BAD NEWS FOR TEX. GOV. “GREG THE BIGOT” ABBOTT: U.S. District Judge Blocks Trump’s Illegal Anti-Refugee Order — But, Will Often Complicit Appellate Courts Uphold The Rule Of Law Or “Toady Up” To The Trump Regime’s White Nationalist Agenda?

Michelle Hackman
Michelle Hackman
Immigration Reporter
Wall Street Journal
Brent Kendall;
Brent Kendall
Legal Affairs Reporter
Wall Street Journal;

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-judge-blocks-trump-executive-order-on-refugees-11579108138?emailToken=575893ec6fe4b185f88708c59e175ef6CwUCcHqk/fEL6ReRFZZtuTxDwMXs7aS/qFBj8SMDh/g7NCEloF0znbPD48wkR6yiC0BZsPXe7V5mlXkbIptEUFTrxSHC0xOnxMYTwzWXscuGXaA/C7v5DN5I0vAE+Hef&reflink=article_email_share

Brent Kendall and Michelle Hackman report for the WSJ:

A fed­eral judge in Mary­land blocked Pres­i­dent Trump’s ex­ec­u­tive or­der giv­ing state and lo­cal gov­ern­ments the abil­ity to say no to hav­ing refugees placed in their com­mu­ni­ties.

U.S. Dis­trict Judge Pe­ter J. Mes­sitte is­sued a pre­lim­inary in­junc­tion Wednes­day that barred the ad­min­is­tration from im­ple­ment­ing the pres­i­dent’s or­der. He said refugee-re­set­tle­ment or­ga­ni­za­tions that sued to chal­lenge the pol­icy “are clearly likely to suc­ceed in show­ing, that, by giv­ing states and lo­cal gov­ernments veto power over the re­set­tle­ment of refugees within their bor­ders, the or­der is un­law­ful.”

Giv­ing states the power to de­ter­mine whether refugees will be re­ceived “flies in the face of clear con­gres­sional in­tent,” Judge Mes­sitte, a Clin­ton ap­pointee, said in the opin­ion.

. . . .

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Those with WSJ access can read the complete article at the above link.

This “victory” might be little more than symbolic for refugee advocates. In an unprecedented action, the Trump Administration has slowed the flow of legal refugees to a trickle and could simply use the “bureaucratic veto” to prevent any more from coming, as they have gotten away with in other areas.

Certainly, this should give lie to the Trump Administration’s inevitable argument to Federal Appeals Courts that this is an “emergency” requiring them to intervene prior to the completion of District Court proceedings. But, up until now, neither law nor reality has been much of a factor when it comes to the Supremes, and sometimes the Circuits, going “belly up” and allowing the regime to run roughshod over human lives and the rule of law in the immigration and refugee areas. 

Chief Justice Roberts wonders why the judiciary is treated with contempt by the regime and is losing respect from the large majority of the legal community not subservient to Trump. The answer is all too often pretty obvious.

Per MKL, Jr.:Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s an important message that all too many Federal Judges and other (supposedly responsible) public officials seem to have forgotten in the “Age of Trump” and his corrupt and overtly White Nationalist regime.

PWS

01-15-20

ROGER ALGASE @ ILW.COM: How The Trump Regime’s Gross Immorality, Inhumanity, & Illegality Have Replaced America’s Moral Leadership On The World Stage!

Roger Algase
Roger Algase
Immigration Attorney
New York, NY

https://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BXLvi&m=fxzs.sAL1oeaGWA&b=YSYqSh1DOxFOlVXvkRos2A

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ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post As asylum-seeker kills himself at the border, leading Jewish cleric condemns administration’s inhumanity toward desperate immigrants. Meanwhile, Trump ramps up hate for 2020 election By Roger Algase

01-10-2020, 09:08 AM

Update: January 11 1:42 pm:

For another viewpoint on the urgency of defeating Trump’s politics of hate against immigrants and other minorities in he upcoming election this November, see Kristian Ramos in The Hill (January 11):

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/477832-we-cant-let-white-nativism-politics-cloud-2020-election

Update: January 11 at 9:15 am:

Two late-breaking January 10 news stories show that Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up the hate against legal non-European immigrants in preparation for this November’s election.

