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Summary
The US elections are less than 3 weeks away. Both Trump and Biden’s immigration policy has a huge impact on Honduras and Honduran families. Over 1 million Hondurans live in the US and thousands migrate to the US-Mexico border every year.
Today, we hear from Judy Ancel of the Kansas City-based organization, the Cross Border Network that co-sponsored an online event this week to outline six immigration policy issues and the two Presidential candidates’s positions on each.
Transcript
Karen Spring:
Hi, everybody, welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues in North American policy. I’m your host, Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that’s lived and worked in Honduras for over 11 years. Thanks so much for listening.
Today I’ve invited Judy Ancel to the show to speak about the positions of the two US presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, on immigration policies. US immigration policy has a huge impact on Honduras and on Hondurans.
It’s estimated that over 1 million Hondurans live in the United States. And as I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, many caravans, or refugee caravans, migrant caravans, leave the country and head to the US-Mexico border.
Judy is a long time labor educator and worked for 30 years inspiring rebels, change-makers, and labor organizers, in her position as director of the Worker Education and Labor Studies Program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Judy has done solidarity work for decades.
My biggest connection to Judy is through her work with the organization Cross Border Network for Justice & Solidarity, which educates about the imperialist policies of the United States, and their effect on countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Judy and the Cross Border Network have organized several delegations to Honduras, and is also a member of the Honduras Solidarity Network. Most recently, Cross Border Network published a report about their findings after a trip to Honduras to investigate the root causes of migration and the migrant caravans.
Judy also has very intimate experiences with issues of migration and immigration, as she is the adoptive grandmother of a Honduran family that was forced to flee Honduras and seek asylum in the United States. The family was fleeing violence related to a land conflict in northern Honduras.
Welcome, Judy, to the show.
Judy Ancel:
Thanks a lot, Karen. I’m happy to be here.
Karen Spring:
On October 12, the Cross Border Network, along with three other Kansas City based organizations, held a webinar called “Eyes on the Election: Candidates’ Positions on Immigration.” Judy, why did the Cross Border Network and other organizations feel it was important to organize this webinar?
Judy Ancel:
Well, I think we realized that if the election turns out to be a defeat for Donald Trump, there are possibilities for immigration reform and a change in the attitude of US government towards asylum seekers. And we thought that it was really important for people to understand the positions of the candidates because, whoever wins, it’s going to take a movement to get change. And we want to arm the movement with good information about where these candidates think they’re going. I specifically researched the policies and proposals of Joe Biden and actually was pleasantly surprised that he has a very pretty well worked-out plan on how to deal with asylum. I think many of us are already very familiar with the positions of Donald Trump. Our event also looked at the positions of candidates for US Senate and the US Congress, who are representing both Missouri and Kansas in our area. So that’s what we did in the event.
Karen Spring:
You have mentioned previously that you feel like immigration is not being discussed very widely. Can you explain a little bit more about that in the context of the elections?
Judy Ancel:
Yeah, well, I’ve noticed that while Donald Trump still keeps talking about immigration, the Democrats are not talking about it very much at all. And I assume that they they’re not talking about it because they think it’s going to lose them votes. Ever since the 1990s, the discussions in the United States have turned on being very, very xenophobic, and, especially since 9/11/2001, the fear of immigrants, as in the mixing up of immigrants as terrorists, has been a pronounced theme, particularly the Republican Party, but I don’t believe that the Democrats have put up a very good argument against that as well. And so rather than actually trying to educate the American people, and talk about immigration as a human rights issue, as an issue related to our foreign policy, the Democrats are pretty much dodging the issue in this election. And so we thought it was important to bring it to the fore.
Karen Spring:
When you did this forum, you looked at local and national candidates. You explained six different issues related to immigration. Can you go through each of these issues and explain each one? I’d like to know why you picked them, why they’re important, and also, what is the Trump administration’s position on each. And just a reminder, there are some people like myself that are Canadian that listen to the podcast that might not be as familiar with these US immigration policies and their histories. So you might have to get into more detail about them. I’m not sure what’s easier, or what you prefer, would you like to go through each of the six policies and then Trump’s position on them or go through the issues first?
