Maria Leonor Pacheco

@micyoung75 @David_J_Bier @ReichlinMelnick Forget about loans and bank accounts. Those are almost trivial restrictions to legal immigrants compared with USCIS PM-602-0192 and PM-602-0194. These may be the most restrictive anti-legal-immigration measures imposed since 1965. Their language is antiseptic and bureaucratic, words like “pause,” “review,” and “operational measure.” But their real-world and functional effects are devastating. They do not simply impose an indefinite freeze on green card and citizenship applications for legal immigrants from 39 countries already living inside the United States. They also shut down almost ALL legal pathways people depend on to remain lawfully present, keep working, renew work permits or visas, and hold their lives together while the pause drags on with no clear end in sight. The policy is categorical. It is applied solely on the basis of country of birth, without regard to entry date or underlying legal status, condemning people for factors entirely beyond their control to an indefinite limbo marked by daily hardship and quiet suffering. The consequences go far beyond delayed paperwork. Through the passage of time and sheer attrition, people lose jobs, fall out of lawful status, become unable to travel, cannot renew driver’s licenses, risk detention despite having violated no law, lose health insurance, face financial ruin, and may be forced to abandon educational or training programs into which they have invested years of effort and significant money. This is collective punishment imposed on legal immigrants who did everything by the book. As long as the policy remains in place, many are left with only two options: remain in the country unemployed, trapped in intolerable uncertainty and under the shadow of detention, or self-deport. Even if one were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the Constitution permits nationality-based discrimination and mass expulsion based on origin, how can anyone justify applying such a policy retroactively to legal immigrants, their U.S. citizen spouses, and their employers, people who filled and built their lives around the rules that existed for a year or even two before this policy was imposed? These are people who signed contracts, moved their families, enrolled their children in school, paid tuition and filing fees, and made medical decisions for sick parents, spouses, or newborn children on the reasonable belief that the government would honor the rules it had itself created. These are physicians with full clinics, professors in the middle of a semester, trainees halfway through their programs, and families depending on health insurance for a delivery, chemotherapy, or urgent treatment. To rip that stability away after the fact is not merely unfair. It is morally grotesque. Yet almost no one seems to care, as though the people caught in this machinery are less than fully human, and their suffering carries no moral weight. #PM6020192 #PM6020194 #USCISPause #LiftTheHold #LiftThePause

My team is discussing how powerful this paragraph of @ckuck MTD opp is. It’s good. #PM6020192