With each passing day, it appears the Trump administration is attempting to whittle down another right, regulation or protection.
The categories range from civil rights, to environmental regulations and immigration protections to, well you name it. Extensive lists under those headings and others display no end to check marks next to an assortment of policies, executive orders, rules and proposals.
For the sake of argument, we’re going to focus on immigration, which borders on being at the very top of this administration’s agenda.
News of its latest effort came this week when it was reported the Trump administration eliminated a protection, effective Aug. 7, that lets immigrants avoid deportation while they or relatives receive life-saving medical treatments.
Children and adults fighting cancer, HIV, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, etc. can be disconnected from care here and deported to where it’s certain the care is not going to match what they receive here.
Here’s some other items on that list under immigration:
A new policy that denies poor immigrants a green card, permanent legal status, if they’re deemed likely to use public benefit programs such as food stamps.
Migrant children (families) who enter the country illegally could be subjected to indefinite detention if a new regulation goes into effect this fall. For now, migrant children can only be held 20 days.
The Remain in Mexico policy, forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico. More than 40,000 people have now been sent back under this policy. They wait in areas not unlike the ones they are fleeing.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids continue to target felons and families alike, but never arrest employers.
Efforts to deport immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before age 16 and have lived here for at least five years — so-called Dreamers — protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, continue.
On several occasions, the president has threatened by executive order to rollback birthright citizenship for U.S.–born children of illegal immigrants.
We’re going to skip over border walls, inhumane conditions in some detention centers, deploying the military, and so on, for now. However, what’s clear about Team Trump’s immigration policy is if it’s a hellish idea, this administration will embrace it.
We have made clear in the past and do so again today, we support the need to control unlawful immigration. But we distinguish between families and felons, children and creeps, dads working to feed their families and gang members.
There’s a lot wrong with our immigration system but it’s possible for Congress to whittle down legislation into a sharper and viable system — a more just point of law.