Judy Ancel:
Well, let me let me give you a little background about each of the six issues and explain why it was we chose them. But in general, we chose these issues, because we think they are the most salient in bringing out the position of a candidate on immigration issues. These are issues that primarily actually are chosen by Donald Trump, because of the policies that he has enacted. These issues have become the key issues to ask candidates what their positions are.
So the first issue is the attitude towards political asylum. And the attitude towards refugees. And I’m sure, even Canadians were aware of the Muslim ban that happened early on in the Trump administration, where the people who were from countries that are considered Muslim, or majority Muslim. Thirteen countries were completely banned from entering the United States. But there has also been a tremendous attack on refugees in general, and a reduction of, as the number of refugees in the world increases, the number that are admitted into the United States has decreased. And also, ever since COVID, asylum seekers have been kept out of the United States. Essentially, our asylum system has been shut down. First little by little, and then absolutely after March. And so that’s a huge issue, because there are all these people around the world who want to find safety in the United States, and are not being permitted to do so. So that’s a huge issue.
The second issue is the wall, the border wall, the wall that Trump began his campaign on in 2016, promising to keep immigrants out by building a wall on our southern border. And then he also added that he was going to make Mexico pay for it, which has turned into a colossal joke. But anyway. And so we wanted to know what the candidates’ positions were on this wall, whether or not they see a wall as a solution. One of the candidates said he saw the wall as a 12th Century solution to a 21st Century problem. Is a wall going to really keep people out, first off, and is that going to make us safer? So that was an issue.
The third one was the issue of people who are called the Dreamers. And these are young people who came to the United States illegally with their parents, and grew up here, went to school here, learned English, are for every intents and purposes Americans, except they don’t have that piece of paper that says that they’re legally here. And these young people starting 10, 12 years ago, organized themselves to demand some kind of path to citizenship and legalization in the United States. And they began the movement called United We Dream. And they were so powerful and engaged in such direct action, that under President Obama, there was an attempt, actually there was an attempt much earlier than Obama to pass what’s called the DREAM Act, which would have given them a path to citizenship. However, it failed to pass Congress, it still fails to pass Congress. Even though the House of Representatives may have passed it, the Senate will not consider it at this point. And so in 2013, I believe it was, President Obama issued an executive order, which he didn’t need Congress to approve, for what was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which gave them a reprieve from being deported if they fulfilled certain requirements and paid some money. And it gave them more permits, and the peace of mind that ICE or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not going to come grab them and send them to a country they didn’t even remember. We wanted to know, and that’s been such a hot button issue on immigration, that we wanted to know what the candidates’ positions were on DACA and an act in Congress called the DREAM Act.
The fourth issue has to do with immigration enforcement. Every immigrant in this country lives in fear of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is under the Department of Homeland Security. It was really established to prevent terrorists from hurting Americans, but has somehow turned into a kind of Gestapo terrorizing our immigrant population. And they are spread all over the United States. They’re a domestic federal police that knocks on people’s doors and takes them away and separates families, and has engaged in tremendous human rights violations. And so we wanted to know what people’s position was on ICE, because there’s a movement growing in the United States to abolish it. But also on what’s called sanctuary cities, which are cities which pass laws prohibiting their police departments from cooperating with ICE.
And then the fifth thing we asked people about was whether or not candidates supported a path to citizenship. In other words, did they support legislation, which would give the 11 million approximately undocumented people in the United States some way of getting papers, getting legalized, and getting a path to become citizens of the United States?
And finally, we asked the question of how is this candidate going to fix the crisis of massive numbers of people coming, particularly from Central America? And, you know, what are they going to do about it?
So we reviewed each candidate on those six issues.
Karen Spring:
In the webinar, you presented on Joe Biden’s position on all these issues. And I will play that recording from the webinar. The elections are less than three weeks away, on November 3 is when they’ll take place, and some people have already voted. Voters should be thinking about these issues, especially since the Democrats aren’t really talking about immigration policies at all. So do you want to go through Trump’s position on each of these six issues, and then I will play the recording, that goes through Biden’s position on each as well?
