Agence Global

Trumpism Is Killing Dreamers' Dreams

“Texas is the national testing ground for bad public policy,” the journalist Molly Ivins used to say.

It was a Texas attorney general, Gregg Abbott, who sued in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, challenging Barack Obama’s 2014 executive memorandum that attempted to provide temporary legal status for undocumented parents of children born in the United States. Twenty-five other Republican state attorneys general joined Abbott in the lawsuit.

Abbott, currently in the media spotlight because floodwaters created by Hurricane Harvey have inundated much of the city of Houston, used to brag that his job entailed “going to the office in the morning, suing the federal government, and going home in the afternoon.” He prevailed in Brownsville, blocking the implementation of Obama’s program, thus denying legal status to some 4 million undocumented residents of the United States. Their children might be citizens, or legal residents, but Abbott’s lawsuit ensured that they continue to live in the shadows.

Since filing suit against the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program (DAPA), Abbott was elected governor, and has moved further to the right, out of both conviction and a legitimate concern that his lieutenant governor, an evangelical extremist not unlike Vice President Mike Pence, will challenge him in a primary.

Abbott’s successor in the elected AG’s office is Ken Paxton, perhaps as extreme as Abbott, if not as bright and articulate, and currently under indictment for securities fraud.

In the footsteps of Abbott, Paxton is now leading a group of Republican state attorneys general in a lawsuit in the same Brownsville federal court, this time attempting to overturn a widely popular Obama executive action that currently defers the deportation of 886,814 young, undocumented residents, allowing them to obtain work permits and driver’s licenses, after paying a $495 fee and passing a background check.

It’s an odd designation, applicants are not granted “legal residence” per se, but rather allowed certain privileges while their deportation is deferred for two years, after which they can reapply to renew their Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. DACA status provides no path to citizenship, nor can people granted DACA status receive any federal financial benefits, such as Social Security, college financial aid, or food stamps.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an implacable opponent of immigration reform while he was in the Senate, appears to be at least supportive of Paxton’s lawsuit, telling “Fox and Friends” hosts: “I like that our states and localities are holding the federal government to account, expecting us to do what’s our responsibility to the state and locals, and that’s to enforce the law.”

Easy to confuse, two similar acronyms for two Obama programs for undocumented immigrants, DACA for children; and DAPA, which has been suspended while tied up in court, for parents. At least it was suspended until Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly rescinded it in mid-June, months before becoming Trump’s Chief of Staff.

For Paxton, rescinding DAPA, which was never implemented because it was tied up in court, wasn’t enough. On June 27, Paxton wrote to Sessions, demanding that he also order the Secretary of Homeland Security to end DACA.

Paxton warned Sessions that if the administration fails to issue a memorandum rescinding DACA by September 5, he will amend the lawsuit that successfully blocked DAPA and ask the same federal court to kill DACA.

Kill is not a legal term, but Paxton writes that unless the Trump administration rescinds Obama’s DACA order, he will ask the court for a ruling that lets the program die: “We respectfully ask the Secretary of Homeland Security to phase out the DACA program.…Specifically…not renew or issue any new DACA or Expanded DACA permits in the future.” If that request is not met, Paxton will go to court.

The suit Paxton intends to amend is sitting in the courtroom of Judge Andrew S. Hanen, whose animus toward undocumented immigrants is of record. As we reported in February 2015, Hanen was the author of a 2015 legal opinion in which he ruled on the enforcement authority of a federal agency, then went on to write 50 superfluous pages of dicta critical of the nation’s undocumented population.

A few examples:

“In 1992, the Attorney General estimated that the country’s immigrant population was as low as three million individuals. Today, California alone is said to have at least that many illegal aliens residing within its borders.”

“Evidence shows that Texas spends $9,473 to educate each illegal alien child … Texas also complains of the millions of dollars it must spend each year in providing uncompensated health care for these increasing numbers of undocumented workers.”

“This influx, for example, is causing the States to experience severe law enforcement problems … And in [Arizona’s] most populous county, these aliens are responsible for disproportionate share of serious crime.”

There is more in the public record that illustrates Hanen’s anti-immigrant bias.

Abbott was aware of Hanen’s hostile disposition toward undocumented immigrants when he carefully steered his 2015 DAPA lawsuit into his Brownsville courtroom. Now, Paxton will be trying his DACA case on the same playing field.

If Paxton goes ahead with the lawsuit, it will be left to Jeff Sessions to put together a defense for the 886,814 Dreamers whose temporary legal status Paxton is determined to end. After all, Paxton and his fellow attorneys general are suing Sessions’ client: the federal government.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to rescind DACA, but he has been ambivalent since taking office, suggesting that children shouldn’t be held responsible for their parents’ decision to bring them into the country.

