Fighting words

Lucia Barragan, a UTRGV nursing sophomore, said President Donald Trump should be more careful with his comments.

“I think he needs to sit down with someone who actually knows what they are doing,” Barragan said, referring to Trump’s tweets on April 1. “Although, it seems a little bit impossible, it affects a lot of people and we need those people here because they are the whole foundation of America.”

“Trump I: Money and Propaganda,” the first of a two-part event organized by the UTRGV Department of Philosophy, will take place from 12:15 to 1:20 p.m. Thursday in Education Complex 1.102 on the Edinburg campus.

“Trump II: Voices of the Valley” will take place at the same time and location on April 24.

Mariana Alessandri, a UTRGV philosophy professor and the moderator for the presentation, said the purpose of the event is to “get experts in the community to share their knowledge with our students about Trump’s policies on immigration.”

“It’s mostly geared to our students because I think that they sometimes don’t know what is going on in their communities,” Alessandri said. “So, the idea is to bring the community inside the university to talk to our students, so that our students can get involved if they want to.”

The four community organizations that will participate in this event are the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, Neta (a bilingual multimedia platform based in the Rio Grande Valley), Humanitarian Respite Center and La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE).

The community organizations expected to attend might change, according to Alessandri.

She said the main question to be answered by these groups is how have Trump’s immigration policies affected the Valley.

Both events are free and open to the public.

On April 1, Trump tweeted that there would be “NO MORE DACA DEAL!”

“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,” Trump posted on Twitter. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”

Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018

Trump published this hours after he had tweeted “HAPPY EASTER!”

Last September, Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an executive order by then-President Barack Obama that protected nearly 800,000 people.

DACA provides young people who were brought illegally to the United States as children with temporary protection from deportation if they can demonstrate that they meet several criteria, according to whitehouse.gov.

On Jan. 13, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services started to allow DACA recipients to apply for renewals due to a federal court order.

“Due to a federal court order, USCIS has resumed accepting requests to renew a grant of deferred action under DACA,” the USCIS posted on its website. “Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017.”

Barragan said the DACA program should not be ended.

“Some people come here to pursue more opportunities, a better life, new chances,” she said. “If America claims to be the country where you can have all these chances, but they are taking it away, then what exactly do you have? Now, you can’t succeed without the immigrants that bring their part to this country. They are not just here living life. They are actually working and putting everything they have on their work or studies. If we take that away, then that means that they basically have to go back and restart from zero.”

Mark Kaswan, a UTRGV political science professor, said it is difficult to know how seriously people should take Trump’s comments.

“Donald Trump came into office thinking that he could issue orders and that they would be followed and that he could basically rule by himself. It does not work that way,” Kaswan said. “He came into office very ignorant about the process of governing and he remains very ignorant about how our government works. So, I think his tweet more than anything else was an expression of frustration. … So, when things don’t turn out the way he wants them to turn out, then, he lashes out.”

He said to some extent Trump’s tweets depend on whom he has talked to most recently.

“Tomorrow, maybe he’ll happen to talk to, who knows, [U.S. Sen.] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] or someone who thinks that DACA is a good thing and he will come out and say something completely different,” Kaswan said.

He also said the tweets make people feel afraid and uncomfortable.

“On the other side, it encourages people who are racists and nativists to continue or expand their attacks,” Kaswan said. “Certainly, with things like his claim about the caravan of immigrants … he actively promotes misinformation. Again, his supporters eat it up and they love it, and they think it is wonderful. Another side of this is that Trump has been criticized on the right for what they think is softness on immigration. And so, in part, he is responding to that criticism.”

He said the effect on the immigrant community is negative and promotes fear and distrust.

During the first three months of 2018, 55,125 initial and renewal applications were approved by USCIS. As of now, 51,118 applications are pending and only 3,929 have been denied, according to a quarterly report published by USCIS.

A copy of this report is available at www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-studies/immigration-forms-data/data-set-form-i-821d-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals.

Trump also posted a tweet that same day, April 1, threatening to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying that Mexico is not doing enough to stop the flow of immigration.

“Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!”

Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018

Kaswan said ending NAFTA would not be as easy as just saying, “That’s it. NAFTA is over. We are pulling out of the treaty.”

“Trump is just not very well-informed about the political process and how things work,” he said. “He may have substantial administrative authority to effectively end the agreement, but my sense is that it is not so easy.”

Alessandri said students should attend the presentations because there will be voices from the community.

“These are community activists. These are nonprofit groups,” she said. “Sometimes students, because they are on campus, they might not know what is going on in the community. So, they should attend them to hear from … community organizations talking about their experience working with the population affected by Trump’s policies.”

Asked whether people should be worried about Trump’s tweets, Kaswan replied, “Yes and no.”

“On the one hand, they seem like immature ravings of a deranged man,” he said. “On the other hand, he is president.”

He compared the situation with an old man standing before a mountain and yelling at it.

“The metaphor kind of works because the government, to an extent … is a huge edifice and it’s, for the most part, quite solid,” Kaswan said. “By the same token, his yelling can scare a lot of people and if he yells loud enough, then the rocks may start to come loose and come tumbling down and crush everything.”

He said what matters is not what Trump says but how people and the media respond to it.