"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Thanks for speaking out Andrea!Andrea is a former Arlington Immigration Court intern and one of the “charter members” of the NDPA. As captured on this video, she was assaulted by ICE while trying to assist her child client in reuniting with his mother! A civil suit against the agent involved is pending.
Zay Nockton “Norty” Smith 1949-2020 Lawrence University ’70 Noted American Journalist, Writer, Card Player
We met in the fall of 1966 at “historic” Brokaw Hall, then the freshmen men’s residence, at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. “Norty” was a “regular” at the card tables in the lounge.
Later, we became friends and “brothers” at the notorious “Sig Ep House,” then located behind the red door at 726 East John Street. That’s right across from Russell Sage Hall, then a women’s dorm. That’s also where our brother “Dick the Stick” once ran a “borrowed” Bobcat from a local construction project up the Sage steps, leaving a deep gash on one of the columns supporting the portico. I remember our kids were impressed when I showed them the then-still-existing mark decades later during an LU reunion (this would have been our “50th,” but we’ve had to “go virtual, at least for now). Something about “For it’s not for knowledge that we’ve come to college, but to raise Hell while we’re here . . . .”
All that nonsense aside, there was plenty of learning and knowledge gathering going on beneath our juvenile stupidity and hijinks. Among the things that marked Norty as one of the “characters”who stays with you for life: humor, satire, and writing. The man could write, boy could he write. Even in those days he stood out as someone who “had the talent” in the world of a small liberal arts college where writing was a “big deal” and many folks did it well.
For awhile, Norty published his own “underground newspaper,” the Bourgeois Pig, sort of an early forerunner of The Onion. I probably didn’t fully appreciate the true brilliance of “The Pig” at the time. But, I like to think that “a little Pig” still lives on at “Courtside.” If my suppressed ambition was to someday become a “gonzo journalist,” Norty actually lived his dream. He became a real journalist, and a great and famous one at that. Up until his death, his blog writings and Facebook postings would bring a chuckle to my wife Cathy who also was “one of our gang” at Lawrence.
Eventually, Norty and I along with the rest of our “happy brotherhood” — Mink, Biff, Bear, Stick, Liv, SJS, Crummy Andy, B.I., Flip the Owl, Rufus, Joe Don, Hatchell, SK, Herbie, Ma Fowls, Ski, Scottie and a host of other characters — all resided together, if not always in harmony, at “The Ep House.” There was a 24-hour “Shoss” (a/k/a “Sheepshead”) game going in the card room, which, not surprisingly, usually involved Norty. Seems to me that he finished even further “down” the semester-long “owes” tab posted on the wall than I did. But, I could be wrong about that. I’ll readily concede that he played more often and with more skill and strategy than I did.
After a stint in grad school in Iowa City, Norty settled in Chicago where he became a “big time” reporter for the Sun Times. His most famous caper, for which he received national, and perhaps international, attention was the “Norty the Bartender” sting operation in the late 1970s. It’s detailed in all its glory, along with some wonderful “period” photos, in the extensive and beautifully written Sun Times obit by Mark Brown, linked below. But, as Mark points out, there was much more to Norty’s life, career, and his writing than that one blockbuster.
Amazingly, our “band of bros,” or at least the survivors, eventually grew up and became (somewhat) respectable, accomplished, distinguished, and productive members of society: doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, executives, journalists, judges, writers, government officials, military officers, businessmen, authors, horsemen, etc. Like many of us, Norty married, and he and his wife Susy had two terrific sons, Bryant, and Zachary of whom he was exceedingly proud. Indeed, Norty’s family was kind and caring enough to keep all of “the gang” posted on his condition and how we could still share with him right up until the end.
Over the years, I sporadically kept in touch with Norty and the rest of the “Chicago branch of the gang.” I recollect that as my travels as a government, and then private, lawyer sometimes took me to Chicago, I occasionally was able to meet up with Norty, Ski, Bear and the others for a beer or two at some local watering hole.
We also had some more full-fledged “mini-reunions” in Chicago. One that Cathy and I attended around 2001 hosted by Ski and his wife involved Norty riding in the back cargo area of the station wagon as we headed to a White Sox game. Another, was hosted by “Bear & Betsy” for the Wisconsin-Northwestern football game in Evanston in November2016. Following the inevitable Badger victory, we all repaired back to Bear and Betsy’s for a great dinner and a massive “Shoss” game with Norty in attendance. Bear “strictly enforced” the “no politics rule” — something that had been added, apparently out of necessity born out of experience, since our days in the old Ep card room.
Sadly, that was the “last hurrah” for that particular configuration of our band. The last time I spoke with Norty by phone was in July 2017. The voice message said “Wick, call me ASAP.” When I did, Norty said “Sit down, you’re not going to like this.” I remember momentarily thinking that he was about to blast me for some egregious grammatical or factual error (or both) on Courtside, or to ask me for advice for a friend on some hopeless immigration case.
But, no, it was much, much worse. Norty called to tell me that our dear friend and brother Russ “Biff Stoney” Birkos had died suddenly. I sat next to Biff at the last football game, and had rushed to his aid when he was viciously “taken out” by a knee-high metal post in the stadium parking lot. Biff’s first reaction had been: “You’re a lawyer, Wick, can we sue? If not, what good are you?” Typical “brotherhood banter.”
I never spoke with Norty again after Biff’s death, although we continued to keep in touch through our e-mail group.
So, now, yet another of us is gone. Norty, has taken his wit, wisdom, and penetrating human insights on to a “higher audience.” “It’s life,” of course. And, it was expected. But, as I have found at other times, that doesn’t make it any easier. I know how much Susy, Bryant, and Zachary miss him. We all do. A life well-lived and elegantly recounted in every way.
Farewell, Norty. And, thanks for the memories and for everything else, including wiping out my final “Shoss debt!”
Each of these daggers to the heart of DOJ made me question if the DOJ I knew and dedicated my professional career to still existed in some semblance of what I knew it to be. Then, a story hit the internet recently that the attorney general of the United States, while at a rally of right-wing high school students, chimed in with chants from students who were screaming “Lock her up.” And, according to reports, while repeating the mob-inspired anti-Clinton creed, Sessions laughed.
I didn’t believe it so I searched for the video and found it. There was the head of law enforcement in the United States laughing and joining the crazed chants of an angry gang of teenagers calling for Trump’s defeated political opponent to be locked up.
When I saw the attorney general in that video, I felt sick to my stomach. Not a figurative sick that comes with reading or seeing something that disgusts me. I felt literally sick, like a dissolving pain that comes from accidentally taking a double dose of my daily fistful of vitamins. Everything the Department of Justice is supposed to stand for — blind justice, equality, fairness — it all evaporated in that moment for me.
I know that there are still a lot of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents who do their jobs, day in and day out, with the impartiality they promised when they made a commitment to the Department of Justice. But, it must be demoralizing to watch your boss dismantle all that DOJ stands for and inch the department closer and closer to the autocratic banana republic system of justice that Trump admires and covets.
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Read Michael’s full article at the above link. I know just how he feels.
Sessions’s disgusting performance before a group of young neo-Nazis was clear proof of his unsuitability for public office. Remember, while Ol’ Gonzo was up there chortling away and stoking the fires of intolerance and ignorance (most of those kids probably had no idea why they were chanting “lock her up” except that some rightist organizer told them to do so, and Sessions encouraged and egged them on) migrant kids whose only “crime” was to come to the US with their parents seeking justice were suffering in separation and torturous conditions in the “New American Gulag” that Sessions has created.
I think Michael eloquently articulates how most of us who dedicated our career to serving the cause of justice in the Department of Justice feel when we watch the unqualified racist xenophobic Sessions rip apart the Constitution, destroy integrity, mock the rule of law, defy common sense, trash human decency, and destroy responsible Government.
Amazing (if depressing) how quickly an institution can be compromised and trashed by having such an evil and corrupt person in charge for a relatively short period of time.
Judge strikes down law underpinning Sessions’ anti-sanctuary city push
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration were handed another stark defeat in their effort to punish sanctuary cities, with a judge declaring a law the administration had been relying on unconstitutional.
In a terse 58-page opinion, a Reagan-nominated district court judge thoroughly rebuked Sessions’ efforts to penalize sanctuary cities, saying efforts he has taken to impose immigration-related conditions on federal law enforcement grants are unconstitutional. The judge also called the underlying law that the administration has pointed to as justifying its efforts unconstitutional.
The ruling will only apply to the city of Chicago for now — but the judge said he intends for his ruling to apply nationwide.
Judge Harry Leinenweber had also previously temporarily blocked the grant conditions, which the appellate court upheld.
But now Leinenweber has gone even further — making his initial ruling permanent and going beyond it to strike down the underlying law, referred to as Section 1373.
The administration has pointed to the obscure law in all of its sanctuary city lawsuits, the vast majority of which it has lost. The law mandates that local governments share immigration status of individuals with the federal government.
The Justice Department has argued that law should be interpreted broadly to mandate cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But citing a recent Supreme Court ruling, Leinenweber did the opposite — striking down the law itself as unconstitutional.
Not only is Sessions’s attack on “sanctuary cities” illegal, it’s also just plain bad law enforcement policy. Sessions is “poisoning the well” for needed cooperation between the Feds and locals on real law enforcement initiatives for many years to come.
You can call it a “policy” (Jeff Sessions) or you can call it a not-policy (Kirstjen Nielsen) or you can call it a “law” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders). You can say that yes it’s a policy but nobody likes it (Kellyanne Conway) or you can say it’s a “zero-tolerance” enforcement of a Democratic law (Donald Trump) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of an amalgam of various congressional laws (Nielsen) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of the Department of Justice’s own preferences with respect to enforcing prior laws (Sessions).
You can say the purpose of the Justice Department’s family separation policy is deterrence (Stephen Miller, John Kelly) or you can claim that asking if the purpose of the policy is deterrence is “offensive” (Nielsen). You can claim in your legal pleadings that the family separation policy is wholly “discretionary” and thus unreviewable by any court, meaning that only the president can change it (Justice Department in Ms. L v. ICE). Or you can claim that only Congress can “fix loopholes” (Nielsen) or you can say that Congress as a whole can’t fix anything because congressional Democrats are entirely to blame (Trump, Mike Huckabee).
