🤯 BORDER: THE “ADULTS IN THE ROOM” DON’T WORK FOR THE USG OR TEXAS: Dedicated Volunteers Left To “Pick Up The Pieces” Of Human Carnage From GOP Racism & Biden Administration’s Lack Of Courage, Competence, Creativity, & Resolve! — Failed Political Leadership On Migration On Both Sides Of The Border & Uncritical Reporting From Most Media Are A Big Part Of The Problem!

Melissa Del Bosque
Border Reporter
PHOTO: Melissadelbosque.com

From The Border Chronicle:

From Education to Everything Else

Felicia Rangel-Samporano and Victor Cavazos founded The Sidewalk School, then a migrant shelter in Mexico. Now they also provide tech-support for a flawed U.S. immigration app.

MELISSA DEL BOSQUE

MAR 14

. . . .

Since opening, the school has also expanded to the neighboring Mexican border city of Reynosa. Because life in the migrant camps is transitory, The Sidewalk School’s teachers came and went, sometimes within weeks, said Rangel-Samponaro. They decided it would be easier to hire educators from Mexican border communities instead. Residents also understand better how to navigate the complicated dynamics at play in cities like Matamoros and Reynosa, which are riven by cartel-related crime—most recently, the kidnapping of four U.S. citizens in Matamoros, two of whom were shot and killed by cartel gunmen.

The Sidewalk School teaches based on the U.S. school calendar. In February they celebrated Black History Month, for example, she said. They focus on reading, writing, drawing, and play activities. Classes are typically held from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. They currently have 10 people on staff in Matamoros and Reynosa. “We need even more staff,” Rangel-Samponaro said. “In both cities.”

Frontline Responders

As elected leaders in both Mexico and the United States fail to acknowledge the seismic shift in global displacement due to climate change, Covid-19, and other factors, migrant camps continue to appear up and down the Mexican border.

Border residents have been frontline responders, adapting to the most pressing needs in the camps, one of which is housing. Recently, The Sidewalk School joined the church group Kaleo International to build a shelter in Reynosa. The shelter houses mostly Haitian and African migrants, who are some of the most vulnerable since they are routinely targeted for kidnapping and persecution in Mexico.

But one of the biggest surprises, said Rangel-Samponaro, is that they now serve as tech support for the CBP One app, which was rolled out in January by the U.S. government for migrants to apply for asylum, as an exemption to Title 42. The app has been plagued with errors. And humanitarian groups have complained that the app, which requires that each person upload a selfie to begin the asylum process, often won’t accept photos of darker-skinned applicants.

Currently, there are thousands of Haitians in both Reynosa and Matamoros, as well as other darker-skinned asylum seekers, who are stuck because they can’t get the app to accept their photos. (The manual on the app, which Sidewalk School employees consult daily is 73 -pages long).

I visited Reynosa and The Sidewalk School in late February and spoke with several Haitian families who had tried to use the CBP One app.

Upgrade to paid

I was quickly surrounded by frustrated parents who said they’d been trying for weeks to make the app work. Living in makeshift shelters made of tarps and cardboard and having little to no access to the internet, parents were waking up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning to find a place with an internet connection, then registering, and trying to take and upload their photo before 8:00 a.m., when the app began accepting daily applications.

“I have an appointment,” one father told me. “But the app won’t accept the photos of my children, so I can’t get appointments for them.”

The app often timed out, crashed, or gave error messages, they said. “It’s a disaster,” one man said, after I asked him to sum up his experience trying to use the app.

“People don’t like hearing it, much less acknowledging what is happening to Black asylum seekers,” Rangel-Samponaro said. “They are stuck inside these encampments for months compared to people of Latin descent, who are at the camps for maybe two weeks or a month.”

I spoke with at least 10 different Haitian families, and they all told me that they’d been living in the migrant camp in Reynosa for at least five months.

“We don’t have enough food,” a Haitian boy told me in Spanish, who said he was 11 years old. “And I have this rash on my face.” He pointed to his cheek. Open sewers and trash littered the area around the camps. And the families, who said they couldn’t work and were struggling to buy food, said they were growing desperate.

Felicia Rangel-Samporano visiting a migrant camp in Reynosa with mostly Haitian and Venezuelan asylum seekers. (Photo: Melissa del Bosque)

So desperate that families were considering splitting up. Rangel-Samponaro said there had been anguished meetings with parents who were considering sending their children across as unaccompanied minors. If the parents could get appointments through the app, they would reclaim their children once they arrived in the United States. At least that’s what they hoped.

Recently, The Sidewalk School brought in an immigration attorney to explain to parents how difficult it can be to find a child once they have been designated as unaccompanied in the U.S. immigration system. Children are held by CBP, then transferred to a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement somewhere in the country. “We’ve explained to them that it’s unlikely that they will cross, and their child will be there waiting for them,” she said.

And once people are accepted by the app for an appointment, they are extensively vetted through a series of law enforcement databases, and some are turned back, she said. “Just because you’ve got an appointment doesn’t mean they’re going to let you in to the United States.”

Rangel-Samponaro, like many others who provide humanitarian services in Mexico, is in frequent contact with CBP about problems with the app. In early March, she said, the agency updated the app so that it only requires one member of the family to submit a photo. But there are still not enough appointments for every member of the family, she said, so families are still splitting up and sending their children across as unaccompanied minors.

The Border Chronicle requested a response from CBP about the app. Tammy Melvin, a CBP press officer, replied in an email that the agency “continues to make improvements to the app based on stakeholder feedback.”

She said that “appointments will only be shown if enough slots for each member in the profile is available.”

And Melvin added in the email that they’ve not seen any issues linked to ethnicity. “CBP One is not conducting facial recognition that compares photos submitted in the application against any other reference system to identify someone,” She wrote. “CBP is not seeing any issues with the capture of the liveness photos due to ethnicity.”

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Rangel-Samponaro and others disagree. “We’ve invited the app developers to Reynosa and Matamoros to see the problems we’re having firsthand, but they’ve declined to visit,” she said.

Meanwhile, the hardships keep growing for asylum seekers. Recently, the Biden Administration announced, beginning in May after Title 42 is lifted, that asylum seekers must apply for asylum in the first country they enter, rather than at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rangel-Samponaro said The Sidewalk School is doing everything it can to help, as even more people will likely be stuck in limbo after the policy change in May. They’re providing educational programs, running a shelter, and now providing tech support, and helping people navigate the U.S. government’s glitch-filled app. “I struggle to categorize everything that we do now,” she said.

Just one of the many error messages encountered while using the CBP One app that Rangel-Samponaro and others try to troubleshoot for asylum seekers. [The “error messages” are all too real! The CBP denial that there is a problem is surreal!]

The first two years were rough going, she said, and she and Cavazos spent their own money to keep The Sidewalk School afloat. Now they’re receiving some grants and donations. But it’s always a struggle, she said. “We need more volunteers, more funding,” she said. “Because the need never stops.”

For volunteer opportunities and to learn more about The Sidewalk School click here.

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

Read Melissa’s full article at the link.

How’s this for “contrast?” Felicia Rangel-Samporano and Victor Cavazos, private citizens, gave up comfortable lives in the U.S. and invested their own time and money in addressing the needs of children and families essentially “tashed” by lawless inhumane policies of both the Trump and Biden Administrations. Meanwhile, racist, cowardly, bullying Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) is leading a clearly unconstitutional effort to deny children in Texas U.S. the public education to which they are entitled under Supreme Court precedent. Have to ask what’s wrong with a state that puts a horrible person like Abbott, who doesn’t even govern very well in emergencies or other areas, in charge? They also enabled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), another bullying, lawless, coward who is basically the “bottom of the barrel!”

What the major networks and “mainstream”nmedia aren’t telling you:

“[E]lected leaders in both Mexico and the United States fail to acknowledge the seismic shift in global displacement due to climate change, Covid-19, and other factors;”
“Same old, same old” deterrence and officially-sanctioned cruelty, even in large, expensive, wasteful doses will NOT “solve” refugee flows;
The U.S. “system,” such as it is, systematically mistreats Black asylum seekers;
“CBP One” is defective technology that should never have been put into operation without testing and approval from the humanitarians actually working in the camps in Mexico;
So bad is CBP One that it is encouraging family separation;
The “requirement” that every family member obtain a separate appointment through CBP One is totally insane;
Even when asylum applicants get an appointment, it’s still a “crap shoot” because the Administration functions in a lawless, opaque, and arbitrary fashion without the necessary legal and practical expertise and safeguards in place;
The very idea that Mexico is a “safe” place to send non-Mexicans rejected at the border, under the totally irrational and illegal “presumption of denial” proposed by the Administration, is beyond preposterous;
The Biden Administration has failed to heed the advice of experts who have actually worked on the border and who have constructive ideas for making the law work.

I’m not just getting the above from this article. I have recently had a chance to hear from individuals actually providing legal and humanitarian services at the border who basically said that the situation there is “beyond FUBAR” and that the Administration officials “crafting” border policies are out of touch with reality and not up to their jobs! In some cases, they are just paying no attention to the law or the advice of those who actually understand the system, both in and out of Government.

That seems exactly what we voted out of office when the Trump kakistocracy was removed. Why, then, does Biden think that ignorance, bias, cruelty, and incompetence on human rights and racial justice is now a “winner?” Why is he aligning himself and his Administration with GOP nativist zealots like Abbott, Paxton, DeSantis, Trump, and Miller, rather than with folks like Rangel-Samporano and Cavazos who actually represent the humane, practical, problem-solving values that the Dems ran on in 2020?🤯

With human lives at stake every day, one would think that our Government’s massive violations of human rights and cavalier dismissal of legal rights recognized for more than four decades, would be of great interest to the so-called “mainstream media” and that all Democrats would be demanding changes in human rights/immigration leadership (obviously, Mayorkas & Garland are the wrong folks) and a competent, legal, humane approach from the Biden Administration. But, unfortunately, you would be wrong! Dead wrong, in some cases! ☠️⚰️

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-18-23

☠️⚰️ “I WANT TO DIE,” SAYS 7-YEAR OLD VICTIM OF AMERICA’S FAILURE TO HONOR ASYLUM LAWS! — “Biden’s Wall” Of Bad Tech & Bad Bureaucracy Cheaper, More Effective At Inflicting “Cruelty For Cruelty’s Sake” Than “Trump’s Folly!”🤮

Biden Statue of Liberty — Biden Betrays Promises to Refugees
Steve Sack @ Star Tribune
Republished under license

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/11/asylum-seekers-mexico-border-app/

Arelis R. Hernandez reports for WashPost:

MATAMOROS, Mexico — It was supposed to be his last day in Mexico. The 7-year-old Venezuelan boy beamed as he bade farewell to his teacher, Liliana Carlos, at a school for migrant children living in tents while waiting for their chance to enter the United States.

His family, finally, had obtained an appointment in February with U.S. Customs and Border Protection after weeks of trying to use a new app to secure a slot.

Now they hoped to be allowed to begin a new life in America. No more sleeping on the ground. No more threats of kidnapping. No more watching his mother cry.

But instead of the safety his family longed for inside the United States, the boy returned to the Sidewalk School, inconsolable, his teacher recalled. CBP officials on the border bridge sent back about 50 families, including his. They’d all made appointments online as family units. But agents were now enforcing a rule requiring each child to register individually.

“We are never going to leave,” Carlos recounted the boy telling her as she ushered the wailing child into an alcove known as the “calm corner.”

. . . .

Two weeks after the boy was sent back to the Sidewalk School, Carlos said her once hopeful student still doesn’t have a new appointment. The child’s name is being withheld by The Washington Post out of concerns for his safety.

She tried to console him, she recalled, but he was despondent, telling her: “I want to die.”

. . . .

Within a northern Mexico safe house, a 30-something-year-old asylum seeker ran his fingers across the bumpy scar tissue that had healed unevenly around his wrists. The marks are remnants of the torture he endured two weeks earlier.

His voice quivered as he recalled black-clad kidnappers ambushing the house where he was living at 1 a.m. in late January. They bound his hands and feet with electric cables and threw him in the trunk of a vehicle.

For two days, he was repeatedly burned and beaten.

