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unlike the Senate-passed immigration bill ignored by the House, those protected from deportation will get only a temporary reprieve that could be reversed by Obama's successor, not a clear path to citizenship or permanent legal status.

the total number of undocumented immigrants now in the U.S. is 11.4 million people.

Obama is also directing the Department of Homeland Security to make significant changes to how it enforces immigration laws. There will be more agents at the border, as well as structural changes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to make its personnel closer in line with traditional law enforcement officers.

Legal immigrants will also have more flexibility to travel to their countries of origin, and those who are working under H-1B visas will be able to change jobs more easily and get employment visas for their spouses.

The administration plans to move cases involving immigrants and families with no criminal history down the list of deportation priorities so that the government can focus on "national security threats, serious criminals, and recent border crossers."

"We’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security," Obama said in his speech on Thursday night. "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day."

What is just as important is what is not included. The so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” which was several times pushed and failed over the last decade had two basic pillars: new security and impediments to illegal immigration and some settlement for the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the country and in many cases have been here for years or even decades. “DACA” was one portion of that larger whole – what we might call the most “deserving” subsection the 10 to 12 million: undocumented immigrants who came too young to have any choice in the matter and knew no other country than the US, despite not being citizens.

Trump’s pillars don’t explicitly say these 10 to 12 million people must all be deported. But that’s the upshot.

Trump is on record for mass deportation and he’s shown for a year that he is as good as his word. We don’t need to guess. Mass deportation is already the policy and practice.

So we’ve gone from border security in exchange for a path to citizenship (Bush and Obama-era comprehensive reform) to the Wall, mass deportation and a dramatic reduction and whitening of legal immigration. Non-deportation of ‘Dreamers’ is now the apparent ‘compromise’ point. But even that seems highly dubious.

My own evolving take is that Democrats should be willing to go along with some version of the wall in exchange for a protection and a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Walls, frankly, can be torn down. It’s a huge waste of money. But walls can be torn down. And the money budgeted this year can be taken back next year. It will take years even to get started. It is a huge mistake and waste of money. But protections for almost a million American young people (de facto not de jure) is worth it

We should be focusing on Trump’s broader plan, to try to cut America off to immigrants in general and make a last stand for America as a white man’s country.

Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”

When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled

Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi.

Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical

But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)

Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat.

In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”

n mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.

In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held.

In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE.

Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me.

On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him.

At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”

In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year.

"It's hard to have two fears," says Ramirez, sitting in the parish hall of the suburban church in north Austin. "I'm afraid they'll separate me from my son, that immigration agents will come at any minute.

Biden pledges to reverse Trump's harsh immigration restrictions and reenact more lenient Obama-era policies, such as restoring the asylum process and creating a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants already in the U.S. Biden's extensive immigration rollback runs to 22 pages.

Ramirez says they fled Ivan's abusive grandfather in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala five years ago, made it to the Texas border, and asked for asylum from the Obama/Biden administration. When her asylum request was denied, they fled to the safety of the church rather than let ICE remove them.

"If I could vote I would prefer Joe Biden," she says, "because, though he has deported lots of people, he was never as bad as Donald Trump, who has divided mothers from their children."

In her hopes for a Biden victory, Ramirez is articulating the aspirations of some 50 immigrants who have taken sanctuary in churches across the country and are publicly fighting their removal orders. And there are millions more.

The list expecting relief from a Biden admnistration includes 11 million migrants who are living in the U.S. illegally, thousands of asylum-seekers waiting in dangerous Mexican border cities for their cases to be heard, and thousands more DACA recipients, plus their parents and siblings. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program started under Obama that gives temporary protection from deportation to immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

More than 250,000 people were given refugee status in Germany in 2016, many of whom had arrived the previous year when Chancellor Angela Merkel threw the country's doors open to refugees, but there are signs that attitudes are hardening.

This month, Germany also deported a second tranche of asylum seekers to Afghanistan, despite the UNHCR's insistence that "the entire state ... is affected by an armed conflict." The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) argues that "by carrying out these deportations, the Federal Ministry of the Interior is completely ignoring the security situation in Afghanistan."

