Kansas has a peculiar link to the furor that President
Trump kicked up when he junked DACA, revived it,
throttled it, then added eviction notices for hundreds of
thousands of Salvadorans, Haitians and whomever else he
has found repugnant, especially those who come from one
of the dark-skinned countries he so despises. As they pull
the curtain on a new institutional bigotry, the Trump administration
and Congress have left nearly a million people in
America to wonder if they are soon to become fugitives.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – DACA – had
been a popular program established by President Obama
six years ago, and it is legal in spite of claims otherwise
by the president and other detractors. The program allowed
the children of illegal immigrants two-year, renewable
deferrals of deportation, work permits and the opportunity
for other government benefits in the future, so long as they
maintained near spotless records.
Trump has cancelled all that, putting roughly 800,000
people in America, including 6,800 in Kansas, at risk of
being rounded up and shipped away. They can be hunted
down because they had believed the promise, when they
applied for DACA, that the personal information and
immigration status they had given to the government would
not be used against them. (Imagine asking them to do that
again.)
The president has vacillated incoherently on additional
eviction notices, apparently leaving the matter to the
Congress, which is akin to washing the crisis into the vast
quicksands of futility. The current Congress is incapable of
crafting anything cogent or intelligent on immigration; the
question will fester on, any resolution temporary, another
frail promise, the infectious cruelty of distant hope.
*
The prospect of 800,000 or a million people turned unsettled
and uncertain overnight prompts the dark vision of long
ago in this country, when the Congress passed the Fugitive
Slave Act in 1850. This law compelled citizens to assist the
capture of runaway slaves and required them to be returned
(to owners) no matter how far they had gone or where they
were. Kansas was among the early destination territories
for freedom seekers, and in 1861 we became the only state
founded on the moral principle that slavery was wrong.
Two years later President Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation that freed all slaves, runaway or not; the issue
was settled legally and morally if not actually.
Today Kansans may see the revoking of DACA and the
impeachment of other protected immigrants as related history
reversed, but in a twisted and perverted way. Because
the U.S. Congress was incapable of crafting immigration
reform, President Obama in 2012 established DACA, a
kind of emancipation proclamation, or promise. Tens of
thousands, then hundreds of thousands and more signed on,
believing in their deferrals, going to work legally, acting
within the law, enrolling in schools and colleges, becoming
taxpayers, finding jobs and professions, emerging as
upstanding Americans and no matter their immigration
status.
Suddenly Trump has ended the emancipation, as though
1863 is returned to 1850, and the free become fugitive. The
beneficiaries of DACA were never slaves in any real sense,
but their status was ever so fragile because Congress could
never summon the will to free them of their status as criminals
in waiting. In a way DACA and the temporary protection
offered Salvadorans, Haitians and others has become a
form of captivity, freedom wholly dependent upon the will
or whim of the master – in this case, the president.
The potential for cruelty is now heightened because
protected immigrants, their promise suddenly reversed by
deportation orders, face a return to the terrors they had
fled. And those without DACA, having been hunted down,
would have no owner to claim them, only a country from
which they may have come, a country they have, in most
cases, never really known.
Emancipation is supposed to come after slavery. But
in America, the president and his attorney general and a
Congress, devoid of decency, have turned it upside down.
Kansas, at least, should channel its own blood-soaked history
and object in the strongest way. We have seen the evil
in slavery and its Jim Crow offspring; we fought to abolish
such atrocity and inhumanity. Why repeat it by way of a
wicked cousin?
