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Workers Vanguard No. 1118 |
22 September 2017
The closing date for news in this issue is 19 September.
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Trump Kills DACA, Democrats Push Border Security No Deportations! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! The lives of some 800,000 younger immigrants, their families and communities were thrown into chaos earlier this month when the Trump administration pulled the plug on the Obama-initiated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The repeal of DACA, which granted a temporary reprieve to a small layer of undocumented immigrants brought into this country as children, puts “Dreamers” at the mercy of immigration authorities and threatens their livelihoods and those of the extended families they financially support. Wasting no time, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo encouraging DACA recipients to pack their bags and leave by next March, when DACA permits begin to expire. Already, there are reports of detentions at the border and racist attacks on DACA students in colleges.
By launching this latest anti-immigrant attack, which has sparked protests nationwide, Trump was playing to his nativist base. Coming on top of the recent presidential pardon of arch-racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the decision by the Supreme Court to temporarily allow partial enforcement of the anti-Muslim travel ban, the demise of DACA has the forces of reaction riding high. In their crosshairs are not only immigrants and Muslims but black people and the working class as a whole. The same racist invective that emboldens the border vigilantes and immigrant-bashers emboldens fascist killers like those who mobilized in Charlottesville in defense of the former slavocracy.
The move to scrap DACA predictably afforded Democratic Party politicians a cheap opportunity for some theatrical grandstanding. First and foremost among them was Barack Obama, who pronounced Trump “cruel” for rescinding the 2012 executive order that established DACA. The previous president certainly knows a thing or two about cruelty. Among his many crimes as CEO of American capitalism, Obama deported more people than any previous president in U.S. history. In fact, despite a spike in arrests, the rate of deportations under Trump to date does not match even Obama’s slowest year. (read on)
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