Booting more legal immigrants

Rubio goes after South Sudanese visa holders, Ukrainians get a false warning, all ahead of a sweep of protected status immigrants lawfully in the U.S.

Just before rising basketball star Khaman Maluach took the court for Duke against Houston in the NCAA tournament Final Four round on Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took steps to revoke his legal residency in the United States.

Without warning Rubio announced Saturday afternoon that he was revoking all visas for South Sudanese passport holders “effective immediately”:

It is time for the Transitional Government of South Sudan to stop taking advantage of the United States. Enforcing our nation’s immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States. Every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the United States, seeks to remove them.

The sweeping turnabout includes anyone from South Sudan in the country on a valid student visa like Maluach, the Blue Devils center. It comes after South Sudanese authorities reportedly refused to accept a man deported to them from the U.S.

It’s not known whether Maluach was aware of the announcement prior to the matchup in San Antonio. But he finished with six points, one block, and zero rebounds while only playing 21 minutes due to foul trouble. It was a below-level performance for a projected lottery pick in the upcoming NBA draft who played for his national team at the Paris Olympics. Maluach was not available for media after his team lost.

Khaman Maluach

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The move against South Sudanese immigrants is just the latest reversal by the Trump administration to leave those residing legally in the United States suddenly subject to fines and deportation.

• Migrants working legally in the U.S. while their cases are pending were notified yesterday via a government app that they must leave the country “immediately.”

• Last week the Department of Homeland Security said it mistakenly sent an email to some Ukrainians that began, “It’s time for you to leave the United States.”

• Homeland Security has announced it will terminate humanitarian parole status for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans on April 24 and will subject them to forced removal if they do not self-deport, a cutoff involving about 532,000 people. Immigration advocates worry that other categories in the country via humanitarian parole may be under threat, too, including South Sudanese, Ukrainians, and Afghans—all facing dire circumstances should they return to their homelands (a fact sheet on all categories is here).

• Members of the Evangelical Immigration Table sent a letter to President Trump April 7 asking him to reconsider terminating temporary protected status for the listed groups. “Many of these individuals are also active members of evangelical churches,” it noted.

• Ahead of more departures, the IRS yesterday reached an agreement to share once-shielded personal data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Top IRS officials, including the acting commissioner, said they would resign in response.

Only about 155 individuals from South Sudan are in the U.S. on humanitarian parole. And just 46 others were issued nonimmigrant visas in January. Many of those are students like Maluach.

Immigrants from South Sudan are predominantly Christians, and nearly all have faced what would seem insurmountable obstacles to arrive in the United States. Their area faced decades of oppression at the hands of an Islamic regime in Sudan before a 2010 peace agreement, brokered largely by the United States, paved the way for independence, making South Sudan the newest country in the world.

I learned of several university students from South Sudan now facing uncertainty about their status, but agreed not to reveal identities or locations given deportation crackdowns on college campuses. The South Sudanese, unsure of their status now, say they are afraid of being forcibly removed. Some cannot get legal services from their schools’ offices for international students, which are overwhelmed due to daily policy changes. The students do not actually know whether their visas remain valid.

In each case, the students I learned about made it into their programs via hard work in competitive church-run boarding schools in South Sudan, long volunteer hours and active service in their communities. One said she wants to return to work in South Sudan after finishing medical school.

Forced departures would send students to a country that continues to face turmoil, some with family members living scattered in refugee camps. In March the International Crisis Group warned that South Sudan is “on the precipice of renewed full-blown war” while the World Food Programme warned this week of hunger at “a tipping point” in parts of the country.

Hunger at a “tipping point” in South Sudan (credit: World Food Programme)

On Tuesday South Sudan bowed to U.S. pressure and said it would admit the man deported by the U.S. The authorities first refused him, they say, because he is Congolese and traveling under incorrect or falsified documents.

If so, there’s some irony there: The mixup most likely showed up through a biometric registration system in South Sudan underwritten at least in part by the United States. South Sudan procured its national ID program in 2012 that collects fingerprint and iris scan data through a U.S.-funded program of the International Office of Migration, or IOM.

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Other news—

• Re-upping this report, which shows planned deportations likely to have direct impact 1 in 12 Christians living in the United States.

• Trump announced today a 90-day pause on new tariffs after lead economists said they threatened the global economy. Eliminating trade deficits, for one, is not a reasonable goal. Consider that the U.S. had slapped a 41 percent tariff rate on Syria, a war-torn country that must import way more than it can export.

• Put another way, imagine a world where the Italians make the watches and the Swiss make the pasta.

• More on HIV/AIDS: A new Lancet study finds that an additional 1 million children will become infected with HIV and 500,000 additional children will die of AIDS without continued PEPFAR programs. The African authors argue for a five-year transition to country-led sustainability.

  • The wonderful Mark Labberton had me on his podcast to talk about the ethics of PEPFAR cuts.

• Yemeni coffeehouses in America is a real thing.

• Homefront: If you live in my area and would like to learn about a small but experienced NGO on the ground now in Ukraine, I’ll be hosting friends at Novi Community at my home this Friday evening and you can DM me for details.

• This quote from a long read (and worth it to get to the end) by David Brooks: "Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes."