Five Takeaways From Mexico’s Election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
- "Donald Trump’s Central America strategy is both cruel and incompetent [...] Stray bullets The US’s lax gun laws, particularly in border states, feed the very violence that migrants head northward to escape. Many critics have singled out the 2004 expiration of the US’s assault weapons ban, arguing that the subsequent resurgence in assault weapons sales has contributed to the grisly massacres and cartel brutality that spiked in Mexico and Central America over the past decade.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador celebrating his victory in the presidential election with supporters at the Hilton Hotel in Mexico City on Sunday. Alex Cruz/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Azam Ahmed and Kirk Semple
July 2, 2018
MEXICO CITY — After 18 years of establishment politics, Mexicans decided on Sunday that enough was enough, electing the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president in a landslide victory in an election of firsts.
"Donald Trump’s Central America strategy is both cruel and incompetent"
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Aug. 2, 2018
President Trump mentioned only the positive effects of his trade wars during a speech last week at a steel plant in Illinois.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times
It’s true that Trump still, on occasion, poses as someone who champions the interests of ordinary working Americans against those of the elite. And I guess there’s a sense in which his embrace of white nationalism gives voice to ordinary Americans who share his racism but have felt unable to air their prejudice in public.
But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all.
There’s also health policy, where Trump, having failed to repeal Obamacare — which would have been a huge blow to working families — has engaged instead in a campaign of sabotage that has probably raised premiums by almost 20 percent .. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/96781/2001727_0.pdf .. relative to what they would have been otherwise. Inevitably, the burden of these higher premiums falls most heavily on families earning just a bit too much to be eligible for subsidies, that is, the upper part of the working class.
But immediate policy doesn’t tell the whole story. You also want to look at Trump’s appointments. When it comes to policies that affect workers, Trump has created a team of cronies: Almost every important position has gone to a lobbyist or someone with strong financial connections to industry. Labor interests have received no representation at all.
When you bear in mind that Kavanaugh, if confirmed, will be around for a long time, this extremism is enough to justify rejecting his nomination — especially when added to his support for unrestricted presidential power and whatever it is in his record that Republicans are trying to hide.
But why would Trump, the self-proclaimed champion of American workers, choose someone like that? Why would he do all the things he’s doing to hurt the very people who gave him the White House?
I don’t know the answer, but I do think that the conventional explanation — that Trump, who is both lazy and supremely ignorant about policy details, was unwittingly captured by G.O.P. orthodoxy — both underestimates the president and makes him seem nicer than he is.
Watching Trump in action, it’s hard to escape the impression that he knows very well that he’s inflicting punishment on his own base. But he’s a man who likes to humiliate others, in ways great and small. And my guess is that he actually takes pleasure in watching his supporters follow him even as be betrays them.
Which brings me back to media use of the term “populist.” When you describe Trump using that word, you are in effect complicit in his lie — especially when you do it in the context of supposedly objective reporting.
And you don’t have to do this. You can describe what Trump is doing without using words that give him credit where it isn’t due. He’s scamming his supporters; you don’t have to help him do it.
David Brooks is on book leave.
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Paul is one-hundred percent right. I hope his opinion there has some affect on political journalism, and that we see less of the word. Meanwhile, i'll have to post pieces with populist in them while gritting my teeth. Trump does not work to represent the interests of ordinary citizens. His business history tells us he never ever has. Spot on. Excellent!
A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis
"Donald Trump’s Central America strategy is both cruel and incompetent"
Those seeking asylum today inherited a series of crises that drove them to the border
Mark Tseng-Putterman Jun 20, 2018
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine set the stage for U.S. intervention throughout Latin America. Photo by Michael Nicholson/Corbis via Getty
A national spotlight now shines on the border between the United States and Mexico, where heartbreaking images of Central American children being separated from their parents and held in cages demonstrate the consequences of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” on unauthorized entry into the country, announced in May 2018. Under intense international scrutiny, Trump has now signed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-executive-order.html .. an executive order that will keep families detained at the border together, though it is unclear when the more than 2,300 children already separated from their guardians will be returned.
