Trump's War On Legal Immigrants

While much of the focus has rightly been on the crimes and abuses against undocumented immigrants by the Trump administration, the attacks on legal immigrants also continues. In fact, the attack on legal immigration began almost immediately, with the institution of the Muslim ban which in practice prevented certain green card holders and legal residents from returning to the United States.

Trump has cut the number of refugees that the US will take in to record lows. He has revoked protected status for Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Haitians, Sudanese, and Nepalese US residents. The immigration sweeps by ICE increasingly pick up legal US residents and even US citizens.  The State Department is denying Hispanic US citizens passport renewals and requiring absurd levels of documentation from them. The administration has set up a denaturalization task force to ferret out those who may have made some misrepresentations on their citizenship applications. And now Trump has just issued a new rule that will make it virtually impossible for those who have ever received government assistance to receive green cards.

In some of these cases, the courts have intervened and struck down the Trump administration's actions. But the intent of the administration is clear and that intent is being carried out in the states now as well.

In Louisiana, the state passed a new law that would require any foreign-born person who wishes to get married to produce an unexpired visa as well as a birth certificate. The ostensible reason for this is "marriage fraud" which is about as big a myth as "voter fraud". Federal law already states that a person's immigration status can not be used to deny them a marriage license. But the requirement of a birth certificate is even more venal. For many foreign-born citizens, whether current US citizens or not, obtaining a birth certificate is virtually impossible, especially if they were born in a war zone, as is true of many Southeast Asian immigrants in Louisiana.

Of course, Trump's continual harping on the fact that Jamal Kashoggi is not a US citizen and his refusal to even acknowledge or condemn his murder and actively engaging in its cover-up is in its own way, another attack on legal immigrants. Sadly, it will only get worse.