Tag: Trump immigration policy

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Trump l’oeil: Seeking Asylum Isn’t a Crime

President Trump’s frustrations with immigration and his inability to build (or even finance) a wall at our southern border has led to the unimaginable: the United States military at the border firing teargas at asylum seekers — most of whom are women and children. It was disconcerting to watch from the comfort of our Thanksgiving holiday as the gas drifted toward Tijuana into the eyes of the innocent.

But it did happen. It’s almost all illegal. And it’s a crisis created entirely by President Trump.

The United States, since the conclusion of the Second World War, has led the Western world in offering protection to asylum seekers. The horrors of the European holocaust forced America to listen more carefully to the pleas of those running (literally) for their lives. Current asylum law, encoded in international treaty and national law, mandates the United States government to consider asylum pleas from people who fear for their lives in foreign lands.

The president and his team of nationalists/nativists have declared, in certain violation of international and federal law, that asylum seekers from Central America shall not set foot on U.S. soil, which makes it impossible for people to file a petition. An asylum petition can only be made upon arrival in the United States.

To deter people from filing, Trump has sent active duty military troops (deployed on U.S. soil) as a sort of shield. But even before deploying troops, the Trump administration had been laying the groundwork for this inhumane spectacle by stalling the procedure and refusing to process families seeking asylum along the border.

The president, of course, would be fully authorized to send the military to defend against an invading foreign army or other bellicose actors, but no one believes that a few thousand unarmed, poor Central Americans represent any sort of threat to this nation’s sovereignty or democracy.

There is a long history of hostilities and disproportionate responses at the border: In 1916, Pancho Villa raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and some innocent bystanders were killed. The U.S. responded by spending $130 million to send a cavalry force (under the command of General John Pershing) that could never capture the wily Mexican revolutionary. Seventy years prior, the U.S. government annexed half of our neighbor’s territory in a war declared after the Mexican government refused to give up their territory voluntarily.

President Trump is the only serious threat to our democracy, not poor and desperate immigrants from Central America. The Trump administration (and all administrations) are prohibited by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act from using the army for policing activities within United States territory. Soon, we believe, the courts will hear challenges to the president’s use of the military and judges will certainly question how long-standing, settled asylum laws and traditions can be tossed aside based on the whims of a capricious president, a rogue government.

We can drown in this sea of lawlessness, or we can fight back. We don’t recommend responding with violence, but these times require action and we draw inspiration from the civil disobedience developed in 19th-century New England. Henry David Thoreau famously went to jail for refusing to pay the taxes that he knew would be used to finance the 1846 war against Mexico (mentioned above); Thoreau — rightfully — declared that war immoral and illegal.

Good people in Memphis, right now, are fighting against the madness; they’re still paying their taxes but have adopted the role of the good Samaritan by helping people (mostly women and children) who have faced illegal family separation and dubious detentions here in America. This group known as “Migration Is Beautiful” (a.k.a. The Mariposa Collective) consists of about 25 people here — most of whom speak Spanish. They organize, and meet the five buses that arrive to Memphis each day carrying people recently released from detention. Released to relatives across the country, the U.S. government forces these travelers to wear ankle monitors, and most have no possessions, no money, and no food.

Greeting these weary families with sandwiches, medicine, and toys for the children, the best of Memphis meets those who have seen and suffered the worst of the federal government. These Memphians are the people who define and sustain our democracy; these are the people who, again and again, make America great.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and the Board Chair of Latino Memphis. Michael LaRosa teaches history at Rhodes College.

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No More Deals with Trump on Immigration

CREDIT: White House

As President Trump’s legal troubles intensify, his public opposition to immigration, immigrants, and refugees has hardened. The “base” — long animated by Trump’s verbal war against the immigrant community — is hanging tough with their president (a.k.a., The Unindicted Co-Conspirator). Immigrant activists and those who hope to see a broad, comprehensive overhaul of our immigration system should cease trying to negotiate with this reckless, criminal organization called the Trump administration and focus entirely on pushing political change.