The Washington Post is withholding the man’s name and other identifying characteristics for safety reasons because he is still in Mexico. But the man showed a reporter the lacerations and described how men pistol-whipped and beat him. Dark circular scars mark the spots on his legs where his captors pressed lit cigarettes into his flesh.

“The app doesn’t feel fair,” said the man, who was denied an exemption to the Title 42 rule barring most migrants from entering and has failed to secure an appointment. “I need protection in the United States.”

. . . .

Nearby in Reynosa, a three-acre lot covered in human feces near a sandy river peninsula overrun by Mexican cartel members sits adjacent to a camp for migrants.

They sleep and eat 50 feet away from the open pit. Soiled toilet paper clings to cactus needles. A toxic plume of nostril-singeing smoke rises over the encampment from a trash heap at the river’s edge where plastic burns.

Nearby, a collection of tall glass candles bearing the image of La Santa Muerte, a Grim Reaper-like Mexican folk saint worshiped by narcos, have been placed in a circle drawn into the sand.

This is Camp Rio, where at least 1,000 Haitian asylum seekers are spending each day they can’t get an appointment.

Many Black migrants are pushed to the fringes of border cities to wait in subhuman conditions. They have more difficulty accessing shelters than those with lighter skin and often experience racism in Mexico.

. . .

The crowd of people around the attorneys swelled. Parents with upcoming dates wondered what would happen if they sent their small children across the bridge alone as unaccompanied minors. D’Cruz begged them not to.

“If we don’t, we will lose everything we’ve worked for,” a woman from Nicaragua said, pressing her bewildered daughter against her leg.

Advocates counted between 40 and 50 children surrendered at the bridge alone days later.

Back at the Sidewalk School, the number of children enrolled has swelled. Carlos, the coordinator, said they went from teaching a handful of kids each day to more three dozen in recent weeks. She said that means more and more children, and their families, aren’t getting appointments.

The longer they despair in Mexico, parents say, the more they consider sending their children to the United States alone.

Valentina Sanchez, 24, of Venezuela, and her husband had appointments in February. Their 3-year-old son did not. He crossed and she stayed behind with the toddler.

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

Read the complete article at the link.

Folks, tragically, we’ve seen in the last few days how totally unsafe Mexico is even for U.S. citizens! Yet, the Biden Administration thinks it’s “A-OK” to propose illegally repelling tens of thousands of non-Mexicans back to danger, torture, exploitation, and death without fairly considering their legal claims for refuge and without insuring that those making such life and death decisions are actually qualified to do so (hint, many aren’t).

At the current rate of 800 “interviews” per day, it would take the Administration four months just to process the 100,000 humans already waiting at the border (4 interviews/officer/day). If the Administration had started with a plan to hire and train 1,000 Asylum Officers over the more than 2.5 years they have been in office, the job could be done in less than a month!

The Administration can (and does) make all the false claims that “CBP One” works that it wants. As Arelis and others who actually interface with asylum seekers on the border have documented, the facts say otherwise!

I happened to be watching “Meet The Press” with Chuck Todd. House Judiciary Chair Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said we need a “surge” of Asylum Officers to the border, grant asylum to those who qualify, remove those who don’t, use more TPS strategically, and open more pathways to legal immigration. Not “rocket science” by any measure!

Yet, although Biden has “dabbled” in some of these initiatives, he still has no systemic plan for reinstating asylum law in a fair and effective manner at the border. Sen. Menendez correctly noted that if Biden continues on the course he has charted, he will go down as the “Asylum Denier In Chief.”

Senator Menendez also said that if Biden has the poor judgement to reinstitute “family detention,” it will fail just as it did in both the Obama and Trump Administrations. He characterized having eliminated family detention upon assuming office as one of the best moves that Biden has made on immigration. Talk about “taking points off the scoreboard!”

Thanks to Arelis Hernandez and a few other reporters who refuse to let the human disaster of the Biden Administration’s treacherous abandonment of the law at the border and the values it represents go unnoticed! It doesn’t have to be this way!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-12-237

🤯🤮 AUTOMATED CRUELTY: FAMILY SEPARATION? — THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS AN APP FOR THAT! — Latest Failed Gimmick From Administration Inflicts Unnecessary Chaos On Vulnerable Individuals Trying To Work Within An Incredibly Incompetent & Poorly Administered System!

Andrea Castillo reports for the LA Times:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=b5d4d78a-33fb-4da8-9a0c-cdc6120dbb7d

Asylum seekers must wait for appointments in U.S. for everyone, or leave some behind.

By Andrea Castillo

WASHINGTON — Inside a tent near the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Jeyson woke up before 3 a.m. every day for a month to fill out applications to request asylum for his family of four through a U.S. government mobile app.

The 25-year-old from Venezuela eventually secured appointments for himself and his wife, but the slots filled up so quickly that he couldn’t get two more for their children. They weren’t worried, though — they had heard about families in similar situations being waved through by border officials.

Instead, he said, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told them recently that because each member of the family did not have an appointment, “you two can enter, but not your children.” Jeyson asked The Times to withhold his last name out of fear for his family’s safety.

Now, many families like Jeyson’s have found themselves confronted with a seemingly impossible decision: Wait indefinitely for enough appointments for the whole family, or split up. It is unclear how many migrants have been put in this position.

. . . .

“We already risked it all,” he said. “What can we do? We are hopeful that we can get three appointments. Three, in the end, is less than four.”

Advocates said some parents have decided to leave their children with extended family or friends in order to keep their appointments.

Jeyson said a couple from his encampment did just that, leaving their five children at the border bridge and entering the U.S. after managing to get only two appointments.

Children who are unaccompanied by a parent are exempt from Title 42. Those in the care of adults who are not their legal guardians — even if they are extended family — are separated until a guardian can be properly vetted. Jeyson said he watched as the children walked up to a border agent and were taken into custody.

Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, director of the Sidewalk School, a nonprofit that offers education, medical care and other assistance to migrants in Mexican border towns, has organized sessions with parents at various shelters and encampments in Matamoros and Reynosa to explain what will happen if they send their child across the border unaccompanied.

“We don’t want them to think you cross and then your child crosses and will come back to you a day later,” she said. “We were surrounded by parents who were showing us, one after the other, [who] have an appointment but their child does not.”

Rangel-Samponaro recommended to parents that they cancel their appointments and restart their search. But some parents told her they would separate from their kids anyway.

“Family separation has never stopped,” she said, referencing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that led to thousands of migrant children being taken from their parents. “The only difference here is that CBP One is now doing it instead of the other ways it’s been done since 2018.”

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

Read Andrea’s complete article at the link.

Let’s start with one undisputed fact: The number of appointments available on CBP One is pathetically, ridiculously inadequate for the KNOWN number of potential applicants waiting in Mexico! Why would this be after the Administration has had over two years to work on this perhaps challenging, yet very solvable problem?

Unnecessary delay is just another form of “bureaucratic deterrence through incompetence” used by the Trump Administration and, inexcusably, continued under Biden.

Just how bonkers is this DHS-created problem? Dependents are included on a primary asylum seeker’s application. Consequently, in most cases one application covers the entire family.

And, dependents don’t have to “prove” independent eligibility for asylum. Therefore, anything beyond biographical information and perhaps proof of relationship is unnecessary.

There is absolutely no reason for requiring a separate “appointment” for each family member. The current system is “pure harassment and deterrence through bureaucratic incompetence.”

In Immigration Court, a family of five required only ONE asylum hearing slot — NOT FIVE!

Most legal asylum seekers at the border want to “do things the right way” — present themselves to DHS and submit an application. It’s neither profound nor “illegal.”

The BEST way of getting applicants to use the ports of entry is to work with experts and NGOs to establish a user-friendly, generous, timely system that prioritizes the many strong claims and grants them promptly at the Asylum Office rather than feeding them into a backlogged and dysfunctional EOIR.

In other words, if you BUILD a fair, credible, user-friendly legal application system at legal ports of entry, applicants will USE it. That the Trump White Nationalists destroyed our legal, statutory refugee and asylum systems was well-known at the time. Indeed, Biden and Harris campaigned on a pledge fix the system and restore legal asylum!

Instead, the Administration failed to utilize the skills and experience of experts to have a planned fix ready on “day one.” Since then, over more than two years, they have inexplicably ignored expert advice, wasted time, squandered resources, and bobbled through a bewildering series of mindless “Stephen Miller Lite deterrence gimmicks,” including “dedicated dockets,” prioritizing the wrong cases, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” on steroids, a “Miller Lite holdover” BIA known for hostility to asylum seekers, ignoring the need for pro bono representation, failing to train and deploy enough Asylum Officers to the border, and not working with advocates, NGOs, and asylum seekers to prescreen cases, start granting asylum and moving qualified refugees (and their families) through the system and into durable legal status prior to the lifting of Title 42.

The CBP One screwup is just the latest in a string of “unforced errors” by the Biden Administration that abuse asylum seekers without any systemic benefits to anyone — “random acts of cruelty and stupidity!” This app was obviously designed by non-users for use by USG “gatekeepers” without any idea of what its like to be an asylum seeker stuck in Mexico.

Indeed, it appears that the app’s developers have little idea of how the legal asylum system works. Talk about “amateur night at the Bijou!”

“Family separation” has never stopped; now it has been “automated” — by a Dem Administration that has abandoned humanity and betrayed its campaign promises! Inexcusable!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-27-23

🇺🇸⚖️🗽 GROUPS LEADING RESISTANCE 🛡⚔️ TO BIDEN’S “MILLER LITE” ASSAULT ON ASYLUM SEEK COMMENTS OPPOSING LATEST ASYLUM-BASHING, SCOFFLAW PROPOSALS!

Here’s the link to the “comment website:”

https://immigrationjustice.quorum.us/campaign/44910/

“I’m gone, but my ‘evil spirit’ lives on in the West Wing! They have even ‘one-upped’’ me with a ‘family separation app’ called CBP One! Never has inflicting gratuitous cruelty been so easy!” Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com

The Biden proposal has picked up somewhat tepid endorsements from the likes of Trumpsters DHS official Chad Wolf and leading GOP insurrectionist Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Tells you all you really need to know about just how cruel and counterproductive these harebrained proposals are!

These are the folks that the Biden administration is pandering to while ignoring and disrespecting experts and asylum advocates who have centuries of collective experience working on asylum and the border. They also have plenty of good ideas for real asylum/human rights/border reforms that will combat cruelty and promote orderly compliance with the rule of law. The Biden Administration just isn’t interested in, or perhaps capable of, “doing the right thing.”

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

Here’s the text of my “custom revision” of the standard comment posted on the website:

I am a retired US DOJ attorney with more than 35 years of government experience, all of it in the immigration field, mostly in senior positions. I have been involved in immigration and human rights, in the public and private sectors, for five decades

My last 21 years were spent as an EOIR Judge: eight years as an Appellate Immigration Judge on the BIA (six of those years as BIA Chair), and 13 years as an Immigration Judge at the (now legacy) Arlington Immigration Court. I was involved in the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980 as well as developing implementing regulations and setting precedents thereunder.

I state unequivocally that these unnecessary proposed regulatory changes are a disavowal of more than four decades of U.S. (and international) asylum law as well as a shocking betrayal of the promise by the Biden Administration to stand up for the rights of legal asylum seekers and end the White Nationalist attempt by the Trump Administration to kill asylum without legislation.

The proposed rule is contrary to well-established United States law regarding the right to seek asylum in our country. There is absolutely no basis in law for the proposed “presumption of denial” for those who seek asylum outside a port of entry or who have transited other countries (as most have) without seeking asylum.

Indeed, the Administration’s approach is in direct contravention of the INA, which establishes rigorous criteria for designating “safe third countries” for asylum seekers. Only Canada has met those rigorous criteria to date, and even then only for a very limited class of applicants.

The idea that Mexico or other countries in Central America that asylum seekers customarily transit on the way to our southern border are “safe havens” for asylum seekers is patently absurd and counterfactual! Indeed, all legitimate experts would say that these are some of the most dangerous countries in the world — none with a fairly functioning asylum system.

Individuals are specifically entitled by the Refugee Act of 1980, as amended, to access our asylum system regardless of how they enter, as has been the law for decades. They should not be forced to seek asylum in transit to the United States, especially not in countries where they may also face harm. The ending of Title 42—itself an illegal policy—should not be used as an excuse to resurrect Trump-era categorical bans on groups of asylum seekers.

