The U.S. immigration detention system under Donald Trump is abusive, racist, sexist and haphazardly implemented, all designed to terrorize people attempting to exercise their right to seek asylum.
Staying in a violent home country can be lethally dangerous – but thanks to European governments, sending family abroad is far from a guaranteed escape.
Jeffrey Davis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Trump’s executive order to end family separations at the border is too little too late, a human rights expert writes. Indefinitely detaining immigrants is breaking the law.
Undocumented entries across the border are at all-time lows. The people now arriving are not Mexican workers, but a smaller number of Central American families seeking to escape dire circumstances.
Donald Trump’s policy to separate children from their migrant parents lays bare his fascism. The time has come for Americans to resist this act of domestic terrorism.
Trump hopes migrants won’t come if they know their children will be taken away. That grim logic ignores the inescapable dangers that drive thousands of Central Americans to flee their homes each year.
International law recognizes that women and LGBTQ people face unique forms of violence that may qualify them for asylum. The US now asserts that domestic abuse is a ‘private’ matter.
Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are leading more Central Americans to stay put in Mexico. Mexico’s presidential candidates have a lot to say about that, and none of it involves mass deportations.
Rather than closing a loophole in a Canada-U.S. agreement that allows Canadian officials to turn back asylum-seekers from the U.S. at the border, the deal should be abolished outright.
Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham