Trump immigration policy poorly implemented
In the past week, Donald Trump has been accused of committing — in the words of a British radio host yelling at me during an interview yesterday — “the worst human rights abuses I’ve ever seen.”
Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) accused him of creating “child internment camps.”
On CNN, Trump is allegedly “turning this nation into Nazi Germany.”
On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough says, “Children are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick.”
Oh, and one other thing: At Gallup, Trump’s weekly approval rating tied its all-time high (45 percent) since he took office. What is happening? It’s not that the Trump “arrest ’em all” border policy is other than an unmitigated political disaster. Not only do Americans in general hate it — 67 percent in the newest CBS poll — but not even Republicans say they like it.
And they shouldn’t. Not because it’s inherently bad necessarily, but because it’s so badly implemented. Trump is right that the law allows the U.S. to treat all illegal immigrants crossing at random points along the border (as opposed to ports of entry) as criminals. And he’s right that federal law doesn’t allow kids to be kept with parents who are being processed through the criminal system.
But if you know all that in advance, what the heck are you thinking when you launch a halfassessed policy like this? The smart approach is to arrange accommodations for the minor children first, then start the illegalimmigration round-up. President Trump, per usual, did it completely backwards. And the result is the nonstop media montage of “Children in cages!” and crying kids on audio.
It doesn’t matter that America (not to mention the U.K., Canada, etc.) “rips children from their parents’ arms” every time a mom or dad goes to jail. It doesn’t matter that the kids are in better living conditions than they were back home. Pictures of kids in “cages” are worth far more than a thousand words.
And yet, despite all this, Trump’s poll numbers are steady. An approval rating of 45 sounds unimpressive on its face, but it’s about where Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were at this point in their presidencies. More significant, it’s way up from Trump’s own low of 34 percent at the beginning of the year.
Why? Because for many Americans, the debate about what’s happening to these illegal-immigrant families is backstopped by the knowledge of what happened to the many families before.
In 2016, more than 70,000 families from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras poured across the border, hoping for “permisos” — a piece of paper that would let them stay in America because they showed up with children. Another 47,000 unaccompanied minors — many teenaged boys — did the same.
That happened because human traffickers and their clients figured out that, when the U.S. handles illegal immigrant families “administratively” (that’s what the people attacking Trump are demanding), the result is they are allowed to enter the U.S. and await a hearing. When they show up in court for that hearing months later … well, of course they don’t show up. That was the scam.
When Trump says, “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” that message resonates, even with Americans appalled by what they’re seeing at the border.
They don’t want Trump to give in to the openborders movement, but they also don’t want to feel ashamed of how the border is being policed. For the moment, they’re giving Trump credit for being right on the big picture. But the devil — not to mention Hitler — is all over the mishandled details.