Papers, Please!
The Jeff Session’s war on immigrants, illegal or legal, seems to ramping up, making the fears of a national deportation force an actual reality. That effort unsurprisingly also abets Republican efforts at widespread voter suppression.
In south Texas, Americans with valid US birth certificates are being denied passports because of a vague suspicion that those certificates were fraudulent. Some of those denied passports were also detained by ICE and/or deported. Others have had their passports revoked while they have been out of the country, essentially leaving them stranded and stateless.
While there were certainly fraudulent birth certificates produced along the Mexican border in the 1940s and 1950s, the limited attempts by both the Bush and Obama administrations to address this issue ended after 2009 litigation by the ACLU, but has now been surging under Trump and Sessions.
In cases where the birth certificates are rejected as valid paperwork, the government requested obscure details that would be almost impossible for some applicants to produce such as baptismal certificates or bills for the mother’s prenatal care. Even in the cases where those are produced, the State Department has often still refused to issue a passport.
Reporting seems to indicate that other US citizens who live nowhere near the Mexican border are similarly being denied passports. Again, the important point here is that these are currently valid US citizens who are presumably subject to their due process rights under the Constitution. While there is no right to receive a passport, being detained or deported or refused entry to the country without the government having anything but circumstantial evidence that the passport my be fraudulently obtained and without a hearing is a violation of their rights.
Yesterday, DHS announced that it was crafting a regulation that would clearly violate the existing Flores agreement that covers how unaccompanied and accompanied immigrant children must be treated, requiring those children to be released from DHS detention within 20 days. The Trump administration used that agreement as an excuse to essentially kidnap immigrant children, some less than a year old, and send them to facilities where they were attacked or abused until a federal judge ordered that practice to stop and the children be reunited with their parents. There are still hundreds of children still waiting for that to happen now well over a month after the court imposed deadline for reunification has passed.
The new regulation would allow the government to detain those children indefinitely, a sort of “Gitmo for children”, as Chris Hayes describes it. In addition, DHS intends to relax the regulation of the detention facilities which have already been shown to be rife with neglect and abuse. Lastly, the extra legal protections unaccompanied minors currently receive would expire when they turn 18 or are placed with a relative or guardian.
Yesterday we also learned that, based on a request from ICE, federal prosecutors have asked for the voter records for the last decade in 44 counties of North Carolina. Prosecutors wanted those records produced in the next 30 days but moved back that deadline until well after the midterm elections after complaints that the request would actually interfere with the election boards ability to handle those elections. The reasons for this request are currently unclear but the fact that the original request came from ICE may indicate preparation for some kind of mass round-up. Another possibility is that this is related to another administration push regarding the non-problem of voter fraud, an effort that fell apart along with the Kris Kobach electoral fraud commission, which itself was a fraud.
It’s no coincidence that the two announcements yesterday came immediately after Trump’s fall in the polls and the double-whammy of Woodward book and the anonymous op-ed in the Times. Trump will always revert to immigrant bashing in order to shore up his base and Sessions is always happy to oblige him. It’s also no coincidence that these actions are designed to target voters in Texas and North Carolina, states which have specialized in voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics for years.
Hispanic voter turnout in Texas has traditionally lagged their white and black counterparts and turnout in the Rio Grande Valley has regularly disappointed. At least part of that is driven by the fear that even eligible Hispanic voters have for registering in any way with the government if they have undocumented immigrant family members living with them. These actions will only enhance that fear as we approach a tighter than expected election between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz that could determine the control of the Senate.
The attacks on immigrants are heinous in their own right but they are also just another weapon in the GOP’s arsenal of voter suppression. And if the crackdown on immigrants “accidentally” manages to ensnare actual American citizens, especially minorities, then all the better.
