Tag: Trump’s immigration policy

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

“Zero Tolerance” for Human Decency

CREDIT: Ben Carson

Last Saturday, around 500 people gathered in Gaisman Park in northeast Memphis to rally against the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in thousands of children being placed in confinement, separated from their parents. The Memphis rally was one of several hundred held in cities around the country. The effect on the adminstration? As far as I can tell, they’ve implemented a “zero reaction” policy.

Maybe we’ve grown inured to these outrages. Now we’re reading stories of three-year-old children being forced to defend themselves in court to prevent being deported. It’s like some Kafka-esque theater of the absurd that never ends.

And speaking of absurd, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson was in Memphis Monday. He pitched his recent proposal to hike federally subsidized housing rents 25 percent. The plan is meant to “encourage people to work.”

Its actual effect, according to most analysts, would be to push thousands of the roughly four million low-income households living in subsidized housing into homelessness. Hundreds of thousands of those in low-income housing are already working, almost all of them at low-wage jobs. The low rents enable them to keep a roof over their heads and keep their families intact. Roughly eight million people would be affected by the rent increase; three million of them are children. See a pattern here?

The HUD proposal is simply the latest attempt by the Trump administration to reduce or even eliminate the social safety net. The theory being, I suppose, that by forcing people out of public housing, they will magically find work, because people living in public housing are lazy, and all they need is a good kick in the pants so they’ll grab their bootstraps.

“It’s our attempt to give poor people a way out of poverty,” Carson said. The truth is, few people are in public housing because they lack ambition. They’re in public housing because they’re elderly and/or living on a fixed income; or they’re uneducated; or they’re physically or mentally handicapped; or they have been forced into bankruptcy due to an inability to pay medical bills.

Those three million children can’t “find work,” so many will find themselves on the street with their caregivers — or be separated from their families and put into foster or institutional care. See a pattern here?

But, looking at the bright side, at least now the precedent has been set: We can put children in prison, preferably private ones owned by Betsy DeVos.

But seriously, forcing a 25 percent rent increase on the most disadvantaged Americans on the hypothesis that they will be forced to find work is just cruel nonsense. It is not a theory espoused by any reputable economist. In a report last month in The Commercial Appeal, Marcia Lewis, director of the Memphis Housing Authority, said 10,600 households in Memphis would be affected by the rent increase. Lewis added that the plan would strip away deductions for childcare and medical expenses, and would triple the minimum rent for Memphis’ poorest families. The proposal would also apply to assisted-living facilities and voucher-funded units.

If half of those households can’t afford the increase and are forced onto the street, who do you think will pick up the tab for the increased social services? The answer is you and me, the Memphis taxpayers.

This administration’s game plan is increasingly clear: Strip away the protections of the social safety net for our most vulnerable and powerless populations; reduce Medicare and Social Security under the guise that they are “unaffordable entitlements” rather than well-earned rewards of a life spent working; reduce access to medical care; and remove environmental protections. Oh, and, we need to cut taxes for the wealthy, because, well, they’ve had it rough for quite some time.

The core principle of MAGA is simple, really. It’s a reverse Robin Hood philosophy: Take from the poor and give to the rich — and keep everybody else preoccupied with issues like immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights, and Melania’s coat.

It seems to be working. Remember when millions marched and blockaded airports to fight the “Muslim ban.” We thought we won. We didn’t. The fix is in, from top to bottom.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Steve Miller Ban

CREDIT: REUTERS | Leah Millis

What would you call a nation that separates children from their immigrant parents and warehouses them in abandoned Big Box stores behind chain-link fences? What do you call a regime that institutes a “zero tolerance” policy for immigrant families fleeing violence, political upheaval, and poverty in their own countries? What does it say about the law when the attorney general quotes Bible scripture to justify the administration’s gestapo tactics while grinning at the camera? And what do you say about a national leader who demands that all followers of a global religion be banned from entering the country?

It used to be verboten for any responsible person to compare our democratic republic with Nazi Germany. But how do you avoid the comparison, when two Texas public defenders testify that some parents were told by U.S. Customs agents that their children were being taken “to be bathed” and were never returned? Reporters have told of nursing babies taken from their mothers; the screams of parents following the realization that their children were gone; and the tears of refugees who presented themselves at proper border crossings seeking asylum but instead were hustled off into criminal custody.

