A prayer for young immigrants

Dear God, in 2018, please help our nation's immigrants who so desperately need our assistance with legal residency. I simply can't imagine what it must be like to live under this cloud of deportation.

"The Trump administration is reportedly considering separating parents from their children — as a disincentive for Central Americans to come in the first place."~ San Antonio Express News

Donald Trump is cruel to dangle the promise of help to these productive young people who contribute to our nation's economy.  Now, he is reneging on his support.

"Echo" opinions published in mySA.com

A cruel twist for the nation’s young immigrants

Don’t make cruelty a centerpiece of immigration policy
Express-News Editorial Board
Published 4:09 pm, Friday, December 29, 2017

In 2018, let's make this the year of respecting our American immigrants.

Some things it should be easy to agree about on U.S. immigration policies:

Children belong with loving parents — in detention and when they are not being detained.

Among the hundreds of Central Americans fleeing their lawless countries for the United States, many will have legitimate asylum claims. If so, why would we want to separate them from their children?

The journey here is often filled with its own cruelty — extortion, deprivation, assault and rape. Why meet arrivals with more cruelty?

The unworkability of the current immigration system — with backlogs, red tape and complex rules that require trained legal minds to navigate — acts as disincentive to attempt to come here legally.

The news: The Donald Trump (cruel) administration is reportedly considering separating parents from their children — as a disincentive for Central Americans to come in the first place.

But apparently not on the table: the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that would deal with the myriad inequities of the system.

Under the Obama administration — itself a notable high achiever in deportations — aid was being given or being formulated to deal with the conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that cause the influx. And the Trump administration — in concert with Mexico — is contemplating continuation of these policies.

How does it do that, however, while also making deep cuts across the State Department? This is problematic, as in, perhaps not even possible.

Those cuts make no sense from a policy perspective. But separating children from parents makes no sense either as preventive policy or as a matter of humanitarianism.

As policy, Central American parents might deem separation “safer” than the violence they and their children are fleeing.

They will come anyway.
Or, instead of simply giving themselves up at the border as occurs now, these Central Americans with children will begin avoiding detection altogether, making the journey even more dangerous as they rely on smugglers who won’t have their best interests in mind.

And then the same effect: They will come anyway.
If Central Americans who may have legitimate asylum claims because of conditions in their own countries get here, it stands to reason they are owed due process. That shouldn’t include being separated from their children or, as is also being reported, being picked up for deportation when they come to shelters for children who may have legitimate asylum claims — another measure under consideration.

Even as migration from Mexico has been reduced for a variety of reasons to net zero, Central Americans continue to come — unswayed by the Trump administration’s enforcement-focused approach to immigration. That’s because it is that bad in their own countries.

Yes, the administration has a legitimate interest in preventing the dangerous journeys from Central America in the first place. But the best way to combat that is by beefing up the kind of aid that will help those Central American countries right themselves. And the best way to combat undocumented immigration from all sources altogether is to enact comprehensive immigration reform that will take away the reasons to not attempt legal entry.

But separating children from their parents will have little discernible effect overall — except to telegraph to the world that cruelty has become an official U.S. immigration policy. 

Maine Writer ~ I pray for a change of heart about immigration from the Donald Trump administration.  Perhaps, Donald Trump must be reminded, again, about how his mother was a Scottish immigrant.  Please, "God, protect these families and the American children of immigrant parents, who need compassionate protections from deportation.  Amen.