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Immigrants, regardless of immigration status, are not only less likely than native-born Americans to commit crime, they also strengthen and revitalize communities they move into. Those are facts. It’s also a fact that since the start of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has consistently conflated violence with immigration while ignoring deadly, white extremists from the far right. During his Stephen Miller-penned State of the Union speech last night, Trump again wasted no time slandering Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and their families:
Trump highlighted immigrant stories solely in negative terms. He discussed the murder of two teenage girls, whose family members were guests at the speech, allegedly at the hands of MS-13 gang members. He also highlighted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who has worked to arrest members of the gang. Later, Trump mentioned two terror suspects who legally immigrated to the country.
No one disagrees we want dangerous people off our streets—“It's immigrants who are often victims of these gangs and if you talk to any of them,” columnist and activist Maribel Hastings writes, “you'll see that they are the first to say that those bad guys should be deported”—but what Trump spewed was disgusting demagoguery to pit Americans against the immigrant youth they overwhelmingly support. And he knows it. “To equate [MS-13] with Dreamers and DACA,” Sen. Kamala Harris told MSNBC, “it was completely irresponsible, and it was scapegoating, and it was fear mongering. And it was wrong.”
There is indeed an urgent immigration crisis right now, and it’s the DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients and families Trump has left in limbo.
The people that Trump didn’t mention were the dozens of DACA recipients, TPS recipients, and family members of deported immigrants who were sitting in the balcony and listening to his speech. While Trump claims his mass deportation agents are rounding up “bad hombres” like MS-13 (fact check: a judge recently released nearly two dozen immigrant teens that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) falsely accused of being gang members), the people he’s truly targeting are Americans like Ivonne:
Another DACA recipient, Leezia Dhalla, tweeted that has “DACA expires in three months.” Already, over 17,000 DACA recipients have lost their work permits and protection from deportation, and every day that Trump and Republican legislators waste, another 122 young people fall out of status. This, not Trump’s anti-immigrant fear mongering, is the real crisis facing Americans, businesses, and communities. “Congress,” she continued, “please get to work and put together a narrow bill that will pass both chambers—there is really no other alternative”:
Salvadoran TPS recipient Edenilson Granados, a State of the Union guest of Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, faces being deported to a nation where he could be killed by the very gang members Trump says he wants to protect people from. With Trump ending TPS protections for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, hundreds of thousands of people who have been here with permission and have built homes, families, and contributed to their communities now face being torn to countries that are in no way prepared to take them back:
“I can’t live there in peace. Gangs over there put cuotas (demands for payment) on the people that live there. If you don’t pay, they kill your family and kids to show you that the threat is real,” said Granados, who has been living in Boston for the past 18 years.
“Taking away my TPS leaves me with no status, no job and no education for my children,” Granados added.
Granados' alternative to stay in the U.S. would be a residency petition that his father, who is already a resident, can request. Granados’ father put in the request four years ago, but this process is at least seven years long. His TPS expires next year.
“In the meantime, anything can happen. Immigration authorities can come, and then what? There’s got to be another solution for TPS,” Granados said.
A final story you won’t hear from Trump will be Juan Escalante’s. “Juan wasn’t even middle-school aged when his family fled to the U.S. in 2000,” notes the Center for American Progress. “He, his parents and his two brothers adjusted to life in America, attending school and paying taxes. After years in the country, there was a chance for them to become legal residents. In 2006, an attorney mishandled the Escalantes’ case. They lost the chance to gain legal status.” Like 800,000 other immigrant youth, he could now be torn from the only country he’s ever known as home:
“Right now, Dreamers are facing potential deportation as the DACA program that currently protects us from deportation has been rescinded,” Juan said. “Every single day, Dreamers like myself lose their DACA protections and become targets for Donald Trump’s deportation force.”
Juan knows he has plenty of hard work ahead. For now, he wrote a message for the president on Medium: “Mr. President, just as your parents wanted you to succeed, and just as you want your children to succeed, my parents took a great risk for my future.”
“All of them want to give back to this great country,” Escalante said about immigrant youth. And that’s exactly why Trump didn’t say a single word about them last night.