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asylum
Rights Advocates Frustrated Over Harris' Messaging on Migrants
"Banning asylum and punishing people seeking safety only causes more chaos and dysfunction at the border, and more refugee deaths," said one advocacy center.
Sep 29, 2024
While fearful of what a second Trump administration would mean for immigrants, rights advocates this weekend sounded the alarm over messaging on the southern border from Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The vice president traveled to Douglas, Arizona on Friday for her first campaign trip to the U.S.-Mexcio border. There, she met with Border Patrol agents—she was photographed walking with them next to a barbed-wire-covered wall—and delivered what The New York Timescalled "one of her party's toughest speeches on immigration and border policy in a generation."
After Harris' address, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS)
expressed agreement with her that "we need to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system," while also warning that her "proposed border policies would do the opposite."
"Banning asylum and punishing people seeking safety only causes more chaos and dysfunction at the border, and more refugee deaths," CGRS said. "We want real solutions to the humanitarian challenges at our border, too. But these policies of cruelty and exclusion fail us, every single time."
CGRS urged Harris to embrace the #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign's policy
solutions: restore access to asylum at the border; support existing systems and launch new ones to receive and integrate people seeking safety; create a more effective and timely immigration system; and strengthen refugee resettlement programs and other pathways to the United States.
During the speech and on social media, Harris emphasized combating drugs. She said: "As attorney general of California, I prosecuted transnational criminal organizations that trafficked guns, drugs, and human beings. I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Today, I visited the U.S.-Mexico border and spoke with Customs and Border Protection officials about our progress to secure our border and disrupt the flow of illegal fentanyl into our nation."
She also took aim at her GOP opponent, former President Donald Trump, for his infamous family separation policy and for killing a bipartisan border bill. While the Republican attacked the legislation so he could campaign on immigration and promise mass deportations, progressives in Congress and rights advocates opposed its "extreme and unworkable enforcement-only policies."
The Democratic nominee also vowed to strengthen asylum restrictions that President Joe Biden imposed in June, which are being challenged in court by critics including the ACLU. The administration's policy change has been followed by a drop in border numbers but also "rampant rights violations," according to migrant rights groups.
Pushing back against Harris' framing that asylum-seekers simply need to go to legal entry points rather than crossing the border unlawfully, Christina Asencio, a research director at Human Rights First, explained on Friday that the border bill would do what the June asylum ban has already done: suspend processing at ports of entry unless people obtain an appointment.
"Human Rights First has documented the life-threatening harm families with children and adults face in Mexico while forced to wait up to nine months for an appointment [through] an app that's only available in three languages," she added. "This is not a solution."
In a social media thread highlighting reports of agents "removing asylum-seekers who explicitly communicated their fear of return in violation of refugee law" since the introduction of Biden's ban, Robyn Barnard, an attorney with the group, said:
Human Rights First and others have interviewed asylum-seekers who expressly requested asylum, relayed their past persecution, explained their asylum claims, showed agents their injuries, had anxiety attacks, sobbed, and begged to be heard, but were ignored.
Other families recounted that not only were they not asked whether they had a fear of return or why they came to the United States, they were not even allowed to speak.
Harris' pledge to toughen the June policy followed Thursday reporting by CBS News that the Biden-Harris administration "is planning to soon issue a regulation to cement the sweeping asylum restrictions it enacted at the southern border" earlier this year.
In response to the reporting, the immigrant youth-led group United We Dream (UWD)
declared, "There's no other way to say this: Turning your backs on people seeking asylum is WRONG and it keeps us stuck in the past with failed policies."
"Communities nationwide agree that our immigration system must be humane, efficient, and fair above all else. Those seeking safety deserve respect and dignity," UWD said. "Our message to the Biden-Harris administration remains clear: We will organize—now and in the future—against any attempts to gut asylum and put our people's lives on the line."
UWD also pointed to a September 4 letter in which it led over 80 groups in warning Biden and Harris that the bipartisan Border Act of 2024 "would cause irreparable harm to our asylum system, our standing on the global stage, and most importantly, it would cause countless deaths at our borders and in other countries."
While many immigrant rights advocates are frustrated with both Biden and Harris, multiple groups continue to support her candidacy—given that the alternative is Trump—and even some critics praised certain parts of her Friday remarks.
"It was good to hear [Harris] recognize the need for more asylum officers and immigration judges, which are a must to tackle asylum backlogs and enable timely asylum decisions," said Eleanor Acer, director of Human Rights First's refugee protection program. "Real solutions like these are needed, NOT bans and bills that cut due process and deny access to asylum."
