by Linda Greenhouse
President Trump didn’t include El Salvador on his vulgar list of deplorables. But his forthcoming expulsion of nearly 200,000 Salvadorans will inflict more harm on that poor and violent country of 6.3 million people than any verbal assault. Actions speak louder than words. Haiti and the continent of Africa got off easy.
Although I usually devote this space to the Supreme Court and legal issues, this column is an exception. There is no legal issue, as far as I can tell, with the president’s cancellation of the “temporary protected status” that the George W. Bush administration granted the Salvadorans in 2001 after two devastating earthquakes. The shelter extended under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which currently covers citizens of 10 countries, is meant to be temporary, and the president can decide the time is up for any particular group.
But in the 10 days since President Trump announced his decision, I’ve been obsessed not with its legality but with its cruelty and self-defeating stupidity. I’ve seen the story fade under the crush of a relentless news cycle, where every “Have you heard the latest?” invites another scary excursion into the land of disbelief. So I will temporarily leave the Supreme Court to whatever mysterious inner struggles have limited the justices to deciding only one argued case since the current term began on Oct. 2. That solitary decision, a unanimous opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on an obscure question of jurisdiction, was issued on Nov. 8. No court-watcher alive can recall such a slow start to a Supreme Court term, and it has become the subject of much head-scratching. The gates will burst open eventually, at which point the mystery may or may not be solved.
Expulsions on the scale the Trump administration envisions are hardly unknown to history. Even modern countries, within memory, have sought to rid themselves of entire populations. It tends neither to turn out well nor reflect well on the expelling country. Two hundred thousand people may not sound like a huge number on a historic scale. But the population of San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, is only 280,000. Money sent home by Salvadorans living abroad, most in the United States, where protected status conveys work authorization, amounts to 17 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the country’s central bank. The destabilizing effect of cutting off this flow of capital is obvious.
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