Thread: Blurry Line Between Citizens and Noncitizens

Tom Elias: Blurry line between citizens and noncitizens



Ventura11:30 a.m. PT Feb. 21, 2017

Almost no one seemed to notice during last fall’s election that yet another line between citizens and immigrant noncitizens was breached. Even before then, there were few privileges and rights that immigrants — both documented and not — could not enjoy in at least some parts of California.

Driver's licenses, check. Illegal immigrant children eligible for state-paid medical insurance under Medi-Cal, check. In-state college tuition, check that, too.


Undocumented immigrants even have the right to practice law here under a bill signed in 2015 by Gov. Jerry Brown. And legal immigrants can be poll workers at election time, because of a perceived shortage of multilingual election officials.


About the only thing noncitizens can’t do is vote. But wait a minute. San Francisco voters by a 54-46 percent margin last fall decided to blur that, too, for immigrant parents of public school pupils, regardless of their legal status.

San Francisco voters passed the local initiative Proposition N to give noncitizen parents of public schoolchildren the right to vote in school board elections.

So noncitizens, even if undocumented, now can help decide who will spend taxpayer money, and indirectly, how it will be spent.
There is one fly in this ointment, at least for the undocumented. One that local officials have not yet figured a way around.
Most school board elections in San Francisco and elsewhere coincide with votes on myriad other offices and issues. But noncitizens there are authorized to vote only on school board candidates.


Does this mean noncitizen parents exercising their new local right will be handed special ballots at the polls or, under California’s soon-to-be-implemented new election system, receive special ballots in the mail? Will they fill out different forms than the ones used by citizens when they register to vote?

This has not yet been decided, but if noncitizens do receive special forms and ballots, it will be because they’re honest enough to admit their actual immigration status. If they do admit it and get separate, unequal treatment via ballots dealing with only one type of contest, they might just be risking deportation.

That’s because President Trump has said for more than a year that he intends to deport all illegal immigrants, regardless of how law-abiding they are in other ways. He’s said he wants to start with undocumented immigrants who are also criminals, but that has not changed his ultimate goal of ousting virtually all.

San Francisco’s voting records might provide a method for his operatives to locate some of them.

This leaves local officials a tad perplexed. “We have to craft a really strong privacy policy so if anyone wants to vote, we ... ensure their contact information ... isn’t revealed or given over to the federal government or any entity like (immigration) enforcement,” said former San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar, who sponsored Proposition N.

That won’t be easy, considering that Trump’s Justice Department can subpoena any voting records it likes, just as federal lawyers have done for years while fighting voting rights cases in the old South.

San Francisco’s school system spent years trying to convince parents of pupils that their records will be safe. That’s one reason the local school databases don’t list citizenship status.

There are other complications, too, including the question of whether some parents could vote twice in school board elections if the schools sent out special schools-only ballots to parents, while citizen parents would also see the same contests on their regular ballots.


So San Francisco has a lot to work through, with no easy solutions in sight. But the city has already taken the issue of noncitizen voting a step beyond where it is anywhere else.

Yes, in New York City, left-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio and his sympatico City Council have several times considered a law allowing all legal residents, regardless of citizenship status, to vote in local elections.

Their rationale is that citizens and noncitizens are equally affected by public policy, from tax levies to road building and policing, which, they say, ought to entitle all residents to an equal voice in local matters. But it has not yet happened there.

Giving noncitizens the ultimate right belonging to citizens, along with all the other privileges they’ve already attained, would remove most of the motive to do the very basic book-learning needed to become a citizen.

Which makes this ultimately a destructive practice.


http://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/...zens/98204660/

They all have to be deported. The federal government has totally failed our Republic and Citizens. Trump has to fix this and fix it 100%.

"Heart" is nice, it sounds good, but it doesn't solve the problem, it feeds the DemoQuack Globalist Socialist agenda that has 94 million working age Americans out of the work force, our citizens burdened with a $20 trillion and growing national debt with no end in sight UNLESS rapid deportation of illegal populations, regardless of circumstance, regardless of sob story, is implemented and they are all removed.

Americans have sob stories, real ones, and no one cares about US. Just US care about US. Trump cares about US but he must not let this foreign-serving mantra defray or distract or destroy his agenda, and if this administration caves on any level, we're just back where we started, and low taxes and better healthcare will do nothing to stop it, it might even feed it since our country will be more attractive to more illegal aliens.

Our immigration laws have to be enforced en masse fast and furious because they are all bad dudes, they are all bad hombres, they are bad for our country. We don't want them here, we don't need them here, we can't afford them to be here, we can't sustain them remaining here.

They all have to go. DACA's, DAPA's, all of them, no one left behind in the United States. "Heart" doesn't play here, that's a personal luxury we can not tolerate.

Breaking: Trump to Keep Protections on DREAMERS

No DACA, No DAPA, No path to citizenship! They all go.

You are a criminal trespasser that broke our Laws whether you came here 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 1 year ago, or 20 MINUTES ago.

Do not REWARD...DEPORT them all.

They Gravy Train is OVER!

