Dismantling US policies towards migrants and the Americas

If you'd like to read two profiles of individuals who served the US during the Trump administration, I would recommend Jon Lee Anderson's profile of John Feeley in The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration. Among other positions, Feeley is former US Ambassador to Panama. Feeley is famous for his op-ed in the Washington Post on “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President. Feeley represents one of many seasoned Foreign Service veterans that our country has lost under President Trump. 

William Brownfield, an Assistant Secretary of State who had served as Ambassador to Colombia and to Venezuela, decided to leave, and this February Tom Shannon, the department’s third-highest-ranking official and for decades the presiding expert on Venezuela, turned in his resignation. Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who in 2016 was nominated to be the first U.S. Ambassador to Cuba in half a century, is also leaving. One of Feeley’s colleagues explained the widespread dismay: “In terms of policy, what is there? Apart from migration issues, there’s the nafta reboot and stronger means being advocated for use against Venezuela. I don’t see much else. There is also the sense of an attempt to eviscerate anything Barack Obama did. I’ve never seen that before in my career.”

In March, Roberta Jacobson announced her resignation, after a three-decade career. Jacobson was appointed Ambassador to Mexico in 2015, but Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, stalled her confirmation for nearly a year. She took up her post in May, 2016, as Trump’s Presidential campaign got under way, so her time as Ambassador was spent mostly managing fallout from the new Administration. 

The second profile is article is Dara Lind on Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Trump made an immigration crackdown a priority. Jeff Sessions made it a reality. President Trump has nominated a number of incompetent people that have done damage to the US by means of their incompetence. That's not the case with Jeff Sessions. He's doing damage to the US and to the country's relationship with the rest of the hemisphere because of his understanding of the bureaucratic process and his distaste for all things migration. There doesn't seem to be anything about people moving to the US that he supports.

Given President Trump's regret at selecting Sessions for the AG position, I imagine that people are speculating whether Trump will now remove him or whether Sessions will do the honorable thing and resign. As Lind explains in the piece, however, that might not make too much a difference as Sessions has been able to groom others with his perspective on immigration and help them into positions of relevance. You should follow Lind. She's really good on the technical details of immigration policy.