 Immigration policy, we haven't talked about it in a long time. This is Jay Fidel, ThinkTech, and we're circling back for a badly needed update on immigration here in Community Matters with John Egan, who teaches at the law school and runs the immigration program there, and is an immigration lawyer for about 200 years now. Just about, a little bit on the long side, but just about, feels like that at least. Thank you for joining us, John. My pleasure. So, I mean, these little things pop up, little issues and outrageous pop up. Let me go through a list of them with you. One is, let's go on with hysterectomies. How is it possible that people who are essentially incarcerated can have forced or forced or misrepresented surgery? Well, it's obviously a violation of every possible patient's right issue you can imagine. But it just shows the contempt that this administration has for immigrants. If you're an immigrant and you are in their detention facility, there is nothing they cannot do to you. Not only have they figured out that it's okay to take away your children, now they can stop you from even having children. It's unthinkable, and yet it's real. Well, it's something out of World War II, something out of Dr. Mengele. And they can do this to you without your consent or by misrepresenting what they're doing to you, without any good reason or benefit to you in any way. And they do this while you're essentially being held as a prisoner. And you know what? I mean, it happens. It hits the press. There are some strident outrage statements about it. And then what? Nothing. The news cycle covers it over. Is anything happened? Well, there is a lawsuit that's underway, but you are exactly correct. I mean, they have still not resolved the question of all the children that they took away on the southern border. And that's two and a half years ago. There are still families who have not been reunited since that time. So you're absolutely right. The news cycle moves on. I still am of the opinion that this administration is using the shock and awe method. They just keep throwing bombs two or three every week. And at some point, it's impossible to keep up. Yeah. And they throw the bomb. The bomb does its thing. And then it moves on. So nobody remembers it. A lot of people, if you stop somebody in the street and said, well, what happened to the children? They wouldn't know. They wouldn't know how it was resolved, if at all, because it hasn't been in the news. But the fact is, thousands of these children are still at unknown whereabouts, right? I mean, is anybody counting? Well, no, that was the original problem, is that they were not keeping track. And that in itself is sort of an amazing thing. You know, Jay, I'm pretty sure you know that early in my career, I spent some time working for the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR. You can go on their website because they organized their operations so that anybody anywhere can get at the information they need. The kits are there with the little gizmos that you put on the child's wrist and embed a chip in there and the program for how you keep track of who's connected to who. That stuff is all available as mail order kits for humanitarian agencies. They didn't have access to that when they took the kids away from their parents. Are you joking me? That's not even thinkable. The tools are readily available. They didn't have to make anything up. The problem is, they had no intention of treating these people in a humanitarian way. And now they're being lost to their parents, maybe forever. Entirely possible. Because some of those parents have now been deported. You'll never see their kids again and their kids will not know who their parents are. Right. And remember that some of these people are being deported to places where their expectancy of life is pretty short. Yeah, cruel, cruel beyond description. More cruelty. What about DACA, the Dreamers? It was such a big deal in the press for a long time. Has that been resolved? Did the court say it was extended? What is the deal on DACA? Well, that's an interesting point. The Supreme Court said that it was arbitrary and capricious to try to end that program the way that the administration wanted to. And so they ordered, at least everybody that I can see who has read that opinion says, they reordered that program to go back to its original condition. That you cannot change that the way you've been trying to. USCIS has ignored that and has put in changes even since the Supreme Court's decision. They've said, no, we will not take in any new applications even if you are qualified under the structure as it exists. We will not accept any new applications. And they've taken those people who are in the program and have to renew every two years, and they said, well, now we're going to make you renew every year, which is just another bit of bureaucratic tangling that's going to cause more delays and more confusion and more expense because these people have to pay every time they make a new filing. So no, they haven't stopped trying to roll that back. We have a number of cases here in our law clinic with students and other young people around in the community. And everybody's scrambling to try to get their applications for renewal in because they just don't know when the door is going to close. Another travesty and a violation of the rule of law. And it's not just that it's a legal predicament. Remember that these are young people who are trying to start their lives or trying to get into careers. They're trying to finish their schooling, maybe start a family. How do