As you must be aware, those policies were designed by xenophobic, White Nationalist, restrictionists in the last Administration motivated by a desire to exclude and discriminate against particular ethnic and racial groups. That the Biden Administration would retain and even enhance some of them, while disingenuously claiming to be “saving asylum,” is beyond astounding.

The rule will also cause confusion at ports of entry and cause chaos and exacerbate backlogs in our immigration courts. Even worse, it will aggravate the already unacceptable situation by making it virtually impossible for most asylum seekers to consult with pro bono counsel before their cases are summarily rejected under these flawed regulations.

People who cannot access the CBP One app are at serious risk of being turned away by CBP, even if the rule says otherwise. Additionally, every observer has noted that the number of “available appointments” is woefully inadequate. In many cases, observers have noted that this leads to “automated family separation.” Rather than fixing these problems, these proposed regulations will make things infinitely worse.

Additionally, as was demonstrated by the previous Trump Transit Ban, the rule is likely to create confusion and additional backlogs at the immigration courts as individual judges attempt to apply a complicated, convoluted rule.

Under the law, the U.S. Government has a very straightforward obligation: To provide asylum seekers at the border and elsewhere, regardless of nationality, status, or manner of coming to the U.S., with a fair, timely, opportunity to apply for asylum and other legal protections before an impartial, expert, adjudicator.

The current system clearly does not do that. Indeed, EOIR suffers from an “anti-asylum,” often misogynist “culture,” lacks precedents recognizing recurring asylum situations at the border (particularly those relating to gender-based persecution), and tolerates judges at both levels who lack asylum expertise, are not committed to due process and fundamental fairness for all, and, far from being experts, often make mistakes in applying basic legal standards and properly evaluating evidence of record, as noted in a constant flow of “reversals and rebukes” from Circuit Courts.

We don’t need more mindless “deterrence” gimmicks. Rather, it’s past time for the Administration to reestablish a functioning asylum system.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever! The treachery of an Administration that abandons humane values, and fears bold humanitarian actions, never!

PWS

02-26-23

🗽DON’T “NORMALIZE” INHUMANITY & SCOFFLAW TREATMENT OF ASYLUM SEEKERS AT OUR BORDERS! — Heidi Altman, Policy Director, NIJC, Reflects On Administration’s “Miller Lite” Proposal To Deter Legal Asylum Seekers From Seeking Protection, Episode 34 Of The “Lawful Assembly Podcast,” With Rev. Craig Mousin of DePaul University!

Rev. Craig Mousin
Ombudsperson
Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Grace School of Applied Diplomacy
DePaul University
PHOTO: DePaul Website

LISTEN HERE:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1744949/12312323Lawful Assembly Podcast

Episode 34: Support Humanitarian Asylum Welcome

FEBRUARY 23, 2023 CRAIG B. MOUSIN SEASON 1 EPISODE 34

Lawful Assembly Podcast

Episode 34: Support Humanitarian Asylum Welcome

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LAWFUL ASSEMBLY PODCAST

Episode 34: Support Humanitarian Asylum Welcome

FEB 23, 2023 SEASON 1 EPISODE 34

Craig B. Mousin

In this interview, Rev. Craig B. Mousin, an Adjunct Faculty member of DePaul University’s College of Law, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Program, and the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy interviews Heidi Altman, the Policy Director of the National Immigrant Justice Center (www.immigrantjustice.org). Ms. Altman discusses a proposed rule that will effectively preclude most asylum-seekers from safely and effectively applying for asylum in the United States. She advocates for humanitarian asylum welcome. She previously served as the legal director for the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and was a Teaching Fellow in the immigration clinic at Georgetown University Law School.

ACTION STEPS

1. Invite friends and family to learn how the proposed rule will undermine refugee protection and encourage them to respond to their elected representatives and the Biden administration urging withdrawal of the proposed rule.

2. The Sanctuary Working Group of the Chicago Religious Leadership Network currently serves and advocates alongside newly arrived asylum seekers in the Chicagoland area. There are many impactful ways you can help asylum seekers, from providing sponsorship and temporary housing to covering legal fees and advocating for policy change. Interested individuals, faith communities, or organizations may contact CRLN staff/consultant David Fraccaro at davidfraccaro99@gmail.com to talk about ways to partner together in supporting and protecting our newest neighbors.

RESOURCES

“Solutions for a Humane Border Policy,” National Immigrant Justice Center, January 17, 2023: https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/solutions-humane-border-policy

“Proposed Ban on Asylum Violates US Law and Catholic Social Teaching,” Catholic Legal Immigration Network, February 22, 2023: https://www.cliniclegal.org/press-releases/proposed-ban-asylum-violates-us-law-and-catholic-social-teaching

“Biden Asylum Ban Will Endanger Refugees, Center for Gender and Refugee Rights, February 21, 2023: https://cgrs.uchastings.edu/news/biden-asylum-ban-will-endanger-refugees

The proposed rule is scheduled for publication on February 23, 2023: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-03718.pdf

Craig Mousin volunteers with the National Immigrant Justice Center. We welcome your inquiries or suggestions for future podcasts. If you would like to ask more questions about our podcasts or comment, email us at: mission.depaul@gmail.com

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

Thanks, Craig and Heidi for a very interesting and informative session!

Taylor Swift — T. Swift. Loss of chance to attend her latest concert due to Ticketmaster SNAFU caused immediate bipartisan Congressional outrage and hearings! Loss of chance to plead for life because of DHS CBP One App SNAFU, not so much! Dehumanization of our fellow humans degrades our society.
LOS ANGELES – Swift at 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards on March 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Glenn Francis/Pacific Pro Digital Photography) Creative Commons License.

Here are “my takeaways:”

Asylum seekers have a legal right, established by the Refugee Act of 1980 and international conventions, to seek asylum at our border or in the U.S., regardless of status and/or nationality;
The Trump and Biden Administrations have abrogated this right without legislation;
The Trump Administration’s anti-asylum actions and intentional dehumanization of asylum seekers was rooted in White Nationalist nativism;
Despite recognition during the 2020 campaign of the invidious motivation for Trump’s anti-asylum policies, the Biden Administration has retained, or even enhanced, the dehumanization and denial of rights to asylum seekers at the border;
Over the past two Administrations, acceptance of the basic rights and obligations of the U.S. toward asylum seekers, incorporated in the Refugee Act of 1980, has been eliminated or reduced to a superficial “shell” (“asylum in name only,” as some advocates have termed Biden’s latest proposed anti-asylum border policies);
By abandoning the framework set forth in the Refugee Act of 1980, the Trump and Biden Administrations have re-injected the ad hoc approach, disorder, nationality bias, and ideological preferences at the border that the Refugee Act of 1980 was specifically enacted to eliminate;
There is much under-appreciated support for welcoming, fairly treating, and helping refugees and asylum seekers among Americans in communities throughout our nation;
NGOs and experts have dozens of great ideas for restoring and improving the legal right to seek asylum in fair, humane, non-discriminatory ways which they have shared or are happy to share with the Biden Administration;
The Biden Administration to date has shown little if any interest in adopting and implementing better humanitarian solutions for asylum seekers at the border;
Both parties lack leaders with the integrity and courage to stand up for the legal and human rights of asylum seekers;
We must continue to discuss ways to break the cycle of dehumanization, cruelty, and scofflaw treatment of asylum seekers and replace it with enhanced humanitarian procedures and a welcoming culture, in accordance with the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.N. Convention and Protocol, and the very best traditions of our nation of immigrants.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-24-23

🗽”HUMANE BORDER POLICIES ARE POSSIBLE” — NIJC HAS 5 STRAIGHTFORWARD POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A HUMANE, ORDERLY BORDER! — The Biden Administration Appears Uninterested!🤯

Julia Toepfer
National Immigrant Justice Center (“NIJC”)

Humane border policies are possible. Here are five solutions.

The United States continues to struggle to create and implement humane border policies that respect domestic and international law and the dignity of people seeking protection. NIJC’s policy experts convened with other experts to suggest five solutions for a humane border policy. Read more about the solutions and see our graphics series.

AUTHOR NIJC Policy Team

The U.S. government and governments around the world are grappling with an increase in the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes by political and social oppression. Despite campaign commitments to restore humanity to immigration policy, the Biden administration has largely continued Trump-era policies at the U.S.-Mexico border. These policies blatantly undermine domestic and international asylum law; result in countless deaths; and create rather than mitigate chaos as people blocked from protection have little choice but to resort to multiple and more dangerous border crossing attempts.

What should the Biden administration be doing to address the humanitarian need at the border? There are other ways to address the situation at the border, leading with empathy and courage in compliance with the Refugee Act of 1980.

The administration can and should: 1) develop and support robust communication and planning between federal, state and local governments, and civil society, so that those arriving migrants in need of additional support can be matched with a destination with capacity to provide services; 2) fully fund and support civil society, including social and legal service providers; 3) create non-custodial, humanitarian reception centers at the border, instead of jailing migrants and asylum seekers; and 4) overhaul the federal immigration budget by moving funds away from detention and enforcement and toward asylum processing and humanitarian needs.

While taking these steps the administration must 5) abide by its obligation to ensure asylum access to those arriving at the United States’ borders and ports. The Refugee Convention, which Congress incorporated into U.S. law, was borne out of the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Genocide. It reminds us of a history we must not repeat, when the United States was among those countries that turned European Jewish refugees away, back to their deaths. Policies developed during the Trump administration, including the Title 42 mass expulsions policy and asylum bans that deny protection on the basis of a person’s manner of entry, stand in blatant violation of this obligation.

Processing large – even unprecedented – numbers of asylum seekers is possible. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was an outpouring of support and political will to welcome Ukrainians forced to flee. In only a five-month period following the invasion, the United States processed and received more than 100,000 Ukrainians. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has tremendous authority and resources at its fingertips; with political will and a reprioritization of funding, the United States absolutely has the means to become a leader in the response to the global refugee crisis and to provide dignity and respect to those arriving at the border in search of safe haven.

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

Get more details at the above link.

This is exactly the kind of practical, progressive thinking and planning that the Biden Administration should have been ready to “run with” upon taking office. They also needed a different leadership team with the skills, expertise, and guts to put policies like this in place and stick with them.

Instead they have been cowed by nativists and wobbly Dem “faux centerists” into an ill-defined and ineptly led program of “Miller Lite” deterrence lamely leavened with arbitrary stabs at amelioration untethered to a statutory framework! They also needed a much better legal team led by skilled, dedicated litigators with proven ability to defend humanitarian legal policies against predictable scurrilous, but determined, well-financed litigation by White Nationalist advocates designed to block progress and insure that equal justice for all would remain a slogan rather than a reality!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-03-23

🤯 BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ACCEPTANCE OF GOP’S NATIVIST MISCHARACTERIZATION OF REFUGEE CRISIS AS A FAUX “LAW ENFORCEMENT CRISIS” @ OUR SOUTHERN BORDER HAS DAMAGED HUMANITY & IMPAIRS DEMOCRACY — “The Biden administration fell into the trap of letting its opponents define the terms of the debate.”— Stuart Anderson @ Reason

Stuart Anderson
Executive Director
National Foundation for American Policy
PHOTO:LInkedin

https://reason.com/2023/01/26/a-historic-refugee-crisis-miscast-as-a-border-emergency/

Stuart writes:

. . . .

The Biden administration fell into the trap of letting its opponents define the terms of the debate. . . . .

Arranging care for asylum seekers would have been necessary even with a better metric. However, managing the humanitarian flow would have been easier if the Biden administration had allowed those seeking asylum to apply in an orderly, timed fashion at a lawful port of entry.. . . .

. . . .

Members of Congress and others who oppose the Biden administration’s parole program raised no objections to the Trump administration dismantling the U.S. refugee program. They also have not advocated for any other legal way for people escaping oppressive governments to enter America. Without paths to enter lawfully, it is inevitable that more people will cross into the U.S. illegally.

. . . .

Critics of the increase in CBP encounters argue, without much evidence, that individuals would not come to America if U.S. immigration policy were harsher—in other words, if Biden were more like Trump.

