Tag: Trump immigration policy

Trump reveals he has no idea how the diversity visa lottery works

Getting a green card isn’t as easy as having your name pulled from a hat.

At a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thursday night, President Donald Trump painted a wildly inaccurate picture to his supporters of how the diversity visa lottery program works.

The diversity visa lottery program awards roughly 50,000 green cards each year to citizens from various underrepresented countries to legally live and work in the United States. In turn, lottery recipients “diversify” the U.S. population: in order to qualify for the lottery, an individual must meet a number of merit-based factors, including a certain level of education or comparable work experience.

In Trump’s mind, however, the diversity visa lottery functions as some kind of Powerball for criminals.

View the complete August 2 article by Rebekah Entralgo on the ThinkProgress website here.

Federal judge rules against Trump asylum policy

The Hill logoA federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday against a Trump administration policy that would only allow migrants who enter the U.S. through legal ports of entry to claim asylum, the latest blow against the administration’s agenda.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee, threw out the policy, finding it to be “inconsistent with” the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The policy has been already blocked by a federal judge in San Francisco and is now being appealed before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

View the complete August 2 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Minnesotans in Congress get troubling look at U.S.-Mexico border

Reps. Dean Phillips and Pete Stauber saw wretched conditions at U.S.-Mexico border.

WASHINGTON, DC – The national immigration debate has turned the southern border into a popular destination for members of Congress, including several Minnesota lawmakers from both parties who report being shocked by what they saw.

“I’d seen the photos and read some accounts,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, a Democrat. “I anticipated I’d see difficult conditions, but what I saw was almost indescribable. I couldn’t believe that, in my own country, that people were being kept in the ways that I saw.”

Phillips’ most recent trip to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas was on July 19, where he and a bipartisan group of House members inspected ports of entry, a Border Patrol station, a centralized processing center and the border itself. It was his second visit in a period of less than two months, following a conversation with Rep. Pete Stauber about his own visit in there in April.

View the complete August 2 article by Patrick Condon on The Star Tribune website here.

Graham moves controversial asylum bill through panel; Democrats charge he’s broken the rules

The Hill logoThe Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill to overhaul U.S. asylum laws on Thursday, waiving committee rules to force the legislation through over objections from Democrats.
The Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 to send the bill, spearheaded by committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to the full Senate, where it’s not expected to get the 60 votes needed to ultimately pass. 
The decision by Graham to force his bill through the committee sparked outrage from Democrats on the panel, who accused him of busting up the rules on how legislation gets taken up in order to push through a partisan bill.

View the complete August 1 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

Trump officials tighten asylum rules, enlist foreign nations to deter migration

Washington Post logoIn court, at the border and through arm-bending negotiations with regional neighbors Mexico and Guatemala, the Trump administration has been devising elaborate new immigration measures to buttress against potential judicial setbacks and the possibility of a new migration surge this fall.

The effort proceeds along two main fronts: a long-range push to narrow access to the U.S. asylum system for migrants seeking protection, and a more immediate attempt to create new deterrents by enlisting foreign governments instead of congressional Democrats.

Late Friday, the administration announced a major new migration accord with Guatemala that would make the country a faraway repository for asylum seekers from other nations. It has been rolled out so hastily that U.S. lawmakers have yet to receive a copy.

View the complete July 31 article by Nick Miroff on The Washington Post website here.

Trump officials tighten asylum rules, enlist foreign nations to deter migration

Washington Post logoIn court, at the border and through arm-bending negotiations with regional neighbors Mexico and Guatemala, the Trump administration has been devising elaborate new immigration measures to buttress against potential judicial setbacks and the possibility of a new migration surge this fall.

The effort proceeds along two main fronts: a long-range push to narrow access to the U.S. asylum system for migrants seeking protection, and a more immediate attempt to create new deterrents by enlisting foreign governments instead of congressional Democrats.

Late Friday, the administration announced a major new migration accord with Guatemala that would make the country a faraway repository for asylum seekers from other nations. It has been rolled out so hastily that U.S. lawmakers have yet to receive a copy.

View the complete July 31 article by Nick Miroff on The Washington Post website here.

ACLU: U.S. has taken nearly 1,000 child migrants from their parents since judge ordered stop to border separations

Washington Post logoLawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union told a federal judge Tuesday that the Trump administration has taken nearly 1,000 migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border since the judge ordered the United States government to curtail the practice more than a year ago.

In a lengthy court filing in U.S. District Court in San Diego, lawyers wrote that one migrant lost his daughter because a U.S. Border Patrol agent claimed that he had failed to change the girl’s diaper. Another migrant lost his child because of a conviction on a malicious destruction of property charge with alleged damage of $5. One father, who lawyers say has a speech impediment, was separated from his 4-year-old son because he could not clearly answer Customs and Border Proection agents’ questions.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has said that family separations remain “extraordinarily rare” and occur only when the adults pose a risk to the child because of their criminal record, a communicable disease, abuse or neglect. Of tens of thousands of children taken into custody at the border this year, 911 children were separated since the June 26, 2018 court order, as of June 29, according to the ACLU, citing statistics the organization received from the government as part of ongoing legal proceedings.

View the complete July 30 article by Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.

What Child Detentions At The Border Are Telling Us

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimms’ fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.

Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.

Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of this country’s identity.

View the complete July 27 by Karen Greenberg on the National Memo website here.

The enduring cruelty of Trump’s immigration agenda

Washington Post logoIn a parallel universe, the scene could have flooded newspaper front pages and cable news networks for days. But in the whirlwind of the Trump presidency, it’ll end up just another footnote in a forgotten chapter of White House absurdity.

Last week, President Trump hosted a delegation of some two dozen victims of religious persecution from around the world. The diverse group, which included a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a Tibetan who fled China and a Rohingya Muslim chased out of Myanmar by a government-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing, huddled around the president’s desk at the Oval Office. They took turns explaining their plight to Trump and what drove them to escape their homelands for safe haven elsewhere.

It was already an awkward set piece, but it turned all the more cringeworthy with Trump’s comments. One exchange in particular — between the president and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Iraq who was raped and tortured and whose family members were murdered by the Islamic State — stood out. The president was not particularly attentive, only perking up when questioning Murad on how she could have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

View the complete July 26 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.