ROQUE PLANAS @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP’S BOGUS CARAVAN THREAT MIGHT BE HIS MOST OUTRAGEOUS SCAM YET! — GOP’S Racist Commercial So Vile That Even Fox Pulls It!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fabricating-border-crisis-before-election_us_5be0a522e4b09d43e321d731

Roque Planas writes in HuffPost:

Almost every day last week, the White House thrust immigration to the center of national politics. The Pentagon announced plans to dispatch some 5,200 troops to the border with Mexico. Trump said he planned to eliminate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat. He announced a coming plan to bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and to detain them indefinitely in tent cities. To hear him speak at a press conference on Thursday, it would appear the United States faces an onslaught of illegal immigration.

None of this reflects reality. For the last eight years, arrests for illegal border crossing have been at their lowest levels since the 1970s.

But it does jibe with the strategy of a president who propelled himself to the White House by making specious immigration claims. Facing an election cycle that imperils the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the president’s message is clear: Voters should blame Democrats for a nonexistent catastrophe at the border.

The ad — which NBC abandoned, along with Fox and Facebook, after a major backlash — is part of Trump’s strategy to drum up fears of the caravan among his base. CNN declined to air it, calling it “racist.”

It’s also flatly false.

Luis Bracamontes, the unauthorized immigrant in Trump’s ad, was convicted in 2014 for killing two Sacramento police officers and has nothing to do with the caravan.

The original version of the ad that Trump posted to Twitter was even more blatantly dishonest. After showing clips of a deranged Bracamontes ranting in court about how he would escape and kill others, it claimed that Democrats let him into the country and that they let him stay. It then it cuts to video of the caravan, giving the impression that it’s composed of similar fiends.

In fact, no one let Bracamontes in. He was deported twice, once in 1997 and again in 2001.

Some critics of the ad have noted that the last time he entered the country illegally appears to have been during the presidency of George W. Bush. He didn’t let Bracamontes in either, though. The fact is that Bracamontes evaded law enforcement, which is not in itself noteworthy. The rate of success for people who attempt to enter the country illegally multiple times never dipped below 96 percent until 2008, according to the Mexico Migration Project, the most comprehensive sociological database to track migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Implying that the migrant caravan is consists of dangerous criminals like Bracamontes is just as untenable as the claim that Democrats let him in. Among the several thousand people traveling through Mexico in the main caravan are 2,300 kids, according to UNICEF USA. The migrants are banding together in caravans not as some kind of invading force but as a way to seek protection in numbers from human traffickers.

The major challenge that the U.S. faces at the border is how to process efficiently an uptick in the number of Central American families and children who make asylum claims or ask for other forms of humanitarian relief from deportation. But that trend dates from 2014, so it’s hardly new.

It won’t be clear until after the midterm elections whether Trump will follow through on his barrage of immigration promises. But with less than 24 hours to Election Day, the more immediate question is how voters will react to his statements.

Mass migration from Mexico had petered out seven years before Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and blaming “open border” Democrats for an immigration crisis that didn’t exist. The strategy helped get him elected in 2016. On Tuesday, we’ll see if it works for him again.

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Lies, knowingly false narratives, corruption, scams on the American people, racism, intolerance, disrespect for millions of Americans and our Constitution — that’s just business as usual for the Trump Administration.

Truth is, the “Caravans” are doing favors for the US Government in a number of ways:

  • Easy to track;
  • Plenty of advance notice;
  • Reduces danger and deaths along the way;
  • Takes business away from professional smugglers;
  • Almost all “Caravan” members who actually reach the border (only a fraction of those who begin the thousand mile plus journey) are processed in an orderly fashion, either waiting patiently at ports of entry or turning themselves in to the Border Patrol immediately upon entry;
  • There is no evidence of  significant numbers of “Caravan” members disappearing into the interior of the US without some type of inspection and screening — almost all those who are not summarily returned have gone through credible fear screenings and are either detained or released on bond after the Government confirms their identity and reasons for coming,  and determines that they have credible cases for protection under our laws;
  • There is no record that I’m aware of that any “Caravan” has attempted to “storm the border” or violently attacked US border authorities en masse — why would they, since their only chance for survival is to hope and pray that the US authorities will actually live up to our legal responsibilities and give them a chance to seek legal protection under our laws?

However, if the Trump Administration continues to ignore our laws and to mount bogus attacks on fleeing refugees, they probably will be able to convince many of those folks that our legal system is a fraud and they had best employ the services of a professional smuggler to get them into the interior of the US where they can lose themselves in the crowd and probably save their lives — a sort of “do it yourself asylum.” And, while wasting taxpayer money on the “border hoax,” this Administration is failing to fund and intentionally ignoring international efforts to address the dangerous and chaotic conditions in the Northern Triangle that causes these refugee flows in the first place — and will continue to cause them until we put wiser and more honest policies into effect.

The real threat to our country’s security and future is Trump and his willfully blind or in some cases outright White Nationalist, racist, or purposefully racially tone-deaf supporters and enablers.

If that’s not the America you want and want for future generations, get out the vote to start regaining control of our country from a misguided yet loud and active minority trying to shove their lack of values down the rest of our throats! America is for all Americans, not just the “Trump Base” and their fellow travelers!

PWS

11-06-18

NO LONGER SUBTLE: Racism, Hate, Intolerance, Lies, Fear-Mongering Against Immigrants At Core Of Trump GOP’s Midterm Pitch! -– The Ugliest Side Of American History & Politics Rears Its Head!

https://apple.news/AxHra5TtoTEqR96pQ3ermwA

RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:

COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.

On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.

“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.

The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in ­anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.

Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.

“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”

He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”

Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.

Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.

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“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”

Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.

The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.

The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”

Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.

“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”

Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.

“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”

Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.

Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”

Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.

Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.

“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”

David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”

“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”

As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.

In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”

An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.

A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”

And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.

“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”

The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.

After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King ­(R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.

Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”

“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”

Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.

Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.

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

I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.

Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!

PWS

11-02-18

TRUMP, HIS SUPPORTERS, & ENABLERS TAKE US BACK TO AMERICA’S DARKEST DAYS OF RACISM & XENOPHOBIA – Echoes Of Dred Scott & The Chinese Exclusion Laws Embodied In Disingenuous Push To Change Birthright Citizenship By Either “Executive Order” Or Unconstitutional Legislation!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/10/31/trump-takes-us-back-to-the-darkest-days-of-american-xenophobia/

John Pomphret writes in the Washington Post:

Trump takes us back to the darkest days of American xenophobia


President Trump has astonished legal scholars with his claim that he can end birthright citizenship with a swipe of his pen. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
October 31 at 2:44 PM

President Trump’s vow to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to women in the country illegally not only harks back to the 1898 Supreme Court case that supposedly decided the issue for all time. He and the rest of his immigration allies also sound like the very people back then who made it their goal to make America white.

When Wong Kim Ark returned from China to San Francisco, the city of his birth, in August 1895, he was denied entry into the United States on the grounds that even though he had been born in America, the chief immigration official of the United States didn’t believe you could be both Chinese and American. That immigration official, John H. Wise, a prominent Democrat and a son of the South, had been appointed to his position as collector of the customs a few years earlier. Wise called himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration” and set out to vigorously enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 1882 law that banned from America all Chinese laborers. It was the first law ever to block a specific ethnic group from entry into the United States.

Democrats and union leaders were solidly behind the Exclusion Act, seeing as a threat to the white working class the industrious Chinese miners, grocery store owners, vegetable growers and traveling doctors who had populated the West. The Democrats were supported by California’s Workingmen’s Party, founded by a firebrand Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, who organized raucous and often violent rallies around the state where the crowd would howl “The Chinese Must Go” and call for building a wall on the southern border (sound familiar?) because they believed Chinese immigrants were sneaking in from Mexico, according to archival material.

In San Francisco, Wise embraced all sorts of tactics to stop the Chinese from entering the United States. When confronted with Chinese American citizens, he demanded they provide two white witnesses who could attest to their citizenship. His agents gave English-language tests, history quizzes and geographical exams to those wishing to return to America. Wise took sadistic pleasure in denying Chinese entry, penning poems about court victories to the immigration lawyers he had beaten. “So just to make this poor Wong Fong / feel very good and nice,” went one ditty, “I’ve sent him back to China, where he can eat his mice.”

Wise opposed the idea that Chinese people should be allowed to become Americans in part because the Naturalization Act of 1870 had barred Asians from becoming naturalized Americans, reserving that right only for whites, Native populations and blacks. In 1884, Wise and his agents blocked a Chinese American man from reentering America but lost the case in district court. In August 1895, Wise got his chance again when 21-year-old Wong Kim Ark arrived in San Francisco. Wise claimed that even though Wong had been born in San Francisco in 1873, he was not really a citizen.

The fight for birthright citizenship in America

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship belonged to everyone born on American soil.

To defend Wong, the Chinese Benevolent Association hired one of the city’s best attorneys. The U.S. government turned to Henry S. Foote, a former Confederate soldier who had served time as a prisoner of war during the Civil War. Foote asked whether any Chinese “by accident of birth” could ever become citizens if their parents were not and could never become naturalized citizens of the United States.

Trump’s rant about immigrants from “shithole countries” echoed Foote’s argument. Foote noted that Wong’s “education and political affiliations” were “entirely alien” to the United States. He was not and never could become an American, Foote said, but rather a “Chinese person and a subject of the Emperor of China.” Indeed, allowing Wong, who spent five months incarcerated on various steamships off the U.S. coast, into the United States would be dangerous, Foote argued, because Asians “must necessarily be a constant menace to the welfare of our country.”

Foote lost the case in district court, but the government decided to appeal, losing in the Supreme Court in a 6-to-2 decision in March 1898. Following the case, local worthies in San Francisco worried that the decision would tempt America’s minorities to angle for more rights. Two days after the verdict, the San Francisco Chronicle frettedthat Japanese and Native Americans might even demand the right to vote. Perhaps, the paper suggested, an amendment to the Constitution to limit “citizenship to whites and blacks” might roll that back.