You can blame all this newfound “loophole” action on a consent decree from 1997 in a case called Flores (Sessions, Paul Ryan, Chuck Grassley) or on a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that interpreted Flores (Nielsen) or on a 2008 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (Nielsen). Better yet, you can fault some magical mashup of “the law” that forces you to defend every statute to its most absurd extreme (Sanders). By this logic, you can also claim that Korematsu—the case authorizing the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II—is still on the books and thus needs to be enforced because it’s also “the law,” but that would be insane. Oh, but wait. Trump proxies made that very claim during the campaign (Carl Higbie).
You can pretend that by turning every adult who crosses the border into a presumptive criminal your hands are tied, so you need to jail children to avoid jailing children (Nielsen). You can insist that the vast majority of children who cross the border are being smuggled in by gang members (Nielsen) or that all asylum-seekers are per se criminals (which they are not) or that lawful asylum-seekers should just come back at a better time (Nielsen). You can claim you never intended your policy (if it is in fact a policy) to have any impact on asylum-seekers at all (Nielsen) but of course it would turn out you were lying and this has been the plan all along (John Lafferty, Department of Homeland Security asylum division chief).
You can pretend that your hands are tied so you need to jail children to avoid jailingchildren.
You can say the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sessions). You can say again, incredibly, that the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sanders). But that would be pathetic (Stephen Colbert).
You can blame the press for the photographs they take (Nielsen) and for the photographs they don’t take (Nielsen). You can suggest that the children in cages are not real children (not linking to Ann Coulter) or that the cages are not in fact cages (Steve Doocy) even though government officials admit that they are cages. You can claim that the detention facilities are “summer camps” or “boarding schools” (Laura Ingraham). You can take umbrage that the good people of DHS and CBP and ICE are being maligned (Nielsen).
You can say that separating children from their parents is a strategic move to force an agreement on Trump’s wall, which would make the children purely instrumental (Trump). Or you could say that this is a way to protect children by deterring their parents, which would also make the children purely instrumental (Kelly). Or you can instead say you are protecting the children from all the harm that happens to children transported over borders by doing untold permanent damage to them as they scream in trauma (Nielsen). Because the best way to deter child abuse is through child abuse.
You can fight to the death about comparisons to Nazis or you can celebrate a candidate (Corey Stewart) who is a hero to Nazis or you can merely show a staggering lack of comprehension about what Nazis actually did (Sessions).
You can fact check and fact check and fact check these claims and it won’t matter that they are false. And the fact that nobody in this administration even bothers to coordinate their cover stories at this point reflects just how pointless it is to fact check them anyhow. It’s an interactive game of choose your own logic, law, facts, and victims, but every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages, sleeping under foil blankets as strangers change their diapers. The trick is twisting and dodging and weaving until you get to that final page.
It is very sad (Melania Trump). Something should be done (Ted Cruz). If only there were some mechanism to stop torturing children. If only there were some way to stop litigating why we’re doing it and who is doing it and just stop doing it.
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump on Tuesday delivered a stream-of-consciousness-style speech on immigration as furor over his administration’s separation of families at the border reaches a fever pitch.
But his speech at a small business event in Washington contained several factual inaccuracies.
White House says family separations at the border are a ‘binary choice,’ but stats say otherwise
Here is what Trump said, and what the reality is.
False claim: Family separations are Democrats’ fault
Trump said the family separations at the border are “a result of Democrat-supported loopholes in our federal laws” that he said could be easily changed.
“These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don’t want,” Trump said.
The reality: Trump’s administration made a decision to prosecute 100% of adults caught crossing the border illegally even if they came with children, and thus are separating parents from their kids at the border with no clear plan to reunite them after the parents return from jail and court proceedings.
The administration has long wanted to roll back a law unanimously passed under President George W. Bush and a court settlement dating back decades but most recently affirmed under the Obama administration — citing those two provisions as “loopholes.” Both were designed to protect immigrant children from dangers like human trafficking and to provide minimum standards for their care, including turning them over to the Department of Health and Human Services for resettlement within three days of arrest, as opposed to being held in lengthy detention, and dictating that children with their families also cannot be held in detention or jail-like conditions longer than three weeks.
The administration has complained the laws make it harder to immediately deport or reject immigrants at the border, and that they are not able to detain families indefinitely.
False claim: Thousands of judges
Trump said his administration was hiring “thousands and thousands” of immigration judges, that the US already has “thousands” of immigration judges and that other countries don’t have immigration judges.
Trump to huddle with Republicans during crucial week on immigration
In reality, there the Justice Department’s immigration courts division has 335 judges nationwide, with more than 100 more judges budgeted for, according to a DOJ spokesman.
Because of a massive backlog in the immigration courts, it can take years for those cases to work their way to completion, and many immigrants are allowed to work and live in the US in the meantime, putting down roots. The funding for immigration courts and judges has increased only modestly over the years as funding and resources for enforcement have increased dramatically. A proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to address the family separation issue would double the number of judges to 750.
Trump’s comments Tuesday echoed remarks he made last month. In a May Fox News interview, he claimed the United States was “essentially the only country that has judges” to handle immigration cases. But that is incorrect.
A number of other countries have immigration court systems or a part of the judiciary reserved for immigration and asylum cases, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and Canada.
False claim: Virtually all immigrants disappear
Trump also claimed falsely that when immigrants are let into the country to have their cases heard by a court, they virtually all go into hiding.
“And by the way, when we release the people, they never come back to the judge, anyway. They’re gone,” Trump said. “Do you know if a person comes in and puts one foot on our ground, it’s essentially, ‘Welcome to America, welcome to our country.’ You never get them out because they take their name, they bring the name down, they file it, then they let the person go. … Like 3% come back.”
In reality, the number of immigrants who don’t show up to court proceedings is far lower. And many of the immigrants released from detention are given monitoring devices such as ankle bracelets to ensure they return.
Republicans craft bill to keep detained families together
According to the annual Justice Department yearbook of immigration statistics from fiscal year 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, 25% of immigration court cases were decided “in absentia” — meaning the immigrant wasn’t present in court. In that year, there were 137,875 cases. The number of cases decided “in absentia” between fiscal year 2012 and fiscal year 2016 was between 11% and 28%.
When White House legislative chief Marc Short made a similarly inaccurate claim on Monday, the White House pointed to a statistic about the high percentage of deportation orders for undocumented children that were delivered in absentia, but amid total case completions for minors, the number of in absentia orders has ranged from 40% to 50% in recent years.
Advocates for immigrants attribute some of the missed hearings to often not receiving a court notice mailed to an old address or not having an attorney who can adequately explain the process to the child. Studies have shown that with legal advice and guidance, immigrants are far more likely to show up for hearings and have their claims ultimately be successful.
False claim: Countries are sending bad eggs to the US
Trump said that countries deserve to be punished for illegal immigration, and that they “send” bad eggs to the US.
“They send these people up, and they’re not sending their finest,” Trump said.
He continued: ‘When countries abuse us by sending people up — not their best — we’re not going to give any more aid to those countries.”
In fact, there is no evidence that countries “send” anyone in particular to the US — rather analyses of recent immigration flows have shown that in recent years, a much higher number of Central Americans have come to the US fleeing rampant gang violence and instability in especially the countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Experts who study the countries agree that cutting aid would only further destabilize the region, likely making illegal immigration worse, not better.
Though gang members do cross the border illegally alongside those fleeing violence, the administration has never been able to provide numbers showing that those are a large percentage of the cases. Only a handful of such prosecutions occur a year, while more than 300,000 people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally last fiscal year. Nearly 120,000 defensive asylum applications were filed last year, according to government data, meaning those individuals believed they were fleeing violent situations back home.
False Claim: Mexico isn’t helping the US
Mexico, Trump said, “does nothing for us.”
As for Mexico’s contribution, experts say the country’s crackdown on immigrants within its borders has been a major help to the US in recent years. According to statistics from the US and Mexican governments compiled by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and shared with CNN, over the past three years, Mexico has deported tens of thousands more migrants back to the primary countries in Central America that drive immigration north. Each of the last three years, Mexican removals exceeded US removals to those countries.
Mexico is also apprehending tens of thousands of Central Americans before they reach the US. According to the data, Mexico intercepted 173,000 Central Americans in fiscal year 2015, 151,000 in fiscal year 2016 and just under 100,000 in fiscal year 2017.
In the past two years, Mexico has lagged behind the US in apprehensions, but Migration Policy Institute President Andrew Selee, an expert on Mexican policy, said that could be due to a number of factors including smugglers successfully changing their routes to avoid detection or relations with Trump.
CNN’s Catherine Shoichet and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
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Join the New Due Process Army today!
Free the children.
Require Due Process and real justice for refugees.
Hold the lying child abusers in the kakistocracy accountable for their indefensible actions.
Remove the abusers and their enablers from office and political power.
Welcome more immigrants and refugees.
End racism masquerading as “government policy” or the “rule of law.”
Time for the decent, tolerant, majority to take back our country from the forces of darkness, evil, and dishonesty.
Trump and Sessions lose another sanctuary cities case
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
A federal appeals court struck another blow Thursday to the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure sanctuary cities, upholding a court order preventing the Justice Department from imposing conditions on grants to cities.
The three-judge panel from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision blocking the Justice Department from adding new conditions on policing grants that had required some cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The ruling makes it the latest federal court, along with courts in California and Philadelphia, to restrict what the administration can try to do to pressure jurisdictions that restrict some cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
It comes as President Donald Trump has been targeting his fury on Twitter at sanctuary cities, which administration officials accuse of jeopardizing public safety.
The judges sided with the city of Chicago in the case, which had challenged Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ July effort to condition the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program on two new requirements: allowing federal immigration authorities access to local detention facilities and providing the Department of Homeland Security with at least 48 hours’ notice before local officials release an undocumented immigrant wanted by federal authorities.
