Trump’s cruel immigration policies

Rick Morain

Certain admirable qualities have identified the United States for many, many years: prosperity, power, creativity, entrepreneurship, world leadership, personal freedom. You can probably name others.

That’s changing. The Trump administration in its first and second terms has added at least one new identifier, discordant with the nation’s longstanding traditions. And that’s cruelty. And way too many members of Congress remain silent about it.

Who would ever have imagined that America would adopt cruelty as an official policy?

Doesn’t seem real. And yet . . .

Remember the huge uproar over the government’s immigration policy of separating immigrant families in the early years of the first Trump Administration? The policy went into effect in 2017 and was publicly declared in April 2018. But because of media coverage, including film footage of the horrible camps that housed young immigrant children, some of them under the age of five, Trump issued an executive order rescinding it two months later.

But the government hadn’t thought it important enough to keep accurate records of the location of the parents, who had been taken from their thousands of children. Consequently large numbers of children still in the U.S. eight years later remain separated from their parents. Many frightened parents located outside the U.S. have not been able to seek out their offspring for fear of arrest here.

And the separations continue today, although under less obvious, more diffuse arrangements. When an undocumented parent living in the U.S. is apprehended here today and scheduled for deportation, dependent children, if they’re American citizens, are sometimes left here with a relative, a guardian or a foster home. If a child of an undocumented parent is not a citizen of the U.S., the child sometimes is expelled with the parents. But not always.

Thousands of children who have been brought here by their parents’ choice remain separated from their parents because of a conscious decision by the Trump administration, part of its attempt to deter illegal border crossings. But immigrants seeking asylum from violence, kidnapping or death in their home country, formerly a legitimate reason for application for entry, are now often swept up in the family separation policy.

That’s because the administration prioritizes preventing as much immigration as possible over keeping families together.

That’s cruel.

And speaking of deportation: thousands of undocumented immigrants, some of whom applied for immigrant asylum status legally at the border, are being shipped off to nations with which they have no connection whatever.

Ever heard of Eswatini? Until a few months ago, neither had I. It’s the former Swaziland, which was a British colony completely surrounded by South Africa. It’s one of the dozens of nations, most of them falling into the “Third World” category, to which the United States pays millions of dollars to accept undocumented immigrants taken into custody in America.

In those nations the deported individuals are often kept in squalid and/or dangerous prisons or under similar conditions where they are mistreated, with the United States assuming no responsibility for them. Or sometimes worse, the nation to which they are deported then passes them on to their home country from which they had fled to avoid persecution of one kind or another. Their future their is uncertain, at best.

It’s a Pontius Pilate operation: the U.S. washes its hands of any concern for what happens to them.

That’s cruel.

And speaking of asylum: the Trump Administration since his inauguration in January 2025 has severely coarsened longstanding and traditional American asylum procedures and protections for immigrants fleeing unjust and dangerous threat conditions in their home countries.

Until recently individuals and families who appeared at a U.S. border seeking protection from dangers in their native land were received by agents trained to deal sympathetically and compassionately with their plight.

No more. Today thousands of frightened refugees are denied what used to be considered due process for their application. And if they are from one of the dozens of countries on Trump’s ineligible list, they don’t even get an initial hearing.

The exception is white Afrikaners (descendants of white Dutch and French settlers) from South Africa, who apply under a refugee policy. Trump claims that there is genocide in that nation against white farmers.

Last fall, the Trump Administration capped the annual number of refugees admitted to the U.S. at 7,500 per year, a small fraction of the Biden Administration’s 2024 cap of 125,000. And between October 2025 and April of this year, 99.97% of refugees successful in their application for entry to the U.S. were white Afrikans from South Africa, a nation whose population is about 80% black. Only three individual refugees — count ‘em, three — from other countries were successful.

In 2023-24, a reported 49 white farmers were murdered in South Africa, two-tenths of one percent of the 27,261 murders in that country. Young black men are the most likely individuals to be murdered in South Africa.

Meanwhile, people from many nations around the world who, for good reason, fear for their lives are denied refugee status here. Dozens of poverty-stricken nations are on a Trump administration list that bans any of their citizens from seeking entry into the United States. Period.

That’s cruel.

I won’t go into the Trump administration’s purge of millions of low-income Americans from their previous eligibility for Medicaid health care coverage. The administration apparently is unmoved by the fact that poor people get sick, too.

That’s cruel.

Most of the world’s religions, including Christianity, require compassion and concern for others as a basis for their theology. Such values also undergird the vast expanse of secular decency in our world. I can’t identify the Trump administration’s behavior, infested with cruelty, with any of them.

Rick Morain is a reporter and columnist with the Jefferson Herald.