Trump has promised that keeping families together will not prevent his administration from maintaining “strong?—?very strong?—?borders,” making it abundantly clear that the crisis of mass detention and deportation at the border and throughout the U.S. is far from over. Meanwhile, Democratic rhetoric of inclusion, integration, and opportunity has failed to fundamentally question the logic of Republican calls for a strong border and the nation’s right to protect its sovereignty.
At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared .. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/roosevelt-and-monroe-doctrine .. the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration.
The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen. In the past fifteen years alone, CAFTA-DR?— [Insert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_Republic%E2%80%93Central_America_Free_Trade_Agreement#Opposition] a free trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic?—?has restructured .. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Impact-of-CAFTA-Drugs-Gangs-and-Immigration-20160301-0008.html .. the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weaken domestic industries. Yet there are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since. In general, the U.S. takes no responsibility for the conditions that drive Central American migrants to the border.
U.S. empire thrives on amnesia. The Trump administration cannot remember what it said last week, let alone the actions of presidential administrations long gone that sowed the seeds of today’s immigration crisis. There can be no common-sense immigration “debate” that conveniently ignores the history of U.S. intervention in Central America. Insisting on American values of inclusion and integration only bolsters the very myth of American exceptionalism, a narrative that has erased this nation’s imperial pursuits for over a century.
As the British immigrant rights refrain goes, “We are here because you were there.” The adage holds no less true here and now. It’s time to insist that accepting Central American refugees is not just a matter of morality or American benevolence. Indeed, it might be better described as a matter of reparations.
The following timeline compiles numerous sources to lay out an incomplete history of U.S. military and economic intervention in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala over the past century.
Anti-war marchers at Copley Square on their way to Boston Common to protest U.S. military involvement in El Salvador, on March 21, 1981. Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty
El Salvador
1932: A peasant rebellion, led by Communist leader Farabundo Martí, challenges the authority of the government. 10,000 to 40,000 communist rebels, many indigenous, are systematically murdered by the regime of military leader Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the nation’s acting president. The United States and Great Britain, having bankrolled the nation’s economy and owning the majority of its export-oriented coffee plantations and railways, send .. https://legionmagazine.com/en/2006/03/the-invasion-of-el-salvador/ .. naval support to quell the rebellion.
1984: Despite the raging civil war funded by the Reagan administration, a mere three percent of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases in the U.S. are approved, as Reagan officials deny .. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-americans-and-asylum-policy-reagan-era ... allegations of human rights violations in El Salvador and Guatemala and designate asylum seekers as “economic migrants.” A religious sanctuary movement in the United States defies the government by publicly sponsoring and sheltering asylum seekers. Meanwhile, the U.S. funnels .. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/12/world/cia-said-to-aid-salvador-parties.html .. $1.4 million to its favored political parties in El Salvador’s 1984 election.
Honduran soldiers operate a mortar for members of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division during a joint exercise, March 1988. (Photo: Department of Defense, NARA)
Honduras
1911: American entrepreneur Samuel Zemurray partners with the deposed Honduran President Manuel Bonilla and U.S. General Lee Christmas to launch a coup .. https://libcom.org/history/ousting-president-honduras-1911 .. against President Miguel Dávila. After seizing several northern Honduran ports, Bonilla wins the Honduran 1911 presidential election.
1912: Bonilla .. https://bit.ly/2YN927a .. rewards his corporate U.S. backers with concessions that grant natural resources and tax incentives to American companies, including Vaccaro Bros. and Co. (now Dole Food Company) and United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International). By 1914, U.S. banana interests would come to own one million acres of the nation’s best land?—?an ownership frequently insured through the deployment of U.S. military forces.