A recent report by Amnesty International highlighted the "dire conditions" in Greek camps, citing "overcrowding, freezing temperatures, lack of hot water and heating, poor hygiene, bad nutrition, inadequate medical care, violence and hate-motivated attacks."

from March, Germany will begin returning asylum seekers to Greece, if that was the first safe country in which they arrived, a spokeswoman for the German Ministry for the Interior told CNN. This process was halted in 2011 due to "systemic deficiencies in the Greek asylum system."

If Europe cannot reliably protect its external borders, De Maiziere said in a speech, Germany will implement "appropriate national border controls against illegal immigration."

Italy's chief of police, Franco Gabrielli, has called for the detention and deportation of migrants, who he blames for "instability and threats" in the country. Gabrielli's comments, published in a circular on December 30, 2016, align closely with the government's position.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has adopted a zero-tolerance approach to immigrants who are unwilling to sign up to the country's way of life, telling those who "refuse to adapt and criticize our values" to "behave normally or go away."

The party pledges to invest in caring for refugees in the Middle East in order to reduce the number traveling to Europe.

The Hungarian parliament introduced a bill on February 14 that requires the police to deport any person who is in Hungary illegally, without allowing any access to an asylum procedure, according to a written statement by the NGO The Hungarian Helsinki Committee.The bill also requires all asylum applications to be automatically held in detention until their claim is processed, according to the NGO.The NGO describes the proposed changes as "extreme and flagrant violations of European Union asylum law.

"The Mexican government has taken the United States to the cleaners," Trump said in a position paper on immigration. "They are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up."

The most vocal proponent — leading Republican candidate Donald Trump — has proposed various measures, including mass deportations, seizure of remittance payments made with illegal wages, raising fees on temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats and other measures.

Once those undocumented immigrants had been removed, it would take another $315 billion in higher enforcing costs to keep them from coming back, according to AAF.

AAF estimated the removal of that many people would shrink the pool of U.S. workers by 6.4 percent, which means that 20 years from now the U.S. economy would be nearly 6 percent cent smaller. That works out to a loss of $1.6 trillion in lost wages, spending and other economic activity.

While this impact would be felt across the country and throughout the economy, sectors such as agriculture, construction, retail and hospitality would be hardest hit, the AAF report.

But the immigration reform plan spelled out in S. 744 would more than offset those costs, thanks to much higher tax collections, both because the workforce would expand and undocumented workers would now pay taxes. Those higher tax receipts would boost federal revenues by $459 billion over the same decade, the CBO estimated.

Unless the Republican-controlled Congress passes a law granting them legal status, they could soon be subject to deportation.

Though often described as “kids,” a majority of DACA beneficiaries are in their 20s—and some of them have children of their own. A recent study conducted by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego along with the Center for American Progress, National Immigration Law Center, and United We Dream found that 25.7 percent of DACA recipients have a child who is a U.S. citizen. “If extrapolated to the total population of DACA recipients, this suggests that at least 200,000 U.S. citizen children live in the U.S. currently who have a DACA recipient for a parent,”

“It’s been really tough, it’s been a rollercoaster of emotion,” said Eliana Fernandez, a DACA recipient and mother of two children, ages 10 and 5. “What’s going to happen with my life, with my work, with my children? I’ve been trying to process everything.”

The vast majority of DACA expirations will come after March 5, 2018. According to the Department of Homeland Security, 275,344 individuals will have their work permits expire next year and 321,920 work permits are set to run out from January through August 2019. That means that hundreds of thousands of immigrants will suddenly be eligible for deportation and lose their ability to work legally in country.

That uncertainty has instilled fear among many of the nearly 700,000 DACA recipients, but particularly those who are parents of U.S. citizens.

While DACA was always supposed to be temporary, the ultimate outcome was meant to be legal status for its recipients, not deportation.

e know enough about brain development to understand that such people are often too young to recognize the true import of what they are seeing or doing. Until 2005, this country allowed even juvenile offenders to be executed, though our laws don’t treat juveniles as adults in other respects. Teenagers are neurological works in progress. They have not yet developed the full capacity for moral reasoning, for impulse control, for understanding the long-term implications of their behavior.