Despite what his supporters assert, Trump’s policies did not reduce illegal immigration or discourage people from applying for asylum. Pending asylum cases rose by nearly 300 percent between FY 2016 and FY 2020 (from 163,451 to 614,751), according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Apprehensions at the southwest border (a proxy for illegal entry) rose more than 100 percent between FY 2016 and FY 2019 (from 408,870 to 851,508). Apprehensions fell for several months at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but by August and September 2020, apprehensions returned to the approximate level of illegal entry for the same months in FY 2019.

Providing individuals with legal ways to work or seek protection in America is the only viable way to reduce illegal immigration. Treating people humanely is not a sign of weakness. Allowing for orderly entry is a smart policy consistent with America’s best tradition as a nation of immigrants and refugees.

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

I highly recommend reading Stuart’s complete article at the link. Members of the so-called “mainstream media,” whose stories often do not accurately reflect the legal right to apply for asylum at the border, which has been shamefully ignored and/or abridged by both Trump and Biden, would also do well to read Stuart’s accurate description of our needlessly screwed up administration of refugee and asylum laws. Most media articles also fail to accurately distinguish between those (often vainly) seeking just to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum at the border and other individuals who might irregularly cross the border.

The real, oft-ignored, problem here is that the Trump Administration dismantled the legal refugee programs established by the Refugee Act of 1980. Then, they unlawfully “repealed” asylum law at the border. Worse yet, Congress and bad GOP appointed Federal Judges let them get away with this outrageously illegal and highly counterproductive conduct (at least to date).

By the time the Biden Administration took office, the real “solvable” part of the problem at the Southern Border was well defined by experts: The US Government’s intentional violation of laws protecting refugees and legal asylum seekers and guaranteeing the latter fair and timely assessment and adjudication of their claims.

The Biden Administration could and should have “hit the ground running” with an aggressive program (and defense thereof) of restoration of the rule of law for refugees, who could and should have been processed in larger numbers outside the U.S. in Latin America and the Caribbean, combined with a restoration of the rule of law for asylum seekers at the, border, led by a reformed EOIR and USCIS Asylum Office, both staffed with true asylum experts!

Instead, the Biden Administration, after an “initial burst” of promising yet highly ineffective rhetoric (see, e.g., “reforms” of gender-based asylum), gave immigration, human rights, and the interconnected problem of racial justice, low priority. Instead of seeking and employing dynamic, progressive, problem-solving leaders, with new and creative ideas, they relied largely on “bureaucratic retreads” who showed little interest in or affinity for taking the bold, often courageous, actions necessary to address the festering humanitarian crisis at the border!

Too many of these individuals seemed to accept the false GOP nativist proposition that elimination or unduly restrictive applications of asylum law were the best way to “deter” unlawful entries, and that we didn’t want to “encourage” refugees from Latin America or the Caribbean by recognizing the legitimacy of their claims and/or running robust, realistically large “overseas” refugee programs for them.

Moving refugees and asylum seekers into an orderly, functioning, legal process at or away from the border would also allow CBP to focus resources on individuals who are not seeking legal refugee in the U.S. Because of the inaccurate and misleading statistics used to “count” border activity, as accurately described by Stuart in his full article, we actually have little idea how large a “cohort” of individual border arrivals legal asylum seekers represent.

“Mixing apples and oranges” certainly plays directly into the hands of GOP restrictionist/nativists who love to lump them all together under the dehumanizing and intentionally demeaning “false rubric” of “illegals.” There is nothing “illegal” about appearing at the U.S. border and asking for refuge under our domestic laws and international conventions to which we are party!

What is “illegal” is our Government suspending legal processing for asylum, and also, even for those chosen under largely arbitrary criteria for processing, delivering a badly flawed biased process that is neither fair nor timely. Also, mixing those merely seeking a chance to state their legal case for asylum with those seeking entry for other purposes certainly “dilutes” the enforcement resources and effectiveness of CBP in preventing “real” unlawful entries.

Instead, the Biden Administration settled into an inept “Miller Lite” posture of utilizing modified and supposedly “humanized” versions of Trump’s illegal policies. As pointed out by Stuart, the Biden Administration also failed miserably to anticipate and establish a Federally-led and funded program for humane resettlement of asylum seekers.

This played right into the hands of White Nationalist GOP pols like Abbott, DeSantis, Ducey, Paxton, Cruz, Cassidy, Vance, Biggs, McCarthy, Jordan, et.al. At the same time, in one of the dumbest moves in recent political history, they left Democratic leaders in locations victimized by the GOP “bussing stunts” in the lurch and without support, thereby driving an entirely unnecessary “wedge” and “stress point” into the “Democratic coalition.”

There might be no “easy and perfect” solution for managing refugee situations. Refugees and other types of “forced migrants’ have been with us since the beginning of human history. They will continue to exist long after the current crop of nativist politicos and “deterrence-only-focused” bureaucrats are gone.

Yet, with all this historical knowledge, the so-called “Western Democracies” failed miserably in protecting refugees from Hitler’s planned genocide in the years leading up to and including WWII. The 1951 UN Convention and later Protocol were supposedly “never again” responses to that deadly failure.

Yet, today, politicians and leaders who should know better seem determined to ignore the lessons of history and recreate the moral and humanitarian failures of the past. One can only hope that the NDPA and the “new generations” can get by the failures of today and treat refugees fairly, humanely, and in recognition of the substantial benefits that most bring to those nations fortunate enough to be “receiving” countries. The future of our world may depend on it!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-31-23

🤯⚠️ REV. CRAIG MOUSIN: NEW YEAR, SAME PROBLEMS, AS BIDEN’S REFUSAL TO FOLLOW REFUGEE & ASYLUM LAWS SOWS CHAOS, TRAUMA — (I’m cited)

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Lawful Assembly Podcast

Episode 33: New Year, Same Problems

JANUARY 13, 2023 CRAIG B. MOUSIN SEASON 1 EPISODE 33

Lawful Assembly Podcast

Episode 33: New Year, Same Problems

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https://lawfulassembly.buzzsprout.com/1744949/12039357-episode-33-new-year-same-problems

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LAWFUL ASSEMBLY PODCAST

Episode 33: New Year, Same Problems

JAN 13, 2023 SEASON 1 EPISODE 33

Craig B. Mousin

Show Notes

This is an interview with Rev. Craig B. Mousin, an Adjunct Faculty member of DePaul University’s College of Law, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Program, and the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy. The podcast critiques Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’ recent NPR interview for what the interview omits in explaining 2023 asylum policies.

ACTION STEP

Imagine you are an asylum-seeker who has left your homeland. Listen to the interview with Secretary Mayorkas and consider its impact as you. Then write to the White House and Secretary Mayorkas and urge the Biden administration to follow the procedures and procedural protections of the Refugee Act of 1980: https://www.npr.org/people/4080709/steve-inskeep

RESOURCES

Dr. Shailja Sharma: “The Border ‘Crisis’ Is a Crisis We Can Solve,” January 9, 2023: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-border-asylum-seekers-resources-title-42-20230109-g3aoghdnn5avxavszsfcln7viu-story.html

Paul Schmidt quotes several experts on the new policy and adds his critique: (January 6, 2023): https://immigrationcourtside.com/2023/01/06/%f0%9f%a4%af%f0%9f%91%8e%f0%9f%8f%bc-experts-condemnation-of-bidens-latest-anti-asylum-border-gimmicks-swift-brutal-true/

Law professor Karen Musalo: “Enough with the Political Games. Migrants Have a Right to Asylum,” January 6, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-06/biden-border-immigration-asylum-title-42

The National Immigrant Justice Center’s FAQs on these policies: https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/recycling-trumps-asylum-bans-expanding-title-42-how-bidens-new-policies-threaten

For information on U.S. policies undermining democracy, see, Mousin, “You Were Told to Love the Immigrant,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2784951, text between fns. 161-166.

For documentation on the violence caused by soldiers trained at the School of the Americas Watch, now WHINSEC: www.soaw.org

The statistics on the violence at the border: US/Mexico: Expelling Venezuelans Threatens Rights, Lives Restore Access to Asylum at the Border, (October 21, 2022) as cited in https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/10/human-rights-watch-usmexico-expelling-venezuelans-threatens-rights-lives-restore-access-to-asylum-at.html

We welcome your inquiries or suggestions for future podcasts. If you would like to ask more questions about our podcasts or comment, email us at: mission.depaul@gmail.com

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SHOW NOTES

Show Notes

This is an interview with Rev. Craig B. Mousin, an Adjunct Faculty member of DePaul University’s College of Law, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Program, and the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy. The podcast critiques Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’ recent NPR interview for what the interview omits in explaining 2023 asylum policies.

ACTION STEP

Imagine you are an asylum-seeker who has left your homeland. Listen to the interview with Secretary Mayorkas and consider its impact as you. Then write to the White House and Secretary Mayorkas and urge the Biden administration to follow the procedures and procedural protections of the Refugee Act of 1980: https://www.npr.org/people/4080709/steve-inskeep

RESOURCES

Dr. Shailja Sharma: “The Border ‘Crisis’ Is a Crisis We Can Solve,” January 9, 2023: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-border-asylum-seekers-resources-title-42-20230109-g3aoghdnn5avxavszsfcln7viu-story.html

Paul Schmidt quotes several experts on the new policy and adds his critique: (January 6, 2023): https://immigrationcourtside.com/2023/01/06/%f0%9f%a4%af%f0%9f%91%8e%f0%9f%8f%bc-experts-condemnation-of-bidens-latest-anti-asylum-border-gimmicks-swift-brutal-true/

Law professor Karen Musalo: “Enough with the Political Games. Migrants Have a Right to Asylum,” January 6, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-06/biden-border-immigration-asylum-title-42

The National Immigrant Justice Center’s FAQs on these policies: https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/recycling-trumps-asylum-bans-expanding-title-42-how-bidens-new-policies-threaten

For information on U.S. policies undermining democracy, see, Mousin, “You Were Told to Love the Immigrant,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2784951, text between fns. 161-166.

For documentation on the violence caused by soldiers trained at the School of the Americas Watch, now WHINSEC: www.soaw.org

The statistics on the violence at the border: US/Mexico: Expelling Venezuelans Threatens Rights, Lives Restore Access to Asylum at the Border, (October 21, 2022) as cited in https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/10/human-rights-watch-usmexico-expelling-venezuelans-threatens-rights-lives-restore-access-to-asylum-at.html

We welcome your inquiries or suggestions for future podcasts. If you would like to ask more questions about our podcasts or comment, email us at: mission.depaul@gmail.com

All content © 2023 Lawful Assembly Podcast.

Republished by permission

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

Thanks for speaking out, Craig! Mayorkas’s interview was a shocking mix of intellectual dishonesty, insincerity, and misdirection worthy of a Trump Administration official. And, as Craig points out several times, the interviewer didn’t ask the right questions either.

Let’s understand what the Biden Administration’s arbitrary, ad hoc “parole program” that has been substituted for the Refugee Act of 1980 (“the law”), as amended, really does: 1) favors those who don’t necessarily meet the “refugee” definition (even if properly interpreted), but who have individual sponsors, over refugees; or 2) forces those who do meet the refugee definition into an inferior “parole status” that denies them the statutory path to a green card and eventual citizenship and other benefits that legal “refugee” or “asylum” status entails, or 3) a combination of 1) and 2).

Sound like a good idea? Of course not! It’s a prescription for a legal, humanitarian, and moral disaster!

Getting the USG to follow the law shouldn’t be this difficult. But, it is, because of the refusal of the Biden Administration to heed the advice of experts who not only know the law, but understand the border and the corrosive effect and real human consequences of unlawfully abandoning the statutory framework established by the Refugee Act of 1980.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-18-23

🇺🇸🗽⚖️ JOIN AFSC IN OPPOSING THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S EMBRACE OF TITLE 42 & THE DAILY VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS THE ADMINISTRATION COMMITS 🏴‍☠️ USING THIS UNLAWFUL & IMMORAL CHARADE!

https://www.afsc.org/action/tell-president-biden-restore-right-to-claim-asylum

Tell President Biden: Restore the right to asylum!

Sign our petition today

American Friends Service Committee

1.89K subscribers

End Title 42!