Judy Ancel:
So Trump’s position is going to be a combination of what he’s already done, and what we think he’s going to continue to do.
Basically, Trump is a xenophobe. He is afraid of foreigners. He uses the immigrant population as a way to create fear in the United States in order to boost him. And so he does whatever he can in the campaign to stoke that fear. And he’s very proud of the record he has.
So, for instance, on the issue of asylum and refugees, he has reduced the number of refugees allowed into the United States to just a very small number, I think the number for next year’s 15,000.
As far as asylum is concerned, as I said, basically, asylum has been stopped. And Trump did this in several different ways. First off, by going back to the Clinton administration, began to criminalize people coming into the United States across our border without first applying. And Trump has applied that to people who seek asylum. Nobody else has done that before. They’re charging people with illegal entry who are coming and applying for asylum, and then they’re locking them up.
And in order to create a deterrence, to say to the people of Honduras, for instance, don’t come because we’re going to separate your families. We’re going to take your children away, we’re going to lock you up, and we’re going to lock your children up in some other place. Trump’s Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, basically said, we’re going to do this as a deterrence. And they have done it.
And then they invented the stay-in-Mexico policy, which is if somebody came into the United States, applied for asylum, they would be deported to Mexico and told to wait in horrific conditions along the border with no support, and living in basically refugee camps that are supported by nonprofit organizations and not much else.
And then they invented the safe third country policy, which created the lie that somehow Honduras is safe for Guatemalans, and El Salvador is safe for Hondurans, and Guatemala is safe for I don’t know who, but anyway. And so they’re taking Hondurans who come and ask for asylum and they’re deporting them to Guatemala, regardless of whether or not they have COVID, and telling them that they’re going to be safe there. Whereas, unfortunately, of course, Guatemala is almost as unsafe as Honduras.
And so those are the major policies attacking asylum that the Trump administration has done. I can presume that if Trump is reelected, they will continue, as much as the courts allow. Many of these policies have been disallowed by the courts through injunctions. But very often, the Trump administration has actually not complied with the court orders.
And the second thing, on the wall, of course Trump wants to complete the wall. But the truth is, he hasn’t built that much wall. What they built is five miles of new wall. This is at least as of August, and 245 miles where walls or barriers already existed, and they improved those barriers into walls, and then 25 miles of secondary walls. So the US border is still largely unfenced or unwalled. Anyway, there are still plenty of places where people get across. Unfortunately, the places that do not have walls are deserts, where people die trying to access the United States. His position is going to be to continue to build the wall.
The third thing was DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the DREAM Act. There are something like 1.8 million of these folks – “Dreamers” – in the United States. It’s a substantial number of people. Many of them because of DACA have jobs, many of them contribute to the US economy in many important ways. Trump wanted to trade DACA legis… or The DREAM Act for money for the wall, and the Democrats refused. And so they basically remain in limbo, except that there was a Supreme Court decision in June, saying that Trump did not end DACA the way he should have. But if he’s reelected, he will come back. And he will again try to destroy DACA.
As far as the path to citizenship, he doesn’t want one. His immigration policy is frankly racist. He said at one point, I don’t want people from shithole countries. That’s, you know, going to be if he is reelected, that will be his immigration policy. That’s why the selection is so important for immigrants and for the issue of immigration.
How’s Trump going to fix the crisis? Trump IS the crisis. The fact that there are huge numbers of people coming from Central America, of course, creates a crisis. But this is a crisis that in part is created by the United States. Trump has done nothing to alleviate that crisis. In fact, he has continued to stoke it.
Karen Spring:
That was a really amazing summary and a ton of information about the policies. And you were actually just going to go into my next question. Before I play the recording explaining Joe Biden’s position and how it would be different from Trump’s, because there are significant differences between them, I wanted to ask you, you’ve spent a lot of time in Honduras with the Cross Border Network, you’ve made several trips to the country looking at so many different issues from privatization, labor issues, and the root causes of migration. You have an extensive knowledge of root causes, which a lot of people in the United States don’t have when they talk about immigration policies and migration from Central America. They don’t often talk about the root causes of migration, or the US role in Central America. You’ve just given this really amazing summary of these domestic policies in the US, but they obviously have a lot of connections with the the root causes of migration. What do you think this connection is? If you had to explain it – the connection – to people that might not know much about root causes and domestic immigration policies, how would you make that connection between both?
