By Andrea López Cruzado
Donald Trump made the persecution of undocumented immigrants a linchpin of his campaign for the presidency in 2016, and days after his victory he released a video of his priorities at the White House on immigration, promising that he would order an investigation of "all abuses. of visa programs that undermine the American worker. "
In his first weeks of presidency, however, it was clear that those words would translate into much more drastic actions.
An escalation in the deportations of immigrants, the separation of families at the border and the unprecedented obstacles to those seeking asylum in the United States are perhaps the main measures taken by Trump to curb legal and illegal immigration in these almost four years of rule.
But there is more, much more.
"The more than 400 executive actions of the Trump Administration have touched every part of the immigration system, virtually ending humanitarian benefits and severely restricting legal immigration," explains Sarah Pierce, public policy analyst with the US Policy Program. Immigration from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan institution based in Washington.
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Pierce is the co-author of a lengthy report that reviews the Trump administration's decisions on immigration.
The analysis points out that, while it is true that in theory these actions could be reversed by future administrations, the intertwined and swift manner in which they were established “makes it likely that the Trump presidency will have effects on the United States immigration system for a long time. weather".
First year: the immigration ban and the cancellation of DACA
On his fifth day in power, Trump acted twice.
On January 25, the president issued a decree to suspend federal funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, those that limit the collaboration of your local police with federal immigration agents.
In addition, it ordered the immediate removal of immigrants with deportation orders, immigrants convicted of a criminal offense, and those accused of a crime even without having been convicted.
That same day, and through a second decree, Trump addressed his great campaign promise, and ordered "the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southeastern border" to "prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism ".
Year after year, the majority of undocumented immigrants entering the country arrive legally on commercial flights and stay after their visas expire.
Most drugs arrive through legal ports of entry.
And the worst terrorist attack in US history, on September 11, 2001, was perpetrated by men with visas who traveled on airplanes.
None were Mexican and Central American.
Two days after his first two decrees, Trump surprised with an immigration ban for thousands of people - including those with permanent residence - from seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that in the first 100 days since those decrees, between January 22 and April 29, 2017, it arrested more than 41,000 people, an increase almost 38% compared to the same period in 2016. Almost 13,000 lacked criminal charges.
In June of that year, the Trump Administration struck down the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Residents (DAPA) program, which was created by former Democratic President Barack Obama to protect undocumented parents from deportation. of US citizens and lawful permanent residents.
On October 18, 2017, hundreds of people protested in Washington DC against the immigration ban for countries with a Muslim majority.
Shortly after, the Supreme Court gave way to Trump's ban.Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
And on September 5, he announced the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), another measure adopted by Obama to protect undocumented immigrants who were illegally brought to the United States by their parents when they were children.
Several states sued the Government to prevent the cancellation of DACA and, after several rulings against Trump, the case reached the Supreme Court, which on June 18, 2020 also ruled in favor of the so-called dreamers.
Yet Trump has not given up on his aspiration to end a program that benefits more than 640,000 young people.
Also in September 2017, Trump expanded his list of countries to which he applied travel restrictions to include Chad, North Korea and Venezuela.
Then his government announced that it would receive a maximum of 45,000 refugees in the fiscal year that ran from October 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018. This figure included a maximum of 1,500 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean, less than a third of the 5,000 that Obama had allowed a year earlier.
The government supported its decision by citing "the safety of the American people."
It would not be the only time that Trump would drastically reduce the number of refugees.
In November 2017, the Government ended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Nicaraguans, who had received protection in 1999 after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country.
The decision meant that more than 5,300 immigrants from that country would be left without permission to live and work in the United States as of January 2019.
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In his first year, Trump also spoke of nullifying the visa lottery and preventing lawful permanent residents and citizens from legally bringing their families, a legal move the president calls "chain migration."
The first lady, Melania Trump, was born in Slovenia.
In August 2018, her parents became naturalized Americans, thanks to that family reunification program.