2009 Vintage. Ted Kennedy pounds Republicans on Minimum wage stance. [...] Depression of wages at the bottom of the scale in Central American by foreign companies such as the United Fruit Company, depressed the growth of a healthy domestic consumer market for many years. I guess it still does. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=40917976
1980s: In an attempt to curtail the influence of left-wing movements in Central America, the Reagan administration stations thousands of troops in Honduras to train .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/10/27/training-of-contras-at-us-site-planned/6c7bcc9d-66be-43d9-ba4f-04db7b445e07/ .. Contra right-wing rebels in their guerrilla war against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. U.S. military aid reaches $77.5 million in 1984. Meanwhile, trade liberalization policies open Honduras to the interests of global capital and disrupt traditional forms of agriculture.
2005: Honduras becomes the second country to enter CAFTA, the free trade agreement with the U.S., leading to protests .. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/business/newsid_4318000/4318025.stm .. from unions and local farmers who fear being outcompeted by large-scale American producers. Rapidly, Honduras goes from being a net agricultural exporter to a net importer, leading to loss of jobs for small-scale farmers and increased rural migration.
2009: Left-leaning and democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who pursued progressive policies such as raising the minimum wage and subsidizing public transportation, is exiled in a military coup. The coup is staged after Zelaya announces intentions to hold a referendum on the replacement of the 1982 constitution, which had been written during the end of the reign of U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz García. Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, a graduate of the U.S. Army training program known as the School of the Americas (nicknamed “School of Assassins”), leads the coup. The United States, under Hillary Clinton’s Department of State, refuses .. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/hillary-clintons-two-fore_1_b_3714765.html .. to join international calls for the “immediate and unconditional return” of Zelaya.
A present-day Guatemala City mural memorializes deposed President Jacobo Árbenz and his historic land reforms. Credit: Soman via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5 Guatemala
1920: President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, an ally to U.S. corporate interests who had granted several concessions to the United Fruit Company, is overthrown in a coup. The United States sends .. https://books.google.com/books?id=h17R_A0n-1MC&hl=en .. an armed force to ensure the new president remains amenable to U.S. corporate interests.
1947: President Juan José Arévalo’s self-proclaimed “worker’s government” enacts labor codes that give .. http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/tpla/9501.html .. Guatemalan workers the right to unionize and demand pay raises for the first time. The United Fruit Company, as the largest employer and landowner in the country, lobbies the U.S. government for intervention.
1952: Newly-elected President Jacobo Árbenz issues .. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887088 .. the Agrarian Reform Law, which redistributes land to 500,000 landless?—?and largely indigenous?—?peasants.
1954: Fearing the Guatemalan government’s steps toward agrarian reform and under the influence of United Fruit propagandist Edward Bernays, President Eisenhower authorizes the CIA to overthrow .. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/americas/an-apology-for-a-guatemalan-coup-57-years-later.html .. democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, ending an unprecedented ten years of democratic rule in the country, colloquially known as the “ten years of spring.” In Árbenz’s place, the U.S. installs .. http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/tpla/9501.html .. Carlos Castillo Armas, whose authoritarian government rolls back land reforms and cracks down on peasant and workers’ movements.
1965: The CIA issues Green Berets and other counterinsurgency advisors to aid the authoritarian government in its repression of left-wing movements recruiting peasants in the name of “struggle .. https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2016/11/19/american-intervention-guatemala/ .. against the government and the landowners.” State Department counterinsurgency advisor Charles Maechling Jr. would later describe .. http://archive.is/EHDg .. the U.S.’s “direct complicity” in Guatemalan war crimes, which he compared to the “methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”
1981: The Guatemalan Army launches “Operation Ceniza” in response to a growing Marxist guerrilla movement. In the name of “counterattacks” and “retaliations” against guerrilla activities, entire villages are bombed and looted, and their residents executed, using high-grade military equipment received from the United States. The Reagan administration approves .. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-does-the-us-bear-in-guatemala/guatemalan-slaughter-was-part-of-reagans-hard-line .. a $2 billion covert CIA program in Guatemala on top of the shipment of $19.5 million worth of military helicopters and $3.2 million worth of military jeeps and trucks to the Guatemalan army. By the mid-1980s, 150,000 civilians are killed in the war, with 250,000 refugees fleeing to Mexico. Military leaders and government officials would later be tried for the genocide of the Maya victims of military massacres.
