Bilingüe, and La Tribuna Hispana. Read her column in English here and Spanish here.
WHAT THE DAY ONE ORDERS TELL US ABOUT THE TRUMP ADMIN’S IMMIGRATION APPROACH
Trump’s day one avalanche of promised executive orders were more about advancing disorder, nativist divisions, and scapegoating immigrants than about lowering the costs of groceries, childcare, and housing for working families. While dozens and even hundreds more orders could be expected soon, what was made undeniably clear by his administration’s day one actions is that its approach to immigration is filtered through the distorted lens of the white nationalist replacement theory, radically restricting immigration to fit that vision and not what is in the best interests of our nation. One of the most revealing orders that Trump signed on his first day was an unconstitutional attack on birthright citizenship, a gift to the white nationalists who from the fringes have long pushed an assault on the 14th Amendment. While this order has already been temporarily blocked by a GOP-appointed federal judge as “blatantly unconstitutional,” Trump’s normalization of this radical idea will have long-lasting downstream consequences. Already, House Republicans are pushing their own legislative attack on birthright citizenship. Beyond the legal implications, this Constitutional assault strikes at the heart of our best ideals and the very motto of our nation – e pluribus unum, out of many, one. Or said another way, this is Trump proclaiming that he is the sole arbiter of who gets to be an American. Read more on his day one orders here.
REMEMBER: WE HAVE RIGHTS
This can’t be stressed enough: everyone in the U.S., no matter their immigration status or who is president, has basic rights. Know your rights and protect yourself, your family, and your community. Click here to read and share these important Know Your Rights resources.
YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS
In another vital Know Your Rights resource, our friends at the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) have released a free, revamped version of their Know Your Rights app, containing vital information on key rights (did you know that ICE cannot enter your home without a signed warrant from a judge, that you have the right to remain silent in an encounter with an immigration enforcement agent, and that you have the right to have an attorney present for any questioning?) and with capability to read those rights aloud to an officer. The app, Know Your Rights 4 Immigrants, is available in more than a dozen languages and will also send an urgent message to an emergency contact in the event of an encounter with an immigration or other law enforcement agent. Currently, the app is only available for iPhone but will soon be ready for Android users, NAKASEC said. Amid alarming reports of indiscriminate immigration enforcement raids targeting immigrant workers and even U.S. citizens in New Jersey and California, resources like the Know Your Rights 4 Immigrants app will be vitally important in keeping our families and communities safer. Find out more about the Know Your Rights 4 Immigrants app here.
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