Things would not improve for decades for Chinese Americans and for Asian Americans in general. By 1924, the United States had constructed a web of legislation that effectively barred any Asian immigration. It would stay in place until World War II, when the United States was shamed into dismantling the ban by its ally China. Still, Trump and his advisers look to the time when the United States locked its doors to immigration as a golden era. No wonder his rhetoric sounds so familiar.

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

Leave it to Trump, his supporters, and those who enable him to pump life into a toxic argument has long been a rallying point for xenophobes, racists, restrictionists, and others happy to support an attack on racial minorities in the U.S. Today it’s Hispanics in the crosshairs of the haters; yesterday it was African-Americans and Asians. But, the ugly motivation and the legal manipulations to justify racism and xenophobia remain the same. And no, we can’t disconnect all of the legal arguments from their social context. These aren’t just legal questions; they are moral and political ones. Lending support to Trump and his campaign of hate and racism is what it is.

As Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez said in her excellent article “Born in the Americas: Birthright Citizenship and Human Rights,” published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal in 2012:

Furthermore, none of the legal, academic, and policy debates about

birthright citizenship should be separated from their clear context of attempting

to limit access to citizenship for the children of Latino immigrants.

Human rights law requires such an analysis. The historical context

must also be taken into account. As will be discussed herein, the Fourteenth

Amendment was enacted to prevent discrimination against people of color,

including immigrants of color. For many years, throughout different waves

of immigration, birthright citizenship was the law of the land. It is no

coincidence that birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immi

grants is being seriously challenged now that the 2010 Census found that

23% of children in the United States are Hispanic, and many of their parents

are immigrants. In addition, advocates for retracting birthright citizenship

frequently rely on negative stereotypes about immigrant women. [Citations Omitted].

Culliton-Gonzalez

Amen.

PWS

11-01-18

APPROXIMATELY 700,000 TRANSGENDER HUMAN BEINGS LIVE IN THE U.S. – The Trump Administration Seeks To “Define” Them Out Of Existence!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Image
, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity.CreditAaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the department confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.

Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, which presses for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they’ve opted to turn their back on transgender people.” After this article was published online, transgender people took to social media to post photographs of themselves with the hashtag #WontBeErased

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

Image

A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.CreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

Health and human services officials said they were only abiding by court orders, referring to the rulings of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Tex., a George W. Bush appointee who has held that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

A 2016 ruling by Judge O’Connor concerned a rule that was adopted to carry out a civil rights statute embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

But in recent discussions with the administration, civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal, have pointed to other court cases. In a legal memo presented to the administration, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote, “The overwhelming majority of courts to address the question since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent in 1998 have held that antitransgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.”

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

“Courts and the previous administration took advantage of this circumstance to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a multitude of agencies, and under a multitude of laws,” the memo states. Doing so “led to confusion and negative policy consequences in health care, education and other federal contexts.”

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

One of the Trump administration’s first decisive policy acts was the rescission by the Education and Justice Departments of Obama-era guidelines that protected transgender students who wanted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive governmentwide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, like sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student’s sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student’s failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

A version of this article appears in print on of the New York edition with the headline: Trump May Limit How Government Defines One’s Sex. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Historical footnote:  At one point in our “respective prior incarnations,” circa late 1970s, early 1980s, Robert Pear was the “immigration beat” reporter for the NY Times, and I was the Deputy General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.”  I was sometimes asked by the Commissioner and the Public Information Office to respond to Robert’s telephonic inquiries. Smart, knowledgeable, incisive, and a “straight shooter” was how I would have described him in those days.
Moving on, I had a number of transgender individuals appear before me in Immigration Court. Almost all of them had been damaged by rejection, abuse, intentional cruelty, and humiliation inflicted by family, governments, teachers, and other community members who should  have known better. The majority had either attempted suicide or admitted to having suicidal impulses. Yet, many appeared to have found the courage and determination to persevere.
Sadly, the attempt to deny the legal existence and humanity of transgender individuals seems to be something right out of the “Third Reich Playbook.” Using the law to “pick on,” target, and “legitimize” the dehumanization of already marginalized minorities was a “Hitler specialty.” And, in too many cases, lawyers and the judiciary were more than happy to help out. Some were even eager to “out-Hitler Hitler.” 
History will deal  harshly with the hate, racism, and intolerance being promoted by the Trump Administration. Where will YOU be recorded as standing! What have YOU done to remove these horrible individuals from public office and to resist their toxic and immoral programs and actions?
PWS
10/21/18

 

 

 

 

GONZO’S WORLD: When The Attorney General Of The United States Is An “Equal Opportunity Hater” — NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill Says “Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has made clear that he has no intention of investigating police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. The Justice Department has essentially all but abandoned civil rights as a priority, and so they are no longer working as a partner with us.”

Sherrilyn Ifill, 54, is a lawyer living in Maryland and New York. She became the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund just after President Obama was sworn in for his second term. Below, she discusses our current political situation, what gives her hope and more.

On the Justice Department under the Trump administration: “During the Obama administration I was trying to push [Obama] further than whatever the administration was already doing in the civil rights space, because that’s kind of my job. But there’s no question that the Obama administration really worked in many instances as a partner. That is not the case now. Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has made clear that he has no intention of investigating police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. The Justice Department has essentially all but abandoned civil rights as a priority, and so they are no longer working as a partner with us.

That means that our work has increased. We have had to function as a kind of private DOJ, trying to take up the slack. The DOJ and the attorney general should be the chief enforcer of the nation’s civil rights law. But what we see with Attorney General Sessions is no attempt to prioritize civil rights. In fact, to the contrary, working against us, working against civil rights implementation, working against the progress of civil rights that we’ve achieved.”

On what she would say to President Trump if he invited her to the White House: “I cannot imagine what the circumstance of that invitation would be, so it’s an impossible question to answer. I don’t do ceremonial visits. I’m interested in substance. So there would be a lot I would have to know in advance about what was going to happen. The president has been so explicitly hostile to civil rights and racial justice that I would have to have a very clear understanding of what reversals he was prepared to make to his policies. And in the absence of those, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would attend such a meeting.”

On Trump’s comments that black Americans are doing better economically than ever before: ”He does state that, and I think the figures that he uses are convenient in terms of job numbers. But look more closely at wage stagnation and, in fact, wage decreases. Look at the ways in which the failure to invest in infrastructure has left African American communities stranded in terms of transportation. Look at the voter suppression that disempowers African Americans from being able to even control their own destiny in the places where they live. Look at the assault on education and the ways in which the Department of Education is prepared to leave students who are victims of for-profit colleges stranded. Look at the ways which they are seeking to fight and undercut affirmative action. All of these are also part of economic opportunity. And the president conveniently leaves that out of the narrative. Those are things that are necessary to give African Americans a chance.”

On her book about the legacy of lynchings in America, and what the country needs to heal: “What America does not need, in my view, is one national conversation. The book really makes the case for the importance of local communities engaging in truth and reconciliatory processes. The recognition that racial discrimination, and particularly acts of racial pogroms, which essentially is what happened in the period in which lynching was so prevalent in this country, that those local communities need to deal with that, grapple themselves with that history and themselves take on the responsibility for how you stitch back together a community that has been broken for decades, how you confront a painful truth.”

On what gives her hope: “I’m excited to see the continuous mass mobilization that people have engaged in, beginning with the Women’s March and continuing since then, in which people understand the need to come out of their homes to see one another and to say what they believe in. I’ve also really been encouraged by the ways in which the rule of law, for the most part, has held despite President Trump’s excesses. The crisis of this administration’s governance has compelled people to reimagine what it means to be a real citizen in this country. And that gives me optimism, because I think the other way was not sustainable. The benign citizenship performance that most Americans were engaged in was simply not sustainable. Now people understand that they are needed. Their voice is needed, every vote is needed, their engagement is needed.”

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Undoubtedly, our Civil Rights Laws were passed to protect African-Americans and similarly situated individuals so that they could enjoy the same advantages and benefits once accorded only to Whites. But, Jeff Sessions believes that civil rights are just about protecting White Power & Privilege against African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and other “uppity” minorities.

Similarly, the Bill of Rights was adopted to protect individual rights against Government overreach. But, Jeff Sessions believes that the right of police to enforce the law using brutality and unnecessary and indiscriminate force is superior to the individual Constitutional rights of people of color.

The solution to restoring reason and the true rule of law (not the perverted “rule of Sessions”): regime change!

PWS

09-23-18

 

 

 

REGIME OF HATE: SPLC Highlights How Trump Administration “Biggies” Cozy Up To Groups Pushing Messages Of Hate, Intolerance, & Exclusion!

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FIGHTING HATE // TEACHING TOLERANCE // SEEKING JUSTICE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2018
Weekend Read // Issue 98

Good morning, Cathryn.

The Family Research Council (FRC) uses discredited research and junk science to attack and vilify LGBT people. It claims they’re incestuous and “violent,” for example, a danger to children and society.

The FRC is an anti-LGBT hate group. And today, it’s hosting some of the most extreme anti-LGBT groups in the country at its annual Values Voter Summit.

Joining them is none other than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The news that such a high-ranking member of the Trump administration — one charged with representing the United States to the rest of the world — is choosing to attend an FRC event certainly “raises eyebrows,” as Nahal Toosi wrote for Politico.

As a former George W. Bush administration official told Toosi, “It’s unusual for a secretary of state to be at an event with ‘voter’ in the title.”

It’s much worse than that, in fact.

Pompeo, though, might feel right at home appearing with such far-right extremists. He’s spoken at numerous conferences hosted by ACT for America and Center for Security Policy, both anti-Muslim hate groups. And he’s not the only one from the Trump administration.

Just last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered remarks at a summit on “religious liberty” hosted by anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.

Days later, a speechwriter for President Trump, Darren Beattie, was fired after revelations that he had spoken at a conference alongside Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist website VDARE.

The Trump administration has opened its doors to the radical right. Not only are high-ranking officials speaking at events hosted by hate groups, they’re inviting extremists to consult on the administration’s policies, set its agenda and shape its rhetoric.

