Trump Loves The Troops, Gonna Deport The Troops' Families
The Trump administration is quietly eliminating a Pentagon program that protected undocumented families of active duty military members from deportation, NPR reports today. Immigration attorneys have been rushing to complete applications for the program, called "parole in place," because family members of deployed servicemembers have been informed it's about to be "terminated."
The lawyers have been told that in the future, the "parole in place" requests will only be allowed under rare circumstances, which we can only assume translates to never, because we've been paying attention.
Here's the NPR radio piece by NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, if you prefer audio over readio:
NPR was unable to get any comment from the Defense Department or the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, because since when does the prying media deserve any information at all? But immigration attorney Margaret Stock, who represents veterans and military members with deportation cases, says it's bad news for The Troops:
It's going to create chaos in the military [...] The troops can't concentrate on their military jobs when they're worried about their family members being deported.
Stock is the retired Army officer who helped blow the whistle on an earlier Trump administration effort to fuck over legal immigrants who signed up for the military to provide needed skills, like translation or doctoring, in exchange for becoming citizens. Instead, once Trump became president, the background checks were slowed down. Many recruits were discharged -- after all, they knew "foreign persons" like their own families -- and their chance at citizenship revoked. Just for laughs, since many of them were on time-limited visas when they joined up, those visas had expired by the time they were discharged, making them ILLEGALS subject to deportation. America!
The "parole in place" program is a "discretionary option" put in place specifically to help military family members who entered the country without papers and can't find any other way to get legal status (it isn't available, for instance, to a family member who overstays a visa). Obviously, that's the sort of thing Trumpers naturally found abhorrent, because no one gets a break, not even parents or spouses or other family members of those who Keep Us Free. What part of ILLEGAL don't these active-duty defenders of America understand? If you really loved America, you wouldn't love your ILLEGAL spouse or your parents, duh.
Ordoñez explainers the details:
Parole in place enables a soldier serving in Afghanistan, for instance, not to worry that a spouse at home who entered the U.S. illegally might be thrown out of the country while the soldier is deployed.
The spouse has the ability to receive "parole" within the U.S. and apply for a green card — unlike someone without that privilege who might be deported and required to wait for years to apply.
It wasn't immediately clear how many people are using this now or have in the past.
No matter how limited the program might be, its elimination is exactly the sort of thing Trump's immigration Obersturmbannführer Stephen Miller would push -- as we've noted before, his entire goal in life is to comb through any immigration rule ever and eliminate as many options for both legal and illegal immigrants to stay in the USA, because that's how the government is supposed to work. We should add the NPR piece doesn't mention Miller at all, but this has his foul stench all over it.
So now it's time for families to hope they get in under the wire, if they can at all:
One government lawyer is urging immigration lawyers to act quickly before the program is officially terminated next month.
"I would advise clients that if they are eligible for [parole in place] to submit it ASAP," a government lawyer warned other attorneys in a message obtained by NPR, adding later: "Wish there was better news to share. Big take-away is that no group is 'safe' any longer."
And we're proud to be an American, where at least we know a lot of those people never will become Americans, hooray! Are we great again?
[NPR]
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Doktor Zoom's real name is Marty Kelley, and he lives in the wilds of Boise, Idaho. He is not a medical doctor, but does have a real PhD in Rhetoric. You should definitely donate some money to this little mommyblog where he has finally found acceptance and cat pictures. He is on maternity leave until 2033. Here is his Twitter, also. His quest to avoid prolixity is not going so great.