you do that with this sort of uncertainty? It's really, really just as you say, a travesty. You said it as well as it can be said. And the emerging truth is that the hard policies, the ultra right wing racist policies that the administration and Donald Trump put into place back in 2017 are essentially all still there. There's been no softening at all, am I right? That's right. And they seem to be getting more and more aggressive every day. There was some footage making the circulations on social media just today of Donald Trump egging a crowd on to chant against refugees as a whole. I mean, as a group, I mean, how does that work out? Since when have refugees become the enemy of America? That's not how that's supposed to work. Give me your tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It brings tears to my eyes to think of the principle of the Statue of Liberty and what he's been doing. Well, and they had the audacity to say, well, that's not what that really means. I mean, their view is first that wasn't on the statue when it was first posted. Therefore, it's not legitimate. And that that's not really what that poem means. I mean, that's Chad Wolf, the fellow who is the head of DHS right now, talking about that. We talk about Chad Wolf for a minute. He seems to be a very inappropriate guy for the job. Well, he's completely unqualified and not just unqualified in the sense that he doesn't have experience running an agency as large as the agency they have put him in, which is absolutely true. He is not qualified, but he's also legally not qualified. He is not eligible for that job because of the chain of succession rules. He is not in the chain of succession. He is not legally appropriate for that job, and that has now been ruled on, and he's still there. I mean, what do they have to do to make it clear that this isn't how you should be running an agency that that's that important? You know, bad enough that Trump throws out anybody who opposes him or speaks against him. I mean, there's so many people. It's not dozens anymore. It's hundreds, but that he leaves people in office who the courts of rule shouldn't be there. Well, now that's both of them. That's the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, as well as the head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, Kuchinelli. Both are not qualified by law to be in the positions they're holding. But they're loyal to Trump and they do what he wants, and that's mostly this kind of racist, unprincipled view of immigration. And for that matter, Homeland Security. That's right. Let's go further down my list. The wall, okay? We had so much talk about the wall and the funding of the wall, and Mexico hasn't really paid a dime on the wall, and that was all strange puffing at the beginning anyway. But where is the wall? There are issues yet about the wall, and there haven't been many miles of wall anyway. And what was 60 minutes had a discussion about how there are drainage canals under the wall. Well, anybody could get through anyway. It's really a problem. And there's health issues all around those drainage canals. I've seen that that's a segment on 60 minutes. So what is the status of the wall? Is this real? Well, it's a real issue, but it isn't a real wall. I mean, there are barriers, and some of them seem to be effective, especially around the ports of entry. But the idea that we were ever going to build a wall that was going to seal the entire border was sort of a pipe dream from the beginning. There really was not anybody of any informed position who said, that's going to work. We know how to do that. Everybody who has any engineering qualifications or any geographical understanding of the terrain said, no, that don't even try. That can't work. And sure enough, it's not working. Everybody's now seen the film. You can take a reciprocating saw available at ACE hardware and cut your way through that fence. And I'm pretty sure they have ACE hardware in Mexico. It's not going to be a hard thing to come by. So that's just a bad thing. However, they've gone ahead now, as you're probably aware. They've just closed the border altogether, and they're using COVID-19 as the rationale. They're saying that because we don't know whether a person coming across the border is or isn't infected, that's a question of national security. And they're using the national security framework to declare an emergency and close the border. So that happened. The border is closed, but it's completely for some other reason. It's not related to anything that anybody has thought about or agreed upon. It's a false flag. They're flying a false flag and stopping the border traffic because of that. When you say close the border, I mean, we had this conversation when we tried to close the border earlier. And the pushback was, wait a minute, you have good economic reasons and trade. And there's 1,000 reasons to come across the border with Mexico. We've enjoyed passing over that border for hundreds of years. So what about the economic impact? What about the social impact of actually closing the border? Well, as you probably have seen and heard in the news media, the people on the border are not in favor of this whatsoever, particularly cities like El Paso, Texas and other borders. Those cities are really like the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. They're across the river, but they're really one metropolitan area and function as one economy. Children get up from their beds in Mexico and walk across the bridge to go to school in the United States. They go back home for lunch and come back for