Sunday, May 07, 2017

Immigrant rights leaders: 'A big part' of Trump's 'strategy is to instill fear'

Rss@dailykos.com (gabe Ortiz) · Wednesday, May 03, 2017, 9:57 pm

Donald Trump has thankfully been dealt setback after setback when it comes to his failed Muslim bans, border wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for, and ongoing failure to repeal the popular Affordable Care Act, all thanks to people power and the courts. But as the Washington Post notes, “one strategy that seems to be working well is fear,” particularly when it comes to immigration. Fear has been a feature—not a bug—of this administration:

“The bottom line is that they have entirely changed the narrative around immigration,” said Doris Meissner, who served as the commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration. “The result of that is that, yes, you can call it words and rhetoric, and it certainly is, but it is changing behavior. It is changing the way the United States is viewed around the world, as well as the way we’re talking about and reacting to immigration within the country.”

According to the Washington Post, “the number of apprehensions made by Customs and Border Patrol agents plummeted from more than 40,000 per month at the end of 2016 to just 12,193 in March.” For the most part, that’s actually attributed to the previous administration—“the federal government already spends more on immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement efforts combined,” with the undocumented immigrant population staying stable for nearly a decade now —but there’s no doubt that Trump’s racist, hateful rhetoric and unshackled deportation force are also having an effect.

Source
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/QuKyNeYt8No/-Immigrant-rights-leaders-A-big-part-of-Trump-s-strategy-is-to-instill-fear

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