Category: Racist: Hispanic

Ignoring voilence, Trump admin ends protections for 200,000 Salvadorans

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The Trump administration will end protections for certain nationals of El Salvador, a move that could leave more than 200,000 immigrants who have lived in the US more than 15 years without any legal status, the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday.

The termination will come with an 18-month delay, as the administration also recently did in ending other recent Temporary Protected Status for other countries. That time will allow individuals who have lived under the status to either seek other means of staying in the US or prepare to leave. The delay means the more than 250,000 TPS protectees will have until September 9, 2019, to either find a different way to stay in the US or prepare to leave.
The widely expected move culminates a series of similar decisions from the Trump administration to substantially curtail the use of Temporary Protected Status — a protection from deportation and authorization to live and work legally for nationals of countries that have suffered a disaster such as war, an epidemic or natural disasters.

The DHS says more than 250,000 Salvadorans — all of whom are required to have lived in the US continually since 2001 — are covered by TPS. Previous estimates by the department have put the number who will most likely be left without other protections around 200,000.

The administration has pushed to strongly curtail the use of TPS, a protection provided for by law, saying that the repeated extensions of the typically two-year protections by previous administrations of both parties have ended the “temporary” piece of the status.
DHS has made an effort to emphasize that TPS depends on the original reason for the designation, not current conditions. In El Salvador’s case, that was a devastating series of earthquakes prior to its designation in 2001.

In a call with reporters, a senior administration official said Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen decided the termination was “required” given that the original disaster that precipitated the status has been resolved enough to terminate the protections. Officials on the call repeatedly dismissed questions about the violence and economic conditions that persist in El Salvador, including the MS-13 gang that has been a top target of this administration, saying those factors are irrelevant to the decision.
Critics immediately slammed the decision.

“They have resettled, established their families and lives here in the United States. Most of them see themselves much more as American citizens than Salvadoran citizens and to end that protection and program is going to disrupt many communities across the United States,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Virginia, said on CNN Monday. “It’s inhumane and not consistent with American values.”

The criticism wasn’t limited to Democrats. Florida Republican and immigration reform advocate Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart quickly released a statement in “strong disagreement” with the administration.

“These innocent people fled their home country after a disastrous earthquake, and while living conditions may have slightly improved, El Salvador now faces a significant problem with drug trafficking, gangs and crime,” Diaz-Balart said. “Since 2001, these people have established themselves in the United States, making countless contributions to our society and our local communities. It would be devastating to send them home after they have created a humble living for themselves and their families.”

The issue will now be kicked to Congress. Senate negotiators are discussing potentially including a deal to end the diversity lottery, which is a top target of President Donald Trump, in exchange for some resolution on TPS, according to Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake”

“We can deal with diversity visa, if we pair it with TPS, doing some kind of reallocation visas there,” Flake told reporters on Friday.

[CNN]

Reality

The move comes as Trump continues policies that treat immigrants with brown skin as a threat.

Trump frequently uses the El Salvadorian gang MS-13 as an example of the threats of immigration, but MS-13 got its start in the 1980’s when this exact scenario played out and we sent back Salvadorian immigrants to a violent country because of nothing more than xenophobia.

Trump said Haitian immigrants ‘all have AIDS’

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The White House strongly pushed back on a report that President Donald Trump spoke about immigrants in a dismissive and demeaning fashion during a June meeting with top administration officials.

The denial came in response to explosive reporting from the New York Times, which wrote that, according to two unnamed officials, Trump said during a meeting in June that people coming from Haiti “all have AIDS,” that recent Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa and that Afghanistan is a terrorist haven.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement blasting the paper and denying that Trump had made the comments.

“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen, and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims and it’s both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway,” Sanders said.

The report said the Oval Office meeting during the summer included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and senior officials, including White House adviser Stephen Miller, who the Times said had provided Trump with a list of how many immigrants received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

he Times report said Kelly and Tillerson tried to respond by saying many of the visas were for short-term travelers, but that as Trump continued, Kelly and Miller “turned their ire” against Tillerson, who threw his arms up and retorted that perhaps he should stop issuing visas altogether.

The Times said its report was the product of more than three dozen interviews. The explosive and disparaging remarks about immigrants attributed to the president were sourced to a pair of unnamed officials, one who the Times said was present in the meeting, and another who was briefed about the comments by a second attendee. But the Times says several other participants told them they “did not recall” the President using those words.