Immigrant rights advocate Erika Andiola, "who has lived through some of the most traumatic experiences because of our broken immigration system," said that "I was so glad to hear her talk about our undocumented community and a promise to fight for a path to citizenship."
"I'm so glad to see Harris pushing back on Trump's scapegoating of immigrants," she continued. "I wish she would have also talked about his plan for mass deportations and the consequences that could have. Consequences not only for our immigrant community, but also for millions of mixed-status families and our economy overall."
The advocate also expressed sadness over her "promise to criminalize reentries" and urged Harris to "move away from starting the conversation on this issue speaking about drugs and criminal activity at the border," stressing that "yes, those are important issues for voters, but conflating security with human migration just creates more fear in the public about our people."
"We must change the narrative about our immigrant community," she argued. "We must show the humanity, tell the stories, and detangle the problems we as immigrants face from the need of the American people to feel safe. Immigrants, we are part of the fabric of this country. We are your neighbors, classmates, and coworkers. That's where the conversation should start."
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Be Prepared to Fight Trump's Mass Deportations
Are we poised to witness the greatest domestic act of genocide since the expulsion of Indigenous people?
Jul 27, 2024
I visited Annunciation House in November of 2019. This is a Catholic-run haven for homeless migrants, a drop of water to combat a limitless thirst. Most people, fleeing climate catastrophe and the political violence orchestrated by decades of U.S. efforts to destroy progressive regimes in Latin America, find no such respite. Nonetheless, people flee starvation, political instability, and death squads, even if the trek across the searing desert kills a great many of them. Families, children, pregnant women, the elderly—people with absolutely nothing—have been trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place. During my 2019 visit to El Paso, Annunciation House was nearly empty due to then-U.S. President Donald Trump's "remain in Mexico" policy.
Refugees flee from deadly conditions no matter how slight their chances for asylum. These migrants are chess pieces for U.S. politicians. North of the Rio Grande, refugees seeking asylum encounter the myths and biases of political theater. Immigrants—suffering, dreaming, striving, and dying—have only symbolic worth to politicians. They are the commodities that can be driven with the sledge hammer of propaganda, deep into our reptilian brains.
Many Americans have always hated immigrants, and U.S. leaders have used that hatred to pump up frothing voters. We have drawn a peculiar line of delineation between those whose ancestors arrived long ago, and those who belatedly attempt to make the same transition. The collective sport of reviling the foreign born has grown in direct proportion to the ruin of forests and fields. As the climate slashes bloody fissures in the agricultural systems of the Global South, politicians in wealthy countries gather the spoils and trade cruelty for votes.
Do Trump's reprehensible promises inevitably become policy? Likely, yes. Trump has staked his legacy to his vow to punish undocumented residents mercilessly.
On the walls of Annunciation House residents display their works of art—a random jumble of shoes lie haphazardly within a glass display case. These shoes represent those who died in the desert. Thousands of people succumb to heat stroke, hypothermia, falls in rough terrain, and dehydration. Border patrol agents have famously spilled water from containers left by good Samaritans. The Chihuahuan Desert heat acts in tandem with the merciless border agents. One staff person at Annunciation House told me about a man and a small child on their knees in prayer. They gave thanks for having survived a 10 day ordeal in the desert, she told me.
One recalls that a much larger pile of shoes represent the gassed victims of Auschwitz. We associate shoes with mobility, opportunity, life—"pull yourself up by your bootstraps." When an assassin's bullet flicked off a piece of Trump's ear, he dropped and his shoes fell off to be photographed on the stage. Even the near death of a tyrant can be reduced to shoes.
Our media pundits seldom focus on refugees with discipline and depth. We rarely reflect on why people come to seek asylum—it is our government that has assisted in the installation of right-wing military juntas, and thus intervened in the political systems of Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The U.S. has instituted embargos upon Cuba and Venezuela in the effort to inflict suffering on citizens of these countries and spread instability. Our relentless burning of fossil fuels and our corporate plunder of Amazonian rain forest have caused climate collapse in the Global South.
We don't usually have an election that has been as perfectly choreographed as this one in 2024. Every brick, every bolt, wire, and ornament has been lovingly placed by predetermined forces. President Joe Biden's descent into slobbering senility, a bullet that precisely pinpricked Trump's ear (drawing just enough blood for dramatic effect and not a drop more), a cascading series of events in Israel and Gaza to frame the Democratic Party's suicidal connection to the genocidal IDF, the rise of the Supreme Court in its newly mutated enormity—everything has been handcrafted to give us fair warning. Every nuance of random chance has fallen exactly in the direction of Republican favor.