Judy Ancel:
Well, I think I’d say that you can’t understand who is coming to the United States without understanding US foreign policy. And that’s particularly true for Latin America. I think it’s also true for other parts of the world, like Vietnam, and like the Middle East, but US foreign policy towards Latin America for 150 years or more has been imperialist. And that policy has brought a kind of savage capitalism to Latin America that is very dangerous for people, poor people, for indigenous people, for people who live off the land as subsistence farmers, as campesinxs. The policies of the US government overwhelmingly dislocate people and create refugees.
The American people are told that our foreign policy brings democracy and freedom to people. But that’s just simply a lie. What US foreign policy is aimed at is being good for business and good for US corporations. And so they create a climate, good for investment, where profits can be made. Countries like Honduras are in this debt cycle where they have to agree to the development plans of both the US government, the international banks, and many NGOs as well, in order to be able to pay their debts and get more money, and then you throw in the added ingredient of corruption, which is growing enormously both in this country here, as well as in Latin America. And you see the siphoning off of any benefits from any of that development into the hands of very few people, which then creates more refugees.
You know, I look at the people who come here from Honduras as being refugees of the global economy. I think that their situation is not going to be improved, they won’t be able to stay home, until we make fundamental changes in the global economy.
Karen Spring:
Thanks, Judy, I think that’s really clear that in order to stop migration, we need fundamental changes in US and Canadian foreign policy in Honduras and in Central America. So before I go to the recording, is there anything you’d like to add in case I missed asking you something?
Judy Ancel:
No, I think that people shouldn’t lose heart because I think there’s growing social movements in the United States that are opposed to the kinds of policies I just talked about. The Dreamers themselves that I talked about are an inspiration. But there’s also many, many other people, many other people who are supportive of the rights of immigrants. And also, I just want to say that I find the the movement of resistance in Honduras to be tremendously inspirational, and every time we bring in a delegation to Honduras, everybody goes home, inspired by the courage and the tenacity of people in Honduras, who are undergoing conditions that are far worse than what we face here.
Karen Spring:
I’m now going to play the summary of Joe Biden’s position on these immigration policies that Judy Ancel presented in the webinar on October 18. People can find a full recording of this webinar on the Cross Border Network’s Facebook page.
Judy Ancel:
Biden’s opening to his statement on immigration says, “It’s a moral failing and a national shame when a father and his baby daughter drown seeking our shores. When children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers and the government seeks to keep them there indefinitely…. When he threatens massive raids that would break up families who have been in this country for years…. When children die while in custody due to lack of adequate care.” This should give you a clue that Biden has a position that is quite different from Donald Trump’s. He has a position paper of almost 7,000 words, outlining his views on what he wants to do on the immigration issue if he becomes president.
But we should also remember that Biden was Vice Deporter-in-Chief under the Obama Administration. And he says he’s changed his positions. And he’s even changed his position since he became a candidate for president. He was pushed to the left by others in the Democratic Party. And so it remains to be seen what the real Joe Biden is going to be on immigration. But right now he’s taking a very progressive stance on it.
Oh, and as for Kamala Harris, I didn’t do a separate thing on her. She is rated as very, very high on refugee issues by an organization which is called the Voice for Refugees, but I’m not going to go specifically into her position.
Biden wants to reassert America’s commitment to asylum seekers and refugees and promises a lot of things in his first hundred days. Many of these things he can do without [inaudible] congressional action. They would mainly be undoing things that Trump has done as President.