2006: Ten years after a U.N.-brokered peace deal and the resumption of democratic elections, Guatemala enters the CAFTA-DR free trade deal with the United States. Ninety-five percent of U.S. agricultural exports enter .. https://www.export.gov/article?id=Guatemala-Trade-Agreements .. Guatemala duty free.
written by Mark Tseng-Putterman Writing on Asian America, racial capitalism, and empire's amnesia. PhD student in American Studies. Twitter: @tsengputterman. More at marktsengputterman.com.
conix, You should be castigating Trump for his bigoted and incendiary rhetoric against asylum seekers. Don't kid yourself that his attitudes, policies and words have not contributed to the very recent rise of asylum seekers on your southern border. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=147999965
Is it our fault that Mexico is full of corruption, narcotic cartels, and extreme violence. Of course not, we would never pay off a government to repress its own people... or train death squads at Fort Benning or anything like that. We never destabilized Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua or Columbia or Brazil or anything We're the good guys. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=139858872
Yes, There’s a Crisis on the Border. And It’s Trump’s Fault.
"Donald Trump’s Central America strategy is both cruel and incompetent" .. and the two back .. "Inside Trump’s Disastrous ‘Secret’ Drug War Plans for Central America "The Border Patrol Was Monstrous Under Obama. Imagine How Bad It Is Under Trump.""
RODRIGO ARANGUA/AFP/Getty Images
Instead of wasting his time on a wall, the president should fix the asylum system.
By ALAN BERSIN, NATE BRUGGEMAN and BEN ROHRBAUGH
April 05, 2019
Alan Bersin served as the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and assistant secretary and chief diplomatic officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Nate Bruggeman held senior policy positions at the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection from 2009 to 2012. He is a partner in the consulting firm BorderWorks Advisers.
Ben Rohrbaugh was the director for enforcement and border security at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2016. He also served in senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Donald Trump has made border security and immigration enforcement a rallying cry of his campaign and the centerpiece of his presidency. But now, as the effects of his immigration policies have become measurable, it is clear to us—three people who have worked on the issue in previous administrations—that Trump is the worst president for border security in the last 30 years.
The border is currently overwhelmed with increasing numbers of migrants, in particular Central American asylum seekers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported that 66,450 persons were apprehended between the ports of entry in February, the highest monthly total in a decade. Projections for March are even worse—exceeding 100,000—with experts concerned that monthly totals could exceed 150,000 in the coming months. CBP is reassigning officers from the ports of entry,which are critically understaffed, to help Border Patrol with the crush. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan has said the immigration system on the border is at “the breaking point.” In response, the president threatened to close the border altogether to legal crossings, a threat he walked back on Thursday and replaced with a “one-year warning” to Mexico.
Despite the administration’s attempts to shift blame for the chaos, make no mistake:It is Donald Trump himself who is responsible. Through misguided policies, political stunts and a failure of leadership, the president has created the conditions that allowed the asylum problem at the border to explode into a crisis. The solution to our current border troubles lies in reforming the U.S. asylum system and immigration courts and helping Central America address its challenges—not in a “big beautiful” wall or shutting down the border. Yet effective action on these issues has been missing. And the president has now so poisoned the political well with his approach that there is little hope of meaningful congressional action until after the next election. Unless the administration changes course, the immigration crisis will only continue to worsen.
In fiscal year 2017, the last year of the Obama administration and the first of Trump’s, 303,916 migrants were arrested by the Border Patrol. This was the lowest level in more than three decades.