We saw another clear example this week with the news that it was Stephen Bannon and Kris Kobach who were behind the addition of a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census questionnaire.

Both have ties to extremists who would like to see exactly such a policy out of the White House. Bannon, of course, is Trump’s former chief strategist, a man who has boasted of transforming Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right.” Kobach, now the secretary of state in Kansas, is a longtime lawyer for the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform. He is also one of the nation’s leading proponents of state laws that suppress the votes of the poor and people of color.

We’ve been tracking instances of extremism in the White House. In less than a year, we’ve found 160 incidents, with at least 15 different hate groups involved in some way.

That’s unacceptable. And it’s why last weekend, we went to Washington to talk to residents who — like us — won’t stand for the bigotry on display at today’s so-called Values Voter Summit.

It’s overwhelmingly clear that the “values” Pompeo will be supporting – tacitly, at the very least –will not be those of LGBT people.

They won’t be the values of the DC residents who are standing with us to say #Y’allMeansAll.

They won’t even be the values of the majority of Americans, whose government should represent their interests rather than the interests of a hate group.

Heather Nauert, a spokeswoman for the State Department, told Politico that Pompeo’s message today is “not political. It’s not a Republican or Democrat message.”

That makes no difference. He has already sent a clear message by agreeing to even appear at the summit. And we’ve all heard it.

The Editors

P.S. Here are some other pieces that we think are valuable this week:

White people are still raised to be racially illiterate by Robin DiAngelo for NBC News

Hate-Crime Acquittal Roils LGBTQ Community in West Virginia by Yawana Wolfe for Courthouse News

Bad paperwork by Lucas Iberico Lozada for Popula

Americans want to believe jobs are the solution to poverty. They’re not. by Matthew Desmond for The New York Times Magazine

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Yup! If you don’t believe in the White Nationalist agenda of hate, false narratives, and intolerance, vote for regime change in November!

PWS

09-23-18

 

NOTE TO NEW US IMMIGRATION JUDGES: YOU WOULD DO WELL TO IGNORE SESSIONS’S FALSE NARRATIVE & ADDRESS THE REAL PROBLEMS PLAGUING OUR US IMMIGRATION COURTS – Lack of Due Process, Abusive Detention, Some Biased Colleagues, Too Few Lawyers, Inconsistent Decisions, Far Too Many Denials Of Legitimate Refugees – “But more importantly, asylum-seekers have suffered from serious human rights abuses and merit protection under our laws. Their cases are not denied because they are not bona fide. Their cases are not denied because they do not qualify as refugees under the INA. Indeed, most of these asylum-seekers were found to possess a credible fear of return upon their initial apprehension. Through a combination of lack of access to counsel, unfair and uneven adjudication by IJs, and impermissible interference by the Attorney General, credible and bona fide cases are frequently denied.”

From LexisNexis Immigraton Community:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/immigration/b/outsidenews/posts/a-pro-bono-asylum-lawyer-responds-to-the-latest-attack-from-a-g-sessions

A Pro Bono Asylum Lawyer Responds to the Latest Attack from A.G. Sessions

Expecting Asylum-Seekers to Become US Asylum Law Experts: Reflections on My Trip to the Folkston ICE Processing Center

Sophia Genovese, Sept. 10, 2018 – “US asylum law is nuanced, at times contradictory, and ever-changing. As brief background, in order to be granted asylum, applicants must show that they have suffered past persecution or have a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and that they are unable or unwilling to return to, or avail themselves of the protection of, their country of origin owing to such persecution. 8 C.F.R. § 1208.13(b)(1) & (2). Attorneys constantly grapple with the ins and outs of asylum law, especially in light of recent, dramatic changes to asylum adjudication.

Even with legal representation, the chances of being granted asylum are slim. In FY 2017, only 45% asylum-seekers who had an attorney were ultimately granted asylum. Imagine, then, an asylum-seeker fleeing persecution, suffering from severe trauma, and arriving in a foreign land where he or she suddenly has to become a legal expert in order to avoid being sent back to certain death. For most, this is nearly impossible, where in FY 2017, only 10% of those unrepresented successfully obtained asylum.

It is important to remember that while asylum-seekers have a right to obtain counsel at their own expense, they are not entitled to government-appointed counsel. INA § 240(b)(4)(A). Access to legal representation is critical for asylum-seekers. However, most asylum-seekers, especially those in detention, go largely unrepresented in their asylum proceedings, where only 15% of all detained immigrants have access to an attorney. For those detained in remote areas, that percentage is even lower.

Given this inequity, I felt compelled to travel to a remote detention facility in Folkston, GA and provide pro bono legal assistance to detained asylum-seekers in their bond and parole proceedings. I travelled along with former supervisors turned mentors, Jessica Greenberg and Deirdre Stradone, Staff Attorneys at African Services Committee(ASC)/Immigrant Community Law Center (ICLC), along with Lucia della Paolera, a volunteer interpreter. Our program was organized and led by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI). SIFI currently only represents detained asylum-seekers in their bond and parole proceedings in order to assist as many folks as possible in obtaining release. Their rationale is that since bond and parole representation take up substantially less time than asylum representation, that they can have a far greater impact in successfully obtaining release for several hundred asylum-seekers, who can hopefully thereafter obtain counsel to represent them in their asylum proceedings.

Folkston is extremely remote. It is about 50 miles northwest of Jacksonville, FL, and nearly 300 miles from Atlanta, GA, where the cases from the Folkston ICE Processing Center are heard. Instead of transporting detained asylum-seekers and migrants to their hearings at the Atlanta Immigration Court, Immigration Judges (IJs) appear via teleconference. These proceedings lack any semblance to due process. Rather, through assembly-line adjudication, IJs hear several dozens of cases within the span of a few hours. On court days, I witnessed about twenty men get shuffled into a small conference room to speak with the IJ in front of a small camera. The IJ only spends a few minutes on each case, and then the next twenty men get shuffled into the same room. While IJs may spend a bit more time with detainees during their bond or merits hearings, the time spent is often inadequate, frequently leading to unjust results.

Even with the tireless efforts of the Staff Attorneys and volunteers at SIFI, there are simply too few attorneys to help every detainee at the Folkston ICE Processing Center, which houses almost 900 immigrants at any given time, leaving hundreds stranded to navigate the confusing waters of immigration court alone.

During initial screenings, I encountered numerous individuals who filled out their asylum applications on their own. These folks try their best using the internet in the library to translate the application into their native language, translate their answers into English, and then hand in their I-589s to the IJ. But as any practitioner will tell you, so much more goes into an asylum application than the Form I-589. While these asylum seekers are smart and resourceful, it is nearly impossible for one to successfully pursue one’s own asylum claim. To make matters worse, if these asylum-seekers do not obtain release from detention ahead of their merits hearing where an IJ will adjudicate their asylum claim, they will be left to argue their claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court, where 95%-98% of all asylum claims are denied. For those detained and/or unrepresented, that number is nearly 100%.

Despite the Attorney General’s most recent comments that lawyers are not following the letter of the law when advocating on behalf of asylum-seekers, it is clear that it is the IJs, [tasked with fairly applying the law, and DHS officials, tasked with enforcing the law,] who are the ones seeking to circumvent the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Throughout the Trump era, immigration attorneys have faithfully upheld asylum law and have had to hold the government accountable in its failure to apply the law fairly. Good lawyers, using all of their talents and skill, work every day to vindicate the rights of their clients pursuant to the INA, contrary to Sessions’ assertions.

But more importantly, asylum-seekers have suffered from serious human rights abuses and merit protection under our laws. Their cases are not denied because they are not bona fide. Their cases are not denied because they do not qualify as refugees under the INA. Indeed, most of these asylum-seekers were found to possess a credible fear of return upon their initial apprehension. Through a combination of lack of access to counsel, unfair and uneven adjudication by IJs, and impermissible interference by the Attorney General, credible and bona fide cases are frequently denied.

We’ve previously blogged about the due process concerns in immigration courts under Sessions’ tenure. Instead, I want to highlight the stories of some of the asylum-seekers I met in Folkston. If these individuals do not obtain counsel for the bond or parole proceedings, and/or if they are denied release, they will be forced to adjudicate their claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court where they will almost certainly be ordered removed. It is important that we understand who it is that we’re actually deporting. Through sharing their stories, I want to demonstrate to others just how unfair our asylum system is. Asylum was meant to protect these people. Instead, we treat them as criminals by detaining them, do not provide them with adequate access to legal representation, and summarily remove them from the United States. Below are their stories:

Twenty-Five Year Old From Honduras Who Had Been Sexually Assaulted on Account of His Sexual Orientation

At the end of my first day in Folkston, I was asked to inform an individual, Mr. J-, that SIFI would be representing him in his bond proceedings. He’s been in detention since March 2018 and cried when I told him that we were going to try and get him out on bond.

Mr. J- looks like he’s about sixteen, and maybe weighs about 100 pounds. Back home in Honduras, he was frequently ridiculed because of his sexual orientation. Because he is rather small, this ridicule often turned into physical assault by other members of his community, including the police. One day when Mr. J- was returning from the store, he was stopped by five men from his neighborhood who started berating him on account of his sexual orientation. These men proceeded to sexually assault him, one by one, until he passed out. These men warned Mr. J- not to go to the police, or else they would find him and kill him. Mr. J- knew that the police would not help him even if he did report the incident. These men later tracked down Mr. J-’s cellphone number, and continued to harass and threaten him. Fearing for his life, Mr. J- fled to the United States.

Mr. J-’s asylum claim is textbook and ought to be readily granted. However, given Sessions’ recent unilateral change in asylum law based on private acts of violence, Mr. J- will have to fight an uphill battle to ultimately prevail. See Matter of A-B-, 27 I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018). If released on bond, Mr. J- plans to move in with his uncle, a US citizen, who resides in Florida. Mr. J-’s case will then be transferred to the immigration court in Miami. Although the Immigration Court in Miami similarly has high denial rates, where nearly 90% of all asylum claims are ultimately denied, Mr. J- will at least have a better chance of prevailing there than he would in Atlanta.

