When does immigration enforcement become ethnic cleansing?
CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf tries to flesh out Stephen Miller’s endgame:
This week, the Supreme Court blessed, for now, the administration’s effort to deport people from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela to places other than their homeland, including nations halfway around the world in Africa.
In Florida, construction began on a migrant detention center intended to be a sort of Alcatraz in the Everglades.
And CNN reported exclusively that the administration will soon make a large universe of people who had been working legally after seeking asylum eligible for deportation.
The Trump administration means to target “people who came into the US unlawfully and then applied for asylum while in the country,” says CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez.
WOLF: This is certainly not the criminal population that President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan said during the campaign that they would target first for deportation, right?
ALVAREZ: You’re right to say that coming into this administration, Trump officials repeatedly said their plans were to target people with criminal records.
That is a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of legwork, and their numbers in terms of arrests were relatively low compared to where they wanted to be.
The White House wants to meet at least 3,000 arrests a day, and you just cannot do that if you are only going after people with criminal records.
They’re creating more undocumented to deport
Brown people cannot immigrate the right way, it seems:
WOLF: So the Trump administration essentially created a large new population of undocumented people who were previously here with some sort of blessing from the government?
ALVAREZ: Yes. I’ve been talking to experts in industries that depend on migrant workers and there have been situations where someone had hired a migrant worker who had a work permit to legally work here while their applications are being adjudicated, while they went through their immigration proceedings, and they don’t have that anymore. Those protections and benefits have been stripped.
That person who was hired legally is now suddenly undocumented. That can create an issue for industries that depend on the migrant workforce.
Someone mentioned that to me as an example earlier this week, as we were talking through how it can affect agriculture, construction and manufacturing.
We don’t have a good sense of the numbers yet, but all indications are that by stripping protections consistently through various ways, the number of people who are undocumented in the United States is growing.
The Trump administration’s problem is not with immigration and border control. It’s problem is with who is doing the immigrating, as Donald Trump’s own wife suggests. When does immigration enforcement become ethnic cleansing?
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