[CNN]

After border agent is killed and partner injured in Texas, Trump renews call for wall

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Authorities were searching southwest Texas for suspects or witnesses after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed and his partner injured Sunday while on patrol in the state’s Big Bend area, officials said.

Agent Rogelio Martinez and his partner were “responding to activity” near Interstate 10 in Van Horn, Tex., when both were seriously injured, according to a Customs and Border Protection news release.

Martinez’s partner called for help. Other agents arrived, provided medical care and took them to a hospital.

Martinez died of his injuries; his partner, who was not identified, remained in the hospital in serious condition, officials said.

Martinez, a 36-year-old from El Paso, had been a border agent since August 2013.

Jeannette Harper of the FBI’s El Paso field office told the San Antonio Express-News that authorities were still gathering evidence. She said reports that the agents were shot were not true, but that a full account of what happened wouldn’t be released until Monday.

“They were not fired upon,” Harper said.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman declined to offer any further details about what happened.

But a National Border Patrol Council labor union official said Martinez may have been killed in a rock attack.

Art Del Cueto, the union’s vice president, said he has heard from other Border Patrol agents that Martinez and his partner were believed to be responding to an electronic sensor that had been activated.

Del Cueto said he was told that Martinez and his partner apparently did not sustain bullet or stab wounds — so he suspects the pair may have been attacked with rocks, which are commonly thrown at agents working in that area.

“It’s heartbreaking; it’s truly heartbreaking,” he told The Washington Post on Monday in a phone interview.

President Trump appeared to connect Martinez’s death to border security and plugged his plans for a border wall Sunday night on Twitter.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said, without explanation, that Martinez and his partner were “attacked” and also linked the incident to security on the border with Mexico.

“This is a stark reminder of the ongoing threat that an unsecure border poses to the safety of our communities and those charged with defending them,” Cruz tweeted. “I remain fully committed to working with the Border Patrol to provide them with all the resources they need to safeguard our nation.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) offered his condolences to the victims’ families.

“Our prayers are with the families of this Border Patrol Agent who was killed & the other who was injured in this attack in Texas,” he wrote on Twitter. “Our resources must be increased to prevent these attacks in the future.”

The FBI in El Paso is leading an investigation into the incident, along with the Culberson County Sheriff’s Department and Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

The acting secretary of homeland security, Elaine Duke, said in a statement that she learned of Martinez’s death Sunday morning, and offered her agency’s full support to “determine the cause of this tragic event.”

“On behalf of the quarter of a million front line officers and agents of DHS, my thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Agent Martinez and to the agent who is in serious condition,” Duke said.

The area where the agents were injured is a dusty stretch of highway about 100 miles east of El Paso.

It is part of Customs and Border Protection’s vast Big Bend Sector, which covers 135,000 square miles in Texas and Oklahoma and 510 miles of river border. The sector’s Van Horn Station, near where Martinez died, covers 15 miles of the Mexico border.

The Big Bend Sector accounted for 1 percent of the roughly 61,000 apprehensions Border Patrol agents made along Texas’s southwest border between fall 2016 and spring 2017, as the Associated Press reported.

Local media photos from the scene showed Border Patrol trucks and about a dozen other unmarked vehicles parked along the side of the road, and a group of law enforcement agents huddled together.

Thirty-eight Customs and Border Protection agents have died in the line of duty since 2003, according to the agency’s memorial page.

Before Martinez, the only other agent to die in 2017 was Isaac Morales, who was stabbed in a bar parking lot in El Paso. Three agents died in 2016, two of them in car accidents, one of a heart attack while on bike patrol.

[Washington Post]

Reality

Trump had jumped to conclusions without available evidence, fanning the flames of racism by blaming Mexicans when we don’t know what happened yet.

For example, in Culberson County, where the two officers were injured, the local sheriff painted a different picture, suggesting to the Dallas Morning News that investigators are considering the possibility that the agents fell into the culvert in a nighttime accident.

“The evidence is not obvious as to what happened out there,” Sheriff Oscar Carrillo told the paper.

Trump administration to end protected immigration status for Nicaraguans

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The Trump administration is planning a January 2019 end to a temporary residency permit program for 5,000 citizens from Nicaragua who have lived in the United States for almost two decades.

