But compassionate sadist that he is, Sessions added that the Death to Dreamers agenda won't be enforced until March, which should give Congress more than (ahem) enough time to do right by the 800,000 people who suddenly find themselves plunked back on the deportation list after being given a respite by the Obama administration.
The relief granted to the important Latino voting bloc by the former president in an election year (2012) was never designed to be long-lasting. It was largely a result of the immense pressure from immigrant activists who threatened to withhold their votes from the Democratic incumbent unless he put his mouth where his money was. So he picked up his pen and he did the right pragmatic thing.
But, neoliberal stickler for boot-strapperism that he was, Obama made sure that signing up for DACA wouldn't be a walk in the park for the young immigrants. They had to jump through quite a few hoops. First, they couldn't have irresponsibly been born either too soon or too late. Anybody younger than 15 and older than 31 was out of luck. This is because the recipients of his selective mercy had to be either prime fodder for military service or smart enough to be in school full-time or lucky enough to have a job. They also had to have the financial wherewithal to pay a hefty fee for their temporary amnesty. Applications would languish for at least three suspenseful months. And most important, they had to come out of the shadows and admit their illegal status to the government.
So now that Trump's merciless brutality has collided with Obama's brutal mercy, the former president has bravely taken to Facebook to type out his displeasure. It's cruel, he says, to punish these young people who were unwittingly brought to this country by their irresponsible parents (read: sneaky immigrants with heavy accents who have probably not "assimilated".) Nowhere in his maudlin message does Obama explore the reasons why the parents entered the country with their kids in the first place. But that's not his point. His point is dog-whistling the message that some unqualified people still have to be sent a message. Mercy does have its limits, after all.
And therein lies my problem with DACA. It separates "good" immigrants from "bad" immigrants, just as the "deserving" poor are artificially separated by policy-makers from the "undeserving" poor as an excuse to slash social programs. The liberal media's love affair with Dreamers, as they are dreamily known, helps paper over such horrendous realities as the private prisons where mother and child refugees from Central American government and gang violence are indefinitely detained pending court hearings on their refugee applications.
Rather than grant those detainees a reprieve, right before leaving office Obama made a prisoner exchange deal with the Australian prime minister, involving about more than a thousand Latino migrants currently being held in a US-controlled prison in Costa Rica, and and an equal number of Asian migrants, jailed on a couple of islands in the Pacific Ocean and in Papua New Guinea. These politicians were playing their own cruel game of international musical chairs with disposable human lives, forcing refugees to move even more many thousands of miles away from friends and relatives to gain their alleged freedom. "Transportation" of prisoners, as occurred in the bleak and brutal times of Charles Dickens, is alive and well.
The inmates of the Dickensian Berks County Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, remain incarcerated for months or even years, pending deportation back to their violence-ridden native countries. They're not included in the Australian/American human refuse swap, probably for fear of any more untoward publicity, such as that arising from the mothers' hunger strike last year. The strike ended only when ICE officials threatened to yank small children away from their desperate parents.
That episode in the annals of American mercy was largely ignored by media. Not so, however, was the story of Donald Trump's crude, rude, and dishonest attempt to renege on Obama's "dumb" deal with Australia - before he eventually went along with it. Or did he?
It seems that the globalized swap of human bodies is running into a roadblock. Trump officials who arrived on the Australian gulag at Nauru in July to "vet" refugees abruptly up and left after only three days of interviews. From Reuters:
To be fair to Obama, whose administration deported a record number of immigrants before the Latino voting population forced him to change course, he at least was seen as trying to expand DACA in 2015 in order to include the parents of Dreamers in the temporary amnesty scheme. But mercilessly brutal Texas officials sued and won, and the administration's subsequent appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court, resulted in a non-decision. And thus does the game of musical chairs with human lives continue unabated. The people in power are always loath to ever let any divide-and-conquer opportunity go to waste. The wielding of fear and resentment is their most valuable weapon.“The U.S. deal looks more and more doubtful,” Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said. “The U.S. deal was never the solution the Australian government pretended it to be.”Former U.S. President Barack Obama agreed a deal with Australia late last year to offer refuge to up to 1,250 asylum seekers, a deal the Trump administration said it would only honor to maintain a strong relationship with Australia and then only on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a center in Costa Rica, where the United States has taken in a larger number of people in recent years.The swap is designed, in part, to help Australia close both Manus and Nauru, which are expensive to run and have been widely criticized by the United Nations and others over treatment of detainees.
Sessions, for his own part, didn't waste the opportunity Tuesday to again spew the canard that "illegals" are invading our country to steal such wonderful jobs as picking fruit and washing dishes from "real" Americans. (No matter that the Dreamers are mostly educated and "assimilated" - for all intents and purposes, already naturalized citizens.)
As soon as Trump was elected on his anti-immigration platform, the American Civil Liberties Union began advising potential DACA applicants to think twice before signing up, and to also consult with an immigration attorney before doing so. Even under Obama, there were always risks to signing up as a Dreamer. An eventual rude awakening was a given.
But if, as some people hope and predict, the feckless Trump will never actually enforce his decision on DACA absent any congressional action (he will humanely "revisit" the issue in six months), the announcement still serves the purpose of absolutely terrorizing 800,000 potential deportees and their families. Thankfully, they learned how to organize a long time ago. They are visible, and therefore they will ultimately be victorious.
In all likelihood, his threat to the Dreamers is just the stick Trump needs to get Congress to appropriate billions of dollars for his never-ending Nightmare Wall.
***
Update: Due to the nature (downright nasty as in "deport yourself back to Mexico!" to "I'm a progressive, and certainly not a racist, but..." of comments submitted in the past 24 hours, I've had no choice but to shut down this function for this particular piece.
I've noticed that such websites as Truthout and Naked Capitalism have done away with reader comments on all their articles entirely in recent weeks. and I hope I'm not forced to do likewise. But it's getting uglier than usual out here in cyberspace. Hate speech is not the same thing as free speech. I don't have to tolerate it, and neither should anyone else.
