Jun 23, 2018
Where We Started vs Where We End Up
We started this week with news of the government separating children from those who illegally crossed the U.S. southern border and ended the week with new orders by the government to reunite them.
A lot happens in a week.
How did we arrive at this point?
For a better understanding, let's travel back in time.
The government says illegal border crossings spiked in March – so
what happened before/after that?
The President announced in his January State of The Union he was
open to granting citizenship to a select group of young adults
brought into the country illegally as children as long as that
policy change was part of immigration reform that
included money to build a border wall. He set an arbitrary
deadline for March 5 for
Congress to compromise; that didn't happen. Weeks later, in
late March, during Congress' spending bill debate, the
opportunity to legislate new immigration reform surfaced
again.
No compromise.
No citizenship.
No money for a wall.
But construction started on a fence
that looked very much like a wall.
And a caravan of asylum seekers arrived at
the border – one of them a former Honduran politician fleeing
a politically unstable country.
Chief of the Rio Grande Valley sector for Customs and Border
Control told Reuters in early April he worried the caravan would
inspire others to do the same.
Fast forward to today, the Trump administration will confront a
similar legal battle the Obama Administration
confronted (and as one legal expert says, every
administration confronted before them). A little-known court ruling
that prevents the U.S. government from holding minor
migrant children more than 20 days. – normally not long enough for
legal proceedings – one of the reasons why DHS says 500,000
families from central America have stayed in the U.S. since
2013.
But traditions change.
This week in news we learned:
Baseball attendance mysteriously drops.
Marijuana laws may
ease.
Americans will soon spend more time online than watching TV.
An American tradition we can depend on? The same country that
blasts people into space, combats the plague, and gives more than 400B to charity, still fights
over unresolved issues.
But the diversity of our accomplishments should show us, what seems
impossible, may be the next big headline.
We’ll watch for it - Have a great weekend!
Jenna & The SmartHER Squad