British ‘New Yorker’ Writer Self-Deporting Due to Trump’s Immigration Enforcement

A British writer for the New Yorker — who became a naturalized American citizen — announced that she plans to self-deport due to President Trump’s enforcement of federal immigration law.

Rebecca Mead, a newly naturalized citizen in the U.S., wrote in the New Yorker that Trump’s enforcement of immigration has been influential in her decision to move back to her native England after arriving in New York about 30 years ago.

Mead writes:

The goals and policies of President Trump—from the “Muslim ban” to the zero-tolerance policy at the country’s southern border—are intended to stigmatize foreigners, documented or otherwise. Students, tech engineers, and asylum seekers are all under the same suspicion of insidiously undermining the country—of taking rather than giving, of harming rather than helping. The President tweets about undocumented immigrants ready to “infest” or “invade” the nation, and anyone who takes offense at the suggestion that his words echo Nazi propaganda hasn’t looked at Nazi propaganda of late. Most recently, the Administration has established a task force charged with “denaturalizing” citizens who may have lied on their immigration applications, thereby undercutting every naturalized citizen’s expectation of permanence. It has also sought to require respondents to the 2020 census to note whether they are citizens; if this change is implemented, it will likely result in an undercount of immigrants, because many will be too frightened to declare their status. [Emphasis added]

…

The Trump Administration is plainly seeking to stoke hostility against immigrants pursuing the “promise of the American Dream”: to deter those who might seek to come to the U.S. and to instill disquiet and fear in those who are already here. Under this government, small children have been torn from their parents and placed in shelters or tent camps, and treating immigrants with cynical cruelty has become official policy. On the day that I mumbled my allegiance to the United States in a Brooklyn courthouse—surrounded by hundreds of other new citizens, all of us dressed in our best clothes—I never imagined that I might soon see such atrocities committed in my name. [Emphasis added]

Now, Mead writes that she is packing up and heading to London, but says she will continue voting in American elections since she is a naturalized citizen.

Mead, in 2010, profiled Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, wherein she chronicled his rise alongside iconic political figures such as Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.