The Washington Post reports that Texas has become the first state to bar resettlement of refugees under Trump’s executive order giving them the authority to do so. Admission to the UIS of legal refugees this year is already at an historic low under the agenda of Trump and Miller. Miller reportedly didn’t want to any refugees at all to be admitted this year.

For more on this latest show of bigotry by Texas Republican governor Greg Abbot, see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2020/01/10/texas-becomes-first-state-publicly-reject-refugees-under-trump-order

On the same day, The Guardian reports that Trump is planning to add unspecified additional countries to his infamous Muslim ban order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/trump-travel-ban-expansion

Both of these developments, which involve barring legal immigrants whose ethnicity or religion doesn’t happen to fit in with Trump’s avowed goal of admitting only immigrants from “Countries like Norway” and with Miller’s goal (expressed in almost 1,000 recent emails) of taking America’s immigration system back to the openly racist 1924 regime (which Adolf Hitler expressed so much admiration for in Mein Kampf) show that exploiting and stirring up more hate against nonwhite immigrants, including those eligible to come to the US legally, will be the order of the day for Trump’s re-election campaign.

My earlier comment follows below:

While the media remain focused on Donald Trump’s apparently now-abandoned threat to commit a war crime by blowing up cultural heritage sites in Iran, as an end result of his dehumanizing 2017 Muslim Ban order; or on the travesty that Senate Republicans are planning in order to “acquit” Trump of cravenly timid Democratic impeachment charges which entirely ignore his High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the basic human rights of nonwhite immigrants, what could very arguably be considered a Crime Against Humanity that the Trump administration is carrying out against desperate asylum seekers at the Mexican border in service of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda is growing worse and worse.

The Guardian reports on January 9 that an obviously desperate Mexican asylum-seeker killed himself on the international bridge after being refused entry to the United States.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/mexico-asylum-seeker-refused-us-entry

This may be less surprising than it seems in light of the appalling, inhuman conditions that legitimate asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and other life-threatening conditions in Central America are forced to endure as a result of Trump’s racist and inhuman (as well as almost certainly illegal) “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy. See Vox (December 20, 2019):

In camps on the US-Mexico border, asylym-seekers have been abandoned

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/20/20997299/asylum-border-mexico-us-io,-unhcr-usaid-migration-international-humanitarian-aid-m…

See also: Slate:

Trump’s tent cities are on the verge of killing immigrant children

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

This horrendous display of inhumanity by the Trump administration as led to a protest by a leading Jewish religious leader, Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (in New York City) America’s leading institution for the Conservative branch of Judaism against what he calls America’s failure to carry out its moral obligation toward desperate asylum seekers and immigrants and other immigrants. See, The Hill, January 9:

https://the hill.com/opinion/immigration/477577/-our-moral-obligation-to-us-migrants-and-asylum-seekers

After visiting overcrowded immigrant border shelters , an ICE detention center and an asylum hearing courtroom along with other Jewish clergy, Eisen writes:

“What we saw was profoundly sobering. The predicament of those trapped at the Mexican border looks increasingly bleak as the federal government enacts more restrictive policies in the name of protecting Americans from the alleged invasion.”

Eisen then explains what motivated him to write:

“When people asked me why I was making this journey, my answer was simple: ‘Because I am a Jew.’ My grandparents arrived in this country seeking a better life, in some cases fleeing pogroms and persecutions, and the Torah’s command to care for the stranger summons me in a voice I dare not ignore. The Bible tells us that Jews are not permitted to stand by in the face of suffering and injustice.”

He then explains that this is not only a Jewish issue.:

“But the crisis at the border is a non-denominational issue and it should be non-partisan.” 

