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Joe Biden also blasted President Trump over a new report that lawyers cannot find the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families under the Trump administration, saying, its criminal.By Versha Sharma

Published on 10/23/2020 at 1:17 AM

President Trump at the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Tennessee. (Getty Images)

President Trump at the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Tennessee. (Getty Images)

At the final presidential debate before voting concludes on November 3, President Trump deflected blame when pressed about his administration effectively orphaning 545 migrant children, falsely claiming they came to the U.S. with coyotes and cartels, and claimed only undocumented immigrants with the lowest IQ, they might come back to attend their immigration hearings.

Moderator Kristen Welker asked President Trump Thursday night about a disturbing report released Wednesday that said lawyers could not find the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mr. President, your administration separated children from their parents at the border, at least 4,000 kids. Youve since reversed your zero tolerance policy. But the United States cant locate the parents of more than 500 children. So how will these families ever be reunited? Welker asked.

Trump responded that the children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, during the debate, and immigrant rights groups on Twitter immediately fact-checked his claim.

Coyotes didn't bring them over. Their parents were with them, Biden said in his rebuttal. They got separated from their parents and it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.

Biden continued, regarding migrant parents: Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents. And those kids are alone. Nowhere to go, nowhere to go. It's criminal. It's criminal.

On the topic of immigration, Trump went on to make an appalling claim that only people with the lowest IQ might show up for their scheduled immigration court hearings.

He was talking about the catch and release policy, which allows undocumented migrants who are intercepted at the border to stay in the U.S. while they wait for hearings on their cases.

We have to send ICE out and Border Patrol out to find them. We would say come back in two years, three years, were going to give you a court case, you need Perry Masonwhen you say they come back, they dont come back, Joe. They never come back. Only the really.... Trump drew the last word out, before stopping himself and then saying, I hate to say this, but those with the lowest IQ, they might come back.

Biden was visibly dismayed by the comment, closing his eyes and shaking his head in response before Welker asked that they move on.

Trump claimed that less than 1% of immigrants in these cases show up for their court hearings, which is not true. A majority attend their hearings; Politifact says around 60-75% of non-detained migrants attend their immigration court proceedings.

Journalists and immigrant rights advocates on Twitter were quick to point out the appalling and blatant racism in Trumps claim:

Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to search for the parents of the separated children have yet to track down the parents of 545 children, and about "two-thirds of [them] are believed to be in their respective countries of origin, according to a court filing Tuesday by ACLU and Department of Justice officials.

Though Welker said Trump ended his zero tolerance policy, reporters have noted that family separation has continued in 2020, with the administration using the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover.

At the debate, Trump tried to pivot away from the story and kept accusing Biden of having a role in the Obama administration building the cages that Trump has used for family detention, in often miserable conditions. Obama administration officials have said in the past that they built detention centers in order to house an influx of migrants, including unaccompanied teenagersbut they did not use them to cage children forcibly separated from their parents by the U.S. government.

As NPR noted, theres one key difference between the two policies: the Obama administration detained apprehended immigrant children with their parents, while the Trump administration separated children from their parents, which is what Welker was asking about at the debate Thursday night.

Trump also tried to defend family separation and the detention of children by saying they were well taken care of in these facilities, though human rights organizations have published reports on the dismal conditions at many ICE detention centers.

Welker also pressed Biden on his time in the Obama administration and their record on immigration reform. Biden acknowledged, We made a mistake. It took too long to get it right.

He continued: Ill be president of the United States, not vice president of the United States. And the fact is, Ive made it very clear within 100 days, Im going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. All of those so-called DREAMers, those DACA kids, theyre going to be immediately certified again, to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.

In a contrast with Trumps frequent depiction of immigrants as rapists and criminals, Biden said, Many of them are model citizens. Over 20,000 of them are first responders out there taking care of people. During this crisis, we owe them. We owe them.

There was a record number of deportations under Obamaso much so that immigration reform advocates called him the deporter-in-chief. Many of those advocates praised Biden for owning up to the mistakes.