The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had worked hard to tackle the problem of illegal migration through substantial increases in border security staffing, improvements in technology, innovations in strategy and improved security coordination and assistance to Mexico. Coupled with improved economic conditions in Mexico, these administrations were hugely successful in deterring and breaking the cycle of illegal crossing: Unlawful Mexican economic immigration, which had historically been the primary immigration enforcement issue at the border, dropped nearly 90 percent between 2000 and 2016.
VIDEO - Is there really a border crisis?
But the nature of undocumented immigration to the U.S. has changed.Today, it is primarily driven not by Mexican economic migrants—and not by a flood of criminals, as Trump claims—but rather by large numbers of families and minors from Central America who are seeking political asylum. Although this issue first rose to public attention in 2014, the influx then was only a fraction of what it is today. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that triple the number of 2017 apprehensions—more than 900,000—will occur at the southern border in 2019. Many of those will be migrants seeking asylum, and they will descend on a border and immigration court system ill-equipped to handle those claims.
Of course, the president did not create the conditions in Central America
that have driven migrants north. But his obsession with the wall, along with a series of other misguided policies, have severely hampered the U.S. government’s response to this flood. The wall has become a profound distraction and waste of time for policymakers and agency leadership as other solutions that would prove far more useful to our real immigration problems have gone neglected.
Virtually all of the desperate families from Central America who seek asylum, whether entitled to protection or not, are permitted to remain indefinitely in the United Sates while awaiting formal adjudication of their claims. These claims cannot be processed fairly, quickly and efficiently, as the immigration courts face a backlog of nearly a million cases. In fiscal year 2018, less than 15 percent of applicants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were granted asylum, but only 1.5 percent .. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/McAleenan%20Testimony.pdf .. of Central American family units apprehended in 2017 have been deported. The rest have, so far, stayed. In other words, Trump, a president fixated on stopping illegal immigration, has presided over a dramatic increase in the numbers of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
It is a system that was almost designed to be exploited. Smugglers and migrant advocacy organizations like Pueblo Sin Fronteras are encouraging distressed families from Central America to travel north through Mexico, surrender to U.S. officials at the border and ask for political asylum. The ability to stay and work in the United States for years as their claims plod through the immigration court system is a powerful inducement to come here. Since the Trump administration has done so little to speed up the processing of claims, it is likely that these families will be staying in the U.S. for years. Indeed, the president’s government shutdown over the border wall only worsened the immigration court backlog.
The president’s wall is, in other words, unmoored from operational reality. A wall will not make Central America a better place to live. A wall will not stop asylum seekers from coming to the United States and being able to claim asylum. A wall will not address, let alone fix, the issues with America’s asylum system and immigration courts. The president’s attacks on Mexico and Central America, coupled with the lack of a coherent strategy for the region, have made harder the already difficult work of addressing the underlying drivers of illegal migration from Central America. Instead of working to address these problems, the president has actively made the problem worse by redirecting resources and attention to his irrelevant wall, antagonizing the people he needs to partner with to actually solve immigration problems, exacerbating backlogs and resource shortages by shutting down the government and announcing enforcement measures that cannot be sustained and which result in increasing numbers of migrants calling his bluffs.
The president may want to implement harsh border security policies, but he has faltered on the basics of governing. The administration has failed at the fundamental tasks of coordinating its plans with the relevant agencies and working through the hard problems of implementation. For instance, the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting illegal border-crossers wasted scarce prosecutorial and detention resources and could never be operationally sustained. The family separation policy—a stain on America’s moral authority—was not vetted and coordinated within the government, leading to confused implementation that still has not been resolved. Instead, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, to preserve her position, has been reduced to a yes woman, kowtowing to every pronouncement the president makes. The enduring images of the secretary’s tenure have been her lame denials of a family separation policy and lockstep support of the president’s wall demands, even as many in her department worked without pay during the shutdown. The professionals who know what it takes to solve the problem are not consulted but rather relegated to following orders.
