With midterm elections fast approaching, President Trump and conservative candidates are once again employing a hard-line stance on immigration to ignite their Republican base and increase voter interest. Based upon voter history trends, it appears that Republican voters become supercharged when candidates discuss and promise anti-immigrant polices. Indeed, President Trump confirmed that he is considering a new family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, with the hope that it will “scare away undocumented individuals from trying to enter the United States. This attempt at political strategery ignores both the enormous socio-political backlash from the earlier family separation policy set forth last June and the First Lady’s clear opposition to familial separation.
Indeed, the White House is actively creating the architectural plans for a variation of the family separation policy, in which parents would be essentially forced to choose between remaining imprisoned as a family or, alternatively, relinquishing their children into foster care. This new separation policy is being called “Binary Choice.
There are also plans to make the burden of proof on asylum-seekers harder and stricter and to expedite the arrest of individuals with deportation orders so that they may leave the country more swiftly.
Immigration lawyers, Immigration advocacy groups, and human rights organizations are uniformly outraged by these proposed immigration policies and by the White House’s humanitarian tone deafness. Immigration attorney, Edward Shulman, a leading expert on deportation cases commented: “ it is my hope that the public will push back against these inhumane policies of family separation and prolonged family detention and that their moral compasses will lead them to the polls where the message of humanity will reign over partisan politics. Shulman also acknowledged profound worry that asylum-seekers who are often fleeing violence and harrowing country conditions will now be sadistically subjected to more grueling interview tactics and administrative roadblocks which may result in their psychological re-traumatization.
Amid this humanitarian crisis and with real worries among the immigrant communities within the United States, Shulman stated that it is even more critically important that undocumented individuals seek immigration counsel to discuss all of their rights and potential avenues for immigration relief.