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Last week, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) met with President Donald Trump to discuss a DACA proposal that, according to Durbin, could be released to the public as early as Wednesday. Graham and Durbin are in a bipartisan group of senators that put the plan together, called the Gang of Six.
President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to give temporary legal status to aliens who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children.
There were 690,000 DACA participants when Trump terminated the program on September 5, 2017, with a six-month grace period.
Trump rejected the Gang of Six’s proposal and criticized the democrats for not negotiating in good faith.
On Sunday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), another member of the Gang of Six, defended his Democratic colleagueson the This Week television program. He said the Democrats are negotiating in good faith, and the proposal is bipartisan. Three of the Gang of Six members are Republicans.
Yet no matter how Flake describes the proposal, it is not a good faith attempt to find common ground with either the majority of congressional Republicans or the president.
Five of the six senators in the Gang of Six were also in 2013’s the Gang of Eight, which showed the same disregard for majority Republican positions when they moved the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, S. 744, through the Senate.
Read more at http://thehill.com/opinion/immigrati...ical-statement
Published originally on the Hill.
About the author. Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an executive branch immigration law expert for three years; he subsequently served as an immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years.
But my main concern about your approach is that you can't stop demonizing Trump. Senate leadership has said that it will not put a DACA bill on the floor without Trump's approval, yet you insist on saying inflammatory things about him, e.g., that he is a racist and that he only wants white immigrants. And sadly, you aren't the only one doing it.
How receptive do you expect him to be to negotiations with people who treat hi that way? Even if you were right in everything you are saying about him, which isn't even a possibility, don't you realize that you are making it much harder to get his cooperation? Do you treat your wife or anyone else that way?
Nolan Rappaport
Trump has been telling us, over and over again fot the past more than two years that he hates Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants. Only last week hes said the same thing about African and Haitian immigrants and said that we should accept more immigrants from Northern Europe instead. He appointed an attorney general who is on record as supporting a 1924 law which sent additional thousands, if not possibly millions, of Hitler's Jewish victims to the gas chambers by denying them refuge in the United States.
I am not claiming that either Trump of his AG, Jeff Sessions, are anti-Semitic or supporters of Hitler. Definitely, absolutely, not.
But now according to the latest news reports, Trump has just angrily dismissd a "horrible" proposal by a group a Senators to solve DACA and keep the government open because it did not include enough restrictions on legal immigration from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Only about 2 weeks ago, he also tweeted to his 43 million Twitter followers that we need to get rid of "horrible" "chain migration" a pejorative and misleading term for extended family immigration, which has enabled 30 or 40 million mainly non-white immigrants to come to the US legally in the past few decades.
How long can we close our eyes to and pretend hat these expressions of hate have not been uttered, and acted on, by the president?
We now have a president who, over and over again, has said that he does not want more black, Hispanic or Middle Eastern people coming to the US but wants only whites (and, maybe, some Asians), and who is trying as had as he can to base his policy on that agenda.
What is the best way to handle that - pretend it isn't so and try to accommodate? Or is it to resist? I vote for looking at the truth squarely in the face and resisting any attempt to poison our immigration system based on racial hatred.
When Trump says that we need white immigrants ueber alles, and tries to force policies on that basis down the throats of the American people, then we have a problem which we need to speak out about.
2,700 years ago, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod praised leaders who "give fair judgments to foreigners and citizens alike" and (in classical Greek): me ti parekbainousi dikaiou - "do not turn away from justice".
Let us not turn away from speaking out for justice for African, Latin American, Asian, Middle Eastern and all other non-white immigrants who are, increasingly, finding themselves unwelcome and unwanted because of their race, color or religion in Donald Trump's America.
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law
Nolan Rappaport