The administration is also postponing a decision until next July on how to deal with a similar program for 86,000 residents from Honduras.

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke said Monday that the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, is no longer necessary for Nicaraguans in the U.S. Duke said temporary residents living under that permit would be allowed 12 months to allow for an orderly transition for their return and for their Central American homeland.

Duke postponed a final decision in the case of Honduras in order to learn more information, automatically extending the current temporary permits for Hondurans in the U.S. for six months, until July 5, 2018. The department’s announcement came 60 days before the programs for both countries were slated to expire on January 5, 2018.

The TPS program currently covers 435,000 people from nine countries ravaged by natural disasters or war and who came to the U.S. — legally or otherwise — during the period their countries were covered by the presidential decree.

While the status was meant to be temporary, it was repeatedly renewed by the Bush and Obama administrations over concerns that the countries could not cope with the repatriation of so many people former residents.

Since taking office, Trump has ended the temporary permit program for Sudan and issued a shorter-than-usual renewal for nearly 60,000 Haitians, who were designated for temporary permits after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Immigrants from Honduras and Nicaragua have been able to renew their temporary permits every 18 months since 1999, when both countries were given TPS status by the Clinton administration due to destruction from Hurricane Mitch a year earlier.

The Congressional Research Service said this month that only 57,000 people from Honduras and 2,550 from Nicaragua were expected to renew their TPS status.

[USA Today]

Reality

TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to avoid sending foreign nationals to countries too damaged or unstable to receive them because of natural disasters, armed conflict or health epidemics.

Trump says military should not have to help with food, water distribution in Puerto Rico

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President Donald Trump said the military shouldn’t have to distribute the “massive amounts” of food and water that have been delivered to storm-battered Puerto Rico.

When a reporter asked Trump about disaster relief on the island, the president said that food and water had been brought to Puerto Rico, but it wasn’t being distributed by local people.

“They have to distribute the food to the people of the island. So, what we’ve done is, we now actually have military distributing food, something that really they shouldn’t have to be doing,” he said in a wide-ranging, hastily scheduled press conference on Monday.

The remark follows comments Trump made last week, where he partly blamed the island for the devastation and said emergency responders can’t stay in Puerto Rico “forever.”

Puerto Rico has been reeling in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which left most of the U.S. territory without power or access to clean drinking water. Over the weekend, local authorities raised the death toll to 48 after reviewing medical records.

A local economist projected that the wreckage may have set back Puerto Rico’s economy so much that it will now take more than a decade to recover.

Trump said Monday that aid operations in Puerto Rico are “very tough” because the island “was in very poor shape before the hurricanes ever hit.” The island had more than $70 billion in debt before Maria landed.

The president has faced criticism for an apparent lack of empathy for Puerto Rico amid the disaster response.

During a trip to the island earlier this month, Trump said the hurricane destruction had thrown his administration’s budget “a little out of whack.” Later that day, he tossed packages of paper towels to hurricane victims.

While Trump has said his administration has done a great job responding to the crisis on the island, a recent poll found that most voters disagreed. Fifty-five percent of American voters say the Trump administration has not done enough to help the U.S. territory after Hurricane Maria struck, according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week.

[NBC News]

Reality

Donald Trump is continuing his racist reasoning that the people or Puerto Rico are too lazy to help themselves.

Trump contrasts Puerto Rico death toll to ‘a real catastrophe like Katrina’

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President Donald Trump told Puerto Rican officials Tuesday they should be “very proud” that hundreds of people haven’t died after Hurricane Maria as they did in “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

“Every death is a horror,” Trump said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds of people that died — and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering … no one has ever seen anything like this.”

“What is your death count?” he asked as he turned to Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. “17?”

“16,” Rosselló answered.

“16 people certified,” Trump said. “Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”

According to FEMA, 1,833 people died in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Before Trump arrived Tuesday, Rosselló said he expected the death count to rise.

“I’ve established from the get-go that due to the magnitude of this event it is likely that that number is going to go up,” Rosselló told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

The White House has pushed back on the notion that Maria is this administration’s version of Katrina, and the President praised relief efforts in Puerto Rico as he departed Washington Tuesday.

“I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico and it’s actually a much tougher situation,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “But now the roads are clear, communications starting to come back.”