But all this might be beyond Trump’s control, unless he requests Sessions to make the DACA suit go away, as he requested him to stop the criminal prosecution of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He failed with Arpaio and had to resort to a pardon. And his odds were better in Arizona, where the federal government was the prosecution in a criminal case, than in Texas, where it is a defendant in a civil action.

Beyond Hanen’s courtroom is the extremely conservative Fifth Circuit, never a friendly forum for undocumented residents of the country, and a conservative Supreme Court likely to be hostile to Obama-era executive orders and undocumented residents in general.

Perhaps this ends up a win-win proposition for Trump. He directs his Secretary of Homeland Security to kill the program. Or Paxton and his cohorts kill it in a Texas courtroom. Either way, a campaign promise is fulfilled. And a decision that at the moment appears inevitable forces almost 900,000 Dreamers back to a life in the shadows.

It all began in a courtroom in Texas.
 

Persistent Roots of Arab Weakness and Relinquished Sovereignty

We are well into the start of the sixth year since uprisings and revolutions rocked parts of the Arab world in January-February 2011, and the balance sheet of achievements is very mixed, and mostly disappointing, beyond Tunisia’s fragile move into the world of constitutional, pluralistic democracies. The two most troubling aspects of what is going on in the other five countries that erupted into major street demonstrations and regime counter-attacks are the lack of any clear national consensus on how to govern the country, and the deep, militaristic interventions by foreign countries, including Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, American and other powers.

Along with the five Arab uprisings countries of Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain, we should also add Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq to complete the list of eight Arab states that now face serious domestic challenges across every major dimension of life: political policies consensus, constitutional governance, economic growth, peaceful and tolerant pluralism, environmental viability, basic security, and — most importantly — genuine sovereignty that allows the citizens of a country to manage their own affairs without external interference.

The easy and simplistic analysis one encounters across the world, especially in the United States, is that Arab lands are hopelessly caught in their own self-made sectarian wars waged by ethnic, national and religious communities that are unable to live together peacefully. This strikes me as exaggerated, and insufficient to explain the profound problems these countries have faced for decades in every aspect of life, such as education quality, environmental ravages, economic mismanagement, corruption, crony capitalism, rule by security forces, widening disparities and inequalities, and a proclivity to allow foreign powers to manipulate us. These problems ravaged our societies well before any serious sectarian clashes occurred, so we should seek an explanation for our troubled condition much further back in our history.

In almost all Arab countries that suffer serious internal conflicts, political violence, and ideological, ethnic, sectarian or socio-economic stresses that have come to the fore in recent decades primarily, their common basic weakness is that they never credibly found a way to achieve an agreed, organic relationship between the rulers and the ruled. The exercise of power and public authority have always been defined by small groups of men — usually anchored in military establishments — who seized and sat in the seats of power. The exercise of responsible citizenship, in terms of duties performed and services enjoyed, has never been fully clear to the citizens or the rulers. The result has been either harsh authoritarian rule deeply backed by foreign powers or national fragmentation and bouts of chaos, incivility, civil wars, state collapse, and large demographic shifts, like internal displacement, ethnic cleansing, forced exile, or emigration at any cost.

So we see today in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Iraq very unsettled conditions that include active warfare, control by external powers, or political authoritarianism that only exacerbates weak citizen-state links and further erodes the socio-economic foundations of the state. Remarkably, some countries like Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Yemen still engage in some sort of formal political process that seeks to create and ultimately validate a national governance system that is acceptable to all the key domestic and foreign parties.

That is by nature a very difficult task when external powers are directly involved in local decision-making, as is the case in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen. The task is made easier if the external parties (like the United States and Russia, or Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia) should agree on the main issues in play, but this rarely happens. This is made all the more difficult today when we see both regional powers and global ones involved in these countries at the same time.

The sad reality for the moment, at least, is that most of these Arab countries have not only lost their relative stability and calm, they have also forfeited most of their sovereignty to external regional and global powers, or to strong internal forces that share and contest power with the government (like Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, Muqtada Sadr’s movement in Iraq, and others).

This troubled common condition across most of the Arab world reflects issues that go far beyond neat but simplistic sectarian rivalries. Instead it is anchored in the Arab states’ failures in three critical and continuing realms: their refusal to allow their own citizens to define national policies, values, and priorities and validate statehood itself; their incompetent inability to manage their national human and mineral wealth in a manner that would achieve sustained wealth, social equity, and national viability; and, due to the structural weaknesses generated by the above two factors, their willingness to allow foreign powers to come to their rescue and thus to dilute or effectively eliminate their sovereignty.

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Trumpism Is Killing Dreamers' Dreams

Persistent Roots of Arab Weakness and Relinquished Sovereignty

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