The Deportation Nation policy continues

This is an encouraging report on two Protestant pastors who are providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, Jacqueline García, Una casa religiosa en L.A. se torna santuario para inmigrantes La Opinión 01.03.2017.

They are part of the immigrant-support network Rapid Response Team (Grupo de Respuesta Rápida). CNN also reports on the same story in a piece with the melodramatic title, Underground network readies homes to hide undocumented immigrants by Kyung Lah 02/26/52017.

Adele Stan highlights the xenophobic emphasis of Trump's speech on Tuesday, reminding us of how it meshes with his Islamophobia (No, Trump’s Address to Congress Wasn’t ‘Presidential’ The American Prospect 03/01/2017):

But with his speech, Trump again called for the deportation of millions of Americans, falsely claimed that only immigrants who committed crimes were being thrown out of the United States, promised a massive increase in military spending, and exploited the pain of a family grieving the loss of Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens, Navy SEAL, in a raid gone awry in Yemen, which the president deemed to have been a great success, despite the killing of civilians in its execution. Earlier in the day, the president seemed less certain of the mission’s glory, blaming the loss of Owens’s life on “the generals.” Trump must have been profoundly irked when Bill Owens, the slain SEAL’s father, told the Miami Herald that he had declined to receive Trump when the president requested to meet Owens at Dover Air Force Base, where they had each come to witness the arrival of the younger Owens’s body.

Bill Owens told the Herald’s Julie K. Brown that he was deeply offended by Trump’s treatment of another Gold Star family—the parents of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 in Iraq. The late captain’s father, Khizr Khan, addressed the Democratic National Convention, demanding that Trump read the U.S. Constitution before pledging to ban Muslims from entering the country. (The Khans are Muslim.)

She also comments on Trump's attack on sanctuary for immigrants in his Tuesday speech:

The narrative created for the president by chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and his deputy, Sean Miller (the two are reported to have written the speech) also squared nicely with Trump’s frequent demonization of Muslims, painting all with a terrorist brush. What Bannon and Miller lack in rhetorical artistry was matched for the speech’s sinister arrangement of words, as when the president said, “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”

By deploying the term “sanctuary” in the context of terrorism, Trump conflated the dangers he says are posed by undocumented immigrants with those posed by thee maybe-terrorists his travel ban ostensibly targets.
The term “sanctuary,” of course, has been much in the news as of late, thanks to Trump’s constant attacks on “sanctuary cities”—municipalities that have declared that they will not contribute resources to federal efforts designed to deport undocumented immigrants. By deploying the term “sanctuary” in the context of terrorism, Trump conflated the dangers he says are posed by undocumented immigrants with those posed by thee maybe-terrorists his travel ban ostensibly targets. Neat trick.

The president also used the grief of families to paint undocumented immigrants, en masse, as murderers, having invited to the chamber the families of people who had lost their lives at the hands of criminals who had crossed the border. While Trump claimed that his deportation orders only target the “bad ones,” some 25 percent of those deported since Trump took office, according to PolitiFact, had no criminal records. [my emphasis in boldDepo]