Turning dreams into nightmares?
Two months into his presidency, the United States’ returning president, Donald Trump, seems to be on a rampage, turning almost all cherished values of a functional and open democracy upside down. Trump vacillates between being a self-righteous politician to being a brattish, idiotic bully. His actions, pronouncements, and even the documents he has signed so far have shown that he is on the warpath against what most Americans consider as their country’s highly admired goal in life—that of achieving the famed “American dream.” This is the outcome of one’s hard work and given the wide array of job opportunities in the famed “land of milk and honey,” anyone will succeed in life, especially in the material aspect of it.
Ironically, many books we read on one of the most powerful countries in the world depict the US as a country built, “in part, by immigrants, and the nation has long been the beneficiary of the energy and ingenuity that immigrants bring.” Currently, it is estimated that 15.8 percent of the country’s residents are foreign-born, almost half of whom are naturalized citizens. In 2022, the country’s demographic statistics recorded that Mexican-born residents make up the largest immigrant group in the US at 23 percent of the US immigrant population or around 10.7 million residents. It used to be 29 percent in 2010.
In his first presidential administration, from 2017 to 2021, Trump was cited as “one of the worst presidents in American history.” This was largely due to his anti-immigrant policies and travel bans. He first declared a travel ban on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim-populated countries, like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. More specifically, he suspended refugee resettlement for 120 days but banned Syrian refugees indefinitely. In 2021, as he was about to end his first term as president, Trump banned residents of Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, and Tanzania from traveling to the US.
Moreover, through its “Remain in Mexico” program, which started in 2019, the Trump administration sent more than 71,000 asylum seekers to Mexico to await asylum hearings. Since 2020, Trump also ordered the expulsion of 400,000 migrants to Mexico, and these included asylum seekers who were denied the opportunity to argue their asylum cases. The Trump administration argued this was also to prevent the spread of the pandemic at that time (COVID-19). His Remain in Mexico program led to a family separation policy that was implemented along with an expanded wall built to prevent Mexicans and migrants from other countries in South America, like Venezuela, from crossing the US-Mexico border.
On the Mexican side of the border, refugees and migrants alike were subject to violent handling by Mexican border police as well as of some rogues known to operate near the border. But they could not report these to Mexican authorities; they were also unable to secure their documents there, leading to their eventual expulsion from the border and their deportation to their countries of origin.
It was also during his first term that Trump showed his lack of understanding of scientific and logical bases for his executive policies that became orders. For example, he rolled back environmental and business regulations and signed controversial laws like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He also withdrew from agreements on mitigating climate change effects, trade, and Iran’s nuclear program. He also “waged” a trade war against China then. Like the impetuous leader that he is until now, he downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and contravened health officials’ perspectives on it.
Data from a report published on the Migrant Policy Institute website on Jan. 20, 2025, noted that after Trump’s inauguration as the new president in 2025, he immediately made and signed executive policies that declared an “invasion” and a “national emergency at the US-Mexico border that will be met by the deployment of thousands of troops, invoking the Alien Enemies Act last used during World War II.”
While it boggles our mind why Americans voted for him for another term, Trump’s newest pronouncements have instilled fear in me and in many Filipinos who have siblings and other relatives who have migrated to the US. Some of them, like my sibling and members of her family have become citizens by naturalization. But a lot of them I know are there on permanent resident status. A few have extended their stay as visitors.
For these Filipinos hoping to make their American dream a reality, they might soon wake up to a nightmare of being forcefully hauled off to a plane to bring them back home here.
God forbid.