Indigenous Mayan from Guatemala Who Was Targeted on Account of His Success as a Businessman

During my second day, I met with an indigenous Mayan from Guatemala, Mr. S-. He holds a Master’s degree in Education, owned a restaurant back home, and was the minister at his local church. He had previously worked in agriculture pursuant to an H-2B visa in Iowa, and then returned to Guatemala when the visa expired to open his business.

He fled Guatemala earlier this year on account of his membership in a particular social group. One night after closing his restaurant, he was thrown off his motorcycle by several men who believes were part of a local gang. They beat him and threatened to kill him and his family if he did not give them a large sum of money. They specifically targeted Mr. S- because he was a successful businessman. They warned him not to go to the police or else they would find out and kill him. The client knew that the police would not protect him from this harm on account of his ethnic background as an indigenous Mayan. The day of the extortionists’ deadline to pay, Mr. S- didn’t have the money to pay them off, and was forced to flee or face a certain death.

Mr. S- has been in immigration detention since March. The day I met with him at the end of August was the first time he had been able to speak to an attorney.

Mr. S-’s prospects for success are uncertain. Even prior to the recent decision in Matter of A-B-, asylum claims based on the particular social group of “wealthy businessmen” were seldom granted. See, e.g., Lopez v. Sessions, 859 F.3d 464 (7th Cir. 2017); Dominguez-Pulido v. Lynch, 821 F.3d 837, 845 (7th Cir. 2016) (“wealth, standing alone, is not an immutable characteristic of a cognizable social group”); but seeTapiero de Orejuela v. Gonzales, 423 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2005) (confirming that although wealth standing alone is not an immutable characteristic, the Respondent’s combined attributes of wealth, education status, and cattle rancher, satisfied the particular social group requirements). However, if Mr. S- can show that he was also targeted on account of his indigenous Mayan ancestry, he can perhaps also raise an asylum claim based on his ethnicity. The combination of his particular social group and ethnicity may be enough to entitle him to relief. See, e.g., Ordonez-Quino v. Holder, 760 F.3d 80, 90 (1st Cir. 2014) (Respondent demonstrated that his “Mayan Quiché identity was ‘at least one central reason’ why he” was persecuted).

As business immigration attorneys may also point out, if Mr. S- can somehow locate an employer in the US to sponsor him, he may be eligible for employment-based relief based on his Master’s degree, prior experience working in agriculture, and/or his business acumen on account of his successful restaurant management. Especially if Mr. S- is not released on bond and forced to adjudicate his claims in the Atlanta Immigration Court where asylum denial rates are high, his future attorney may also want to explore these unorthodox strategies.

Indigenous Mam-Speaking Guatemalan Persecuted on Account of His Race, Religion, and Particular Social Group

My third day, I met with Mr. G-, an indigenous Mam from Guatemala. Mr. G- is an incredibly devout Evangelical Christian and one of the purest souls I have ever met. He has resisted recruitment by rival gangs in his town and has been severely beaten because of his resistance. He says his belief in God and being a good person is why he has resisted recruitment. He did not want to be responsible for others’ suffering. The local gangs constantly assaulted Mr. G- due to his Mam heritage, his religion, and his resistance of them. He fled to the US to escape this persecution.

Mr. G- only speaks Mam, an ancient Mayan dialect. He does not speak Spanish. Because of this, he was unable to communicate with immigration officials about his credible fear of return to his country upon his initial arrival in November 2017. Fortunately, the USCIS asylum officer deferred Mr. G-’s credible fear interview until they could locate a Mam translator. However, one was never located, and he has been in immigration detention ever since.

August 29, 2018, nine months into his detention, was the first time he was able to speak to an attorney through an interpreter that spoke his language. Mr. G- was so out of the loop with what was going on, that he did not even know what the word “asylum” meant. For nine months, Mr. G- had to wait to find out what was going on and why he was in detention. My colleague, Jessica, and I, spoke with him for almost three hours. We could not provide him with satisfactory answers about whether SIFI would be able to take his case, and when or if he would be let out of detention. Given recent changes in the law, we couldn’t tell him if his asylum claim would ultimately prevail.

Mr. G- firmly stated that he will be killed if he was forced to go back to Guatemala. He said that if his asylum claim is denied, he will have to put his faith in God to protect him from what is a certain death. He said God is all he has.

Even without answers, this client thanked us until he was blue in the face. He said he did not have any money to pay us but wanted us to know how grateful he was for our help and that he would pray for us. Despite the fact that his life was hanging in the balance, he was more concerned about our time and expense helping him. He went on and on for several minutes about his gratitude. It was difficult for us to hold back tears.

Mr. G- is the reason asylum exists, but under our current framework, he will almost certainly be deported, especially if he cannot locate an attorney. Mr. G- has an arguable claim under Ordonez-Quino v. Holder, on account of his Mam heritage, and an arguable claim on account of his Evangelical Christianity, given that Mr. G-’s persecution was compounded by his visible Mam ethnicity and vocal Evangelical beliefs. His resistance to gang participation will be difficult to overcome, though, as the case law on the subject is primarily negative. See, e.g., Bueso-Avila v. Holder, 663 F.3d 934 (7th Cir. 2011) (finding insufficient evidence that MS-13 targeted Petitioner on account of his Christian beliefs, finding instead that the evidence supported the conclusion that the threats were based on his refusal to join the gang, which is not a protected ground). Mr. G-’s low prospects of success are particularly heart-wrenching. When we as a country fail to protect those seeking refuge from persecution, especially those fleeing religious persecution, we destroy the very ideals upon which this country was founded.

Twenty-Year Old Political Activist From Honduras, Assaulted by Military Police on Account of His Political Opinion

I also assisted in the drafting of a bond motion for a 20 year-old political activist from Honduras, Mr. O-, who had been severely beaten by the military police on account of his political opinion and activism.

Mr. O- was a prominent and vocal member of an opposition political group in Honduras. During the November 2017 Honduran presidential elections, Mr. O- assisted members of his community to travel to the polling stations. When election officials closed the polls too early, Mr. O- reached out to military police patrolling the area to demand that they re-open the polling stations so Hondurans could rightfully cast their votes. The military police became angry with Mr. O-’s insistence and began to beat him by stomping and kicking him, leaving him severely wounded. Mr. O- reported the incident to the police, but was told there was nothing they could do.

A few weeks later, Mr. O- was specifically targeted again by the military police when he was on his way home from a political meeting. The police pulled him from his car and began to beat him, accusing him of being a rioter. He was told to leave the country or else he would be killed. He was also warned that if he went to the national police, that he would be killed. Fearing for his life, Mr. O- fled to the US in April 2018 and has been in detention ever since.

SIFI was able to take on his bond case in August, and by the end of my trip, the SIFI team had submitted his request for bond. Since Mr. O-’s asylum claim is particularly strong, and because he has family in the US, it is highly likely that his bond will be granted. From there, we can only hope that he encounters an IJ that appropriately follows the law and will grant him asylum.”

(The author thanks Jessica Greenberg and Deirdre Stradone for their constant mentorship as well as providing the author the opportunity to go to Folkston. The author also thanks Lucia della Paolera for her advocacy, passion, and critical interpretation assistance. Finally, the author expresses the utmost gratitude to the team at SIFI, who work day in and day out to provide excellent representation to the detained migrants and asylum-seekers detained at Folkston ICE Processing Center.)

Photos from my trip to Folkston, GA:

The Folkston ICE Processing Center.

Downtown Folkston, GA.

Volunteers from Left to Right: Sophia Genovese (author), Deirdre Stradone (Staff Attorney at African Services Committee), Jessica Greenberg (Staff Attorney at ASC/ICLC), and Lucia della Paolera (volunteer interpreter).

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Many thanks to the incomparable Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis for forwarding this terrific and timely piece! These are the kinds of individuals that Jeff Sessions would like Immigration Judges to sentence to death or serious harm without Due Process and contrary to asylum and protection law.

As Sophia cogently points out, since the beginning of this Administration it has been private lawyers, most serving pro bono or “low bono,” who have been courageously fighting to uphold our Constitution and the rule of law from the cowardly scofflaw White Nationalist attacks by Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and the rest of the outlaws. In a significant number of cases, the Article III Federal Courts have agreed and held the scofflaws at least legally (if not yet personally) accountable.

Like any bully, Sessions resents having to follow the law and having higher authorities tell him what to do. He has repeatedly made contemptuous, disingenuous legal arguments and presented factual misrepresentations in support of his lawless behavior and only grudgingly complied with court orders. He has disrespectfully and condescendingly lectured the courts about his authority and their limited role in assuring that the Constitution and the law are upheld. That’s why he loves lording it over the US Immigration Courts where he is simultaneously legislator, investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, appellate court, and executioner in violation of common sense and all rules of legal ethics.

But, Sessions will be long gone before most of you new US Immigration Judges will be. He and his “go along to get along enablers” certainly will be condemned by history as the “21st Century Jim Crows.” Is that how you want to be remembered — as part of a White Nationalist movement that essentially is committed to intentional cruelty, undermining our Constitution, and disrespecting the legal and human rights and monumental contributions to our country of people of color and other vulnerable groups?

Every US Immigration Judge has a chance to stand up and be part of the solution rather than the problem. Do you have the courage to follow the law and the Constitution and to treat asylum applicants and other migrants fairly and impartially, giving asylum applicants the benefit of the doubt as intended by the framers of the Convention? Will you take the necessary time to carefully consider, research, deliberate, and explain each decision to get it right (whether or not it meets Sessions’s bogus “quota system”)? Will you properly factor in all of the difficulties and roadblocks intentionally thrown up by this Administration to disadvantage and improperly deter asylum seekers? Will you treat all individuals coming before you with dignity, kindness, patience, and respect regardless of the ultimate disposition of their cases. This is the “real stuff of genuine judging,” not just being an “employee.”