I saw a documentary about children torn from their parents’ arms once, only it took place in 1939 and I had to read the subtitles because it was in German. This is no longer the home of the brave and the land of the free. It’s the home of the intolerant and the land of the incarcerated. I don’t know about you, but I want my country back.

REUTERS | Leah Millis

Stephen Miller

Always looking to deflect his assholism on to someone else, Trump tweeted in his own ungrammatical way, “Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change.”

He’s lying. No law requires this.

During the influx of mothers and children from Central America in 2014, the Obama administration attempted to detain families with Immigration and Customs Enforcement until their cases could be adjudicated, which was administrative rather than criminal detention. Even then, a federal judge ordered a stay for confined asylum seekers and ruled that families could be held in detention for only a short period of time — usually 20 days. And children were not taken from their parents.

In Trump’s America, immigrants are taken into federal criminal custody, thus transforming their children into unaccompanied minors who are then whisked away to one of 200 immigrant detention centers all across the fruited plain. Presidential Chief of Staff John Kelly claimed that children and their parents would be separated “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network. The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”

Or whatever.

Currently, the government has opened a “tent city” near El Paso, Texas, to house 360 minors in 100-degree heat, with plans to construct numerous such “cities” across Texas. They are also actively looking at military bases to house immigrant children. Even conservative pastor Franklin Graham said it was “disgraceful.”

It only figures that a corrupted corporatocracy like the United States would eventually cough up a hairball like Donald Trump, but you’d have to look far and wide to find a Jewish Nazi like Stephen Miller. A far-right icon, Miller is a senior advisor to the president at the age of 32. Born into a liberal Jewish family in Santa Monica, California, Miller is a descendant of ancestors who fled the pogroms of what is now Belarus. His conversion to conservatism took place after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a screed against progressive ideas and criminal justice reform written by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre.

While at Duke University, quasi-Nazi and white nationalist Richard Spencer claims he mentored Miller, although Miller disavows knowing Spencer. Miller’s first D.C. gig came as spokesman for Minnesota’s moron Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who said in 2014 that American Jews “sold out Israel” by voting for Obama, and apologized in Jerusalem only last week for her calls for converting “as many Jews as we can” because “Jesus is coming soon.”

In 2009, Miller became advisor and communications director for then-Senator Jeff Sessions. In an interview with Breitbart News, Sessions praised the National Origins Act of 1924 which restricted immigration from Eastern Europe, saying, “It was good for America.” The irony was lost on Miller.

Miller followed Sessions into the White House, where his white nationalist views meshed perfectly with the new administration. After cozying up to the incendiary Steve Bannon, Miller invited the writers and editors of Breitbart News to the White House to discuss immigration. He played an integral part in Trump’s illegal travel ban and was a crusader for restricting refugee resettlement and immigration from Muslim countries. He even wrote Trump’s “American Carnage” Inaugural speech.

His initial appearance on national news was notable for his assertion that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” A recent New York Times article said, “Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy.” Senator Lindsey Graham opined, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere.” 

I don’t know the conditions that create a self-loathing Jew. If Miller was oblivious to the darkest chapter of the 20th century, you’d have thought he’d at least seen Schindler’s List. 

The Times reports that over the last six weeks, an estimated 12,000 children have been separated from their families. One immigrant from Honduras killed himself in custody after being separated from his wife and child. With Josef Goebbels wannabes like Miller advising the president, the time has come to decide whether the United States will retain its status as a beacon of liberty to the world or become just another “shithole country.”

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

DACA Dilemma

The nation has just witnessed another orgy of political partisanship on steroids — the 69-hour governmental shutdown resulting from a standoff between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, with the GOP members carrying water for the immigration hardliners in President Donald Trump’s White House.

The ostensible issues involved in the standoff were hardly trivial, with congressional Democrats basing their position on a determination to see the passage of enabling legislation for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) and Republicans being just as determined to keep anything involving DACA out of the continuing resolution bill that was being prepared to maintain the operations of the federal government.

What underscores the absurdity of the conflict is the fact that, by general consent, clear majorities existed in both parties favoring DACA, which would shield from deportation and other penalties the children, many of them now grown and active participants in the economic and civic life of America, who were brought here by parents who were themselves illegal aliens. 

