The Machinations of Empire: TPS, DACA and the Salvadorans Who Will Soon Be at Risk of Deportation

By Hilary Goodfriend, Jacobin

13 January 18

Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans will soon be at risk of deportation — just the latest injustice they've suffered at the hands of the US state.

n Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it was terminating protections that have shielded over two hundred thousand Salvadorans in the United States from deportation for nearly twenty years. After a final eighteen-month extension, Salvadoran Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders will join the ranks of over a million US residents newly vulnerable to deportation under Trump.

They and their families have been thrown into chaos, twice uprooted by the machinations of US empire, with only a dysfunctional Congress to look to for relief.

DHS’s decision came nearly seventeen years to the day after the first of two massive earthquakes devastated El Salvador, prompting US officials to grant Temporary Protected Status to thousands of undocumented Salvadorans then residing in the country, most of whom had fled the violence and destruction of El Salvador’s twelve-year, US-backed civil war (1980–1992) and its aftermath.

Salvadoran TPS recipients were refugees, but the United States had refused to grant them that status, unwilling to recognize that the Salvadoran military dictatorship — a principal US ally in the bloody anticommunist campaign in the region — committed vast and egregious human rights violations. Along with other concessions won thanks to the organizing of Salvadoran refugees and their supporters, TPS emerged as a partial and entirely inadequate response to this problem. The program must be renewed by DHS every eighteen months, at great cost to the applicants, and beneficiaries are barred from applying for permanent residency.

Salvadorans comprise the vast majority of immigrants covered under the program. Already, the Trump administration has canceled TPS program for 60,000 Haitians, 2,500 Nicaraguans, and 500 Sudanese, with 60,000 Hondurans likely to face the same fate. This is on top of the 800,000 young people, majority Mexican, who will be rendered undocumented when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program expires in March.

Hostage to the political climate in the States, uncertain TPS holders and their families have been something of a political football for nearly two decades, with Republican threats to terminate the program routinely leveraged for electoral gain by the reactionary right in El Salvador.

Fallout in El Salvador

With elections on the horizon in El Salvador, Trump’s decision comes like a match to kindling.

Already, Trump’s anti-migrant attacks were being manipulated by the far-right opposition to smear the governing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the party of the former leftist insurgency, for its support for the embattled Maduro government in Venezuela. Just a week earlier, a likely FMLN presidential candidate drew fire for speaking at a university rally in solidarity with Honduras in which a banner reading “Yankee Go Home” was draped across the stage; the US ambassador scolded the Salvadoran public on Twitter for the slight, and the corporate media suggested (falsely) that the incident threatened to torpedo both US aid and TPS renewal.

Now, campaign season has officially opened for the March 2018 midterms, and all parties are gearing up for the 2019 presidential vote. The government has sought to calm the public and cast the eighteen-month extension as a qualified achievement, while the US embassy hands out pamphlets on moving to El Salvador for the newly deported. Opposition candidates from the right to the center are tripping over each other to blame the FMLN and claim that their election would reverse the DHS’s decision. All agree that the country, 16 percent of whose GDP is comprised of remittances from the United States, is in no condition to absorb two hundred longtime US residents and their families.

But despite the opposition’s shrill intonations, the termination of TPS for Salvadorans was not a response to unfavorable local politics. Rather, as the president’s recent “shithole” remarks confirmed, this cruel and irresponsible decision is consistent with the administration’s extremist, white-nationalist project, the victims of which span the width of US imperial engagement, from the Middle East to Central America.

Toward Migrant Justice

Unfortunately, the crisis has prompted many in the United States to adopt, out of desperation, an insidious discourse of deservingness. TPS holders insist that they are not criminals or gang members and portray themselves as upright seekers of the American Dream; advocates rattle off statistics demonstrating migrants’ contributions to the US economy. This rhetoric, which divides the population into “good” and “bad” immigrants, only weakens the struggle for a radical and inclusive migrant justice.

So too does the privileging of “Dreamers” in the current immigration debate. The January 8 DHS decision briefly thrust Salvadoran TPS holders into the limelight, as it did a few weeks ago for Haitian TPS holders. Yet these populations remain marginalized from the mainstream discussion about immigration, upstaged by the Dreamers, who even Trump can admit appear to merit consideration. Even as DHS slashes TPS for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the White House is trying to ransom protections for DACA recipients in exchange for further border militarization and enforcement.

As all eyes turn to Congress, it is imperative that any discussion around immigration also include those who have benefitted from TPS. Organizers with the National TPS Alliance are fighting for legislation that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for all TPS holders. While representatives on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills that would shield certain populations, the American Promise Act, sponsored by New York Democratic congresswoman Nydia Velazquez in the House, encompasses all TPS nationalities and, importantly, is a “clean” bill, with no border enforcement strings attached.

