VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN @ LA TIMES: Yes, Trumpism Is a Cult: “To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook.”

Virginia Heffernan
Virginia Heffernan
American Journalist & Author

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=c7eff502-0fc6-4c15-a5a9-4fd8adb62bb5

Trumpism deserves to be called a cult

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The comparisons have come hard and fast, at least since 2015. Trump is like Silvio Berlusconi, like Adolf Hitler, like Boris Johnson. A 2018 film called “The Trump Prophecy” took the evangelical route, comparing Trump to Cyrus the Great, the 6th century BC Persian monarch chosen by God to free Jewish captives in Babylon.

But maybe it’s time to stop searching for the exact analogy for Trump, be he Cyrus or Boris, Adolf or a Silvio. What demands analysis is less the arrogant 73-year-old mediocrity in the Oval Office, but the worshipful attitude so many Americans have toward him.

A lot of nut jobs have peddled lies to Americans before, and even styled themselves as messianic. But at no time in history have so many Americans been drawn to what’s looking increasingly like a cult. I don’t use the term recklessly.

When Steven Hassan, an expert in cults and an ex-Moonie (as in the Unification Church, founded by a Korean businessman, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon), published “The Cult of Trump” last spring, some reviewers objected to his use of the cult framework as incendiary and not all that useful.

Indeed, for Trump critics to call his admirers cult members might be just another salvo in our nasty political warfare. It’s similar to the Trump psychologizing over the years that often doubles as name-calling: He’s a baby, a psychopath, a stone-cold narcissist.

The discourse around cults partakes of some woolly theories. “Mind control” and “brainwashing” are shibboleths from the 1950s, when the coinages were used to describe what Chinese Communists did to convert freethinkers to their cause. The implicit suggestion is that unsavory ideas and ideologies can only win adherents using extreme and witchy measures.

All that put me off the notion of Trumpism as a cult. But then in August, Trump looked heavenward and called himself “the chosen one.”

Suddenly, among evangelicals, it wasn’t enough to make comparisons with Cyrus or even King David. He had to be the savior himself. The far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root called Trump “the second coming of God.” Then former Energy Secretary Rick Perry straight up affirmed Trump’s craziness, telling him, “You are here in this time because God ordained you.”

As 2019 drew to a close, my doubts about Trumpism as a cult dissolved. And I’m not alone.

Republican lawyer George Conway reportedly described his wife, Trump’s presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, as a member of a cult. Former GOP strategist John Weaver has used the term. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s onetime communications director, concurs. Also news vet Dan Rather, conservative political scientist Norman Ornstein, science journalist Steve Silberman, pastor John Pavlovitz and academic and journalist Jared Yates Sexton.

What the cult diagnosis may lack in scholarly rigor, it makes up for in explanatory power. When polled, far too many Republicans come across as having abandoned their commitment to libertarianism, family values or simple logic in favor of Trump worship. They’re lost to paranoia and factually unmoored talking points, just the way Hassan was lost to Sun Myung Moon.

It can be heartbreaking when loved ones succumb to Trumpism. (It’s a double whammy when your grief is dismissed as liberal tears.) A true believer undergoes a “radical personal change,” as Hassan puts it. The person you once knew seems somehow … not there.

Journalists Luke O’Neil and Edwin Lyngar, as well as Jen Senko in “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” have compiled stories of Americans who have gone over. O’Neil summarized the transformation this way: “A loved one … sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person.”

Sounds about right.

Hassan — who remembers, during his Moonie days, shouting, “I don’t care if Moon is like Hitler. I’ve chosen to follow him, and I’ll follow him to the end” — broke free, and became an expert on cults and how to leave them. He has spent his career proving it’s possible.

To see Trumpism as a cult is not to refuse to engage with its effects, the crimes committed in its name or the way it has awakened and emboldened the cruelest and most destructive beliefs and practices in the American playbook. Instead, the cult framework should relieve the pressure many of us feel to call Trumpites back to themselves, to keep arguing with them. They are stuck in a bad relationship with a controlling figure.

Understanding Trump is a fool’s errand. He’s sui generis, and far too erratic and finally insubstantial to reward close attention. Trump zealots are another matter. They are part of the tradition of radical converts in American history who elected to forfeit their authentic personalities and principles rather than refine or strengthen them. We need to stay focused on how so many Americans came to this pass and took this destructive course. The Trump cult will define American politics for decades to come, even after its dear leader is gone.

Twitter: @page88

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Heffernan’s analysis leads to the conclusion that it’s naive for Dems to keep wishing, hoping, and thinking that they can just speak truth and advance facts and thereby expect Trump’s followers to wake up, discover decency,  and suddenly embrace humanity and rationality again. 

No, the way the Democratic majority takes back the White House is by making sure that they get maximum turnout among the majority of Americans not enthralled by Trump and, particularly, that they fight through concerted GOP voter suppression efforts to appeal to, register, and get out the many new and younger voters who don‘t identify with Trump’s dark, White Nationalist view of America and the unfailingly false, cruel, and negative values that he so arrogantly projects to his cult followers.

PWS

01-11-20

STEPHEN MILLER’S OVERT WHITE SUPREMACY ISN’T “IN THE MARGINS” OF THE GOP — IT IS THE GOP! — That’s Why He Isn’t Going Anywhere & Even If He Did His Fascist Message Of Hate Would Remain The Face Of Today’s GOP! — “Republican voters made Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief.“

Cas Mudde
Cas Mudde
US Columnist
The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/16/stephen-miller-white-supremacy-republican-party?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

By Cas Mudde for The Guardian:

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a bombshell article revealing troubling emails that White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller sent to editors at Breitbart News, the far-right media outlet previously led by Steve Bannon.

Marie Yovanovitch says state department fails to fight ‘corrupt interests’

The emails, which were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh and predate Miller’s period in the White House, show Miller’s obsession with immigration and his seemingly successful attempts to get Breitbart editors to write anti-immigration stories, some of which were based on openly white nationalist sources like American Renaissance and V-Dare.

The widespread public outrage in response to the revelations is understandable. Miller is the longest serving senior advisor to President Trump who is not related to the president, and is believed to be the architect of the White House’s draconian anti-immigration policies, which doesn’t just target “illegal immigration” but also aims to return to the country to the infamously racist immigration policy of the early 20th century.

In its response to the leak, the White House tried to discredit the source, SPLC, which has had some internal and external problems recently, but is overall a very reliable authority on the US far right (full disclaimer: I regularly collaborate with the SPLC). One White House spokesperson went full “alternative facts” by accusing SPLC of antisemitism, because Miller is Jewish. By doing so, the White House displayed a complete lack of understanding about what antisemitism is, which is no surprise, given that Trump considers himself “the least antisemitic person you’ve ever seen”.

The Democratic responses were predictable and swift as well. Of all the 2020 candidates, Julian Castro went the furthest in condemning Miller – he called him a “neo-Nazi” – but all agreed that he should resign from the White House.

But would Miller’s resignation change anything? While Miller might be behind the concrete policies that harm immigrants, he is not the main white supremacist in the White House. And Trump can easily find someone else to do Miller’s work, particularly now that almost the whole Republican party has fallen in line with their president.

It also externalizes white supremacy, as if it lives in the margins. But it has been hiding in plain sight within the Republican Party for decades. Miller wrote the emails to Breitbart when he was still an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been a consistent voice of white supremacy in Congress since 1997. And the Alabama Senator was not alone in Congress either. Representative Steve King has been the most open and unapologetic voice for the cause since 2003. Others, like representatives Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher, might not be as open in their support, but they all encourage white nationalism to varying degrees.

But white supremacy in the Republican party is not limited to just these individual congressmen and women. It runs much deeper than them. White supremacy was at the core of the “Southern Strategy”, dating back to the unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which was formative for the future conservative movement. Perfected by President Richard Nixon, with the help of speechwriter Pat Buchanan, dog whistles to white supremacy have been at the heart of virtually every Republican campaign since the 1970s.

Talking of Buchanan, more than 25 years ago he gave his now famous “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention. While the term has become mainly linked to the religious right, Buchanan is at least as much a white supremacist as a Christian fundamentalist. In many ways, he is the intellectual father of the Trump administration, personifying Mike Pence and Donald Trump in one.

This is why calling for Stephen Miller’s resignation wouldn’t change much. Neither Miller nor Bannon “made” Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief. And Trump is not the only problem either, as Joe Biden seems to believe. He won the Republican primaries, and presidential elections, not despite white supremacy but because of it.

In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.

  • Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia

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Mudde’s conclusion is worth repeating:

In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.

Let’s take a real life example. Joe Biden clearly would be a huge upgrade over Donald Trump as President, whether or not he’s your “first choice.” But, one of Biden’s “selling points” has been his long experience in the Senate and his good working relationships and mutual respect with GOP Senators.

Yet recently, Trump has shamelessly slandered and blatantly lied about Biden while besmirching his character. This is all without a scrap of actual supporting evidence.

Under the circumstances, you would certainly expect some of Biden’s long time GOP colleagues to speak up in his defense and vouch for his character. Almost all Republicans know that Trump is a chronic liar and everything he says about Biden is untrue.