On the ground in Puerto Rico, Trump also appeared to blame the island and its 3.5 million residents for throwing the federal budget “a little out of whack.”

“I hate to tell you Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” Trump said with a grin. “Because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that’s fine, we’ve saved a lot of lives.”

But the bulk of Trump’s remarks on Tuesday focused on praising his administration’s response to the destructive hurricane, even as more than half of the island’s roughly 3.5 million residents still lack access to potable water and as nearly all of the island remains without power.

[CNN]

Trump slams Puerto Ricans: ‘They want everything to be done for them’

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President Trump on Saturday criticized Puerto Rico’s “poor leadership” and defended his administration’s response to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s devastation on the island in an early morning series of tweets that earned immediate backlash from Democrats and other critics.

Following a plea for aid on Friday by San Juan’s mayor, Trump said the mayor was being “nasty.”

“The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” Trump tweeted. “Such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”

“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he continued. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/353216-trump-criticizes-san-juan-mayors-poor-leadership-during-puerto-rico

Trump: ‘Big decisions’ need to be made about cost of rebuilding Puerto Rico

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President Donald Trump on Friday said that “big decisions” loom about the cost of rebuilding of Puerto Rico in the wake of two severe hurricanes while relaying praise he said his administration had received from the island’s governor for its recovery and aid efforts.

“Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: “The Administration and the President, every time we’ve spoken, they’ve delivered,’” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning, an apparent reference to a Fox News interview that Rossello had given a day earlier. “The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!”

Trump did not clarify what “big decisions” are upcoming or how the price would factor into those decisions.

Puerto Rico remains devastated in the wake of two major hurricanes, Irma and Maria, that made landfall on the island this month. The storms, especially Maria, have left much of the island without power and many of its residents without shelter. Flights in and out of the island have been limited and access to supplies, including clean drinking water, remains spotty.

Relief efforts in Puerto Rico thus far have been slower than those along the Gulf Coast for Hurricane Harvey or in Florida for Irma, in large part because of the added layer of logistical complications involved in supplying aid to an island. Criticism that recovery efforts have been slower have been compounded by Trump’s recent tirade against NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, an issue to which some accused Trump of paying too much attention at the expense of storm response in Puerto Rico.

The president has said that his outbursts against the NFL and its players have not distracted him from hurricane recovery efforts.

Trump had initially refused to waive the Jones Act, a law requiring intra-U.S. shipping to be performed by U.S.-flagged vessels, telling reporters earlier this week that he had left the rule in place at the behest of the U.S. shipping industry. By Thursday, Trump had reversed course, waiving the Jones Act at the behest of Puerto Rican officials.

[Politico]

Trump Ends DACA Program

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President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises.

The administration’s deliberations on the issue have been fluid and fast moving, and the president has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program.

Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. But conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program and kick the issue to Congress, the two sources said.

In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.”

White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.

Trump is expected to formally make that announcement on Tuesday, and the White House informed House Speaker Paul Ryan of the president’s decision on Sunday morning, according to a source close to the administration. Ryan had said during a radio interview on Friday that he didn’t think the president should terminate DACA, and that Congress should act on the issue.

A spokesman for Ryan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, “A decision is not finalized. We will make an announcement on Tuesday.”

The president’s expected decision is likely to shore up his base, which rallied behind his broader campaign message about the importance of enforcing the country’s immigration laws and securing the border. At the same time, the president’s decision is likely to be one of the most contentious of his early administration, opposed by leaders of both parties and by the political establishment more broadly.

The White House and Congress have tried to pass the issue off on each other – with each arguing that the other is responsible for determining the fate of the approximately 800,000 undocumented immigrants who are benefiting from DACA. Though most Republicans believe that rolling back DACA is a solid legal decision, they are conscious of the difficult emotional terrain. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch joined Ryan in cautioning Trump against rolling back the program.

The president is likely to couch his decision in legalese. Many on the right, even those who support protections for children brought into the country illegally through no fault of their own, argue that DACA is unconstitutional because former President Barack Obama carried it out unilaterally instead of working through Congress.

Some Republican lawmakers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have said that Congress needs to pass a law to protect the so-called Dreamers.

“My hope is that as part of this process we can work on a way to deal with this issue and solve it through legislation, which is the right way to do it and the constitutional way to do it,” Rubio told CNN in June.

