By Hannah Nightingale – The Postmillennial
Progressive magazine The Nation has called for President Joe Biden to issue a blanket pardon for all illegal immigrants in the United States ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second presidential term. Trump has vowed to enact mass deportations under his term to in response to the record levels of illegal immigration the US has seen under the Biden-Harris administration.
After noting pardons of previous administrations, including Trump’s pardons and the proposed preemptive pardons for Biden to issue for “lawmakers and officials deemed enemies of the MAGA movement,” The Nation DC Bureau Chief Chris Lehmann wrote, “So let me float a modest proposal: To redeem the use of the pardon power, Biden should disburse it far and wide.”
“One obvious use of it, which would yield robust moral and political benefits, would be to grant a preemptive pardon to undocumented (and documented) immigrants now facing the prospect of indiscriminate mass deportation when Trump takes office next month—people who entered the country illegally within the last 20 years, who are currently awaiting an asylum decision, or are under the age of 12,” Lehmann wrote, noting that the idea was encountered on Blueksy.
He wrote that special consideration should be taken for those who received Temporary Protected Status, including those in the “Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, relentlessly demonized by the Trump campaign,” because Trump is “bound to try to abolish the TPS program as he moves forward on mass deportations.”
Lehmann added that while “this would be an effective way to throw up major obstacles to its enforcement at the outset” for Democrats, “the strategy could prove legally fruitless over the long haul, particularly as Trump can count on a MAGAfied federal court system to shore up his phony, jury-rigged argument that an immigrant “invasion” warrants expansive emergency war-power measures from the executive.”
The plan to mass deport illegal immigrants “is indeed a dramatic and inestimably damaging lurch toward fascism,” he wrote, and “a mass pardon for immigrants imperiled by this horrific escalation of Trump’s xenophobic predations would mark a long-overdue clean break with the Democrats’ craven and unimaginative collaboration with draconian border policies designed to stoke unfounded moral panics and political revenge fantasies on the right, as well as supplying a bulwark of support for taxpaying workers in this country menaced by brown-shirt raids dispatched from Washington.”
Lehmann noted that the legal grounds for such pardons are “shaky” as “unlawful presence” is a civil offense, while presidential pardons only apply to criminal offenses.
“It’s no doubt far too late in the game for Joe Biden to be bold and imaginative under his own steam in the cause of immigration justice—so let him cite the old Beltway saw of bipartisan accord in the spirit of an immigration reform he voted for nearly 40 years ago,” Lehmann concluded. “But most of all, let him use the long-discredited power of the pardon for the democratic protection of a huge population of workers poised to be unjustly demonized and banished from the country in a burst of fascist retribution. And let the Democratic Party stir back to life on that bold precedent.”