The Trump Administration’s Failures on Immigration
Early on the campaign trail, President Trump expressed the unfounded hostility towards immigrants to the United States that would come to define his administration. Aside from launching his candidacy with an infamous denunciation of Mexico sending drugs, crime, and rapists to the United States, he remarked as early as August 2015 that undocumented immigrants “have to go.” From these first ugly remarks through his administration’s most recent policies — including heinous family separations and a broken promise to build a wall, paid for by Mexico, along the southern border — President Trump has driven the immigration debate in this country with his racism and xenophobia.
From the first days of his candidacy, President Trump’s administration has made immigration and immigrants themselves a target. As a result, a wide range of people — from those already here who truly are Americans in all but name to newer arrivals who are only seeking better, safer lives for their children — have suffered, while our military has been deployed to the border for months in order to carry out a mission founded on fear mongering. Following the longest government shutdown in history, Congress now enters negotiations once more over President Trump’s inane, ineffective border wall and the future of our nation’s immigrants; in so doing, Democratic leaders must not repeat the mistakes of last year’s January government shutdown, when they accepted even more empty promises from the administration and its allies.
Instead, Democrats should demand that the Trump Administration deliver a comprehensive accounting of its horrific conception and implementation of the zero-tolerance policy and pass a clean bill for the wildly popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, so as to secure the safety of those who already contribute to our economy and national security. They must also refuse the president his billions for a border wall which would do nothing to keep us safe, urge a withdrawal of troops from the border and hold a hearing on the deployment, and demand the resignation of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen for her blatant lies about separating families — a policy she fully endorsed.
THE ATTEMPTED ELIMINATION OF DACA
In September 2017, President Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without any replacement. Almost immediately, multiple cases were filed against the administration’s decision in states including California, Maryland, New York, Texas, as well as Washington, DC. When rulings began to be made, the Trump Administration did not fare well — partly due to how the president tweeted support for DACA shortly after rescinding it, saying, “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” In a January 2018 ruling in California, U.S. District Judge William Alsup actually directly quoted the president in his order that demanded the administration resume receiving applications for the program; “We seem to be in the unusual position wherein the ultimate authority over the agency, the Chief Executive, publicly favors the very program the agency has ended,” Judge Alsup wrote.
Over the course of the next few months, the Trump Administration’s efforts to rescind DACA faced defeat in New York, where the judge attested to how the president showed “a failure to explain their decision” at all, and Washington, DC, where one judge stated that the administration’s decision was “virtually unexplained” and “unlawful” and another called the decision “arbitrary and capricious” as well as “inadequately explained.” Meanwhile, in August 2018, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the Federal District Court in Houston rejected a lawsuit by seven states — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia — seeking to stop DACA, ultimately ruling that ending the program would cause irreparable harm to the nearly 700,000 young recipients.
This past November, the Trump Administration asked the Supreme Court to skip over lower federal courts and take up a case on DACA themselves, which the court has not yet done and seems unlikely to in its current term. At about the same time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to eliminate the program and noted in particular the “cruelty and wastefulness of deporting productive young people to countries with which they have no ties.”
THE ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY
While throwing the futures of young Americans in all but name into limbo, the Trump Administration was simultaneously separating immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In April 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally ordered a “zero tolerance” policy, with the goal being to charge more people with illegal entry. This policy led to the separation of children from their parents at the border because those charged were sent to federal prison, where their children could not join them. Nearly 3,000 children became separated from their parents in absolutely horrific, forcible ways. Those children were then forced into detention centers and tent cities where they faced extensive physical abuse such as kicking by guards, and mental abuse on top of the already traumatizing event of being separated from their families. Adults also faced severe abuse at detention centers; for instance, pregnant women were being shackled around their bellies and denied desperately needed medical care. Even now, within the last month or so, reports have emerged documenting the deaths of children in U.S. custody.
The administration denied that the policy was intended to separate families, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in June saying, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” Yet, in September, a memo from top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to Secretary Nielsen, dated April 2018, was released. The memo put forward three options to fulfill the zero-tolerance policy and recommended option three, which would “pursue prosecution of all amenable adults who cross our border illegally, including those presenting with a family unit.” Though the signature approving option three is redacted, it is almost certainly Secretary Nielsen’s given that the memo is addressed to her.
Other members of the administration have also stepped in to double down on the zero-tolerance policy, including former Attorney General Sessions who said, “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly also chimed in to defend the draconian policy by stating that, in immigration, “a big name of the game is deterrence” and separating families “could be a tough deterrent.” Senior advisor to the president Stephen Miller commented as well, saying, that “it was a simple decision” to implement zero tolerance and require family separation.
However, on 20 June 2018, the Trump Administration yielded, in part, to justified public outrage when President Trump signed an executive order that instead outlined the administration’s intent to detain, rather than separate, entire families indefinitely. Yet, this was not a legal solution, as a judge later ruled, and it also failed to state how families would be reunited. Thankfully, just six days later, District Judge Dana M. Sabraw for the Southern District of California ruled that the separation of families at the border must stop and that children must be reunited with their parents with 30 days, with children under the age of 5 needing to be reunited in 14 days.
