Immigration
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Trump-era Covid-19 border policies are being carried over to the new administration
For weeks, pundits, conservative politicians, and anonymous Border Patrol sources have been warning of a crisis brewing at the U.S.-Mexico border. They claim there’s a “surge” in migrant families and unaccompanied children arriving at the border each day and that the Biden administration — which promised to take a softer stance on immigration than its predecessor — is being overwhelmed by record numbers of unauthorized migrants.
But the real crisis at the border is that most people still aren’t being let in. Almost a year ago, the U.S. abandoned its legal responsibility to asylum-seekers using a little-known health statute called…
Immigrants have long felt the pain of being separated from loved ones
The first conscious, whole memories I have of meeting my extended family are right around my 16th birthday — at my grandmother’s funeral. Rather than celebrating the typical American Sweet Sixteen, I was flown to India for the first time in over 10 years to mourn someone I had barely known in a country I hardly recognized. Yet it was something to be grateful for: finally really meeting the aunts, uncles, and grandparents who had raised me, nurtured me, and held me as a child before my family moved to the United States 20 years ago.
It should come as…
Migrant teenagers have been forcibly medicated while in immigration custody, according to Vice. The report is based on an ongoing lawsuit against the federal government for its treatment of migrant…
The lie at the heart of the Pham family ‘pass to freedom’
In August, my mother forwarded me an email. “Trump administration taps Vietnam refugee as new ICE chief,” it said. I opened it, and learned that my cousin, Tony Pham, had just been appointed to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Tony’s ascent to this position instilled great pride in my family, especially among the older members who skew politically conservative. I, however, was appalled that my cousin allowed his identity as a refugee to be used as cover for the enforcement of increasingly cruel and dehumanizing immigration policies. …
The government can’t find the parents of 545 migrant children who were forcefully separated from their families more than two years ago. The Trump administration knew this would happen. Officials were warned ahead of time that reunification would be nearly impossible under the current immigration system, and therefore the separation policy shouldn’t be implemented, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff reported in his book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.
The administration also knew separation would traumatize these children for life. Still, they forged ahead in an attempt to shock Congress into limiting immigration into the United States. “They put politics ahead…
For a refugee family in St. Paul, Billy Ray Cyrus and Tanya Tucker provided a window to a different, more Americanized world
When I think about country music, I think of a Hmong refugee family on the East Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, huddled in an old house with peeling paint and window panes frosted with ice in cold January. I think of my mother and my father and their work as assemblers in the old factories. I think of the snippets of songs they came home with for me and my siblings to translate, our efforts to make sense of our lives in the songs of the white men and women on the radio.
The scent of freshly steamed jasmine rice…
Jean Guerrero’s new book explores how Stephen Miller became one of the most powerful, anti-immigrant White House advisers in history
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller has been the driving force behind the Trump administration’s most racist policies over the past few years, breathing life to an agenda long-imagined by white nationalists. But how did the descendant of Jewish refugees find himself crafting policies that would have certainly banned his family from coming into the United States in the first place? Investigative journalist Jean Guerrero tries to answer the question of Miller’s embrace of white supremacy in her new biography Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, out on August 11.
Guerrero carefully charts the 34-year-old’s radicalization…
Across the U.S., migrants say they face cramped quarters, soap and disinfectant shortages, and violent threats from guards
When the guards came in on May 6 to tell the detainees that someone in their unit had died, Alberto had already gone 17 days without eating. Dozens of others in the Otay Mesa Detention Center had done the same, he said. The detainee, a Salvadoran named Carlos Escobar-Mejia who had spent decades living in the U.S., had died from complications related to the coronavirus. The news shook Alberto deeply — it embodied exactly why he and 12 other unit-mates had gone on a hunger strike in the first place.
The strike had started in mid-April; by early May, Alberto…
