If Trump wins the presidency, this will be his immigration policy

Don’t say that he didn’t warn us. It warned us at every step. With every rally, every speech, no matter how incoherent and crazy it may be. He told us what he is going to do: imprison his opponents. Illegalize dissent, disregard the law.

And make life miserable for undocumented immigrants.

Much worse than Romney

Trump is the favorite candidate to face and maybe replace Joe Biden in November next year. His ideas recall Mitt Romney’s “immigration plan”, when he, too, was the candidate for president for the Republican Party in 2012. Then he lost to Barack Obama.

In the January 23 debate in Florida of that year, Romney described his immigration plan: self-deportation. Make their lives miserable until they leave on their own. Without the need for anything that contradicts morality. Clean and easy, like Romney himself.

But Trump does not suffer from that limitation. He has no moral restraints. He doesn’t mind admitting it, because the tougher, more aggressive and uncompromising he appears, the more his fans support him, and the more he listens to them and drinks their cheers until he is, well, drunk.

He will be much worse than Romney. Heck, he will be worse than himself in his first term.

Last month, Axios detailed the former president’s immigration plan. Here are the most relevant points of it, explained.

The ‘Migra’ unhinged

If he becomes President again, Trump intends to launch a constant, urgent and large-scale operation to hunt down undocumented immigrants throughout the country and carry out a large-scale deportation. To do this he will unhinge La Migra and use the cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the National Guard and other agencies to hunt down the immigrants.

To this end, Trump intends to issue an executive declaration according to which the nation is suffering an “invasion” of “illegals,” which is why he could deport those with criminal records, as well as human smugglers, without requiring judicial proceedings. For them he plans to label people from certain nationalities as “enemy foreigners.”

Asylum applications

In 2020, Trump imposed the policy called Title 42, due to the section in the 1944 Public Health Services Law, perversely assuming that undocumented immigrants bring the COVID-19 disease,  which at that time was often fatal, from Mexico. This served as an excuse to deport them.

He limited the right of those seeking asylum, contravening international law without allowing them to meet a border agent and much less present their application.

The new plan includes a renewed agreement with Mexico to restart its “Stay in Mexico” policy. To this would be added a renegotiation of migration agreements with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, so asylum-seeking immigrants can be returned directly to their countries of origin.

Family separation

Trump – in the mouth of his ideologue Stephen Miller – intends to renew the family separation policy, through which the United States government lost track of thousands of children.

What’s more, instead of accepting these children into the United States under different programs as it has been done in the past, Trump plans to deport them and their parents to their countries of origin. In his speeches, he cynically presents it as if it were a means to fight child exploitation.

Says the New York Times: “Approximately 5,500 foreign-born children were separated from their parents under that policy. On average, the separation lasted a few weeks, but in some cases it lasted for years.”

In some cases children were taken from their parents even though they were born here and were American citizens.

The policy was initiated during the administration of Barack Obama, which was the first to place children in gigantic cages, in 2014, but was canceled shortly thereafter. Trump, through his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, renewed it in 2018 on a much larger scale.

Naval blockade

In 2020, Trump put a price on the head of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: $15 million for his arrest. He then sent gunboats to the Caribbean to intimidate the drug traffickers with whom Hugo Chávez’s successor president was supposedly cooperating, the BBC reported.

“Today, the United States is launching enhanced counternarcotics operations in the Western Hemisphere to protect the American people from the deadly scourge of illegal narcotics,” Trump announced at the time.

Under the plan he says he will put into effect in 2025—if he is elected President—Trump will send gunboats to establish a border blockade “to stop drug smuggling boats.”

The Muslim ban

In 2017, as soon as he took office, Trump fulfilled his electoral promise at that time and banned people from Muslim countries from entering the country. He later limited the decision to those from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. Three years later it added Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania to the list.

He thought the idea was so good that he plans to continue to expand the list at will.

But that “good idea” will be a boomerang that will undo decades of efforts to promote US political influence around the world.

Unlawful enemy combatants

To circumvent the Geneva treaties regarding the treatment of the 780 “detainees” without trial in Guantanamo, Cuba – mostly terrorists close to al Qaeda – the George government W. Bush designated them unlawful enemy combatants.

That is, they were not prisoners of war, because they were not part of the regular army, as determined by the agreements. For that reason, they had no guaranteed rights. But later, the same designation was given to prisoners who were soldiers in the Taliban army in Afghanistan, because, according to Bush’s lawyers, they belonged to a “failed state.”

As remembered, the appeals before the US justice system failed, because being in the territory of Guantánamo the prison was outside national jurisdiction, according to a Supreme Court ruling in 1950.

Now, Donald Trump wants to use the same designation of unlawful enemy combatants to arrest members of the Mexican drug cartels, in Mexican territory. A country that is neither failed nor at war against the United States, which is sovereign and a member of all international organizations. Sending troops to Mexico could unleash an unprecedented crisis in the country’s relations with  Latin America.

Denying citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants

In October of 2018, Trump was about to sign an executive order that would have ended the citizenship automatically granted to everyone born in the country, which is what the Constitution says in its 14th amendment.

To cancel this practice a constitutional amendment was needed. But Trump wanted to ignore it.

“It can definitely be done with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can just do it with an executive order,” Trump said at the time.

Who told you, Trump? “John Eastman”. Yes, the lawyer and law professor now on trial for his similar role in the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Eastman was the author – and propagandist – of the view that the vice president has the right to decide which votes of electors to accept and which to reject.

Trump wanted to cancel birthright citizenship. He didn’t dare then, but he still wants to do it, and now he has a Supreme Court whose arch-conservative makeup has given him the confidence to take this decisive step.

Inaugurate the Border Wall

The fantasy of a border wall that physically separates the United States from Mexico was always a cheap electoral trick with which Trump reaped rich dividends of unrestricted support among his voters. During his four years of government he was unable to make it a reality. But this did not prevent him from declaring that “the wall is almost complete.”

The Trump administration through Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said it had built 452 miles of wall before Joe Biden took office, halting construction.

However, the BBC corrects, “only 80 miles of new barriers have been built where there were none before; that includes 47 miles of primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall built to reinforce the initial barrier.”

Now, the plan is to complete construction of the wall across the entire border with Mexico.

An exhaustive, complete, total immigration plan

Trump’s plan is comprehensive, detailed and relentless. Here are some of the additional points it contains.

• Expand Texas’ controversial floating barriers on the Rio Grande.
• Quickly deport immigrant gang members, smugglers and other criminals, using an obscure section of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
• He is also prepared to severely reduce legal immigration.
• Further evaluation of the ideologies of immigration applicants would involve searching their social media accounts, to fish out “Marxists.”
• Cut access to the US immigration system for countries whose citizens have high rates of illegally staying in the United States after their visas expire.

Finally, to execute this plan, Trump will need allies in all government agencies, which is why his advisors are compiling a list of current officials who will be terminated and allies who will be appointed to executive positions in charge of detention tasks. and deportation.

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This article was supported in whole, or in part, by funds provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library and the Latino Media Collaborative.