The months following Judge Sabraw’s order shed light on the extent to which the Trump Administration failed to plan for the implementation of the zero-tolerance policy and the eventual reunification of families. First of all, the administration did not meet the deadline to reunite families, citing ongoing DNA testing of parents and children and background checks on parents as delaying the process. However, it soon became clear that the delay was due to lost or destroyed records linking children to their parents by the federal agencies in charge of apprehending migrants and overseeing the care of migrant children. Last October, DHS’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) actually released a report documenting the chaos behind execution of the policy. The report listed some of the most grievous errors, including but not limited to: at least 860 migrant children were left in custody (many in chain link holding pens) for longer than the 72-hour limit; there were problems identifying, tracking, and reuniting families due to a poorly coordinated interagency process; the department lied about the existence of a central database; and officials gave inconsistent information to migrant parents, who did not know they would be separated from their children.
The revelations, however, did not stop there. Just this month, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report admitting that the Trump Administration likely separated thousands of more children at the U.S.-Mexico border than previously known, given that HHS began separating children for about a year before former Attorney General Sessions made his formal announcement in spring 2018.
MILITARY ON THE BORDER
Finally, while the atrocities at the border unfolded by their very hands, the Trump Administration attempted to involve the Department of Defense — in other words, our military forces — in their cruel, immoral, and largely illegal attacks on immigration. At first, in June 2018, DHS formally asked the Pentagon to house and care for about 32,000 people, of whom 12,000 would be members of immigrant families and 20,000 would be immigrant children. The Pentagon, however, ultimately rejected the request, as well as a later one that asked them to build migrant housing.
Unfortunately, by the end of October, President Trump did involve our armed forces by ordering 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to meet an approaching caravan. The president defended his order by claiming, “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border.” Yet, the reality was far different from this idea of a national security threat promoted by the president: The caravan was, in truth, largely composed of immigrants fleeing from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — countries that face severe poverty and extreme violence and that the United States has financially pledged to help in order to address the exact conditions causing the migrants to leave and seek a better, safer lives elsewhere.
Regardless, our active duty military traveled to the southern border to fulfill their mission, initially named “Operation Faithful Patriot.” In November, the mission began with nearly 6,000 active duty troops — in addition to the about 2,000 National Guardsmen already there — who were tasked with providing support for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), such as transporting supplies or installing concertina wire. By mid-November, the troops received, due to an order signed by then Chief of Staff John Kelly, the authority to use “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention and cursory search” in order to protect Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. Such powerful authority was given, however, without any long-term plan in place; after all, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis plainly said that the long-term goal was “somewhat to be determined.”
Despite a clear lack of long-term goals, the Pentagon announced that our military’s presence on the border has been extended until 30 September 2019. The mission, as described by the Defense Department, will be “transitioning its support at the southwestern border from hardening ports of entry to mobile surveillance and detection, as well as concertina wire emplacement between ports of entry.” While there are currently about 3,000 troops on the border after a slight drawdown in December, it remains unclear how many will remain on the border for the mission’s duration — though Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan just stated that “several thousand” more troops will be deployed to the border again soon.
The Trump Administration, quite frankly, has yet to justify the presence of the military on the U.S.-Mexico border in the first place, let alone the extension of the mission and the apparent deployment of several thousand more troops. There is no real national security threat; therefore, rather than sending so-called support for CBP in the form of an active military presence, the president should instead demand more extensive training for CBP officials so that they stop tear gassing people who strive only to find a better, safer life for their children and contribute to the United States’ economy and communities.
NEXT STEPS
Last month, the president shut down the government for the longest period in history, all in order to secure funding for an ineffective wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He attempted to offer a temporary, three-year reprieve for DACA recipients in exchange for the wall, but Democrats rightly refused such a deal as it failed to provide a permanent solution to a crisis of the administration’s making.
As negotiations continue following the reopening of the government, Democratic leaders in Congress must demand that the Trump Administration drop its request for a border wall that is ultimately just a vanity project for the president and pass a clean bill for the DACA program that will permanently secure the futures of recipients. Furthermore, the president owes Congress, as well as all American people, a full response to his immoral zero-tolerance policy — which should include the resignation of Secretary Nielsen — and deployment of troops to the border, where families were brutally torn apart.
President Trump’s attacks against those who have known no other home than the United States, or who want only to escape unspeakable violence elsewhere, violate the very values of the America that we all strive to build every day. Democratic leaders must cease this opportunity to hold the Trump Administration accountable for its heinous acts against immigrants and demand they shift course immediately.
Shannon Bugos is the Communications and Writing Manager at Truman National Security Project and the editor-in-chief of the Doctrine Blog. Views expressed here are her own.
