In response to mounting political pressure to address the crisis in
U.S-Mexico border detention centers, the Obama Administration is putting
plans into action to speed up deportations—a move critics slam as a
"step backwards for immigration policy."
Efforts to achieve the
faster deportations include accelerating immigration trials and opening
additional detention centers, as well as increasing the use of tracking
devices such as ankle bracelets to keep track of immigrants after they
are released and awaiting trials for deportation, The New York Times reports.
"It's a real step backwards for immigration policy," Bob Libal, the
executive director of Grassroots Leadership, which advocates for
alternatives to detention, told the Huffington Post.
"Detention should always be used as a last option ... the harm that
comes from children from being detained is well-documented, and if we
don't have to do this, we shouldn't be doing it."
The humanitarian crisis at the border has once again stirred up
anti-immigrant sentiment at many levels. The union representing more
than 16,000 border patrol agents wrote
on its Twitter feed last weekend complaining of "Babysitting, Diaper
Changing, Burrito Wrapping," although the tweet was removed after
immigration advocates called it racist. An op-ed in the Guardian on Friday noted
the role the Associated Press has played in dehumanizing the debate
around the crisis by referring to the children as "detainees" rather
than just children.
Yet public opinion is behind a long-term solution to immigration. A
survey that came out June 12, conducted by the Public Religion Research
Institute and the Brookings Institution, found that 62 percent of
Americans favor giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship,
while just 19 percent favor a policy of deportation.
Before the planned increase in deportations was reported, President
Obama had called President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico on Thursday to
discuss the best ways to "work in close cooperation with Mexico to
develop concrete proposals to address the root causes of unlawful
migration from Central America," according to a White House statement.
The likelihood of the White House actually targeting the "root
causes" of immigration is highly improbable from the point of view of
staunch critics of how the U.S. consistently tackles immigration
problems. Founder and former president of the Economic Policy Institute
Jeff Faux, told
the Real News Network that "lost in this debate is the question of U.S.
responsibility for the basic causes of this tragic immigration to the
United States. Immigration politics in the U.S. focuses on the U.S., but
the question of what to do with people who are arriving here misses the
point of how they arrived and why they arrived. In this case 95 percent
of the children are coming from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador."
The reporting by the Times came on World Refugee Day, which the president commemorated by saying
that the United States "was built by people who fled oppression and
war" and that “the refugees who arrive in the United States today
continue this tradition, bringing fresh dreams and energy and renewing
the qualities that help forge our national identity and make our country
strong.”
from here
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