Yet, not a murmur of support or sympathy from the GOP for their “old buddy Joe.” That would cast at least some doubt on Biden’s optimism that he could work successfully with Mitch McConnell and the GOP in the Senate to get bipartisan things done for the country.

More likely, the GOP would treat him exactly like they treated his former “boss” President Obama. That means opposing and mischaracterizing everything, regardless of merit, in an attempt to make Biden a one-term President and to play to the “Trump base.” 

Even if Trump loses the next election (by no means a given), his white supremacist base will remain critical to the GOP’s future. Without its enthusiastic support, they become perhaps a “20% party” until they finally cease to exist. 

With it, the GOP has a decent chance of imposing some semblance of minority rule over the majority of Americans for decades to come, even if they don’t always control the White House. Given the GOP’s strength in lesser populated states which are “over represented” in the Senate, they also have a decent shot at indefinitely controlling the Senate and therefore the appointments process as well as the judiciary.

Consequently, Trump or no Trump, there is little incentive for the GOP to abandon white supremacy as their fundamental identity. Perhaps that counsels a Democratic strategy of less hand wringing about how to reach out to GOP voters and more of a focus on how to get new Democratic voters registered, get out the Democratic vote, hold the party together (note that the GOP’s “hard right” under Trump didn’t by any means split the party as many pundits had predicted), and use their potential numerical advantages, their wider appeal to a diverse America, and their more positive message to restore at least some semblance of majority rule.

Recapturing the White House certainly won’t solve all of America’s problems. But, it’s an important start.

It could be America’s last chance for survival as a Constitutional Republic. 

PWS

11-19-19

THE HATER-IN-CHIEF: “Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-has-spread-more-hatred-of-immigrants-than-any-american-in-history/2019/11/07/7e253236-ff54-11e9-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

Professor Tyler Anbinder
Tyler Anbinder
Professor of History
George Washington University

Professor Tyler Anbinder writes in WashPost:

November 7, 2019 at 10:03 a.m. EST

President Trump insists that he harbors no prejudice against immigrants. “I love immigrants,” he told Telemundo in June. Indeed, Trump has married two immigrants — Ivana Zelníčková (from what is now the Czech Republic) and Melanija Knavs (born in what is now Slovenia). He does occasionally say something positive about an immigrant group, such as when he wondered why the United States couldn’t get more immigrants from Norway. But for the most part, Trump portrays immigrants as a threat or a menace, and he calls the largest segment of America’s newcomers — Latinos — “animals” and invaders.

As a historian who specializes in the study of anti-immigrant sentiment, I know that Trump is not the first president to denigrate newcomers to the country. But Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.

Trump’s nativism is especially striking for its comprehensiveness. Over the centuries, nativists have leveled 10 main charges against immigrants: They bring crime; they import poverty; they spread disease; they don’t assimilate; they corrupt our politics; they steal our jobs; they cause our taxes to increase; they’re a security risk; their religion is incompatible with American values; they can never be “true Americans.”

Trump has made every one of these charges. No American president before him has publicly embraced the entire nativist worldview. A commander in chief who is also the nativist in chief has the potential to alter immigrants’ role in American society now and for generations to come.

There have, of course, been upsurges of nativism in previous eras, but presidents have rarely been the ones stoking the flames. President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things nearly tripled the time immigrants had to wait before they could become citizens and vote, but his voluminous writings contain nary a word critical of immigrants.

Millard Fillmore, president at the height of the massive influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, remained silent during his administration on the social tensions these newcomers caused. Even in 1856, when the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (popularly called the Know Nothing Party) nominated Fillmore to return to the White House, he and his surrogates eschewed attacks on immigrants and rebranded the party as a moderating force between proslavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans.

Congress has typically been the source of the greatest nativist zeal in national politics — and presidents have generally tried to tamp down that zeal. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur vetoed legislation barring the immigration of Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, though Arthur later agreed to sign a 10-year ban. In subsequent decades, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed bills making the ability to read a prerequisite for adult men to immigrate. Congress eventually overrode Wilson’s veto to enact such a law in 1917.

By the 1920s, most Americans were convinced that further limits on immigration were necessary. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in December 1923, following the political winds, and by “American,” he meant white in race, Anglo-Saxon in ethnicity and Protestant in religion. Coolidge endorsed the severe limits Congress placed on the immigration of Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews and accepted a ban on immigration from Asia and Africa, as well.

Those racist restrictions were rescinded in 1965. When Lyndon Johnson sat at the feet of the Statue of Liberty and signed legislation that ended the discriminatory quotas, he predicted that the federal government would “never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.” But Johnson could not have imagined a president like Trump.

The only Americans who came even remotely close to rivaling Trump’s nativist influence were more narrowly focused than the president is. Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were widely admired anti-Semites whose views reached millions, but their animus was focused on powerful Jews at home and abroad, not Jewish immigrants in general. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had millions of loyal radio listeners in the 1930s, but he, too, was more an anti-Semite than a broad nativist. None of them commanded the devotion of nearly as large a share of the population as Trump does.

John Tanton, who died this year, was a driving force behind the modern anti-immigration movement, organizing and raising money for a variety of groups that have advocated a reduction in immigration. But those groups didn’t have influence until Trump began spreading their ideas and appointing their leaders and allies to positions in his administration.

Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts have featured several classic nativist tropes. He falsely associates immigrants with crime, as when he said during his campaign that Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In truth, immigrants commit significantly less crime than the native-born do. He scapegoats entire immigrant religious groups for the actions of one or two criminals, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after Syed Rizwan Farook (who was not even an immigrant) and his wife (who was foreign-born) killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. He perpetuates the notion that immigrants pose a public health threat, as when he wondered in 2018 why we let “all these people from shithole countries come here.” One of his objections, reportedly, was that Haitians “all have AIDS,” though the White House denies he said that. He’s making it harder for low-income immigrants to come here in ways that would almost certainly reduce immigration from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, justifying his proposal on the grounds that he needs to “protect benefits for American citizens.” And he argues that even the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants — if they are part of ethnic, religious or racial minorities — are not real Americans, as he suggested when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

What makes Trump more influential than any previous American nativist is the size of his audience and the devotion of his supporters. Trump has more than 66 million Twitter followers and a powerful echo chamber in conservative media, allowing him to instantaneously convey his ideas to a quarter of the adult population. Other presidents had passionate followers (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan come to mind), but none of them expressed much, if any, animus toward immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way many Americans view immigrants: Nearly a quarter now call immigration a “problem,” more than double the percentage who characterized it that way in 2015, and the highest share since Gallup began asking that question a quarter-century ago.

Trump has made public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations. As he lambasted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali immigrant, at a July rally in Greenville, N.C., the crowd erupted with chants of “Send her back,” echoing Trump’s notorious tweet. “There was a filter,” a Latino resident of Greenville noted after the rally, that previously prevented Americans from expressing such hatred of immigrants, but “now the filter has been broken. My Hispanic friends are afraid to go to the store. They’re afraid to do anything. It’s scary.”

Trump’s spread of nativism has led to an upsurge in animosity directed at immigrants. Those who read or hear the president’s nativist views are more likely to write offensive things on social media about the groups he targets, one political science study found. One study using data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League found that counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, primarily assaults or acts of vandalism, compared to counties that didn’t host rallies. ABC News identified at least 29 cases in which violence or threats of violence were carried out, and the perpetrators targeted immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants more than any other group.

The president’s rhetoric inspires not merely petty violence but occasionally full-fledged acts of terrorism as well. Throughout the fall of 2018, Trump relentlessly sowed fears that an “invasion” of Central American refugees was imminent via an immigrant “caravan” heading through Mexico toward the United States. Before a gunman killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, he apparently justified his actions on the grounds that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which these days assists refugees from all over the world, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”

Five months later, the man accused of killing more than 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand hailed Trump as a symbol “of renewed white identity” in an online manifesto. In August, a man traveled to El Paso with the goal of killing as many Latinos as possible, authorities said, slaying 22 people at a Walmart. A manifesto linked to him echoed many of the president’s favorite talking points: It condemned “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” charged that immigrants are taking jobs from natives and lauded Republicans for reducing “mass immigration and citizenship.” These accused shooters all seemingly found Trump’s nativist rhetoric inspirational.

While this upsurge in nativist violence is terrifying, history suggests that, over the long term, those who embrace immigrants will win out over those who fear them. The percentage of Americans who want to cut immigration has risen since Trump took office, but that figure is still down by almost half since the mid-1990s. Ironically, Trump’s nativist pronouncements and actions may have galvanized Americans who oppose him to look even more favorably at immigrants than they did before. Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that immigration is good for the country — an all-time high in Gallup’s poll — while the percentage who call it harmful, 19 percent, is at an all-time low.

Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.

After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.

Twitter: @TylerAnbinder

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Beyond the vileness and lies of Trump’s White Nationalist, racist, xenophobia, Professor Anbinder’s article ends on an upbeat note:

Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.

After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.

Unfortunately, the “upward arc of history” will be too late to save the many individual lives and futures daily destroyed by Trump’s White Nationalist hate campaign.

