Opinion: For Trump, the cruelty is the point. But it’s actually worse than that.
By Greg Sargent Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer April 9 at 10:26 AM President Trump, egged on by immigration adviser Stephen Miller, is currently undertaking a purge of top homeland security officials who are seen as suspect, in part because they are not willing to flout the law in the quest to be as cruel and inhumane to asylum seekers as Trump would like them to be.
First, let’s look at Trump’s purge. Trump will remove the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, because, as the New York Times reports, Miller was “angered” when he refused “to make changes to asylum policy without congressional approval” that would have made it harder for unauthorized immigrants to exercise their legal right to seek asylum.
All this dovetails with previous reporting which tells us that Trump ousted Nielsen in part because she refused to illegally deny entry to all asylum seekers.Trump and Miller are looking to implement a new version of family separations, to force migrant parents to choose between indefinite detention as a family or agreeing to a separation under which children are released.
And Axios reports that Trump and Miller also hope to raise the bar for people to invoke “credible fear” of persecution in home countries. They might try to get the State Department to produce “analysis” that contradicts migrants’ claims about conditions in their home countries. In keeping with these findings, the current head of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, has repeatedly said we must expand aid to these countries to treat the underlying conditions that help cause these migrations. He may soon head DHS.
We should have a bigger debate over whether asylum categories should be broadened to include extreme economic deprivation. But we can say right now that many of the policies Trump and Miller want are completely detached from those “push” factors, and only address “pull” factors.
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