The Clinton Presidency: The Bill that Set the Stage for Immigration Policies Today
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that overhauled immigration enforcement in the US and laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today. Before the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was passed in 1996, immigration policies were much more benevolent with immigrants.
The law authorized greater resources for border enforcement, such as the construction of new fencing near the San Diego, California, area, and enacted civil penalties for attempting to cross the border illegally. It amended regulations regarding the removal of individuals residing in the country without legal permission by prohibiting legal reentry for a certain period of time and introducing a process for expedited removal. The law also applied new restrictions to the asylum application process
The result was that thousands of foreign-born residents were deported back to their countries, including the young men escaping the civil war in El Salvador, characterized by Jose Miguel Cruz from Florida International University, as “displaced teanagers who hung out on street corners in Southern California’s underprivileged neighborhoods.” The targets of police sweeps, these teanagers were criminalized–arrested and sent to jail–and then deported. They went from jail to the streets of Central America, which led to the growth of the leadership of MS-13 in El Salvador.
A Whole New World: Immigration Policy Changes After 9/11
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks didn’t start the country’s immigration debate, but it did alter the course of the discussion. The security discourse shifted from Anti-Communism which had been the priority ever since the Cold War to fighting terrorism and the War on Drugs.
In addition, in the years following 9/11, immigration, criminal, and national-security screening systems across executive-branch agencies were expanded, upgraded, and integrated. These interoperable data systems became accessible to consular and immigration officials, as well as to local law enforcement. The Bush administration, in its final days, launched Secure Communities, a program allowing the fingerprints of those arrested by local law enforcement to be matched against federal criminal and immigration databases operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and DHS.
Some of the main immigration system changes after 9/11:
- Increased funding
In 2002, President Bush passed the Homeland Security Act, creating an umbrella entity charged with keeping the U.S. safe from future terrorist attacks. The new department would oversee a range of agencies, including those dealing with immigration — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB). With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security came an avalanche of federal funding.
- Spending on deportations
Immigration enforcement increased dramatically after September 11. Immigrant removals — including deportations and so-called voluntary departures — went from roughly 200,000 people in 2001 to nearly double that in 2011. One reason for the increase in deportations is the growth in the undocumented population.
- Removing criminals — even those we’re not worried about.
Many of those deported have never actually been convicted of a crime, since simply being charged with a crime is grounds for deportation. Of those who have been convicted, the crime may have been minor or non-violent, including a prior immigration infraction or drug possession.
President Obama: Deporter in Chief and the Backing of the 2009 Honduran Coup
President Obama holds the record for deporting more immigrants than any president, with 3 million deportations over eight years, this is how he earned the title of “Deporter in Chief” for some, though he scaled back enforcement in the last two years of his administration. This jump was made possible by Obama’s expansion of a Bush‐era program called Secure Communities (S-COMM). At first, this program allowed local police departments to cooperate voluntarily with the federal government on deportation. Obama made it mandatory for all states to cooperate. Obama’s policy was “Deport Felons, Not Families.”
On the morning of June 28th, 2009, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya Rosales was removed from his home by Honduran soldiers and was put on a plane to Costa Rica. This was the first successful coup of state backed by the U.S. in Latin America in the last 20 years. In 2010, Wikileaks released confidential documents, among these was a cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens in late July 2009, which analyzes the legality of the removal of Zelaya under the Honduran constitution. Llorens concluded that although Zelaya might “have committed illegalities and…even violated the constitution”, “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. The US Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan congressional committee, however found the interpretation and application of the Honduran constitution that led to the removal of Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales to be legal. Emails released afterwards detailed that the 2009 removal was supported by Hillary Clinton’s State Department by not recognizing it as a coup in order to maintain U.S. aid to Honduras. Clinton and her team worked behind the scenes to stall and successfully doing so, the military and economic efforts by neighboring countries through the Organization of American States to restore Manuel Zelaya to office.
“The coup preciated a rapid downward spiral that cast the Honduran people into a maelstrom of repression, violence, and increasing poverty. The post-coup regime destroyed the rule of law and gutted the country’s welfare state – indeed, the state itself.” – Dana Frank in her book The Long Honduran Night referring to the ramifications of the U.S. backed coup.
Trump Full Circle: The History Exists in the Political Discourse
To justify the anti-immigation policies noted above, first articulated by Candidate Trump, he characterized Mexican Immigrants as criminals and rapists. Trump also foregrounded the dangers of the “killer gang” MS-13, whose members, he claimed, invaded the United States by acrossing the southern border. Yet the inception of MS-13, which first appeared on the streets of Los Angeles, was formed by young Salvadorans who fled a country torn apart by civil war in the 1980s. Contrary to President Trump’s claim that MS-13 entered the U.S. illegally, MS-13 members were deported to Central America after the IIRIRA in 1996. The deportations from California jails to El Salvador, eventually spreading to Honduras, Guatemala and even Mexico. The 1990’s marked the beginning of gang violence and the drug trade in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Today, exploitations, corruption, the loss of democratic institutions and the rule of law, exacerbated by the coup in Honduras, the resource extraction in Guatemala, and the policies led by security discourses in El Salvador, constitute the main sources for out-migrations from those countries.