That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is fighting to save lives and protect the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of everyone.

PWS

11-11-19

REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

OUR DISTINGUISHED PANEL:

Eileen Blessinger, Blessinger Legal

Lisa Johnson-Firth, Immigrants First

Andrea Rodriguez, Rodriguez Law

FBA Austin -Central America — Intro

JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW

By

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Federal Bar Association Immigration Conference

Austin, Texas

May 17, 2019

Hi, Im Paul Schmidt, moderator of this panel. So, I have something useful to do while my wonderful colleagues do all the heavy lifting,please submit all questions to me in writing. And remember, free beer for everyone at the Bullock Texas State Museum after this panel!

Welcome to the front lines of the battle for our legal system, and ultimately for the future of our constitutional republic. Because, make no mistake, once this Administration, its nativist supporters, and enablers succeed in eradicating the rights and humanity of Central American asylum seekers, all their other enemies” — Hispanics, gays, African Americans, the poor, women, liberals, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, Democrats will be in line for Dred Scottification” — becoming non-personsunder our Constitution. If you dont know what the Insurrection Actis or Operation Wetbackwas, you should tune into todays edition of my blog immigrationcourtside.com and take a look into the future of America under our current leadersdark and disgraceful vision.

Before I introduce the Dream Teamsitting to my right, a bit of asylum history.

In 1987, the Supreme Court established in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca that a well founded fear of persecution for asylum was to be interpreted generously in favor of asylum applicants. So generously, in fact, that someone with only a 10% chance of persecution qualifies.

Shortly thereafter, the BIA followed suit with Matter of Mogharrabi, holding that asylum should be granted even in cases where persecution was significantly less than probable. To illustrate, the BIA granted asylum to an Iranian who suffered threats at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, DC. Imagine what would happen to a similar case under todays regime!

In the 1990s, the Legacy INSenacted regulations establishing that those who had suffered past persecutionwould be presumed to have a well-founded fear of future persecution, unless the Government could show materially changed circumstances or a reasonably available internal relocation alternative that would eliminate that well-founded fear. In my experience as a judge, that was a burden that the Government seldom could meet.  

But the regulations went further and said that even where the presumption of a well founded fear had been rebutted, asylum could still be granted because of egregious past persecutionor other serious harm.

In 1996, the BIA decided the landmark case of Matter of Kasinga, recognizing that abuses directed at women by a male dominated society, such as female genital mutilation(FGM), could be a basis for granting asylum based on a particular social group.Some of us, including my good friend and colleague Judge Lory Rosenberg, staked our careers on extending that much-need protection to women who had suffered domestic violence. Although it took an unnecessarily long time, that protection eventually was realized in the 2014 precedent Matter of A-R-C-G-, long after our forced departurefrom the BIA.

And, as might be expected, over the years the asylum grant rate in Immigration Court rose steadily, from a measly 11% in the early 1980s, when EOIR was created, to 56% in 2012, in an apparent long overdue fulfillment of the generous legal promise of Cardoza-Fonseca. Added to those receiving withholding of removal and/or relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), approximately two-thirds of asylum applicants were receiving well-deserved, often life-saving legal protection in Immigration Court.

Indeed, by that time, asylum grant rates in some of the more due-process oriented courts with asylum expertise like New York and Arlington exceeded 70%, and could have been models for the future. In other words, after a quarter of a century of struggles, the generous promise of Cardoza-Fonseca was finally on the way to being fulfilled. Similarly, the vision of the Immigration Courts as through teamwork and innovation being the worlds best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for allwas at least coming into focus, even if not a reality in some Immigration Courts that continued to treat asylum applicants with hostility.

And, that doesnt count those offered prosecutorial discretion or PDby the DHS counsel. Sometimes, this was a humanitarian act to save those who were in danger if returned but didnt squarely fit the somewhat convoluted refugeedefinition as interpreted by the BIA. Other times, it appeared to be a strategic move by DHS to head off possible precedents granting asylum in close casesor in emerging circumstances.

In 2014, there was a so-called surgein asylum applicants, mostly scared women, children, and families from the Northern Triangle of Central America seeking protection from worsening conditions involving gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments.There was a well-established record of femicide and other widespread and largely unmitigated gender-based violence directed against women and gays, sometimes by the Northern Triangle governments and their agents, other times by gangs and cartels operating with the knowledge and acquiescence of the governments concerned.

Also, given the breakdown of governmental authority and massive corruption, gangs and cartels assumed quasi-governmental status, controlling territories, negotiating treaties,exacting involuntary taxes,and severely punishing those who publicly opposed their political policies by refusing to join, declining to pay, or attempting to report them to authorities. Indeed, MS-13 eventually became the largest employer in El Salvador. Sometimes, whole family groups, occupational groups, or villages were targeted for their public acts of resistance.

Not surprisingly in this context, the vast majority of those who arrived during the so-called surgepassed credible fearscreening by the DHS and were referred to the Immigration Courts, or in the case of unaccompanied minors,to the Asylum Offices, to pursue their asylum claims.

The practical legal solution to this humanitarian flow was obvious help folks find lawyers to assist in documenting and presenting their cases, screen out the non-meritorious claims and those who had prior gang or criminal associations, and grant the rest asylum. Even those not qualifying for asylum because of the arcane nexusrequirements appeared to fit squarely within the CAT protection based on likelihood of torture with government acquiescence upon return to the Northern Triangle. Some decent BIA precedents, a robust refugee program in the Northern Triangle, along with continued efforts to improve the conditions there would have sealed the deal.In other words, the Obama Administration had all of the legal tools necessary to deal effectively and humanely with the misnamed surgeas what it really was a humanitarian situation and an opportunity for our country to show human rights leadership!

But, then things took a strange and ominous turn. After years of setting records for deportations and removals, and being disingenuously called soft on enforcementby the GOP, the Obama Administration began believing the GOP myths that they were wimps. They panicked! Their collective manhooddepended on showing that they could quickly return refugees to the Northern Triangle to deterothers from coming. Thus began the weaponizationof our Immigration Court system that has continued unabated until today.

They began imprisoning families and children in horrible conditions and establishing so-called courtsin those often for profit prisons in obscure locations where attorneys generally were not readily available. They absurdly claimed that everyone should be held without bond because as a group they were a national security risk.They argued in favor of indefinite detention without bond and making children and toddlers represent themselvesin Immigration Court.

The Attorney General also sent strong messages to EOIR that hurrying folks through the system by prioritizingthem, denying their claims, stuffingtheir appeals, and returning them to the Northern Triangle with a mere veneer of due process was an essential part of the Administrations get toughenforcement program. EOIR was there to send a messageto those who might be considering fleeing for their lives dont come, you wont get in, no matter how strong your claim might be.

They took judges off of their established dockets and sent them to the Southern Border to expeditiously remove folks before they could get legal help. They insisted on jamming unprepared cases of recently arrived juveniles and adults with childrenin front of previously docketed cases, thereby generating total chaos and huge backlogs through what is known as aimless docket reshuffling(ADR).

Hurry up scheduling and ADR also resulted in more in absentiaorders because of carelessly prepared and often inadequate or wrongly addressed noticessent out by overwhelmed DHS and EOIR court staff. Sometimes DHS could remove those with in absentia orders before they got a chance to reopen their cases. Other times, folks didnt even realize a removal order had been entered until they were on their way back.

They empowered judges with unusually high asylum denial rates. By a ratio of nine to one they hired new judges from prosecutorial backgrounds, rather than from the large body of qualified candidates with experience in representing asylum applicants who might actually have been capable of working within the system to fairly and efficiently recognize meritorious cases, promote fair access to pro bono counsel, and insure that doubtful cases or those needing more attention did not get lostin the artificial backlogs being created in an absurdly mismanaged system. In other words, due process took a back seat to expedienceand fulfilling inappropriate Administration enforcement goals.

Asylum grant rates began to drop, even as conditions on the ground for refugees worldwide continued to deteriorate. Predictably, however, detention, denial, inhumane treatment, harsh rhetoric, and unfair removals failed to stop refugees from fleeing the Northern Triangle.

But, just when many of us thought things couldnt get worse, they did. The Trump Administration arrived on the scene. They put lifelong White Nationalist xenophobe nativists Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller in charge of eradicating the asylum process. Sessions decided that even artificially suppressed asylum grant rates werent providing enough deterrence; asylum seekers were still winning too many cases. So he did away with A-R-C-G- and made it harder for Immigration Judges to control their dockets.

He tried to blame asylum seekers and their largely pro bono attorneys, whom he called dirty lawyers,for having created a population of 11 million undocumented individuals in the U.S. He promoted bogus claims and false narratives about immigrants and crime. Perhaps most disgustingly, he was the mastermindbehind the policy of child separationwhich inflicted lifetime damage upon the most vulnerable and has resulted in some children still not being reunited with their families.

He urged judgesto summarily deny asylum claims of women based on domestic violence or because of fear of persecution by gangs. He blamed the judges for the backlogs he was dramatically increasing with more ADR and told them to meet new quotas for churning out final orders or be fired. He made it clear that denials of asylum, not grants, were to be the new normfor final orders.