<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpQH–gTPoA” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>

Migrants should be welcomed with dignity and compassion—not turned away or treated inhumanely.

Finally, after over two years, a district court has ruled that the Title 42 expulsion policy- which has blocked most migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum- violates U.S. law and ordered the Biden administration to end it.

This anti-immigrant policy has led to hundreds of thousands of people deported back to dangerous conditions or stranded in makeshift camps. Other migrants have been forced to take dangerous routes through deserts, mountains, rivers, and the ocean—facing extreme heat, violence, even death.

The termination of the policy goes into effect at the end of December, unless the administration attempts to delay this. That is why we are calling on the Biden administration to end this policy IMMEDIATELY and to not accompany this with the expansion of detention.

Sign our petition to speak out against this cruel policy today!

Letter to President

Dear President Biden:

I believe that people fleeing dangerous situations in their home countries should be welcome to the United States with compassion—not dealt overwhelming obstacles to seeking asylum.

That is why I am relieved to hear that after over two years, a district court has ended the cruel and unnecessary use of Title 42. This anti-immigrant policy has led to hundreds of thousands of people deported back to dangerous conditions or stranded in makeshift camps. Under this cruel policy, Black and Brown migrants have suffered disproportionately while some others have been able to seek asylum—evidence of the racism that drives our immigration enforcement policies.

That is why I am calling on the Biden administration to end Title 42 immediately and to not replace it with other inhumane and xenophobic policies that cause similar harm. Additionally, your administration must not accompany this with the expansion of immigration detention. Any efforts to uphold this policy actively supports more family separations, trauma, and violence against Black, Brown, and immigrant communities.

All people—regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, their culture or religious affiliation—should be able to seek refuge and be welcomed with the compassion, dignity, and respect we all deserve. I urge your administration to do all that you can to end Title 42 immediately—and ensure all migrants can exercise their right to seek asylum.

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”BIDEN DOJ HALL OF SHAME” — Those Who Have Defended or Enabled Stephen Miller’s “Crimes Against Humanity:”

Merrick Garland, Attorney General
Lisa Monaco, Deputy Attorney General
Vanita Gupta, Associate Attorney General
Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights
Elizabeth Prolager, Solicitor General

When these guys eventually “come out” of their cushy political positions, and are looking for jobs in the “real world” they now blithely ignore, progressives, human rights, and racial justice advocates should remember where they stood and what they did or failed to do when human rights and the rule of law were “on the line!”

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-10-22

🗽DISSENTING OPINION: TRADING AWAY REFUGEE RIGHTS & DUE PROCESS FOR LONG OVERDUE DREAMER PROTECTIONS IS “NOT OK!”

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Dec. 6, 2022

I dissent.

I was outraged when I read in this morning’s Washington Post about the horrible “Sinema/Tillis misnamed immigration compromise” (actually a “sellout”) being negotiated during the lame duck session of Congress. In short, that proposal apparently would trade long overdue protection for “Dreamers” for the rights and lives of refugees and asylum seekers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/congress-working-strike-last-minute-immigration-deals/

Incredibly, in the face of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s findings that the intentional illegal use of Title 42 had resulted in countless clear violations of the legal rights of asylum seekers, subjecting them to a litany of horrors and abuses that he described as “dire harm,” these legislators would extend those abuses for an indefinite period! That’s notwithstanding evidence not only of the irreparable harm that Title 42 has caused, but also the rather obvious fact that once we “normalize” those abuses, they will never end.

There will always be another fabricated reason for extending the Title 42 charade. Indeed, once we start mischaracterizing abuse as “law,” we can’t even call it “abuse” and hold the abusers accountable! That’s all part of the dehumanizing or “Dred Scottification” process!

Additionally, in the place of a functioning working asylum and refugee system, the proposal would eventually substitute so called “processing centers” and “expedited procedures” to railroad asylum seekers out of the country without due process. And, it wouldn’t address the total dysfunction and denial of due process in our Immigration “Courts” by enacting another long overdue provision: the “Lofgren Article I Immigration court bill!” What a farce!

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here! The legal and human rights of refugees and asylum seekers are not “ours” to trade away for relief for another deserving group that has long been irrationally denied! “Processing centers” are a euphemism for “immigration prisons” — part of the “New American Gulag.” “Expedited processing” is a euphemism for “railroading.” Both detention and artificially expediting dockets have been proven to be ineffective and unjust, over and over. Yet, here we go again!

My outrage turned to shock and dismay when I learned that some erstwhile defenders of due process, human rights, and racial justice for asylum seekers (incredibly) thought that this type of immoral compromise was a “good idea!” Not me!

Restrictionist/nativist Dems masquerading as “moderates” are a huge problem. They play right into the GOP’s hands.

When committing crimes against humanity or giving away refugees’ rights becomes a “strategy,” “option,” or “bargaining chip,” we’re lost as a nation. And, that’s exactly where we’re heading with horrible, immoral proposals like this.

Human rights and due process are non-negotiable! And, I guarantee that extending Title 42, building additional Gulag (rather than making the existing legal asylum and refugee systems work), and railroading asylum seekers will empower smugglers and lead to further growth of our underground population.

Human migration won’t be stopped by ineffective and immoral “deterrence.” And, although many hate the idea, refugees basically “self-select” and are driven by forces beyond our immediate control.

Refugees are, by definition, folks who can’t return! So, there is no reason to believe that true refugees (of which there are many) are going to be “deterred.” They might be “incentivized” to seek refuge in particular, relatively safe, places; but, nobody seems interested in a “carrot” approach — even though the “stick approach” has failed and continues to do so!

Look at the folks who continue to die in vessels in the Mediterranean even though they are fully aware that they are unwanted and that the EU will stop at no cruelty to keep them out.

And, examine the wealth of documentation that folks forced to “remain in Mexico” — and apply under what we know to be a corrupt and inadequate system — are systematically abused and exploited.

This time, we’re not just “pushing the St. Louis out to sea.” We’re torpedoing her and watching the passengers drown. And Dems are a huge part of the problem!

Other (soon to be former) progressive Democrats might choose to “go along to get along” with heaping additional abuses on largely defenseless refugees and asylum seekers. But, not me! I dissent!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-06-22

🗽PRANTL & YALE-LOEHR @ NY DAILY NEWS: Private Refugee Sponsorship — An Idea Whose Time Has Come! — But, The Biden Administration Has Turned Its Back On The Legal & Human Rights Refugees!🏴‍☠️

Dr. Janine Prantl
Immigration Postdoctoral Associate
Cornell Law
PHOTO: Cornell Law

Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr
Cornell Law

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-let-private-citizens-sponsor-refugees-20221015-dtepnanthfegnpf6anjirwt3by-story.html

Let private citizens sponsor refugees

By Janine Prantl and Stephen Yale-Loehr

New York Daily News

Oct 15, 2022

Every fall, the U.S. president sets a refugee ceiling — the maximum number of refugees that may be resettled annually to the United States. For the new fiscal year that started Oct. 1, President Biden plans to resettle up to 125,000 refugees. Because of dramatic cuts to the refugee program during the prior administration, that goal will be hard to meet. A year ago, Biden set the same target, but more than 100,000 refugee slots went unused.

Historically, only the U.S. government, working with international refugee agencies and nonprofits, has determined which refugees will be admitted to the United States. That’s a mistake. To meet its goal of admitting 125,000 refugees this fiscal year, the United States should also promptly allow private sponsorships of refugees.

In February 2021, Biden issued an executive order to rebuild our refugee program, including through private refugee sponsorships. Subsequently, the State Department announced plans to start a pilot program, but the launch has been delayed. Over a year after the first announcement, and close to the end of 2022, the State Department has not decided on the funding of prospective partners or issued guidelines on the pilot. The clock is ticking.

Several countries, including Canada, Australia, Argentina, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Spain, already allow private sponsorships of refugees. Under private sponsorships, individuals and community groups collaborate to provide financial, emotional, and practical support for refugees. Some countries also empower sponsors to nominate specific refugees to enter and stay in their country.

Canada’s experience shows that private sponsorships can work. A 2020 study confirmed that privately-sponsored refugees are more likely than government-sponsored refugees to be working within the first year after entering Canada, with an employment rate at 90% for men and 71% for women. Findings from Canada also suggest that privately-sponsored refugees are more likely to stay at their initial destinations and private sponsorships could contribute to geographic dispersal of resettled refugees.

Americans are already engaged in private sponsorships for Afghans and Ukrainians through the Sponsor Circles initiative. This initiative supports Americans who decide to become sponsors by assisting them in the application process, offering temporary housing credits through Airbnb.org, as well as ongoing expert guidance and other sponsor tools and resources. More than 123,000 Americans have applied to financially sponsor Ukrainians, and over 87,000 Ukrainians have been granted permission to travel to the United States. The number of arrivals will likely exceed 100,000 by the end of 2022.

While technically most Ukrainians and Afghans have not entered the United States as refugees, lessons learned from the Sponsor Circles initiative could help establish a formal private refugee sponsorship model. Because most Ukrainians enter the United States under parole power, they can be authorized for travel in as little as two weeks. However, prospective sponsors have recently reported longer processing times.

To transform private sponsorships from an emergency one-time program to a formalized program where beneficiaries enter as refugees, with access to long-term residence and citizenship, the backlog issue becomes even more concerning. Current tests of 30-day streamlined visa processing for Afghans in Doha could be expanded and serve as a role model for both parolees and refugees. Moreover, to mobilize private refugee sponsors and enable them to prepare, the U.S. government needs to move forward quickly and specify a program design for private refugee sponsors, including financial requirements, sponsorship time commitments, and concrete sponsor responsibilities.

Once a private refugee sponsorship program gets launched, sponsors will have to accomplish challenging tasks. They will have to deal with language barriers, find affordable housing and help new refugees apply for public benefits. For such a process to work, it is important to set up communication streams between private refugee sponsors and existing refugee resettlement agencies.

Public-private partnerships work in other areas. For example, they have become an increasingly popular way to upgrade infrastructure and address the challenges of climate change. By incorporating a private refugee sponsorship model, the U.S. government can supplement its own efforts to admit 125,000 refugees this fiscal year.

More importantly, private refugee sponsorships would allow Americans to participate directly in welcoming refugees and facilitating their successful integration. Experience in the United Kingdom shows that private sponsorship can be a powerful tool in expanding communities’ understanding and capacity for welcoming newcomers. It can reduce fears about others more generally, change working practices to make them more inclusive for diverse populations, and bring new perspectives into relatively homogeneous communities. Involving U.S. citizens in the immigration process could thus be a way to dampen the current heated debate about immigration and allow Americans to see the mutual benefits of immigration.

Janine Prantl is an immigration postdoctoral associate in the Cornell Law School Immigration Law and Policy Research Program. Stephen Yale-Loehr is professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School.

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

Lots of creative ideas out here on how to improve our broken refugee and asylum systems! But, from those in charge of migration policy in the Biden Administration, not so much!😢

No, they are stuck in reverse. A small-time “overseas” refugee program for Venezuelans (24k “slots” for a refugee crisis that has generated more than 6 million refugees)🤯; a heavy dose of cruel and discredited “Stephen Miller Lite” Title 42 for those who exercise their legal right to apply for asylum at or near the border 🤮; more “due process free” illegal returns to abusive conditions in Mexico☠️.

Perhaps inadvertently, a recent NBC Nightly News report on the border mentioned a widely ignored fact. It pictured and described desperate Venezuelans patiently waiting in line to turn themselves in to CPB to exercise their legal rights to apply for asylum and other protections in the U.S. That’s right — “turn themselves in!”

This is NOT real law enforcement, nor does it present a security crisis! Nor are the oft repeated “record numbers” of border “apprehensions” legitimate!

Since individuals are often returned to Mexico with neither proper processing nor due process, many of these “apprehensions” are inflated — representing repeated “apprehensions” of the same individual merely seeking to apply for asylum — a legal right denied to them by both the Trump and Biden Administrations!

One might also ask whether an individual turning him or herself in and requesting legal asylum is “apprehended” at all? That’s why CBP has started using the more ambiguous term “encounter” to disguise what’s really happening at the border.

