the tears, and the songs we shared on those days driving down Highway 10, this is Diego’s book, too.
Ann Donnelly’s name echoed all over social media the night of January 28, 2017. Donnelly had been a federal district court judge for just over a year when a ruling from her court in Brooklyn, New York, made her the first judge to block an executive order by President Donald Trump.
The executive order, signed by Trump the day before on Friday, January 27, was announced as a temporary cancellation of permission to enter the United States for citizens of seven countries: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, with the alleged aim of protecting the country from terrorism. Although the order defined those barred from entering by their nationality, it was widely known as the “Muslim ban,” a phrase popularized by Trump himself during his presidential campaign, because Islam was the predominant religion in the seven countries cited.
Of the twenty-three executive orders signed by Trump during his first twelve weeks in office, this was the most polemic, stirring the strongest reaction from U.S. citizens. Within just a few hours, large crowds descended on the biggest airports in the country to protest the measure and to show support for people being detained upon arrival, including permanent U.S. residents who had temporarily traveled to their country of origin. Syrian refugees scheduled to arrive in the United States that weekend were detained; an infant girl from Iran traveling to the United States for life-saving heart surgery was not allowed to enter the country. Within a few days, federal courts in other cities had also blocked the order. For the first time in many years, the United States took a hard look at itself and its policies of accepting and excluding refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and people from other countries in general.
It was probably about time. For decades, the United States has promoted itself to the rest of the world as a democratic country, with an open-arms policy that affirms diversity, which has very little to do with how the nation actually shapes its policies around immigration, refuge, and asylum.
In spite of being the country with the largest number of immigrants in the world—almost 50 million people living in U.S. territory were not born there—the United States has a smaller percentage of immigrants in relation to the general population than other countries. Immigrants comprise 14 percent of the U.S. population, compared with 22 percent in Canada and 28 percent in Australia; countries that have openly acknowledged their need for foreign labor have reached figures as high as 75 percent in Qatar and 88 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Even in Spain, a country experiencing large-scale immigration only recently, 13 percent of the population are immigrants, just one percentage point less than the United States.
Another image the United States sells to the world is the “melting pot,” referring to its ethnic diversity. Compared with other countries, however, it is not a leader in that sense either. In terms of diversity, once again other countries such as Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have higher indices. In the United States, one of every four immigrants comes from a single country, Mexico. In other destination countries popular with immigrants, mainly in Europe, migration comes from a wider, more diverse range of countries.
As with most countries that receive immigrants, the current demographic composition of the United States is the result of the government’s application of immigration policy based on the country’s economic and workplace needs. But it is also a function of the alliances and shifting sands of international politics. In terms of refuge and asylum policy, and the methods for detaining and processing immigrants, the predominant principles have more to do with political, and even partisan, criteria, not human rights or social justice. The United States opens its arms to whoever benefits it economically at the moment, and to asylum and refuge seekers who can demonstrate persecution or a threat to their safety or their lives, as long as they come from countries with governments viewed as questionable by the United States. For those seeking asylum or refuge for identical reasons who come from countries with governments viewed as friendly and democratic by the United States, the door slams shut, even if they can demonstrate a fear for their lives as credible as any exhibited by nationalities with governments deemed hostile by the U.S.
Throughout history, the collective imagination of the United States has constructed the “other” as the enemy—“the undesirable,” as described by law professor Bill Ong Hing. That “other” has evolved as necessary to successive administrations. There was “the undesirable Asian”—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos—in the second half of the nineteenth century, followed by Jews and Italians at the beginning of the twentieth century, Communists for several decades, Mexicans for much of the same century, Central Americans for the last twenty years, and Muslims filling the role of the “other” for the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The normalization of using political criteria to establish rules for entering the country, and for granting refugee status or political asylum in particular, is reflected in actions such as Trump’s order, which broadly violates international protocols protecting human rights.
After glimpsing a reflection of itself as a nation in the “Muslim ban,” a significant part of the U.S. public has reacted with horrified alarm; along with protests in the streets, a strong legal response has been launched. Just hours after Trump’s executive order was announced, groups of volunteer lawyers got to work, setting up shop in airport cafeterias. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the most powerful civil rights organization in the country, filed its first lawsuit in the name of two brothers originally from Iraq in the federal court presided over by Judge Donnelly, resulting in the first suspension of the travel ban. That Monday, barely seventy-two hours after Trump’s executive order was signed and suspended, the ACLU reported that it had received $24 million in donations in just three days through its website—six times more than the total for an average year.
One hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was connecting anti-terrorist and national security rhetoric with migration. In addition to justifying measures like the “Muslim ban,” such connections encompassed building a border wall, accusing Mexicans of being drug dealers and rapists, and claiming without evidence that undocumented people vote illegally; these last two assertions reinforced his promise to deport 11 million undocumented people from the country.
Since he was sworn into office, reality has forced Trump to tone down this rhetoric. During his administration’s first hundred days, the “Muslim ban” was blocked twice. The 11 million promised deportees has shrunk to 2 or 3 million; given the state of U.S. infrastructure and federal resources, deporting such a massive number of people would be extremely difficult and onerous, aside from incurring political and social costs. As for the border wall, Congress has forced Trump to get his head out of the clouds. The political will may be there and the legislative grounds in place, but at least for the first two fiscal years of the Trump administration, the money has not been included in the budget.
With no way to launch a controlled media offensive on these issues—not even by disqualifying them as “fake news”—and faced with the need to produce some evidence of success in his first months in office, Trump seems to have chosen to focus his efforts on arresting undocumented people and putting them into deportation proceedings, as well as denying entry to people seeking refuge or political asylum in the United States. Neither action requires any special allocation of resources, or Congressional approval.
Although talking about Trump as a dangerous threat to immigrants has been a good strategy for media outlets trying to increase their online traffic, the so-called “deportation machine” has already been up and running for at least a decade, beginning with the George W. Bush administration in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and picking up steam during Barack Obama’s time in office. Almost
