David Bacon: Unquestionably, the Obama administration did do terrible things. We saw the deportation of 300,000 to 400,000 people a year, the growth of these privatized detention centers. But the rhetoric of the administration and the ability of people to pressure the government is different.
The whole reason we have DACA to begin with is because young undocumented people organized themselves against deportation and were able, through action, to get people out of detention, finally sitting in Obama's campaign office in Chicago in 2012 and getting them to issue an executive order that gave legal immigration status to about 800,000 young people.
Now we have people in power like Jeff Sessions and Jim Kelly who are saying they are going to undo the kinds of advances that people made in the last eight years. A lot of what Trump is talking about is undoing what immigrant rights activists and unions and progressive people have fought for over the last eight years.
Another thing is reinstituting these cooperation programs between the police and the immigration authorities that we were able to get rid of in California and New York. Now here comes Trump and Sessions saying that they are going to reinstitute it.
In fact, the rate of deportations in the first months of the Trump administration have been much higher than in the last part of the Obama administration, when popular pressure was able to force the administration to stop this kind of cooperation between the police and immigration authorities.
Dennis Bernstein: In the 45 seconds remaining, what is your version of humane immigration reform?
David Bacon: It means that everybody has a legal status here in the United States. We need to decriminalize migration and get rid of the detention centers. We need to demilitarize the border. And we need to stop the process by which people are being forced to migrate in order to survive. Changing the trade agreements, including NAFTA, is another crucial part of humane immigration reform.
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