Congress may be essentially done for the year, but the Trump Administration is moving forward aggressively to fundamentally reshape the way America treats immigrants and refugees. Just in the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen the Trump administration:
- Abandon ICE’s presumed release policy that kept most pregnant women out of immigrant detention facilities;
- Float a radical policy to deny legal residency and facilitate the deportations of legal immigrants who rely on benefits such as the earned-income tax credit and health insurance subsidies (see disturbing details in a leaked memo reported on by the Washington Post);
- Terminate Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Liberians, a move that will, over time, subject thousands of settled Liberian immigrants to deportation;
- Add a new citizenship question to the 2020 Census in order to undermine the political power of diverse communities across America;
- Put their “blame the immigrants” effort into overdrive, with the President holding a White House round-table event on sanctuary policies that sought to whip up fears about immigrants and crime, and delivering a NH speech blaming immigrants for the opioid crisis; and
- Continue their indiscriminate and cruel enforcement against long-settled immigrants — a direct consequence of their choice to eliminate enforcement priorities and sow fear in immigrant communities.
These new developments are just the most recent additions to a list of policies that is as long as it is extreme, including Trump Administration decisions to:
- End DACA and plunging some 800,000 young immigrants into a crisis that has yet to be resolved;
- Block a half-dozen bipartisan compromise bills that would have resolved Dreamers’ crisis (instead seeking to use Dreamers’ status to advance a full-throttle version of a nativist wishlist);
- Empower an “unshackled” ICE and CBP to become unaccountable and politicized police forces;
- Ramp up ICE enforcement – arrests of non-criminal immigrants surged 171% last year (many detained through“silent raids” against individuals who were complying with the law and checking in regularly with the government);
- Dismantle protections for hundreds of thousands of TPS holders from nations in no condition to accept their return;
- Seek to punish California and local jurisdictions more interested in public safety than aiding and abetting mass deportation;
- Eviscerate protections for Central American minors fleeing violence and using the specter of criminality to advance sweeping raids against immigrant youth;
- Slash refugee admissions; and
- Impose a ban on millions of Muslims.
According to Pili Tobar, Managing Director of America’s Voice, “The Trump Administration continues full steam ahead in its efforts to sow fear, scapegoat immigrants and redefine who we are as a people. From the decision to rescind DACA, to canceling Deferred Enforced Departure for Liberians, to their latest heartless change in ICE detention policy of no longer releasing pregnant women, the Trump administration has made it clear they will stop at nothing when it comes to harming and attacking immigrants. Anti-immigrant hostility is the central and consistent theme of this administration, the basic focus of their political and policy agenda, and a push that is at direct odds with our basic values and best traditions in America.”
