Newsletter: The cruelty and bigotry of Trump’s immigration policies
Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Aug. 11, 2018. Happy solar eclipse day! (Only if you happen to live in some of the most remote corners of the planet.) Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.
Crafting immigration policy requires great attention to detail, so it’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of each of President Trump’s multiple offenses in this area. For example: Yes, President Obama warehoused some child migrants in less than ideal conditions, but taking minors from their parents wasn’t an administration policy. And yes, Obama temporarily restricted the flow of refugees from certain countries, but he did nothing like instituting a wholesale suspension of travelers from majority-Muslim nations. And on, and on.
These arguments are worth making, if only to put down on the historical record our rejection of Trump’s attempts to mislead the public. But it comes up short in a failing-to-see-the-forest-for-the-trees sense, because when you step back and take a wider view of the administration’s broader approach to immigration policy, the picture that becomes clear is of a hard-hearted White House that believes certain people simply do not belong in the United States. The Times Editorial Board takes this big-picture look and calls Trump’s immigration policies “a disaster”:
First there was the ban on travel of people from mostly Muslim countries and then the effort to eliminate protections for so-called “Dreamers” who have been living in the country illegally since arriving as children. Hard-line Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions has inserted himself in the immigration court system and overridden previous decisions over who qualifies for asylum; not surprisingly, the number of people granted protection has dropped as a result. President Trump also has throttled the flow of refugees resettled here; last year, for the first time since the passage of the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act, the United States resettled fewer refugees than the rest of the world, a significant step away from what had been an area of global leadership. (Over the last 40 years, the U.S. has been responsible for 75% of the world’s permanently resettled refugees.)
Then there’s this: The White House is reportedly drafting a plan that would allow immigration officials to deny citizenship, green cards and residency visas to immigrants if they or family members have used certain government programs, such as food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit or Obamacare.
And this: The now largely abandoned “zero tolerance” policy of filing misdemeanor criminal charges against people crossing the border illegally led to a surge of cases in federal court districts along the southwest border as non-immigration criminal prosecutions plummeted, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In fact, non-immigration prosecutions fell from 1,093 (1 in 7 prosecutions) in March to 703 (1 in 17 prosecutions) in June, suggesting that serious crimes are taking a back seat to misdemeanor border crossing....
Trump’s immigration policy has been characterized by unnecessary detention and inadequate monitoring that has allowed for abuses at detention centers — including sexual assaults and forced medication of children. The immigration court system is now overwhelmed by a backlog of 733,000 cases.
In short, it’s been a disaster.
Cruel and scandal-plagued: It’s not just on immigration that the Trump administration is plumbing new depths. Editorial writer Scott Martelle reminds us that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been at the center of 14 — yes, 14 — ethics investigations; Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin is under scrutiny for his possible misuse of a military plane; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head resigned after it was revealed she bought stock in tobacco companies. The kicker? “Remember, we’re less than halfway through Trump’s first term,” Martelle writes. L.A. Times
He also doesn’t know anything about fighting wildfires. Trump’s tweets about California not having enough water to fight fires because our environmental laws require that our rivers flow unimpeded to the Pacific Ocean (his actual words were far less comprehensible but just as asinine as that summary) were stupid, politically motivated and insensitive to the trauma and loss of life happening right now. Said The Times Editorial Board: “Trump ignores climate change and tweets his absurd musings about environmental laws and water at a time when fires have killed nine people, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and caused the evacuation of thousands. It reminds us of someone else, way back in Roman days. If only Trump had a fiddle instead of Twitter.” L.A. Times
L.A. Times readers also feel poorly served by their president in this crisis. Regarding Trump’s now-infamous tweets, one letter writer said: “People are dying in my state, and with these tweets I wonder if anything is beneath this craven man.” Separately, a letter writer whose house nearly burned down last month in Goleta’s Holiday fire accused Trump of allowing allied business interests to profit from the public’s suffering by permitting unprecedented logging in certain national forests.
Californians are miserable at the DMV, even more so than before, and all of California’s lawmakers appear able to do is beat up on a favorite political punching bag without doing the deep dive into the problems that have long plagued the agency. Since the Legislature won’t address the problem by ordering an audit, says The Times Editorial Board, that job of reforming the DMV will fall on the governor, something Jerry Brown’s likely successor has said he would deserve to be recalled over if he failed to fix. L.A. Times
Speaking of disasters in California, this is one area in which our state no longer suffers alone: wildfires. Parts of Europe, Argentina, Chile and Russia are sharing in the seasonal misery long suffered by fire-weary Californians (except that in California, that danger is no longer seasonal). The grim reality of a world gripped by climate change appears to be one where a feedback loop of fire has taken hold; in other words, global warming has created the conditions for destructive fires, resulting in unprecedented deforestation and accelerated climate change, further creating an environment for destructive fires. New York Times
Reach me: paul.thornton@latimes.com
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