To the Teacher:
On June 30, 2018, hundreds of protesters, mostly women, occupied a Senate office building in Washington, D.C., and 600 were arrested. Some 700 other protests took place in cities and towns across the country. The protests reflected widespread outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies, and the strength of a campaign that is being organized to challenge it, called "Families Belong Together."
In recent months, the Trump administration has taken several controversial steps to restrict immigration into the United States. First, the federal government adopted a policy that involved separating children who are illegally entering the U.S. from their parents. After widespread public outcry, Trump backed off this stance, although critics charge that the administration’s current policy continues to entail inhumane treatment of families.
In a second move, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new protocol for dealing with immigrants applying for asylum, eliminating domestic and gang violence as valid bases for receiving asylum protections. Like family separation, this policy has generated condemnation from immigrant rights and human rights advocates.
This lesson introduces students to these two major policy changes on immigration, as well as to the controversy surrounding their implementation. The first reading reviews family separation, explaining the stated purpose for the policy offered by the administration, some of the many objections to it, and responses to Trump’s subsequent executive order backing away from the policy. The second reading explores moves to restrict asylum applications. Questions for discussion follow each reading.
Reading One:
Outcry Over Family Separation
On June 30, 2018, hundreds of protesters, mostly women, occupied a Senate office building in Washington, D.C., and 600 were arrested. Some 700 other protests took place in cities and towns across the country. The protests reflected widespread outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies, and the strength of a campaign that is being organized to challenge it, called "Families Belong Together."
In April, the Trump administration announced a policy that involved separating children illegally entering the U.S. from their parents. After widespread public outcry, Trump backed off this stance, although critics charge that the administration’s current policy continues to entail inhumane treatment of families.
Dara Lind, a senior reporter at Vox who specializes in immigration issues, explained the family separation policy in a June 15, 2018 article:
"As a matter of policy, the U.S. government is separating families who seek asylum in the U.S. by crossing the border illegally.
Dozens of parents are being split from their children each day — the children labeled “unaccompanied minors” and sent to government custody or foster care, the parents labeled criminals and sent to jail.
To many critics of the Trump administration, family separation is an unpardonable atrocity. Articles depict children crying themselves to sleep because they don’t know where their parents are; one Honduran man killed himself in a detention cell after his child was taken from him.
But the horror can make it hard to wrap your head around the policy.
Family separation isn’t sudden, nor is it arbitrary. While the Trump administration claims it’s taking extraordinary measures in response to a temporary surge, it is entirely possible this will be the new normal."
This change in the U.S. immigration system prompted public backlash. Religious congregations, public officials, immigrant rights advocates, international organizations, and many concerned Americans united in opposition to the new policy. The New York Times editorial board echoed many of these objections in a June 14, 2018 editorial:
"The United Nations human rights office called this new practice a serious violation of the rights of children and demanded an immediate halt. Catholic bishops denounced it as immoral. The American Psychological Association warned that the separations threatened the mental and physical health of the children. All to no avail.
The administration has come back with a mix of just-following-orders and falsehoods. The Department of Homeland Security said it had no policy for separating families; it was just catching criminals. President Trump feigned sympathy for the separations but claimed he was the victim of “bad legislation passed by the Democrats,” which nobody could find. Only John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, offered what appeared to be a plausible, if shocking, explanation: that separating parents from their children could be a “tough deterrent.”
The heartlessness of that is mind-boggling. It seems to elude the administration and its cheerleaders that this is not about crime or security, but about the most elemental human values; that ordering armed border guards to cruelly and needlessly rip children from mothers — in one case, while she was breast-feeding the child — goes against fundamental American values and undercuts its standing in the world."
The strength of these objections and the magnitude of the organized pushback led President Trump to issue an executive order on June 20, 2018, ending the forced separation policy. However, critics point out that the administration’s revised policy still leaves families with small children locked up in inhumane conditions, and that it fails to reunite children already separated with their families. Further, the administration has argued in court that it should be allowed to hold families in detention for longer periods of time. The law currently requires that children must not be detained for more than 20 days.
Richard Gonzales, national desk correspondent for NPR, related some of the critiques of the administration's policies in a June 20, 2018 article:
"Immigrant advocates say the president's executive order is no solution and will only create more trauma for children because they will be placed in facilities that are unfit for minors.
‘First, there are more than 2,000 children already separated from their parents; the executive order does nothing to address that nightmare,’ said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women's Refugee Commission. ‘Second, this executive order effectively creates family prisons, which we already know are a threat to the well-being of children.’
‘The president doesn't get any Brownie points for moving from a policy of locking up kids and families separately to a policy of locking them up together,’ said Karen Tumlin, director of legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center. ‘Let's be clear: Trump is making a crisis of his own creation worse.’"
Although Trump’s executive order aimed to quell controversy, the administration’s continued commitment to a “zero tolerance” policy of border control raises continued concerns about the country’s treatment of immigrants.
For Discussion:
- How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?
- According to the reading, what was the change in immigration policy that caused the most public controversy?
