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A Trump second term could bring another family separation crisis

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation program starting on day one of his second term. That could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in “mixed status” households: those in which both undocumented imm…

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President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation program starting on day one of his second term. That could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in “mixed status” households: those in which both undocumented immigrants and people with permanent legal status reside. Trump has said he would rely on an 18th-century law to carry out mass deportations and that he intends to first target “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” Vice President-elect JD Vance has set an initial goal of 1 million deportations. A representative for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about whether any exceptions would be made for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for a long time or who have immediate family here, including US-citizen spouses and children. There are many such people: The US has an estimated 4.7 million mixed-status households, according to a 2024 Center for Migration Studies report. Roughly 500,000 people in those households may have hoped for new protections against deportation through a Biden administration program that would have cleared the way for undocumented spouses and stepchildren of US citizens to apply for legal status. That program was struck down in federal court on Thursday. If Trump gets his way, his deportation program threatens to rip families apart in what could be a new iteration of his first administration’s policy of separating immigrant families. However, Tom Homan, Trump’s former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and current immigration adviser, has also proposed that families could be deported together, apparently including US citizens. It is not clear whether he was suggesting that they would go voluntarily together. There are clear practical challenges associated with implementing a mass deportation program on the scale Trump is promising. But if he manages to overcome those hurdles, such a program could wreak lasting psychological damage on millions of US-born children in mixed-status families, place economic strain on their communities, and even weaken the US economy. The familiar damage of family separation Research on the effects of Trump’s previous policy of separating immigrant families sheds light on the potential fallout from breaking up mixed-status families through mass deportations. In his first term, Trump adopted what was called the “zero tolerance policy” for undocumented immigrants arriving at the southern border. Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would not have detained the parents or children, releasing them together into the US.) At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy. As of May 2024, some 1,400 still had not been reunited, despite an ongoing Biden administration effort to do so. The harm the policy would inflict was well-known to Trump officials at the outset. Commander Jonathan White, who previously oversaw the government’s program providing care to unaccompanied immigrant children during the first Trump administration, told Congress he had repeatedly warned the officials who concocted the policy that it would likely cause “significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.” A September 2019 government report confirmed those effects, finding that immigrant children who entered government custody in 2018 frequently experienced “intense trauma,” and those who were “unexpectedly separated from a parent” even more so. In 2021, a group of pediatricians concluded in a study that separating families “constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that rises to the level of torture.” As Vox previously reported, psychologists have seen that childhood trauma manifested in three main ways: disruptions to social attachments, increases in emotional vulnerability, and, in some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder. Those symptoms could be short-lived or they could persist; they could also not even manifest until a child enters their teen years or adulthood. Any of them could significantly hinder a child’s later success in academics and in the workplace. The family separation caused by mass deportations would look different from family separation at the border, and whether the psychological effects on separated children are more or less extreme will depend on their circumstances. What is clear, however, is that mass deportation would cause family separation at a scale far larger than anything Trump tried in his first term in office. “This is orders of magnitude higher as far as families that are going to be split apart, and the kind of life-altering consequences of that will be visited upon 5.5 million US-born children,” said Matthew Lisiecki, a senior research and policy analyst at the Center for Migration Studies. He and his co-researcher Gerard Apruzzese conservatively estimate that a third of American-born children in mixed-status families, including 1.8 million who live in households with two undocumented parents, would remain in the US even if their household members were deported. That would inflict not just psychological suffering, but also a hefty financial cost: Children who remain in the US would see their median household income drop by nearly half, from $75,500 to $39,000, if their undocumented household members were deported, Lisiecki and Apruzzese found. Other family members or public social services would have to pick up the cost of raising them, which the researchers estimate at $116.5 billion. The loss of their parents’ productivity — and the $96.7 billion they contribute annually in taxes — could also hurt the US economy. “The kind of trauma experienced as part of that is something that these Americans will be living with every day of their life from here on out,” Lisiecki said. “I don’t think we have the experience at that scale to say what that means for the lives of those kids as they grow up and move forward.” Whether Trump can actually deliver on his promises of mass deportations is a big question mark. He has said the program would have “no price tag,” suggesting that the budget is unlimited, but he would need congressional support to make that happen. It’s not yet clear he’ll have the numbers to increase the immigration enforcement budget, especially given that control of the House is still undecided. But even if implemented on a small scale, the consequences for affected mixed-status families would be dire.
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Sports

Wemby 'not worried,' expects Popovich back soon

Spurs star Victor Wembanyama said he is "not worried" about Gregg Popovich, adding that he and his teammates expect the longtime coach to "come back soon."