My feeling is Trump is going to let the 2012 DACA expire in June and let the 2014 expanded DACA and DAPA die in the courts undefended so the states win their cases with a federal court ruling in their favor on the record.

Originally Posted by Judy

My feeling is Trump is going to let the 2012 DACA expire in June and let the 2014 expanded DACA and DAPA die in the courts undefended so they states win their cases with a federal court ruling in their favor on the record.

No Judy, they are still accepting new applications and are allowing everyone to renew their DACA. They were afraid that he would cancel the DACA EO and let them expire, but now they are celebrating. He is their man, their president, to quote them. If anything they feel that DACA will never go away until Trump gets Congress to grant them amnesty. They say they are safe and so are their families. Sorry, but their President Trump only has heart for them ("he has a really good plan for them").

Originally Posted by MontereySherry

No Judy, they are still accepting new applications and are allowing everyone to renew their DACA. They were afraid that he would cancel the DACA EO and let them expire, but now they are celebrating. He is their man, their president, to quote them. If anything they feel that DACA will never go away until Trump gets Congress to grant them amnesty. They say they are safe and so are their families. Sorry, but their President Trump only has heart for them ("he has a really good plan for them").

"No, Judy" what? Under the 2012 DACA which is the only program in effect, people within those narrow guidelines can still sign up and renew until June. In June the Obama DACA 2012 ruling expires on its own, after which no one can sign up or renew. The program work permits will all have expired by March 2019, according to an article I or someone posted a few weeks ago. No one can sign up under the 2014 Expanded DACA or the DAPA program. Those were stalled by the court injunction in the lawsuit filed by the 26 states almost 2 years ago that was upheld by the US Supreme Court Tie that meant the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal Ruling in favor of Hanen's injunction that stopped the Expanded DACA and DAPA program, that expanded the hundreds of thousands eligible under the 2012 criteria to over 5 million. The 2012 DACA's the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago was 869,000. Some will expire this year, most expire next year and few expire in 2019. It was my read of that article that by March of 2019, there will be no more DACA's and the whole thing is over by its own terms.

They are confused. Trump will never renew DACA. They are mistaken about that. The question is whether he will use a MEMO or EO to reverse it which means stopping it now instead of in June. I don't believe without a court ruling, he can recall the work permits already issued. If he does nothing the program ends in June of this year and all possible applications and renewals expire in March of 2019. He could try to stop it now and not let any more applications be taken or approve those that are taken.

There are 48 lawsuits against Trump and the government already filed for his EO to reverse green cards and visas issued to people from 7 terrorist countries. A federal appeals court has affirmed Judge Robart's ruling that the President didn't have the right to do that. Right or wrong, the court stopped him from trying to stop the immigration. Same thing would happen 100 times over if he messes with DACA. Universities will file suits, employers will file suits, states and cities will file suits. It's not worth it. That's why the trend seems to be to let it expire. There's no chance at all that any of the cases that would be filed would be resolved before June. There's also no chance in my mind that a liberal pro-immigration circuit court or court of appeals would not rule against Trump. Our court system has never been our friend. Even the Hanen Ruling that stopped Expanded DACA 2014 and DAPA had nothing to do with the merits of the case, it was a technicality on the Obama Administration failing to provide proper public notice for the required time frame in the Federal Register.

It's a mess. Not because of Trump because of our court system and it's eternal support of illegal aliens and immigrants instead of American Citizens.

This is how I'm looking at it, right or wrong, there's over 30 million illegal aliens in the United States. If Trump focuses on deporting the other 29 million plus who are not 2012 DACA's, there will be enough overlap onto the DACA's, that by the time he's finished with the priorities, there will be no reason to do anything for the rest of them. That would be up to Congress and they're not going to do it. The House of Representatives will never agree to it.

There are plenty of sneaks in Congress, but we stopped the Dream Act through the House, we stopped Amnesty through the House, the House has never been more revved up than it is now to stop this madness.

Originally Posted by MontereySherry

No Judy, they are still accepting new applications and are allowing everyone to renew their DACA. They were afraid that he would cancel the DACA EO and let them expire, but now they are celebrating. He is their man, their president, to quote them. If anything they feel that DACA will never go away until Trump gets Congress to grant them amnesty. They say they are safe and so are their families. Sorry, but their President Trump only has heart for them ("he has a really good plan for them").

I feel exactly as you do. Anyone paying attention can clearly see Trump has no plan to deport those under DACA. If that was in the future the program would have already been cancelled. There is currently an amnesty bill being worked by Sen. Tillis (R-NC) that addresses the DACA program and would legalize those folks in the program. It would appear President Trump's just got too much "heart" to deport them.

Sounds like Trump has to listen to ryan - how disappointing to say the least.

[IMG]https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/77712921/greg_****_bigger.jpg[/IMG]

Greg SargentVerified account‏@ThePlumLineGS 11m11 minutes ago More


Greg Sargent Retweeted Jordan Fabian
DHS tells me they are continuing to give DACA recipients work permits:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/02/21/trumps-mass-deportations-have-arrived-but-will-republicans-pay-for-them/ …