On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump took office in the American government. Since then, his mandate has been seen as anti-democratic and anti-liberal by many, both world-wise as well as for the American citizens. The immigrant and transgender population has been the most affected by Trump’s changes, until now, in the country.
What is happening to the immigrant population in the U.S?
In his first day as President, Trump issued a series of executive orders, ten of those impacting the immigrant population in the USA territory.
Trump has ordered that entries anywhere along the US-Mexico border are suspended, alongside with the help that these people had from agencies that help immigrants. The “Remain in Mexico” program, that forces people seeking a better life in the USA to stay in dangerous life scenarios in Mexico, has returned. The app “CBP One” that helped asylum-seekers make an appointment to the U.S, created during Biden’s government, has been revoked. The removal of the app resulted in the cancellation of the appointments of 30,000 people who were waiting for months to guarantee a legal stay in the country. The Secretary of State is also forcing people to look for asylum in other countries, alongside so many other orders that impact very horribly the immigrant population in the United States territory.
There is something else that has been catching the new’s – and people’s – eyes: Guantánamo Bay. That place is a prison located in Cuba and it was created in 2002 by a former president of the U.S, George W. Bush. The installation was known to contain terrorists and now is being expanded to become a detention facility for immigrants considered dangerous, according to President Trump.
That is, the new president is choosing to keep in prison people who were previously in deplorable situations in their native countries or that had already established a more decent life in the United States. There are people who have been for 30 years in the U.S that are now being sent to Guantánamo Bay; these people are not criminals, just immigrants.
According to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at MPI, immigrants in the United States commit crimes at a lower scale than the population born in the U.S. “Some of them (immigrants) are so bad that we don’t even trust [other] countries to stop them, because we don’t want them to come back. So let’s send them to Guantánamo Bay”, said Donald Trump. Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s President, said that Trump’s announcement was an “act of brutality”.
Donald Trump’s supporters use the fact that Obama‘s government was the time that immigrants were most deported as an argument. But president Obama was able to do something that Trump doesn’t even bother to try: search every single immigrant who committed a crime in their native country or in the U.S, after their immigration, and only deport these people. While Obama understands that not every immigrant is a criminal, Trump says that they all are delinquents: “The largest mass deportation operation in history is going on. Promises made. Promises fulfilled.”, said the Secretary of State.
The LGBTQIAPN+ community is being utterly and totally violated
The LGBTQIAPN+ is another community that has been seriously attacked by Trump’s actions. One of his first actions was to order that the State only reconizes two genders, cisgender women and cisgender men. Hunter Schafer, an American actress, posted a very emotional video on Tiktok in which she said that her new passport had her biological gender instead of the one she identifies as. Hunter is a 26 year old trans woman that started her transition journey when she was 14 years old, and now, almost 10 years ahead, she is going through a nightmare. All the fight that she has ever stood for is being discredited.
In one of his first days as President, Trump prohibited trans women from serving their sentences in women’s prisons. A few days later – on the 28th of january -, the President signed an executive order that forbade people who are less than 19 years old from gender transitioning.
From now on, trans people can’t be in the Army either. “To ensure that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, we will remove the infernal transgender ideology from our Armed Force”, said Donald Trump. He also prohibited trans women and girls to practice or participate in sports events, even in schools and colleges. This executive order also covers the entry of trans gender women that have the goal of participating in female sports events into the country. “For a lot of students, sports are about finding a place where they can belong. We should want this for all children – not partidary politics that make life even harder for them”, said Kelly Robinson, President of the LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign.
Therefore, the minorities living in the U.S will have to fight a lot more in these following four years. But, the population has to remember that they have been through a lot worse, and that they came so far regarding their rights! It will be just another – unnecessary – fight that they will win, and that win will be written down in history for the next generations.
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The article above was edited by Marina di Bernardo Babichak.
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