Under the Biden Administration’s latest discriminatory and brain dead application of Title 42, those Venezuelans who voluntarily turn themselves in at ports of entry or near the border will be illegally returned to Mexico to rot — as a “reward” for attempting to follow the law. Does this make sense? Of course not. And the consequences of this horrible “policy” are dire for both the refugees and our nation. In many ways, the Biden Administration inexplicably has gone even beyond the cruel stunts of DeSantis and Abbott in making “political footballs” 🏈out of vulnerable Venezuelan refugees! It’s an ongoing national disgrace, masquerading as “policy!”

The only avenue for legal refugee for these Venezuelans fleeing a repressive left-wing dictatorship is to hire a smuggler to get them past the border where they can lose themselves in the interior of the U.S. That is, under the Biden policy, “do it yourself, black market refuge” substitutes for a variable legal system and adds to the unscreened and often unknown underground population of undocumented migrants. in the U.S.

A robust, realistic refugee program for Venezuela, operating both in Mexico and in or near Venezuela, might well reduce the incentives for extralegal migration. It could also take some pressure off of other “receiving” countries in the Hemisphere. But, the “token” — unduly limited — program proposed by the Biden Administration will do nothing of the sort!

Extralegal entries and underground populations are not good. Robust, realistic, timely, refugee and asylum programs — properly focused on using existing laws for protection, not rejection — would reduce the incentive for extralegal migration while reaping the many potential benefits and strengths that refugees and asylees “bring to the table.”

Such a beneficial program is achievable — under current law. But, not without a radical shakeup in both the leadership and substance of the Biden Administration’s so-called human rights bureaucracy!

Casey Stengel

“Can’t anybody here play this game,” wonders Casey Stengel about the cruel, clueless crew in charge of human rights and immigration (non)policy in the Biden-Harris Administration.
PHOTO: Rudi Reit
Creative Commons

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-17-22

THE GIBSON REPORT — 09-12-22 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Managing Attorney. NIJC — How Bogus Are CBP “Apprehension Stats?”

Weekly Briefing

This briefing is designed as a quick-reference aggregation of developments in immigration law, practice, and policy that you can scan for anything you missed over the last week. The contents of the news, links, and events do not necessarily reflect the position of the National Immigrant Justice Center. If you have items that you would like considered for inclusion, please email them to egibson@heartlandalliance.org.

CONTENTS (jump to section)

◦NEWS

◦LITIGATION & AGENCY UPDATES

◦RESOURCES

◦EVENTS

PRACTICE UPDATES

USCIS Releases Revised Editions of Forms I-589 and I-765

USCIS: USCIS released the revised editions of Form I-589 and Form I-765 in compliance with the Asylumworks decision. Effective Nov. 7, 2022, USCIS will only accept the 07/26/22 editions of the Form I-589 and Form I-765. Until then, you can submit either the new editions, or the previous editions of Form I-589 (dated 08/25/20) and Form I-765 (dated 05/31/22 and 08/25/20).

NEWS

Texas Says 10,000 Migrants Have Been Bused to Democratic Cities

Bloomberg: Abbott said Friday that the state has bused more than 7,900 people to Washington in the past five months, sent 2,200 to New York and 300 to Chicago. See also Inside Migrants’ Journeys on Greg Abbott’s Free Buses to Washington; Attack on asylum seeker in New York sparks outrage over conditions. (If you’re curious how conservative media is playing this: Chicago mayor accused of ‘hypocrisy’ for sending migrants to GOP suburb.)

Most Border Patrol Apprehensions are for Repeat Crossers, But Agency Data Doesn’t Yet Provide the Full Picture

TRAC: Using detailed government records, TRAC found that the percent of Border Patrol (BP) apprehensions that comprise repeat border crossers did not significantly increase when, under Title 42 , illegal border crossers were not penalized or sanctioned before they were expelled. This finding, based on data obtained from the Border Patrol by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, is contrary to agency contentions and arguments by policy analysts that immediate expulsions without applying meaningful sanctions such as criminal prosecution to repeat crossers encourages illegal reentry attempts.

Republicans and Democrats have different top priorities for U.S. immigration policy

Pew: Republicans place particular importance on border security and deportations of immigrants who are in the country illegally, while Democrats place greater importance on paths to legal status for those who entered the country illegally – especially those who entered as children, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

DHS unwinds Trump-era ‘public charge’ rule for immigrants

Politico: The new law unravels the Trump-era public-charge rule, under which immigrants could be denied permanent resident status if they had received or were expected to receive food assistance, Medicaid, housing assistance, or other public benefits. The Biden administration in stopped enforcing that regulation in March 2021.

ICE violated federal law by holding migrant teens in adult custody

Sentinel: Following a ruling that transferring migrant kids to adult detention centers just as they turned age 18 was illegal, a federal judge approved a settlement in a 2018 lawsuit this week.

‘Scary and chilling’: AI surveillance takes U.S. prisons by storm

Reuters: Beginning in 2019, Suffolk County was an early pilot site for the Verus AI-scanning system sold by California-based LEO Technologies, which uses Amazon speech-to-text technology to transcribe phone calls flagged by key word searches… Suffolk County is among dozens of county jails and state prisons in seven U.S. states including major metro areas such as Houston, Texas, and Birmingham, Alabama, that LEO says have so far implemented the Verus system to monitor inmates’ calls.

Deported veterans who returned to US face uncertain futures

RollCall: A Biden administration initiative brought them back to America under a temporary immigration status that expires after a year.

USCIS Has Used Nearly All Available Employment-Based Immigrant Visas for FY2022

JDSupra: This is a significant accomplishment for the agency because it approved approximately twice the annual allocation of employment-based immigrant visas in fiscal year 2022 (FY22).

LITIGATION & AGENCY UPDATES

3rd Circ. Tosses Salvadoran Man’s Deportation Review Bid

Law360: A Salvadoran man convicted of marijuana possession cannot overcome removal requirements of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act through a waiver found in a 1952 immigration law, the Third Circuit ruled Friday, denying his petition for review of a deportation order.

5th Circ. Says Guatemalan’s Stepkids Can’t Stop Deportation

Law360: The Fifth Circuit on Friday rejected a Guatemalan man’s bid to cancel his deportation on the basis that it would cause his stepchildren extreme hardship, saying he didn’t provide evidence strong enough to prove they were U.S. citizens.

9th Circ. Says High Court Ruling Limits Detainee Bond

Law360: The Ninth Circuit ruled Thursday that immigrants challenging deportation orders from mandatory detention aren’t entitled to bond hearings while the federal courts review the orders, citing a recent high court ruling at odds with a prior circuit decision allowing bond.

Final Settlement Approved In Lawsuit On Unlawful Detention Of Unaccompanied Youth

NIJC: A federal court approved a settlement agreement on September 7 in a lawsuit challenging the unlawful detention of unaccompanied children who turn 18 in U.S. government custody and are transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.

Immigration Judges Say the FLRA Made Up Rules to Decertify Union

GovExec: In its appeal in federal circuit court, the National Association of Immigration Judges accused the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s then-Republican majority of already deciding to decertify the union before considering arguments in the case.

Final Rule: Public Charge Ground of Inadmissibility

DHS: The rule restores the historical understanding of a ‘public charge’ that had been in place for decades, until the prior Administration began to consider supplemental public health benefits such as Medicaid and nutritional assistance as part of the public charge inadmissibility determination.

DHS Notice of Extension of Venezuela for TPS

AILA: DHS notice extending the designation of Venezuela for TPS for 18 months, from 9/10/22 through 3/10/24. The 60-day re-registration period for existing TPS beneficiaries runs from 9/8/22 through 11/7/22. (87 FR 55024, 9/8/22)

EOIR Memo: Credible Fear and Asylum Procedures

EOIR: This memorandum summarizes certain key provisions of the interim final rule and provides guidance on the new streamlined removal proceedings.

EOIR to Relocate Arlington Immigration Court, EOIR to Open Sterling Immigration Court

EOIR: The Arlington Immigration Court will end normal operations at noon on October 6, 2022, to prepare for the court’s relocation to Annandale.

RESOURCES

AILA: Practice Alert: Biden Administration’s Asylum Processing Rule Is Now in Effect in the Courts and Asylum Offices of Seven Destination Cities

AILA: Practice Alert: Filing Form G-1593 to Appear Remotely at Asylum or NACARA Interviews

AILA: Asylum and Credible Fear Interim Final Rule

AILA: Find Resources for Assisting Afghan Clients

CLINIC: Federal Register Notice for 18-Month Extension of TPS Designation for Venezuela Published

CRS: An Overview of the Statutory Bars to Asylum: Limitations on Applying for Asylum (Part One)

CRS: An Overview of the Statutory Bars to Asylum: Limitations on Applying for Asylum (Part Two)

DHS OIG: DHS Encountered Obstacles to Screen, Vet, and Inspect All Evacuees during the Recent Afghanistan Crisis (REDACTED)

DHS OIG: USCIS Should Improve Controls to Restrict Unauthorized Access to Its Systems and Information

ILRC: The ICE Parental Interests Directive: How Child Welfare Agencies Can Advocate with ICE to Ensure Fair Treatment of Detained or Deported Parents

JFL: Advisory on new prison phone surveillance tech

NIJC: A Brief Guide to Representing Noncitizen Criminal Defendants in Illinois (with Quick Reference Chart for Determining Immigration Consequences of Common Illinois Offenses).

NLG: Biden’s Asylum Processing Rule: Three Months in, What Practitioners Need to Know

NLG: Explainer: Biden Administration on Policing Two Years In

USCIS: USCIS Stopped Applying June 2020 Rules Pursuant to Court Order in Asylumworks v. Mayorkas (Updated: 09/07/2022)

EVENTS

9/13/22 PLI: Representing Children in Immigration Matters 2022: Effective Advocacy and Best Practices

9/14/22 Representing U Visa Clients with Complex Issue

9/14/22 Partial to Full Accreditation Initiative 2022

9/15/22 Monthly NIPNLG Removal Defense Webinar: Credibility and Impeachment

9/15/22 Advanced Mandamus Trends

9/20/22 19th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference

9/20/22 Nonprofit and For-Profit Entity Intersection 2022: Achieving Charitable Goals Through Innovative and Nontraditional Mechanisms

9/21/22 Breaking Down the Record in a Ninth Circuit Petition for Review

9/21/22-9/22/22 Refresher and Practice Tips: Legal Remedies for Immigrant Survivors

9/22/22 Maximizing Second Chances: Filing Appeals, Motions, and Practicing before the BIA

9/22/22 USCIS: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Final Rule National Stakeholder Engagement

9/23/22 Politics and Purpose Movement Lawyering Workshop

9/28/22 AILA: Microsoft Word Tricks That Will Change Your Life

9/29/22 Consular Processing Roundup for Families and Survivors

10/1/22-10/8/22 Spanish for Lawyers in Allende, Mexico

10/4/22 & 10/11/22 CLINIC: Webinar Series: U Visa Certification Advocacy: Creating Policies and Laws to Protect Immigrant Victims of Crime

10/6/22 2022 Fall Immigration Skills Conference

10/6/22-10/19/22 CLINIC: Immigration Practice Skills Course

10/7/22-10/28/22 Understanding and Preparing Waivers

10/12/22 Prosecutorial Discretion Updates

10/12/22-10/13/22 NLG: Immigration Defense Strategies

10/18/22 VAWA Updates – USCIS Policy Changes and Practice Tips

10/19/22 CLINIC: Outreach Strategies and Social Media to Connect With and Serve Immigrants

10/19/22 U Visa: I-929 Process & Issues

10/20/22 Understanding Unlawful Presence and I-601/I-601A

10/27/22 2022 Convening On Advancing Universal Representation

10/29/22 4th Annual 5k for Immigrant Justice (includes remote option)

11/2/22 TPS Updates

11/3/22 Drugs and Naturalization

11/8/22 SIJS-based Adjustment of Status with Delinquency or Crimes

11/16/22 Introduction to Conditional Permanent Residence and Filing the I-751

11/17/22 NLG: Updates on Terrorism-Related Inadmissibility Grounds (TRIG) with guest speaker, Jay Gairson

11/29/22 Building an Asylum Claim

12/6/22 Emerging Strategies for Prolonged Detention

12/7/22 Parole in Immigration

12/13/22 The Effects of Absences on Naturalization

12/14/22 Hot Topics in Asylum Law

12/15/22 NLG: Obtaining Criminal Records with guest speaker, Gabriela Kahrl

01/19/22 NLG: Top Ethical Issues Facing Legal Representatives in Removal Hearings with guest speaker, Retired Immigration Judge Dana Marks

To sign up for additional NIJC newsletters, visit: https://immigrantjustice.org/subscribe.