Or will you, as Sessions urges, treat migrants as “fish in a barrel” or “easy numbers,” unfairly denying their claims for refuge without ever giving them a real chance. Will you prejudge their claims and make false imputations of fraud, with no evidence, as he has? Will you give fair hearings and the granting of relief under our laws the same urgency that Sessions touts for churning out more removal orders. Will you resist Sessions’s disingenuous attempt to shift the blame for the existing mess in the Immigration Courts from himself, his predecessors, the DHS, and Congress, where it belongs, to the individuals and their attorneys coming before you in search of justice (and also, of course, to you for not working hard enough to deny more continuances, cut more corners, and churn out more rote removal orders)?

How will history judge you and your actions, humanity, compassion, understanding, scholarship, attention to detail, willingness to stand up for the rights of the unpopular, and values, in a time of existential crisis for our nation and our world?

Your choice. Choose wisely. Good luck. Do great things!

PWS

09-11-18

 

GONZO’S WORLD: HOW SESSIONS IGNORES FACTS AND MISREPRESENTS STATISTICS TO SUPPORT HIS PRE-ORDAINED RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST AGENDA! — “[A] bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-rejected-report-showing-refugees-did-not-pose-major-n906681

Dan De Luce and Julia Edwards Ainsley report for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugeesdid not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News.

Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.

At a meeting in September 2017 with senior officials discussing refugee admissions, a representative from the National Counterterrorism Center came ready to present a report that analyzed the possible risks presented by refugees entering the country.

But before he could discuss the report, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand dismissed the report, saying her boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would not be guided by its findings.

“We read that. The attorney general doesn’t agree with the conclusions of that report,” she said, according to two officials familiar with the meeting, including one who was in the room at the time.

Brand’s blunt veto of the intelligence assessment shocked career civil servants at the interagency meeting, which seemed to expose a bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda. Her response also amounted to a rejection of her own department’s view, as the FBI, part of the Justice Department, had contributed to the assessment.

“She just dismissed them,” said the former official who attended the meeting.

The intelligence assessment was “inappropriately discredited as a result of that exchange,” said the ex-official. The episode made clear that “you weren’t able to have an honest conversation about the risk.”

A current DHS official defended the administration’s response to the intelligence assessment, saying immigration policy in the Trump administration does not rely solely on “historical data about terrorism trends,” but rather “is an all-of-the-above approach that looks at every single pathway that we think it is possible for a terrorist to come into the United States.”

A spokeswoman for DHS said, “If we only look at what terrorists have done in the past, we will never be able to prevent future attacks … We cannot let dangerous individuals slip through the cracks and exploit our refugee program, which is why we have implemented security enhancements that would prevent such violent individuals from reaching our shores, while still upholding our humanitarian ideals.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Following the dismissal of the assessment, anti-immigration hard-liners in the administration clashed with civil servants about how to portray the possible threat from refugees in documents drafted for inter-agency discussions, former officials said. In the end, the president’s decision last year to lower the ceiling for refugee admissions to 45,000 did not refer to security threats, but cited staffing shortages at DHS as the rationale. But once the decision was issued, the White House released a public statement that suggested the president’s decision was driven mainly by security concerns and said “some refugees” admitted into the country had posed a threat to public safety.

An Afghan refugee sleeps on the ground while another looks out a window in an abandoned warehouse where they and other migrants took refuge in Belgrade, Serbia, on Feb. 1, 2017.
An Afghan refugee sleeps on the ground while another looks out a window in an abandoned warehouse where they and other migrants took refuge in Belgrade, Serbia, on Feb. 1, 2017.Muhammed Muheisen / AP file

“President Donald J. Trump is taking the responsible approach to promote the safety of the American people,” said the Sept. 29 statement.

Political appointees in the Trump administration then wrote a new report a few months later that seemed to contradict the view of the country’s spy agencies.

The January 2018 report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security stated that “three out of every four, or 402, individuals convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. federal courts between September 11, 2001, and December 31, 2016 were foreign-born.”

In a press release at the time, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the report showed the need for tougher screening of travelers entering the country and served as “a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists.”

But the report is being challenged in court by several former officials and rights groups who say it inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S. Two lawsuits filed in Massachusetts and California allege the report improperly excludes incidents committed by domestic terrorists, like white supremacists, and wrongfully includes a significant number of naturalized U.S. citizens and foreigners who committed crimes overseas and were brought to the United States for the purpose of standing trial.

Rachel Brand
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand speaks during the opening of the summit on Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking at Department of Justice in Washington, on Feb. 2, 2018.Jose Luis Magana / AP file

Mary McCord, former assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which prosecutes terrorism charges, said the January 2018 report is “unfortunately both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.”

When the report was released in January 2018, Trump tweeted that it showed the need to move away from “random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit based” because it showed that “the nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born.”

But the report only focuses on international terrorism, which is defined as a crime committed on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization. The document excludes domestic terrorism committed by groups such as white supremacists or anti-government militias, which are more likely to be supported by those born in the U.S.

Because of the way the terrorism statute is written, those who support domestic organizations like anti-government or white supremacists groups cannot be charged with terrorism, even if the groups they support have committed crimes. Only supporters of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the State Department can be charged with “material support” of terrorism.

Still, Trump has repeatedly stated that the overwhelming majority of terrorists in the United States came from overseas, even before the 2018 report.

In his first speech to Congress in February 2017, Trump said that the “vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our own country.”

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, MSNBC legal analyst and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, took issue with that statement and sued the Justice Department to provide documents that backed up the president’s claim. But the Department was unable to locate any records.

“There are a lot of domestic terrorism cases, and they are generally not committed by people born abroad. To the extent that those cases were excluded — white supremacist violence, anti-abortion terrorism and militia violence — the inquiry is grossly biased,” Wittes wrote on Lawfare.

Wittes said that almost 100, or about a quarter, of the 402 individuals listed as foreign-born terrorists committed their crimes overseas and were brought to the U.S. to face trial.
Stephen Miller
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller at roundtable discussion on California immigration policy at the White House on May 16.Evan Vucci / AP file

During her time in government as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Barbara Strack said her staff worked diligently to thoroughly vet refugees for any possible terrorist links. But she said there was no information she came across that indicated refugees posed a significant security threat.

“I did not see evidence that refugees presented an elevated national security risk compared to other categories of travelers to the United States,” she told NBC News.

The administration must decide by the end of the month how many refugees to allow in the country in the next fiscal year. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, known for his hawkish stance on immigration, has been pushing for a drastic reduction in the ceiling.

The cap was set at 45,000 last year, but the number of refugees allowed in the country has fallen far below that ceiling, with only about 20,000 resettled in the United States since October 2017. Rights advocates and former officials accuse the White House of intentionally slowing down the bureaucratic process to keep the numbers down, overloading the FBI and other government agencies with duplicative procedures.

This level of total intellectual dishonesty, overt racism, and policy driven solely by a White Nationalist philosophy and political agenda by an Attorney General is unprecedented in my experience at the DOJ.
If you remember, Brand escaped to a “soft landing” in the private sector earlier this year. One of my theories is that she was trying to protect herself and her reputation for a future Federal Judgeship. If and when that happens, I hope that those serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee will remember her completely sleazy role in carrying Sessions’s racist-polluted water on this one. Someone with no respect for facts, the law, humanity, or professional expertise definitely does not deserve to be on the Federal Bench!
And for Pete’s sake don’t credit Sessions with any integrity whatsoever in not resigning under pressure from our “Mussolini Wannabe.” He’s not “protecting” the Mueller investigation or anything else worthy in the DOJ. In fact, he has wholly politicized the DOJ and taken it down into the gutter. The reason he “hangs on” is not because he respects the Constitution or rule of law. Clearly, he doesn’t! No, it’s because he wants to do as much damage to civil rights and people of color as he can during his toxic tenure.
Make no mistake, that damage he has done, as has been reported elsewhere, is very substantial. It has set the goals that Dr. Martin Luther King and others fought for and even gave their lives for back by decades. Despicable!

Sessions’s White-Nationalist driven lies and false narratives about refugees are described above. For the truth about refugees and immigrants and all of the great things they have done and continue to do for our country, see my recent post at https://wp.me/p8eeJm-313.

Due Process Forever — Jeff Sessions Never!

PWS

09-07-18

WASHPOST: RACISTS FIND HOME IN TODAY’S GOP —From Dissing Mexican Americans, To Barring Muslims, Abandoning Refugees, Restricting Legal Immigration, Slamming Families, & Encouraging Voter Suppression, GOP Appears To Be “All In” On “Built To Fail” Strategy Of Making America White Again: “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/im-not-going-there-as-trump-hurls-racial-invective-most-republicans-stay-silent/2018/08/18/aab7fd8a-a189-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html

August 18 at 6:14 PM

The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog” — but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) had no interest in talking about it.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind, so I really don’t have a comment on that,” said the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, chuckling at the question.

 Has President Trump ever said anything on race that made Cornyn uncomfortable? “I think the most important thing is to pay attention to what the president does, which I think has been good for the country,” the senator demurred.

What about his constituents back home — are they concerned? “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that,” Cornyn said, politely ending the brief interview in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. “I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.”

And so it went last week among Republicans: As Trump immersed the nation in a new wave of fraught battles over race, most GOP lawmakers tried to ignore the topic altogether. The studied avoidance is a reflection of the enduring reluctance of Republicans to confront Trump’s often divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, in part because the president remains deeply popular within a party dominated by older white voters.

The Washington Post reached out to all 51 Republican senators and six House Republican leaders asking them to participate in a brief interview about Trump and race. Only three senators agreed to participate: Jeff Flake of Arizona, David Perdue of Georgia and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate.

Trump has a history of mocking his black critics’ intelligence

President Trump insulted NBA player LeBron James’s intelligence in a tweet Aug. 3. It’s not the first time Trump has taken this approach.

Flake, a frequent Trump critic who is retiring, rattled off examples when asked if there were times he felt Trump had been racially insensitive.

