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“Some are having difficulty securing appointments for visas at U.S. consulates overseas that are hobbled by skeletal staffing,” The Times continued, completely unsurprising when the administration went on a closing binge last year and shut down a number of international immigration offices. “But many of those working to get medical help from overseas said there was an apparent lack of coordination between the various government agencies involved,” The Times continued, “including Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.”
Of course, these are all headed by yes-men like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting Homeland Security Deputy Sec. Ken Cuccinelli—though all still minor players to Miller, who’s been in the job before them, and whose white supremacist radicalism is so central to the Trump administration’s tenets, he’ll be there after them. “Connect the dots,” immigrant rights advocate Frank Sharry tweeted last week. “Stephen Miller is the de facto head of DHS: ICE keeping detainees in a death trap, sending back kids fleeing violence without a hearing, ICE enforcement ongoing, admissions and citizenship stopped. Blood on his hands.”
The Times reports that Physicians for American Healthcare Access, a nonprofit group that represents foreign-born doctors, “had compiled a list of doctors willing to go to New York and New Jersey to assist” in novel coronavirus relief. “But because of the rigidity of the government visa policies, nearly all of them are unable to do so.” Policies that the administration could presumably put on hold right now, today on an emergency basis, because we’ve all seen how the administration has taken executive orders to new extremes, and has waived law in order to build useless border fencing, also on a supposed emergency basis.
There’s an emergency now. Attorney Ian Wagreich, chair of the Government Liaison Committee of the International Medical Graduate Taskforce, seemed to believe making urgent changes to benefit foreign-born medical professionals and help save lives are possible, telling The Times, “There are easy fixes that the administration should be willing to make in the face of a national emergency.” But then that would mean the administration would have to acknowledge that our nation is facing a serious crisis, wouldn’t it?