Read more:
Trump Claims Only Immigrants With The Lowest IQ Show Up For Court Hearings In Appalling Debate Rant - NowThis

The political debate over what U.S. policy should be on undocumented immigrants has been heated for decades. The temperature went down for a short period as there was some bipartisan discussion on comprehensive immigration reform, which may have included a path to citizenship.

But the Trump administration has focused on harsher actions on the undocumented, and thousands of DACA recipients remain in limbo despite a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Changing Hands Bookstore

Michelle Malonzo with the book "The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

As part of our Page Turners series on important books to read, The Show spoke with Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore about one she is passionate about. Its called "The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

The conversation began by talking about whether the authors own experience of having support and benefactors in her immigration process made her want to tell the stories of others who havent been as fortunate.

Go here to see the original:
Page Turner: 'The Undocumented Americans' - KJZZ

The fates of thousands of immigrants and refugees hinge on the presidential election, as President Donald Trump looks to continue his rollback of programs that admit or legally protect foreigners in America.

Joe Biden, in contrast, pledges to dramatically increase refugee resettlement and unwind Trump's efforts to end policies for immigrants to live and work lawfully in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and to end a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The Democratic nominee says he would end Trump's policies "to drastically restrict access to asylum in the U.S." and overturn the president's travel ban affecting Somalia and other Muslim-majority countries.

Khalid Omar lamented that his brother cannot immigrate from Kenya because he has a Somali passport.

"These are the kinds of issues that are very important to our community this year," said Omar, a senior organizer with Muslim Coalition of Faith in Minnesota. "We can change the outcomes if we all go out and claim our voices."

He spoke moments after he helped hang a sign that said, "We Make Minnesota Better off Together" by the Cedar Cultural Center, where faith and community leaders held an event this month to encourage voting.

In his appeals to Minnesotans, Trump has focused most prominently on refugees. The president said during a September rally in Bemidji that Biden planned "to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet. Your state will be overrun and destroyed."

Weeks later, Trump announced that he was limiting refugee arrivals over the next year to 15,000, the fewest in the program's 40-year history. He has steadily dropped the number since taking office, following a yearly average of 95,000 established by presidents of both parties.

Trump's campaign also began running an ad in Minnesota and elsewhere bashing Biden's plans amid a pandemic for "increasing refugees by 700% from the most unstable, vulnerable, dangerous parts of the world." Biden has pledged to raise the refugee admissions ceiling to 125,000 15,000 more than President Barack Obama had authorized before leaving office.

The president's approach has some support in Minnesota, where Beltrami County commissioners voted in January against allowing refugee resettlement. And in recent years, amid tensions between whites and Somali newcomers in St. Cloud, several political candidates called for a pause on refugee resettlement.

"My position consistently has been that the refugee resettlement program is broken and until it is fixed, we should not be bringing hundreds of thousands of refugees which the country is not prepared to assimilate," said John Palmer, who lost his bid for the St. Cloud City Council in 2018 with 43% of the vote.

Trump's election, he said, "gave us a breathing space." For nearly 20 years, he added, "no one of any political persuasion is taking time to put that program in order so that the refugees that need to be resettled in the U.S. will come to a setting in which we can do what we need to for them."

Advocates say the entire refugee program depends on the election.

"The contrast couldn't be starker and the stakes couldn't be higher," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee resettlement agency. "Four more years of a Trump administration would presumably be the death knell for the refugee program."

With Biden's plan to raise the ceiling, Vignarajah said, "we're talking about hundreds of thousands of lives the U.S. could be saving."

If Biden prevails in the election, resettlement agencies would need time to restore their capacities after several years of cutbacks and closures under Trump.

The bulk of the Somali diaspora settled in Minnesota in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Trump has repeatedly singled out people from Somalia in his criticism of refugees. During Trump's first three years in office, Minnesota took in just 541 Somali refugees. That compares to 3,499 during the previous three years under Obama. The state's largest refugee groups now are Congolese and Karen migrants from Myanmar.