“It started long before his campaign, the whole Barack Obama, the birtherism . . . that was abhorrent, I thought,” Flake said in a phone interview. “And then you know, the Mexican rapists . . . on his first official day as a campaign. And then you know, Judge Curiel, the statement that he couldn’t judge because of his heritage. Failure to, you know, condemn in Charlottesville. Just the willingness to go there, all the time. Muslim ban. This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. It’s just — it’s been one thing after another.”

Six other lawmakers granted impromptu interviews when approached in the Capitol, although most declined to be specific about whether they were uncomfortable with any of Trump’s statements on race. One exception was Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, another Trump critic who is leaving Congress in January.

 “It’s a formula that I think they think works for them, as it relates to winning,” Corker said, referring to the use of divisive racial issues by Trump and his advisers. “I think that’s their kind of governing. I think that’s how they think they stay in power, is to divide.”

Several other lawmakers said they did not like some of Trump’s language, especially on race, but did not consider Trump to be racist.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Trump’s description of former black adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog” was “not appropriate, ever.” But he stopped short of pointing to a time when he felt the president had crossed a racial boundary.

“I just think that’s the way he reacts and the way he interacts with people who attack him,” Thune said. “I don’t condone it. But I think it’s probably part built into his — it’s just going to be in his DNA.”

The month of August — which included the first anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville — has seen Trump unleash a steady tide of racially charged invective, including questioning the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James, attacking Chinese college students and reviving his attacks on anthem protests by black NFL players. At one point last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she could not guarantee that no audio recording exists of Trump using the n-word, as Manigault Newman alleges in her book.

Republicans have struggled over issues of race since the Civil Rights era, with periodic efforts to appeal to blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Trump’s critics within the party fear that, in an increasingly diverse nation, the president is reopening wounds many Republicans had sought to heal.

Trump and his allies frequently counter by offering economic data that they say is favorable to minorities, seeking to separate Trump’s harsh rhetoric from his policy agenda.

But some longtime party stalwarts worry about the long-term consequences of the party’s near-silence on race.

Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant and vocal Trump critic, bemoaned “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”

“Trump’s shtick is that he’s the grievance candidate,” Murphy said. “He’s focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter. . . . He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That’s Trump’s DNA.”

. . . .

Perdue said in an interview that he believes Trump is results-focused and “trying to be all-inclusive,” and that Democrats are the ones using race as a political issue.

“Well, I hope they will,” Perdue said. “I have many friends in the African American community and they’re tired of being treated as pawns.”

But Republicans who believe that Trump has galloped past norms of civil society on race and other issues worry about the costs the party may ultimately pay, both politically and morally.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Read the rest of the article at the link.
Not surprising to see modern-day Jim Crows like Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) out there carrying water for the Trump/Sessions brand of 21st Century racism. After all, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that America needs more legal immigration and that family-based immigration is good for America, Perdue is one of the chief sponsors of the CIS-inspired bogus merit-based immigration bill that actually reduces legal immigration in a losing attempt to bar immigrants of color and “Keep America White As Long As Possible.”  Donald Trump trying to be “all-inclusive?” How’s that David, by dissing African-Americans, calling them “dogs,” dehumanizing immigrants, slurring Hispanics, taking protections away from transgender kids, taking away security clearances of critics, attacking the free press, attacking the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community, promoting a false narrative about voter fraud, or telling thousands of lies since assuming office? Which one of these is “all inclusive?” The only “inclusive” thing about Donald Trump is that the majority of Americans who aren’t in his overwhelmingly White Guy “core.” are all included in his insults, lies, and disrespect!
I also thought that the final comment about the late George Wallace was telling. Yup, Wallace accomplished some things in Alabama including getting more textbooks. (Remember that Adolf Hitler built great Autobahns too!) But, the screaming crowds of White Folks who supported Wallace on the national stage weren’t excited about textbooks or better roads — they loved the message of racism and White Supremacy. And, that’s exactly how history will remember Wallace and his supporters — not for the textbooks, but for the public defense and advocacy of racism (just like Hitler isn’t remembered for his Autobahns). Which is how Trump, his “base,” and his many enablers (whether enthusiastic, merely willing, or downright cowardly) will also be remembered!
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Still doubt the racism of Trump and his agenda. check out this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic entitled “The First White President:” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

****************************************
I encourage you to read Coates’s entire totally cogent expose of the Supreme ugliness of Trump, his “team,” and his core supporters. No, you can’t really separate Donald Trump’s policies from his racism.
That’s why America needs regime change at the ballot box. NOW!
PWS
08-18-18

JASON JOHNSON @ WASHPOST: YES, TRUMP IS A RACIST, AS ARE MILLER, SESSIONS, BANNON & THE REST OF THE WHITE NATIONALIST CREW — “If you think a racial slur is the only way to determine if the president is racist, you haven’t been paying attention, and you don’t understand what racism is.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/08/15/is-trump-a-racist-you-dont-need-an-n-word-tape-to-know/?utm_term=.427cd1460cea

Jason Johnson writes in the Washington Post:

Associate professor at Morgan State University and politics editor for the Root

August 15

Omarosa Manigault Newman — who once declared that “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump” — evolved from mentee to frenemy to antagonist before her nonstop media blitz promoting her new post-White House tell-all, during which she’s touted the existence of a recording of Trump using the n-word. It’s all sent the White House scrambling, with the president tweetingMonday that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday she “can’t guarantee” Americans will never hear audio of Trump using the slur.

It doesn’t matter.

Trump is a racist. That doesn’t hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It’s about the totality of his presidency, and after 18 months you can see his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not.

ADVERTISING

Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump’s antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In the ’70s, his real estate company was the subject of a federal investigation that found his employees had secretly marked the paperwork of minority apartment rental applicants with codes such as “C” for “colored.” After black and Latino teenagers were charged with sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, he took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. He never backtracked or apologized when the teenagers’ convictions were overturned. He championed birtherism, and wouldn’t disavow the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya until the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president, he’s targeted African American athletes for criticism, whether it’s ranting, “Get that son of a bitch off the field,” in reference to professional football players silently protesting police brutality or tweeting that:

Calling African American Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) a “low IQ person” is now a routine bit at his political rallies. He was quoted referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole” countries. He announced his campaign in 2015 by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Later that year, he called for the United States to implement a “total and complete” Muslim ban.

After taking office, he hired xenophobes such as Stephen Miller — an architect of the ban, whose hostility toward immigrants is so stark, and hypocritical, that his uncle excoriated him this week in an essay for Politico Magazine, writing of Miller and Trump that “they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.”

I could go on. The point is that Trump’s view of nonwhites is out in the open. As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci notes, there’s every reason “to believe that an n-word tape wouldn’t torpedo Trump’s presidency”; there’s no indication his supporters “will turn against him because he used a racial slur.” Trump’s words and deeds over time have demonstrated his racism — it doesn’t hinge on being outed, Paula Deen-style, by a tape of him using the word. Racism hardly ever does.

I’m not saying it would be okay for Trump to use any variation of the n-word — in jest, in anger, singing along to the lyrics of a song, with or without the hard “R.” But the feverish speculation about whether he ever deployed the term wrongly implies that a verdict on his racist character turns on its use. What matters more about Trump are the positions he’s taken and the policy choices he’s made that harm communities of color. In his first year as president, Trump evolved from mere interpersonal racist to racist enabler when he proclaimed there were “very fine people, on both sides” when white supremacists and anti-racist protesters converged in Charlottesville last year. Jeff Sessions, a senator from Alabama who, three decades ago, was denieda federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee over concerns that he was a racist, was installed by Trump as attorney general.

Since assuming that role, Sessions has worked to undermine consent decrees meant to restrain racially abusive police departments and explicitly articulated the administration’s intent to use family separation to deter immigration. The Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos, is dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Trump hired Manigault Newman as a liaison to black constituent groups based on their reality TV relationship and, according to him, her willingness to say “GREAT things” about him, despite almost universal criticism of her appointment and subsequent work by African American Republicans and Democrats.

Being a racist — which entails belief in a fixed racial hierarchy and the power to act upon that belief in commerce, government or social spaces — is not now, and never has been, about one word or one slip of the tongue. It is about the ability of those in power to use public and private resources to enforce a racial hierarchy, whether that means having black people arrested for sitting in Starbucks, refusing to hire or promote qualified black job applicants or staffing a presidential administration with people who tolerate or encourage white nationalists. Trump’s statements and his approach to governance suggest he believes in a set racial hierarchy, and the possible existence of a hyped tape doesn’t change that. So far, and as far as I know, no one’s produced audio of white nationalist participants in last Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington using the n-word. Presumably, by the logic of some Trump defenders, that would mean there’s no proof they’re racist, either.

If American public discourse on race continues to revolve around a game of “gotcha,” with sentiments and smoking guns, divorced from an acknowledgment of how racists use their power, we won’t make any progress, during this administration or any other.

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

Johnson states a simple truth that some don’t want to acknowledge. But, racist anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Mexican American, xenophobic “dog whistles” were at the heart of Trump’s campaign and remain at the heart of his policies, particularly on immigration, refugees, and law enforcement.

Does that mean that the majority of Americans who don’t endorse racism don’t need to deal with the fact that Trump is President and that Sessions and Miller are exercising outsized control over our justice system? Or that today’s Trumpist GOP isn’t your grandparents’ GOP (in my case, my parents’ GOP) and, although they might occasionally mutter a few insincere “tisk, tisk’s,” are firmly committed to enabling Trump and his racist policies including, of course, voter disenfranchisement. Of course not. Just think of how African-Americans, Hispanics, and liberals had to deal in practical terms with Southern political power in the age of Jim Crow (which is basically the “Age of Jeff Sessions”).

But, it is essential for us to know and acknowledge who and what we are dealing with and not to let political expediency totally obscure the harsh truth. Trump is a racist. And, that sad but true fact will continue to influence all of his policies for as long as he remains in office. Indeed, “Exhibit 1,” is the failure of the GOP to achieve “no-brainer” Dreamer protection over the last two years and the stubborn insistence of Sessions and others in the GOP to keep tying up our courts with bogus attempts to terminate already limited protections for those who aren’t going anywhere in the first place.

