Trump ended protected status for Salvadorans who’ve been in the U.S. since 2001 after an earthquake in their home country, setting up the prospect that more than 200K people who have lived and worked here for nearly two decades will be kicked out of the country. Via The Washington Post:
The administration said it will give the Salvadorans until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or find a way to obtain legal residency, according to a statement Monday from the Department of Homeland Security. The Salvadorans were granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, after earthquakes hit the country in 2001, and their permits have been renewed on an 18-month basis since then…
Immigrant advocates, Salvadoran government officials and many others had implored [DHS Secretary] Nielsen to extend the TPS designation, citing the country’s horrific gang violence and the potentially destabilizing effect of so many people being sent home.
Others urged her to consider the approximately 190,000 U.S.-born children of Salvadoran TPS recipients. Their parents must now decide whether to break up their families, take their entire families back to El Salvador, or stay in the United States and risk deportation.
Senior DHS officials told reporters Monday that the families would have to make that decision, and that the effect on American businesses, among other potential consequences of the TPS decision, were not part of Nielsen’s decision-making process. They said it is up to Congress to determine a remedy.
It’s a cynical ploy, of course, as are Trump’s actions on the Dreamers, the Muslim ban, ending TPS for Haitians, etc. Xenophobia plays well with Trump’s base, the only segment of our population he’s interested in pleasing. Maybe kicking brown people out of the country will distract the mouth-breathers from the fact that Trump is enriching himself and his fellow plutocrats at the public’s expense.
Will the cynical ploy work? Could be! People are pretty fucking racist and stupid. We have all the proof for that we’ll ever need sitting in the White House. I just hope the Democrats are ready to play hard ball on the upcoming spending bill — and that non-xenophobic assholes will reward them for their courage by turning out this fall.
trollhattan
Trump still puzzled by folks telling him we can’t build a border wall with El Salvador. SAD!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
C’mon, Mueller (or a stroke or meteor strike), take this MF out!
We all came from somewhere. My mother’s family came here from Poland in about 1900. My father’s family is a mix of Native American and English/German. I’m a total mudblood. I wish we could just be humans first and stop f***ing hating everyone who is different.
cain
The man and his cronies are cruel beyond belief.
I’m waiting for him trying to see if he can kick out the native peoples.
efgoldman
You give Littlefingers too much credit. He simply, viscerally hates brown, black or yellow people. All he needs is someone to whisper some “action” in his ear, and off we go.
ETA: If we leave these shitstains in power, sooner or later they’re coming for the Jooz!
SenyorDave
Evil mf’ers. My wife taught kindergarten in DC metropolitan area from 1998 – 2011. She taught in a school that was 2/3 Hispanic, and most of the Hispanic were Salvadoran. Those kids and their parents were great. They embodied every single quality you would want in immigrants – hard working, seeking to better themselves and their kids, close knit family. They just have one little problem in the eyes of Trump and his followers. BTW, whatever happened to Javanka, Uday and Qusay being a moderating influence on the orange turd? I guess when you’re worried about the ending up in the slammer you have other considerations. I wonder how much responsibility that POS Kelly has for this decision.
The Moar You Know
Trump won because of a far less cynical ploy during the campaign (where’s that fucking wall, Two Scoops?). However, something he and his party just don’t seem to understand is that they’re going to need to broaden their appeal to keep winning, and they aren’t. This is kind of the opposite of that.
I think the murder rate in El Salvador at the moment is the highest in the world. So if I’m Salvadoreno I’m damn sure not going back there. Would try Canada for asylum first and then see where else I could go, but wouldn’t go back there for anything.
PS: the reason for this is pretty simple. That psychopath Miller told him that’s where MS-13 comes from (true, in a sense) and that was all the motivation he needed.
Yutsano
@efgoldman: Stephen Miller strikes again. This really worries me since the Salvadorans have been paying into Social Security and Medicare this whole time. Not to mention where the hell are they gonna go after 17 years in the US?
