Trump Administration Uses Bureaucracy to Choke Immigration System
Trump Administration Uses Bureaucracy to Choke Immigration System
Sep 17, 2018 at 11:30 am
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An immigrant says goodbye to his family before deportation. Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Trump administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy on the southern border has somewhat faded from the news after they agreed to stop separating parents and their kids, but the story hardly ended there. The administration has limited immigration in dozens of ways, and over the weekend, This American Life aired a stunning hour on public radio stations across the US about how the government is using its own bureaucracy to choke the immigration system and force people into detention.
According to American law, it is perfectly legal for a noncitizen to approach the border and request asylum. But, under the Trump administration, the line at the border is sometimes weeks long. Asylum seekers, some of whom have literally walked across a continent to get there, have to pay for lodging and food, which many asylum seekers just can't afford.
This American Life talked to one asylum seeker from Cameroon—where the government has been killing minority groups and burning their homes—who'd walked to the US border from Ecuador. He had been waiting for three weeks and had run out of money for food, so he was surviving by just drinking water.
The long waits, as you can likely imagine, lead some asylum seekers to give up on the legal route and try to cross the border on their own. When this happens, and if they are caught, they are turned over to federal criminal court for mass hearings. Julia Preston, who reported this story for both the Marshall Project and
This American Life, was in a courtroom during one of these hearings, and she saw 74 immigrants convicted en masse, as though this were Egypt or Turkey.
They were sentenced en masse too, and with a few exceptions, everyone was given "time served." So, after a few days in detention and a mass hearing, most of the immigrants were released and immediately sent back to the border. "All of this work to deter illegal crossings, and yet most everyone walked out of the court that day with basically no punishment," Preston said.
So, what's the point? That part of the plan comes in later.
As Preston noted, almost no one is deterred from trying to cross the border again. But when you are picked up a second time, what was formerly a minor misdemeanor becomes a felony, this one punishable by up to two years in prison. And after a felony conviction, it becomes almost impossible to legally enter the US ever again. And that is exactly the point of "Zero Tolerance. "
"This could mean prosecuting something like 200,000 people a year for the misdemeanor offense," Preston says. "Before long, it could mean tens of thousands of newly convicted felons in federal prison. President Trump and the attorney general have long said that people who cross the border illegally are just criminals. Now, every day, more and more of them are becoming exactly that."
The administration is cracking down on immigration, including legal immigration, in dozens of other ways that are so small and incremental that they will never get the attention of separating parents and children, but the intent is the same: to close the United States to foreign entry. Why are they doing this? Jeff
Sessions is certainly ideologically opposed to immigration (and there's plenty of evidence that he's not just a little racist to boot), but there are profits to be made as well.
The Trump administration (and the Obama administration before them) has been feeding an immigration industrial complex increasingly run by private prisons. ICE spends more than $2 billion a year detaining immigrants in private prisons, so everything that's happening on the southern border is a real win/win for the administration: Make it impossible for immigrants to ask for asylum, and then use taxpayers dollars to imprison them.
Listen to the whole show here, and then send it to your Trump-voting cousins. Maybe tell them it's a sermon.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/201...gration-system