PWS

08-18-18

 

GONZO’S WORLD: SPLC RESPONDS TO GONZO’S SLIME ATTACK!

 

We’re being attacked by Attorney General Jeff Sessions for standing up to anti-LGBT hate.

It’s an attack not just on us but on you and everyone else who believes in equality.

Yesterday, Sessions spoke to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group that vilifies the LGBT community and promotes discrimination against it in the name of religion.

Because of its bigotry, we’ve named the ADF a hate group.

It’s a label that’s richly deserved.

The ADF has promoted the myth that there’s a link between homosexuality and pedophilia – even though the weight of scientific authority has debunked the claim. Linking the two is not an expression of religious belief. It is simply a dangerous and ugly falsehood.

The group also supports the criminalization of sexual relations between consenting adults abroad … opposes anti-bullying policies that provide protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity … and is working to strip LGBT protections from U.S. law.

In his speech, Sessions attacked us for calling the ADF what it is – a hate group that would like to push the LGBT community into the closet if not into jail.

It’s ironic – and utterly hypocritical – for the attorney general to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.

After he made similar comments last week, we explained in a letter to the attorney general that we identify hate groups in a manner analogous to how the Justice Department defines hate crimes.

Just as religious beliefs would not be a defense to a hate crime prosecution, vilifying others in the name of religion should not immunize a group like the ADF from being designated as a hate group.

Sessions’ boss, President Trump, promised during his campaign to be a “real friend” to the LGBT community. Yet, Sessions has taken multiple actions to roll back protections for the LGBT community, as have Trump and other administration officials.

The nation’s top law enforcement officer should not be lending the prestige of his office to a group that wants to enshrine its bigotry into law.

But based on everything we’ve seen from this administration, it’s not surprising. It’s obvious that this administration is no “friend” to the LGBT community.

We don’t relish being attacked by the attorney general of the United States, but we’re not going to be intimidated by him.

With supporters like you behind us, you can rest assured that we’re not going to stop calling out hate when we see it. In the Trump era, it may be our most important job.

Thank you for standing with us.

Sincerely yours,

Richard Cohen Signature

Richard Cohen
President, Southern Poverty Law Center

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How upside down perverted has America become in the Age of Trump & the White Nationalists? Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is charged with standing up for the rights of all Americans, instead stands up for a hate group, lies, tramples the First Amendment separation of church and state, and slimes a courageous and highly respected civil rights group that has been fighting such hate and discrimination for many years. Incredibly, Sessions fans the flames of intolerance and hate while White Supremacist hate groups are preparing for another assault on the good people of Washington and Charlottesville!

This is just the latest in Gonzo’s perverted, White Nationalist, anti-American agenda. That such a misguided and prejudiced individual is actually the holder of high public office, which he regularly misuses to deliver messages of hate, intolerance, and ignorance of the law, is beyond appalling.

PWS

08-11-18

 

AS WHITE SUPREMACISTS GATHER TO DISRUPT NATION’S CAPITAL, SESSIONS SUCKS UP TO NOTORIOUS HOMOPHOBIC HATE GROUP – Blames SPLC For Outing His Misconduct & Group’s Agenda Of Hate & Intolerance, Cloaked In Bogus Christianity!

https://thinkprogress.org/jeff-sesions-says-adf-not-hate-group-e0e5af4dfe70/

Zack Ford reports for ThinkProgress:

Jeff Sessions wants to keep working with this hate group, so he told them they aren’t a hate group

The Alliance Defending Freedom is totally a hate group.

CREDIT: Win McNamee/Getty Images
CREDIT: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

A week after announcing a mysterious new “religious liberty task force,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions once again addressed the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on Wednesday. He assured them that he does not believe they are a hate group for constantly advocating for discrimination against LGBTQ people, and then claimed that his Department of Justice does not “partner with any groups that discriminate.”

Sessions previously spoke to ADF last June, and his at-the-time secret address caused quite a backlash as many in the media pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. His remarks were later made public, and ADF took a conservative media tour to claim that they were a victim of this false accusation.

This time, Sessions addressed the controversy head on. After mentioning “the ordeal faced bravely by Jack Phillips,” the baker ADF represented in Supreme Court who blatantly discriminated against a same-sex couple, Sessions told the group that people of faith are facing “a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith.”

“You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts,” he said. “They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals. No, they just call people names—like ‘hate group.’”

Sessions claimed that groups like the SPLC wield the “hate group” designation to “bully and intimidate” conservative groups “that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience.” He noted, for example, that the label led Amazon to disqualify ADF from its Smile fundraising program.

“You and I may not agree on everything — but I wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: you are not a hate group,” he said.

Contrary to Sessions’ claims, there are ample facts to substantiate ADF’s designation as an anti-LGBTQ hate group — so much so that it’s pure gaslighting to say otherwise. The group has defended wedding vendors challenging nondiscrimination laws, parents and schools that want to reject transgender students, and businesses that want the right to refuse to even employ LGBTQ people. They have even repeatedly advocated for the criminalization of homosexuality. Media Matters recently published a massive report cataloging the litany of ways ADF has demonized LGBTQ people and lobbied against their basic civil rights.

Sessions had made similar remarks about hate group designations at last week’s religious liberty summit, and the SPLC responded. In a letter to Sessions, SPLC President Richard Cohen highlighted some of the facts that led to hate group designations for groups like ADF and the Family Research Council (FRC). “Linking the LGBT community to pedophilia as the FRC and the ADF have done is not an expression of a religious belief,” he wrote. “It is simply a dangerous and ugly falsehood. As you know, FBI hate crime data show that the LGBT community is the minority group most likely targeted for violent hate crimes.”

“If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail,” Cohen wrote. “It’s inappropriate for the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lend the prestige of his office to this group. And it’s ironic to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.”

Sessions may also have been trying to protect his own reputation. In the same speech to ADF, he also insisted that the DOJ “will not partner with hate groups. Not on my watch.”

But of course the DOJ partners constantly with ADF. The Trump administration has backed ADF’s position in multiple cases, ADF’s representatives were front and center at last week’s religious liberty summit (including former ADF staff who now work for the DOJ), and Sessions even consulted with ADF when drafting the “religious freedom” guidance that the new task force will enforce. It’s just that Sessions himself has long advocated against LGBTQ equality, so he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong or hateful when it comes to taking such positions.

Anti-LGBTQ conservatives were quite flattered to have the U.S. attorney general’s support. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist, as examples, were quick to praise Sessions’ remarks and join the pile-on to smear the SPLC. Rather than respond to the detailed critiques the SPLC provides about their prejudiced positions, anti-LGBTQ hate groups have instead campaigned to besmirch the historic civil rights organization’s reputation.

With Sessions constantly catering to these groups, they have only been more emboldened to express their discriminatory beliefs — further confirming the legitimacy of the SPLC’s designation.
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Yeah, pretty much says it all about our totally unqualified AG. Pumping up hate groups on the eve of a White Supremacist rally. Just what the country needs from its chief law officer! But, I suppose what you’d expect from a unrepenitent child abuser. Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to tell America who Jeff Sessions really is. But she was silenced and smeared by Mitch McConnell and the GOP, just like the SPLC is being smeared by Sessions.
I actually do have some “higher ideals” to propose — stop misusing the loving, inclusive, foregiving teachings of Jesus Christ in support of hate campaigns against the LGBTQ community; tolerate and respect all people as they are; stop discriminating against LGBTQ individuals; let transgender kids use the bathroom; stop trying to criminalize consenting sexual relations between adults; stop defending business people who bring their religion into the public marketplace by refusing to supply goods and services to members of the LGBTQ community based on so-called “religious beliefs.” Fundamentally, it’s no different than a lunch counter owner claiming that his “religion” forbade him to serve African Americans or Jews.
This story is “Classic Gonzo.”  Confronted with facts — ADF  is a hate group — and the law —  ethics considerations forbid the AG from speaking to hate groups, Sessions lies — says ADF isn’t a hate group — implicitly blames the victims — the LGBTQ community,— and smears their defenders — the SPLC — who happened to be on the side of truth. He also, as he no doubt intended, sent a strong message to all hate groups in America, from White Supremacists on down — Don’t worry, I’ve got your back! As if there were ever any doubt!
Fortunately, Sessions and his disingenuous cohorts won’t be able to evade the judgment of history. That’s why it’s important to keep making the record about who he really is and what he really believes in. And, I can guarantee you it’s not the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, human decency, or American democracy!
PWS
08-09-18

GONZO’S WORLD: AG’S LATEST SCAM, “RELIGIOUS LIBERTY TASK FORCE” @ USDOJ WIDELY PANNED!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/twitter-sessions-religious-liberty-task-force_us_5b5f92bae4b0b15aba9bfcff

Mary Pappenfuss reports for HuffPost:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the U.S. Justice Department is launching a “religious liberty task force” — and Twitter erupted.

The new unit will aid the department in fully implementing the religious liberty legal “guidance” issued last year under President Donald Trump’s direction, Sessions said in a speech at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit in Washington.

The attorney general charged that the freedom to practice religion in America has come “under attack” in the nation’s current “cultural climate.”

A “dangerous movement, undetected by many, but real, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom …. It must be confronted … and defeated,” he added.

“We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives. We’ve seen United States senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma …. We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips,” Sessions added, referring to the Colorado baker who won a religious liberty challenge to LGBTQ anti-discrimination law in the U.S. Supreme Court after refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Sessions called freedom of religion “indeed our first freedom being the first listed right in the First Amendment” and said that the Trump administration is “actively seeking to accommodate people of faith.”

Sessions touted his department’s prosecution of attacks on religion, among them court actions shielding about 90 plaintiffs from Obama-era requirements that employer health insurance cover contraception, an amicus brief “we were proud to file” on behalf of Phillips, and indictments in an arson attack and threats directed at two mosques.

