New immigration rules target pregnant women and immigration advocates

Pregnant women are the latest targets of Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies. The administration also wants to make it harder for immigrants or refugees to find legal help.

The Trump administration on Thursday published new visa rules aimed at restricting "birth tourism", in which women travel to the United States to give birth so their children can have a coveted US passport.

“This ugly development is ultimately an issue of racial profiling of Asians. The Trump administration will go to any lengths to demean immigrant women. Millions of Asian people come to the U.S. to visit their families and targeting them because of their race or country of origin is discriminatory and wrong," said National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum Executive Director Sung Yeon Choimorrow in a statement.

As an immigrant woman who has experienced harassment at an airport when I was pregnant, this incident and the administration’s rule are disturbing, invasive, and reveal the coercive and invasive methods that our government will use to enforce the new rule," Choimorrow's statement continued.

"This administration has a track record of detaining pregnant people and has made it impossible for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to seek asylum. There is no justification for the harm they have done to immigrant women or for their xenophobic agenda.”"

Visa applicants will be denied tourist visas if they are determined by consular officers to be coming to the US primarily to give birth, according to the rules in the Federal Register. It is a bigger hurdle to overcome, proving they are traveling to the US because they have a medical need and not just because they want to give birth in the country, according to Al Jazeera.

Trump's administration has attempted to restrict most forms of immigration. Birthright citizenship, which is embedded in the US Constitution - anyone born in the US is considered a citizen. Trump has threatened to go against the Constitution in order to end that right, but scholars and members of his administration have said it is not so easy to do.

Consular officials be placed in a nearly impossible position of having to visually determine if a woman is pregnant because they are not allowed to asked a visa applicant if she is pregnant.

Trump also wants to make it illegal to offer legal help when people have problems with immigration rules or their status in the US, 

Advancing Justice | AAJC (Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC) filed an amicus brief Jan. 22 before the Supreme Court in United States v. Sineneng-Smith to urge the Court to strike down a federal statute that makes it a felony to “encourage or induce” individuals to enter or remain in the U.S. unlawfully.

This statute has the potential to chill the everyday work of immigrants’ rights advocates and service providers who often assist undocumented individuals, their families, and their communities. The brief was joined by 33 community-based, advocacy, and social services organizations.

“This statute threatens everyday interactions with immigrants and people advocating on behalf of them because any speech that could be construed as helping an immigrant stay in the United States would be seen as a violation of the law,” said Niyati Shah, assistant director of legal advocacy at Advancing Justice | AAJC. 

“In a time where there is already so much fear, immigrant communities and their advocates should be able to receive legal help and information without fear that such help will subject them to prosecution.”

2019 Review: Trump immigration policies shake up, wake up Asian Americans

If there is one thing that the diverse AAPI communities have in common, it is their almost universal opposition to the persistent attempts of the White House-driven policies intending to reduce immigration from Asia.

"The administration has literally every month enacted new fundamental restrictions on the rights of immigrants, and in particular, the rights of asylum-seekers at the border," the ACLU's immigration specialist Lee Gelernt told CBS News.

While the dire conditions at the US-Mexico border receives most of the media attention, immigration from Asia, now the source of most of US-bound immigrants, is affected by the hardline policies proposed by the Trump administration.

These policies or proposals include:

• The end of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in which thousands of AAPI young people who were brought into the US illegally by their parents. DACA allows them to stay and work in the US where they were raised

• A reduction of who qualifies as family threatens to separate siblings and parents of new immigrants. About 70% to 80% of Asian immigrants come to the US through family-based immigration.

• Rules to look into would-be immigrants' social media use to make sure they are not anti-Trumpers;

• A measure to make sure that visa applicants would not be a financial burden to the US by becoming a "public charge," by using any form of government assistance including SSI, food stamps or a school's free lunch program;

• Raising the fees -- almost double -- for greencard holders to become citizens;

• New limits of H1-B visas that allows workers with special skills needed in the US, to move to head of immigration que; and student visas that permit foreign students to study here and in many cases, after their studies, remain in the US;

• The deportation of refugees from Southeast Asia refugees who might have run afoul of the law for even minor infractions such as a DUI or possession of small amounts of marijuana. Although they served their sentences, ICE often awaits to detain them as soon as they step out of jail;

• And for good measure -- perhaps simply because a rule was approved by President Obama -- the administration seeks to eliminate the so-called parole program that allowed family members to join and care for elderly Filipino WWII vets who were granted US citizenship.

Although most of policies have been mired in the court system because of legal challenges filed by various states and immigration advocates, the government keeps appealing them hoping that they will eventually make their way to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

Many people believe, including AAPI members of Congress, slowing the numbers of immigrants of color to keep America white, is at the heart of the Trump anti-immigrant policies. Hundreds of congressmembers have written a letter asking Trump to fire Stephen Miller, the alleged white supremacist who is the mastermind behind the reforms restricting immigration.  

"What has been going on at the border is so visual and so visceral that I think it's the thing that has absolutely dominated everybody's attention with respect to immigration issues," León Rodríguez, the last U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director under President Obama, told CBS News. "A lot of these other issues are very bureaucratic, very technical but very impactful for the families that are affected."

"The overall thrust of what the administration has been doing is pretty much at every turn to restrict immigration, both in terms of the overall numbers of people who are able to acquire immigration benefits, but also as to any individual applicant or petitioner, to make it infinitely more difficult for them to attain those benefits," Rodríguez said.


2019 REVIEW 
Part 1: AAPI political visibility explodes on nat'l scene
Part 2: Affirmative action debate exposes schism in Asian American community
Part 4: Hollywood 'discovers Asians