UNITED States President Donald Trump’s campaign against immigrants to America was bound to hit Filipinos. We thought the first to be sent out of the country would be those who had simply gotten in and overstayed, who came to be known as TNT – for “tago ng tago.” Instead, the Trump administration zeroed in on children of Filipino World War II (WWII) veterans waiting to join their parents in the US.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced last week that it will terminate the Filipino World War II Veterans Parole Program which had begun on May 9, 2016, allowing certain members of Filipino veterans now in the US to enter the country while they waited for their immigration visas. In March, 2017, the USCIS said it had received 361 applications, approved 52, and denied 33, with the rest pending. We presume many more have since been filed.
The “parole” was a discretionary measure to enable the son or daughter of a veteran to come to the US and take care of the elderly veteran who had become a US citizen. The program was approved “in recognition of the extraordinary contributions and sacrifices of Filipino veterans who, before the policy change, had to wait decades to be reunited with their children,” said Marita Etcubanez of the Asian American World War II Veterans Advancing Justice, one of the organizations which had advocated for the program.
Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who had lobbied for the program during the Obama administration, said that before it had begun in 2016, thousands of aging Filipino veterans living in the US had been unable to reunite with their family members living in the Philippines because of a decades-long visa backlog. The parole was a humanitarian act, to enable the aging veterans, now in their late 90’s, to be with their children in their few remaining years.
Many Filipino-American groups deplored the decision of the Trump administration to terminate the program. Leaders of the Filipino-American community in the US appealed to the Trump administration to reverse the decision to end the program for the Filipino war veterans’ families.
We have low hopes and expectations that this will happen in the light of the Trump administration’s series of anti-immigrant policies and decisions. But we still have them – for the sake of the Filipino veterans who had fought with the US in World War II and chose to live later in the US. As Rey Robles, son of a WWII veteran, said, only a few of these veterans are alive today. The program could have been allowed to run “until the last veteran passes,” he said.
