The Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project stands in strong opposition to the numerous anti-immigrant actions taken by President Trump this week, including a flurry of executive orders attacking immigrants at the border and in our communities.
Through these orders, the Trump administration is employing demonizing invasion rhetoric to justify using military resources to carry out immigrant enforcement and to position people seeking protection as enemies of the United States while simultaneously criminalizing immigrants who are already in the country.
“These orders are already sowing fear and confusion at our borders and across the country,” said Laura St. John, Florence Project Legal Director. “Taken together, the executive orders issued effectively end access to asylum in the United States, expand immigration detention and interior removal operations, and take aim at the very core of our national identity. They entirely block access to asylum at the border, seek to eliminate status for people who came through legal pathways, and go to unprecedented extremes to detain and deport immigrants who are already in the United States. Essentially, the new administration is trying to make it impossible for people to seek protection in the United States while simultaneously criminalizing and demonizing immigrants who are already in the country. This is an all-out assault on immigrants in our country and at our borders.”
None of these actions offer meaningful solutions to the challenges at our southern border or address the backlogs in our immigration courts. Instead, they double down on policies of detention and deterrence, cruel strategies that have failed time and again through multiple presidential administrations and that tear apart families and our communities.
Asylum access: The executive orders effectively end any access to asylum at the southern border by halting the use of the CBPOne app and cancelling all scheduled appointments, declaring a wholesale border closure, and laying the path to resume the Remain in Mexico program.
Interior Deportation Operations: The administration moved forward plans for massive interior detention and deportation efforts in multiple ways, including by expanding expedited removal, which allows immigration officials to summarily deport people without their case ever being presented to a judge, to apply to people throughout the U.S. and not just in the border region; allowing ICE to make arrests at “sensitive locations” including schools, hospitals, and places of worship; authorizing the use of military resources for deportation operations; and authorizing the punishment of sanctuary jurisdictions by withholding federal funding for any jurisdictions in which local law enforcement doesn’t cooperate with federal deportation operations. In an unprecedented move, the Acting DHS Secretary also issued a directive allegedly authorizing certain federal law enforcement agencies under the Department of Justice, including the U.S. Marshals, Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Prisons, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to investigate and enforce immigration law.
Expanded Detention: The administration has directed the Department of Homeland Security to take all possible steps to expand the already massive immigration detention system and detain as many immigrants as possible, including detaining asylum seekers instead of granting them parole and allowing them to fight their immigration cases outside of detention. Detention is traumatizing, punitive, and the extremely limited access to counsel in immigration jails makes it more difficult for immigrants to meaningful participate in their legal cases. Moreover, ICE has a long history of subjecting people to inhumane detention conditions and denying people in their custody medical care, a pattern that is likely to expand under these orders, particular for the most vulnerable after this week’s executive orders rejecting gender affirming care and safe custody for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. Additionally, the slew of interior enforcement actions authorized by President Trump, as well as the passage of the Laken Riley Act, will lead to the detention of many more people, subjecting thousands more to dangerous detention conditions.
Access to counsel: The administration issued a stop work order for many legal services contracts, including our Legal Orientation Programs (LOP), threatening legal services for people in immigration detention. Because there is no right to a public defender in deportation cases, most people in immigration detention go through the entirety of their immigration case without a lawyer to help them, representing themselves. The LOP offers basic education and information to people who are otherwise trapped navigating a notoriously complex legal system, but by issuing this stop work order this administration is seeking to remove even this modest, but critical protection of peoples’ rights.
Still, in the face of these varied attacks, we are steadfast in our commitment to safeguarding immigrants’ rights and protecting access to asylum in the United States, and we are ready to stand with people facing deportation here in Arizona and with people seeking protection at the southern border, as we have for the past 35 years.