Twitter exploded, with critics charging that the Religious Liberty Task Force was a front to protect religious zealots attacking LGBTQ rights and an unconstitutional push to marry church and state on the altar of Christianity.

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Read the entire Article, including the “Twitter Storm” at the link. Some pretty funny but “right on” reactions!

Yet another taxpayer-financed scam by our corrupt and bigoted Attorney General. Obviously this is a thinly disguised effort to use Government funding and power to promote and establish far right-wing Christian views and biases.

Don’t expect any help for Muslims targeted for hate crimes, irrationally excluded under the “Travel Ban,” or targeted by anti-Muslim pronouncements of Administration officials and GOP right-wing politicos. Don’t expect any assistance or protection for those religious groups actually engaged in “God’s work on earth” and carrying out Christ’s true humanitarian, forgiving teachings by providing help to migrants and resisting inhumane and illegal Administration policies. Don’t expect any help for Bhuddists, atheists, deists, or any other non-right-wing Christian groups trying to vindicate their First Amendment rights. Don’t expect any help for members of the LGBTQ community whose rights are being trampled upon by so-called Christians who promote intolerance, discrimination, humiliation, de-humanization, and hate in the name of false “religious expression.”

Interestingly, Sessions himself has been charged within the Methodist Church (of which my wife and I are members) with violation of teachings of Christ and the Church’s own rules and values.

He’s a total scofflaw and a fraud, seeking to impose his corrupt, inhumane, intolerant views on the rest of us by abusing his Government position and squandering taxpayer funds on an anti-Constitutional  attempt to establish particular “so-called Christian views” as the law of the land.

PWS

08-01-18

 

 

SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ (D-HI) @ LA TIMES: NO, FAILURE TO REUNITE MORE MIGRANT FAMILIES ISN’T JUST ABOUT THIS ADMINISTRATION’S UNDOUBTED INCOMPETENCE – IT’S REALLY ABOUT SESSIONS’S PURE, INTENTIONAL CRUELTY & RACISM! — “This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-schatz-family-reunification-20180727-story.html

Senator Schatz writes:

The failure of the U.S. government to reverse the kidnapping of migrant children from their parents has been chalked up to incompetence. People want to believe that this act of extraordinary cruelty — and the Trump administration’s inability to fix it — stems from our leaders’ lack of experience or common sense.

But this too is a failure — of our collective imagination. Although the government claimed it met the Thursday deadline to reunite families, it admitted that hundreds of parents had been deported without their children. The separation policy was designed to inflict harm. And the resolution process is chaotic by design.

How else can we explain what has happened to these families? Some 14 million checked bags are managed by the Transportation Security Administration — and that’s just during Thanksgiving weekend. Even high school students can manage a coat check for an evening without losing everyone’s coats. They match each coat and owner with corresponding tickets, and do not store the coats outside the building, or even thousands of miles away from the event.

This administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies.

The administration did not take even these basic measures when it began to separate children — not coats! — from their parents. It did not use corresponding numbers for the files of parents and children, or take photos of families together, or hand out hospital-style bracelets. It did not house families near one another, choosing instead to hold mothers in California and daughters in Chicago, fathers in Texas and sons in New York City.

In fact, the administration seems to have taken a comprehensive inventory of confiscated items — sneakers, toothpaste, rosaries — everything except which child belongs to which parent.

These are the actions of a government that intended to separate families but did not intend to reunite them. It meant to inflict so much suffering that other families wouldn’t make the dangerous trek. No matter how bad the violence might be in Central America, surely these families would choose to stay united rather than come and be separated.

In fact, through all the blather, the Trump administration has admitted as much.

“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America,” White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2017. Even separate children from their parents, asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer? “Yes.”

“We expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect,” Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Steven Wagner told reporters in June.

“Hopefully people will get the message,” Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said casually on Fox News in June.

But according to the Department of Homeland Security, no one has been deterred. The number of families stopped at the border actually increased by 64% in the months after the administration began to separate families. So even if you could stomach traumatizing toddlers, this policy did not accomplish Sessions’ objective of sending a warning across the desert.

Still, cruelty has its uses. Across the country, Republicans have made the Trump administration’s immigration stance their rallying cry for reelection, running more than 14,000 campaign ads this year bragging about their efforts to “stop illegals.” And last month, Sessions spelled out the administration’s plan to use all the bad press for good.

“We do not want to separate parents from their children,” he clarified. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”

In other words, this administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies. But let’s be clear: No lawmaker of any party should ever accede to a legislative demand in response to the intentional infliction of harm.

The American people must also speak up. Our government has kidnapped children from their parents. It forces these lost boys and girls to say the Pledge of Allegiance while they are held captive in building wings named for U.S. presidents. (It is not hard to believe that President Reagan would be aghast.)

This is not who we are, we want to say, but that isn’t quite true. This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.

Will it work again? That’s up to us.

Brian Schatz representsHawaii in the U.S. Senate.

 

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Senator Schatz provides a clear, succinct, powerful statement as to why we need regime change if American is to remain a great, diverse nation that uses the full abilities and respects the lives, dignity, potential, and rights of all of those who reside here now and may do so in the future.

“MAGA” has always been a not-so-thinly veiled exhortation to “Keep America As White As Possible For As Long As Possible No Matter How Much Damage We Inflict.”

Yeah, I remember that after his confirmation, I was willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt” and hope that he meant his sworn testimony that he would rise above his past as a partisan Senator and represent the rights and dignity of all Americans (which, of course, would include those Americans residing here and protected by our Constitution regardless of “status”).

However, it didn’t take long to see that it was just more of the perjury and lies that roll so effortlessly off Sessions’s tongue. What he actually intended all along was to use his good fortune in being somewhat unexpectedly elevated to the Attorney Generalship to carry out a heinous, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, restrictionist, extreme right program directed against people of color, women, children, and other vulnerable minorities. This is the type of horrible program that had always driven him, but that had been able to inflict little actual damage on America due to Sessions’s “outlier” position, even among his fellow GOP Senators.

To be fair, that’s precisely what Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Corey Booker, and the Black Caucus tried to tell the Senate and the rest of American during the confirmation process. But, they were silenced or ignored. Now, innocent kids, families, abused women, and the international reputation of our entire nation are all “paying the price” for Sessions as AG.

Vote for “regime change” this November. Vote for accountability, decency, the real “rule of law,” and to rein in and ideally remove Jeff Sessions from office before he can do further damage to humanity and to our country!

PWS

07-27-18

 

WASHPOST: THE LATEST VULNERABLE GROUP TARGETED BY THE TRUMP/SESSIONS DEATH SQUADS: LGBTQ REFUGEES!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-sending-lgbtq-migrants-back-to-hell/2018/07/24/eb305d72-8ec3-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html?utm_term=.c1e37f62bd81

From the Washington Post Editorial Board:

Trump is sending LGBTQ migrants ‘back to hell’

IN THE 1990s, the United States was among the first countries to start granting sanctuary to LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution stemming from their sexual orientation or gender identity in their home countries. Now the Trump administration, intent on turning back the clock on almost every major facet of immigration policy, is increasingly complicit in their mistreatment.

As administration officials have intensified their efforts to hollow out the asylum system — narrowing eligibility criteria, creating bottlenecks for would-be asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and tearing apart families as a means of deterring future applicants — LGBTQ individuals have suffered inordinately. That is particularly true in the case of those from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Central America where sexual and gender-based violence is pervasive.

There are no statistics to indicate that LGBTQ asylum seekers are refused admittance to the United States more (or less) frequently than other applicants, though the rate at which migrants of all sorts are granted asylum seems to be plummeting because of the administration’s policies. However, sending LGBTQ migrants back across the southwestern border to Mexico subjects them to heightened risks: According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, two-thirds of such individuals reported that they had suffered sexual or gender-based violence in Mexico after entering that country.

In the case of those deported to their countries of origin in the Northern Triangle, their fates are often even worse. A report last year from the rights group Amnesty International said LGBTQ deportees were effectively “sent back to hell,” based on the horrific conditions from which they fled in the first place. The UNHCR reported that 88 percent of LGBTQ asylum seekers had been victims of sexual and gender-based violence in their countries of origin.

Police and other law enforcement authorities in Central America and Mexico are often indifferent, and frequently overtly hostile, to the fate of LGBTQ individuals. A 34-year-old transgender woman interviewed by Amnesty International said she had fled El Salvador after receiving threats from a police officer who lived near her; when she tried to report him, she said, “the response was that they were going to lock me and my partner up.” She finally fled to Mexico, where she was harassed and abused by officials before finally being granted refugee status.

Another Salvadoran transgender woman interviewed by Amnesty International said that after reaching the United States, she was detained for more than three months in a cell with men — “they never took account of my sexuality or that I was trans.” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement sometimes, but not always, detains transgender women in a dedicated facility whose capacity is 60 beds.)

To qualify for asylum in the United States, migrants must prove they are subject to persecution in their home countries based on specific criteria, including identification with a particular social group, and that the government is either complicit in their mistreatment or powerless to stop it. By any reasonable assessment, many or most LGBTQ asylum seekers meet those criteria.

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The qualification of LGBTQ individuals for asylum was established more than two decades ago by the BIA’s decision in Matter of Tobaso-Alfonso, 20 I&N Dec. 819 (BIA 1990, 1994).
Since then, scores of well-documented LGBTQ asylum cases have been granted by the USCIS Asylum Office and in Immigration Court. Indeed, in the Arlington Immigration Court the cases were so well-documented by the counsel for the respondents that most could be “pre-tried” between the Assistant Chief Counsel and respondent’s counsel and placed on the Immigration Court’s “short docket” for brief hearings and granting of asylum.
Like refugees fleeing domestic violence, I found these cases to involve some of the most badly abused, most deserving, most grateful, and potentially most productive refugees that I dealt with over my many decades of involvement in t he U.S. refugee and asylum systems.
Once again, the biased, racist, White Nationalism of Trump, Sessions and their cronies have taken a well-working part of the asylum system and made it problematic.
We need regime change!
PWS
07-25-18