You now can change your email settings or search the archives using the Google Group. If you are receiving this briefing from a third party, you can visit the Google Group and request to be added.

Elizabeth Gibson (Pronouns: she/her/ella)

Managing Attorney for Capacity Building and Mentorship

National Immigrant Justice Center

A HEARTLAND ALLIANCE Program

224 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 600, Chicago, IL 60604
T: (312) 660-1688| F: (312) 660-1688| E: egibson@heartlandalliance.org

www.immigrantjustice.org | Facebook | Twitter

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

Sure looks like CBP is “apprehending” the same individuals multiple times. Also, many of these so-called “apprehensions” want to be “caught” because it’s the only possible way of getting the chance to apply for asylum that our law guarantees, but fails to provide in practice. That’s because ports of entry are still “closed” under bogus Title 42 restrictions. So, the overhyped “border apprehensions” appear, to a significant extent, to be “smoke and mirrors.”

It’s really not surprising that “sanctions” apparently don’t deter unlawful entries. That’s because 1) the vast majority of unlawful entrants aren’t “criminals” in any normal sense of the word except in the mind of White Nationalist xenophobes, 2) many are just trying to get the Government to follow the law and let them apply for asylum, or other legal protections, and 3) even those without credible claims for protection are, for the most part, at worst, just coming here to work at jobs that U.S. workers don’t want.

Jeff Session’s racist “zero tolerance program” of useless border prosecutions violated the Constitution by intentionally separating families, cost the Government millions, ruined lives, squandered prosecutorial resources that should have been spent on real crime, and accomplished absolutely nothing positive. Yet, Sessions, his neo-Nazi henchman Stephen Miller, and the government sycophants (including unethical DOJ lawyers) who carried out this travesty remain free and will never be held accountable.

Somehow, GOP nativists have gotten away with turning the self-created border “crisis” upside down. If we cut through their smokescreen, we see that the Government actually is the “law breaker” and many of the “forced irregular entrants” actually are trying to comply with the law! Not to mention that the USG has failed to establish viable refugee programs to process Western Hemisphere refugees before they come to our borders. Pretty kafkaesque!

Also, the effort by unqualified right-wing Federal “Judges” and neo-fascist GOP state AG’s to close the border to legal asylum seekers is a national disgrace that seems to be “below the radar screen.” Gotta hope that history “toasts” these corrupt, ignorant, and immoral public officials even if there is little interest in holding them accountable in “real time.”

But, somehow, even the so-called “mainstream media” hypes the wrong story!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-14-22

🇺🇸⚖️🗽AMERICANS MUST REJECT THE FAR-RIGHT’S FICTIONAL “INVASION” CHARADE & THE REST OF THE BOGUS ANTI-IMMIGRANT AGENDA — It’s Racism, Pure & Simple — There Is No “Invasion,” “Replacement Theory” Is A Racist Trope, The Borders Aren’t “Open,” Asylum Seekers Aren’t Trafficking Fentanyl (the very suggestion is facially absurd), & There Is More Than Enough Detention & Enforcement, Just Not Very Smart, Effective, Or, In Some Cases, Even Legal!☠️

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/01/republican-immigration-ads-invasion/

By Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent in WashPost:

. . . .

But over the airwaves and online, another story is playing out: an absolute torrent of ads meant to frighten and anger voters about immigration.

A new report from the pro-immigration group America’s Voice seeks to document this ongoing phenomenon. One of its key conclusions: “Republicans have made their nativist narrative a top messaging priority.”

In the world of Republican campaign ads, very little has changed since the xenophobic Trump presidency, and some of what’s in these ads is truly repellent.

Three themes dominate these ads, the report finds, and they are all wildly inflammatory and profoundly dishonest: The Biden administration has created “open borders,” undocumented immigrants are responsible for fentanyl overdoses and a full-blown “invasion” is underway.

The borders are anything but open; the Biden administration is pursuing, arresting and deporting people seeking to come to the United States by the thousands. The vast majority of fentanyl that comes in is smuggled through ports of entry in cars, boats and planes, not carried by undocumented immigrants. And as for an “invasion,” that’s no more true now than it was when Trump warned that caravans were about to overrun the country.

But the Republican ads portray horror and chaos — usually with a non-White face. Some ads show pictures of young Black men walking through rivers on their way to “invade” America, with language suggesting this “invasion” brings “terrorists, drugs and crime.”

Other ads say the Biden administration is supposedly “importing 20 million illegals and giving them amnesty” (the image for that one is people in Haiti), which can only be stopped by “a declaration of invasion.”

In some ads it’s not just an open border but a “wide open border” — once again, illustrated with pictures of Haitians. In others we’re told that “human, sex and drug trafficking are out of control because of Democrat governance,” while Democratic candidates “refuse to oppose Biden’s open border policy.”

Of course, there is no open border policy, but why should the fact that it doesn’t exist stop Democrats from opposing it? That just shows how sinister they are, these ads say, because they “want to destroy this country.”

All of this captures something essential about this political moment. For months, Republicans were certain they could spread fears of chaos in order to ride to victory in the midterms. They’d run on crime and immigration, not just to excite the base but also to scare unsettled swing voters.

Yet the dynamic unexpectedly shifted, and now disorder and, dare we say it, crime — as in the potential crimes of Donald Trump and many Jan. 6 defendants — are not necessarily playing in the GOP’s favor. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has unleashed another form of chaos and a host of new dangers threatening women. And all of these things are energizing Democrats.

. . . .

“Republicans are indulging in the worst kind of White nationalist rhetoric,” Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, told us. “And an issue they thought would win over swing voters is at best a base mobilizer for voters they already have.”

What makes this all really ugly, however, is that the messaging remaining under the radar — which Democrats bear some blame for, having gone quiet on the issue — allows it to continue mostly unexamined. This, even though its worst incarnations — such as “great replacement theory” — have inspired recent mass shootings.

Along these lines, it’s worth keeping an eye on Blake Masters, the GOP Senate candidate in Arizona. He has trafficked heavily in great replacement theory and has run truly vile ads on immigration, including one that features machine-gun fire at the border. Yet in a place President Biden won by a whisker that’s also a border state, Masters is trailing by a meaningful margin.

As Sharry told us, Masters’s whole “declare an invasion” line “is not working, in a state where one-third of the voters are independents and border security is a top issue.”

Yet whether it works with independents and swing voters, this foul sewage has been flowing unabated. And it will surely continue to do so.

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

Read the complete article at the link.

The idea that individuals seeking to find a U.S. official who will listen to their asylum cases would be trucking along large amounts of fentanyl in their backpacks is facially absurd.

Ending scofflaw Trump failures to follow asylum and refugee laws at the border and beyond would not halt all illegal entries. No policy will do that, nor has there ever been one that even came close, although illegal incursions have risen and fallen over the years.

But, fair refugee and asylum programs that actually interpreted the applicable domestic and international laws correctly (instead of the “any reason to deny, no matter how wrong attitude” still widespread and tolerated at both Mayorkas’s DHS and Garland’s DOJ) and generously granted protection as was the intention behind the UN Refugee Convention in the first place would certainly encourage large segments of those now forced to irregularly cross the border instead to apply abroad or at legal ports of entry.

It would also facilitate the USG working with NGOs, the UNHCR, states, and localities to get individuals needed assistance so that their legal claims could be processed in a fair, efficient, and timely manner. The latter objectives seem to have totally eluded both Mayorkas and particularly Garland. They continue to “blow off the experts” and flounder with mindless, “designed to fail,” “deterrence-focused” gimmicks. Talk about a lose-lose!

Also to state the obvious, if CBP were less focused on apprehending individuals who pose no real threat to the U.S., but merely want a fair shot at applying for legal protection — something our laws require that Trump annihilated, the Federal Courts have flubbed, and Biden has done a substandard job of re-instituting — they would have time to focus more resources on drug and human smugglers.

Instead, in perhaps one of the dumbest and most wasteful juxtapositions in recent American history, the CBP focus is on “apprehending” (a term I use lightly, since many individuals “want” to be “found,” so they can get access to the system otherwise improperly denied to them by CBP) those merely seeking to comply with the law! To do that, CBP ignores or misses many of those who actually pose threats. At the same time, both DHS and DOJ use methods, attitudes, and legal interpretations that themselves undermine fundamental fairness, the rule of law, and humanity itself.

Immigrants are America’s past, present, and future! Indeed, climate change, rising oceans, drought, starvation, transportation improvements, globalized commerce, wars, religious bigotry, pandemics, and other factors beyond the control of any one government will continue to drive worldwide migration.

Building walls, prisons, hate, resentment, and constructing bogus “invasion myths” will not change the reality of human migration and the necessity to adopt to and harness it in a smart, humane, realistic manner. Doing the opposite, will only diminish us as a nation and inhibit our own chances for future prosperity. But, in the end, it won’t stop human migration.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-04-22

DAN RATHER & ELLIOT KIRSHNER: TRUMP’S VERSI0N OF A “WEST WING NUDIST CAMP” — CHECK YOUR DECENCY @ THE DOOR, ENTERING AN “ETHICS FREE ZONE!” — “The naked self-interest was so rampant that Trump’s West Wing could be considered a nudist colony where decency was shed instead of clothing.” 🏴‍☠️

Clothing/Ethics Optional in MAGALAND — Ethics Prohibited Beyond This Point! “The naked self-interest was so rampant that Trump’s West Wing could be considered a nudist colony where decency was shed instead of clothing.” CREATIVE COMMONS.

They Knew. They All Knew.

Cowardice, Cynicism, Contempt, Rationalizations

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner

6 hr ago

1,403

476

Documents seized from Donald Trump’s Florida home (credit: Department of Justice)

Sometimes we write a lot of words on Steady. Today will be an exception. Because for all that there is to say, for all that needs to be said, for all that an accounting for history requires we say, the general sentiments are quite simple:

They knew. They all knew.

It was clear to anyone who had an ounce of appreciation for what the job of the presidency entails, to anyone who respected the constitutional order of our government, to anyone who worried about the health and safety of this nation, to anyone with a moral compass, to anyone who prizes the common sense of purpose that great leaders can summon, that Donald J. Trump had no business anywhere near the presidency.

Now, as he melts down in the face of a serious criminal investigation, as we see pictures of how he stored classified material and his utter disregard for our nation’s most sensitive secrets, as we are left to wonder what he was up to and what damage was done, we should recognize that we would not be where we are today without his enablers, apologists, and hangers-on.

They heralded his outrageousness in a chorus of sycophancy.
They feted his vileness.
They viciously attacked those who pointed out the obvious, that Trump was mentally, emotionally, intellectually, morally, and constitutionally unfit for his office.

And who are they? They are the Republican politicians, the so-called serious ones who expressed their concerns in private even as they used Trump to achieve their desired tax cuts and judges. They are the members of his administration — senior and junior — who jockeyed to maximize their career benefit at the expense of doing the necessary work for the American people. They are the lawyers who twisted themselves into pretzels to try to legalize his inherent lawlessness. They are the media personalities who saw Trump as a printing press for their accrual of wealth and power. They are the capitalists who put corporate earnings ahead of the well-being of the nation.

While Trump’s voters were primed with a toxic stew of hatred, bigotry, and divisiveness, the small cabal playing the inside game didn’t bother with the MAGA hats. They were too busy trading access for favors. The naked self-interest was so rampant that Trump’s West Wing could be considered a nudist colony where decency was shed instead of clothing.

But make no mistake…

In their cowardice, they knew.
In their cynicism, they knew.
In their contempt, they knew.
In their rationalizations, they knew.
In their acquittals of his conduct, even for impeachment, they knew.

They knew when they could have stopped him — before he became president, and once he was president.

But they didn’t stop him. And with their inaction, they encouraged him.

