- President Trump has renewed his wildly racist attacks on Black immigrant populations, this time targeting Minnesota’s Somali population. This latest string of attacks are reminiscent of his attacks on Haitian immigrants in Ohio during the campaign and are similarly based on unfounded accusations in right-wing media. This time, instead of eating dogs, the community is being accused of diverting tax-payer dollars to terrorist organizations. Following these media reports, the president used Tuesday’s televised cabinet meeting to say that, “[Somalis] contribute nothing. I don’t want them in the country, I’ll be honest with you….we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” 58% of Minnesota’s Somali population were born in the US, and 87% of those who have immigrated have naturalized.
- The administration is using the tragic shooting of two National Guard members last week as an excuse to further remake our nation in their image. The most immediate consequences was the immediate suspension of asylum application processing by USCIS (applications pending in immigration court are unaffected for the time being). The administration then suspending processing all immigration applications for nations of 19 countries that they consider to be “high-risk” and threatened to expand that list to 30 nations. The administration also directed USCIS to review all applications for immigration benefits from nationals of those 19 countries if they had been approved since the start of the Biden Administration.
- These changes are in addition to the proposed rule on Public Charge that would place significant obstacles on the path to a green card. The Protecting Immigrant Families coalition, which was formed when the first Trump Administration tried to make significant changes to Public Charge, has quickly responded with a number of ways for individuals and organizations to respond to this attack, including a sign-on comments and templates for service providers and for sector specific organizations. MIRA will also be doing our own public comment and will share around for MA organizations to sign-on. If your organization has any stories or data points that you would like to see included in our comment, we invite them to share them here.
- Media revealed this week that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is creating a database of any non-citizens employed by or associated with the department and will be sharing that information with other government agencies. The VA confirmed that they will share this information for the purposes of immigration enforcement. The stated purpose is to vet the department’s workforce for “personnel suitability and national security standards.” Thousands of medical workers and veterans could be harmed by this move, including many who had legal status through TPS or parole until the administration stripped it away.
- Senator Richard Durbin (IL) is reintroducing the DREAM Act on Dec 4. The DREAM Act has been around in many forms since it was first pushed as a bipartisan bill in 2001; Republican Orrin Hatch from Utah was the first to introduce a version called the “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act” or “DREAM Act” in August of that year. Beginning in 2007, Senator Durbin has been one of the leading proponents of the bill and has introduced versions of the legislation every session since 2007. Although we have not yet seen specific language of the current bill, we expect it to follow the broad outlines of previous versions that provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived as youth and reached a certain level of education or have served in the US military.
- On the other end of the spectrum, Senator Bernie Moreno (OH) has introduced a bill to eliminate dual citizenship. Under the bill, anyone applying for naturalization would be required to relinquish citizenship to any other nation. Individuals who already have dual citizenship would have a year to renounce their foreign citizenship or else lose their US citizenship. Such a law, if passed, would be in direct conflict with Supreme Court rulings which have established a constitutional right to dual citizenship and that US citizenship cannot be forcibly taken away from someone.