Election Day 2020

Campaign 2020 is over.  It is Election Day!

Few are watching the election as closely as a Guatemalan mother and her teenaged son who have taken refuge in a church in Austin, Texas, for the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency.  NPR reports that Hilda and Iván Ramirez are ensconced in the Sunday school wing of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, which has given them sanctuary for more than four and a half years.  The mother and son believe that if they leave church property they’ll be picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE agents generally do not make arrests inside churches, schools and hospitals.

Immigration was not as big an issue in 2020 as in 2016.  Rebecca Rainey on Politico summarizes the contrasts between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on immigration.

Nicole Narea for Vox writes that President “Trump has fundamentally reshaped the immigration system in ways that would be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. In a second term, he could embrace further restrictionist policies.

But he hasn’t taken a victory lap. Instead, on the campaign trail, the topic has largely receded into the background. . . . Trump [instead] has presented himself as the `law and order’ candidate. He was a vocal opponent of the protests over racial inequity and police violence that broke out over the summer and efforts to defund the police. And he has stoked fear about public safety in Democratic cities and surrounding suburbs, including exaggerating the looting and violence that broke out amid some otherwise peaceful protests.”

At the same time, Trump still repeats anti-immigrant rhetoric at his rallies and in his campaign ads.  “At a rally in North Carolina on Sunday, he read aloud the song lyrics of `The Snake,’ which tells the story of a `tenderhearted woman’ who unsuspectingly rescues a half-frozen snake that later bites her. Trump has invoked the song, once a regular feature of his rallies in 2016, as a xenophobic parable about the risks of unauthorized immigration.”

Meanwhile, senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller is planning an immigration blitz for the second term.

KJ