Aura of lawlessness a struggle for us all
Joshua Matz
Thursday 9 March 2017 11.05 EST
Last modified on Thursday 9 March 2017 11.35 EST
... the first battle over Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees was a clear defeat for the administration. Citizens and judges recoiled from its policy, which reeked of anti-Muslim prejudice, unleashed chaos, lacked a basis in national security and consigned innocents to certain death ...
The most basic problem with the order is that is lacks any valid justification. It arbitrarily cuts the total intake of refugees for fiscal year 2017 from 110,000 to 50,000, in effect (and needlessly) condemning thousands to death or torture. It bars entrants from six countries even though no American has been killed by immigrant terrorists from those particular countries. And it ham-handedly achieves Trump’s conceded goal of using immigration law to make an anti-Muslim political statement.
... the stated purpose of the ban is to freeze entry so that the administration can establish “extreme vetting” procedures. Yet Trump has never identified any actual defect in the existing system – not during his campaign, and not since issuing a 90-day freeze back in January, supposedly for the same purpose ...
In the meantime, yet another disaster of historic propositions will unfold in US public policy: Trump’s vast expansion of deportation and immigration enforcement programs at all levels of government. This radical transformation includes efforts to brand all undocumented migrants as criminals, and to relegate millions of people to lives of constant, crushing fear. In the coming years, Trump will build and expand prisons, allow ever more “expedited hearings”, and fill the books with novel grounds for ripping apart migrant families ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/09/trump-administration-an-aura-of-lawlessness