Trump made stopping illegal immigration his signature issue. It is time to acknowledge that he has failed miserably—so we can start thinking about how to clean up the mess he has made.
topdawg tdr - Trump’s shutdown has paralyzed immigration courts. Oh, the irony. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145863474 .. and .. This must be a joke Mitch McConnell: "So will these new Democrats come to Washington ready to roll up their sleeves, work together, and make laws -- or they're going waste time on partisan show votes that will do nothing to move the country in a forward direction?" hill.cm/nMzo13M https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145846434 .. both ot those, with a reminder of the Caucus Room Restaurant meeting on Obama's first inauguration day, are here .. 100%, hookrider. The immigration court situation reads as about the biggest Fuck Up ever, and it's obviously being made much worse by the most fucked up president the USA has ever had. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145864498
Fact-checking claim about Trump administration changes to the immigration system
"Donald Trump’s Central America strategy is both cruel and incompetent "Inside Trump’s Disastrous ‘Secret’ Drug War Plans for Central America""
Alejandro Mayorkas stated on March 21, 2021 in in an ABC News interview: The border surge is “challenging” because the immigration system that had been in place for decades “was dismantled in its entirety by the Trump administration.”
A migrant child sleeps on the shoulder of a woman at an intake area after turning themselves in upon crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, March 24, 2021, in Roma, Texas. (AP)
By Miriam Valverde March 24, 2021
If Your Time is short
* Trump’s administration did make significant changes to the U.S. immigration system, including the process for migrants arriving at the southern border to seek asylum.
* While those actions may have an impact on migration, they are not wholly responsible for a surge in migration or the Biden administration’s ability to deal with it, experts said.
President Joe Biden’s top immigration official defended the federal response to the growing numbers of people arriving at the southern border, and claimed that current efforts are complicated by the Trump administration’s drastic changes.
Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said the Biden administration has a plan and knows what to do, but it will take time to get things done.
"And why does it take time now? Why is it especially challenging and difficult now? Because the entire system under United States law that has been in place throughout administrations of both parties was dismantled in its entirety by the Trump administration," Mayorkas told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on March 21.
The Biden administration is "rebuilding the system" to address the needs of unaccompanied children making their way to the southern border, he said.
How accurate is Mayorkas’ claim that the Trump administration "dismantled" the "entire system"?
There’s some truth to his broad claim, but the challenges the Biden administration faces can’t all be blamed on the prior administration, immigration experts said.
"The border surge is just the latest symptom of a broken immigration system," said Laura Collins, director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative.
Conditions that push migration haven’t changed, and U.S. hasn’t adapted
Experts said it’s important to take a step back and note the underlying factors that push people out of their countries and why the U.S. — regardless of who’s president — has trouble handling their arrival.
Persistent corruption, poverty, lack of opportunity and violence in Central America drive people to leave their families and seek a better life in the United States. Recently, hurricanes in Central America made things worse for many people, ruining their crops and displacing them from their homes. The coronavirus pandemic has also left many people without a job.
On the U.S. side of the issue, Congress hasn’t passed meaningful legislation to modernize the legal immigration system or to better prepare the federal government for surges at the border. (The last big immigration law was enacted in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president.)
DHS directed PolitiFact to a statement Mayorkas issued March 16 about the Trump administration dismantling the asylum system. Many people who make it to the southern border ask for asylum.
"We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago," Mayorkas said.
Under federal law, immigrants may be granted asylum if they have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. To apply for asylum, people have to be physically present in the U.S. They can apply even if they arrive without legal permission.
A backlog of cases existed before Trump took office and continued to grow during his tenure, despite his attempts to limit the number of people filing cases.
