Deportation of undocumented immigrants’ U.S. citizen family members. An attempt to end birthright citizenship. A possible eventual solution for Dreamers.
President-elect Donald Trump put all of these on the table in a wide-ranging "Meet the Press" interview with Kristen Welker yesterday, reports Allan Smith of NBC News.
Asked specifically about the estimated 4 million American families with different immigration statuses, Trump said, "I don’t want to be breaking up families. So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back."
The president-elect said he would try to use executive action to end birthright citizenship, which Smith points out "would be certain to spark immediate legal challenges." Trump suggested that birthright citizenship makes the U.S. an outlier, to which we’d say: Exactly. It’s also constitutional, and don’t go messing with success.
Meanwhile, state and community advocates are preparing immigrant communities, including in the Kansas City area (Eric Adler, The Kansas City Star), Utah (Tim Vandenack, KSL.com) and California (Alyssa Goard, NBC Bay Area).
Mixed-status families and people with temporary statuses are among those preparing themselves in case a family member is arrested and deported, report Michelle Hackman and Elizabeth Findell of The Wall Street Journal.
Welcome to Monday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I’m Dan Gordon, the Forum’s strategic communications VP. The great Forum Daily team also includes Jillian Clark, Soledad Gassó Parker, Camilla Luong, Clara Villatoro and Becka Wall. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].
REFUGEES — The United States resettled 7,162 refugees in November, a slight decrease from October. Our policy expert Dan Kosten notes that resettlement in the next two months is important, given Trump’s promise to pause refugee admissions. Faith groups are trying to help, an NPR team reports. And in a guest essay in The New York Times, Viet Thanh Nguyen urges us to recognize that refugees’ and migrants’ fates are tied to our own and that a brighter future is possible for everyone.
UNDERCOUNT — The United States and Mexico are underreporting deaths along the Rio Grande, a team at The Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports and El Universal Newspaper report. Journalists collected death records from every Texas county and Mexican state along the Rio Grande since 2017, showing that 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river between 2017 and 2023, including a rising number of women and children. A separate academic study indicates an undercount of deaths in Arizona, reports Albinson Linares of NBC News (and, earlier, J.D. Long García of America magazine).
EXCHANGE VISITORS — An update to the J-1 Exchange Visitors Skills List from the U.S. State Department may mean fewer scientists are forced to leave the country, writes Stuart Anderson in Forbes. Experts Anderson interviewed say the visa will be a viable option for international workforce development, especially with fewer people having to leave the U.S. for two years as part of the program.
FOR SECURITY AND OUR SOULS — Solutions to immigration challenges come "not in walls or raids but in updating our laws to match reality while upholding our highest principles," Nevada lawyer and pastor Jason D. Guinasso writes in a Nevada Independent op-ed. " ... With wisdom, good faith and commitment to our laws and values, we can create immigration policies that work for our security, our economy, our communities and our souls," he writes.
