Trump Told Asylum Seekers To Do It “The Legal Way.” Now He’s Revoking 200,000 Of Their Visas.

from the only-white-people-deemed-to-do-it-the-right-way dept

Many Trump supporters keep insisting that his immigration purges are justified because the people swept up in them came here “illegally,” so who cares if they get kicked out (or shipped off to some random war-torn country). When asked what people seeking asylum should do, the answer is often “do it the legal way.” That the US government has spent years making “the legal way” harder and harder — and, as we’re about to see, has now started punishing the people who actually took it — never seems to enter the conversation. But here we have a really clear example of people doing it “the legal way, as instructed by Trump himself” who are about to get kicked out of the US.

The AP is reporting that the administration is about to pull out on the order of 200,000 visas from those who came to the US legally under B1 or B2 visas, and then sought asylum, just as Trump said they should. This would be the largest mass revocation of visas in US history.

The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.

Unless challenged or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.

Go back to 2018, when the first Trump administration proclaimed that anyone crossing the southern border anywhere other than an official port of entry would be ineligible for asylum. The whole framing was that there was a legal way to seek asylum and an illegal way, and only the legal way was going to count. In remarks about this executive order, Trump said that those who wished to seek asylum would have to “lawfully present themselves at a port of entry,” at which point they could seek asylum.

Under this plan, the illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry. So they’re going to have to lawfully present themselves at a port of entry.

A few months later, in his State of the Union, he claimed he wanted immigrants to enter the country legally (in large numbers!):

“I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” he declared…

Note that these are two separate demands: show up at a port of entry rather than sneaking across, and get into the country through legal channels in the first place. The people about to lose their visas satisfied both, and then some. They applied for a visa, got vetted and approved by the State Department, walked in through the front door, and filed an asylum claim through the official process. If there’s a more “legal way” available, nobody has described it.

That demand, that people come “legally” and then make their asylum claims at a port of entry (though the courts later deemed this “asylum only counts at port of entry” to be wildly against the law) still resulted in a ton of people getting legal visas to the US, and then seeking asylum when they entered.

It now appears that (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration was full of shit when they claimed they wanted asylum seekers to “come the legal way.”

There was nothing in what Trump said initially that said they had to get other types of visas to seek asylum. It just said “get here legally and then make your case.” Which is exactly what all of these people did, and Trump and Marco Rubio are about to pull their visas, even though they literally did things “the legal way” that Trump himself had encouraged.

While this won’t necessarily mean immediate deportations, it will likely mean that people with live, pending asylum claims lose their lawful status while those claims are still being adjudicated — which is precisely how you end up removable. And with bands of roving ICE thugs looking for anyone without legal status to deport, you know these people are likely to be added to the target list.

So once again, doing things “the legal way” turns out to protect you from exactly nothing. Follow the instructions the president himself gave you and on the visa the State Department itself issued you, file the paperwork the process demands, and the reward is having that visa pulled while your claim is still pending. What good is doing things “the legal way” when, with the stroke of a pen, Trump and Rubio will make that “legal way” illegal?

The New Colossus poem on the Statue of Liberty reads:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

To which the Trump administration responds: “get the fuck out of here.”

Filed Under: asylum, deportation, donald trump, immigration, marco rubio, trump administratin, visa revocation, visas