What is happening with immigration?
We have a new issue page up today, looking at the multi-pronged assault on both immigrants to the United States and the immigration system itself. The specific attacks we’re seeing include:
- Stripping lawful immigration status from people who had humanitarian protections, work permits, and even green cards in some cases, thus making hundreds of thousands of immigrants newly “illegal.”
- Dramatically escalating all aspects of immigration enforcement by conducting sweeps targeting Black and brown communities, militarizing and federalizing state and local law enforcement, reclassifying members of foreign-origin gangs as deportable “terrorists,” refusing to release arrestees on bond, and in all ways denying due process to arrested and detained immigrants.
- Undermining the integrity of the immigration system by firing immigration judges, demanding faster case processing, limiting access to hearings, and refusing legally mandatory oversight of detention centers.
- Attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born to immigrant parents in the United States, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.
These are not the only attacks underway. Our timeline is best understood as representative rather than comprehensive. We’re building an explainer to go with this timeline, and we’ll also be publishing a separate page on the exploitation of the immigration system for repression and persecution of ideological and political targets.
If you want to help build out this explainer (and others), here’s how to join us.
Taking a break
Next week, the Unbreaking team is taking a much needed break. One of our core principles with this project is to do the hard work of documenting the harm without expanding that harm to ourselves. That means doing what we can each week and no more, and making sure to build in time for rest and recovery. We’ll be back with regular updates after Labor Day.