Matt McIrvin
@efgoldman: This is correct. Bigotry is on the very short list of Trump’s real, sincere values.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: Heard something on NPR this morning about a spike in asylum seeking in Canada…from the U.S.
NCSteve
@efgoldman: Any time Trump feels insecure, he inflicts gratuitous cruelty on brown people. There is zero chance that it’s not Miller thinking up the gratuitously cruel acts he knows Trump needs to feel powerful and in charge when the walls are closing in on him.
MisterForkbeard
Remember, the three actual priorities Trump appears to have:
1. Enriching himself and getting praise.
2. Helping out the Russians.
3. Hurting brown people.
And there, you’ve just explained his entire presidency. Now we get to document the atrocities that result from it. >_<
Schlemazel
After the last 20 years do you even need to ask?
Of course it will
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Apologies for going OT so early in the thread but… Sweet dancing christ on a pogo stick
I… just… it beggars snark
Adam L Silverman
The DHS folks are not wrong about this part. Unfortunately the reason this was being handled by executive branch agency decision making is that Congress can’t get out of its own way to actually fix the mess that US immigration laws and procedures have become. Majority support in both chambers doesn’t matter when you’ve got the Hastert Rule giving the Freedom Caucus a veto in the House and you’ve got the cloture rule giving 40 senators a veto in the Senate.
Brachiator
It ain’t cynical and it ain’t political. As I noted in an earlier thread, Trump has always had a racist and nativist agenda.
Also, Stephen Miller, one of the gleeful architects of this policy, tipped his hand in remarks about immigration during his horrible interview with Jake Tapper.
There is absolutely no reason to single out these people who have been living in and contributing to this country for decades except hatred of black and brown people.
And as is so often the case, Trump officials blandly assert rubbish about “nothing can be done” and “the rule of law.”
sharl
OT, especially for Kay if she’s around. Is the lead-in theme from Jaws appropriate accompaniment for this news?
HAL
Terminal, crazy and mean. Trump in a nutshell.
Timurid
800,000 Dreamers, 200,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands of Haitians and other nationalities, an unknown number of voluntary emigrants (including native citizens)…
Under Trump the US could see the first significant population decline in its modern history.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
Trump was a racist long before he met Miller. Trump chose these people and have let them loose on the country; they are not leading Trump around by his nose.
El Caganer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’d say that took brass ones, but there isn’t any amalgam of any known elements that describes this.
Timurid
@Adam L Silverman:
This is going to be especially difficult because immigration isn’t an issue that can be resolved by party line vote. It’s one of the few major issues that both parties are divided on. Some Republicans want Fortress America; others want cheap, exploitable labor. Some Democrats want to protect middle and working class jobs at all costs; others see immigration as vital to our economic, social and cultural well being.
Gin & Tonic
@sharl: Huh. On what party’s ticket?
rikyrah
A number of people I went to high school and college with are children of immigrants, and they post routinely the stories on Facebook about how immigrants are being targeted.
The latest one this past weekend, is a parent being separated from his American-born special needs child.
I read these stories and utterly seethe.
I despise the people who are making the policy.
I despise the people who voted for the people making the policy, and see nothing wrong with this.
There is no common cause with people who see nothing wrong with this. None.
And, I don’t wanna hear shyt about ‘reaching out to them.’
Ohio Mom
@sharl: Those groans you just heard were Ohio Dad’s after I read your comment aloud.
Dennis Kucinich, like Bernie, is a novelty act grown stale.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Magda in Black
I have so many friends and acquaintances among the communities being targeted, that when asked why I voted for HRC, one of my answers is “So that my friends would be safe.”
And now, they’re not.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
True. But Trump could provide leadership or signal that he wanted a fair solution.
Except that Trump is a straight-up racist.
This decision ultimately is at the wishes of a president who believes that these people are unworthies who are somehow taking taking advantage, taking more than they are supposed to, who should just get the fuck out because they fundamentally do not belong.
