By Conor P. Williams and Rosario Quiroz Villareal, LA School Report, September 16, 2019
It was a busy, if often frustrating, summer for the Trump administration’s many efforts to destabilize U.S. immigration policies. Federal judges ruled in August that, under a longstanding legal agreement, the administration was required to provide detained children at the border with “edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste.” So the administration announced that it would write new regulations to supersede that agreement.
This came on the heels of the culmination of the administration’s multi-year push to redefine the country’s “public charge” rule, aiming to make it harder for hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants to obtain long-term legal residency in the United States. That effort also drew a raft of lawsuits.
For immigrant families and their communities, these recent efforts cap a terrifying few months. A series of dramatic ICE raids heightened immigrant communities’ fears across the country. And the Aug. 3 mass shooting in El Paso was a horrific, dramatic escalation of a wave of violence targeting immigrants in recent years. Against this backdrop, rumors — that the administration might (illegally) start targeting undocumented children in public schools as a way of pressuring their families, for instance — come to resemble facts. Immigrants in the United States today often find the rule of law to be unreliable — and their place in the country to be insecure.
Comments (0)