Video of a woman being pulled away from her weeping daughters on a California street and shoved into a US Customs and Border Protection vehicle is drawing criticism of the manner in which federal agents are enforcing immigration laws. …
Perla Morales-Luna, 36, came to the US illegally at the age of 15.
(CBS News March 9, 2018)
Such images are beginning to define President Trump’s immigration policy – his serial attempts to ban Muslims notwithstanding.
Morales-Luna is among hundreds of thousands whose parents brought them to the United States as children, which purportedly qualified them as DACA recipients. (DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and is supposed to provide legal status for illegal immigrants whose parents brought them into the United States as young children a.k.a. Dreamers.)
Now they’re being deported back to countries like Mexico, where some don’t even speak the language. Never mind the trauma DACA parents must experience, wondering when or if they’ll ever see their children again.
Incidentally, thanks to that video of her arrest going viral, Morales-Luna won a temporary reprieve. But members of Trump’s jackbooted “deportation force” are arresting and deporting many others like her in the shadows. This, despite his promise that
We are gonna deal with DACA with heart.
(Politico, February 16, 2017)
Granted, Trump’s presidency is littered with broken promises. But this is the cruelest one.
For the record, President Obama signed DACA as an executive order in 2012 to protect Dreamers from deportation. He hoped it would serve only as a stopgap while he forged legislation on comprehensive immigration reform, which would include regularizing their status and establishing a path to citizenship.
Unfortunately, the Republican-controlled Congress was so committed to opposing every legislation Obama proposed, they would have opposed legislation canonizing Ronald Reagan if Obama proposed it. And then came Trump. Motivated either by racial hatred or political envy, he began systematically revoking Obama’s executive orders, including DACA on September 5, 2017.
Its recipients have been living with the clear and present fear of deportation ever since, despite intermittent judicial reprieves like the one handed down just this week:
Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said that the administration’s decision to terminate the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was based on the ‘virtually unexplained’ grounds that the program was ‘unlawful.’
The judge stayed his decision for 90 days and gave the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the program, the opportunity to better explain its reasoning for canceling it.
(The New York Times, April 25, 2018)
Shamefully, in Trump’s America, it takes judicial intervention for this land of immigrants to honor its promise to welcome huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Clearly, it would take some doing for any democratic country to execute a more heartless immigration policy. Yet Britain seems to have done just that with its Windrush policy.
In the aftermath of World War II, the British government invited thousands of people from Caribbean countries in the British Commonwealth to immigrate to the United Kingdom and help address the war-torn country’s labor shortages.
The migrants are known as the ‘Windrush generation,’ named for the HMT Empire Windrush that brought the first group of them to the UK in June 1948.
(The Atlantic, April 19, 2018)
Now bear in mind that the United Kingdom “invited” them from countries that were British colonies. In other words, this was not like the United States turning a blind eye back then to people illegally crossing its Southern border in droves to toil away in menial jobs.
Therefore, at the very least, the UK had a moral obligation to grant legal status to Windrush migrants – complete with IDs, passports, and access to the panoply of benefits all citizens enjoy. Besides, thanks to colonialism, they were already de-facto British citizens.
Yet, from the outset, the British government used institutional roadblocks to prevent many of these migrants from regularizing their status. This caused such dire consequences for Windrush migrants, it makes those DACA recipients are facing seem salutary.
An 81-year-old Windrush NHS nurse [Greta Gocan] has been separated from her six kids after being refused re-entry to Britain after a holiday. …
‘From the life, I once had surrounded by my children in London to having been made homeless in Jamaica has broken my heart.’
(The Sun, April 20, 2018)
This is why it speaks volumes that the person most responsible for this heartless policy is none other than UK Prime Minister Theresa May.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded an apology from Theresa May for the policy she introduced as Home Secretary of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants by requiring individuals to prove their right to be in the UK before receiving services.
‘People that have given their lives to this country, to our health service, to our education system, our transport system are suddenly being told to go home.’
(The Daily Mail, April 20, 2018)
To her credit, though, May is not trying to justify her policy in Trumpian fashion. Instead, she is seeking redemption and offering compensation.
Theresa May has said that members of the Windrush generation who have been treated unfairly by the Home Office are to be compensated. …
The PM said money will be offered to resolve ‘anxieties and problems’.
(BBC, April 21, 2018)
Still, her critics wasted no time extracting clarifications to ensure that those affected will be fully compensated. Here, for example, is what Labour MP David Lammy, who led the Windrush campaign, tweeted:
Compensation must be provided to anyone who has forked out for legal fees or has lost their job, their pension, benefits, access to healthcare or been detained, deported or refused re-entry back to the UK.
That is justice.
— David Lammy (@ DavidLammy) April 21, 2018
Say what you will about the British, when confronted/shamed with such injustice, they generally do the right thing. This might explain why they abolished slavery and granted women’s suffrage before the Americans did.
But the most relevant precedent is the way the British government finally came to terms with victims of colonial crimes committed during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. I commented on their historic compensation in “Britain Apologizes and Pays for Colonial Atrocities,” June 7, 2013.
Accordingly, while DACA recipients continue to live in fear in Trump’s America, members of the Windrush generation are being naturalized and compensated in May’s Britain.
Of course, for those denied re-entry, nothing can compensate for lost years with family and friends, to say nothing of those who died in that perverse state of exile. Except that, but for their heartrending stories, the British government would not be rushing now to make amends.
That said, this Windrush scandal exposes for all to see the specious ties that bind the British Commonwealth. It also vindicates those of us who have been urging the former colonies to … er … regularize their relationships with the UK to duly reflect their independence.
I refer you in this regard to such commentaries as “Another Commonwealth Summit on Trade Ends with Imperial Promises but No Guarantees,” November 29, 2005, “No More Privy Council. Take Care of Your Own Judicial Mess!” October 8, 2009, and “Australia Bans British Honours. Other Commonwealth Countries Should Too,” November 3, 2015.
Alas, the Commonwealth Heads of Government seem all too willing to abide the “enduring tendrils of empire.” Nothing betrayed this quite like the way they acceded recently to the Queen’s “sincere wish” for her son Charles to succeed her as head of the Commonwealth.
You’d think, if only as a matter of racial pride, all Caribbean and African heads would have seized this golden opportunity to elect one of their own, especially in light of all the Windrush scandal exposed.
Related commentaries:
DACA…
Britain apologizes…
Commonwealth summit…
Privy council…
British honours…