Trump administration brings new policies, activists and immigrants’ rights groups speak out

Friday marked the inauguration of President Donald Trump as the U.S.’s 45th commander in chief. Last fall’s election of a Republican-majority Congress in conjunction with Trump’s own Republican administration heralds a shift in official policy on some of the most oft-debated topics in American politics, including foreign policy, gun control, abortion and immigration.

President Trump’s stance and proposed policies on immigration have been widely publicized by the media for over a year and currently he has a 10-point plan for his administration.

According to the official policy listed on his website, his primary concern is to build a physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico, paid for by Mexico, beginning on “day one.” He also wants to focus on deporting all undocumented immigrants with a criminal record.

Other initiatives on his 10-point plan include ending sanctuary cities, tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, ending former President Obama’s executive amnesties and suspending visas from countries for which the U.S. does not have sufficient screening.

Juan Escalante, an immigrant from Venezuela, is the digital campaigns manager for America’s Voice, an organization aiming to enact immigration policy change.

“[Trump] ran his campaign on the basis of demeaning immigrants like myself, and what’s really at stake here is the safety and security of immigrants all across the country,” Escalante said.

“His promise of mass deportation and his rhetoric sparks fear and anxiety amongst millions of individuals across this country who are hardworking, law-abiding Americans. A lot of the plans Trump is proposing are not only unworkable but costly for taxpayers and people who want to see this country improving, and the only way to do that is to make sure that immigrants remain in this country—remain with their families—and to not criminalize them.”

Escalante entered the country when he was a teenager and is one of the over 800,000 estimated people in the country whose rights are maintained under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) act, a policy implemented by the Obama administration in 2012. DACA is intended to protect immigrants who entered the country as minors under the recognition that they grew up predominantly in America.

The program, which grants childhood arrivals renewable rights such as work eligibility and deferred action from deportation, is acknowledged by immigration reform advocates as Obama’s principal immigration policy achievement.

Cathleen Farrell, an immigrant from Canada, is the chief media executive at the National Immigration Forum, a center for social justice that backs immigrants’ rights.

“These young people have no recollection of another country. This is their country: they went to school here, they’re involved in the community here and they’re making valuable contributions,” Farrell said. “[DACA] is a way to protect these people and to give them the ability to study and work here legally.”

The DACA act now faces the threat of revocation under the Trump administration.

“The repeal of the DACA program could have a negative impact on hundreds and thousands of lives, and could also impact our economy negatively,” Escalante said. “DACA should be kept in place. It has benefited countless people across this country.”

Franco Vidal, 18, is an undocumented immigrant student who attends California State University and is part of the DACA program. The Winged Post interviewed him last April when he was a senior at John W. North High School in Riverside.

“I was the first of my family of four to move a step further towards citizenship, and my father was proud of me, my mother was proud of me [and] everyone in my family who’s known me and even people who heard my name were proud of the accomplishments I’ve done,” he said. “This was a huge stepping stone to me and reminder that I can’t just quit … I’ve made it this far; I can’t quit now.”

Yet, the DACA act protects only a part of the undocumented immigrant population. From 2009 to 2015, over 2.5 million people were removed from the country.

In response, attempts at reform in recent years have revolved around the rights of all those entering the country, including undocumented adults who leave their home country due to conditions like violence or food shortages.

“My parents had the hindsight to see what was happening to their country—a country that currently doesn’t have enough power to serve its hospitals, a country that is home to one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a country where shortages of food were common and basic goods are a rarity,” Escalante said. “That is the kind of reality that a lot of people don’t conceptualize when they think of immigrants: that they’re fleeing from conditions and they’re willing to come here and work hard and do right by this country in exchange for an opportunity.”

Many seeking these opportunities find work in America, resulting in immigrants, both documented and undocumented, constituting a significant portion of the labor force.

According the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, immigrants, including American citizens, other documented immigrants and undocumented immigrants, comprised 16.7 percent of the U.S labor force in 2016. According to the Pew Research Center, undocumented immigrants made up five percent of the U.S. labor force in 2014.

Various pro-immigration organizations have focused on immigrants’ contributions in their advocacy, aiming to promote their value to the country in order to achieve reform.

“Even though a lot of [immigrants] might not have papers, they bring skills and talent and life experiences,” Farrell said. “Unemployment rates amongst immigrants are typically much much lower than the general population because immigrants come to work, and the only way you can survive as an immigrant is by working.”

According to the Bureau of Labor, the unemployment rate among all U.S. immigrants in 2015 was 4.9 percent, whereas the national unemployment rate averaged 5.3 percent.

While organizations such as the National Immigration Forum support the rights of all people entering the U.S., others take a more conservative approach.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a District of Columbia-based think tank and research center that promotes tighter immigration enforcement and border control, is on the forefront of the movement against immigration reform and aligns itself with several of Trump’s presented policies on the subject.

“Restoring immigration enforcement will be one step towards fixing the trust gap between the public and all of our institutions, and it will also contribute to a tightening labor market,” Center for Immigration Studies veteran director Mark Krikorian said. “What Trump is proposing is a return to standard immigration enforcement practices so that [undocumented immigrants] who come into contact with law enforcement are, indeed, deported.”