America's Ethnic Cleansing Continues

Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the US since the turn of the century or earlier will now be deported back to El Salvador. The Salvadorans were allowed to live and work here legally under a program call the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that was put in place to handle the refugee crisis created by the US-funded civil war and accompanying natural disasters in El Salvador. Earlier, 45,000 Haitians also living and working here legally under a similar program enacted after the massive earthquake in that country in 2010 also lost their protection and will be sent back to Haiti.

TPS status is actually a semi-permanent program designed to allow refugees from war and disaster find a safe haven in the US. It was initially signed into law in 1990 by George H. W. Bush.

According to one study, nearly 90% of these 200,000 Salvadorans are currently employed compared to the overall rate of 63% for the country. All told, they have over 190,000 children who are US citizens and who will lose one of both of their parents when their TPS protection ends next year. So much for GOP family values.

Equally horrendous is an ongoing DOJ effort called "Operation Janus" that is actually aimed at potentially revoking the citizenship of thousands of current US citizens. The operation is focused on fingerprint data that had not been digitized and therefore not available for confirmation during the citizenship process. ICE, Trump's personal enforcers, has claimed it has uncovered over 150,000 fingerprint files of "aliens with final deportation orders or who are criminals or fugitives" that had not been digitized. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has similarly identified over 315,000 people who were granted citizenship without proper fingerprint records. Operation Janus will attempt to reconcile these two sets of data and "refer for prosecution" any citizen whose newly found fingerprint records show an outstanding criminal indictment or deportation order. So far, USCIS has claimed to have uncovered over 1,800 such cases. Moreover, the DOJ is asserting that anyone without digitized fingerprint records may have "sought to circumvent criminal record and other background checks in the naturalization process."

Yesterday, the first of these de-naturalization cases came before a judge who ruled that Baljinder Singh, who had originally come to the US in 1991, would lose his citizenship, making him subject to possible deportation. So Singh, who has apparently been living and working in this country for probably over half his life at this point, will now probably get thrown out of the country. For what? ignoring a deportation order and instead filing for asylum under a slightly different first name in 1992.

In yesterday's bipartisan confab at the White House, Trump basically agreed with everyone on DACA and immigration reform, regardless of what position they took. He agreed to do a clean DACA but then said it had to be linked to a border wall. He talked about comprehensive immigration reform but gave no parameters, saying he would sign whatever is put on his desk. He then reiterated that a border wall must be in place before immigration reform could be approached. In other words, his ignorance on the issues and usual lack of precision allowed everyone to think he was open to their position in immigration. And much of the press fell for it once again.

As noted in the beginning of this administration, Trump's words are meaningless, it is his actions that count. And it is clear that the real Trump position on the ground regarding immigration is to deport as many black and brown undocumented immigrants as possible. Don't believe anything else until that actually changes.