It may seem that Biden's withdrawal and the abrupt emergence of Kamala Harris from the crypt of vice-presidential anonymity now changes Republican good fortunes, but it does not. Harris is unlikely to significantly distance herself from the travesty of Gaza, or crawl out from Biden's shadow (though I anxiously hope that she surprises skeptical progressives and becomes an advocate for peace). Democrats continue on the treadmill of hasty choices. So long as the Democrats fail to produce a movement of working class passion in favor of pulling centrists out of the emergency supply closet, the groundswell of fascism will continue. This will not be an election like 2016, where people wake up in shock the next morning.
In 2016 comedian Jim Jefferies quipped that he might vote for Trump to see "just how crazy shit gets." We more or less know now, but not exactly. Trump has no policy, no platform, no values. He is absolutely not Hitler with an orange wig. Hitler was young and riveted upon the fine details of a society driven by the principles of eugenics. Trump is ancient, scattered, barely intelligent, and trivial to the core.
His bigotry is less deeply felt than transactional. Still, like a rat that understands which lever releases a pellet of food, Trump has figured out that cruelty toward immigrants inspires the love of his acolytes. His chaotic, stupid, disorganized blather gains coherence and meaning only by returning again and again to the fantasy that millions of snarling migrants have been marauding throughout the nation, murdering, raping, selling fentanyl, living in luxurious hotels, and sucking the life blood out of the American people.
Are we to watch passively as up to 20 million innocent souls are dragged from their homes to be interned, deported, or butchered? The only line of defense against genocide is the American public.
Without this preposterous, delusional tale, Trump could not get enough votes to become the animal control officer of the town of Bumfuck. Immigration, or rather, the racist fairy tale about dark-skinned, barbarian invaders raping and pillaging at the urging of the Biden administration—which allegedly aspires to bludgeon white political power with an unlimited roster of illegal voters—is pretty much the solitary plank in the MAGA platform.
There are a few so-called cultural issues that add flavor to the MAGA gruel—stuff like eliminating transgender access to bathrooms of choice and tossing books willy-nilly out of schools and public libraries. The Republicans also cling to their free market/neocon policies—welfare for billionaires, charity for fossil fuel megaliths, private prisons, increased funding for military and police—but these are honorable, bipartisan policies near and dear to the heart of America. No one gets excited about erasing Darren Woods' tax bill. The crown jewel, indeed the only jewel, in the MAGA world view is the imminent public display of vicious and violent military force enacted upon unarmed, dark-skinned civilians. Immigration narratives provides cover for an old-fashioned, Tulsa-styled race riot.
That is what energizes voters, and that is why Trump rambles distractedly about windmills and flushed toilets, but always returns to the horror story of a nation being ravaged by criminals and insane asylum escapees from the Global South. The true target of MAGA rage is not even immigrants or illegals, but rather, poor people. This passage from Ken Cuccinelli, writing for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—the reimagining of the Department of Homeland Security as The Waffen-SS—displays the MAGA passion for a eugenics informed policy of immigration:
The incoming administration should spearhead an immigration legislative agenda focused on creating a merit-based immigration system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family-based and luck-of-the-draw immigration. To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the "best and brightest."
Cuccinelli's vision involves military deployment on the southern border and Coast Guard intervention on the high seas. Cuccinelli's MAGA utopia features internment camps and strong-armed threats of sanctions against countries that balk at receiving the millions and millions of rounded up unfortunates. Police forces across the nation will be preoccupied with this anti-Latino pogram.
How will this be implemented? We all have the German WW II template in our brains—we picture door to door roundups, a bureaucratized system of collaborators and para-military forces, and a parallel deployment of Jewish police. But the U.S. is not WW II Germany or occupied Eastern Europe. Jews were well under 1% of the German population, whereas undocumented people comprise 3% of U.S. residents, and many of these have blood or marriage connections to people with U.S. citizenship. Those with Hispanic heritage comprise nearly a fifth of the U.S. population.
