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U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III praising Stephen Miller’s white supremacist wish list of “immigration principles” as “reasonable” and “commonsense” tells you everything you need to know about how much they want to screw over immigrant families—and how much they’re threatened by the overwhelming consensus among American voters that undocumented immigrant youth should be able to stay:
The White House proposals would curb the ability of American citizens to sponsor family members to join them from abroad, upending decades of immigration policy, and put strict new limits on asylum claims. The list also includes increased money for border security and mandatory use of the government's E-Verify system for employers to ensure that workers they hire are legal residents.
Also on the list is a tighter crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, localities that decline to cooperate fully with federal immigration authorities. The list also included measures to more quickly remove minors who have crossed into the U.S. from Central America in recent years seeking asylum.
The proposal would reduce the number of permanent resident visas issued, lower the number of refugees accepted, restrict family-based green cards to spouses and minor children and create a point-based system for legal immigration. Administration officials would not say how much legal immigration would be reduced under the plan, but the impact would clearly be significant.
Included in these nativist proposals are hate group favorites, including slashing legal immigration in half and building an immoral, racist border wall. These are platforms so extreme that even Republicans are divided about them. And, that’s the point—the ghoulish President Miller wants to kill any deal that would legalize immigrant youth, which nearly 90 percent of American voters support doing. He knows that if the Bipartisan DREAM Act came to a floor vote, it could pass.
“On top of that, Dreamers would not even get citizenship if the administration gets it way,” notes Mother Jones.
From the Muslim bans to the decision to end DACA, it’s been Miller in charge, whose white supremacist beliefs are so deeply embedded, he’s been harassing Latinos since middle school. “It’s an extension of the white supremacist agenda,” Congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) said about the nativist wish list. “What they want to do is criminalize and delegitimize Latinos." In particular, immigrant rights advocates note that Miller’s wish to use undocumented youth as bargaining chips to deport unaccompanied minors will have deadly results:
Critics say the focus on deporting unaccompanied children is heartless and impractical. They say many were sent by their parents on long, dangerous treks in the hopes of avoiding poverty, hunger, abuse or death by gangs in their home countries.
Advocates acknowledge that more resources are necessary to speed up those [asylum] hearings. But they argue that White House efforts to demand quick decisions are likely to merely result in many children being sent back to places where they are raped, beaten or killed.
Sending the children back with just a cursory hearing is “a recipe for disaster in terms of returning people to danger,” said Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a group that aids young refugees.
David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called the proposal “a system that will help make America White Again":
If Miller is allowed to derail the DREAM Act, America’s Voice founder Frank Sharry said, Donald Trump and Republicans “will go down in history as the architects of one of the cruelest moves in American history: exposing 800,000 American young people to deportation from the country they love to countries they barely remember.”