The New York Times’ editorial board is dismayed that the Obama White House has taken steps to round up a few dozen illegal immigrants who have traveled from South America to seek asylum in the United States, arguing that “spreading fear” in this way is the sort of thing that they’d expect from GOP front-runner Donald Trump.
“A president who spoke so movingly about the violent gun deaths of children here has taken on the job of sending mothers and children on one-way trips to the deadliest countries in our hemisphere. Mothers and children who pose no threat, actual or imaginable, to our security,” the Times wrote Thursday.
Many of the immigrants being rounded now up are reportedly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“The targets are those who arrived in a recent surge of people fleeing shockingly high levels of gang and drug violence, hunger and poverty and who offered themselves at the border to the mercy of the United States, but ultimately lost their cases in immigration court,” it added.
The move, the newspaper noted, comes after Obama said last year that his administration would focus primarily on cracking down on illegal aliens who are also felons.
“We’ll keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. That means felons, not families. That means criminals, not children. It means gang members, not moms who are trying to put food on the table for their kids,” the president said in 2014.
The Times was equally dismayed by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who said in a statement, “Our borders are not open to illegal migration. If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values.”
“This should come as no surprise. I have said publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed,” the statement added.
It’s little wonder, the Times suggested, that billionaire businessman Donald Trump, who has focused much of his campaign on addressing illegal immigration, “is applauding the policy, and taking credit for it.”
The Times is hotly opposed to Trump’s campaign, and has published multiple articles suggesting that the GOP candidate is a “bigot” and accusing him of outright demagoguery.
The editorial suggested that federal authorities don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to national security.
“It’s not illegal to go to the border and seek asylum, as these families have. And his defense of our ‘values’ jarringly sidesteps vital questions — Why are people fleeing?” the Times asked. “And if they are desperate to escape their murderous homelands, what is the best response of the United States? It’s certainly not home raids that send powerless individuals unjustly back to mortal danger and, as collateral damage, spread fear and panic in immigrant neighborhoods across the country.”
It urged the Obama administration to address the root of the issue and to do something about violence in South America, including drug-related violence and the “underfunded legal system at the border,” and to stop “spreading fear.”
“The administration should have long ago begun building routes of escape for families in danger, with safe havens and in-country screening for those seeking resettlement, in the United States or elsewhere in the region,” it wrote.
“While federal agents have been knocking on doors and spreading fear, advocacy groups have been scrambling to help the Central Americans,” it concluded. “Protection, due process and outstretched arms for terrorized families: That’s an approach consistent with America’s laws and values, not agents at the door, on the hunt for mothers and children.”
