The President working for a better America
The New York Times
David Leonhardt
31 August, 2018,
| In early 2011, Donald Trump began doing two things: trying to raise his profile among influential Republicans and publicly spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (You can read more of the history in this Times news story, as well as this one.) |
| So from the very beginning, a false claim about a dark-skinned American not really being an American has been central to Trumpism. Now, the idea appears to have become part of federal policy. |
| Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post reported this week that a growing number of Latino citizens in Texas were having their citizenship questioned and being denied passports. “The Trump administration,” Sieff writes, “is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.” |
| It is a chilling story, and it’s one that should not be allowed to disappear amid all of the tumult of Trump’s presidency. I can’t think of anything as profoundly un-American as denying rights to citizens based on their ethnicity. |
| Congress should hold hearings, as Democrats called for yesterday. I also hope Sieff and other journalists will stay on the story. The Trump administration claims that it has not changed any policies and is simply continuing an effort by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to crack down on forged birth certificates. But Sieff reported that cases he reviewed, along with comments by immigration lawyers, suggested “a dramatic shift.” |
| Social media was full of reaction to the story on Wednesday: |
| “I don’t shock easily these days, but this is shocking,” my colleague Paul Krugman tweeted. |
| “Birtherism is now federal policy,” wrote Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Anyone who is not white is suspected of not being a real American.” |
| “Every single action from the Trump administration is compatible with a view that nonwhites are presumed foreign & incompatible with American-ness, to the point where the administration seeks to strip citizenship from U.S-born Americans of Hispanic descent,” Jamelle Bouie of Slate wrote. |
| Heidi Przybyla of NBC News said American citizens of Yemeni descent have also had their rights denied and are now “trapped in Yemen,” unable to return. |