Legislation to restore DACA was made necessary when Trump last year arbitrarily revoked the executive order by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, that had established the program. Trump, who has an obvious fetish for eradicating any possible vestige of Obama’s two terms, claimed (and claims) that he, too, favors the concept of DACA but contended at the time that only Congress should authorize the program and set a deadline of March 4th for legislative reauthorization.

Basing their stand on a distrust of Trump’s long-evident proclivity for reversing his stated positions regularly and whimsically, the Democrats obviously wished to nail the issue down as far in advance of the President’s arbitrary deadline as possible.

Republicans, taking their cue from the aforementioned administration hardliners, resolved to resist dealing with DACA without a clear go-ahead from Trump, who has insisted on coupling DACA reauthorization with Congressional appropriations to enact his Great Wall fantasy on the border with Mexico, as well as on approval of an assortment of other harsh anti-immigrant positions. Hence, after some typical back-and-forthing from Trump that made hash of attempts to negotiate the matter, the impasse.

Disagreements are inevitable within a democratic framework, but they should be based upon legitimate divisions of opinion, not on Us-Against-Them invocations of party loyalty, which was so obviously the cause of the DACA standoff. The governmental shutdown was fairly quickly ended when the Democrats blinked and concurred with a GOP formula for a continuing resolution to extend to February 8th, at which time the DACA issue will still need resolution, and more urgently. To everybody’s shame, party was put before country.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The ICE-man Cometh: The Tragedy of Trump’s Immigration Policy

CREDIT: Latino Memphis

As with almost all his policy initiatives, President Trump’s administration has resorted to obfuscation and lies; this is particularly true with regard to immigration enforcement.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed that his administration would focus on arresting undocumented criminals, the so-called “bad hombres.” Homeland Security insists that this, in fact, is official policy. The most current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Memphis suggest a very different reality.

From July 23rd to July 26th, as part of a regional operation, ICE arrested 83 individuals on immigration charges in Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. Of the 83 arrested, 64 had no significant criminal background.

This means that 80 percent of the arrests made during these raids were conceivably of people who were taking their kids to day care or the grocery store. These arrested and detained individuals are our friends, family, and neighbors. They are an integral part of the cultural, economic, and social fabric of our cities.

Unfortunately, we have been growing accustomed, since January 2017, to Trump administration deceptive-speak and aggressive actions. Last week, we should remember, Trump told police on Long Island, New York, that it’s “okay” to rough up individuals during detention and arrest.  

But the president is not solely responsible for the fear facing the Latino community in Memphis and around the country. For nearly two decades, both political parties have recognized that our broken immigration system serves neither our economy nor the individuals caught in its archaic, outdated structure.

Latino Memphis

Latino Memphis members distribute immigration information

Rather than taking proactive measures, most politicians, business owners, and citizens have remained silent while a shadow economy developed in agriculture, construction, and the service industries. The vast majority of Americans said nothing as generations of undocumented immigrants toiled in the U.S.A., constructing our houses, preparing our food, and taking care of our children.

We Americans perpetuated the lie that this system was somehow mutually beneficial. We professed our personal support for legislation reforming this broken system, but failed to take effective action to make reform a concrete reality.

Our silence and inaction have created the perfect storm, whereby entire communities live under siege as a callous opportunist seeks political gain by tearing families apart. The greatest enemy to these communities is not President Trump, but the apathy of those who profit from decades of work undertaken by the undocumented. If Trump is to be stopped in his supposed “patriotic” pursuit of deportation, American apathy must end immediately.

In light of deep fears spreading through a community under attack, the response of our elected leaders has been silence. County Mayor Mark Luttrell has said nothing. Several months ago, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland stated that the city would not enforce immigration laws and that Memphis remained a “welcoming city.” Those were important statements at a time when the threat was largely theoretical.

But now our community is struggling to make sense of the ICE incursions. With the school year starting, families will be exposed to ICE stops and raids while carrying out the most mundane of tasks, such as taking their kids to school. The time for broad platitudes from our mayors is over. We need action immediately.