the afternoon classes. It's just an everyday kind of thing to move back and forth. To be interrupting that is just nonsensical. And even if you take it out from the social side, the other part is that there's a huge environmental question down there that this border obstruction is actually going to be going through wildlife reserve areas and cultural reserve areas. This is just nonsensical because it isn't going to stop traffic. People are going to come one way or another. And it hasn't stopped traffic. They've closed the border, but arrests on the U.S. side of the border have gone up in the last three months, month on month on month, more people are coming over. They're making all of these political moves to show that they're doing something, but the facts on the ground don't match what they're pretending to do. What about the facts on the Canadian border? Is that any different? Well, it's hugely different because we don't dislike Canadians. Why do I feel there's a racism element in that too? Bingo, Jay. I would say that that's dead on the money. I was in private practice in immigration for 20 odd years here in Honolulu. Unbeknownst to most people, we have a large number of illegal aliens in the Hawaiian islands from Canada. And why isn't that an issue? Because they kind of look like you and me. They speak native English. They intermarry with Americans and nobody thinks twice. Their kids go to our schools. They're out there in the surf lineup with everybody else. And nobody says, where is this guy from? Canada. It's kind of like part of us. But no, not the same for Mexico. I want you to know you're making me sad, but at the same time, I expected to be sad for this discussion, this update. Let's talk about corruption in the Department of Homeland Security and the immigration service. The immigration service was never all that clean. I guess you've had some observation of that over the years. But it seems poor now and Homeland Security seems poor. In fact, the government has not drained the swamp. It's created a new kind of swamp of perhaps a more outrageous swamp. Can we talk about the wall and Steve Bannon how he got into this multi-million dollar scam? Well, that's a pretty interesting story. I have actually seen some instances of corruption. We don't really see it here in the islands because we're pretty far from the center of all of that. I think our crew here is pretty clean as far as I can tell. But when you get out there where there's big temptations and drugs and human trafficking and all of those opportunities, well, there have been some really horrible stories about corruption, especially with customs and border protection on the Mexican border. That it's just been awful. The thing about Steve Bannon is that he just jumped on a bandwagon. A fellow started a website said, let's fund that wall. Send me your money and I'll make sure that Trump's wall gets built. And Steve Bannon joined up with him. The flow of money went up because now they had a public figure also validating this idea. And they're taking in millions of dollars and it was going south. And I do not mean going south to the border. I mean going south to their pocketbooks. And when they finally caught up with Steve Bannon to call him to account for this, well, he was on some Chinese billionaire's yacht floating out in the off the coast of the Atlantic making deals. And these are the people who are telling us that what we need to do is clean up Washington. Yeah, well, Bannon was in the White House under that rubric for at least a while. And we know now what kind of a guy he is. This is really felonious when he allegedly did. But let's talk about isolationism in general. I guess the border with China is still closed. And I guess the border with Europe is still closed. Can you talk about that? Well, isolationism is something that runs in the American bloodstream somehow. And every once in a while we seem to be reinfected with this idea. It never worked out. It's never been good for America. America is always best served by being interactive with the world. I would say more than interactive. We have a leadership role to play. And it's appalling that we would be standing back from that and allowing some kind of jingoistic point of view to hold us back from having the leadership role that we ought to be playing in world affairs. Right. So right now, because of COVID, pretty much immigration from Europe and from Asia are out of standstill. I think that that is serving the political agenda of the Trump administration. They want to be able to show their base that they have been effective at reducing numbers of people coming into the United States. And that's their game plan. That is completely okay with them. Makes no sense to the rest of the world, but it seems like it's perfectly okay with them. Yeah. Can we just divert to that for a minute? The base seems to be agreeing with all these policies. Somebody who is in the base will defend every single policy. I spoke to a Trumper a couple of days ago, and I was sad that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And his response to me was, oh, she really failed in her duty to the nation. What? What do you mean by that? Well, if she was ill, she should have resigned from the court a long time ago, instead of hanging around and just trying to delay Trump's next appointment. This was the day she died, John. So I found that people in the base will support every argument that Trump makes, however outrageous. Today, he's saying that he gives himself an A-plus on COVID. I said, well, okay, the entire base is now talking to each other