In immigration policy, lawlessness starts with the Trump administration

The Trump administration has been ignoring the Flores Agreement for a very long time now, which had stipulated that migrant children were to be provided with humane living conditions and not held more than 20 days in de facto concentration camps. But while there have been many “outcries” in response, nothing has changed; Trump, Stephen Miller and Ken Cuccinelli continue to defy the “law” they claim to be upholding. It wasn’t until March 27 that the ICE—in response to a letter of complaint from Rep. Jerry Nadler—even bothered to distribute adequate hand sanitizers and just plain soap to the nearly 40,000 immigrants held in its detention centers. Oh and by the way,  in William Barr’s new policy of releasing prisoners who pass an “algorithm” test that can be “gamed” to release only white white-color criminals, only inmates convicted of violent and sexual crimes, and those who are detained for immigration-related offenses, are not eligible for early release. That’s right: undocumented workers rounded-up at a poultry plant or in a strawberry field are just as “dangerous” as native-born murderers and  rapists, according to the Trump administration.  

Meanwhile, to add on to the Trump administration’s continuing record of law-breaking—which includes the “remain in Mexico” policy and the outrageously disingenuous “safe third-party” policy which makes it impossible for Central American migrants to make asylum claims in this country—border agents are now using the coronavirus as an excuse to implement a new policy: to detain all migrants on their way to a border station to apply for asylum before they actually reach them to do so, and on an average of 96 minutes have them back across the border after insuring that they are duly noted as “criminals” for just crossing the border. It is a matter of little question that the Trump administration will continue this policy as long as they are allowed to get away with it long after the virus danger recedes.

Reports are that 15 percent of border crossers are allowed to remain in the U.S. to apply for asylum. Who are they? Mostly Indian (nearly 10,000 were detained crossing the southern border in 2018) and Chinese. For them, because they are the “favored” ones it is back to “catch and release.” One-in-six persons from Asia and India are in the country illegally, but according to ICE’s website, they claim not to have sufficient “resources" to spend their time tracking down non-Hispanic illegal immigrants, particularly "low priority" Asian immigrants with expired visas--such as the illegal immigrant who raped and murdered a 92-year-old Hispanic woman recently. 

Some people may still cling to the idea of the “letter” of the law, but there is also the law of simple human decency. We all know that Trump and Stephen Miller are racists, and that they simply hate Hispanics. We know all about the Miller emails (and he still has a job), and Trump jumpstarted his presidential campaign by claiming that except for a “few” who maybe might be “good people,” Hispanic immigrants were all rapists and murderers. The ICE, which has devolved into a thug organization, recently released its 2019 report of the crimes allegedly committed by immigrants it detained, or had been arrested for by local authorities but not convicted for; the report did not breakdown by “ethnicity” or race (so that people would assume that they were all Hispanic; one-quarter of illegal immigrants are non-Hispanic), but it did breakdown by type of crime—and only 10 percent of those arrested by the ICE who had committed actual crimes had engaged in what could legitimately be called violent crimes, and most of those for various forms of “assault.” Even the numbers provided were subject to question, since the people the ICE arrested were those who had been released after serving prison terms; they did not refer to crimes that had actually been committed in 2019, but anti-Hispanic immigrant types “interpreted” them for that purpose anyways.

But in the Trump administration, crime starts at the top, and “trickles-down” from there. A month ago U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued a ruling stating that the Trump administration violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act when Cuccinelli was installed as head of the ICE. Moss found that the administration had invented a phony position for Cuccinelli, and that the then “acting” head of the DHS, Kevin McAleenan, followed orders (most likely from Miller) to illegally “appoint” Cuccinelli as his “first assistant” ahead of the deputy DHS director, who was actually the “first assistant” by law. Because he was unlawfully in his position, Moss invalidated two of Cuccinelli’s directives. One of them allowed only a maximum of “one calendar day” for an asylum seeker to have a “credible fear” interview; thus if an asylum seeker showed up at 6 PM at a border station, they just had 6 hours to “prove” their case, if border agents even bothered to allow them the opportunity. The second directive denied asylum officers from granting extensions for that time period “except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” which of course is subject to “interpretation.” Both directives remain in effect.

These outrageous, unlawful directives have been denounced by immigrant advocates, but the media, lawmakers and the public in general don’t really see these migrants as human beings, just numbers and figures; they are from “shithole” countries anyways, “right”? 800 million Indians live in “shithole” conditions, more than in Latin America and sub-Sahara Africa combined, but in this country it is assumed that they are all “high-skill” workers, ignoring the impact of caste and “ethnic” prejudice and discrimination there—and here. According to the Wall Street Journal, contrary to racist myth, 4.4 million illegal immigrants pay federal taxes according to the IRS, and they are not eligible for any federal benefits derived from it, including the stimulus check--and the $500 per child even if their children are U.S. citizens. Nor has anyone called into question the way the judge’s ruling has been ignored not just in the Cuccinelli case but in the way the Trump administration has ignored the rulings of many others. Cuccinelli, of course, is not going anywhere, which only underlines the lawlessness of this administration.