DID YOU KNOW?
*Unauthorized entry into the U.S. is a misdemeanor offense.
*Contrary to President Trump’s allegations, the number of persons apprehended in crossing the Southern border is at a 46 year low–this at a time when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has more staff than ever. This decline has been occurring steadily for two decades.
*There is a negative correlation between undocumented immigrants and violent crime. Places with many immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. Furthermore, violent crime in America is at historic lows.
*Rather than being a drain on society, recent immigrants are more likely to have college degrees and start businesses than U.S. citizens.
*The Republican Administration and party are waging a war on legal as well as illegal immigration.
THE ADMINISTRATION’S OTHER CHANGES TO IMMIGRATION:[meaning other than the current ones of indefinitely detaining families or eliminating due process for migrants]
1) The phrase “nation of immigrants” has been eliminated from the mission statement of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, replaced with an emphasis on “protecting Americans, securing the homeland.”
2) In keeping with his promise of a “total….shutdown of Muslims entering the U. S.” Trump has arbitrarily barred travel to the U.S. from eight nations (six predominantly Muslim), possessing populations of over 100 million people. (Saudi Arabia, home of the 9/11 hijackers, is not on the list.)
3) In September 2017 Trump eliminated the DACA program, which allowed certain immigrant youth, about 800,000, to live and work in the country–a program favored by a majority of Americans.
4) Families are being torn apart as hundreds of undocumented persons who have worked and paid taxes in this country for years, raising American citizen children, are being rounded up and deported, often without an opportunity to say good-by to their families. Deportations of anyone in the country without papers has escalated beyond the already high levels during the Obama Administration, which switched its focus in its final years to deporting only genuine criminals.
5) One of Trump’s first acts as President was to freeze all refugee admissions. These were resumed, but he has lowered the admissions cap to 45,000– the lowest since the program’s creation in 1980. Only 6,704 refugees were resettled in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 as the Administration slow walks the resettlement process; the backlog of family reunification cases has exploded.
6) Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recently severely narrowed the criteria for asylum status–decreeing that fleeing domestic or gang violence, as so many Central American asylum seekers do, is no longer qualifying.
6) Trump is ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for persons from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, who make up about 75% of persons with that status. (TPS is given to persons who cannot return to their home countries due to war, hurricanes or other disasters.) The President declared Haiti, among others, to be a “sh__-hole country.”
7) Asylum seekers are being illegally turned away at the U.S. border.
8) The Administration closed down a family case management program for asylum-seekers that operated in numerous U.S. cities. This program functioned less like a prison and more like a counseling center and had a high success rate.
9) The Administration is staffing key positions influencing immigration policy with nativist, anti-immigration activists.
10) The Administration is concocting ways to strip naturalized U.S. citizens of their citizenship and deport them.
11) The Administration supports Republican legislative efforts to drastic
Research by Althea Schoen