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By Michelle Martin, PhD, MSW  What I want to address in this blog post is whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ assertion that the only legal way to request asylum in the United States is through a U.S. port of entry (or U.S. consulate) is accurate. I also want to explore how the government can distinguish between undocumented economic immigrants who cross the Mexico border without documentation to work, and those who cross the border seeking political asylum because they are fleeing persecution.
The “Dem Laws” the Trump Administration Claims have Tied Their Hands: Separating Myth from Fact7/1/2018
By Michelle Martin, PhD, MSW  The Trump administration has referenced several “Dem laws” they claim have tied their hands in the current crisis involving the separation of Central American children from their political asylum-seeking parents. The narrative, according to Sarah Sanders, White House spokesperson, is that President Trump didn’t create the crisis, but is just the first president to “come to the table” and do something about it.
The administration was initially somewhat mysterious about what specific laws they were referencing that “only Congress could fix,” so I, along with many others, took shots in the dark in an attempt to untangle the pertinent immigration legislation at play, exploring whether any of them would warrant separating the children from their parents who are being detained while they await their asylum hearing. Since the initial zero-tolerance policy was implemented in April of this year, the administration has been more forthcoming in their legal stance, and several immigration experts have weighed in on the matter. This blog post is an attempt to make sense of the various laws and policies involved in this crisis. My Response to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s Press Briefing Today On Zero-Tolerance Policy6/19/2018
 I watched the White House Press Briefing today with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I took notes as best as I could so I could later respond, while furiously posting comments online, and clicking the angry face emoji 😡 every five seconds. I found Nielsen to be very defensive and angry. This could have been because she knew she was lying, but my instincts told me that it was more likely because she believes she's correct and is outraged to be so misunderstood. Quite likely it was a combination of the two, and perhaps she's just furious that she's in this place to begin with. Who really knows. But her general disdain and disregard for these traumatized families was apparent to me, and I kept wondering if she had ever gone through hardship, because regardless of what one's thoughts are on border protection, all of our hearts should be breaking in half.
There is so much misinformation out there about the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy that requires criminal prosecution, which then warrants the separating of parents and children at the southern border. As a professor at a local Cal State, I research and write about these issues, so here, I wrote the following to make it easier for you:
Myth 1: This is not a new policy and was practiced under Obama and Clinton - FALSE. The policy to separate parents and children is new and was instituted on 4/6/2018. It was the “brainchild” of John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration, and some allege to be used as a bargaining chip. The policy was approved by Trump, and adopted by Sessions. Prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit. Here is the memo. |
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May 2019
AuthorDr. Michelle Martin is a social worker, policy specialist and Assistant Professor at California State University, Fullerton in the Department of Social Work, where she teaches social welfare policy, and researches dynamics related to immigrants, political asylum-seekers, refugees and other displaced populations. Categories
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