The immigration battle continues. What does President Trump’s new executive order mean for those families who have been separated at the US/Mexican border? Stony Brook University Associate Professor Lori Flores, an immigration expert in the border region explains the update:
“Trump has not ‘reversed’ his own separation order. The order he signed only modifies the order by delaying the process of family separation. It also transforms crossing the border from a civil violation (a misdemeanor) to a criminal one. Even though families will be held in detention together, that detention can be "indefinite" and because border crossing will be made a criminal violation, parents can be charged criminally and their children can still be forcibly taken from them. This Executive Order doesn't change anything in terms of treating migrant families humanely or following the rules of asylum application processing - instead it keeps the private detention camps in operation and profiting, and still has the intent of criminalizing migrants and their children, and then spreading them to all corners of the United States with no plan for reunion. Resistance to all these things must continue.”
Lori Flores' research and writing focus on Latino life, labor, and politics, particularly when it comes to Mexican Americans, immigration, the US-Mexico border region, and California. She is an expert on the Bracero Program and Mexican guestworkers, the Farmworker rights movement both before and after Cesar Chavez, undocumented immigration, and the working and social relationships between different groups of Latinos. Her other interests are gender, civil rights, and global borderlands history.
Fore more experts at Stony Brook University click here.
RSS