Legal Immigration Pathways Are Disappearing

Often, public debate on the topic of immigration reverts back to a discussion of “doing things the right way.” As a litigator, I have sued every President since George W. Bush for failing to do things the right way. During President Donald Trump’s first term, I successfully challenged his attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. However, I’ve never seen a disregard for the rule of law comparable to the one on display today.

Trump has long claimed that his immigration crackdown is focused on undocumented migrants—those who, the his eyes, did not come to this country “the right way.” But in practice, the Trump Administration is shutting the doors to the few lawful pathways that do exist for migrants at lightning speed. As a result, we could be left with a system that is even more dysfunctional and cruel than it is today and in which there is no “right way” to come to the United States.

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First, let’s consider one population the Trump administration is calling “criminal migrants:” people who are applying for legal status—a process that almost always takes several years, if not decades, to complete.

These are people who have lived in the United States, and who have been in the process of earnestly applying for legal status for years. To do so, these individuals must show up to their ICE check-ins, pay hefty fees for attorneys and applications, and wait endlessly for the day they can finally find peace in the place they call home.

They are also asylum seekers following legal processes and awaiting their day in court to prove in painstaking detail that they are fleeing based on a “credible fear.” Many asylum seekers are forced to wait years on end in dangerous conditions on the other side of the border until their case is heard.

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The Trump Administration is also making moves against people who secured legal documentation against tremendous odds while, you guessed it, also falsely referring to them as “criminal migrants.”

This includes hundreds of thousands of people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a legal protection that is designated for people from specific countries facing significant violence or instability. This also includes more than a million participants of several humanitarian parole processes, providing a lawful pathway for people from select countries if they are able to find a U.S. sponsor or meet other criteria. {snip}

These attacks impact tax-paying immigrants—folks who have long paid into a system whose benefits they cannot access—who have long been demonized for false claims that “immigrants don’t pay taxes.” With lightning speed, our President went from parroting that myth to using immigrants’ IRS records to target them for deportation. This bait and switch is abhorrent, and it is causing immeasurable heartbreak and chaos in families, classrooms, workplaces, and neighborhoods in every corner of the country.