His sycophantic successor, Bill Barr, an immigration hard-liner, immediately picked up the thread by eliminating bond for most individuals who had passed credible fear. Under Barr, the EOIR has boldly and publicly abandoned any semblance of due process, fairness, or unbiased decision making in favor of becoming an Administration anti-asylum propaganda factory. Just last week they put out a bogus fact sheetof lies about the asylum process and the dedicated lawyers trying to help asylum seekers. The gist was that the public should believe that almost all asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle are mala fide and that getting them attorneys and explaining their rights are a waste of time and money.

In the meantime, the Administration has refused to promptly process asylum applicants at ports of entry; made those who have passed credible fear wait in Mexicoin dangerous and sometimes life-threatening conditions; unsuccessfully tried to suspend the law allowing those who enter the U.S. between ports of entry to apply for asylum; expanded the New American Gulagwith tent cities and more inhumane prisons dehumanizingly referred to as bedsas if they existed without reference to those humans confined to them;  illegally reprogrammed money that could have gone for additional humanitarian assistance to a stupid and unnecessary wall;and threatened to dumpasylum seekers to punishso-called sanctuary cities.Perhaps most outrageously, in violation of clear statutory mandates, they have replaced trained Asylum Officers in the credible fearprocess with totally unqualified Border Patrol Agents whose job is to make the system adversarialand to insure that fewer individuals pass credible fear.

The Administration says the fact that the credible fearpass rate is much higher than the asylum grant rate is evidence that the system is being gamed.Thats nativist BS! The, reality is just the opposite: that so many of those who pass credible fear are eventually rejected by Immigration Judges shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the Immigration Court system. Under pressure to produce and with too many biased, untrained, and otherwise unqualified judges,many claims that should be granted are being wrongfully denied.

Today, the Immigration Courts have become an openly hostile environment for asylum seekers and their representatives. Sadly, the Article III Courts arent much better, having largely swallowed the whistleon a system that every day blatantly mocks due process, the rule of law, and fair and unbiased treatment of asylum seekers. Many Article IIIs continue to deferto decisions produced not by expert tribunals,but by a fraudulent court system that has replaced due process with expediency and enforcement.

But, all is not lost. Even in this toxic environment, there are pockets of judges at both the administrative and Article III level who still care about their oaths of office and are continuing to grant asylum to battered women and other refugees from the Northern Triangle. Indeed, I have been told that more than 60 gender-based cases from Northern Triangle countries have been  granted by Immigration Judges across the country even after Sessionss blatant attempt to snuff out protection for battered women in Matter of A-B-. Along with dependent family members, that means hundreds of human lives of refugees saved, even in the current age.

Also significantly, by continuing to insist that asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle be treated fairly in accordance with due process and the applicable laws, we are making a record of the current legal and constitutional travesty for future generations. We are building a case for an independent Article I Immigration Court, for resisting nativist calls for further legislative restrictions on the rights of asylum seekers, and for eventually holding the modern day Jim Crowswho have abused the rule of law and human values, at all levels of our system, accountable, before the court of historyif nothing else!

Eventually, we will return to the evolving protection of asylum seekers in the pre-2014 era and eradicate the damage to our fundamental values and the rule of law being done by this Administrations nativist, White Nationalist policies.Thats what the New Due Process Armyis all about.

Here to tell you how to effectively litigate for the New Due Process Army and to save even more lives of deserving refugees from all areas of the world, particularly from the Northern Triangle, are three of the best ever.I know that, because each of them appeared before me during my tenure at the Arlington Immigration Court. They certainly brightened up my day whenever they appeared, and I know they will enlighten you with their legal knowledge, energy, wit, and humanity.

Andrea Rodriguez is the principal of Rodriguez Law in Arlington Virginia. Prior to opening her own practice, Andrea was the Director of Legal Services at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). She is a graduate of the City University of New York Law and George Mason University.  

Eileen Blessinger is the principal of Blessinger Legal in Falls Church, Virginia. Eileen is a graduate of the Washington College of Law at American University.  In addition to heading a multi-attorney practice firm, she is a frequent commentator on legal issues on television and in the print media.

Lisa Johnson-Firth is the principal of Immigrants First, specializing in removal defense, waivers, family-based adjustment, asylum and Convention Against Torture claims, naturalization, U and T visas, and Violence Against Women Act petitions. She holds a J.D. from Northeastern University, an LLB from the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and a B.A. degree from Allegheny College.

Andrea, starting with you, whats the real situation in the Northern Triangle and the sordid history of the chronic failure of state protection?

PWS

05-20-19

 

 

COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/sunday/anti-immigrant-hatred-1920s.html

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.

Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

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Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. 
Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.

***********************************

The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.

Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.

At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.

Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?

How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-black-men-of-the-civil-war-were-americas-original-dreamers/2019/02/15/8c00088e-30a8-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html

Colby King writes in WashPost:

Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.

I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”

Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.

However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.

My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.

Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.

Yet, serve they did.

As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”

According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .

King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.

The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.

The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.

For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.

That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.

That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.

While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”

It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

02-16-19

SPLIT DECISION: Supremes Deliver “Gut Punch” To Transgender Americans, But Give Another Round To Dreamers

SPLIT DECISION: Supremes Deliver “Gut Punch” To Transgender Americans, But Give Another Round To Dreamers

 

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

United States Immigration Judge (Retired)

On Tuesday, a divided Supreme Court allowed a portion of Trump’s homophobic ban on certain transgender troops to go into effect. At the same time, they properly squelched the arrogantly disingenuous attempt by Trump and his “go along to get along” Solicitor General Noel Francisco to “expedite” review of lower court rulings that found that Trump, former Attorney General Sessions, and DHS acted lawlessly and without any apparent legal rationale in terminating the “DACA” program. In simple terms, decisions that required the Administration to follow the law.

Prior Solicitors General have sometimes balked at representing liars and presenting disingenuous arguments in behalf of their Government “clients.” (Actually, somewhat of a bureaucratic misnomer, because the “institutional client” is really the “People of the U.S.”  who pay Government salaries, regardless of whether they are citizens or can vote.) Not this one, who seems to savor the opportunity to carry Trump’s more than ample “dirty water” and reduce the credibility of his one-respected office to around zero. As I predicted, nobody serves Trump without being tarnished.

For the LGBTQ community, it’s a horrible signal that a narrow majority of the Supremes are unwilling to move into the 21stcentury and recognize their Constitutional rights to equal protection under the 14thAmendment as well as their rights as human beings. It’s also shockingly disrespectful to those who have stepped forward to risk their lives in the name of our country, something Trump took great pains to avoid. It’s doubly disappointing that Chief Justice John Roberts joined his far-right colleagues on this one, at least in part (he rejected the bogus argument for immediate review put forth by Francesco and instead sent the case back to the lower courts for further development).

Unlike some of his colleagues on the right, Roberts has some sense of institutional history, the horror and existential dangers to democracy of Trump as Chief Executive, and the future. Come on, “Chiefie,” we can all get smarter as we get older! Don’t blow your chance to “get on the right side of history.” Leave the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” behind in their dust and join your four more enlightened colleagues in moving America forward and showing some leadership and courage on the Supremes. As this month has shown, you might be the only person able to save America.

Paraphrasing what many pundits have said, “The Supremes can basically do anything they want, whenever they want to, for any reason they can come up with, because they are Supreme.” With that caveat in mind, the Court’s well-deserved slap down of Trump on DACA basically leaves the full protections in effect for Dreamers until the end of the Trump Administration. At that point, we’ll either get a new President, or there won’t be any country left for the “Dreamers,” the Supremes, or the rest of us to “dream about” or live in. The so-called “American Dream” will be at a tragic end. We’ll all be living in a continuing nightmare of cruelty, incompetence, and randomness.

I think the Supremes would be wise not to take up the DACA issue ever. It needs to be resolved by the lower courts, who have for the most part done a fine job, and the Congress, which hasn’t. But, assuming the Supremes do take the issue, they probably wouldn’t schedule argument before the October Term 2020. That makes it highly unlikely that they would reach and issue any final decision before the November 2020 elections. There would certainly be no reason for them to “rush to judgement” on this one.

Thus, Trump’s hollow offer of meager “Dreamer relief,” no path to green cards or citizenship and less than they have now under the court decisions, is even less of a legitimate “bargaining chip” than it was before. And, “poisoning the well” with Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, child-abuse agenda shows how intellectually dishonest Trump and the GOP are and that the rancid “thousand pages of vile gibberish” that they launched as a “fake offer to reopen our Government” is a pure political stunt and an insult to 800,000 unpaid Government workers.

Moreover, all of this nonsense must be viewed in context of reality. That’s something that seldom intrudes on the daily intentionally created chaos and national dysfunction of this Administration. The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere! Almost all of them have legitimate applications for immigration relief that they can file in Immigration Court, including cancellation of removal, asylum, withholding of removal, or relief under the CAT.