The administration has been aggressive in asking cities to comply with those requests, but a number of cities and police chiefs around the country argue that cooperating in that way could jeopardize the trust police need to have with local communities, and in some cases could place departments in legal gray areas.
Like the district judge, the appellate judges found that Chicago was likely to succeed in its case that such conditions would be a violation of the Constitution and law, as Congress did not authorize those conditions when it created the grants.
The judge who wrote the opinion called the attorney general’s move a “usurpation of power.”
MAYWOOD, Ill. — Rosa Aramburo sailed into her final year of medical school with stellar test scores and high marks from professors. Her advisers predicted she’d easily land a spot in a coveted residency program.
Then President Trump announced the end of the Obama-era program that has issued work permits to Aramburo and nearly 700,000 other undocumented immigrants raised in the United States.
“Don’t be surprised if you get zero interviews,” an adviser told her.
She got 10, after sending 65 applications.
But as she prepared to rank her top three choices last week, Congress rejected bills that would have allowed her and other “dreamers” to remain in the United States, casting new doubt on a career path that seemed so certain a year ago.
Employers and universities that have embraced DACA recipients over the past six years are scrambling for a way to preserve the program. They are lobbying a deeply divided Congress, covering fees for employees and students to renew their permits, and searching for other legal options — perhaps a work visa or residency through spouses or relatives who are citizens. Some companies have considered sending employees abroad.
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They are also awaiting the outcome of a court challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted the young recipients a temporary reprieve and allowed them to continue renewing work permits for the time being. The Supreme Court could decide as soon as Friday whether to intervene in the case.
Nationwide, more than 160 DACA recipients are teaching in low-income schools through Teach For America. Thirty-nine work at Microsoft, 250 at Apple and 84 at Starbucks. To employers, the young immigrants are skilled workers who speak multiple languages and often are outsize achievers. Polls show strong American support for allowing them to stay.
Based in part on that data, many DACA recipients say they believe that the United States will continue to protect them, even as a senior White House official has indicated that Trump and key GOP lawmakers are ready to move on to other issues.
Human-resources experts warn that employers could be fined or go to jail if they knowingly keep workers on the payroll after their permits have expired. And while the White House has said that young immigrants who lose DACA protections would not become immediate targets for deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says anyone here illegally can be detained and, possibly, deported.
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“I’ve gotten emails saying, ‘Oh, we loved you,’ ’’ Aramburo, 28, said one recent morning as she hurried to predawn rounds at a neurology intensive-care unit. “But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘What if I can’t finish?’ ”
Dreams and disbelief
Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine has 32 DACA recipients enrolled in its medical program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
Cesar Montelongo is a third-year student in the school’s MD-PhD program. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
Nearly 100 DACA recipients are medical students enrolled at schools such as Harvard, Georgetown and the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago, which this May will graduate its first five dreamers, including Aramburo.
Loyola, a Catholic school, changed its admissions policies to allow DACA recipients to apply soon after President Barack Obama — frustrated by Congress’s failure to pass an immigration bill — declared in 2012 that he would issue the young immigrants work permits. Trump and other immigration hard-liners criticized the program as executive overreach.
Thirty-two students with DACA are enrolled at Stritch, the most of any medical school in the country, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Most are from Mexico, but there are also students brought to the United States as children from 18 other countries, including Pakistan, India and South Korea.
The school helped the students obtain more than $200,000 apiece in loans to pay for their education. Some agreed to work in poor and rural areas with acute physician shortages to borrow the money without interest.
Mark G. Kuczewski, a professor of medical ethics at Loyola, said the school was inspired to launch the effort after hearing about Aramburo, a high school valedictorian who earned college degrees in biology and Spanish and yearned to study medicine but could find work only as a babysitter because she was undocumented.
He said it is unthinkable that Congress may derail the chance for her and the other DACA recipients at Loyola to become doctors and work legally throughout the United States.
“We just can’t believe that that will happen,” Kuczewski said. “Can something that irrational happen in America?”
2:52
This nurse found hope in DACA, now his life is in limbo
Jose Aguiluz is a 28-year-old registered nurse who may face deportation from the United States if Congress doesn’t come to an agreement on DACA recipients. (Jorge Ribas, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
Teach For America said its lawyers have pored over immigration laws to find ways to sponsor workers who lose their DACA protections. But the process often requires workers to leave the United States and return legally, a risk many young teachers are unwilling to take. The organization also offered to relocate teachers close to their families in the United States.
“They’re desperate. They’re stressed,” said Viridiana Carrizales, managing director of DACA Corps Member Support at Teach For America. “They don’t know if they’re going to have a job in the next few months.”
A spokesman for a major tech company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of political negotiations, said it asked DACA employees whether they would like to be transferred to another country where their work status would not be in jeopardy.
“It fell completely flat,” he said. “The employees were polled, and with virtual unanimity, the resounding answer was a ‘No, thank you.’ They considered it giving up.”
The Society for Human Resource Management said companies can defend workers and lobby Congress on behalf of DACA recipients. But the group, which has 240 member organizations, is also urging employers to consider what might happen if their employees’ work permits expire.
“The bottom line is, if people don’t have documents that allow them to work in the United States, they have to be taken off the payroll,” said Justin Storch, a federal liaison for the society.
Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student and a DACA recipient. (Alyssa Schukar/for The Washington Post)
‘Not just farmworkers or housekeepers’
On the snow-covered campus at Loyola University Chicago, medical students with DACA permits say they are continuing with their studies and renewing their work permits even as they keep one eye on Washington.
Cesar Montelongo, 28, a third-year medical student who attended the State of the Union address last month, spent part of one recent day examining bacteria in petri dishes in a school laboratory. His family fled a violent border city in Mexico when he was 10.
He is earning a medical degree and a PhD in microbiology, a high-level combination that could land him plenty of jobs in other countries. But he said he prefers the United States, one of “very few places in this planet you can actually achieve that kind of dream.”
Less than a mile away, Alejandra Duran, a 27-year-old second-year medical student who came to the United States from Mexico at 14, translated for patients at a local clinic for people with little or no insurance.
With help from teachers in Georgia, she graduated from high school with honors. She wants to return to the state as a doctor and work to help lower the rate of women dying in childbirth.
“A lot of things have been said about how illegal, how bad we are; that’s not the full story,” Duran said. “We’re not just farmworkers or housekeepers. We’re their doctors. We’re their nurses, their teachers, their paramedics.”
Alejandra Duran, a second-year student who intends to practice obstetrics and gynecology, translates for Dr. Matt Steinberger at the Access to Care clinic. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)
Cesar Montelongo, a third-year medical student, examines Petri dishes in which he conducted an experiment looking at interactions of viruses with bacteria in the bladder. (Alyssa Schukar/For The Washington Post)
During rounds at the Loyola University Medical Center, Aramburo studied computer records, then examined stroke victims and patients with spinal and head injuries. Some may never regain consciousness, but she always speaks to them in the hope that they will wake up.
“That’s my dream: to make a difference in people’s lives,” she said. “I hope I can do it.”
In the glass-walled neurology intensive care unit, she and two physicians stood before a 45-year-old stroke victim who spoke only Spanish. The woman struggled to grasp what the two doctors were saying.
Aramburo stepped forward.
“You’ve had a small stroke,” she explained in Spanish, as the woman listened. “It could have been a lot worse. Now we’re going to figure out why.”
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Some of the WASHPOST comments on this article were predictably idiotic ands racist., Really, what’s happening to our country that folks have such perverted, ill informed, anti-social, and inhuman views?
These are American kids. Raised, educated, and residing in our country. They aren’t “taking places” from anyone, except, perhaps those of their classmates who are less talented or less ambitious. But, why would we want to reward mediocrity over merit just because someone was born here? Other American kids have the same opportunities that Dreamers have. If some chose not to take advantage of them, so be it!
When the Arlington Immigration Court was located in Ballston, Virginia, the kids from nearby Washington & Lee High would come over to the Mall for lunch. Undoubtedly, some of them were undocumented.
But, I couldn’t tell you who. They were just American kids. Even when they showed up in my courtroom, I couldn’t tell you who was the “respondent” and who was the “support group” until I called the case and the respondent came forward. Contrary to the White Nationalists, folks are pretty much the same.
As usual, Trump and his White Nationalist cronies have taken a win-win-win and created a lose-lose-lose! When Dreamers get screwed, they lose, US employers lose, and our country loses, big time! But, that’s what happens when policies and actions are based on bias, ignorance, and incompetence.
HERE’S THE INTRODUCTION SETTING FORTH “THE PLAYERS:”
IDENTITY AND INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE
Amici have served in the U.S. Department of Justice and senior positions in the federal agencies charged with enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, and in those capacities have played substantial roles in the development, implementation, and adjudication of federal immigration policy and laws. Amici thus have an interest in this case, and in the just and efficient operation of the U.S. immigration enforcement system.
Mónica Ramírez Almadani served in the U.S. Department of Justice as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division from 2009 to 2012, and as Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General from 2011 to 2012, during which time she, among other things, advised on immigration
1 Amici submit this brief pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 29(a)(2). The parties have consented to the filing of this brief. Amici further state, pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 29(a)(4)(E), that no counsel for a party authored this brief in whole or in part, and no person other than the amicus curiae or their counsel made a monetary contribution intended to fund the preparation or submission of this brief.
policy and litigation and worked closely with the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
Seth Grossman served as Chief of Staff to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) from 2010 to 2011, as Deputy General Counsel of DHS from 2011 to 2013, and as Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2013.
Stephen Legomsky served as Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2011 to 2013, and as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2015.
Leon Rodriguez served as Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2013 to 2017.
John Sandweg served as the Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) in 2013 and 2014, and as the Acting General Counsel of DHS from 2012 to 2013.
Paul Wickham Schmidt served as an Immigration Judge for the U.S. Immigration Court from May 2003 until his retirement from the bench in June 2016. Before his Immigration Judge appointment, Judge Schmidt served as a Board Member and Board Chairman for the Board
of Immigration Appeals, Executive Office for Immigration Review, from 2
1995 until 2003. Judge Schmidt also served as acting General Counsel of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1986 to 1987, and as the Deputy General Counsel of INS from 1978 to 1987.