TPS, like DACA, was an insufficient response to a crisis born of decades, if not centuries, of US military, political, and economic intervention in the region. The only just response today is to provide secure and regular status to all within our borders — documented or not. No wall, no more agents, just residency: now.

How the Media Protects a President Unfit for Office

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

13 January 18

ow that Trump has been president for almost a year, it’s time the media called his behavior for what it is rather than try to normalize it. Here are the six most misleading media euphemisms for conduct unbecoming a president: 

1. Calling Trump’s tweets “presidential “statements” or “press releases.” “The President is the President of the United States, so they’re considered official statements by the President of the United States,” Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, said last June when asked during his daily briefing how his tweets should be characterized

Wrong. Trump’s tweets are mostly rants off the top of his head – many of them wild, inconsistent, rude, crude, and bizarre.

Normal presidential statements are products of careful thought. Advisers weigh in. Consequences are considered. Alternatives are deliberated. Which is why such statements are considered important indicators of public policy, domestically and internationally.

Trump’s tweet storms are relevant only to judging his mood on a particular day at a particular time.  

2. Referring to Mar-A-Lago as “the Winter White House.” The White House says the term is accurate because Trump does official business from there, and, besides, Mar-A-Lago’s former owner wanted the Palm Beach estate to become a presidential retreat.

Rubbish. Unlike the White House and Camp David, the traditional presidential retreat, both of which are owned by taxpayers, Mar-a-Lago is a profit-making business owned by Trump.

The White House is open for public tours; Mar-a-Lago is open only to members who can pay $200,000 to join.

Mar-a-Lago, along with the other Trump resort properties that he visits regularly, constitute a massive conflict of interest. Every visit promotes the Trump resort brand, adding directly to Trump’s wealth.

Normal presidents don’t make money off the presidency. Trump does. His resorts should be called what they are – Trump’s businesses.

3. Calling his lies “false claims” or “comments that have proved to be inaccurate.” Baloney. They’re lies, plain and simple.

Early last year the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief insisted that the Journal wouldn’t label Trump’s false statements as “lies.” Lying, said the editor, requires a deliberate intention to mislead, which couldn’t be proven in Trump’s case. 

Last fall, NPR’s then news director, Michael Oreskes defended NPR’s refusal to use the term “liar” when describing Trump, explaining that the word constitutes “an angry tone” of “editorializing” that “confirms opinions.”

In January, Maggie Haberman, a leading Times’ political reporter, claimed that her job was “showing when something untrue is said. Our job is not to say ‘lied.’”

Wrong. Normal presidents may exaggerate; some occasionally lie. But Trump has taken lying to an entirely new level. He lies like other people breath. Almost nothing that comes out of his mouth can assumed to be true.

For Trump, lying is part of his overall strategy, his MO, and his pathology. Not to call them lies, or to deem him a liar, is itself misleading.  

4. Referring to Trump’s and his aide’s possible “cooperation” or “coordination” with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

This won’t due. “Cooperation” and “coordination” sound as if Trump and his campaign assistants were merely being polite to the Russians, engaged in a kind of innocent parallel play.

But nothing about what we’ve seen and heard so far suggests politeness or innocence. “Collusion” is the proper word, suggesting complicity in a conspiracy.

If true – if Trump or his aides did collude with the Russians to throw the election his way –  they were engaged in treason, another important word that rarely appears in news reports.

5. Calling Trump’s and Paul Ryan’s next move “welfare reform,” as in “Trump has suggested more than once that welfare reform might be the next big legislative item on his agenda.”

Rubbish. They’re not going after “welfare.” Welfare – federal public assistance to the poor – was gutted in 1996. Trump and Ryan are aiming at Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Nor are they seeking to “reform” these programs. They want to cut them in order to pay for the huge tax cut they’ve given corporations and the wealthy. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform,” Ryan said recently, “which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”

So call it what it is: Planned cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

6. Describing Trump’s comments as “racially charged.” “Racially charged” sounds like Trump doesn’t intend them to be racist but some people hear them that way. Rubbish.

Trump’s recent harangue against immigrants from “shitholes” in Latin America and Africa comes only weeks after The New York Times reported that at another Oval Office meeting Trump said Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians who visit the US would never “go back to their huts.”

This is the man who built his political career on the racist lie that Barack Obama was born in Africa, who launched his presidential campaign with racist comments about Mexican immigrants, who saw “fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville march of white supremacists, and who attacked African-American football players for being “unpatriotic” because they kneeled during the National Anthem to protest police discrimination.

This is the same man who in 1989 took out full page ads in New York newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty so it could be applied to five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park – and who still refuses to admit his error even though they were exonerated by DNA evidence.

Stop using terms like “racially charged” to describe his statements. Face it. Trump is a racist, and his comments are racist.

Words matter. It’s important to describe Trump accurately. Every American must understand who we have as president.