Trump, Sessions, and now Whitaker have totally destroyed the U.S. Immigration Court system.  I’m not sure it will be able to reopen even when the Trump shutdown finally ends. With a politically-created backlog of well over one million cases, growing by tens of thousands with every day of the mindless Trump shutdown, virtually no “Dreamer” (other than a minute percentage who might be convicted of crimes and probably would have had their DACA status revoked or denied on that basis) would be scheduled for removal proceedings within the next four years, let alone by 2020. Indeed, if Congress doesn’t step in and provide Dreamer relief and an Article I independent Immigration Court to replace the current dysfunctional mess in the DOJ, some of these cases may well still be pending a decade from now!

This context also reaffirms the total disingenuous absurdity of SG Francisco’s argument that this is an “emergency” requiring “early intervention” by the Supremes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only “emergency” is the one intentionally caused by his “client” Trump — by illegally and unnecessarily trying to shut down the DACA program and aggravated by his Administration’s wanton destruction of our U.S. Immigration Courts, and by the “Trump shutdown.”

The Supremes must take a “hard line” against being “sucked in” to the many bogus “emergencies” that Trump creates to detract attention from his and his party’s inability to govern in even a minimally fair and effective manner. Perhaps, it’s also time for Francisco to reread the rule of ethics for lawyers and have a “heart to heart” with his “client” about abusing the Federal Courts with semi-frivolous litigation and presenting lies as “facts.” It’s never too late to learn!

PWS

01-23-19

COLBERT I. KING @ WASHPOST: NATION IN REGRESSION: Trump & His White Nationalist Flunkies Are An Insult To All That Rev. Martin Luther King & His Supporters, Of All Races & Religions Stood For! — From the promise of guaranteed rights to a return to the insecurity of injustice. A pluralistic America is being cynically drawn along racial lines by a president who is as far from the civility of his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama as the charter of the Confederacy was from the Constitution.” — But, The New Due Process Army Continues MLK’s Legacy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/martin-luther-king-jr-would-be-outraged/2019/01/18/e4a7b4c6-1a75-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html

Colby King writes:

. . . .

The greatest contrast between the time King led the struggle for America’s legal and social transformation and now is a White House occupied by Donald Trump.

There is a long list of ways in which backtracking on civil and human rights has occurred since the election of a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. It ranges from discriminatory travel bans against Muslims to turning a federal blind eye to intentionally racially discriminatory state voter-suppression schemes, to opposing protections for transgender people, to inhumanely separating children from families seeking to enter the country.

Sadly, that’s not all that stands out.

Once the federal locus of the nation’s quest for racial reconciliation, today’s White House is a source of racial divisiveness and a beacon to the prejudice-warped fringes of American society. It’s no surprise that the FBI found hate crimes in America rose 17 percent in 2017, the third consecutive year that such crimes increased. In King’s day, racially loaded, hateful rhetoric could be heard across the length and breadth of the Deep South. Now, mean, disgusting and inflammatory words come out of the mouth of the president of the United States.

From the promise of guaranteed rights to a return to the insecurity of injustice. A pluralistic America is being cynically drawn along racial lines by a president who is as far from the civility of his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama as the charter of the Confederacy was from the Constitution.

King, and the movement he led, would be outraged. The rest of us should be, too.

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Read the full op-ed at the above link.

Very powerful! King speaks truth, reason, and humanity — in the spirit of Dr. King. Contrast that with the vile slurs, bogus race-baiting narratives, and non-policies spewing from the mouth of our racist (and incompetent) Liar/Grifter-in-Chief!

Two of my favorite MLK quotes (from the Letter from the Birmingham Jail — with acknowledgment to the Legal Aid and Justice Center from their poster hanging in my “office”)):

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Thanks to those many courageous and dedicated individuals tirelessly serving America in the New Due Process Army by resisting Trump’s illegal and anti-American policies! You, indeed, are the 21st Century continuation of Dr. King’s legacy to our country and the world! Dr. King would be proud of you! Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-21-19

NEW BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO: THE MARSHALL PROJECT RELEASES “WE ARE WITNESSES, BECOMING AN AMERICAN” – Includes Video Of Me On “Being An Immigration Judge!” – View It Here!

we are witnesses

BECOMING AN AMERICAN

Despite controversies over border walls, separated families and the Muslim travel ban, immigrants are still striving for American citizenship. WE ARE WITNESSES: BECOMING AN AMERICAN tells their stories and the stories of those trying to help and hinder them.

Presented with

Judge Paul Schmidt

Former immigration judge
Alina Diaz

Domestic abuse survivor from Colombia
Zaid Nagi

Yemeni-American immigrant and organizer
Villacis-Guerrero Family

A family separated by deportation
Jose Molina

Legal permanent resident from Panama
Nisrin Elamin & Tahanie Aboushi

An immigrant and lawyer on the travel ban
David Ward

Former Border Patrol/ICE agent
Youngmin Lo

Undocumented immigrant from South Korea
Lee Wang

An immigration lawyer explains how we got here
Teofilo Chavez

Undocumented minor from Honduras
John Sandweg

Former acting director of ICE
Alena Sandimirova

LGBT asylum grantee from Russia
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I’m proud to have been a part of this project. Many thanks to Isabel Castro, Ruth Baldwin, and all of the other great folks over at The Marshall Project for making this happen!
PWS
01-16-19

CHRISTMAS EVE @ COURTSIDE: A Muslim Gets The Message Of Christ Better Than Many Christians!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/muslim-christian-trump-supporters.html

By Wajahat Ali

NY Times Contributing Opinion Writer

Image

A Christmas nativity scene.CreditCreditAmir Levy/Getty Images

At Bellarmine, an all-boys Catholic school in San Jose, Calif., I was often the token Muslim and probably the only person who began freshman year thinking the Eucharist sounded like the name of a comic book villain. I eventually learned it’s a ritual commemorating the Last Supper. At the monthly Masses that were part of the curriculum, that meant grape juice and stale wafers were offered to pimpled, dorky teenagers as the blood and body of Christ.

During my time there, I also read the King James Bible and stories about Jesus, learned about Christian morality, debated the Trinity with Jesuit priests and received an A every semester in religious studies class. Twenty years later, I can still recite the “Our Father” prayer from memory.

Growing up, I’d been taught that Jesus was a major prophet in Islam, known as “Isa” and also referred to as “ruh Allah,” the spirit of God born to the Virgin Mary and sent as a mercy to all people. Like Christians, we Muslims believe he will return to fight Dajjal, or the Antichrist, and establish peace and justice on earth. But it was everything I learned in high school that came together to make me love Jesus in a way that made me a better Muslim.

Even though I don’t personally celebrate Christmas, the season always makes me think of his legacy of radical love. This year, it’s especially hard to understand how Trump-supporting Christians have turned their back on that unconditional love and exchanged it for nativism, fear and fealty to a reality TV show host turned president.

According to a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted in January, 75 percent of white evangelicals in the United States — compared with 46 percent of American adults over all — said “the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” was a positive thing. Sixty-eight percent of them believe America has no responsibility to house refugees, according to a Pew Research poll conducted in April and May.

The numbers aren’t quite as jarring when we look at different slices of religious America. According to a PRRI poll conducted in late August and early September, 59 percent of Catholics and 75 percent of black Protestants view Trump negatively. Still, I can’t fathom how anyone who knows the Jesus I encountered at Bellarmine could be comfortable with this administration.

Jesus was a humble carpenter from Nazareth who miraculously fed 5,000 people but never humiliated them with condescending lectures about God favoring those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Mr. Trump has expressed enthusiasm for gutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, by adding unnecessary and cruel work requirements for food stamp recipients.

Mr. Trump also chose Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who admitted he isn’t qualified to run a federal agency, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Carson, who says his Christian faith helps him “serve the nation even better,” tweeted he’s “moving more people toward self-sufficiency” by advocating huge cuts to housing aid, increased rent and more stringent work requirements. In high school, I must have missed the sermon where Jesus told the poor, hungry and homeless to stop asking God for handouts.

President Trump and Republicans have also waged a nonstop war on Obamacare for nine years, allowing 14 states to opt out of Medicaid expansion, leaving four million eligible Americans unable to enroll. The Jesus I met in high school healed a blind man. Guess what he didn’t do? Rail against the socialist evils of taking care of people’s health.

The Jesus I know commanded, “You shall love your neighbors as yourself.” He didn’t add “unless they are undocumented immigrants or Muslim or gay.” He would welcome refugees from Central America, feed them, wash their feet. He would have been horrified at the conditions that led 7-year-old Jakelin Caal to die of dehydration and shock in Border Control custody after seeking refuge in this country with her father.

Christianity isn’t unique: Every religion is abused as such by some of its followers and manipulated to advance political agendas. But the hypocrisy of white Evangelical Christians’ support for Trump in light of his undeniable cruelty and apathy — toward refugees, Puerto Rican citizens recovering from a devastating hurricane, victims of California fires and a newspaper columnist killed by Saudi Arabia — is too much to bear. Despite this barrage of hate, Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham still support Mr. Trump because they believe he “defends the faith.” How?

Our school’s motto was “Men for others,” a reminder that the Christian faith should be lived through active selfless service. Judging from the type of Christianity that is practiced and preached by some Trump supporters, they must know a Jesus whose message is “Every man for himself.”

