Immigration Insanity
For one brief moment, on Thursday, June 12, Donald Trump appeared sympathetic to immigration reform. That moment of sanity—motivated not by a sense of shared humanity or a recognition that most immigrants are not dangerous criminals—came in response to pressure from the Department of Agriculture and business leaders. The majority of farmworkers in the United States are foreign-born and nearly half lack documentation; immigrants are also disproportionately represented in the hotel and leisure industries. Speaking about those workers, Trump said, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, great…. We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back.”
Unfortunately, that moment of apparent sanity soon passed, proving once again that Trump is easily swayed by the policy preferences of the most recent person he’s spoken to. Mere hours after suggesting that ICE would no longer be going after farmworkers, dishwashers, and hotel maids, Trump was back on his earlier crusade, urging ICE to “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” That has meant immigration crackdowns at workplaces across the country, from construction sites in Miami to farms in Ventura County to the Home Depot raid that set off mass protests in Los Angeles.
Behind this reversal lurks Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser. Miller’s enthusiasm for mass deportation is notorious. In a meeting with ICE officials, he reportedly shouted, “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” His demands contradict the administration’s earlier rhetoric about targeting only “the worst of the worst,” but they are part of a larger pattern: the Venezuelans with no criminal record sent to a Salvadoran prison; the rescission of temporary protected status, which renders previously legal entrants vulnerable to deportation; the efforts to smear wrongly detained individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Andry Hernández Romero; and ICE’s targeting of people on their way to or from immigration court.
Congress will be no help. Republicans in charge of the House Committee on Homeland Security have recently launched a probe investigating NGOs for facilitating illegal activity by aiding migrants. Among the alleged offenders are the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities, whose food, housing, and transportation aid was recast as “a launching pad for illegal aliens to disperse throughout the country.” Meanwhile, the budget bill working its way through Congress provides a combined $135 billion to Customs and Border Protection and ICE, introduces new or increased fees for immigration applications and sponsorship, and limits food stamps, health care, and other services for some legal immigrants.
Trump himself may still waffle about how much economic damage he’s willing to inflict in order to rid the country of undocumented immigrants, but his hateful rhetoric has a logic and momentum of its own, as does his insatiable appetite for revenge. His refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election has led him to target the supposed “core of the Democrat Power Center” —places like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, “where they use Illegal Aliens” to “cheat in Elections.”
But the administration may be overplaying its hand. A majority of Americans now say they don’t want more ICE raids or an end to temporary protected status. The more that people see the effects of Trump’s policies in their own communities, the less they support those policies. Undocumented immigrants provide many of the services we’ve all come to take for granted. No amount of xenophobic ranting can change that basic fact about our economy, and even Trump’s advisers know it.
No comments:
Post a Comment