White House

Stephen Miller

Since Trump first declared as presidential candidate, his supporters have claimed that they are not opposed to legal immigration, but only undocumented immigration, or in Trump parlance “illegals.”  But the administration’s attack on U.S. refugee policy, immediately following his inauguration, completely undermines this argument. Trump and his young, arrogant, neocon political advisor Stephen Miller have quietly targeted legal immigrants — suspecting, perhaps, that Americans might not notice, or care. In 2016, under the Obama administration, 1.2 million immigrants gained lawful permanent residency. The numbers for 2018 suggest that the Trump administration is on track for a 20 percent decrease in green cards granted.

The Trump administration is also proposing to limit the pathways by which people earn residency and citizenship. Under Miller’s design, if an immigrant has accepted any public benefit — such as Obamacare subsidies or social security disability benefits for a disabled child — he or she may find their chances for citizenship significantly diminished. By redefining and broadening the term “public charge,” Miller’s cruel calculus can be enacted without congressional approval.

 The pressure that the Trump administration has put on the immigrant community through enhanced enforcement and rule changes means immigrant advocates are negotiating from a position of weakness and uncertainty. Such negotiations have led to concessions on funding for Trump’s wall, elimination of the lottery visa, and even consideration of an end to family-based immigration — derisively referred to as “chain migration” by hard liners — a bedrock principle of our immigration system for decades. 

These negotiations/concessions must end immediately. If not, we will allow the dangerous dynamic duo of Trump and Miller to remake American immigration policy for generations to come. In negotiating with an administration that does not value immigration — legal or otherwise — we risk undoing more than a half century of policy that has infused our nation with a dynamic pluralism. The very idea of America and the promise the word holds for the world community is on life support, thanks to these dangerous demagogues ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lyndon Johnson passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, one of his most lasting achievements as president. This law quadrupled the number of immigrants living in the United States from 9.6 million to 45 million. Prior to 1965, more than 75 percent of all immigrants came from Europe. Since the passage of the INA, more than half of all immigrants have their origins in Latin America and 25 percent in Asia. This law directly affected the diversification of the American population: In 1965, 84 percent of the U.S. population was of European descent; now it is approximately 62 percent. 
The co-conspirator in chief and his MAGA movement have grown as a response to these demographic shifts. But demographic shifts are not something Trump can control without a major change in immigration law. Why then should those of us who value diversity and the vision of America as a nation of immigrants negotiate from a position of perceived weakness when time is on our side and no deal under these circumstances strengthens our position?

Fear of demographic changes, fear of science, fear of truth — these are a few of the hallmarks of this angry, antediluvian administration in Washington. It’s time to tune out the noise and hatred billowing out of D.C. and prepare for the future. That future holds the promise of enlightened leadership, coupled with a resituating of the national narrative that has always focused on America as a place of hope and opportunity for the world.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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Forget Trump

CREDIT: Joshua Roberts | reuters

In Memphis last week, civil rights leader Reverend James Lawson commented on the recent peaceful, anti-gun violence March on Washington, suggesting that the decision to go to the nation’s capitol was a tactical error. He noted how the leaders in D.C., especially those who occupy the White House and Congress, will never change unless a movement takes hold first in our local communities.

Joshua Roberts | reuters

Previously on President Trump

Sound reasoning from the leading tactician of the civil rights struggle — a man rooted in peaceful protest, the man who invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in support of striking sanitation workers 50 years ago.

As immigration becomes the defining 21st-century social struggle, Lawson’s thinking is prescient and steeped in historic relevance. The leadership in Washington is using “immigration” as a wedge political issue, and for the moment, they seem to be winning.

Immediately after his inauguration, President Trump and his cohort of nativists took aim at the the refugee and immigrant communities by attempting to enforce a discriminatory travel ban while pushing immigration enforcement resources back into the interior of the country — into schools, apartment complexes, and businesses where families live, work, and play. After some success rebuffing such executive orders in the courts, many thought Trump had been sufficiently brushed back and that he’d move on.

But on September 5, 2017, Trump announced that his administration would end DACA, declaring simultaneously that he was giving Congress time to act because he had “a great heart” and “great love” for those whose security he was submerging in a sea of uncertainty. Of course, like most people for whom Trump claims to have had a “great love,” the romance didn’t last long.

Last fall, Trump said that he would sign any immigration bill that came across his desk, then as a compromise plan gained ground, he declared that he would never support it after talking with immigration hardliners in his administration (Stephen Miller) and listening to Ann Coulter and his media friends at FOX News.