As the Trump bubble begins to pop, all these people who knew what he was all along will likely scurry like cockroaches when the lights go on. They will make all sorts of excuses for their complicity. They will gaslight, lie, and try to rewrite history. You can already see it in many of their so-called tell-all books. Except what they are telling is only the story they want people to hear. It is not the truth.

The truth is that they don’t dare say what we all know. They knew.

Note: If you are not already a subscriber to our Steady newsletter, please consider doing so. And we always appreciate you sharing our content with others and leaving your thoughts in the comments.

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Throughout history, despots and would-be despots have surrounded themselves with motley crews of sycophants, toadies, and retainers. Trump has excelled at it!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-01-22

⚖️🗽 US JUDGE IN SAN DIEGO EVISCERATES TRUMP’S ILLEGAL AND IMMORAL “TURNBACKS” OF ASYLUM APPLICANTS; MAYORKAS TERMINATES REMAIN IN MEXICO (AGAIN) EVEN AS RED RESTRICTIONIST AGs FILE MORE FRIVOLOUS OBJECTIONS! 🤮

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12R1mt07Z4S7R7xiieRUznueR9DRXrBdq/view?usp=sharing

Al Otro Lado v. Mayorkas

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Bashant minces no words in blasting both the unlawful, cruel, and unconstitutional policy and the Supreme’s toxic decision to look the other way as immigration enforcement runs roughshod over legal, constitutional, and human rights.

In its September 2, 2021 decision, this Court held the right to access the U.S. asylum

process conferred vis a vis § 1158(a)(1) applies extraterritorially to noncitizens who are

arriving at Class A POEs along the U.S.-Mexico border, but who are not yet within the

jurisdiction of the United States, and is of a constitutional dimension. (Op. Granting in

Part and Denying in Part Parties’ Cross-Mots. for Summ. J. (“MSJ Opinion”), ECF No.

742.) It further held that Defendants’ systematic turnbacks of asylum seekers arriving at

Class A POEs (the “Turnback Policy”) amounted to an unlawful withholding by

immigration officials of their mandatory ministerial “inspection and referral duties”

detailed in 8 U.S.C. § 1225 (“§ 1225”), in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act,

5 U.S.C. § 706(1) et seq., and the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause. (MSJ Opinion at

33–34, 37–38); see 8 U.S.C. §§ 1225(a)(3) (mapping out immigration officials’ duty to

inspect asylum seekers), 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii) (mapping out immigration officials’ duty to

refer asylum seekers to the U.S-asylum process).

In casting appropriate equitable relief to rectify the irreparable injury Defendants’

unauthorized and constitutionally violative Turnback Policy has inflicted upon members

of the Plaintiff class,2 this Court ordinarily would be guided by the fundamental principle

that an equitable remedy should be commensurate with the violations it is designed to

vindicate. See Columbus Bd. of Educ. v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449, 465 (1979) (“[It is an]

accepted rule that the remedy imposed by a court of equity should be commensurate with

the violation ascertained.”). Equitable relief should leave no stone unturned: it should

correct entirely the violations it is aimed at vindicating. That cornerstone of Article III

courts’ equitable powers generally is unfaltering, whether the party against whom an

injunction is sought is a private entity, a state actor, or, as here, a federal official. Thus, in

2 Plaintiffs consist of the named Plaintiffs listed in the case caption, along with a certified class

consisting of “all noncitizens who seek or will seek to access the U.S. asylum process by presenting

themselves at a Class A [POE] on the U.S.-Mexico border, and were or will be denied access to the U.S.

asylum process by or at the instruction of [Customs and Border Protection] officials on or after January 1,

2016.” (Class Certification Order at 18, ECF No. 513.) The Court also certified a subclass consisting of

“all noncitizens who were or will be denied access to the U.S. asylum process at a Class A POE on the

U.S.-Mexico border as a result of Defendants’ metering policy on or after January 1, 2016.” (Id.)

– 3 – 17cv2366

the ordinary course of things, this Court would not hesitate to issue broad, programmatic

relief enjoining Defendants from now, or in the future, turning back asylum seekers in the

process of arriving at Class A POEs, absent a valid statutory basis for doing so.

Yet the circumstances with which this Court is presented are not ordinary because

of the extraordinary, intervening decision of the United States Supreme Court in Garland

v. Aleman Gonzalez, 142 S. Ct. 2057 (2022). That decision takes a sledgehammer to the

premise that immigration enforcement agencies are bound to implement their mandatory

ministerial duties prescribed by Congress, including their obligation to inspect and refer

arriving noncitizens for asylum, and that, when immigration enforcement agencies deviate

from those duties, lower courts have authority to issue equitable relief to enjoin the

resulting violations. It does so through unprecedented expansion of a provision of the

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1989 (“IIRIRA”), 8

U.S.C. § 1252(f)(1) et seq. (“§ 1252(f)(1)”), which for years the Ninth Circuit has

interpreted as placing a relatively narrow limit on injunctive relief. In essence, Aleman

Gonzalez holds that § 1252(f)(1) prohibits lower courts from issuing class-wide injunctions

that “require officials to take actions that (in the Government’s view) are not required” by

certain removal statutes, including § 1225, or “to refrain from actions that (again in the

Government’s view) are allowed” by those same provisions. Id., 142 S. Ct. at 2065.

Federal courts (except for the Supreme Court) now may only issue injunctions enjoining

federal officials’ unauthorized implementation of the removal statutes in the individual

cases of noncitizens against whom removal proceedings have been initiated. See id.

In no uncertain terms, the logical extension of Aleman Gonzalez appears to bestow

immigration enforcement agencies carte blanche to implement immigration enforcement

policies that clearly are unauthorized by the statutes under which they operate because the

Government need only claim authority to implement to immunize itself from the federal

judiciary’s oversight.

With acknowledgment that its decision will further contribute to the human suffering

of asylum seekers enduring squalid and dangerous conditions in Mexican border

– 4 – 17cv2366

communities as they await entry to POEs, this Court finds the shadow of Aleman Gonzalez

inescapable in this case. Even the most narrow, meaningful equitable relief would have

the effect of interfering with the “operation” of § 1225, as that term is construed by the

Aleman Gonzalez Court, and, thus, would clash with § 1252(f)(1)’s remedy bar. Aleman

Gonzalez not only renders uneconomical vindication of Plaintiff class members’

statutorily- and constitutionally-protected right to apply for asylum, those inefficiencies

inevitably will lead to innumerable instances in which Plaintiff class members will be

unable to vindicate their rights at all. Thus, while the majority and dissent in Aleman

Gonzalez hash out their textual disagreements concerning § 1252(f)(1)’s scope in terms of

remedies, make no mistake, Aleman Gonzalez leaves largely unrestrained immigration

enforcement agencies to rapaciously scale back rights. See Tracy A. Thomas, Ubi Jus, Ibi

Remedium: The Fundamental Right to a Remedy Under Due Process, 41 San Diego L.

Rev. 1633, 1634 (2004) (“Disputes over remedies provide a convenient way for dissenters

to resist conformance to legal guarantees. Courts can declare rights, but then default in the

remedy to avoid a politically unpopular result.” (footnote omitted)).

Although it is no substitute for a permanent injunction, class-wide declaratory relief

is both available and warranted here. In lieu of even a circumscribed injunction enjoining

Defendants from again implementing a policy under which they turn back asylum seekers

presenting themselves at POEs along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Court enters a

declaration in accordance with its MSJ Opinion that turning back asylum seekers

constitutes both an unlawful withholding of Defendants’ mandatory ministerial inspection

and referral duties under § 1158 and § 1225 in violation of both the APA and the Fifth

Amendment Due Process Clause. The Court also issues relief as necessary to named

Plaintiff Beatrice Doe.

. . . .

You can read Judge Bashant’s full opinion at the link.

Meanwhile, Secretary Mayorkas exercised the authority recognized by the Supremes in Biden v. Texas to terminate the reprehensible and illegal “Remain in Mexico” (a/k/a “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico”) program engineered by Trump and Miller. Predictably, the same scofflaw, restrictionist “Red AG’s” who had instituted frivolous litigation to block this long overdue action filed more specious objections with the Trump-appointed US District Judge, as advocacy groups like Justice Action Center (“JAC”) pledged to fight the racist right until this vile (and highly ineffective) program is finally ended.

JAC Responds to Official Termination of Remain in Mexico, Attempts by Texas to Delay Wind-Down

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 9, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a victory for immigrants’ rights movement, the Remain in Mexico program has been officially terminated after court proceedings following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Biden v. Texas on June 30. Below is a statement from Justice Action Center founder and director Karen Tumlin:

“The official end to shameful Remain in Mexico program is a victory for the immigrants’ rights movement and the right to asylum. RMX is a stain on the country’s history, having harmed tens of thousands of people fleeing for their lives since the Trump Administration instituted the unlawful and immoral program in 2019.

“Since the Supreme Court’s ruling affirming the authority of the Biden Administration to end the RMX program, the #SafeNotStranded campaign has called on the President and DHS to implement a swift and humane wind-down, including halting all new enrollments and allowing everyone in RMX to safely pursue their asylum claims in the U.S. Yesterday, DHS stated its wind-down has begun and new people will not be enrolled in the program, and that it would disenroll individuals with upcoming RMX hearings. These are important first steps to finally redress just some of the immense harm inflicted by the program.

“This commitment by DHS, following such a significant SCOTUS victory, illustrates the strength and resilience of the immigrants’ rights movement. But even after a clear loss, Texas is continuing its hateful attempts to keep this deadly program in place for as long as possible: After the District Court rightfully vacated its injunction of the RMX wind-down yesterday, Texas unfortunately—yet unsurprisingly—filed an amended complaint challenging the second DHS memo rescinding RMX, as well as a motion asking the District Court to stay the memo’s effective date.

“But we will not be deterred: advocates will continue to fight back against ongoing red state efforts to continue Trump’s racist and xenophobic agenda and work towards a world where all people fleeing danger can be safe, not stranded.”

# # #

Contact: Tasha Moro; 323-450-7269; tasha.moro@justiceactioncenter.org

Justice Action Center (JAC) is a new nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting for greater justice for immigrant communities by combining litigation and storytelling. JAC is committed to bringing additional litigation resources to address unmet needs, empower clients, and change the corrosive narrative around immigrants in the U.S. Learn more at justiceactioncenter.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Related:

8/1/22: JAC Responds to Supreme Court’s Certification of Decision on Remain in Mexico; Encourages Swift and Humane Wind-Down of Deadly Program

6/30/22: Justice Action Center Welcomes Positive Supreme Court Decision on Remain in Mexico in Biden v. Texas

3/21/22: #SafeNotStranded Campaign Launches Ahead of April Supreme Court Arguments in Biden v. Texas

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

We should remember that the Trumpest GOP’s insurrectionist war on American democracy and attack on truth and human decency began with overt lies and racist attacks on migrants of color and non-Christians. It has escalated to become an all out assault on our future as a nation of laws and values.

We can’t go back to a time when liberals and progressives viewed immigration as a tangental or secondary issue. It is THE all-encompassing issue now in preserving American democracy from GOP efforts to destabilize and destroy our nation’s fabric from bottom to top!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-11-22

From The Border Chronicle:

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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Arelis R. Hernandez reports for WashPost:

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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Andrea Castillo reports for the LA Times:

Asylum seekers must wait for appointments in U.S. for everyone, or leave some behind.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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Here’s the link to the “comment website:”

Here’s the text of my “custom revision” of the standard comment posted on the website:

🇺🇸Due Process Forever! The treachery of an Administration that abandons humane values, and fears bold humanitarian actions, never!

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LISTEN HERE:

Here are “my takeaways:”

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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Stuart writes:

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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Tell President Biden: Restore the right to asylum!

”BIDEN DOJ HALL OF SHAME” — Those Who Have Defended or Enabled Stephen Miller’s “Crimes Against Humanity:”

Merrick Garland, Attorney General

Lisa Monaco, Deputy Attorney General

Vanita Gupta, Associate Attorney General

Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights

Elizabeth Prolager, Solicitor General

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🗽DISSENTING OPINION: TRADING AWAY REFUGEE RIGHTS & DUE PROCESS FOR LONG OVERDUE DREAMER PROTECTIONS IS “NOT OK!”

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Dec. 6, 2022

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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Al Otro Lado v. Mayorkas

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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