Who sets terms of immigration debate?

Abusive relationships have a common signifier: Eventually, the abuser begins to control the perception of the person being abused. The classic tactic is to blur the abused person’s sense of reality — so that the abuse they suffer appears not only normal and familiar, but even justified.

If you’re not thinking of Donald Trump and his hardline, anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller right now, look again. “Innocent Americans,” Miller claimed recently, “are victimized on a daily basis because of illegal immigration.”

But if you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, it’s plain that immigrants are the ones being victimized.

This spring, the Trump administration instituted a zero tolerance policy toward undocumented immigrants, vowing to criminally prosecute immigrants who would normally face only a civil violation for crossing the border without inspection — along with asylum-seekers who break no laws at all. It’s a classic tactic to abuse people who’ve already been victimized, and then to blame the victims.

In June, a mother from El Salvador wrote for the New York Times about her decision to seek asylum in the United States to save her life and her family from gang violence. Instead of finding safety, however, she and her small child were placed in a rat-infested detention camp where water and food were rationed and often expired. Medical needs were routinely neglected: In one case at the facility, another mother was denied medical care for her son. That mother was then deported — and the child died. The mother who wrote the story eventually got out of detention, but her son remains traumatized — especially now that his father is locked up in such a facility.

Abusers often rely and thrive on instability. The fluctuation of ups and downs have us feeling that if we do everything right, all the abuse will stop. Similarly, Trump’s policy statements on immigration swing wildly from one extreme to extreme to another. It’s not because he can’t make up his mind. It’s because he’s playing us. He’s destabilizing us until ordinary Americans see the extreme as the middle ground.

On June 20, the Trump administration announced it would end its policy to separate families in immigration detention. Many people across the political spectrum called it a victory. Yet the zero tolerance policy remains in place — the only difference is families would now be detained together, indefinitely. A court ruled against that indefinite detention as well, but the extreme of family separation somehow got some people to accept the extreme of zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance means deportations and detention camps. It’s a death sentence for many undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.

Trump’s ability to wear people, laws, and systems down has always worked to his benefit. We’ve watched him go back and forth on policies — like protection for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients — giving many people the impression of incompetence. But somehow the most racist immigration policies since 1920 are now fully in the public narrative.

I think that very appearance of inconsistency was a premeditated tactic. Whatever his day-to-day fluctuations, Trump’s immigration policy has always been informed by a white nationalist desire to limit the number of nonwhite people that enter this country.

To combat it, people of conscience need a bigger vision for an immigration policy rooted in human decency. And it should be led by the people most affected, not just a reaction to the latest Trump outrage.

For a long time, we’ve known that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol kill and deport the hungry, the needy, and the poor. We’ve allowed these agencies to treat undocumented people and refugees as the targets of a military operation. Some of us have been convinced that our cities, schools, and workplaces need to be raided viciously by increasing interior enforcement of deportations, because we trust Stephen Miller’s judgment of something he’s never experienced.

Deportations, detention, and family separation for immigrants and refugees crossed a line. But if can’t put forward a moral vision for immigration of our own — that is, if we can’t assert our own view of reality, based on the input of the people that know it best — we’ll continue letting abusers set the terms of debate.