Throughout all of this back-and-forth, immigrants and their allies have tied the rise and fall of their hopes to the 140-character whims of an individual who has demonstrated that he has “great love” only for himself.

At the same time, we have allowed our local communities to fall in line with the nativist policies of Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. During the week of MLK50, the MPD arrested a local Hispanic journalist and eight activists for crossing a street. The immediacy with which the charges were dropped highlighted the unreasonableness of the arrests.

But quickly dropping the charges did not end the damage caused by the MPD, because the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department chose to honor an ICE hold and turn Manuel Duran, the journalist, over for deportation proceedings. In less than a week, Duran went from covering the events of MLK50 in Memphis to a detention center in Jena, Louisiana.

This incident comes just a few months after the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) arrested 20 workers locally, and District Attorney Amy Weirich initially charged them with using fraudulent documents to obtain employment. The collaboration between ICE and THP was so tight in this case that the THP had them processed by ICE before taking them to the Shelby County jail. Weirich’s office dropped the state charges, but only after the U.S. Attorney’s office charged the workers with a federal crime: obtaining employment using false documents.

These incidents show that our local police, sheriff’s department, and district attorney are being co-opted by the Trump administration to upend the lives of our neighbors and friends, whose greatest crimes were working to support their families and providing media coverage of a protest.

We can’t wait any longer for Trump to show his “great heart.” This dangerous administration is doubling down on harassing immigrants — because that plays well to the base. We can fight by engaging locally — the Lawson way — to ensure that Trump’s efforts at tearing families apart does not occur in our community with the cooperation and consent of local elected officials and law enforcement. Local officials, it’s useful to remember, face a local electorate.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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MS-13 For Dummies

The term MS-13, (Mara-Salvatrucha) is from “Mara” (gang) + Salvatrucha, which derives from a common expression in Salvadoran street Spanish, “Ponte Trucha” — an informal way of saying “stay alert!” Mara-Salvatrucha roughly translates to “a gang of young, alert Salvadorans.” The number 13 is a universal badass gang number.

The common link here is El Salvador. During the late 1970s up through 1992, El Salvador was the site of a vicious civil war between conservative governments propped up by the U.S. and insurgents who aspired to a more communal society. At least 70,000 people died. Most were innocent civilians, including the Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero. He was gunned down while celebrating mass in 1980 on orders of right-wing paramilitary fighters.

The war caused such disruption in such a small space — El Salvador is roughly the size of Massachusetts — that at least a million people left the country, and many headed north to the United States, where they joined family in Los Angeles and around Washington, D.C. U.S. immigration law, dating back to a comprehensive reform in 1965, offered “family reunification” as a primary objective. Recently, this policy has been rebranded as “Chain Migration” by anti-immigrant and alt-right hardliners. The term itself is sinister and purposefully pushes (some of our) thinking back to the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke and away from law-abiding families living together in American neighborhoods.

Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Guatemalans literally ran for their lives during the decades of civil war in these three nations. Many faced harrowing journeys through Mexico — passages depicted in the classic 1984 Gregory Nava film El Norte. The southwest border was certainly more porous at that time; not exactly an open border, but analogous to the way Americans thought about airport security prior to 9/11.

Between 20 to 30 percent of El Salvador’s population fled during the civil war, about half a million of whom headed to the United States. The U.S. government under Ronald Reagan referred to these people as “economic refugees,” making them ineligible for protection under the Refugee Act of 1980. However, more than 1,000 churches, organized through the “Sanctuary Movement” provided protection and community for the Central Americans during the 1980s.
Some relief came through a 1986 comprehensive immigration reform, offering amnesty to 2.7 immigrants who arrived prior to 1982, but some Salvadoran youth during this period, primarily to defend themselves on the mean streets of L.A., joined gangs.
In the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. riots, hundreds of these kids were “repatriated.” Thus, a made-in-the-U.S.A. gang (the MS-13) got exported to El Salvador. There it metastasized in a society devastated by decades of war, unwilling and unable to confront the criminal organization.

