John Oliver on Trump immigration policies: ‘Truly disciplined about being truly evil’

The “Remain in Mexico” program, for example, has forced asylum seekers to await judgments from deliberately backlogged immigration courts in makeshift, inadequate and unsafe refugee camps in Mexico. Conditions are often unsanitary and unsafe; as of May, there were at least 1,114 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults on migrants sent back to Mexico unnecessarily by the US.

Kidnappings are such a fact of life, Oliver added, that cartels will give some people a codename upon release to indicate, if they were captured again, that they had already paid a ransom. “It’s pretty bleak when drug cartels have a more efficient system for keeping track of asylum seekers than the US government,” Oliver said.

Many migrants relegated to Mexico have missed their asylum hearings in the US, a fact the acting homeland security secretary and “human razor burn” Chad Wolf attributed to “walking away” from not having a “meritorious claim”.

“These hearings are migrants’ only shot at getting to safety; it’s everything they’ve been waiting for, and if they miss their hearing, they lose their case,” Oliver retorted. “So a person not showing up in court after you forced them to wait in a dangerous area without adequate shelter or support isn’t proof they were trying to cheat the system. It’s proof your system is not fucking working.”

The government hasn’t made the hearings easy to attend; immigration attorneys have reported hearings scheduled for outside court hours and notices without date or time. Basically, “the government system is about as effective as painting ‘meet us at the place’ on a raccoon and just throwing it over the wall into Mexico”, Oliver said. “Good luck getting the instructions, and if you do, good luck figuring out how to follow them.”

And then there’s Title 42, a provision outside immigration code that gives the federal government broad power to act during a public health crisis. The Trump administration, citing the coronavirus pandemic, has invoked Title 42 to close the border and eject migrants with pending applications in what Oliver called “a transparent attempt to exploit this pandemic to do whatever they want with migrants”.

“Invoking Title 42 has basically created a shadow deportation system that moves quickly and is accountable to no one,” Oliver added; since March, there have been 197,371 expulsions of asylum seekers, without a successful court hearing.

The system, Oliver concluded, is “shattered”, and potentially solidifying, as the Trump administration aims to make Title 42 permanent, drafted new regulations to reject asylum requests outright and redesigned the application process in English, with impossibly tight deadlines.

For those despairing, Oliver concluded, “there is actually one thing you can do: you can vote for Joe Biden”.

Although the American immigration system has been “pretty shitty under Democratic administrations too, like the one Joe Biden was in for eight years” and Biden isn’t “the perfect candidate” (Oliver found his stance against Medicare for All “utterly ridiculous” and “aviator glasses should only be worn by hot pilots, cute babies and cute baby pilots”), Biden has promised to end the Remain in Mexico policy and restore asylum eligibility for domestic violence survivors and victims of gang persecution.

“The fact is, a lot of our immigration policy is set solely by the executive branch,” Oliver concluded. “We can’t begin to fix the damage done by this administration until we replace the administration itself.”