The Immigration Policy That Wasn't

Growing up in the suburbs of Bethesda, Maryland just outside Washington, D.C. in the 1970's and 80's, I knew families from all over the world who lived there as part of diplomatic, international trade, lobbying or military missions that interacted with various branches of the federal government.

Within two blocks of the street I grew up on there were families from Bangladesh, Australia, Japan, Columbia, England and Ghana.

To me, the kids from those families that I played with and went to school with were just kids, and as a child I didn't think of it as a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood - it just was.

That's one of the reasons that I vented some frustrations about the Trump administration's approach to undocumented immigrants in my previous blog - the toxic vilification of people simply because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their religion or their country of origin makes no sense to me.

It's remarkable, and somewhat disturbing, that a country like the United States, one of the most culturally diverse nations on the planet where everyone who is not Native American is an immigrant, still wrestles with immigration in the 21st century.

Considering how much the issue of immigration reform was such a part of the political dialog in this country during the recent 2016 presidential race, it's remarkable how little the Republican politicians (who control both the House and Senate) have done about it.

For a White House which has almost rendered itself politically impotent as a functioning branch of the federal government because of the chaotic, delusional man who currently occupies it, the idea of immigration reform has basically been limited to poorly thought out executive orders restricting the flow of people from predominantly Muslim countries into the U.S. and ordering U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to ramp up the arrests and deportation of the tens of millions of people who are in this country illegally.

Oh and spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money on building a really big wall between the U.S. and Mexico, even though data from the Pew Research Center shows that illegal immigration from Mexico has declined sharply in the past decade and most illegal immigrants are now coming from other countries.

Romulo Avelica-Gonzales with two of his daughters

Under the Trump administration ICE agents now lie in wait outside of schools waiting to arrest and deport parents dropping their children off in the morning.

Like Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez, a 48-year-old father of four who'd just dropped his 12-year-old daughter off at school in Los Angeles when ICE agents pulled him over and arrested him back in February as his wife looked on in horror and his other 13-year-old daughter cried uncontrollably.

Does that really make America safer?

Is that what "Making America Great Again" is supposed to look like? Breaking up American families?

According to an August 7th L.A. Times article the Board of Immigration Appeals has granted a temporary hold on his deportation while it decides whether or not the federal government is going to kick a married father of four daughters who has lived here for over 20 years out of the country.

What's unfortunate is that a fairly comprehensive immigration reform bill that would have offered someone like Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez a legal avenue to remain here in the U.S. was almost passed back in 2006 during the 2nd term of President George W. Bush.

Those old enough to remember will recall that Bush genuinely wanted, and fought for, meaningful comprehensive immigration reform.

With two years left in his tumultuous lame-duck presidency, Bush, desperate to leave some kind of political legacy not related to the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his failure to react quicker to Hurricane Katrina, swung for the fences.

As the brilliant investigative journalist Janet Reitman observed in her insightful profile of Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, in May of 2006 Bush pressed Congress to draft an immigration reform bill and after months of intense lobbying and negotiation, Republicans and Democrats reached what was touted at the time as "a Grand Bargain".

Then Sen. Jeff Sessions speaking against immigration
reform on the floor of the Senate chamber 

But it was not to be.

As Reitman reported, "On June 27th, 2007, a coalition of Republican senators backed by more than a dozen Democrats and independent Senator Bernie Sanders, defeated the bill 53-46". 

Delivering a stinging blow to the hugely unpopular Bush and establishing the foundation of a conservative coalition against moderate Republicans.

A coalition that continues to divide the Republican Party to this day and hamstrings their ability to pass meaningful legislation at a time when they have majorities in both the House and Senate and a Republican president in the White House.

The defeat of that immigration reform bill also put millions of folks who immigrated to this country illegally, people who've been here for years and established themselves as productive members of society with roots in their respective communities, back into the perpetual state of legal limbo, uncertainty and fear in which they now find themselves.

And as Reitman points out, the architect of the defeat of that bill was none other than the then-Republican Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

He spent months on the floor of the Senate chamber ripping apart immigration reform, ironically helping to defeat legislation that would have authorized federal funds to strengthen the very same borders that Trump now wants build a wall to make more secure.

Why? Because Sessions' rigid ideology, so clearly rooted in his own antiquated southern views of white supremacy and prejudice against people of color, opposed any pathway that would have allowed undocumented immigrants to remain here in the country legally.