Apparently, this administration has a long list of people who just don’t belong. I wonder who is next.
Peale
@Adam L Silverman: Yep. This class of non-immigrant immigrants and non-refugee refugees is a problem. That’s why its so easy to now make them into undocumented documented residents now. It would have been better had they been recognized as refugees all along. There’s got to be a better way of dealing with people fleeing disasters than to keep stamping their status every 18 months for years and years on end.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
“Reaching out” to Trump voters assumes they are rational creatures. Any rationality they possessed has been subsumed by bigotry, fear, fury. F them.
sharl
Haha, maybe the
Connecticut for LiebermanOhio for Kucinich Party???@Ohio Mom: I kinda figure that a lot of Democrats will react in similar fashion.
Since I already follow a number of young and frustrated lefty types on twitter, gonna be interesting to see what their responses are in the coming days.
Captain C
@efgoldman:
Which would remove Jared as competition for Ivanka’s affections. Unless she gets caught in the net, too.
Roger Moore
While I agree this is driven by Trump’s visceral hatred of Those People, it only came about because of pervasive political disfunction. Think about why they’re here on a temporary basis a decade and a half after the event that triggered them coming here. At some point since 2001, we should have decided either that they’ve been here for long enough to justify granting them permanent status or that El Salvador has recovered enough that they ought to go home. But Congress has been unable to come to any kind of agreement either way, so they’ve been granted temporary reprieve after temporary reprieve. Trump is awful, but he’s only in position to enact his awfulness because Congress has abandoned its responsibilities so thoroughly.
ETA: or what Adam L Silverman says.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
This. These are law-abiding people who have followed all of the rules set up for them and now we’re going to pull the rug out from under them because fuck you, you shouldn’t have let a civil war happen in your country?
SFBayAreaGal
@rikyrah: Agree 100%. I loath the people that voted for this monster. I loath the people that still support it. There is no reaching them. I will let them burn themselves.
ruemara
@Timurid: Feature, not a bug. I’m lucky. I actually have until 2021 before my card expires. Of course, my concern is that we slide even more down the hole of evil while folks on the left argue about who they stan for, but fingers crossed we move the ball back towards way less evil in 2018.
Adam L Silverman
@Timurid: Yep. When they had the Gang of 8 comprehensive attempt a few years back it cleared cloture in the Senate because of bipartisan support. It never even made it out of committee in the House because Speaker Boehner didn’t want to set off the Freedom Caucus guys. He had the votes between the rest of his majority and the Democratic caucus to pass it. But he didn’t want another fight with Meadows and Jordan and their merry band of nihilists.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: No arguments here.
Lapassionara
Every day, a new horror story. Anyone who thinks there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is delusional.
Eric S.
@SenyorDave:
Scary thought, this is moderated.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I’m guessing this is also a part of the ongoing attempt at a bust-out — they want to try and stampede the Democrats into going along with bad legislation that will be hard to reverse even after the wave hits in November.
Hopefully Pelosi and Schumer will stand firm against these blackmail threats.
The Moar You Know
@Brachiator: So painfully aware of that. That bullshit he pulled on the kids in New York that he blamed for the Central Park attack should have gotten his fat ass sued into bankruptcy. He put that ad out the year I graduated from college, couldn’t believe a paper would run that shit.
@Brachiator: in order:
1. Non-whites
2. Poors
3. Gross old people
4. You
5. Me
jl
Hopefully, can slow down these stupid, counterproductive, and hateful actions in court. I don’t think a chance to do anything legislatively, as there just might possibly be with DACA kids.
Since open thread, Janice Min’s twitter feed has some interesting notes on Wolff’s working methods at the WH.
And, a joke tweet on Oprah running for president is the new alt-right poutrage scandal of the day? Jeesh. I guess joke presidential runs are out now.
