The student news site of Carlmont High School in Belmont, California.

The impact of the Trump administration

January 19, 2021

In the past four years, dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric towards immigrants has become a defining characteristic of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

At a conference on Northern Triangle issues in 2017, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence spoke of “vicious gangs and vast criminal organizations that drive illegal immigration and carry illegal drugs northward on their journey to the United States.” Pence demonized illegal immigrants by associating them with the cartels and gangs that control the Northern Triangle. This description of Latino immigrants has been propagated by Trump since his campaign for president began.

Professor Bill Ong Hing, a professor of law and the director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic at the University of San Francisco, said, “It’s very clear that Trump is anti-Latino. In his first speech in 2015, he accused Mexico of sending ‘criminal rapists’ into the United States. From the very beginning, [Trump] espoused a very anti-Mexican tone, and then a few years ago, when caravans of migrants fleeing Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala were arriving at the border, [Trump] labeled them as national security risks, as terrorists, before even considering why people are leaving.”

The Trump administration’s anti-Latino ideology has caused major changes in immigration policy, which have hindered the ability of the Northern Triangle immigrants to enter the U.S. Lisa Weissman-Ward, a lecturer in law and a supervising attorney with the Stanford Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, explained these changes and the challenges that the new policies present. 

“[Policy changes] range from seemingly innocuous things, like the government have policy changes about not being able to leave any blank spaces on immigration forms and rejecting immigration forms [as a result of blank spaces], to much more obvious and problematic positions like setting up a metering system at the Mexico-U.S. border by which asylum seekers were not permitted to enter the United States and claim asylum in the United States. Rather, they were forced to remain in Mexico and travel to the United States for hours at a time to appear before a court,” Weissman-Ward said. 

By not providing immigrants with a clear path to citizenship or asylum, U.S. immigration agencies have disadvantaged immigrants. Furthermore, policy changes during the Trump administration have fundamentally altered the basis of the U.S. asylum system, revising policies that have been the accepted standard for decades. 

“The [Trump] administration, mostly through agency decisions, has really worked to undermine what are the foundations and the basis of asylum law, which is rooted in international norms,” Weissman-Ward said. 

The combination of policy changes and anti-Latino rhetoric espoused by Trump built a foreboding barrier against immigrants from Northern Triangle countries, but these immigrants and asylum seekers continue traveling to the U.S. border, undaunted.

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