As former leaders of the nation’s primary immigration agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice, and a former longtime Immigration Judge, amici are familiar with the operation of the United States immigration enforcement system. Amici support the district court’s preliminary injunction order and urge this Court to affirm that decision. Amici focus here on two issues before this Court: (i) first, whether the “motion to reopen” process currently available before our immigration courts provides Petitioners with an “adequate and effective” substitute for habeas relief; and (ii) second, whether the public interest is served by briefly staying enforcement of removal orders regarding these Iraqi nationals so that the immigration courts have a fair opportunity to review their claims.
Based on our experience helping to lead the federal agencies charged with enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, we are compelled to conclude that the district court reached the correct conclusion on both these issues. In particular, without the “breathing room” provided by the district court’s temporary stay of removal, our overburdened immigration courts are unable to provide an adequate and effective remedy for Petitioners having valid claims for protection from removal due to the likelihood they face persecution or torture on return to Iraq. In addition, given the clearly established changed circumstances in Iraq, which show that the Petitioners would have an objective well- founded fear of persecution if forced to return, the district court’s order furthers the public interest by affording aliens threatened with persecution on removal to Iraq a meaningful opportunity to have these claims heard. The some-1,400 Iraqi nationals impacted by the district court’s order represent a drop in the bucket compared to those subject to removal each year by immigration authorities, and a temporary stay of their removal to allow immigration courts time to assess their claims will not undermine the United States’ immigration enforcement system.
\
AND, HERE’S AN OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT:
ARGUMENT ……………………………………………………………………………….. 5
I. The District Court Was Correct In Finding That, Under Current Circumstances, The Immigration Courts Do Not Provide Petitioners with Adequate and Effective Alternatives To Habeas Relief…………………….5
A. The Immigration Courts System ……………………….. 5
B. Our Immigration Courts Are Overburdened and Underfunded………………………………………………………. 6
C. Emergency Stay Motions before Our Immigration Courts Do Not Currently Offer Petitioners an Adequate and Effective Alternative Remedy …..10
II. Allowing Petitioners Time to Obtain Review of Their Motions To Reopen Is In the Public Interest and Will Not Unreasonably Interfere with Immigration Enforcement ……………………………………………………………..15
A. The United States has a Strong Interest In Protecting from Removal Those Petitioners Who Will Face Persecution or Torture in Iraq…………15
B. The District Court’s Order Will Not Interfere With the United States’ Immigration Enforcement Scheme………………………………………..18
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………… 21
CERTIFICATE OF COMPLIANCE…………………………………………….23
CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE…………………………………………………….24
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Many thanks to my “Fellow Amici” and to Michael Doss & his team at Sidley & Austin for a “Super Outstanding Job!” May Due Process prevail!!!!
“The roughly 10-20 percent of Americans who do not support protecting the Dreamers in any way have long had a hugely outsized influence on our politics. Gerrymandered white Republican districts led to a wave of radical anti-immigration restrictionists in the House. That trend, of course, continued through the 2016 election, when hardline immigration opponents got perhaps their greatest champion in recent memory in the White House with President Donald Trump. While he has been very inconsistent on DACA, he has consistently elevated and empowered immigration hardliners in his administration — those who appeal to his white nationalist base.”
The Dreamers have won the hearts of most all Americans — across our political boundaries — whose country they joined when they were just children and who are clearly Americans too.
There is enormous public support for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) from the American people. According to a poll released by CBS News last week, “nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) favor allowing young immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children to remain in the U.S.” This number includes 79 percent of Republicans, 92 percent of Democrats, and 87 percent of independents who favor the policy.
The DACA program, which is designed to shield from deportation undocumented Americans who were brought to this country by their parents, was established by President Obama in 2012 and ended by President Trump in September. Congress has tried and failed for the last 17 years to pass legislation that would formally confer legal status on these young men and women.
Because of President Trump’s decision, about 800,000 Dreamers currently protected by DACA will be at risk of deportation in early March unless Congress passes legislation and the president signs it by then. That’s why Democrats and some Republican members of Congress have felt such urgency to finally pass permanent legal protection for the Dreamers. Until the issue is resolved legislatively, it is likely to dominate the political debates in Washington in the weeks to come.
Dreamers are essential members of our communities. As politicians play games with their futures, it’s important that we share their stories. They are Dreamers like Mauricio Lopez-Marquez, who is 28 years old and was able to become a social worker after receiving DACA. In that role and as a dance instructor for an after-school program, he works with 180 young people in New Mexico. They are Dreamers like 22-year-old Teresa Rivera, who is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a part-time child facilitator at an organization that supports women and children who have experienced domestic violence. They are Dreamers like Zabdi Samuel Olvera, 18, who was brought from Mexico to Charlotte, N.C., at 6 months old, and is currently majoring in computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zabdi’s work with underprivileged children in South Charlotte and his excellence on his varsity wrestling team earned him a Golden Door Scholarship, which provides a full-tuition scholarship that is making it possible for him to earn his degree. If Congress does not pass legislation to protect the Dreamers by early March, these young men and women and so many more will be unable to work legally in the United States and could be vulnerable to deportation.
In 2012 many Dreamers had the opportunity to step out of the shadows and participate fully in the economy in ways that were previously impossible. They have done so, however, at great risk: In exchange for legal protection, they had to provide their personal information to the government. And now, unless Congress acts, the government could use that information to find and deport them. This is not a tenable moral or political position, and the public support for a permanent DACA fix reflects that. Americans understand that the Dreamers are our children’s teachers, they work in our communities, and they serve their country in all kinds of ways, including the military.
It is also undeniable that churches across the theological and political spectrum of American Christianity have been steadfast in support for the Dreamers. Even among white evangelicals, the base of Donald Trump’s support, 57 percent favor protection for Dreamers. This support comes from biblical commands about how we should treat “the stranger” among us, a religiously inspired sense of what is moral and just, and the fact that many Dreamers and their families are members of our church communities —and even our pastors. As I’ve written many times before, the biblical command to protect immigrants is unambiguous, and that certainly informs how many Christians approach this issue. But the human stories are perhaps even more influential in changing minds and hearts. Indeed, many churchgoers have discovered over the last five years that people they know well and care for deeply are undocumented because DACA gave them the incentive to step out of the shadows. Now, congregations all over the country are facing the possibility that many families in their midst will soon be torn apart. That is justifiably causing righteous outrage and determination for Christians all over the country to stand beside Dreamers and demand a solution from Congress.
Yet the problem, as it has been for many years, is to translate the strong public support for protecting Dreamers to actual policy change. The roughly 10-20 percent of Americans who do not support protecting the Dreamers in any way have long had a hugely outsized influence on our politics. Gerrymandered white Republican districts led to a wave of radical anti-immigration restrictionists in the House. That trend, of course, continued through the 2016 election, when hardline immigration opponents got perhaps their greatest champion in recent memory in the White House with President Donald Trump. While he has been very inconsistent on DACA, he has consistently elevated and empowered immigration hardliners in his administration — those who appeal to his white nationalist base.
We don’t know how this fight will ultimately turn out, but we do know two things. First, we know that the right thing for Christians to do is to fight — and fight hard — for Dreamers until they get the permanent protection they need, and continue fighting for their parents and the many other undocumented people living among us. These are the people Jesus literally commands us to treat as we would treat him.
Second, we know that since an overly influential group of hardline anti-immigration White House officials and politicians in Congress are blocking both the will of the overwhelming majority of the American people and what God wants, we must defeat them at the ballot box. There are fundamental Christian issues that cause Christians to vote against political candidates — and being opposed to immigrants should become one of those issues. We need to ensure that the fate of the Dreamers and other undocumented Americans is a voting issue for Christians this November and beyond.
Jim has nailed it! Our public immigration policy has been taken over by a group of White Nationalist GOP restrictionists who represent a minority of Americans, but are now driving the debate and the policies.
Guys like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose racially tinged White Nationalist views on immigration as a Senator were so extreme that he was once marginalized within his own party, and his White Nationalist strategist/protégée Steven Miller, are now in charge of the Government’s immigration policies. They and others in the GOP with similar restrictionist views have made overtly racist immigration policies “fashionable” again.
We now “debate” things like “should we reduce African immigration, deport long-term law abiding Hispanic residents, and bar Muslims” as if these immoral minority proposals were a legitimate “other side” of the immigration issue. The real issues often get shoved aside.
The minority might have seized control. But that doesn’t mean that they are entitled to ram their anti-immigrant, basically anti-American policies down the throats of the rest of us.
The resistance is going to take a prolonged and energetic effort — at the ballot box, in the courts, and in the arena of public opinion. But, eventually, human decency, true American values, and having our “nation of immigrants” treat current and future migrants as human beings whose contributions we recognize and value will be restored!
“The Justice Department on Wednesday escalated its attempt to crack down on so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions, threatening to subpoena 23 states, cities and other localities that have policies the department suspects might be unlawfully interfering with immigration enforcement.
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have long promised to target places with policies friendly to those in the country illegally — warning they might withhold federal money from some and trying to tie grant eligibility to cooperation with federal authorities on immigration matters. The Justice Department had previously contacted the 23 jurisdictions threatened Wednesday, raising worries they might be in violation of a federal law barring places from enacting policies that block communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In a new letter, Bureau of Justice Assistance Director Jon Adler said officials remained “concerned” that the places had policies that violate the law, even after their previous responses. He asked for a new bevy of documents — including “any orders, directives, instructions, or guidance to your law enforcement employees” — and said the department would subpoena the materials if necessary.
. . . .
Among those jurisdictions in the crosshairs are Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and the states of California, Illinois and Oregon. In total, the 23 jurisdictions received more than $39 million in fiscal year 2016 money from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program — which Sessions is now threatening to put at risk.