Maybe the comedian Russell Peters will run a joke campaign for US president in 2020. If Trump is still in office, we are all still alive and he is running again, that will cause an amusing and very confused uproar.
jl
@The Moar You Know: You forgot ‘them dang kids these days’. Youth vote will be high on the list for voter suppression, right up there with non-reactionary older adults and oldsters who want the social insurance they paid for all their working lives, and non-whites.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I’ve seen people on the liberal side taking it seriously, too. Sigh. ?
Betty Cracker
Obviously, Trump is a racist, xenophobic shithead to the core and a shitlord rather than the strategic genius he imagines himself to be. But some of y’all seem to be implying he and the creeps who help him develop policy, like Stephen Miller, either don’t grasp or aren’t motivated by the political advantage in policies like this. I couldn’t disagree more. Of course they do.
MattF
Trump’s racism is loud, clear, and consistent– just look up ‘Central Park Five’.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: This relieves the anxiety of those who are the President’s most fervent supporters. As long as the draconian immigration policies continue, they will be with him, and excuse anything.
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
This.
jl
@Mnemosyne: Well, she can run if she wants. won’t make the joke tweet anything but a joke.
I am doubtful that any of the celebs will be all that successful, who may be thinking that if Trump can do it, so can they. I think a good chance people will look askance at any kind of celebrity or super star business person running after Trump. So Oprah, The Rock, and Mr Facebook may not have the chances some people give them, even they all could do ten times a better job than Trump, or maybe any GOPer (assuming The Rock is not a GOPer, I don’t know). Trump may ruin celeb political runs for a while.
Adam L Silverman
@Peale: The laws delineating who is and isn’t a refugee in the US are weird. Cubans are considered political refugees because of a post Castro takeover law that specifically addresses this. All others, Haitians, Salvadorans, Syrians, etc are by legal default considered to be economic refugees, basically immigrants, unless they can prove otherwise.
Ohio Mom
I have to give one thing to Miller, and that is his eye for detail. Two hundred thousand people is hardly anything, this isn’t a particularly high-profile group of immigrants. Yet this administration knew they were there to zero in on.
Kay
It’s time to gin up the fear for the midterms. Terrorism doesn’t work anymore so they’ve turned to fear-mongering on immigrants.
It’s handy too. Whichever Trump voters are mad because he didn’t follow thru on any of his economic promises can blame immigrants. Sort of all purpose scapegoats.
jl
@Kay:
” Terrorism doesn’t work anymore so they’ve turned to fear-mongering on immigrants. ”
They are already scraping the bottom of the barrel, if they have to resort to refugees from natural disasters. Only the hardest of the hard core Trumpster racist base are going to get excited about that.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
That may be part of their thinking, but I think it’s more about opportunity than anything. It’s coming up now because now is when the 18 month renewal is scheduled. They’re going to push every chance they get, but they don’t have complete control over when the chances come up.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
In a nuttershell: “We can’t kick them ALL out so who can we kick out?”
200k is a lot of people with funny names and, it seems, an obvious target.
mai naem mobile
There’s probably going to be 50K-100K fake green card marriages.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Except that is not just Salvadoran people. Trump is coming after Latino and black groups here as temporary residents, whose presence is not bothering anyone or causing problems, and telling them to get the fuck out, just out of racist spite.
Could Trump strike a nonpartisan deal and shut down GOP extremists? Don’t know because he did not try. Could he have maintained the status quo? Fuck yeah, because even his dumb ass supporters didn’t know squat about these people and their temporary status.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: The administration is staffed with people from anti-immigration think tanks like Numbers USA and FAIR. John Tanton is the father of this restrictionist immigration agenda.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I would be somewhat amused to see the Rock make a token attempt, if only to see the freak-out from the white people who always assumed he was white, or at least half-white. (His father is Black Canadian and his mother is Samoan so, nope, not even half-white like Obama.) Other than that, nah.
MattF
@Mnemosyne: Don’t forget that Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota. Anything is possible.