Trump’s expected decision to scrap DACA within six months represents another challenge for Ryan and fellow congressional Republicans, who are facing an end-of-September deadline to avert a government shutdown and government debt default, while also tackling a Hurricane Harvey relief package and a major tax reform push.

It’s not clear that Congress will be able to come to an agreement on the future of DACA.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who previously said he was very disappointed by Trump’s lack of action on DACA, expressed fresh frustration on Sunday night with the idea of a delayed implementation.

“Ending DACA now gives chance 2 restore Rule of Law. Delaying so R Leadership can push Amnesty is Republican suicide,” King tweeted.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has called on Trump to stand up for the Dreamers, tweeted out her displeasure with Trump’s expected announcement.

“After teasing #Dreamers for months with talk of his ‘great heart,’ @POTUS slams door on them. Some ‘heart’…” she wrote.

[Politico]

Reality

As a candidate, he pledged that on the first day of his presidency he would terminate Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which offers work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Instead, on the 229th day of his presidency, he trotted out Attorney General Jeff Sessions to announce that the Trump administration will gradually wind down the program over the next six months. DACA will end more than a year after Trump took office — or possibly not at all. The delay is intended to give Congress time to pass a replacement measure that could provide similar protections to those known as “dreamers.”

 

Donald Trump Goes All In On Slashing Legal Immigration

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President Donald Trump threw himself behind a bill on Wednesday that would make it dramatically more difficult for people to come to the U.S. legally, in spite of his past claims that he did not want to cut the number of people allowed into the country.

Trump held an event at the White House with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) to boost the latest iteration of their bill to slash the ways foreign nationals can move to the United States.

The bill from Cotton and Perdue, known as the RAISE Act, would end the practice of prioritizing green cards for adult children and extended family of people already in the U.S., discontinue an immigration lottery program and limit the number of refugees to be accepted into the U.S. to only 50,000.

The president said the bill would be “the most significant reform to our immigration system in half a century” and would “reduce poverty, increase wages and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.”

He also claimed the current green card system provides a “fast-track to citizenship” ― although in truth, having a green card is the standard path to citizenship.

The bill would favor applicants “who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy,” Trump said.

The president said the legislation would require immigrants to be more self-sufficient and prevent them from collecting safety net benefits. “They’re not gonna come in and just immediately collect welfare,” he said.

Current law already bars anyone who might become a “public charge” from receiving a green card, and prevents lawful permanent residents from receiving most safety net benefits for five years. But immigration hawks have long complained of loopholes in those restrictions. For instance, food stamps and Medicaid ― two of the country’s biggest safety net programs ― are exempt from the public charge criteria.

The idea, according to the president and senators, is to move toward a “merit-based” immigration plan, along the lines of the systems in Canada and Australia. But this legislation wouldn’t simply change the makeup of who can come into the country ― it would dramatically reduce the number of immigrants admitted overall, the bill’s proponents say.

“This legislation will not only restore our competitive edge in the 21st century, but it will restore the sacred bonds of trust between America and its citizens,” Trump said. “This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first.”

Most economists say that immigration is actually beneficial to the economy and that curtailing legal immigration would slow growth. And Canada and Australia both admit legal immigrants at a far higher rate relative to their total populations than the U.S. does, including on the basis of family ties.

Trump also claimed that the current immigration “has not been fair to our people,” including immigrants and minority workers whose jobs, he said, are taken by “brand new arrivals.”

In fact, the bill could disproportionately affect nonwhite Americans, who are more likely to be recent immigrants and still have relatives living abroad, by making the already difficult process of bringing their families to the U.S. next to impossible.

Cotton previously said the bill would help prevent people from immigrating to the U.S. and then bringing over their “village” or “tribe.”

Trump told The Economist in May that he was not looking to reduce the number of legal immigrants. “We want people coming in legally,” he said at the time.

Immigration reform groups and even one Republican senator immediately panned the bill. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who pushed for a broad immigration reform bill in 2013, said in a statement that he supports merit-based immigration but believes cutting legal immigration would hurt the economy.

“I fear this proposal will not only hurt our agriculture, tourism and service economy in South Carolina, it incentivizes more illegal immigration as positions go unfilled,” he said. “After dealing with this issue for more than a decade, I know that when you restrict legal labor to employers it incentivizes cheating.”

[Huffington Post]

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