* Denying asylum to people who did not ask for protection in another country first;
* Entering into agreements with Central American countries so that they’d take asylum seekers who would have otherwise applied for protection in the United States; and
* Launching the "Remain in Mexico" program that sent asylum seekers to Mexico to wait there for a resolution of their case. Previous administrations allowed people into the United States as their case made its way through the complex immigration system. (It can take years for cases to be resolved.)
Trump’s administration also tried to discourage people from coming to the U.S. to apply for asylum by implementing a policy that ultimately separated parents and children upon arrival at the border. The Biden administration got rid of that policy and launched a task force to help reunify families. Biden’s administration has also begun letting in asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.
Separately, Trump also weakened another venue for legal migration — the U.S. refugee program. People apply for refugee admission from outside the U.S. (in their home countries or in refugee camps elsewhere). Before leaving office, President Barack Obama said the U.S. should let in as many as 110,000 refugees in fiscal year 2017. When Trump took over, he said that was too much and capped it at 50,000. Trump continued to lower the caps every year he was in office. Biden has pledged to significantly raise the admissions cap.
Elimination of Central American Minors program
Mayorkas’ statement also said that Trump "tore down" the Central American Minors program — created in 2014 by the Obama administration to address a surge of children fleeing gang violence and arriving alone at the border. The program sought to deter Central American children from making the dangerous trip north.
The program allowed certain parents lawfully present .. https://www.uscis.gov/CAM .. in the United States to petition for their children in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to come in as refugees. Children ineligible for refugee admission but at risk of violence were eligible for immigration parole .. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R46570.pdf .. (allowed into the U.S. temporarily, but not formally admitted under the U.S. immigration system).
The Trump administration in 2017 decided to end the program. Mayorkas and Democratic lawmakers argue that its absence contributes to the current surge.
But Democrats are overstating the program’s impact, experts said. Plenty of kids were left out of it, due to eligibility requirements and its lengthy application process, said Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
The program "had not yet developed into a fully effective alternative to illegal immigration for a broad population," Bolter said.
Also, it ended years ago, so "it doesn’t make sense that the effects would suddenly appear this year," she said.
In this June 18, 2014 photo, boys await medical appointments in a holding area at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. (AP)
Cuts in foreign aid
Mayorkas also claimed that Trump cut "foreign aid funding" and that "no longer did we resource efforts in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to tackle the root causes of people fleeing their homes."
He’s right about cuts in foreign aid, and that may have exacerbated some conditions that potential migrants were facing, experts said. But they also emphasized that other factors likely carried more weight in people’s decision to migrate.
Obama’s administration in 2014 .. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10371.pdf .. decided that improving living conditions in Central America would be beneficial to the U.S. and approved a new strategy to increase annual foreign aid to the region. Trump’s administration did the opposite, proposing cuts instead.
Annual funding for the Central America strategy declined from $750 million in fiscal year 2017 to $505.9 million in fiscal year 2021, a Congressional Research Service analysis found. And amid an immigration surge in 2019, the Trump administration suspended that support while it negotiated asylum agreements with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
That pause "was a colossal waste," said Susan Martin, a professor emerita at Georgetown University and director of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform from 1992 to 1997. None of the three countries are safe or capable of processing asylum applications, she said.
Aid targeted toward the problems in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador "would have been much more effective in reducing emigration pressures over time," Martin said.
It’s hard to tell at this point how much impact those aid cuts have had on migration.
"A lot of foreign assistance is about investing in long-term change rather than short-term results," Collins said. "Lots of foreign assistance won’t fix migration on its own, but it is an important piece of a comprehensive approach."
Mayorkas said the border surge is "challenging" because the immigration system that had been in place for decades "was dismantled in its entirety by the Trump administration."
Trump’s administration did make significant changes to the U.S. immigration system, including the asylum-seeking process for migrants arriving at the southern border.
While those actions may have an impact on migration, they are not wholly responsible for a surge in migration or the Biden administration’s ability to deal with it, experts said.
Mayorkas’ statement is partly accurate. We rate it Half True.
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