- What rationale did Trump’s chief of staff offer for implementing this policy? What is your view of this rationale?
- President Trump’s executive order on June 20, 2018 aimed to end the family separation policy. However, many immigrant rights advocates still think that the new policy is still unacceptable. Why might they say this?
- The family separation policy provoked strong, immediate opposition, which eventually forced its partial reversal. What does this suggest about the value of political activism?
- What are some ways in which people can make their views on issues like this known? How might these stances result in changes to public policy?
Reading Two:
A Tougher Road for Asylum Seekers
On June 11, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced another major change in immigration policy, making it harder for immigrants to be granted asylum.
The American Immigration Council defines asylum as:
“a protection granted to foreign nationals already in the United States or at the border who meet the international law definition of a ‘refugee.’ The United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol define a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country, and cannot obtain protection in that country, due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Traditionally, the U.S. government has allowed people who face persecution or oppression in their home countries to stay in the United States if they prove that returning home will present significant danger to them. However, the Trump administration is now narrowing its standard of who should qualify for asylum.
Evan Halper, a national reporter at the Los Angeles Times, explained the policy change in an article published after Sessions’ announcement:
"Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered immigration judges to stop granting asylum to most victims of domestic abuse and gang violence, a move that could block tens of thousands of people, especially women, from seeking refuge in America.
The decision, which immigration advocates are sure to aggressively fight, comes as Sessions seeks to use the authority of his office to sharply change U.S. immigration law to make it less friendly to asylum seekers.
The attorney general has the power to issue decisions that serve as binding precedents for immigration judges. In this instance, he used a case involving a victim of domestic violence from El Salvador to rule that survivors of such “private” crimes are not eligible for asylum under U.S. law.
The woman, referred to in immigration court as A.B., for her initials, said she was fleeing years of physical and emotional abuse by an ex-husband who had raped her. An immigration judge had denied her asylum claim, but the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled in her favor in 2016, saying the Salvadoran government had shown it was incapable of protecting her, even after she moved to another part of the country."
Immigrant rights advocates have widely condemned this new set of asylum criteria. In a June 12, 2018, letter to the editor published in the The New York Times, J. Wesley Boyd, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, offered a criticism of the policy change based on his experience working with asylum seekers:
“The ruling that Attorney General Jeff Sessions handed down saying that fleeing domestic or gang violence isn’t reason enough to qualify someone to receive asylum here in the United States is tantamount to holding a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger.
I am a psychiatrist who has performed scores of evaluations of asylum seekers over the last decade and can attest to the fact that asylum seekers overwhelmingly face death if they are sent back to their country of origin.
For example, if a Central American gang has recruited an adolescent male and he refuses to join, he will be killed. Or if an adolescent girl refuses a gang’s request that she become a sex slave for the gang (no matter how they phrase the request), she will be killed. I have seen mothers who fled Central America only after not one but two of their children were killed for refusing to comply with gang requests.”
Sessions contends that the United States must only assist asylum seekers who have been subject to persecution by the state—not by private parties such as a street gang or an abusive spouse. USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Alan Gomez explained the attorney general’s defense of the new policy in a June 11, 2018, article:
"Our nation's immigration laws provide for asylum to be granted to individuals who have been persecuted, or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their membership in a particular social group," the Justice Department said in a written statement, accompanying Sessions' opinion. "But victims of personal crimes do not fit this definition — no matter how vile and reprehensible the crime perpetrated against them."….
"I understand that many victims of domestic violence may seek to flee from their home countries to extricate themselves from a dire situation or to give themselves the opportunity for a better life," the attorney general concluded. "But the asylum statute is not a general hardship statute."
However, in a June 14, 2018 opinion piece published in The Hill, attorney and journalist Raul A. Reyes countered this position, arguing that restricting asylum represents an overreach by the administration and fails to uphold the country’s responsibilities to those facing oppression. He wrote:
"No doubt, the U.S. needs a more functional immigration system. That doesn’t mean we need a harsher, more restrictive system. Consider that 15 retired immigration judges and former members of the Board of Immigration Appeals signed a statement calling Sessions’ decision “an affront to the rule of law.” They point out that the precedent Sessions reversed was the culmination of 15 years of legal process through the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals. How can conservatives, who typically oppose the overreach of the federal government, be comfortable with Sessions acting like a one-man Supreme Court?
By curtailing the opportunities for asylum, Attorney General Sessions abandons America’s responsibility to help victims of violence and persecution. His decision violates women’s rights, immigrants’ rights and human rights.”
Under international law, all countries have an obligation to accept and offer protection to those who flee persecution and violence. Critics of the new policy announced by Sessions ask: Is the United States living up to this obligation?
For Discussion:
- How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?
- According to the reading, what is asylum?
- In what way is the Trump administration’s new position on asylum a departure from past practices? What do you think of these changes?
- Given that asylum is meant to protect people facing persecution and oppression in their home countries, what types of standards do you think might be appropriate in determining who is granted asylum protections?
— Research assistance provided by John Hess.