Analyst says Donald Trump acts before he thinks

Donald Trump’s immigration policies have proven that the US president acts without thinking first, an analyst in Virginia says.

Keith Preston, director of attackthesysten.com, made the remarks while discussing a slew of directives by Trump that have plunged the country’s immigration system into chaos.

In late January, Trump introduced a travel ban against people from Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia Iraq and Libya. All refugee admissions, except for Syrian refugees who were banned indefinitely, were halted for three months under the executive order, which has been halted upon a federal judge’s order.

Trump has also signed a directive to begin the construction of a controversial wall on the border with Mexico, while hiring thousands of new enforcement agents to carry out more deportation raids.

Preston said the refugee crisis south of the American borders took place in the 1980s, when people tried to flee US-backed wars in Central America, including Guatemala and El Salvador.

The crisis deepened “in the 1990s, when NAFTA—the North American Free trade Agreement—was imposed,” he argued. “That had the impact of destroying Mexican agriculture and then that created mass unemployment among Mexican agriculture workers, so they started migrating north to the United States.”

Preston said Trump was more focused on the issue of crimes committed by immigrants rather than the economic impact of immigration on the US economy.

“There is a question of practicality,” he said. “One real issue that the Trump administration has demonstrated is that they often act before they think.”

“We saw that with the seven [Muslim] nation travel ban. That was an executive order that was issued very hastily, very rapidly, and was not crafted in such a way as to address serious problems that would come up naturally when trying to impose something like that,” he explained.

“There is also the question of who is actually going to be impacted by this? Is it only going to be convicted criminals, or is it going to be their families?”

The human resources required to arrest immigrants and the due process during their detention were some of the other matters that Trump had not taken into consideration, according to Preston.

“I suspect that the more the Trump administration tries to ratchet up these kinds of actions the more political conflict there is going to be,” the analyst concluded.