and talking to Fox News and adopting that position, A-plus on COVID, which is just ridiculous. And so the same thing on immigration policy. And I guess my question to you is, how does the base feel about immigration policy, as one of the many things that Trump has been doing, which they will support every point we've been talking about? Am I right? The base supports that. And why? Well, you caught it earlier. You mentioned basically that there is a racial element in this, and I don't think you can get around that. You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has long been a friend to immigration. She was on the side of the decision to keep DACA in place. She also was opposed to putting the citizenship question on the census. Those are both recent things that she did in favor of the immigrant community. I think you know, one thing that she was also on the right side of the Oberfeld decision that endorsed same-sex marriages, which then had the immigration effect of allowing same-sex couples to sponsor their partners for immigration benefits. So she's been a longtime supporter of all of these sort of moves. I mean, honestly, I personally wish that she had retired when Barack Obama's friends asked her to. She was already in her 80s at that time, but that bridge is past. We crossed that a long time ago. We're in the situation we're in. And I think anybody who is trying to denigrate her legacy is really, you know, that's a pretty bad taste. What can you say? Well, let's talk about inside the country. We have the problem of the Latinos being pressured and threatened. And for example, through the census. And even if the census people don't want to talk about what has happened, we on the outside of the census know what happened and how the Trump administration has violated the law, violated court decisions about this. Where are we? I guess the most important question is, what effect does this kind of pressure on the Latinos have on their ability to vote and on their ability to participate in the economy? Well, I would say any attempt to reduce the count is going to have a disproportionate effect on minority communities. I mean, I think everybody understands that. That's why the census does what it does. Why would they want to interfere with that? Because they really do not want a clear picture of who's who, where are they from, and what are they doing in our economy? They don't really want to have that clear. Man, just think about it. They're just the way they're trying to discredit the electoral process. They're also trying to discredit the census process. Well, why wouldn't they when they have two senators from a state that has less than 500,000 people in it? You know, when you think about a place like Wyoming, there's more people on the big island than there are in Wyoming. Why don't we have two senators from the big island? And why do they both get to vote for the same party and keep out a democratic nominated Supreme Court justice? Since when does that make any sense? That's not democratic. The more we know about our country's demographics, the less pleased we're going to be with how it's being manipulated. That's how I see it. Well, it's not sustainable. In the end of the day, it's simply not sustainable. We've changed our complexion over the past few decades, and we better recognize that. Well, it's not only the complexion. There's another side of that that's also absolutely irrefutable is that we have seen it's a done deal that our country has urbanized. The major population centers are way more, there's more people to be represented in our urban centers than in the rural communities. Now, I think you have to give the rural communities some kind of voice, but you can't let the tail wag the dog, and that's what they want. Yeah. One very tragic piece of the Constitution is Article Five, which calls for the amendment of the Constitution, and it goes through all these procedures on how you can amend the Constitution. In the last phrase of it, there's a proviso. This is provided. You cannot amend this arrangement where we have two senators from every state, period. And you say, what does that mean? What do you have to do to amend a Constitution that says you can't amend it in that regard? So I hope we can get to the question, but it's a disappointment. I guess even constitutions get negotiated. Well, you would hope. Anyway, so internally, there was a whole thing about raids, raids on Latinos, raids on undocumented aliens. And there seemed to be an awful lot of them when the Trump administration took office. Have they continued? Are they still breaking the door down in the middle of the night looking and walking into places of business? To the extent there are still places of business, trying to arrest undocumented aliens? Well, actually, Jay, yes they are. Remember, the kind of businesses that are still open are precisely the kind of businesses that our undocumented population work in. Meat processing plants, poultry processing, agricultural products. That's where we have high numbers of undocumented migrants working for our economy. And yes, when the administration first came in, there were some big high-profile raids, and then they backed off a little bit. But just recently, and I do not doubt for a moment that you touching right on the purpose here, is this is to intimidate. They're looking at the Latino community and thinking how can we shake them up a little bit? And they have a pretty effective way of doing that. The other thing that springs to mind is back a couple years ago, DHS announced that they were not going to consider, I