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OPINION: Trump's unproductive obsession with MS-13 detracts from honest discussion

Orange County Register - 2/24/2018

Feb. 24--Editor's note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today's headlines.

Over the past year, President Trump has made a point of repeatedly invoking the gang MS-13 when talking about immigration and immigration reform.

In his State of the Union Address, after asking the parents of victims of MS-13 gang members to stand, he proceeded to use their terrible experience as a set up for laying out his immigration reform proposals, which included conflating the status of DACA-eligible young immigrants with the wall and the alleged need to end the Diversity Immigrant Visa program and chain migration.

On Friday, he reiterated this cynical approach to the complex and nuanced issue of immigration by tweeting: "MS-13 gang members are being removed by our Great ICE and Border Patrol Agents by the thousands, but these killers come back in from El Salvador, and through Mexico, like water. El Salvador just takes our money, and Mexico must help MORE with this problem. We need The Wall!"

Putting forward MS-13 as often as he does in the context of immigration reform might play well with his most rabid of supporters, but all he's really doing is perpetuating a false and harmful picture of immigrants, legal and illegal alike. By muddying the waters this way, Trump has made it significantly harder for partisans on all sides to have a reasoned debate of the issues at hand.

Instead of facilitating responsible policy making, he has demonized and distorted in the minds of many the millions of hardworking, decent people who have dared to seek a better life and nothing else.

Lost in his overemphasis of criminals and gangs is the reality that most undocumented immigrants are not here to cause trouble and harm others. Most of them work and have been here ten years or longer, including about a third of whom who have been here 15 or more years. They're not gang members, threats to Americans or members of MS-13.

It's perfectly fine that he wants to crack down on dangerous criminals, of course, but conflating tough actions against gangs with immigration policy to the extent that he does is fundamentally dishonest.

Trump's obsession with building up and highlighting villains like MS-13 and simplistic solutions like wall-building has prevented not only a timely and responsible DACA fix, but has only made it harder to talk about the millions of others who deserve amnesty, an inevitability so obvious even Rush Limbaugh supports amnesty now.

He's probably going to keep at it, to keep his base happy, while the rest of us who just want the right thing done are forced to rely on the Congress of all things to eventually come up with a solution.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

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