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SAN ANTONIO -- Spurs star Victor Wembanyama said he and his teammates expect Gregg Popovich to return soon after a health issue caused the longtime coach to miss four games, including Thursday night's 118-105 win over the Portland Trail Blazers.

"We don't hear a lot from Pop," Wembanyama said after the game. "They keep us informed as much as we're allowed to know. So, I'm not worried about him. I know he's going to come back soon."

Popovich experienced an undisclosed medical episode last Saturday, about 2½ hours before the Spurs' home game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. San Antonio acting head coach Mitch Johnson said then that Popovich was "not feeling well" but would not elaborate on what happened hours earlier.

When asked Thursday night if there was any clarity about Popovich returning this season, Johnson could not provide an answer but said Popovich is "doing good."

"We've been talking," Johnson said. "I've had my hands full with this, in trying to stay above water. So, have not talked details and I'm not sure about anything."

Popovich, 75, is the oldest coach in NBA history. In 2020, he passed the previous mark held by Hubie Brown (71) in his final game as Memphis' head coach.

Popovich is the NBA's career leader with 1,390 victories and another 170 postseason wins with five NBA titles. He is in his 29th season, all with San Antonio.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Regional

Did Democrats lose the 2024 election because of “bad” policies?

As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swi…

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As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over President Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Even chalking the election entirely up to inflation seems rather convenient and incomplete. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who earned about 6,000 fewer votes in his reelection bid than Kamala Harris did in Vermont, came out on Wednesday with a statement blasting the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people, who appeared to break overwhelmingly for Trump. This critique quickly gained traction, with commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats had lost touch with working people’s needs, prioritizing issues like democracy and abortion rights too much. “If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them,” Matt Karp wrote in Jacobin on Wednesday. “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on,” former Biden administration official Bharat Ramamurti lamented on Thursday. I’m not here to prescribe what politicians should or should not run on next time around, and I do desperately hope that elected officials use their time in office to pass good, well-designed legislation that improves people’s lives. But it seems like the discourse is barreling toward a well-trodden yet dubious place. The (appealing) contention is that Democrats could have turned their electoral fortunes around if they had passed the right policies and then campaigned more effectively on those programs. In recent years this philosophy has been dubbed “deliverism” — coined to suggest that voters will elect politicians who deliver on their promises to solve problems. “Deliverism means governing well and establishing a record that the electorate needed to win actually feels,” American Prospect editor David Dayen wrote in 2021. After the 2022 midterms, Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued in the New York Times that voters had rewarded Democrats specifically for programs like pandemic relief and infrastructure modernization. Other policies, like allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and capping insulin costs for older Americans, Warren argued, were what motivated voters to cast their ballots for Democrats. Party leaders particularly favor a more sophisticated version of this theory: that policies will create “positive feedback loops,” building loyal constituencies who enable further policy victories through their continued electoral support. It’s no secret, for example, that Democrats believe making it easier for workers to join unions will not only improve their standard of living but improve Democrats’ electoral position by increasing the number of union members in the US. Deliverism’s appeal lies in its intuitive logic, especially for college-educated rationalists drawn to clear cause-and-effect relationships: Good policies will lead to subsequent electoral victories. But there’s not a lot of evidence that policymaking actually works like this. Decades of scholarship have shown that most people don’t understand how policies work, what policy benefits they’re getting, and which party is responsible for enacting specific policies. And even when a politician designs a program so it’s easier for them to take credit, that still doesn’t always work out to their benefit. Those who received health insurance through Obamacare Medicaid expansion, for example, showed very little change in voter turnout or party loyalty. As Northwestern University political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston outline in their essential research on these questions, history should fundamentally challenge the premise that good policy success will most likely lead to political rewards for the party that passes it. “Upon inspection, the intellectual basis for thinking that policies are good vehicles for building electoral majorities — or good substitutes for the more tedious work of organizational party-building — is quite thin,” they write. This isn’t to say that Democrats shouldn’t try to pass good policy. The expanded child tax credit during the pandemic was demonstrably good policy, even if most voters showed only muted enthusiasm for it. And it’s of course not the case that politicians are never rewarded for good policy. Many voters even now still credit Trump for the stimulus checks they received in the mail during the pandemic, checks that prominently featured the president’s name. Doing good things and taking credit for those things can be helpful sometimes. But as Democratic leaders move to refocus on working-class priorities, they face two sobering realities: Policies alone rarely drive electoral outcomes, and an increasingly stark divide separates non-college voters from the college-educated liberals and socialists who lead the party and its allied progressive groups. Navigating these tensions will be necessary for charting future strategy, and the research suggests that Harris’s loss this week could not have been avoided if she had just emphasized Biden administration accomplishments more clearly. Such thinking oversimplifies a much more complex political reality.
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