So what about refugees and asylees? He will immediately rescind the Muslim ban. He calls it racist and a recruiting tool for terrorists. He will set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000 and seek to raise it over time. Trump just announced that he is lowering the admission of refugees to 15,000 in the year 2021. So that’s a pretty big difference. He will reverse separating parents and children, stop prosecuting parents and other asylum seekers for entering illegally, reunify families, and the requirement that asylum seekers first must apply in a country they travel through if they want to get asylum. He will reverse the policies of denying asylum to victims of gang and domestic violence and persecution as LGBTQ persons. He also promises to process asylum applications rapidly, and says he will expand the nonprofit sector of shelters, legal aid, and other help for people awaiting asylum hearings, so that they do not need to lock them up. And he will end the incarceration of families with children. He does not say he’ll stop locking up other people who seek asylum, or others who are just coming in here to work.
So what about the wall? Biden says not one more inch of wall will be built under his presidency. The wall is unneeded, he says, because terrorists don’t come across the southern border. They come with visas. The wall, he thinks, does little to stop drug cartels and human traffickers. Rather, he would reallocate resources for more surveillance at the border.
And speaking of the wall, as we recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we should acknowledge that the wall is being built on the land of the Tohono O’odham people who live in the borderlands of Arizona. Their sacred monuments and springs have been desecrated by the wall construction crews, and their people have suffered arrest and incarceration because of their protests.
So what about the Dreamers? Well, Dreamers and their parents, according to Biden, should have a roadmap to citizenship through legislative immigration reform. But in the meantime, Biden will remove the uncertainty for Dreamers by reinstating the DACA program, and he will explore all legal options to protect their families from inhumane separation. Biden will also ensure Dreamers are eligible for federal student aid, like loans and Pell grants, and include them in his proposals to provide access to community college without debt.
So would Biden abolish ICE? Probably not. Rather, Biden’s plan will redirect enforcement away from the workplaces and law-abiding long-term migrants, very similar to what the Obama administration did. He also pledges to reform ICE by professionalizing it and holding them accountable for inhumane treatment. He’ll increase resources for training, and demand transparency and independent oversight over ICE and the Border Patrol.
And what about a path to citizenship? Joe says he wants to modernize America’s immigration system. What he says he means by that is, what he said, he will, first off, reverse the public charge rule. Then he wants to commit significant political capital to finally delivering legislative immigration reform to ensure that the US remains open and welcoming to people from every part of the world. He wants immigration reform to create a roadmap to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people in the United States, and reform the visa system for temporary workers in certain industries to make it more flexible to protect workers’ rights, among many other things. There’s a real trade-off between that – how many people we’re going to admit, and how many people we’re going to give temporary visas to. That’s unclear.
Does Joe have a clue as to how to get out of the crisis of so many people trying to pour in asking for asylum? Well, Joe wants to convene a regional meeting of leaders, including from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Canada, to address the factors driving migration, and to propose regional resettlement solutions, whatever that means. Joe has another paper about his foreign policy, which I really recommend that people read to get us a greater sense of what he’s planning for Latin America. I’m not sure what all of this means.
But judging from past experience under Obama and Biden, it would mean the same policies which led to the coup in Honduras and its transformation into a narco state, the institution of global extractive capitalism, with the US and global banks investing in lending for huge resource extraction projects, which displace Indigenous people and campesinxs, and lead to tragedies like the assassination of Berta Cáceres in Honduras, and the militarization of the entire region of Central America. That has been the fruit of a bipartisan coalition of American presidents and administrations for a long time. Joe was the author of the so-called Biden Plan, which was modeled on Plan Colombia, and his plan was called CARSI, the Central America Regional Security Initiative, which contributed to the exact opposite of what Biden says he wants to do to fix the crisis.
Karen Spring:
That was Judy Ancel of the organization Cross Border Network, giving an overview of Biden’s immigration policies. Obviously, policy written on paper is one thing. And as Judy said well, there needs to be deep and fundamental changes to immigration policy in the United States that includes a fundamental change in US foreign policy that plays such a huge role in driving Central Americans out of their own countries.
So that’s the show for today. Since the US election is less than three weeks away, on the next episode we will go into more depth about the role of US foreign policy in Latin America, and what each presidential candidate and even changes in the US Congress could mean for Honduras and other countries in the region.
Check out our show notes at Honduras now.org. Are they useful? Do people read them? Sometimes I post the show notes and I’m not sure if they’re helpful for others. But get in touch and let me know. I would love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for joining me today. And, until next time, hasta pronto.