At Bellarmine, we had to perform 100 hours of community service before graduating. I volunteered at the senior center and the local homeless shelter, where my friends and I cleaned the kitchen and packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for struggling men and women, most of them eager for employment.

This Christmas, I hope Trump-supporting Christians try to find compassion for people who are similarly suffering. I hope they open their Bible and reflect on James 2:14: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?”

Thankfully, I know many Christians who resemble Jesus, investing their life to uplifting vulnerable people. Mr. Trump’s supporters should meet Sister Simone Campbell, who in 2012 organized Nuns on the Busto oppose the Paul Ryan-backed budget plan’s assault on social programs for the poor. They should join the Rev. William Barber II of North Carolina, who has revived the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign to fight racism and income inequality. They should donate to Sister Norma Pimental of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a “respite center” in McAllen, Tex.,offering food, clothes and shoes to people seeking asylum.

These are the kinds of Christians who I believe are following the lessons and footsteps of Jesus, the prophet I met and loved as a Muslim at a Catholic high school. This Christmas, I hope some of the Christians who support President Trump can meet him too.

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, lawyer and contributing opinion writer.

*******************************************

There’s no doubt that if Jesus were here today he’d be holed up with the migrants waiting on the Mexican side of our Southern Border for a chance at justice or whiling aways the hours in DHS detention. One place he’d never be found would be in the West Wing, Mar A Lago, or any far right Evangelical Church that preaches doctrines of exclusion, intolerance, and “beggar thy neighbor.”

And when his time came, Jesus, as a scruffy, unemployed, uneducated, single Palestinian male who led a ragtag band of similarly unemployed men and was considered to be a subversive by the authorities would be given short shrift by the U.S. system and returned to those who would torture and kill him.

Something to think about.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays

PWS

12-24-18

🎄👍😎

 

GONZO’S WORLD: STILL A BIG LOSER! – He’s Gone, But His Scofflaw Positions Continue To Be Hammered By The Real (“Article III”) Courts! – Federal Judges Smoke Illegal “Sanctuary Cities” & “Transgender Troops” Abuses By Administration!

https://apple.news/Aw1vvPVvPTMGBMle4Z4fXow

Sophie Tatum reports for CNN:

US judge rules against Trump administration in suit over policing grants to ‘sanctuary cities’

Updated 5:21 PM EST November 30, 2018
Washington

A federal judge ruled against the Justice Department on Friday in a lawsuit over withholding federal money from so-called sanctuary cities, the latest blow to the Trump administration’s hardline immigration tactics.

The lawsuit challenged the Justice Department’s efforts to punish sanctuary cities by withholding a key law enforcement grant the department said was available only to cities that complied with specific immigration enforcement measures.

In July 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that applicants for Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants would have to comply with federal immigration enforcement in ways that were unlike years past, like allowing federal law enforcement agents to have access to detainees in jails for questioning about their immigration status.

According to the ruling, the seven states involved in the lawsuit, as well as New York City, had been receiving the grant money since Congress created the fund for the “modern version of the program in 2006,” and the funds “collectively totaled over $25 million.”

“In 2017, for the first time in the history of the program, the U.S. Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) and Attorney General (collectively, ‘Defendants’) imposed three immigration-related conditions that grantees must comply with in order to receive funding,” wrote Judge Edgardo Ramos, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, in his ruling.

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood led the suit and was joined by New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington state and Virginia.

Underwood said in a statement on Friday that the ruling was “a major win for New Yorkers’ public safety.” CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

This isn’t the first ruling of its kind — in April, a panel of three judges from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling in favor of the city of Chicago that blocked the Justice Department from adding new requirements for the policing grants.

*******************************************************

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/419170-judge-refuses-to-hold-or-limit-ruling-on-transgender-military-ban

Lydia Wheeler reports in The Hill:

A federal district court judge on Friday denied the Trump administration’s request to block or limit the scope of a ruling that temporarily prohibits the government from enforcing its ban on transgender people serving in the military.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the court is not convinced the government will suffer irreparable harm without a stay of the court’s October 2017 preliminary injunction.

The government had asked for a stay pending any potential, future proceedings in the Supreme Court. Bypassing normal judicial order, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court last week to review the case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Arguments before the appeals court are scheduled for Dec. 10.

At the very least, the government asked the district court to limit the nationwide scope of the injunction while the court weighs in, but Kollar-Kotelly refused. She said the government had not convinced the court that a more limited injunction is appropriate.

“Without supporting evidence, defendants’ bare assertion that the Court’s injunction poses a threat to military readiness is insufficient to overcome the public interest in ensuring that the government does not engage in unconstitutional and discriminatory conduct,” she said.

“After all, ‘it must be remembered that all Plaintiffs seek during this litigation is to serve their nation with honor and dignity, volunteering to face extreme hardships, to endure lengthy deployments and separation from family and friends, and to willingly make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives if necessary to protect the Nation, the people of the United States, and the Constitution against all who would attack them,’ ” she said.

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Not surprisingly, policies stemming from racism and homophobia being advanced for crass political reasons aren’t doing very well in Federal Courts. There, the judges tend to prefer cogent legal arguments. The latter is something for which Gonzo was never known. Indeed, a number of the biased based positions he advanced in support of the Administration were so outlandish that the judges actually gave the Government additional time to develop a legal rationale. But, that also proved to be time wasted, because there never was any legal rationale for these policies and legal positions. Just hate and bias, and an ignorance of the real meaning of our Constitution.

There’s lots of irony, indeed total absurdity, in Sessions’s audaciously bogus claim that he “stood for the rule of law.” Safe to say that no Attorney General since “John the Con” Mitchell has done so much to undermine our Constitutional system and the real “rule of law.”

PWS

12-03-18

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION “POLICIES” ARE BASED ON RACISM, CRUELTY, LIES, & KNOWINGLY FALSE NARRATIVES — THE GOP HAS SOMETIMES ENCOURAGED, & OTHER TIMES ENABLED, THESE OUTRAGES AGAINST HUMANITY & THE RULE OF LAW — Now Some Accountability For These Despicable Actions Are On the Horizon!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/11/28/the-true-depths-of-trumps-cruelty-are-about-to-be-exposed/

Greg Sargent writes for the WashPost:

The House GOP’s near-total abdication of any oversight role has done more than just shield President Trump on matters involving his finances and Russian collusion. It has also resulted in almost no serious scrutiny of the true depths of cruelty, inhumanity and bad-faith rationalization driving important aspects of Trump’s policyagenda — in particular, on his signature issue of immigration.

That’s about to change.

In an interview with me, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee vowed that when Democrats take over in January, they will undertake thorough and wide-ranging scrutiny of the justifications behind — and executions of — the top items in Trump’s immigration agenda, from the family separations, to the thinly veiled Muslim ban, to the handling of the current turmoil involving migrants at the border.

“We will visit the border,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is expected to chair the committee, which has jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security, told me. “We will hold hearings in committee on any and all aspects of DHS. … We will not back off of this issue.”

This oversight — which could result in calling for testimony from Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — will include scrutiny of the administration’s justifications for its policies. Importantly, Thompson tells me Democrats will seek to grill officials on what went into Trump’s public statements on various aspects of the issue, many of which are falsehoods.

On asylum seekers, for instance, Trump’s public rationale for his various efforts to restrict their ability to apply (which is their legal right), is based on lies about the criminal threat they supposedly pose and absurd exaggerations about the rates at which they don’t show up for hearings.

Migrant caravan crisis escalates with tear gas at border fence

U.S. authorities fired tear gas at members of a Central American migrant caravan who had rushed the fencing along the U.S. border with Mexico on Nov. 25.

To be clear, Trump has used these rationales to justify actual policies with real-world impact, such as the effort to cruelly restrict asylum-applications to only official points of entry. Trump has also threatened a total border shutdown. Hearings could reveal that the justifications are nonsense, and spotlight their true arbitrary and cruel nature (putting aside for now that their real motive is ethno-nationalism).

“All this innuendo we hear about criminals coming in the caravan, we just want to know, how did you validate this?” Thompson told me, adding that DHS officials would be called on in hearings to account for Trump’s claims. “Policy has to be backed up with evidence. So we will do rigorous oversight.”

This will also include a look at the recent tear-gassing of migrants, and the administration’s public statements about it and justifications, Thompson said. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has defended the fact that tear gas appears to have impacted children by claiming they were used as “human shields.”

The use of the military as a prop

Thompson said such scrutiny could dovetail with an examination of Trump’s use of the military at the border as campaign propaganda, though that might involve the House Armed Services Committee. “We have to get full disclosure in a public setting or a classified setting,” Thompson said. “Under no circumstances will we not get information.”

By the way: Even if you take some of Trump’s complaints about asylum seeking seriously — there are serious issues with backlogs that have real consequences — you should want this oversight. If done well, it could shed light on actual problems, such as the role of the administration’s deliberate delays in processing asylum seekers in creating the current border mess, to the real need to reorganize the bureaucracy to relieve backlogs and to pursue regional solutions to the root causes of migration surges.

The overall goal, Thompson said, will be this: “As a nation of immigrants ourselves, we want to make sure that our process of immigration that includes asylum-seekers is constitutional and represents American values.”

