Reference no: EM132635952

Discuss your thoughts about the topic "Rights of Non-Citizens"

More than 2,500 families were forcibly separated at the US border as the Trump administration targeted parents traveling with children for criminal prosecution. As part of this policy, children with disabilities were separated from their families, including in one case, a 10-year-old girl with Down Syndrome from her mother.

Though a federal court and tremendous public outcry put a stop to mass separations in late June, reunifications of hundreds of families lagged for months. According to media reports, families continued to be separated on a smaller scale after Trump issued an executive order supposedly ending the practice. Reportedly, many of these continued separations were based on vague or unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing or minor violations against the parents. Ramped-up criminal prosecutions for illegal entry continued. Mental health professionals warned that separation was very likely to cause trauma, both immediate and long-lasting.

Hundreds of parents were deported separately from their children, including many whose asylum claims were improperly dismissed by US border agents. A June administrative ruling by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought to restrict access to asylum for people claiming persecution by non-state actors, including victims of domestic and gang violence. In November, the administration issued an interim final rule barring migrants who enter between ports of entry from asylum, in violation of US and international law; it was temporarily enjoined by a federal judge. A peaceful march by migrants on November 26 seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border ended with US border agents lobbing teargas projectiles at migrants, including young children.

The US Supreme Court upheld an executive order issued by Trump banning travel to the US from several predominantly Muslim countries, which Human Rights Watch and those challenging the ban said was discriminatory. The administration also announced Temporary Protected Status would expire for almost 400,000 deeply-rooted immigrants from Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Nepal from late 2018 to early 2020, placing them at risk of deportation and separation from home and family. Arrests and deportations of undocumented people arrested in the interior of the United States mainly through minimal contact with the criminal justice system or in large-scale workplace raids continued to mount, without regard to their rights to home and family. 

Immigration authorities sought to detain more people-including vulnerable populations like children and pregnant women-in the already-sprawling immigration detention system. Immigration authorities sought to remove legal limits to detaining children in families indefinitely. Of 15 recent deaths in immigration detention, Human Rights Watch found that eight were linked to poor medical care.

The fate of almost 800,000 young immigrants who hold work permits and protection from deportation under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) remained uncertain as court challenges continued around the administration's 2017 decision to end the program. Proposed regulatory changes to the definition of "public charge" under US immigration law threatened to disrupt essential public health and benefit programs supporting citizen children of non-citizens.