The Trump campaign has not responded to a request for comment on these actions.
On Wednesday, in a call with journalists, Stephen Miller, presidential adviser and architect of many of the government's most restrictive immigration policies, defended the actions taken by the Trump administration and hinted that if he won re-election, the president would keep his hand. hard on the subject.
Second year: separation of families
In the first days of 2018, the Government set the expiration date of the TPS for Salvadorans, giving them until September 9, 2019 to return to their countries.
It noted that “the conditions caused by the 2001 earthquake” that motivated the original protection did not persist.
The measure affected nearly 200,000 people who had made their living in the United States for more than 15 years.
A few months later, on May 4, the Government made the same decision for Honduran immigrants who, like Nicaraguans, had been covered by TPS since January 1999 after Hurricane Mitch passed through their country at the end of 1998. Around 55,000 Hondurans would have to return to their homeland in January 2019.
However, lawsuits to block those decisions have extended the legal stay of more than 331,000 Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Salvadorans, whose TPS is now in effect through January 4, 2021.
In what has been perhaps the most controversial immigration action of the four years of Trump's administration, on May 7, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal entry into the country.
He issued the following warning to parents who planned to cross the border with their children: "It may be that that child will be taken away from you."
It was later revealed that the government had been separating families since mid-2017 as part of a pilot program in El Paso, Texas.
Under the pressure of criticism against the measure and two days after the investigative medium ProPublica published an audio where Central American children cried out in tears for their parents, Trump announced the end of the measure.
More than 4,100 minors had been separated from their parents.
However, since the official end of the measure, the government has set aside 1,100 more children, for a total of at least 5,446, according to a report by The Intercept.
And the number could be even higher.
In October 2018, Amnesty International noted in a report that Customs and Border Protection told it that "between April 19 and August 15, 2018, it had forcibly separated more than 6,000 family units."
December 2018. A Central American boy runs into a shelter in San Diego, after arriving from a border detention center.
As of October 2020, the Trump administration has been unable to locate the parents of more than 500 children separated from their families.
Gregory Bull / AP
On June 26, a judge ordered the government to return to their parents the children it had kept in “cages”, to whom it had served cold or frozen food and to whom it wanted to deny basic hygiene products such as soap.
To this day, more than two years after that order, more than 500 children remain separated from their families.
"We cannot ignore the intentional separation of families at the border as a supposed way to deter migrants," explains Dan Gordon, a spokesman for the National Immigration Forum, an organization that advocates for the value of immigration in the United States.
“The crisis continues with families that remain separated.
The inhumanity of this policy is appalling, "he added.
Less than a month after establishing the zero tolerance policy, Sessions announced that victims of domestic and gang violence in their home country would not automatically be able to access asylum in the United States.
In another effort to suppress asylum claims, Trump ordered the deployment of more than 5,000 troops to the Mexican border in late October to halt the advance of a caravan of Central American migrants, whom the Border Patrol would later repel with tear gas.
That same month, the president said he would sign a proclamation to eliminate the right to citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents or immigrants who have not become naturalized Americans.
"It is absurd, it is absurd and it has to end," said the president about the constitutional right to citizenship.
A few days later, on November 9, he issued a proclamation to prevent migrants entering the United States illegally from seeking asylum.
The measure was immediately rejected by immigrant advocacy groups and a judge blocked its implementation.
However, the following month, on December 20, the government announced that migrants entering the United States illegally with the intention of seeking asylum would be returned to Mexico, where they would have to wait indefinitely for the US government's decision on their cases.
The person in charge of giving the announcement was the then Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, who referred to a "crisis at the border" and said that migrants "will no longer be able to disappear in the United States", but would have to wait for the government permission to enter the country.
Under the program, called Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico, more than 68,000 migrants have already been deported.