Family separations and the travel ban

Thompson told me the committee would also look at the process leading up to the travel ban, which proceeded despite the fact that two internal Homeland Security analyses undercut its national security rationale.

Democrats can demand that DHS officials justify that policy. “What did you use to come up with this travel ban? How did you select these countries?” Thompson said, previewing the inquiry and vowing subpoenas if necessary. “We will ask for any written documentation that went towards putting the ban in place, what individuals were consulted, and what the process consisted of.”

Thompson also said the run-up to the implementation of the family separation policy and its rationale would receive similar scrutiny, as well as at the conditions under which children have been held, such as the reported Texas “tent city.” “Somebody is going to have to come in and tell us, ‘Is this the most efficient way to manage the situation?’” Thompson said. But also: “How did we get here in the first place?”

What can Democrats do?

One big question: What will House Democrats do legislatively against such policies? Thompson told me the goal is to secure cooperation with DHS, but in cases where the agency continues policies that Democrats deem terribly misguided or serious abuses, they can try to legislate against them. That would run headlong into Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate, at which point one could see discussion of targeted defunding of certain policies, though whether that will happen or what that might look like remains to be seen.

“As far as I’m concerned, no option is off the table,” Thompson said. Some more moderate House Democrats who won tougher districts might balk at such a stance, but Thompson said: “Every committee has responsibilities, and we have to carry them out.”

The big story here is that Trump has relied on the outright dismissal of his own administration’s factual determinations to justify many policies, not just on immigration, but also with his drive to weaken efforts to combat global warming despite the big report warning of the dire threats it poses.

The administration will strenuously resist Democratic oversight, and I don’t want to overstate what it can accomplish. But House Democrats must at least try to get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever possible. And when it comes to the humanitarian crises Trump has wrought on immigration, this is particularly urgent.

*********************************

Finally, some much-needed, long-overdue accountability, fact-finding, and truth about Trump’s intentionally cruel and usually lawless immigration policies and those sycophants and toadies who implement them and egg him on. No, it won’t necessarily change things overnight. But, having some “pushback” and setting the factual record straight for further action is an important first step. And, I hope that the absolutely avoidable politically created mess in the U.S. Immigration Courts, and their disgraceful abandonment of Due Process as their sole focus, is high on the oversight list!

 

PWS

12-02-18

 

 

 

 

GOP BIGOTS “OUTED” IN MIDTERMS — Message Of Hate & Intolerance Directed @ LGBTQ Americans Being Rejected By Voters Across The Nation!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-gop-antigay-candidates-midterms_us_

Michelangelo Signorile writes for HuffPost:

Dana Rohrabacher, the 15-term Republican incumbent washed away by Democratic challenger Harley Rouda when the blue wave came ashore in Southern California’s 48th Congressional District last week, isn’t your average homophobic extremist.

He is, in fact, an architect of the decades-long battle against LGBTQ rights and a politician, among many others, whose bigotry is partly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people from AIDS.

Rohrabacher was a lieutenant of President Ronald Reagan throughout his two terms as a speechwriter and special assistant, helping Reagan court the evangelical right, which Reagan has been credited with bringing into politics. Reagan, bowing to the zealots from whom he helped amass enormous power (power they still wield with President Donald Trump), was among the most anti-gay presidents in history, ignoring the AIDS epidemic until far too late.

Rohrabacher was first elected to Congress in 1988, at the end of the Reagan administration, representing a district in Orange County, a bastion of conservatism in the ’80s and beyond. He was among a trio of California right-wing Republican congressmen ― including Bob Dornan and William Dannemeyer ― who demonized people with AIDS in that era, voted against efforts to stem the epidemic and battle discrimination and pushed legislation that was discriminatory against LGBTQ people.

Rohrabacher also teamed up with the virulently anti-gay Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina in attacking government grants to queer artists. Rohrabacher railed against the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 ― even as George H.W. Bush’s White House tried behind the scenes to get him to pull back ― for supporting artists who created “drawings of homosexual orgies, bestiality and a Statue of Liberty turned into a transvestite, complete with male sex organs.”

Over the years, Rohrabacher twice backed a federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage, voted against preventing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment and voted against legislation extending hate crime coverage to LGBTQ people. In 2009 he said allowing people with HIV to enter the country, even on tourist visas, was “humanitarianism gone wild.” And this year, Rohrabacher, who became a national embarrassment as a Vladimir Putin apologist in the Trump era, caused a national uproar when he supported allowing homeowners to turn away gay buyers.

Now, after 30 years, this bigot has finally been booted.

And he’s not the only one.

There has been much discussion in the aftermath of last week’s midterms about the rainbow wave, a record number of LGBTQ candidates elected in races across the country ― over 150 at last count. But on the other side of the coin, many ardent homophobes and anti-gay candidates were taken down too.

In Minnesota, Rep. Jason Lewis, a Republican who equated gay couples with rapists, lost his House seat to Democrat Angie Craig ― the first lesbian mom elected to Congress.

In another case of poetic justice, openly bisexual California Democrat Katie Hill defeated Republican House member Steve Knight, who supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, and voted against banning “ex-gay” therapy during his time in the California Senate. His father, Pete Knight, spearheaded a precursor to Prop 8 ― the anti-gay Knight Initiative, a 2000 ballot measure — as a state senator. Even after his own brother, David Knight, came out as gay, Steve Knight carried on his dad’s hateful tradition.

In Georgia’s now-famous 6th Congressional District, short-lived GOP incumbent Karen Handel, who said last year while running in a special election against Democrat Jon Ossoff that she didn’t support allowing adoption by gay and lesbian couples, was beaten by African-American Democrat and gun reform advocate Lucy McBath.

Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions, who claimed the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida ― the site of a 2016 gun massacre ― wasn’t actually a gay club (and who voted anti-gay every chance he got in his more than 20 years in Congress, garnering a score of zero every year from the Human Rights Campaign) was defeated by African-American civil rights lawyer Colin Allred.

In a huge upset in Oklahoma, Republican Steve Russell, who in 2016 introduced a bill that would have provided religious exemptions to President Barack Obama’s executive order banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination among federal contractors, lost to Kendra Horn, the first Democrat to win the state’s 5th Congressional District in 44 years.

Former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin took down Republican Rep. Mike Bishop in Michigan. He voted last year to deny transgender service members medically necessary transition-related health care and was an ardent opponent of marriage equality, seeking religious exemptions.

In fact, the list of GOP House members opposed to marriage equality who came crashing down last week goes on and on: Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock in Virginia, Iowa’s Rod Blum, Illinois’ Randy HultgrenMike Coffman in Colorado and Keith Rothfus in Pennsylvania.

In races that have yet to be called but where Democrats seem likely to prevail, GOP marriage equality opponents include New York’s Claudia Tenney, New Jersey’s Tom MacArthur and Utah’s Mia Love, who even sent out anti-gay emails during the campaign attacking her opponent’s support of marriage equality.

In the Senate, GOP marriage equality opponent Dean Heller went down in Nevada against Jacky Rosen. And in Arizona, Martha McSally, another equality opponent, lost in the fight for the open seat to replace marriage equality opponent Jeff Flake ― to openly bisexual Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema.

Far-right Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who once compared homosexuality to polygamy, was stopped from taking the governor’s seat and continuing the Kansas GOP’s anti-LGBTQ agenda. Democrat Laura Kelly flipped the state and has already vowed to reinstate protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender government employees, which were rescinded in 2015 by then-Gov. Sam Brownback.

In Wisconsin, anti-LGBTQ Republican Scott Walker lost his governorship to Tony Evers, after nearly eight years, in a major win for equality.

Democrat Gretchen Whitmer flipped Michigan in its governor’s race, preventing Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette ― who rejected the Michigan Civil Rights Commission’s expansion of state law to protect LGBTQ people ― from continuing GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s hostile agenda. (In another boost, openly lesbian civil rights attorney Dana Nessel, who fought Snyder to overturn the state’s same-sex marriage ban in a case among those that eventually prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2015 Obergefell ruling ― was elected Michigan’s new attorney general.)

And in the open governor’s race in Maine, Democrat Janet Mills flipped the state, ensuring right-wing extremist Gov. Paul LePage’s horrifically anti-LGBTQ agenda won’t continue under Shawn Moody, who similarly opposed marriage equality.

In many state legislatures, the blue wave washed away the hate last week. In Texas, where anti-LGBTQ Republicans in recent years introduced more than a dozen bills harmful to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people each session, Democrats flipped 12 House seats, in the biggest shift since 2010. In an upset, Ron Simmons, who authored an infamous anti-transgender “bathroom” bill ― which died in the Texas House last session but which conservatives vowed to bring back next year ― was defeated by Michelle Beckley.

There are more ― and I’m sure there are still others about whom I haven’t yet become aware. Just a couple of years ago, many queer activists and LGBTQ leaders would have grudgingly denied that these enemies of equality, several of whom they’ve fought for a decade or more, could have been defeated.

But the 2018 midterms showed that when progressives work together and organize with enormous drive, the possibilities are endless.

