OKPOLICY.ORG
The federal government took less than 100 days after President Trump’s inauguration to mount an unprecedented and wholesale attack on immigrant families in America, regardless of their immigration status or criminal history. The Trump administration is destroying lawful pathways into the country, detaining people with no criminal background using “collateral arrests,” suddenly enforcing rarely implemented, decades-old immigration policies that require immigrants to register and carry documentation, and stripping people of their lawful immigration status. The federal government is abducting students from the streets, their homes, and even from a citizenship interview; moving them across the country thousands of miles from their homes, far from lawyers or other help; and revoking their visa – for nothing more than exercising their first amendment rights
Once detained, loved ones who are immigrants can be transported to for-profit detention facilities, which are renowned for human rights violations. Since the majority of immigration offenses are for unlawful entry or reentry into the country, this means that people with no other criminal charge are being detained with no access to toilets, beds, and limited access to food, water, and medical care. People held in these facilities can die in custody due to terrible conditions and lack of care. The Trump administration is not targeting “violent criminals; instead they have deported immigrants with no criminal records to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Being an immigrant does not give the government carte blanche to violate people’s constitutional rights, human rights, and basic decency. We cannot use immigration status to justify authoritarian repression, violation of due process, and punishment of our immigrant friends and neighbors for what is ultimately Congress’s decades of failure to create pathways to citizenship and fix our long-broken immigration system.
Now more than ever, as Oklahomans and as Americans, we need to reject efforts to dehumanize, criminalize, and disappear members of our community. We cannot base our respect for our fellow human beings on how well they fit a “legal” definition; as we’ve seen, even lawful immigrants can have their immigration status arbitrarily revoked. We cannot carry on as “business as usual” or pretend that what is happening is normal or justifiable. If history has taught us anything, it is that authoritarian repression may start by targeting marginalized communities, but will inevitably metastasize to reach all of us before the end.
