Forgive my French but Donald Trump is an asshole, which is why he’s using the final weeks of his presidency to push policies including agreements that finalize forcing asylum-seekers to Central America, CNN reports. The thing is, President-elect Joe Biden’s immigration plan has pledged to roll these exact kind of anti-asylum policies back, as experts have also noted. So why do it right now? For the same reason he’s busy sabotaging Biden’s transition: to be an asshole.
The asylum agreements that CNN reports are being floated by the soon-to-be-former administration would only add to the exhausting list of hundreds of immigration-related policies that will be left for a Biden administration to clean up. Some can be easy to reverse, experts have said. But others might take years. So the Trump administration is figuring, hey, let’s just make that workload even worse, and maybe get to hurt even more people in the process.
Other policies already rolled out as Trump lost the 2020 election is a new rule blocking immigrants released from federal custody under supervision from work permits, depriving them of the ability to be able to support themselves and their families legally as they fight their cases in immigration court. Immigrants have already been disproportionately impacted by the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the government gave them a middle finger and excluded them from relief. Now it’s giving them the other finger on the way out.
“President-elect Joe Biden believes we must do better to uphold our laws humanely and preserve the dignity of immigrant families, refugees and asylum-seekers," a Biden transition member told CNN. "The Biden-Harris agency review teams are laying the groundwork for the Biden-Harris administration to secure our values as a nation of immigrants."
CNN notes the appointment of Ur Jaddou, former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services chief counsel, to the Biden transition team, a move welcomed by immigrant rights advocates. But USCIS staffers have reportedly also been ordered to have no communication with the transition team until General Services Administration (GSA) administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee who has refused to recognize Biden’s victory, gives the okay. Bullshit on top of bullshit.
Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner recently noted Trump’s intention “to leave behind a system so broken that no one can fix it,” including leaving Americans to die amid the pandemic because he’s mad he lost and it can hurt Democrats in the long run. “Trump is doing everything he can to leave Joe Biden a nation that is sick and divided at home, weak and besieged abroad,” he writes. “And he’s doing it for the same reason he decided to not engage in a serious attempt to stop COVID-19. He believes that a little death and disaster will be good political strategy.”
