President Trump’s recent comments calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole countries,” has been met with strong reactions. House Speaker Paul Ryan, reflecting upon the hardships that Irish immigrants like his ancestors had once faced, called the president’s choice of language “very unfortunate" and "unhelpful” and said “the Irish were really looked down upon back in those days.” Ryan’s reference to the Irish offers a teachable moment about US immigration history, explains Hidetaka Hirota, a professor of American history at the City University of New York-City College and author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. It was the backlash in large part against poor Irish immigrants that led to the first US immigration policies and law, Hirota says.
Read moreUSCIS Announces They Will Resume DACA Renewals
Because of the nationwide injunction last week, US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that they will resume accepting requests to renew DACA status. The agency says that unless otherwise specified the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be operated until further notice on the same terms that were in place before it was rescinded on September 5, 2017.
Read moreNY Times: “Trump Must Keep DACA Protections for Now, Judge Says”
On Tuesday, Judge William Alsup of the Federal District Court in San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction ordering the Trump administration to partially resume the DACA program. The judge said the Trump administration’s decision to discontinue the program was improper and wrote that the administration must “maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis” as legal challenges go forward in court. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was set to end on March 5, 2018, and this week lawmakers and the Trump administration have been negotiating the program’s continuation.
Read moreVox: “Hundreds of immigrants will get to resubmit DACA renewals originally rejected as ‘late’”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that they will allow DACA recipients who missed the October 5 deadline either because of delays with the US Postal Service or the failure of a courier to pick up the applications from a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) mailbox, to reapply for their extensions. This is crucial for these applicants since the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be ending on March 5, 2018, and the deadline to apply for one last two-year extension of DACA protections was October 5, 2017. The government says that approximately 4,000 individuals failed to meet the October 5 deadline to renew their DACA protections, and initially chose to reject many of these applications that were late due to no fault of the sender. USCIS reversed their decision not to accept the late DACA applications after they “identified USPS mail service delays that affected a number of DACA renewal requests” as well as “discovered certain cases in which the DACA requests were received at the designated filing location (e.g., at the applicable P.O. Box) by the filing deadline, but were rejected.”
Read moreThe Washington Post: “Immigration judges say proposed quotas from Justice Dept. threaten independence”
The Trump administration is attempting to impose “numeric performance standards” on federal immigration judges in order to reduce the immense backlog of cases, a move that many fear will threaten judicial independence. In a proposal made by the White House earlier this month as part of negotiations regarding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Trump administration says that their intention is to “establish performance metrics for immigration judges.” More specifically, documents obtained by the Washington Post show that the Justice Department "intends to implement numeric performance standards to evaluate Judge performance." Dana Leigh Marks, the spokeswoman and former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, says this is alarming. “That is a huge, huge, huge encroachment on judicial independence. It’s trying to turn immigration judges into assembly-line workers.”
Read moreThe Chance to Feel Safe
NBC News: “Homeland Security Cancels Massive Roundups of Undocumented Immigrants”
In response to reports of a nationwide immigration raid that was scheduled to target approximately 8,400 undocumented immigrants later this month, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a statementlast Thursday saying that there are no nationwide enforcement actions planned at this time, as all upcoming operations have been reviewed and “adjusted accordingly” given the impact of the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida . In this statement, ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez stated there is no nationwide operation planned at this time because “the priority in the affected areas should remain focused on life-saving and life-sustaining activities.” While the statement released by ICE officials was an attempt to encourage undocumented immigrants in the affected areas to seek help, many undocumented foreign nationals still fear that the devastating effects of Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey will still not stop immigration officials from enforcing policies.
Read moreThe New York Times: "Trump Moves to End DACA and Calls on Congress to Act"
The Trump administration formally announced on Tuesday that they will begin to end the Obama-era program that has protected thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling the policy unconstitutional. The Trump administration suggested Congress could replace the program with legislation that would provide these immigrants with some form of legal status before the program expires on March 5, 2018. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was enacted in 2012 by former President Obama through executive action and has since protected approximately 800,000 young immigrants, known as “dreamers”, who were brought to the US illegally as children, from being deported. The program has also provided these immigrants with renewable, two-year work permits. If Congress fails to act before the program expires on March 5, 2018, these undocumented “dreamers” could face deportation back to countries where many of them have never even lived.
Read moreTenacity and Stubbornness
The Guardian: “Trump’s immigration crackdown is traumatizing a generation of children”
While the Trump administration dramatically increases immigration arrests and deportation orders, children of undocumented immigrant parents have reported a corresponding increase in fear, anxiety, and emotional trauma, and school officials have noted increased cases of absenteeism. Lisseth Rojas-Flores, an associate professor of marital and family therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, explains to the Guardian what these children are going through: “Kids start lagging behind academically, having social stress, anxiety and depression. With the new administration and all the threats for deportation that are so vivid and so real, and all the rhetoric that’s going around, the anxiety escalates to a point that can be very paralyzing for some of these kids, who don’t want to go to school, or who go to school and sit in there and still worry about their families.”
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