"Every election year, there is a playbook used by some politicians," said Imam Hassan Jama, executive director of the Islamic Association of North America, during a recent gathering of faith leaders in Cedar-Riverside. "The playbook is to use Muslims, Somalis refugees and immigrants, as scapegoats in order to divide people by what they look like or where they came from instead of offering solutions that could help all of our families."

Daisy Kabaka, a member of the Minnesota Immigration Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), pointed out that the Trump administration has made it harder for new arrivals to win asylum cases and wants to charge them fees for applying, though many claiming persecution in their homelands arrived here with nothing. Kabaka noted that the administration also requires participants in the DACA program, which grants temporary protections for unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children, to renew their status for a year instead of two, while it reviews a Supreme Court ruling that found flaws in how the administration tried to end the program.

Kabaka questions whether immigrants will fare better under Biden, however. Kabaka said Obama enacted DACA in 2012 only after immigrants took initiative, including through hunger strikes, and that he was considered the "deporter in chief" because he sent more people back to their homelands than either the Trump or George W. Bush administrations.

"Just because there's a Democratic president in office, that doesn't necessarily make immigrants feel any better," Kabaka said.

After the Supreme Court ruling in June, Trump said he would try again to end DACA, and the administration has stopped accepting new applications. Biden said he'll make the program permanent on "day one" if elected.

Carolina Ortiz is a DACA recipient working to get out the vote this year, though she cannot vote herself. She's communications director of COPAL (Communities Organizing Latinx Power and Action), a Latino grassroots organization.

"I feel like I'm sleeping and breathing and everything, 'Vote, vote, vote,' but I feel like it is because I can't vote that I need to encourage people who can vote to be my voice and the voice of people like myself that have DACA," said Ortiz, a Mexican immigrant.

After months of phone banking in the Latino community, she said the organization has secured over 15,000 pledges to vote.

Those with Temporary Protected Status face uncertainty after the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently sided with the Trump administration decision to rescind rules allowing citizens of some countries facing natural disasters or armed conflict to live and work here legally. If that holds, TPS holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan would lose their legal status next year. TPS designations have been renewed under Republican and Democratic administrations alike for many years, but the Trump administration argues that the program was always temporary.

The Biden campaign has said he will protect TPS holders and offer them a path to citizenship through immigration reform measures.

Continue reading here:
Presidential election weighs heavily on Minnesota immigrants, 'dreamers' and refugees - Minneapolis Star Tribune

One administration built the cages. Another administration filled them. Who is actually to blame?

That question occupied President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden for a good portion of the time allotted to a discussion of immigration during Thursday's debate, the last of the 2020 campaign season. Trump blamed the Obama administration for "building cages to keep children in" and (technically correctly) argued that he had been falsely maligned for inventing inhumane immigration enforcement practices that he inherited from his predecessor. Biden, meanwhile, blamed Trump for ramping up the cruelty by separating families who crossed the border without authorizationa policy that has somewhat predictably resulted in the federal immigration bureaucracy losing track of the families of more than 500 migrant children.

Here's the thing: They're both right.

The Trump administration's family separation policy is a nightmare. More than 2,800 children have been taken away from their families since the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy was implemented, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Trump officials believed the policy would deter more families from trying to cross the border unlawfully.And that new policy was implemented by the order of Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, over the complaints and warnings of top immigration lawyers in the Justice Department. It is entirely fair to lay this whole mess at Trump's feet.

But those excesses were made possible because the Obama administration oversaw a huge escalation in federal immigration enforcement and deportations. Trump talks a tougher game on immigration, but Obama still holds the inglorious record for the most deportations in a single year. And, yes, Trump is correct that the detention facilities his administration has filled to the brim were built during the Obama administration, which also caged immigrant kidsalbeit under less common circumstancesthan the Trump administration has done.