We have been warned well before the fact that the Trump administration, upon its inauguration in January of 2025, will launch a protracted genocidal action upon a large segment of our residents. This policy will be costly—potentially ruinous to our economy with lost labor and tax money in the trillions. But political theater defines life in the U.S. Trump is a mirage. We never quite understand the connection between his lies and his behavior. Do Trump's reprehensible promises inevitably become policy? Likely, yes. Trump has staked his legacy to his vow to punish undocumented residents mercilessly.
Depend on the Democratic Party to do jack shit. The Dems are already neck deep in MAGA immigration mimicry. What about the rest of us? Are we to watch passively as up to 20 million innocent souls are dragged from their homes to be interned, deported, or butchered? The only line of defense against genocide is the American public.
We should not be caught ruminating about our plan of action as the deed unfolds. We have about six months to prepare. And, please, no one should be believed in the future when they claim, "We had no idea."
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The Dems’ Border Security Push Repeats the Mistakes of the Clinton-Era Crime Bill
Just like in the ‘90s, Democrats are selling out their multiracial coalition and trading perceived short-term gains for the long-term suffering of the very communities that mobilized to put them in power.
Jul 07, 2024
As an organizer working on death penalty issues in 1994, I watched in horror as Democrats—led by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton—caved to Republican “tough on crime” rhetoric and passed the largest law enforcement bill in U.S. history—a move now widely seen as one of the most consequential legislative setbacks in modern times for people of color.
Today, as leader of a national immigrants’ rights advocacy organization, I am again horrified as Democrats ignore the lessons of that colossal moral and policy failure and double down on a misguided political strategy to outdo Republican extremism on immigration.
Democrats would be wise to avoid their past mistakes. Instead, President Joe Biden and his Senate counterparts recently adopted Republicans’ “tough on immigration” rhetoric in a failed bid to pass a sweeping border bill that would upend long-established asylum protections and resembles some of the worst government sanctioned cruelties we saw under former President Donald Trump.
Democrats are once again showing that they are willing to sell out communities of color to look “tough.”
Fortunately, it was always clear this bill would fail a second time when Democrats put it up for a vote again in May. Still, some of its worst provisions were implemented with President Biden’s subsequent asylum executive order. The long-term consequences of the Democratic Party embracing this cruel approach for political expediency could cause lasting damage for decades.
The Clinton-era crime bill—championed in Congress by then-Senator Joe Biden—should offer Democrats a clear warning about legislating out of fear for a perceived political gain. Billed as an answer for a society grappling with addiction, poverty, and inequality, it instead devastated Black and brown communities, helping to drive mass incarceration, with no significant reduction in crime. Thirty years after the bill’s passage, policymakers across the political spectrum have disavowed the bill’s punitive approach. Many of these unlikely partners have become allies on many justice reform issues, including Trump’s First Step Act.
Like the crime bill, we know that the bipartisan border bill’s “tough” measures are not real solutions to our overwhelmed and severely outdated immigration system. We know this because the U.S. has already squandered billions of taxpayer dollars in the pursuit of deadly deterrence strategies and bolstering border enforcement. After decades of misdirecting investments into hardening the border, including four dystopian years of chaos under Trump, the data shows that this approach does not work.
While this border bill would not help solve our problems, its consequences—even of just propping it up with its accompanying anti-immigrant rhetoric—will almost certainly fall disproportionately on Black and brown people. Democrats are once again showing that they are willing to sell out communities of color to look “tough.”
Let’s not forget that Biden and Democrats won in 2020 with the largest multiracial, multigenerational coalition this country has ever seen. And yet, just like in the ‘90s, Democrats are selling out this coalition, trading perceived short-term gains for the long-term suffering of the very communities that mobilized to put them in power.
History will not be kind to such choices.
That’s why, much like the crime bill debate of the ‘90s, many diverse constituents are ringing the alarm bell on this disconnect. For instance, as the Libertarian Cato Institute has argued, “Allowing immigrants to arrive legally is [Biden’s] only chance to break out of a decade of failed immigration deals.” Similarly, business leaders concerned with worker shortages, as well as faith and civic leaders, have joined the calls for an approach that welcomes the people our communities and economy need.
Immigrants are vital to the success of our communities and shared future. There is no lack of support for a humane and orderly immigration system that welcomes people in need. What is lacking is courage and the political will to enact real solutions.
Following the collapse of the border bill earlier this year, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lamented—apparently without irony—that “too many Republicans succumbed to the ministrations of Donald Trump” in rejecting the bill. Either way, he gloated, Democrats win.
The tragic fact is that it is Democrats who are succumbing to Trump, just as Republicans have done now for years. In that sad reality, we all lose.
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