guess it was Trump, announced they were not going to consider any applicant for permanent residence if that individual used the social safety net or any of the benefits from the social safety net in living in this country. And query whether, you know, was that legal in the first place? Was it tested? And assuming it still exists, is it being enforced? Well, right now, this was proposed and the sort of framing that they put this into is that we shouldn't have immigrants coming into the country and becoming a public charge, the term that they use. And that makes perfect sense. I mean, we don't want to have people coming here for the purpose of collecting welfare checks. That makes no sense whatsoever. However, in the course of family life, you know, young couples coming here from another country, sometimes there are needs, and hopefully they're temporary, but, you know, in no way are we expecting immigrant families to let their children go hungry when there are benefits that would be available. And these are legal benefits. These are not benefits that anyone has broken any law or misrepresented in. These are benefits that by law they're entitled to. And now, the administration has set out a new set of rules and a whole bunch of long forms, you know, very invasive questions in the people's economic background and said, if you can't pass this test, you cannot come and stay in America. Well, yes, in fact, that was challenged and enjoined. There was a nationwide injunction, but that only lasted a matter of days before a judge reduced it down to the single court of appeals circuit that it was ushered under. I think that was the second circuit. But because there was so much confusion about it, the immigration service has withdrawn that form and that requirement. But whether or not that's a temporary withdrawal or whether they're going to reimpose it as soon as the coast is clear, certainly I would say that if we're looking at a second term for this administration, that will resurface. It's very interesting, you know, this form that they're talking about. One of the things they require is for immigrants to give up their Duns number, their Duns in Bradstreet or their credit history, give it submit a credit report with your application. Well, come on, you know, how many people, you know, how many people even have are aware that they have a credit history out there that's obtainable, much less are ready and able to access that and submit it. It's really, it's remarkably invasive and very burdensome. You know, this morning I saw that Trump, or rather William Barr, his attorney general, the emphasis on the word his attorney general identified several American cities as anarchist cities. That's unprecedented in every way, but I wonder if you have any thoughts, maybe it's too early to have these thoughts, but if you have any thoughts on whether that would affect the lives of immigrants in those cities? Well, it's no coincidence that when they sent out federal agents to Seattle, for example, to confront demonstrators on the street, that those federal agents were from the immigration enforcement agencies. And you have to ask yourself, why are immigration enforcement agents confronting US citizens on the streets? I don't have an answer for that. I've always understood that immigration agents deal with immigrants and they leave US citizens alone. But there you are. It absolutely is an intimidation sort of tactic. And I really don't think that we are, I don't think we're immune to that. I think we're going to see more of that. And I think that unless there's a change of administration, this is not going to get better in the short term. Shades of the brown shirts. So one last question, John, before we have to go. And that is, what about immigration lawyers? Because the practice of immigration law was one thing prior to this administration. And I would guess that it's quite a different thing now since this administration. In view of all these points you and I have been talking about. Well, I have to tell you that I'm feeling a little bit sequestered now that I'm working at the university pretty much full time. You know, I feel kind of okay. But I'm looking around at some of my colleagues and some of them are seriously believing this. The number of denials on basic immigration applications has gone sky high. Every application that you send in gets one or two requests for additional evidence and challenges. It makes it hard to make a living. And it makes it hard to represent that you know your field when your field changes every single day. If you're not watching this stuff very closely, you're simply not going to be able to give your client sound advice. So there is this sort of being slightly shell shocked view that is what I'm hearing from my colleagues. People are hard pressed to get through the day with a good attitude. Well, we talked before about, you know, the suggestion. This is so many of these things are travesties. But I come away from this discussion, John, with another similar word and that is tragedy. I think it's a national tragedy. And that's what it adds up to. And it's going to continue as long as this administration is in power. I fear you're right. I fear that you are exactly correct. And honestly, especially in light of current events, I think it's going to get somewhat worse before we see any turn for the better. Thank you, John Egan immigration lawyer, teacher, organizers. So nice to talk to you. I hope we can come back and catch up with you again. Well, I hope that we have a brighter topic to talk about next. The same here, John. Okay, aloha.