Trump’s assault on immigrants is wrong!

“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.”

-James Madison

A bewildering 22 percent of inmates in the federal prison population are immigrants who have either already been deemed to be in the country illegally or who the government is looking to put in deportation proceedings. They are the stock in trade steered into incarceration by a judicial system that incarcerates minorities and immigrants to feed those evil puppet masters who thrive on exploiting and enslaving them. See, e.g., “The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?” by Vicky Peláez published in Global Research.

Moreover, nearly 50,000 unauthorized immigrants were ordered removed from the U.S., a 28 percent increase over last year, according to statistics released by the immigration review branch of the U.S Department of Justice, an inhumane act which destroyed families, businesses and dreams in its wake.

The 22 percent is much higher than the population of foreign-born in the U.S. as a whole-13.5 percent. Moreover, the government confirmed more than 42,000 aliens in federal prisons as of June 24. About 47 percent already face final deportation orders, making them illegal immigrants, and 3 percent are currently in immigration courts facing deportation proceedings. Almost all of the rest are being probed by federal agents looking to deport them.

Immigrants who commit serious crimes, even if they once had legal status, can have that status revoked and can be subject to deportation, hence the high number of cases where an alien is still being probed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Additionally, The U.S. Marshal Service, is holding about 12,000 “self-reporting” aliens, and almost all of them have already been ordered deported.

The DOJ’s Executive Office of Immigration Review’s data also revealed that total orders of removal combined with voluntary departures by immigrants in the U.S. between Feb. 1 and July 31 were up close to 31 percent over that same period last year. Final decisions issued by immigration judges also rose 14.5 percent during that time frame this year, the DOJ said recently.

There was also a total of 73,127 final decisions issued by immigration judges between February and the end of July this year, compared to 63,850 issued during the same period last year.

The boost in orders of removal over last year is undoubtedly the consequence of President Trump’s signing of an executive order on January 25 requiring more stringent enforcement on immigration. It also mandated the hiring of 10,000 more immigration officers, targeted funding for so-called sanctuary cities and revived a controversial information sharing program known as Secure Communities, which allows fingerprints of arrested individuals to be checked against U.S. Department of Homeland Security databases.

The agency mobilized more than 100 existing immigration judges to DHS detention facilities across the country after Trump signed his January order, triggering a 90 percent increase of the cases those new judges oversaw resulting in orders or removal requiring unauthorized immigrants to depart or be removed. The Justice Department has also hired an additional 54 immigration judges since Trump took office “and continues to hire new immigration judges each month.”

In contrast, between Feb. 1 and July 31 this year, 49,983 unauthorized immigrants were ordered removed, compared to 39,113 last year. Another 7,086 unauthorized immigrants agreed to voluntarily depart the U.S., bringing the total removal and voluntary departures so far this year to 57,069, whereas he total orders of removal and voluntary departures in that same six months last year was 43,595.

When juxtaposed with the unholy alliance between his racist base of white supremists, neo-Nazis, the KKK and other hate and bigotry groups, the present administration’s assault on immigrants is most un-American and mitigates us as a nation, and must be stopped!

Note: Albert Baldeo is a civil rights activist and community advocate. His political battles placed previously ignored minority communities like Richmond Hill and Ozone Park firmly on the political and economic map.