The Trump administration's approach to immigration enforcement has been aggressive and deliberately punitive in a way that Obama's was not. Beyond the appalling family separation policy, Trump's sought to restrict both legal and illegal immigration in ways that no president in recent history has. He's shifted one of America's two major parties in a nationalist, xenophobic directionor perhaps he owes his success to the fact that it had already shifted that direction, but that's no betterand elevated people like Stephen Miller to places where they can set policy. That's all horrifically bad.

But he was only able to do most of that because previous presidential administrationsnot just Obama and Biden, but plenty of others before itbuilt a powerful leviathan dedicated to preventing the free movement of people.

During Thursday night's debate, Biden promised that he'd send Congress a major immigration reform that would include a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants within 100 days of taking office. But it's fair to ask, as Trump did several times, why that wasn't done already.

"He had eight years and he did nothing except build cages to keep children in," Trump said.

If Biden gets another shot at one of the top spots in the executive branch, maybe he'll take a lesson from all this. Before you start building cages, you should ask yourself how your political opponents might use them.

See the original post:
Trump and Biden Are Right: Both Parties Are To Blame for America's Inhumane, Broken Immigration System - Reason

Democratic U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider of Deerfield and Republican challenger Valerie Ramirez Mukherjee of Northbrook discussed immigration policies, racial issues and other topics Sunday in an online forum for 10th Congressional District voters.

Dubbed the North Shore Jewish Community Candidate Forum, the discussion was put together by Deerfield-based Congregation B'nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim.

In his opening remarks, Schneider touted his work for Jewish groups, talked of his experience on issues relating to Israel and pledged support -- as he's done in the past -- for a two-state solution to the strife between Israel and the Palestinian people.

Schneider, who is seeking a fourth term, also voiced support for more gun control laws, the need for financial relief for Americans during the COVID-19 crisis and the right of women to have abortions.

Ramirez Mukherjee, a first-time candidate, opened by noting she's a relatively new Illinoisan, having moved here only three years ago. She complained that no significant legislation has originated from Illinois -- even though several proposals put forth by Illinois lawmakers have become law -- and said she hopes she "can do my part to help."

When asked about racial injustice and anti-Semitism in the U.S., Schneider accused President Donald Trump of seeking to divide the country. Schneider said the U.S. must address the inequities experienced by certain communities, and he promoted his support of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to increase accountability for law enforcement misconduct and eliminate discriminatory policing practices.

The proposal passed the House in June and awaits action in the Senate.

In contrast, Ramirez Mukherjee expressed frustration with how Congress reacts to problems rather than being proactive. She urged Congress to be "more entrepreneurial" but didn't put forth any legislative proposals regarding discrimination.

Moving on, Schneider said the U.S. "desperately" needs comprehensive immigration reform, and he voiced support for a proposal that would defer deportation for some immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and let them work. It passed the House last year but wasn't debated in the Senate.

"We have to be the light to other nations," Schneider said. "We need to get this done."

Whereas Schneider supports creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living here illegally, Ramirez Mukherjee doesn't -- and she maintained that position Sunday.

Ramirez Mukherjee said Americans should open their arms to immigrants, "but we have to do it legally."

When asked about climate change, Ramirez Mukherjee said she favors incentivizing green behavior, such as the now-expired federal tax credits for buying electric cars.

Schneider said he led the effort to condemn Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and said the U.S. should rejoin that plan.

Through wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and crop damage, climate change is affecting every American in one way or another, "and we need to address it now," Schneider said.

A recording of the debate can be viewed at facebook.com/BJBECommunity/live/.

The candidates for the neighboring 9th Congressional District seat -- Democratic U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston and Republican challenger Sargis Sangari of Skokie -- debated first and are included in the video.

The two districts include different parts of the North and Northwest suburbs.

Continued here:
Schneider, Ramirez Mukherjee debate immigration policies, racial issues and more in forum - Chicago Daily Herald