It’s much harder to know how to think about the young Friedrich Karl Bergers who stood silent while innocent people were worked to death on their watch, even if they have lived good lives in the years since. Neuroscience tells us that they deserve the same understanding as the young offenders sentenced to death row for drug violence, but I can’t seem to find any understanding in my heart for the young Nazis.Well, life isn’t fair, and we all know it, but justice is about doing our best to impose fairness in an unfair world. And the presence of the once-young Friedrich Karl Bergers among us — living a good life, causing no trouble, exacting no harm — impels us into an uncomfortable gray area. Somehow we must weigh the imperatives of justice against the imperatives of compassion for the heedlessness of youth.In that context, what happened to the Oak Ridge Nazi seems to me both far too little and also exactly right. No punishment can possibly restore to life the people who died in a concentration camp that Mr. Berger helped to guard, and exile in an assisted living facility is hardly fit recompense for such unspeakable crimes. But sending him to prison at the age of 95 for what he did as a teenager also seems wrong. Surely deportation from his home of more than 60 years is a fair penalty for a nonagenarian for whom prison could provide no possible rehabilitation.So which is it: real justice, or too little too late? I honestly don’t know.Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the books “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” and the forthcoming “Graceland, At Last: And Other Essays From The New York Times.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”

Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”

Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.

It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.

yet it is one the government’s opponents are always reluctant to admit because its logical corollary is that there will always be an incentive for those not included under the cap to try their luck in the Channel — unless they perceive a high risk of deportation. You cannot stop the boats while taking in the passengers.

Sunak’s policy, despite its logic, faces a tortuous road ahead. To ministers’ surprise, they won their case on the Rwanda scheme in British courts last year, only to have the first flight blocked in the middle of the night by an ECHR judge.

Yet as the home secretary recently suggested, the government still believes it can get its way. The ECHR, despite its reputation for inflexible and expansionist application of human rights law, can be expedient when its institutional reach is under threat

In 2012, for example, after an unmanageable surge of cases that provoked European governments’ wrath, the ECHR agreed to limit itself to intervening only where it believed national courts had not done their jobs properly. Its caseload quickly shrank.

With the UK outside the EU and therefore able to leave the ECHR with relative ease, the court’s survival instinct has kicked in. Its officials are said to have been taken aback by the hostility to its Rwanda injunction last June and are in a mood to compromise to avoid the risk of losing the UK altogether

Even assuming the legislation takes full effect, it may not work. Migrant arrivals are expected to reach 65,000 this year. The asylum backlog stands at 166,000 and counting, hotels are full to bursting and the government hasn’t yet sent a single person to Rwanda, which in turn hasn’t built the capacity to house more than 200. No wonder most think the policy is doomed.

Between the prospect of being deported, housed in unappealing lodgings such as barges and RAF bases rather than hotels, and caught by the French, who are being given large sums of money to step up their coastal policing, the government is hoping it can make trying to cross the Channel sufficiently unattractive

There has been a sharp drop in the number of Albanians arriving on our beaches since the government signed a co-operation agreement with Tirana, stepped up deportations and publicised both.

evidence from Canada in 2016, where a publicity campaign highlighting the deportation of failed asylum seekers from Hungary led to a dramatic drop in arrivals.

It all depends on what’s required to deter people from crossing. The aim, after all, isn’t to run a constant, high-volume travel service to Kigali, but to stop people from getting on boats in the first place. This may already be working

This leaves the final piece, which is the expansion of “safe and legal routes” to the UK. It has taken months of awkward media interviews, select committee hearings and the threat of a backbench rebellion, but the government has finally accepted it needs a better system for taking in legitimate refugees.

One way is a broader, Ukraine-style scheme, so households can bring in refugees if they agree to take them in

Another is to allow for more extended family reunifications for refugees who have relatives here

And another would be to expand the practice of assessing and accepting people at UN camps, like the Syrian resettlement scheme

After years of ineffectual government under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, we have become used to the idea that ministers never have any ability or intention of keeping their promises

“When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” Golsan said Friday at the symposium, according to the Eagle, a newspaper that covers the College Station area.

The university then sprang into action, the Eagle reported, with President Michael Young reaching out to law professor Fatma Marouf,

He confirmed his experience Saturday on Twitter: “I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was ‘inexperienced.’”

It remains unclear what about Rousso was identified as suspect by immigration authorities.

Egypt — from which Rousso and his family were exiled in 1956, after a slew of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the administration of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — was not among the seven nations in the travel ban, which had been suspended by the time he arrived in the United States.

