According to various reports published yesterday morning, immigration lawyers discovered that the Trump regime is planning to end programs that shield the families of active duty service members from being deported, but the regime is apparently planning to go further than that.
Immigration lawyers now say the regime will also end a handful of programs that shield actual members of the military from being deported and the Military Times has confirmed that memos concerning plans to end these programs have been circulating at the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“I wanted to confirm that this was all true, so I started calling a few people, and I got confirmation in various emails that this was all true,” Margaret Stock, an Alaska-based attorney, told Military Times in a Thursday phone interview. [...]
Stock first got wind of the changes on Saturday, at an American Immigration Lawyers Association meeting. There are about four weeks until the new rules go into effect, she said, so those affected are scrambling to get their requests approved before late July.
The memos show that both deferred action and parole in place are being eliminated for service members, veterans and their families, "with the exception of the immediate relatives of United States citizens ― and those are people who don’t actually need deferred action, for the most part,” because they have another path to legal residency, Stock said.
That covers military veterans, current service members and family members ― including parents, spouses and children ― in both the active and reserve components, she said.
It occurred to me that it's entirely possible that some of the active duty service members deployed to our southern border with Mexico by Trump could be at risk of deportation or have family members at risk of deportation.
We have no way of knowing if any members of Trump's brush-clearing force are non-citizens or have non-citizen children or spouses, but it's plausible that a handful of them do.
Immigration lawyers who spoke to the Military Times say it could take years to actually deport service members under these new policies, but I don't think we should underestimate the zeal the Trump regime has for quickly deporting anyone they can get their hands on even if they have to break or stretch the law to do it.
In any event, this will introduce uncertainty in the military's ranks and it comes from a regime that has spent the past two years arguing that transgender service members are the real threat to military readiness.