First, school property must be declared a safe zone from ICE enforcement. Second, the Shelby County Sheriff should refuse any future collaboration with ICE at the Shelby County jail. Third, our city and county mayors should begin monthly meetings with the Latino community to explore policies to help resist and impede ICE enforcement within our city and county.  

But resistance to this assault cannot be left solely in the hands of our local government. Individual citizens must demand action. We can begin by contacting local, state, and federal government officials, demanding a stop to ICE’s cruel tactics. We should also call for passage of comprehensive immigration legislation that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As the government continues its raids, we can push back against the ICE machine via sustained resistance both in the courtrooms and in the streets.  

Silence and apathy have led us to where we are today, together with a political neophyte president in D.C., who reveals, daily, dictatorial tendencies.  If Memphis is truly a “welcoming city,” we must not sit idly by while ICE tears families apart.

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

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Slouching Toward Refuge

A looming battle is building between United States cities, some states, and the federal government. The issue involves sanctuary status for communities reluctant to cooperate with officials of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), given the Trump administration’s stated goal of detaining and deporting all undocumented persons.

The modern sanctuary movement began in the 1980s when perhaps a million people from Central America fled their war-torn homelands (the wars, in all cases, partially financed by the United States). Reagan-era (1980-88) policy referred to these folks as economic migrants. (According to this logic, the migrants were fleeing poverty, not the wars we promoted.)

President Ronald Reagan refused to acknowledge the political dimension of the conflict, and thus, migrants were ineligible for protection under the 1980 Refugee Act. Against this backdrop, some cities with significant Hispanic populations organized a “sanctuary” movement to provide shelter (mostly in religious houses of worship), protection, and aid for people who, literally, were running for their lives.

So we go, historically, from bad to worse.

Back in the 1980s, our nation actively pursued Cold War proxy wars in Central America, the arms industry profited from those wars, we helped destroy infrastructure in three Central American nations displacing multitudes, and then we shut our doors to fleeing refugees. All of this seems, when looked at holistically, especially cruel, written not in conformity with reality but for a modern, tragic Italian opera.

Now we have Mr. Trump, a Reagan redux but without the charm, affability, or charisma of the great communicator. The two presidents share one important characteristic: cluelessness. Given Trump’s recent executive orders, we see a rapid descent back to the ’80s, but this time, thanks to technology, the world can watch the tragedy in real time.

Trump’s executive order regarding refugees seeks to ban people from some majority Muslim nations and is especially unkind, given that one of the nations on the original list, Iraq, was completely destroyed by the U.S. in the illegal (but profitable) war of 2003 that never really ended. Syria is on the list, a country we’ve begun bombing with cruel consequences for a civilian population stuck in a sectarian civil war. Trump’s order, rewritten to pass constitutional muster in the eyes of skeptical judges, has been enjoined once more by skeptical judges.

The President’s executive order on immigration seeks to fulfill an unfulfillable campaign promise: to deport all “illegals.” Given that the administration is determined to win somewhere, sanctuary status for cities — and a few states — has reappeared in the media, with Trump threatening to pull federal grant money in retaliation for these cities’ noncompliance with federal mandates.

The current sanctuary movement is about city leaders protecting the people within their jurisdictions from federal overreach; the central concern involves trust and public safety.

For example, police departments need support from people living in cities and communities who witness crimes; their job is not to enforce federal (and, in this case, politically motivated) immigration executive orders, but to protect people from petty and more serious crimes. When the police are seen as potential agents of deportation, police work and public safety collapse. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t seem to understand any of this and has reacted by bullying local officials, reminiscent of the mid-19th-century Alabama leadership style that defines him.

Trump has already made it clear that raids and deportations will occur as America cracks down on the undocumented. Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Obama, who deported a lot of people, Trump wants to round up everyone who is not in the country with proper documentation — including women and children. People who cross a border without permission, or overstay a tourist visa, have committed a civil code violation, not a crime. Only a cruel cynic could accuse a child who crosses a border with parents or relatives of having committed any type of legal violation. But this administration, unfortunately, is bringing new meaning to cruel and unusual.

We need collaboration between federal and local officials. We don’t need a mass roundup of innocents to appease the political positions of a few fanatics. A showdown between some states/many cities and the federal government is approaching, but given the path this administration is charting, we might be heading back not to the 1980s, but way back to the 1860s.

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