Michelangelo Signorile is an editor-at-large for HuffPost. Follow him on Twitter at @msignorile.

*************************************

Some of the slimiest politicians in America are on this list: Kris Kobach, Scott Walker, and Paul LePage are particularly “good riddance!” Intolerance seems to live in the GOP.

Another notorious GOP bigot, former AG Jeff Sessions, also was “outed,” in a somewhat different way, ironically by the “Bigot-in-Chief.”

PWS

11-13-18

 

GONZO’S WORLD: SNL BIDS ADIEU TO “EVIL ELF!” – See It Here!

https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/jeff-sessions-robert-mueller-robert-de-niro-kate-mckinnon-saturday-night-live.html

BROW BEAT

Jeff Sessions and Robert Mueller Say Their Goodbyes on Saturday Night Live, With a Little Help From Kate McKinnon and Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro and Kate McKinnon embrace on SNL.
Friends to the end.
NBC

It’s been an emotional week for people who love Jeff Sessions, assuming such people exist. On the one hand, Donald Trump fired Sessions the day after the election in favor of an unqualified loyalist who used to sit on the board of a hilariously fraudulent patent marketing company. On the other hand, once Sessions skulks back to Alabama, Kate McKinnon will have no further reason to play him on Saturday Night Live, which will probably be good for his reputation. But there was no way SNL would let a walking caricature like Sessions leave the national stage without a kick in the ass on his way to the wings, so McKinnon glued on her Jeff Sessions ears this week for what might be the very last time:

Sketches like this one, in which one celebrity caricature after another marches in, does his or her thing, then leaves, almost always suffer from a lack of momentum. The payoff here, the surprise appearance of Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller, is no substitute for rising action, not least because De Niro’s performance isn’t exactly worthy of Taxi Driver. Some of the individual jokes are hilarious—see, e.g., Sessions’ mug-within-a-mug—but as a whole, the sketch feels like one damn thing after another, for much, much too long. In that sense, it brilliantly captures the essence of the Trump administration, with or without Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Best of luck to the cast member who has to squeeze into a bald cap to play Matthew Whitaker next week.

https://youtu.be/EGy-xpK-1mw

********************************************

Kids in cages, weeping parents, families separated, refugees turned away, African-Americans brutalized by the police, domestic violence victims sent back to torture by their abusers, minority voters suppressed, prisons overflowing with minor offenders, American youth denied opportunities and threatened with removal, scientific evidence ignored, intentionally clogged courts, open season on the LGBTQ community, vigorous defense of hate speech (but not the right to protest), glorification of bias masquerading as “religion,” judges turned into border agents in robes, judges and lawyers publicly dissed, un-prosecuted corruption in government, rampant gun violence mostly generated by disgruntled White guys, journalists attacked, bogus efforts to keep migrants from knowing their rights, lies to Congress  — Man-o-Man, this Dude was just a barrel of laughs and good times! Unless, of course, you were one of the millions of men, women, and children in America who was permanently damaged or traumatized by his racist scofflaw approach to “justice” and his failure to enforce the Constitutional rights due to everyone in America. Not exactly “Janet Reno’s Dance Party!”

PWS

11-12-18


GONZO’S WORLD: Racist AG Takes Parting Shot At Civil Rights, African-Americans, People Of Color, & DOJ Career Lawyers

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/us/politics/sessions-limits-consent-decrees.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Katie Benner reports for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

In a major last-minute act, Mr. Sessions signed a memorandum on Wednesday before President Trump fired him sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions.

The move means that the decrees, used aggressively by Obama-era Justice Department officials to fight police abuses, will be more difficult to enact. Mr. Sessions had signaled he would pull back on their use soon after he took office when he ordered a review of the existing agreements, including with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., enacted amid a national outcry over the deaths of black men at the hands of officers.

Mr. Sessions imposed three stringent requirements for the agreements. Top political appointees must sign off on the deals, rather than the career lawyers who have done so in the past; department lawyers must lay out evidence of additional violations beyond unconstitutional behavior; and the deals must have a sunset date, rather than being in place until police or other law enforcement agencies have shown improvement.

The document reflected Mr. Sessions’s staunch support for law enforcement and his belief that overzealous civil rights lawyers under the Obama administration vilified the local police. The federal government has long conducted oversight of local law enforcement agencies, and consent decrees have fallen in and out of favor since the first one was adopted in Pittsburgh more than two decades ago. The new guidelines push more of that responsibility onto state attorneys general and other local agencies.

Mr. Sessions conceded in his memo that consent decrees are sometimes the only way to ensure that government agencies follow the law. But he argued that changes were necessary because agreements that impose long-term, wide-ranging obligations on local governments could violate their sovereignty.

By setting a higher bar for the deals, Mr. Sessions limited a tool that the Justice Department has used to help change policing practices nationwide.

Mr. Sessions’s new guidelines make it nearly impossible for rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers to use the agreements, warned Jonathan M. Smith, a former official in the department’s civil rights division and the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

“This memo will make the Justice Department much less effective in enforcing civil rights laws,” Mr. Smith said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the memo.

A consent decree is a type of injunction that allows federal courts to enforce an agreement negotiated between two parties — say, the Justice Department and a local police department — to address a violation of the law. The department started enforcing them during the Clinton administration, after a statute was enacted in 1994 allowing the attorney general to use court agreements to remedy systemic, unconstitutional behavior.

The agreements gained a higher profile as the Obama administration entered into 14 of them as part of its efforts to improve relationships between the police and their communities. They became even more prominent after the killings of black men at the hands of the police captured headlines and set off the Black Lives Matter movement.

In March 2017, a month after he took office, Mr. Sessions ordered a review of the use of consent decrees to ensure that they “advance the safety and protection of the public.” He said that the pacts should also ensure that the police are safe and respected and that they should not interfere with recruiting efforts by the local police.

Mr. Sessions, who has long championed local sheriffs and police officers, maintained that the agreements “reduce morale” among police officers and lead to more violent crime. Academics and researchers have contested his assertions about the links between consent decrees and crime rates.

Under Mr. Sessions, the department also dropped Obama-era investigations into the police in Chicago and Louisiana.

Last month, Mr. Sessions opposed a consent decree between the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois attorney general enacted after a Justice Department report unveiled in the final days of the Obama administration found rampant use of excessive force aimed at black and Latino people. Under Mr. Sessions, the Justice Department said the deal placed too many restrictions on Chicago’s police superintendent.

“When Jeff Sessions intervened in the locally negotiated consent decree in Chicago, it belied the love of federalism that he professes and uses to justify this effort to effectively end the use of consent decrees,” said Vanita Gupta, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The agreements enacted after high-profile police killings in recent years would likely not exist if Mr. Sessions’s restrictions had been in place.

“The need for consent decrees and the oversight they guarantee,” she said, “has not disappeared.”

***************************************

Ah, “Courtsiders,” you might have thought that my regular “Gonzo’s World” feature column would disappear with the eagerly awaited departure of Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions from the office he never should have held in the first place. But, alas, as other commenters and I have said on numerous occasions, the pernicious influence of, and damage to nation and our Constitution by, Gonzo in less than two years in office will remain with us for years, if not decades to come!

Between Gonzo and Trump, the reputation and role of the DOJ as a credible organization and fair and unbiased protector of citizens’ and residents’ Constitutional and legal rights has been totally trashed; rebuilding it might prove to be “mission impossible.” After all, the true damage can’t even be objectively assessed until we get “regime change.”

Indeed, it might be time to think about a totally different structure and safeguards for “America’s Law Department” — certainly, removal of the U.S. Immigration Courts from this disastrous mix of improper influence, incompetence, and unethical behavior has to be “Priority I” if and when we return to a system of responsible government.

With respect to Katie’s report, pretty sleazy move by a really sleazy guy. But, “Black Lives” and the lives of immigrants and other folks of color have never mattered much to Sessions and his White Nationalist Nation.

He claims he might run for Senate again in Alabama. Having gotten this morally corrupt and incompetent individual off the public dole, it’s important to America’s future to pull out all the stops to insure that he remains “retired” from public office.

Fox News deserves him. I doubt he actually knows any law; certainly many Federal Judges have expressed skepticism about that. But, reading off the “cue cards” and false narratives that various White Nationalist groups have prepared for him ought to keep the “Trump crazies” happy and well fed.

Sure, Whitaker is a totally unqualified and unprincipled “acting successor.” But nobody except committed White Supremacists should mourn the departure of Sessions.

One of many, many horrible things about Trump is that when he inevitably turns on his former loyalists, he is so vicious and demeaning that he actually creates undeserved sympathy for these clowns. Nobody was forced to become a Trump supporter. They all went into it with open eyes. And, Trump’s lack of character, loyalty, manners, ethics, and human decency have always been on public display.

The folks we really should feel sorry for is African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, Asian Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, refugees, children, journalists, civil servants, civil rights and immigration lawyers, judges, state and local officials, career diplomats, and all of the other many groups of Americans that Sessions, Trump, and their White Nationalist cronies have abused. The stain of Gonzo’s tenure will not be easily or quickly erased.

PWS

11-09-18