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Local leaders criticized the move. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D), president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said he would skip a planned White House meeting on infrastructure because of it. “An attack on one of our cities mayors who are following the constitution is an attack on all of us,” he said. His city was not among those targeted Wednesday.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio similarly wrote on Twitter he would skip the gathering after Trump’s Justice Department “decided to renew their racist assault on our immigrant communities. It doesn’t make us safer and it violates America’s core values.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said officers in his city endeavor to build trust with residents to reduce public safety threats, and “you cannot do that if you drive a wedge between any immigrant community and the law enforcement.” He said Sessions’s threats were “amazing” in that the attorney general seemed to “disregard what the court system has already said uniformly from coast to coast.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “The White House has been very clear that we don’t support sanctuary cities. We support enforcing the law and following the law, and that is the Department of Justice’s job is to do exactly that, and if mayors have a problem with that, they should talk to Congress.”
Much of this crackdown has been stymied by the courts. A federal judge in California last year blocked Trump’s executive order to cut funding to such places, and a federal judge in Chicago ruled that Sessions had exceeded his authority in imposing new conditions, such as requiring recipients to give immigration authorities access to jails and 48 hours notice when suspected illegal immigrants are to be released. A federal judge in Philadelphia also ruled that city was in compliance with the law and blocked the Justice Department from withholding money. The Justice Department has appealed all those cases.
. . . .
Sessions has long sought to tie crime to immigration — recently releasing data, which experts said was misleading, that said 73 percent of terrorism convictions in the U.S. involved individuals from other countries. Determining a link between illegal immigration and other crime is statistically difficult to do, though some research shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than those who are native born. Civil liberties and immigration advocates, too, note there is irony in Sessions threatening to withhold law enforcement grants in the name of fighting crime.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
On paper, Gonzo isn’t actually in charge of the DHS. That job is nominally in the hands of Lightweight Sycophant Kirstjen Nielsen.
Remarkably, what Sessions is actually supposed to be doing is administering a fair and unbiased U.S. Immigration Court System in a manner that guarantees the legal and Constitutional Due Process rights of each individual brought before those courts by the DHS. Yeah, right! Sessions never met a migrant he didn’t despise and want railroaded out of the country as part of his White Nationalist agenda. And, he’s clearly “in bed” with DHS Enforcement. That’s why the U.S. Immigration Courts under Gonzo Apocalypto are well on their way to becoming mere “Whistle Stops on the Deportation Railway.”
There was a time when what is now ICE worked hard to gain community support and be considered part of the “legitimate law enforcement apparatus.” But, those days are long gone.
Trump, Gonzo, and Tom Homan are well on the way to making ICE the most hated, distrusted, and despised police force in America — the “New American Gestapo” if you will. The aforenamed “nasty clowns” will be gone someday. But, I’m not sure that ICE will ever be able to undo the damage they are doing to its reputation and standing in the law enforcement community.
As one or more Federal Judges has noted in enjoining Gonzo’s illegal overstepping, “once lost, community trust is not easily, if ever, regained by the police.”
Folks, as we take a few minutes today to remember Dr. King, his vision for a better America, and his inspiring “I Have A Dream Speech,” we have to face the fact that everything Dr. King stood for is under a vicious and concerted attack, the likes of which we haven’t seen in America for approximately 50 years, by individuals elected to govern by a minority of voters in our country.
So, today, I’m offering you a “potpourri” of how and why Dr.King’s Dream has “gone south,” so to speak, and how those of us who care about social justice and due process in America can nevertheless resurrect it and move forward together for a greater and more tolerant American that celebrates the talents, contributions, and humanity of all who live here!.
On Martin Luther King’s birthday, a look back at some disquieting events in race relations in 2017.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop and looked out over the promised land. In a powerful and prophetic speech on April 3, 1968, he told a crowd at the Mason Temple in Memphis that while there would certainly be difficult days ahead, he had no doubt that the struggle for racial justice would be successful.
“I may not get there with you,” he said. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I am happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything.”
The following day, he was assassinated.
The intervening years have been full of steps forward and steps backward, of extraordinary changes as well as awful reminders of what has not changed. What would King have made of our first black president? What would he have thought had he seen neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., so many years after his death? How would he have viewed the shooting by police of unarmed black men in cities around the country — or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement? He would surely have heard the assertions that we have become a “post-racial” society because we elected (and reelected) Barack Obama. But would he have believed it?
This past year was not terribly heartening on the civil rights front. It was appalling enough that racist white nationalists marched in Charlottesville in August. But it was even more shocking that President Trump seemed incapable of making the most basic moral judgment about that march; instead, he said that there were some “very fine people” at the rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Racial injustices that bedeviled the country in King’s day — voter suppression, segregated schools, hate crimes — have not gone away. A report released last week by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on inequities in the funding of public schools concludes — and this should surprise no one — that students of color living in poor, segregated neighborhoods are often relegated to low-quality schools simply due to where they live. States continued in 2017 to pass laws that make it harder, rather than easier, for people of color to vote.
The Trump administration also seems determined to undo two decades of Justice Department civil rights work, cutting back on investigations into the excessive use of force and racial bias by police departments. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in March ordered a review of all existing federal consent decrees with local police departments with the possibility of dismantling them — a move that could set back police reform by many years.
Here in Los Angeles County, this statistic is telling: 40% of the estimated 57,000 homeless people — the most desperate and destitute residents of the county — are black. Yet black residents make up only 9% of the L.A. County population.
But despite bad news on several fronts, what have been heartening over the last year are the objections raised by so many people across the country.
Consider the statues of Confederate generals and slave owners that were brought down across the country. Schools and other institutions rebranded buildings that were formerly named after racists.
The Black Lives Matter movement has grown from a small street and cyber-protest group into a more potent civil rights organization focusing on changing institutions that have traditionally marginalized black people.
When football quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest, as he said, a country that oppresses black people, he was denounced by many (including Trump) but emulated by others. Kaepernick has been effectively banished from professional football but he started a movement.
Roy Moore was defeated for a Senate seat in Alabama by a surge of black voters, particularly black women. (But no sooner did he lose than Joe Arpaio — the disgraced, vehemently anti-immigrant former Arizona sheriff — announced that he is running for Senate there.)
So on what would have been King’s 89th birthday, it is clear that the United States is not yet the promised land he envisioned in the last great speech of his life. But we agree with him that it’s still possible to get there.”
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See this short HuffPost video on “Why MLK’s Message Still Matters Today!”
Read about how the Arizona GOP has resurrected, and in some instances actually welcomed, “Racist Joe” Arpaio, an unapologetic anti-Hispanic bigot and convicted scofflaw. “Racist Joe” was pardoned by Trump and is now running for the GOP nomination to replace retiring Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake, who often has been a critic of Trump. One thing “Racist Joe’s” candidacy is doing is energizing the Latino community that successfully fought to remove him from the office of Sheriff and to have him brought to justice for his racist policies.
Spared from the threat of deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, she campaigned to oust Joe Arpaio when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection as Maricopa County sheriff in 2016. She knocked on hundreds of doors in south Phoenix’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods to register voters. She made phone calls, walked on college campuses. Her message was direct, like the name of the group she worked with, Bazta Arpaio, a take on the Spanish word basta — enough Arpaio.
But now, the 85-year-old former sheriff is back and running for Senate. Sanchez, who had planned to step away from politics to focus on her studies at Grand Canyon University, is back as well, organizing once more.
“If he thinks he can come back and terrorize the entire state like he did Maricopa County, it’s not going to happen,” Sanchez, 20, said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”
Arpaio enters a crowded Republican primary and may not emerge as the party’s nominee, but his bid has already galvanized Arizona’s Latino electorate — one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing voter blocs.
Organizers like Sanchez, who thought they might sit out the midterm elections, rushed back into offices and started making calls. Social media groups that had gone dormant have resurrected with posts reminding voters that Arpaio was criminally convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos.
“We’ve been hearing, ‘Is it true Arpaio is back? OK, what can we do to help?’” said Montserrat Arredondo, director of One Arizona, a Phoenix nonprofit group focused on increasing Latino voter turnout. “People were living in terror when Arpaio was in office. They haven’t forgotten.”
In 2008, 796,000 Latinos were eligible to vote in the state, according to One Arizona. By 2016, that potential voting pool jumped to 1.1 million. (California tops the nation with the most Latinos eligible to vote, almost 6.9 million.)
In 2016, Latinos accounted for almost 20% of all registered voters in Arizona. Latinos make up about 30% of Arizona’s population.
. . . .
Last year, President Trump pardoned Arpaio of a criminal conviction for violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos. When announcing his candidacy Tuesday, Arpaio pledged his full support to the president and his policies.
On Saturday, Arpaio made his first public appearance since announcing his candidacy, attending a gathering of Maricopa County Republicans. He was unmoved when asked about the enthusiasm his candidacy has created among Latinos.
“Many of them hate me for enforcing the law,” he said. “I can’t change that. … All I know is that I have my supporters, they’re going to support who they want. I’m in this to win it though.”
Arpaio, gripping about a dozen red cardboard signs that read “We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio in DC,” walked through the crowd where he mingled with, among others, former state Sen. Kelli Ward and U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, who also are seeking the GOP Senate nomination. Overall, Arpaio was widely met with enthusiasm from attendees.
“So glad you’re back,” said a man wearing a “Vietnam Veteran” hat.
“It’s great to be back,” Arpaio replied.
Arpaio, who handed out business cards touting his once self-proclaimed status as “America’s toughest sheriff,” said he had no regrets from his more than two decades in office.
“Not a single one,” he said. “I spoke my mind and did what needed to be done and would do it the same in a minute.”
In an interview, Arpaio, who still insists he has “evidence” that former President Obama’s birth certificate is forged, a rumor repeatedly shown to be false, did not lay out specific policy platforms, only insisting he’ll get things done in Washington.
During his tenure as sheriff, repeated court rulings against his office for civil rights violations cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.”
Read the complete story at the link.
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Professor George Yancy of Emory University writing in the NY Times asks “Will America Choose King’s Dream Or Trump’s Nightmare?”
“Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written, spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about itself.
So, as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live, and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head on.
On the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.
We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy.
