US shouldn’t become new persecutor of refugees
Even those most sympathetic to would-be immigrants should acknowledge that America’s immigration debate has two sides; national security requires secure borders and a healthy society requires some controls on who from the outside can join it.
But some actions of immigration officials under President Donald Trump are so clearly wrongheaded they demand condemnation.
The cavalier, indiscriminate seizure and separation of children from their parents at the southern border has been the most notorious, but another is happening in Columbus.
On the Far East Side, a community of refugees from Mauritania that has been living relatively quiet lives for the past two decades is now gripped with fear because, since Trump took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials seemingly have targeted them for deportation.
Known in their west African home country as Black Moors, they fled in the 1990s because the nation’s Arab rulers had embarked on a campaign of persecution. Blacks were forcibly expelled from the country, their existence erased from official records. Tens of thousands who remain are enslaved in one of the last bastions of human servitude.
Such horrors could be the textbook definition of the “well-founded fear of persecution” that is supposed to entitle a migrant to seek refuge in the U.S. That doesn’t seem to matter, though, to the ICE officials carrying out the Trump administration’s policy that any immigrant without documents be removed.
Many of the Columbus residents likely could have won asylum, but were derailed by a scammer whom they paid to help them with their applications. The “helper” copied and pasted boilerplate narratives into multiple applications, causing them to be rejected as fraudulent.
Many of those were ordered deported years ago, but were essentially left alone as long as they reported periodically to ICE. Many received work permits. They got jobs, started businesses, bought houses and built families and productive lives. Now, all of that is in jeopardy.
The U.S. and central Ohio would in no way benefit from the removal of these people, but their lives likely would be destroyed.
We say this not because we have much hope of changing the politically calculated course of the Trump administration but in hopes central Ohioans might recognize the human cost of blind, unthinking condemnation of people seeking better lives.
The Columbus City School District’s new Central Enrollment Center offers the welcome promise of better customer service for district families and greater integrity in attendance and enrollment records.
Housed in an expanded and refurbished Ohio National Guard garage, it’s also another good use of the extraordinary resource that is the Fort Hayes campus.
Former superintendent Dan Good, who retired last year, deserves credit for the idea and for hiring Machelle Kline as chief accountability officer and putting her in charge of it.
Along with giving families a one-stop shop for choosing a school and signing up for services such as English as a Second Language classes and screenings for preschool and kindergarten, it provides a place where principals can get consistent training on how to count and report attendance accurately.
The district needs both to serve the families already enrolled and to convince more to try city schools.