France is a beneficiary of the U.S. visa waiver program, which permits French citizens to enter the United States without a visa. All that is required is an online ESTA application before departure.

“It seems like there’s much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and technicalities of every visa,” she told the Eagle.

“Thank you so much for your reactions,” Rousso posted Saturday evening on Twitter in response. “My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was.”

“It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic,” Rousso wrote Sunday in the French edition of the Huffington Post. “What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”

has not been given final approval by DHS

violence that was a key factor in driving people to flee Central America last year has surged again

"It would be an outrage if the administration subjected Central American families to even more aggressive enforcement tactics,"

You might be lucky and be among the very few who are released from immigration jail and allowed to live in our country while your asylum application is pending. This won’t mean that your immigration case will be over though. Your immigration case will not be solved for years, and even though you have a case for staying in this country, the government will make you wait for years before you get a final answer.

Then, something unexpected will happen. You will get sick or you will get very depressed. Maybe you will be sad because you miss your family. Because of how sick or sad you were, you will sleep in one day, miss a shift at work, and you will be fired. You will run out of money and while looking for jobs, one day you will jump the turnstile to get on a train for a job interview. To you, it was worth the risk, but you miscalculated.

You will get arrested and charged with a crime for the first time in your life. You will swear never to make a mistake again but it will be too late.

But let’s say you don’t get deported. If for some reason, and against all the odds, you find an immigration judge that listens to your story and understands your life is at risk if you return to your country, you will be granted permission to stay here. Then, you finally may feel that something good came your way.

I know you have heard so many wonderful things about this place. I am sure that you heard that we were a “nation of immigrants,” correct? Well, that’s a thing of the past. We even changed the mission of the government agency handling asylum applications so it is clear to you. We are now “committed to protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” What values, you ask? Well, whatever we pick to justify that you are not welcome here.

I know. I know you will come because I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. I am so ashamed that we will do this to you and I am angry because my new country has betrayed me and every other person who believed in it. This place is not what it used to be. Just know that.

Abdul Hamid II intentionally provoked uprisings in Armenian areas

Local massacres of Armenians became commonplace,

In the spring of the following year, a counter-coup made up of Islamist students and military officers broke out against the Young Turks. Because the Armenians were seen as pro-revolution, they were targeted by the counter-coup, which killed between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Massacre.

the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and as a result, lost 85% of its land in Europe. At the same time, Italy seized coastal Libya from the empire. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of the refugees, fresh from abuse by Balkan Christians, were sent to Armenian-dominated regions of Anatolia. Unsurprisingly, the new neighbors did not get along well.

Embattled Turks began to view the Anatolian heartland as their last refuge from a sustained Christian onslaught.  Unfortunately, an estimated 2 million Armenians called that heartland home, as well.

Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces be reassigned from combat to labor battalions, and that their weapons be confiscated. Once they were disarmed, in many units the conscripts were executed en masse.

The Armenians quite rightly suspected a trap, and refused to send their men out to be slaughtered, so Jevdet Bey began a month-long siege of the city.  He vowed to kill every Christian in the city. 

this Russian intervention served as a pretext for further Turkish massacres against the Armenians all across the remaining Ottoman lands.

From the Turkish point of view, the Armenians were collaborating with the enemy.

Red Sunday incident

Tehcir Law, also known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, authorizing the arrest and Deportation of the country's entire ethnic Armenian population.

These acts set the stage for the genocide that followed.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched out into the Syrian Desert and left there without food or water to die. Countless others were crammed onto cattle cars and sent on a one-way trip on the Baghdad Railway, again without supplies. Along the Turkish borders with Syria and Iraq, a series of 25 concentration camps housed starving survivors of the marches.

In some areas, the authorities didn't bother with deporting the Armenians. Villages of up to 5,000 people were massacred

The people would be packed into a building which was then set on fire.

thrown overboard to drown.

In 1919, Sultan Mehmet VI initiated courts-martial against high military officers for involving the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

they were accused of planning the elimination of the empire's Armenian population.

The victorious Allies demanded in the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the Ottoman Empire hand over those responsible for the massacres. Dozens of Ottoman politicians and army officers were surrendered to the Allied Powers