Nearly all the immigration policies the Trump administration has put in place are not only inhumane, but also violations of the United States’ own asylum laws and international protocols on asylum to which the U.S. is a signatory. What then are those policies? And what do we do about them? US policy says that any “alien” who is physically present in the US, whatever their status, may apply for asylum. The UN defines a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future due to race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
Thousands of papers that the Washington Post sued the government for, then released last December, show that the official narrative behind the Afghanistan War, the longest in US history, has been a constant lie. Some 2,400 American soldiers have been killed and more than 20,000 wounded in the conflict. General Douglas Lute, Afghan War czar for Presidents Bush and Obama, is quoted as saying the US “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Yet, the Afghanistan Papers have not provoked nearly the same outrage as the 1971 Pentagon Papers that exposed US government lies about the Vietnam War. Where is the outrage?
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