So many Americans suffer from the obsessive need to claim “innocence,” that is, to lie to ourselves. Yet such a lie is part of our moral undoing. While many will deny, continue to lie and claim our national “innocence,” I come bearing deeply troubling, but not surprising, news: White racism is now comfortably located within the Oval Office, right there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, embodied in our 45th president, one who is, and I think many would agree, must agree, without any hesitation, a white racist. There are many who will resist this characterization, but Mr. Trump has desecrated the symbolic aspirations of America, exhumed forms of white supremacist discourse that so many would assume is spewed only by Ku Klux Klan.”
Read the rest of Professor Yancy’s op-ed at the link.
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From lead columnist David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick at the NY Times we get “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”
Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. More recently, his political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.
The New York Years
Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.
Trump treated black employees at his casinos differently from whites, according to multiple sources. A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”
In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
In 1989, on NBC, Trump said: “I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.”
He uses the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants. Among many other statements, he has suggested that Obama’s protection of the Dreamers — otherwise law-abiding immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children — contributed to the spread of MS-13.
In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.
In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
At the White House on Jan. 11, Trump vulgarly called forless immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.”
The disgusting list goes on and on. Go to the link to get it all!
“I find nothing more useless than debating the existence of racism, particularly when you are surrounded by evidence of its existence. It feels to me like a way to keep you fighting against the water until you drown.
The debates themselves, I believe, render a simple concept impossibly complex, making the very meaning of “racism” frustratingly murky.
So, let’s strip that away here. Let’s be honest and forthright.
Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.
The history of America is one in which white people used racism and white supremacy to develop a racial caste system that advantaged them and disadvantaged others.
Understanding this, it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.
It is not a stretch to say that Trump is racist. It’s not a stretch to say that he is a white supremacist. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump is a bigot.
Those are just facts, supported by the proof of the words that keep coming directly from him. And, when he is called out for his racism, his response is never to ameliorate his rhetoric, but to double down on it.
I know of no point during his entire life where he has apologized for, repented of, or sought absolution for any of his racist actions or comments.
Instead, he either denies, deflects or amps up the attack.
Trump is a racist. We can put that baby to bed.
“Racism” and “racist” are simply words that have definitions, and Trump comfortably and unambiguously meets those definitions.
We have unfortunately moved away from the simple definition of racism, to the point where the only people to whom the appellation can be safely applied are the vocal, violent racial archetypes.
Racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness. We want racism to be fringe rather than foundational. But, wishing isn’t an effective method of eradication.
We have to face this thing, stare it down and fight it back.
The simple acknowledgment that Trump is a racist is the easy part. The harder, more substantive part is this: What are we going to do about it?
First and foremost, although Trump is not the first president to be a racist, we must make him the last. If by some miracle he should serve out his first term, he mustn’t be allowed a second. Voters of good conscience must swarm the polls in 2020.
But before that, those voters must do so later this year, to rid the House and the Senate of as many of Trump’s defenders, apologists and accomplices as possible. Should the time come where impeachment is inevitable, there must be enough votes in the House and Senate to ensure it.
We have to stop thinking that we can somehow separate what racists believe from how they will behave. We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.
And finally, we have to stop giving a pass to the people — whether elected official or average voter — who support and defend his racism. If you defend racism you are part of the racism. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you’re an egalitarian, how much you say that you are race blind, how much you say that you are only interested in people’s policies and not their racist polemics.
As the brilliant James Baldwin once put it: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” When I see that in poll after poll a portion of Trump’s base continues to support his behavior, including on race, I can only conclude that there is no real daylight between Trump and his base. They are part of his racism.
When I see the extraordinary hypocrisy of elected officials who either remain silent in the wake of Trump’s continued racist outbursts or who obliquely condemn him, only to in short order return to defending and praising him and supporting his agenda, I see that there is no real daylight between Trump and them either. They too are part of his racism.
When you see it this way, you understand the enormity and the profundity of what we are facing. There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.
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Back over at the Washington Post, op-ed writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., tells us the depressing news that “We could be a much better country. Trump makes it impossible.”
Dionne concludes his piece with the following observations about our current “Dreamer” debate:
“Our current debate is frustrating, and not only because Trump doesn’t understand what “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” even mean. By persistently making himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation, Trump is blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward.
And while Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will do all they can to avoid the issue, there should now be no doubt (even if this was clear long ago) that we have a blatant racist as our president. His reference to immigrants from “sh–hole countries” and his expressed preference for Norwegians over Haitians, Salvadorans and new arrivals from Africa make this abundantly clear. Racist leaders do not help us reach mutual toleration. His semi-denial 15 hours after his comment was first reported lacked credibility, especially because he called around first to see how his original words would play with his base.
But notice also what Trump’s outburst did to our capacity to govern ourselves and make progress. Democrats and Republicans sympathetic to the plight of the “dreamers” worked out an immigration compromise designed carefully to give Trump what he had said he needed.
There were many concessions by Democrats on border security, “chain migration” based on family reunification, and the diversity visa lottery that Trump had criticized. GOP senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) bargained in good faith and were given ample reason by Trump to think they had hit his sweet spot.
Trump blew them away with a torrent of bigotry. In the process, he shifted the onus for avoiding a government shutdown squarely on his own shoulders and those of Republican leaders who were shamefully slow in condemning the president’s racism.
There are so many issues both more important and more interesting than the psyche of a deeply damaged man. We are capable of being a far better nation. But we need leaders who call us to our obligations to each other as free citizens. Instead, we have a president who knows only how to foster division and hatred.”
Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
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Our “Liar-in-Chief:” This short video from CNN, featuring the Washington Post’s “Chief Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler deals with the amazing 2000+ false or misleading claims that Trump has made even before the first anniversary of his Presidency: “Trump averages 5-6 false claims a day.”
Also on video, even immigration restrictionists sometimes wax eloquent about the exceptional generosity of U.S. immigration and refugee laws (even as they engage in an unending battle to undermine that claimed generosity). But, the reality, as set forth in this short HuffPost video is that on a regular basis our Government knowingly and intentionally returns individuals, mostly Hispanics, to countries where they are likely to be harmed or killed because we are unable to fit them within often hyper-technical and overly restrictive readings of various protection laws or because we are unwilling to exercise humanitarian discretion to save them..
I know first-hand because in my former position as a U.S. Immigration Judge, I sometimes had to tell individuals (and their families) in person that I had to order them returned to a country where I had concluded that they would likely be severely harmed or killed because I could not fit them into any of the categories of protection available under U.S. law. I daresay that very few of the restrictionists who glory in the idea of even harsher and more restrictive immigration laws have had this experience.
And clearly, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Steven Miller, Bob Goodlatte and others in the GOP would like to increase the number of humans we return to harm or death by stripping defenseless juveniles and other vulnerable asylum seekers of some of the limited rights they now possess in the false name of “border security.” Indeed, Sessions even invented a false narrative of a fraud-ridden, “attorney-gamed” (how do folks who often don’t even have a chance to get an attorney use attorneys to “game” the system?) asylum system in an attempt to justify his totally indefensible and morally bankrupt position.
Check out this video from HuffPost, entitled “This Is The Violent And Tragic Reality Of Deportation” to see the shocking truth about how our removal system really works (or not)!
Thinking of MLK’S “I have a dream,” next, I’ll take you over to The Guardian, where Washington Correspondent Sabrina Siddiqui tells us how “Immigration policy progress and setbacks have become pattern for Dreamers.”
“Greisa Martínez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.
Martínez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca.
She considers herself “one of the lucky ones”. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.
Martínez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines.
In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trump’s reported – if contested – reference to African and Central American nations as “shithole countries”.
“It feels like a sequel,” Martínez told the Guardian, adding that Trump’s adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. “This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.”
Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants “rapists” and “killers”, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.
He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers – despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.
Then, less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.
“People are picking their jaws up from the table and they’re trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.
“We always knew we were climbing a mountain … but it’s improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.”
As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trump’s remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.
Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship – an effort to appease Trump’s stance against so-called “chain migration” – but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status.
There would be other concessions to earn Trump’s signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall.
The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.
The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship.
The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.
Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trump’s ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.
“I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before,” Flake told the Guardian. “We’re going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. That’s the biggest difference.”
Read the rest of the story at the link.
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Finally, John Blake at CNN tells us “Three ways [you might not know] MLK speaks to our time.”
That’s a famous line from the 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it could also apply to a modern American hero: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the nation celebrates King’s national holiday Monday, it’s easy to freeze-frame him as the benevolent dreamer carved in stone on the Washington Mall. Yet the platitudes that frame many King holiday events often fail to mention the most radical aspects of his legacy, says Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College and author of several books on the civil rights movement.
“We turn him into a Thanksgiving parade float, he’s jolly, larger than life and he makes us feel good,” Theoharis says. “We’ve turned him into a mascot.”
Many people vaguely know that King opposed the Vietnam War and talked more about poverty in his later years. But King also had a lot to say about issues not normally associated with civil rights that still resonate today, historians and activists say.
If you’re concerned about inequality, health care, climate change or even the nastiness of our political disagreements, then King has plenty to say to you. To see that version of King, though, we have to dust off the cliches and look at him anew.
If you’re more familiar with your smartphone than your history, try this: Think of King not just as a civil rights hero, but also as an app — his legacy has to be updated to remain relevant.
Here are three ways we can update our MLK app to see how he spoke not only to his time, but to our time as well:
. . . .
But here’s one more uncomfortable thought that also explains why King remains so relevant:
The country is still divided by many of the same issues that consumed him.
On the last night of his life, King told a shouting congregation of black churchgoers that “we as a people” would get to “the Promised Land.” That kind of optimism, though, sounds like it belongs to another era.
What we have now is a leader in the White House who denies widespread reports that he complained about Latino and African immigrants coming to America from “shithole” countries; a white supremacist who murders worshippers in church; a social media landscape that pulsates with anger and accusations.
King’s Promised Land doesn’t sound boring when compared to today’s headlines. And maybe that’s what’s so sad about reliving his life every January for some people.
Fifty years after he died, King’s vision for America still sounds so far away.”
Read the complete article at the link.
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There you have it. A brief but representative sample of some of the many ways in which Dr. King’s dream of a “post racist America” is still relevant and why there’s still much more work still to be done than many of us might have thought several years ago.
