President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families is quickly morphing into the expansion of an existing policy of detaining families. At the end of June, the federal government announced that an immigration prison—the Port Isabel Service Processing Center—would be its “primary family reunification and removal center,” though it has since walked that policy back. We work out of this facility and have visited it many times. Call it what they like, this is a prison. That Port Isabel is at the center of the administration’s new policy to expand family detention only underscores [...]
Family Separation and Reunification
By Anita Ortiz Maddali There has been widespread public outcry following the administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy, which called for criminal prosecution of parents crossing the border without proper documentation and forced separation from their children. The President recently issued an Executive Order ending the separation policy. Now, parents will be detained with their children. But what about the 2000 plus children who have already been separated because of the zero tolerance policy? How will they be reunited with their parents? Initially, and, understandably, from an [...]
Trump’s family separation & detention executive order
Responding to the outcry over his administration’s policy of separating migrant families, President Trump signed an executive order today ostensibly limiting separation while simultaneously expanding family detention. The executive order explicitly links the alternative nightmares of family separation and detention. The executive order purports to end the family separation policy. Indeed, it claims that the administration’s policy is to “maintain family unity, including by detaining families.” To do that, the president ordered DHS to “maintain custody of alien families during the pendency [...]
Two-tiered citizenship in DHS terrorism report
This week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report of terrorism activity that reveals little about terrorism and much about the Trump administration’s view that United States citizenship comes in multiple forms, some of which are more authentic than others. The report, a response to Trump’s travel ban executive order, purports to list terrorist activity conducted by “foreign nationals” since September 11, 2001. It claims that approximately seventy-three percent of people convicted of international terrorism-related charges since then were foreign-born. President Trump [...]
Attorney General delivers fiery speech in defense of the status quo
Visiting the southwest border for the first time since becoming Attorney General, today Jeff Sessions delivered a campaign-style speech promising to bring the federal criminal justice system to bear against immigration law violators. Standing before Customs and Border Protection officials in Nogales, the Attorney General described beheadings, machete attacks, and gang violence. “Criminal aliens, and the coyotes and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration,” he claimed. In response, the Justice Department that he leads will “take our stand against this filth” [...]
Colorado Republicans target sanctuary cities—again—in pursuit of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda
By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch After suffering a party-line defeat in a state House committee last month, Republican state legislators in Colorado are once more attempting to coerce cities, counties, school districts, and law enforcement agencies to entangle themselves in immigration enforcement. The “Colorado Citizen Protection Against Sanctuary Policies Act” (Senate Bill 281), like the Republicans’ earlier failed bill, is a wrong-headed effort to solve a largely nonexistent problem. Perpetuating the myth of immigrant criminality Following the Trump [...]
Trump asks Congress for $3 billion in supplemental funding for FY 2017
Earlier today, President Trump asked Congress to find $3 billion in funding to pay for the president’s immigration executive orders through the end of September 2017. This request comes as an addition to the billions of dollars Congress has already given the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2017 operations. In particular, the White House requests supplemental funds to pay for the border wall, an expansion to ICE’s immigration detention system, and to prepare to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents. As the president’s most expensive immigration policing project, the [...]
Beyond Rhetoric: “Sanctuary” in Practice
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehended 680 people over the last week, pointing to the increased role of federal agencies in immigration detention under the Trump administration. While this is still a lower number than the weekly average detained under the Obama administration, it does represent a much larger share of detentions for ICE specifically. Three recent cases of ICE overreach stand out as examples: Guadalupe García de Rayos, an Arizona mother who had checked in with ICE regularly since 2013 to review her status, arrived for her scheduled meeting last week [...]