Immigration Court Spotlights ‘Legal Hell’ Of U.S. Deportation System
By Bill Boyarsky for Truth Dig - I spent four days in immigration court recently as I began reporting on how President Trump’s nativist immigration policy, favoring native-born Americans, is reaching down to the street level. Contempt for immigrants was at the heart of his presidential campaign, and it remains a cornerstone of his domestic policy, whether the immigrants are from Muslim countries or are from Mexico and Central America. The United States is a nation of immigrants, founded and shaped by them, an idea so ingrained in the national psyche that it is almost a cliche. So is opposition to them, from the 19th century and the Know Nothing Party to Donald Trump. But the immigrants—Germans, Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews and many others—survived and prospered. “The migration of foreign peoples to the United States has been one of the most significant transformation processes in American history,” Erika Lee writes in her review of Roger Daniels’ book “Guarding the Golden Door.” Personally, I root for the immigrants. I see them as America’s future, a feeling reinforced most recently while I watched journalism students, children or grandchildren of immigrants, from Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles’ heavily Latino Boyle Heights. They were learning the best way of using their mobile phones to cover their community and transmit the news stories they dig up.