Mnemosyne
@MattF:
Possible, but not probable. Dwayne Johnson seems to be way smarter than Jesse Ventura, for one.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: That explains it, because I couldn’t imagine how they came up with this on their own.
The Wikipedia article on Tanton is interesting — he founded his anti-immigration nonprofit with support from Eugene McCarthy and Warren Buffet (!).
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: I am fairly well versed different visas and the restrictions on them etc, certainly more than the average person on the street, but even I heard of TPS for the first time last year.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
This suggests that Trump and his people might moderate their racist agenda if it were not to their political advantage. I don’t believe this for a second.
To the contrary, I would say that Trump is preparing the country to accept a new and extreme version of American apartheid.
Harvey Weinstein wasn’t just a bad man. He hurt women because it gave him pleasure.
Donald Trump is a racist who is also the most powerful man in America. He enacts policies which hurt black and brown people because it gives him pleasure. Politics is personal.
louc
You want to get really angry? Read this story.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: That was the subject of my law review article back in law school of so many years ago.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Glad I can help you revel in the nostalgia. I liked to cover it when I was teaching immigration stuff as part of American Federal government at UF. It was always good for getting the students all riled up.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator:
No, it doesn’t, though it does suggest they wouldn’t shout it from the rooftops if racism and xenophobia weren’t products millions of Americans willingly buy.
VeniceRiley
House (R) Ed Royce (Dist 39 in CA OC) Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee, is retiring. HRC won by 8+ points in his district. Easy pickup! Flip it good!
It also includes one of my favorite punchline cities: “No, YOU’RE BELINDA!”
parts of Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties, and includes Fullerton, La Habra, La Habra Heights, Brea, Buena Park, Anaheim Hills, Placentia, Yorba Linda, Diamond Bar, Chino Hills, Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Knew, was certain, the administration was staffed by anti-immigrants, also racists and fascists of all stripes. But thanks for the additional details on who those despicable rats are.
I guess these folks – the young citizens – will be able to return here, for college, to work, eventually. They should certainly get a passport ASAP with their US birth certificate.
This is so despicable. I am not surprised by this, though. Dump is despicable, as are 100% of the people he was able to recruit throughout the government. The prosecutor in the Bundy case was a Dump appointee, for one tiny example; no wonder the Bundy legal team didn’t get everything they were entitled to. Could this have been deliberate? Only the Shadow knows!!
Steve Miller is a huge example. Stone psychopath, self-hating, turned against his heritage and family, and for what? To be more despicable than the average coyote eating carrion or house-cats in the desert.
So many words I have learned to spell corektly(sic) the fery(sic) first time: despicable, fascist, psychopath, Nazi, etc, etc. I used to have to look some of these words up because I didn’t use them every day. That has changed, for some reason.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
This is Trump we’re talking about. He has often been openly racist in his business life, from his first operations with his father (and don’t be fooled, a lot of New Yorkers had no problem with Trump’s racist real estate practices).
Trump was a shameless birther, and also questioned Obama’s academic achievements on racist grounds.
You have watched Trump as a candidate and as president. He does not look to see what racists might want. He is leading the charge.
Your reference to products that millions of Americans willingly buy uses a passive voice.
Trump is a salesman. He brags about it. And he is selling an extreme form of racism. It’s one of the reasons that he loves to run around with European racists like the leader of UKIP, Farage and others.
J R in WV
@louc:
That was way beyond angry, I couldn’t read the whole thing. Those Border and Immigration agents are out of control and need, many of them, to be prosecuted, convicted, and jailed, losing their insurance and pensions.
JGabriel
@SenyorDave:
Their sense of moderation was formed by Traitor Donald, and women who were willing to marry him and bear his children. So it was really never any different than his own.
Dan
Not sure if the post title references the Michelle Malone song, but if so good on you. https://soundcloud.com/michelle-malone-music/immigration-game-michelle