Since the inauguration in January, we've seen some disturbing examples of the consequences of the Trump administration's heartless, ramshackle immigration policy - or perhaps, anti-immigration might be a better term.

Are undocumented immigrants receiving proper
 medical treatment in the Hudson County Jail?

As The Guardian reported back in February, a woman who'd filed three previous police reports for domestic abuse against her partner (incidents in which she'd been choked, punched, kicked and had a knife thrown at her) was arrested by ICE agents moments after an El Paso, Texas court had granted her a protective order - they literally arrested her as she walked out of the courtroom.

Are undocumented women in the U.S. silently enduring physical abuse right now because they're afraid that if they go to the police to report it they'll be arrested by ICE?

On Wednesday afternoon reporters Hannan Adely and Monsy Alvarado were interviewed on the Leonard Lopate Show to discuss the results of their ongoing investigation published in a series of articles for the Bergen Record posted on NorthJersey.com looking into the deaths of undocumented immigrants while in custody in the Hudson County and other detention facilities in New Jersey.

They also shared some really troubling insight into detainees who are not getting proper medical treatment for life-threatening ailments and how activist groups are trying to pressure politicians and authorities into holding corrections staff and administrators responsible for ensuring the health and safety of people being held in jail simply because of their immigration status.

As Attorney General, Jeff Sessions rolled back Department of Justice restrictions on the use of private prisons to hold federal inmates that were put into place under President Obama, largely because he knew arrests of undocumented immigrants under the Trump administration was going to spike drastically - arrests are up 40% since the inauguration in January.

Not only did he order federal judges to border detention facilities to radically increase the processing of cases of undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation, back in April he also ordered federal prosecutors to being making deportation cases a higher priority.

Former U.S. attorney Jenny Durkan

"Which prosecutors and agents does he want to divert from the growing threats like terrorism, cybercrime, the opioid and heroin trade, organized crime and cartel activity? The 'surge' philosophy always requires taking agents, money and prosecutors from other priorities. In fact, the cost of satisfying Washington will reduce the ability of every U.S. attorney from addressing the greatest threats to their communities." 

Those are the words of Jenny Durkan, a former U.S. attorney.

She served as the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Washington under President Obama from 2009 to 2014 - she made that observation in an interview for the Washington Post back in April in article about the impact of Sessions' decision to take resources away from other cases in order to ramp up the prosecution of undocumented immigrants.

As a recent Quinnipiac University poll which shows that 71% of Americans think Trump is not levelheaded and 63% said he does not share their values or have good leadership skills, the void of leadership from the White House seems to grow by the day.

That's basically the guy dictating a flawed U.S. immigration policy that's being enforced by anti-immigrant zealot Attorney General Jeff Sessions - who may literally be putting Americans in danger by diverting the resources of the Department of Justice and federal courts to enforce the ideology of Trump and overtly racist White House advisers like Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

Anti-Trump protesters at Trump's Phoenix speech
vastly outnumbered Trump supporters inside

And so Trump plunders on, determined (as evidenced by his quasi-delusional unhinged rambling in Phoenix the other night) to keep the media's and public's attention away from the encroaching Russia investigation with an almost non-stop series of bizarre words and actions that read like a laundry list from a lunatic:

Granting a pardon to the former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a racist anti-immigrant nutjob who was convicted by a federal court for ignoring a court order to stop using the resources of his department to carry on a campaign of harassment against immigrants.

Threatening to shut down the federal government and plunge the economy into chaos if Congress doesn't authorize billions in taxpayer funds to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

Signing an executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military - even though he himself ducked military service in Vietnam after he graduated from military school.

America has always been a culturally diverse nation and it always will be, Trump's desire to somehow remold it into the image of some kind of ethnically-homogenous Neo-Nazi fantasy stands in total contrast to the rich cultural fabric which defines this nation.

His demented vision is nothing like the America that I grew up in, or the one I see every day.

As we close out yet another week in which the media cycle was dominated by a chaotic White House, to me the real question is how much longer are Republican politicians going to wait before they cut the cord, admit they backed the wrong horse and find a way to work with Democrats in order to remind Trump that Congress controls the purse strings and writes the laws?

(Of course there's the power of impeachment too...)

Or are Republicans just going to sit back and watch their brand become completely toxic before the 2018 mid-term elections?  Clock's ticking.