As you’ve probably heard, the Republican Party has not adopted a new platform for 2020. Instead, they resolved that the “Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I find this frightening.
The whole point of a platform is to get together (perhaps virtually) to discuss/debate the party’s priorities and then reach some consensus about how to proceed during the next four years. But now–in spite of significant new problems facing our country–the Republican Party has decided to simply defer to President Trump and stick with their 2016 platform. If you’re interested, I already wrote about the 2016 platform. In 2016. That an entire party, diverse in its opinions (if not its ethnic make-up), would take a pass on setting its goals, and instead agree simply to follow the leader, is deeply undemocratic.
That said, at least in terms of asylum seekers and refugees, we have a pretty good idea about what a second Trump Administration would do: Close the doors to America by every means at its disposal, including trampling due process of law (which endangers us all) and lying about the reasons why asylum seekers and refugees come here, who they are, and what they do once they get here (and of course, this never-ending mendacity also endangers us all).
So we have a general idea about what the Republicans would do with a second term, but what about specifics? Since the Republican Party itself won’t tell us its proposals related to asylum seekers and refugees, the intrepid reporters here at the Asylumist have scoured the internet to find out exactly what Mr. Trump has in mind if he is re-elected. Here is what we found–
- The border patrol will deploy a heat ray weapon, which produces “agonizing pain” to those caught in its line of fire. The idea is that migrants caught in the device’s ray will turn back to Mexico before they become burnt toast.
- ICE will continue to arrest thousands of non-citizen, thus demonstrating that it is more important to detain “illegals” in overcrowded, coronavirus-infected prisons, than to worry about public health. This also has the benefit of enriching the private-prison companies that hold immigrant detainees. In turn, those companies use their money to help bankroll President Trump’s re-election campaign. So it’s a win-win-win!
- Since Mexico hasn’t paid for a wall (yet), Trump supporters have raised private funds through a group called “We Build the Wall,” which raked in $25 million from private donors who wanted to put their money where their hate is. How much wall they’ve actually built is anyone’s guess, but a number of the organization’s leaders–including ex-Trump aid Stephen Bannon–did manage to get themselves indicted for fraud. Despite this small hiccup, perhaps we can expect private funding of the border wall to continue under another Trump term.
- During his first campaign, Mr. Trump famously opined that asylum seekers are bringing crime and drugs, and that they are rapists. “Some, I assume, are good people,” he said. But since most migrants are not good people, we have to continually treat them with suspicion. In that spirit, the Trump Administration wants to collect much more biometric evidence from non-citizens, including DNA samples. So essentially, immigrants will be forced to live in a surveillance state until they become citizens.
- President Trump has gone back and forth about what to do for/to DACA recipients (people who came to the U.S. as children but who do not have status here). Recently, he proposed “taking care of people from DACA in a very Republican way.” Given how the Trump Administration has treated migrant children, asylum seekers fleeing gangs and domestic violence, and Muslims, the idea of being treated in a “very Republican way” does not seem all that appealing.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t have specifics from the Republicans about their immigration goals for the next four years. When a political party puts their proposals in writing, at least it requires members of the party to think through their plans, and it gives the public a clearer idea about what they hope to accomplish.
In the absence of a platform, we are left to speculate. And given the Trump Administration’s track record on asylum, refugees, and immigration, it seems unlikely that we can expect anything positive from them during a second term.