So, the next time you hear bandied about terms like “merit-based” (means: exclude Brown and Black immigrants); “extreme vetting” (means: using bureaucracy to keep Muslims and other perceived “undesirables” out); “tax cuts” (means: handouts to the rich at the expense of the poor); “entitlement reform” (means: cutting benefits for the most vulnerable); “health care reform” (means: kicking the most needy out of the health care system); “voter fraud” (means: suppressing the Black, Hispanic, and Democratic vote); “rule of law” (means: perverting the role of Government agencies and the courts to harm Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, women, the poor, and other minorities); “job creation” (means: destroying our precious natural resources and the environment for the benefit of big corporations), “border security” (means: slashing rights for children and asylum seekers, and more money for building a wall and expanding prisons for non-criminal migrants, a/k/a/ “The New American Gulag”), “ending chain migration” (means keeping non-White and/or non-Christian immigrants from bringing family members) and other deceptively harmless sounding euphemisms, know what the politicos are really up to and consider them in the terms that Dr. King might have.
What’s really behind the rhetoric and how will it help create the type of more fair, just, equal, and value-driven society that majority of us in American seek to be part of and leave to succeeding generations. If it isn’t moving us as a nation toward those goals, “Just Say NO” as Dr. King would have done!
“It would have seemed unbelievable in 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in New York City, but as of Wednesday there have been just 286 in the city this year — the lowest since reliable records have been kept.
In fact, crime has fallen in New York City in each of the major felony categories — murder and manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts — to a total of 94,806 as of Sunday, well below the previous record low of 101,716 set last year.
If the trend holds just a few more days, this year’s homicide total will be under the city’s previous low of 333 in 2014, and crime will have declined for 27 straight years, to levels that police officials have said are the lowest since the 1950s. The numbers, when taken together, portray a city of 8.5 million people growing safer even as the police, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, use less deadly force, make fewer arrests and scale back controversial practices like stopping and frisking thousands of people on the streets.
“There is no denying that the arc is truly exceptional in the unbroken streak of declining crime,” said William J. Bratton, who retired from his second stint as police commissioner last year.
But officials see one area of concern: an uptick in reports of rapes toward the end of the year. The increase, which officials said included a higher-than-normal number of attacks that occurred more than one year ago, coincided with the publication of accusations against powerful menlike Harvey Weinstein, which gave rise to the #MeToo movementencouraging victims to come forward. City police officials have said they believed news coverage played a role in the spike in reports, though they also credited their own efforts combating domestic violence with encouraging victims to speak up.
And while rapes were down from last year by one, to 1,417, misdemeanor sex crimes — a catchall for various types of misconduct that includes groping — ticked up 9.3 percent to 3,585 so far.
The lower homicide numbers are still preliminary — and include one announced on Wednesday night — but they jibe with large drops in killings in major cities like Chicago and Detroit, while contrasting with sizable increases in killings in smaller cities like Charlotte and Baltimore.
The city today is a far cry from what it was when Mr. Bratton arrived in 1990 to become the head of the then-separate Transit Police. Not only were there 2,245 killings that year, but there were more than 527,000 major felony crimes and more than 5,000 people shot. Shootings have plunged to 774 so far this year, well below last year’s record low of 998. And for the first time, fewer than 1,000 people have been hurt by gunfire: 917 as of Sunday.
The continued declines are a boon to Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat elected on promises of police reform — promises that prompted warnings of mayhem to come by his opponents in 2013. But the opposite has happened, putting him on stronger footing as he pivots to a second term with a Police Department transformed to exercise greater restraint as it focuses on building trust in the city’s neighborhoods.
Franklin E. Zimring, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said the downturn was an “astounding achievement,” but it raised another question: How long and low will crime fall?
Mr. de Blasio and the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, credit recent drops in crime to the Police Department’s emphasis on going after the relatively small groups of people — mostly gangs and repeat offenders — believed to be responsible for most crime, while also building relationships in communities where trust has been strained.
Mr. Bratton applauded political support for the police from the mayor, who provided funding for investments in officer hiring, training, equipment and overdose-reversal drugs.
One of the results is that police officers are using deadly force less often. As of Dec. 20, police officers intentionally fired their service guns in 23 encounters, a record low, down from 37 in 2016. The Police Department said officers were relying more on stun guns, which were used 491 times through November, compared with 474 times during the same period in 2016. More than 15,000 officers have been trained how to use them.
But criminologists differ about the cause of the continued declines. Mr. Zimring said that while better policing accounted for much of the decline in crime since 1990, it was no longer a primary driver. New York is “tiptoeing” toward a 90 percent crime decline for reasons that remain “utterly mysterious,” he said.
More broadly, research suggests that crime trends are closely tied to economic conditions. Interest rates, inflation and unemployment are among the macro-level factors influencing crime, according to James Austin, the president of the JFA Institute, a criminal justice policy nonprofit.
“What the Fed does will have more of an impact than any sentencing or police reforms,” Mr. Austin said.
The reductions in New York are a part of what the Brennan Center for Justice expects will be a 2.7-percent decline in crime rates and 5.6-percent drop in murder rates across the country’s largest cities. After record-high bloodshed last year, killings in Chicago have declined 15 percent.
Through August, rape was down in New York City 7 percent compared with last year, but a small increase in September was followed by spikes in October and November. The New York Times first published accusations against Mr. Weinstein on Oct. 5.
Reports of rapes that had occurred in a previous year, meanwhile, were up almost 12 percent through November. In response, the Police Department is adding investigators to its Special Victims Unit and hasmodernized the techniques detectives use to investigate claims.
“We can’t answer definitively” what is driving the rise, Commissioner O’Neill told reporters at a crime briefing this month. “At least I can’t. But we’re seeing people coming forward and having faith in the N.Y.P.D. And that’s what we want to happen.”
Whatever the reason for New York’s crime reductions, the statistics do not capture the complete picture of public safety. Some crimes are not represented fully or at all: acts of domestic violence, sexual assaults, identity thefts, hate crimes, and shootings that don’t result in injuries or damage.
Increasingly, officers are receiving calls to help people in emotional crises. The police responded to 157,000 such calls in 2016. But only 7,000 officers have received crisis intervention training for handling those situations.
While most police encounters are resolved without officers resorting to deadly force, fatal police shootings of people in emotional distress — including Dwayne Jeune on July 31 in Brooklyn and Miguel Richards on Sept. 6 in the Bronx — have drawn scrutiny. A police sergeant, Hugh Barry, was indicted on murder charges in May for the fatal on-duty shooting of a mentally ill woman, Deborah Danner, in October 2016. His trial is scheduled to begin in January.”
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AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions’s White Nationalist inspired anti-immigrant, anti-Sanctuary Cities, “turn a blind eye to police brutality” campaign actually impedes the type of community-trust based policing that appears to work in reducing crime. As I have noted before, Gonzo’s policies show little respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or state and local rights, but lots of anti-immigrant bias.
“The number of people caught trying to sneak over the border from Mexico has fallen to the lowest level in 46 years, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics released Tuesday that offer the first comprehensive look at how immigration enforcement is changing under the Trump administration.
During the government’s 2017 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, U.S. border agents made 310,531 arrests, a decline of 24 percent from the previous year and the fewest overall since 1971.
The figures show a sharp drop in apprehensions immediately after President Trump’s election win, possibly reflecting the deterrent effect of his rhetoric on would-be border crossers; starting in May, the number of people taken into custody began increasing again.
Arrests of foreigners living illegally in the United States have surged under Trump. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers made 110,568 such arrests between inauguration and the end of September, according to the figures published Tuesday, a 42 percent increase over the same period during the previous year.
Tom Homan, ICE’s temporary director and Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, praised the president and gave a vigorous defense of ICE’s more aggressive approach.
“This president, like him or love him, is doing the right thing,” Homan told reporters at a news conference in Washington, accompanied by the heads of the U.S. Border Patrol and Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“A 45-year low in border crossings? That’s not a coincidence,” Homan said. “That’s based on this president and his belief and letting the men and women of ICE and the Border Patrol do their job.”
[How Trump is building a border wall no one can see]
Trump’s sweeping promises to crack down on illegal immigration fueled his presidential campaign and are at the center of his most ambitious domestic policy proposals, including construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.
Asked whether such a barrier was justifiable given its high cost and the decline in illegal immigration, DHS officials endorsed the president’s plan.
“In this society, we use walls and fences to protect things. It shouldn’t be different on the border,” said Ronald Vitiello, chief of the Border Patrol.
Apprehensions by Border Patrol agents peaked at more than 1.6 million in 2000 and began falling substantially after 2008. The previous low point was 331,333 arrests, during fiscal 2015. Experts have attributed the decline to tougher U.S. enforcement, improving job prospects in Mexico and long-term demographic changes that have driven down the country’s birthrate.
3:32
On the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump supporters wait for th
Still, the drop in border arrests is among the sharpest year-to-year changes on record, one that only casts more doubt on the wisdom of building a border wall, said Doris Meissner, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
“It’s a throwback response to yesterday’s problems,” she said, arguing that the money would be better spent addressing what accounts for a growing share of illegal migration: families with children fleeing rampant violence and dismal poverty in Central America.
Border agents took more than 75,000 “family units,” classified as at least one child and a related adult, into custody during fiscal 2017. But the number of unaccompanied minors fell 31 percent, to 41,435.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
This has to be what true greatness looks like! Imagine a world without those pesky undocumented workers to support our economy, our society, and our “American” way of life! That’s making America Great Again!
I’m sure future generations will be inspired by Homan’s humanity and wisdom as they pick produce or pound shingles in 100 degree heat, clean toilets, empty urine bags for the elderly and handicapped, clean tables, wash dishes, limb trees, shuck oysters, schlep concrete blocks, dig ditches, and, horror of horrors, take care of their own children while working full-time. Man, that’s going to be “America the Great” just as Trump, Sessions, Bannon, Miller, Homan, and others envision it!