The Trump administration’s fake narrative concerning immigration can be characterized as a sin (or series of sins) of omission. The immigration hardliners provide just part of the story. Like all petty, tyrannical regimes, they’re expert at manipulating public opinion. The State of the Union focus on American victims of gang violence, while certainly tragic, masks a more profound, prevalent reality: There are millions of young immigrant kids in schools, not in gangs or prisons, hoping to live in America and achieve the American dream.

Trump’s promise of a “big, beautiful wall” costing $20 billion or more cannot keep young, energetic people from South/Central America and Mexico from traveling to America. The opportunities here are too real and too tempting. But the contradictions of America — our helping destroy Central American nations through war, repatriating gang members there, and then constructing a wall to keep those same people out — are transparent to those who know the history. The real tragedy, however, is how seamlessly cruel intimidation, hostile tactics, and deceit link two malevolent organizations: The MS-13 and the Trump administration.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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The Seismic Shift in Voting Demographics

A seismic demographic shift in the United States has forced some to consider what actually “makes America great.” This debate has been fully displayed within the Republican Party, referred to — somewhat ironically given the recent rhetoric — as the Party of Lincoln.

Beginning in 2008, a vocal base of the Republican Party — whiter, older, and less formally educated — rebelled against the “otherness” of President Barack H. Obama. They challenged his veracity, religion, and citizenship. In that campaign, Senator John McCain had the decency to push back against the know-nothings in his own party.

Now the same party has nominated for president a man who has exploited this relentless wave of ignorance, once claiming that he sent investigators to Hawaii to uncover the secrets of President Obama’s birth certificate. Such overt racism has infected the party at all levels. Who can forget the revealing 2010 rant of State Representative Curry Todd (R-Collierville) against the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause when he suggested that Latinos would multiply like “rats”? He was reelected two more times by the people of his district.

Though the GOP has been handed over to racists and xenophobes, there are signs that the American public has had enough of hateful speech and fearmongering. Representative Todd’s political implosion and Trump’s tumbling poll numbers may be omens of what’s to come.

Demographics are the harbingers of the inevitable failure of this movement. Latinos number 27.3 million eligible voters, and their participation in November will prove critical in many states. In New Mexico, 40.4 percent of the electorate is Latino; their voice, their history, and their concerns will greatly impact that state’s vote.

To ignore or offend the Latino community in swing states makes little sense. For the past several years, education, jobs/economy, and health care have been the top three issues rated for registered Latino voters. But, immigration will be at the heart of the Latino vote for the foreseeable future because it directly affects nearly every Latino family.

For many Latinos in the United States, Obama will leave behind a nebulous legacy and an opportunity for Republicans. While signing executive orders (DACA, for example) which established a temporary status for young, undocumented immigrants, his administration also pursued deportations at an unprecedented level, earning him the nickname of “Deporter-in-Chief” from some activists.

The Republican response nominated a man whose rhetoric toward the Latino community is unidimensional and built on vilification, and who has plans for deportation and national isolation via construction of a wall.

The vast majority of Americans are rejecting this posturing. They are not fooled by a disingenuous campaign that focuses on a few bad Latino apples and completely dismisses the hardworking, tax-paying, social security-contributing people who are part of the basic fabric of our communities.

America’s greatness does not come from harkening back to a mythical past, but from the sueño Americano — the American Dream — built on dynamism created by constant influxes of new immigrants who are hungry to earn their place, contribute to their communities, and raise their kids. The energy, vitality, and optimism that still influences and guides this nation are not to be found in every nation, but here, it still endures.

Shifting demographics create challenges, opportunities, and, for some, fear. We shouldn’t ignore that. There are serious problems with our immigration system, but hateful speech and reactionary policies can never lead to a better way. Only a reasonable, bipartisan, comprehensive immigration package set by Congress, that offers a pathway to citizenship for millions of hardworking people who have been contributing to our nation for decades, can address immigration misunderstandings.

America is not the unhinged mob that Trump hopes to lead. Trump’s downward spiral shows us that any person in America who aspires to public office has to live in a world defined by the demographic data upon which we’re anchored.

Trying to alter that data, through mass deportation, is not the America to which we aspire. We hope that Todd and Trump represent the last gasp of a movement that’s completely contrary to that which makes this nation unique and great.

Bryce W. Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.