Kicking People Out of the Country

Amid the swirl of attention brought on by Li'l Donnie Trump's temper tantrum in his meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and recent developments with Robert Mueller's investigation with Trump's former attorney and fixer Micheal Cohen actually going to jail, it is worth remember that Trump and his minions are still trying to get things done to benefit the moron in chief.  

Nothing makes Li'l Donnie happier than kicking people out of the country. Get a load of this shit.  

The Trump administration is  looking to deport  Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades; many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.

The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are “violent criminal aliens.” But Washington and Hanoi have a unique 2008 agreement that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.

The White House unilaterally reinterpreted this agreement in the spring of 2017 to exempt people convicted of crimes from its protections, allowing the administration to send a small number of pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants back, a policy it retreated from this past August. But Trump is reversing course again, acting on the view that the 2008 agreement fails to protect pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants from deportation.


When it first decided to reinterpret the 2008 deal, Donald Trump’s administration argued that only pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions were exempt from the agreement’s protection and eligible for deportation. Vietnam initially conceded and accepted some of those immigrants before stiffening its resistance; about a dozen Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported from the United States. 

The latest shift now leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt. Now no pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection. That means all such people are subject to standard immigration law, rendering them eligible for deportation.

Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs on the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities, such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.

The idea that the Montagnards may be caught in the net of Trump's virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies is particularly problematic for me. My church has been very involved in helping Montagnard refugees start a new life in the United States, safe from persecution for the Christian faith. The Montagnards are kind, friendly and they work hard to make a new life for themselves here in America.  

Some of the older members of the church who I know helped with Montagnard resettlement are also Trump supporters. There is some small amount of amusement at the prospect of watching their heads explode trying to reconcile that contradiction. Let me take off my "church hat" and put on my "blogger hat" and say, "Fuck you if didn't see this coming!"   

I can't help but think that the current renewed fixation to resume this deportation of  Vietnamese immigrants who have lived here for decades is to appease Trump who is in a bad mood and needs something to brighten his day.