There's a term for what the government is doing ...

... it's "aiding and abetting." Specifcally, DHS is (in a moral, if not legal, sense) aiding and abetting domestic violence by abusers who use their victims' lack of immigration status as a way to control them, by restricting the access of those victims to status that's not dependent on the abuser. It's a sadly common pattern in law enforcement (in immigration and elsewhere) -- crack down in whatever ways comes easiest, on whichever people you can get your hands on, without thinking about how that crackdown can generate unintended consequences elsewhere and inhibit your ability to deal with the people doing the really bad stuff.

In very tangentially related news, on NPR this morning they had a report about mercury contamination in fish. The health experts they talked to said (paraphrased) "the general public should go ahead and eat lots of fish, but children and women of childbearing age should be careful." So women and children are apparently not part of the "general public." It's a nice illustration of how environmental health science still treats the middle-class adult white male as the generic person, with everyone else handled as an exception to the rule. I also like the way they slip from the risks specifically related to pregnant and nursing mothers into warning all "women of childbearing age" -- I guess the public outcry got them to back off explicitly labeling all women as "pre-pregnant," but the mentality behind it stuck. (This is not to say that the mercury contamination versus health benefits of fish tradeoff is being significantly overblown in one direction or the other. Obviously, as a vegetarian I'd prefer that anyone who can afford to do so avoid fish for reasons unrelated to mercury, as well as preferring that everyone could afford to do so, and that fish not be contaminated both for their own sake and for the sake of whatever people or other animals eat them.)