And, the best part: we won’t have to worry about any of that burdensome, nasty “globalism” and the unfair burden of global leadership! That’s because the Chinese, Indians, Canadians, Mexicans, and Europeans will be in charge of the world economy and the Ruskies will control world politics. So we can enjoy our little White Nationalist enclave modeled on post-revolutionary Cuba — life in the 1950’s preserved forever! Save those “Classic ’57 Chevies!”
Kinda sorry I won’t be here to enjoy it! But, then again, I already lived through the real 1950’s once — Cold War, Jim Crow, segregation, anti-semitism, racial covenants, no women doctors, lawyers, or execs, African Americans only welcome on the football fields and basketball courts of a few Northern colleges! Boy, it was great! But, not sure I want to do it again, even to experience the pure, unadulterated joy of having “my Milwaukee Braves” win the 1957 World Series (before fleeing to Atlanta)!
On the flip side, at Homan’s “record pace” of “law enforcement,” he and his minions will have every single undocumented American resident removed from the U.S by 2080 — that’s if no more arrive in the interim. And, the really great thing — they and those around them (including U.S. citizen kids and family members) will be living in fear every moment for the next six decades! Now, that’s something of which we can be truly proud! Of course, this all assumes that the North Koreans don’t nuke us and the rest of the world out of existence first!
THE TRUMP administration likes to justify its multi-front crusade against immigration and immigrants as a revival of the rule of law, or a recalibration of the rules to favor disadvantaged American workers. In fact, it is largely a resurrection of xenophobia that coincides with a spike, nearly 50 years in the making, in the number of foreign-born residents living in the United States.
“For decades,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech in October, “the American people have been begging and pleading . . . for an immigration system that’s lawful and serves the national interest. Now we have a president who supports that.”
Mr. Sessions’s claims are specious. An embrace of legality is not the driving force behind the president’s decision to slash the admission of refugees to levels unseen in nearly 40 years. It is not what compelled Mr. Trump to endorse Republican legislation that would cut the annual allotment of green cards by a half-million, mainly by barring relatives of existing legal permanent residents of the United States. It is not why the Pentagon has considered ending a recruitment program that put skilled foreigners on a fast track for citizenship if they served in this country’s armed forces. And it is not why the administration favors ending the so-called diversity visa lottery program, under which immigrants are admitted from nations underrepresented in other programs.
Those programs were all legally enacted and, by and large, carried out in compliance with the law. The animating force in targeting them, as the administration is now doing, is an effort to turn back the tide of foreigners in our midst and exorcise what the president evidently sees as the demon of diversity.
The administration’s goal is not to reshape America’s immigration policy but to prune immigration itself. While Mr. Trump backs a GOP plan that would give preference to immigrants with skills rather than family connections in the United States, the effect would be not simply to shift the mix while maintaining the current level of legal immigration but to drastically reduce overall numbers of admissions.”
. . . .
Unfortunately, Mr. Trump has poisoned the debate on immigration so thoroughly that he has twisted the frame through which many Americans see the issue. His slurs — labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and Muslim immigrants as terrorists — form the context from which the administration’s policies arise. They are affronts to U.S. tradition and values.
They’re also an assault on what Mr. Sessions refers to as “the national interest” and specifically the United States’ economic well-being. Legions of employers dependent on immigrant workers, especially to fill low-skilled jobs for which native-born Americans are too well educated and in short supply, will be harmed by choking off the flow of immigrant labor. With unemployment at a 16-year low and approaching levels unseen in a half-century, the Trump policies threaten to sap the economy by depriving it of the energy of striving newcomers who have fueled this nation’s ambitions since its founding.
It is within the president’s discretion to intensify efforts at deportation, though the humanitarian price — in shattered communities and families, including those whose children, born in this country, are Americans — is high. It is reasonable to take steps to tighten border security, though with illegal crossings already at a 40-year low and the Border Patrol’s staffing having already been doubled since the George W. Bush administration, a significant new investment along those lines faces the risk of diminishing returns. The administration may arguably have had a valid legal basis for ending the Obama-era program granting deportation protection for “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children, often brought by their parents — though only a smallish minority of Americans believes they should be removed from this country.
But what value, other than sheer bigotry, is served by reducing the resettlement of refugees in the United States at a time when the number of displaced people worldwide has soared to staggering levels? In a country founded and in many respects shaped by refugees — a country that has resettled some 3 million refugees since 1980, more than any other nation — why does the Trump administration insist on turning its back on them now, when some 17 million people have been displaced from their homes across international borders around the world due to conflict or persecution, the highest number in a quarter-century?
It is clearly jarring to some Americans that the foreign-born portion of the overall population has nearly tripled since 1970. Many communities, towns and cities have been transformed culturally and socially by that surge, about a third of which was driven by illegal immigrants.
In some places, local government budgets have strained to provide services for immigrants, particularly public education, and the economic dislocation felt by many working-class Americans is a fact. But that dislocation is not mostly caused by immigrants. The United States is a more prosperous place today than it was before the surge in immigration, and immigrants have fed that prosperity — by helping to harvest America’s crops, build its cities, care for its young and elderly, and found some of its most buoyant companies.
. . . .The Trump administration’s crusade against immigration and immigrants is not just a quest to diminish the influence of the “other”; it is an assault on the nation’s future and prospects.”
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Read the complete editorial at the link.
This is largely (not entirely — I believe that there is a sound legal basis for continuing DACA, for example) what I’ve been saying all along:
Jeff Sessions is a bigoted, xenophobic, anti-American scofflaw whose disingenuous, self-righteous claims to be restoring the “Rule of Law” (that would be the “Jim Crow laws” of Sessions’s Alabama past) are totally outrageous;
The real purpose of the Administration’s xenophobic program is to divide and weaken America by stirring up racial, religious, and ethnic animosities;
The “Gonzo,” arbitrary interior enforcement program serves no useful purpose other than playing to the “biases of the base” and the wishes of some (not all) disgruntled immigration enforcement agents for unbridled authority;
Our xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are costing us leadership and respect on the world scene (just this weekend, the Administration withdrew from the UN Global Migration Pact);
Our past strength as a nation and our future success and prosperity is based on immigration (and, the US clearly has benefitted from BOTH legal and “extra-legal” migration);
The Trump Administrations’s rhetoric and actions are preventing us from having the serious discussion we need: how we can better regulate (not cut off, diminish, or eliminate) future legal migration of all types to serve our national interest (and to be more “in tune” with “market realities” that drive much immigration), reflect our humanitarian values and the legitimate needs of current and future migrants, and encourage use of our legal immigration system, thereby diminishing the incentives for extra-legal migration.
As long as U.S. immigration policy remains in the hands of White Nationalist xenophobes like Trump, Sessions, Miller, and Bannon (yes, Stevie “Vlad the Lenin” has vacated his perch in the West Wing, but he continues to pull strings through his White Nationalist disciples Sessions and Miller and to stir the pot through his alt-right “news” apparatus Breitbart News) we won’t get the constructive dialogue and the humane, realistic “immigration reform” that we really need. In other words, under current leadership, the real “Rule of Law” will continue to be diminished.
PROFESSOR CÉSAR CUAUHTÉMOC GARCÍA HERNÁNDEZ writes in the NY Times:
“At the door of the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse in Denver one Friday in April, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tackled a man to the ground. A chilling video shows the man — who, according to his lawyer, was there to deal with a traffic ticket — yelling “No!” “My hand!” and “Why?” in Spanish. Sheriff’s deputies order passers-by to stand back, and the violent arrest continues.
The next month, ICE agents returned and arrested another man. His lawyer can be heard in a video of the incident asking the agents if they had a warrant. One responds, “Yes, sir.” The lawyer asks, “Can I see it?”
The agent’s response: “No, sir.”
Both men, according to their lawyers, were taken to immigration detention centers.
This type of arrest is on the rise. Lawyers and judges in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington all reported in the first year of the Trump administration that immigration officials were breaking with tradition to descend upon their courthouses. Such arrests in New York have increased by 900 percent in 2017, according to the Immigrant Defense Project.
This is a deeply worrisome trend because arrests at courthouses don’t just derail the lives of the unsuspecting people who are detained, they threaten the very operation of our judicial system. Such arrests scare people away from the courts, keeping them, for example, from testifying at trials or seeking orders of protection. By using this tactic, the nation’s lead immigration law enforcement agency is undermining a pillar of our democracy.
. . . .
Courthouses have a special place in American society. It’s only in a court of law that we can be confident that disputes will be mediated deliberately, and according to a set of rules intended to ensure justice for all parties. As the Supreme Court declared in 1907: “The right to sue and defend in the courts is the alternative of force. In an organized society it is the right conservative of all other rights, and lies at the foundation of orderly government.”
The pursuit of justice depends on getting the parties in the same room. That’s why courts have the power to drag in unwilling participants with subpoenas. They can compel witnesses to testify or risk contempt charges. Courts rely on their hard-earned legitimacy as the rightful locations for resolution of disagreements.
Courthouse arrests by ICE deter not only undocumented immigrants but also people who are here legally but are nervous that they might have somehow compromised their status (or that an officer will think they have). That’s a nuance that is next to impossible for the average person to discern, and those complicated legal questions are exactly what immigration judges spend a lot of energy trying to answer.
. . . .
The harm this causes is bigger than the people whom ICE arrests. United States citizens are not immune to the impact of ICE activity in courthouses. All of us — including those of us who could easily prove our immigration status — depend on courts to do their job, and all of us suffer if the fear of ICE keeps people away.
ICE understands its actions can paralyze important institutions. Longstanding ICE policy discourages questioning or arresting people in schools and churches. It is time to add courthouses to that list. But top administration officials have vigorously defended courthouse arrests.
With no change to federal policy in sight, it is up to cities and states to push back. Elected officials must take seriously their legal obligation to keep courthouses accessible. In addition, the cities and states that own and operate most courthouses and ensure that no one uses their courts in a way that halts judicial business — protesters can’t block the doorway, bail bondsmen aren’t allowed to set up shop in the lobby — should do the same here for immigration agents.
ICE should no longer get free rein to tackle, handcuff and haul away immigrants, sending a message to others that they should think twice before trusting in the courts.