“The government has practically eliminated humanitarian immigration channels,” explains Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, “asylum on the southern border has all but disappeared.” “Refugee admissions are at an all-time low and as a result, the US resettlement network has been paralyzed and it will take years for it to be restored, "he adds," and other benefits for victims of human trafficking, victims of violence, and unaccompanied children have been significantly reduced. "
Third year: money for the wall and express deportations
In his third year in the White House, Trump redoubled his efforts to fulfill one of his campaign's flagship promises: the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico.
In February, and after Congress did not approve the funds he requested, Trump declared a state of emergency to allocate up to $ 8 billion from other sources to the project.
June saw one of the most shocking images of the desperation of migrants fleeing crisis and violence in their countries, and who have been forced to take increasingly dangerous routes to reach the United States.
The Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martínez and his daughter Valeria, barely 2 years old, drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande on the border between Matamoros, Mexico, and Texas.
June 24, 2019. The bodies of Salvadoran immigrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria, almost 2 years old.
Both drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico to Brownsville, TexasJulia Le Duc
Also in June, the government announced a system of express deportations against any undocumented immigrant who could not prove that they had been in the country for at least two years without interruption.
Automatic removal was previously used to remove migrants detained no more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the border and who had been in the country for less than two weeks.
The order, however, expanded express deportation to immigrants found anywhere in the country and without receiving legal support.
In July, the Trump Administration signed an agreement with the Guatemalan government for migrants to apply for asylum there before seeking it in the United States.
In August, it was announced that the United States would deny permanent residency to immigrants who had become a “public charge,” which meant receiving one or more public benefits, such as food or housing assistance.
With these regulations, the Government sought to reduce the granting of
green cards
and also prevent the arrival of people through legal channels that it considered could become a public charge for the country in the future.
This measure, Pierce said, "could significantly transform [migratory] flows to the United States, disadvantaging immigrants from Latin America and the elderly, among others."
In September, the Administration once again reduced the number of refugees the country would receive to just 18,000 in the fiscal year from October 2019 to September 2020.
And an agreement with Honduras made that country, like Guatemala, a "safe country" to receive migrants seeking to reach the United States.
Fourth year: the pandemic as a reason to further restrict immigration
In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an order to suspend the entry of foreigners from countries where "a communicable disease" created a serious danger to the United States.
The government took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to prohibit the entry or quickly deport people seeking asylum.
He first did it for 30 days, but continued to extend the order in the following months.
Under the new rules, migrants, including children, are expelled without having gone through any legal process.
Less than a month after the implementation of the new measure, nearly 7,000 migrants had been returned to Mexico, including nearly 400 children.
In June, Trump announced that he would freeze the issuance of various types of visas, including those that benefit specialized professionals, and
green cards
to protect the labor market from the ravages of the pandemic.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government, allowing it to deport some asylum seekers without first giving them the opportunity to present their case to a judge.
I have a deportation protection, how do I change my immigration status?
Oct. 29, 202001: 12
After suspending the admission of refugees in order to protect American jobs during the pandemic, Trump announced in September that in 2021 the country would only receive 15,000 refugees, a record low.
In fiscal year 2017, Obama's last, the United States opened its doors to up to 110,000 refugees.
ICE threatened to expel international students who were to take only online classes, and the government ordered the collection of DNA samples from undocumented immigrants arrested across the country.
In addition, Trump signed a presidential memorandum to exclude undocumented immigrants from the Census carried out this year.
"The Trump Administration has seriously undermined legal immigration to the detriment of our economy and communities," says Gordon of the National Immigration Forum, "we are receiving fewer highly qualified professionals, fewer international students, fewer refugees and people with valid asylum applications."
In fiscal year 2020, which ended on September 30, 21 immigrants died in ICE custody, the worst year since 2015. Eight of those who died died after contracting COVID-19.
And for the next four years?
As White House adviser Stephen Miller announced this week, if he continues in the presidency, Trump's top immigration priorities would be: limiting the right of asylum, punishing and banning sanctuary cities;
toughen evaluations for visa applicants;
and put new limits on work visas.