Unfortunately, in today’s America, the crisis caused by the Trumps administration’s egregious violations of essential human rights of nonwhite immigrants is anything but non-partisan. One party is blindly following its Leader into making hatred of non-European immigrants, both legal and “irregular”, as the centerpiece of its agenda, while the other party’s leaders are too cowardly to mount an effective defense of immigrants’ human rights which are being trampled on.

Ironically, the driving force of this agenda of anti-immigrant persecution, Stephen Miller, is also the grandchild of a Jewish immigrant. What kind of understanding of the Jewish heritage of care and compassion for the suffering of the stranger in our midst is he showing?

And how much understanding of this tradition of essential humanity does Miller’s boss Donald Trump, who claims to be a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people, show in his immigration policy, which includes drastic measures against even the most highly skilled and educated legal immigrants, not only asylum seekers and unauthorized immigrants?

Roger Algase

Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 01-11-2020, 01:43 PM.

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Unfortunately, for America and the world, Roger has it pegged exactly right. Humanity, compassion, decency, and equal justice for all have disappeared from U.S. foreign and domestic policy under Trump. That’s the essence of a White Nationalist kakistocracy. And, as Roger also recognizes, there is more than a little anti-semitism and racism mixed in and driving these policies. It just so happens that Hispanics and folks with brown skins are the current “target of the day.”  

But, actually, nobody is safe in the “Age of Trump” as his sycophants and supporters have found out (see., e.g., Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kristjen Nielsen, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, et al.). The only thing or person that Donald Trump has ever cared about is (surprise): Donald Trump. Everybody else, including our nation, the environment, and world civilization, is expendable.

I also appreciate Roger’s “outing” of bigoted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his ridiculous and disingenuous attempt to “bar” refugee resettlement in Texas. For the record, quite contrary to Abbott’s racist whining, few states have benefitted more than Texas from migrants, whether they be refugees, asylum recipients, documented, or undocumented.  See, e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-texas

In the “race to the bottom,” never count out Donald Trump and his GOP stalwarts!

PWS

01-13-20

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

Clyde W. Ford
Clyde W. Ford
American Author

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-07/great-race-passing-trump

Ford writes:

OPINION

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

 

By CLYDE W. FORD

JAN. 7, 2020

 

3:01 AM

The images horrify.

On the banks of the Rio Grande, a child floats lifelessly, her arm around her father, both drowned while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe regularly drown. A Honduran mother dragging children flees from tear gas at the U.S. border. Children in cages.

The policies terrify. A border wall. Family separation. The purgatory of waiting for asylum in a third country.

In December, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to use migrant children in detention as bait. Adults who show up to claim them would be targeted for arrest and deportation.

The words incite fear. “Bad hombres.” “Rapists.” “Criminals.” “Shithole countries.” When uttered by a U.S. president, they carry even greater weight.

Britain, Poland, Italy, the United States. Around the world, countries once proud of welcoming immigrants seem determined to find ever more devious ways to keep them out. Are these signs of a newly ascendant nationalism? Or the last gasps of existential fear?

The worldwide immigration crisis — and the racism apparently driving it — can trace its roots in part to a century-old book, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.”

In publishing a centenary edition of the 1916 work, white nationalist Ostara Press praised the book as a “call to American whites to counter the dangers both from non-white and non-north Western European immigration.” Grant proposed a “Nordic race,” loosely centered in Scandinavia, as principally responsible for human social and cultural development. He feared immigration and intermarriage would dilute this race, dooming it to extinction.

Grant’s fears of his “great race” passing are very much alive today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing study of emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart News in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election document his affinity for white nationalism. Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, lauds former President Calvin Coolidge for signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which hardened non-white immigration and eased white immigration from Western Europe. It also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the predecessor of Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Grant’s writing is credited as part of the inspiration for the creation and passage of that 1924 Act. Hitler called Grant’s book, “my bible.” Grant’s ideas defined apartheid. His book fueled the U.S. eugenics movement.

Eugenics is a pseudoscience of race that seeks to breed and maintain a “Nordic stock” of human beings, while culling undesirables — blacks, Jews, Asians, South Americans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally ill, and others — through measures ranging from forced sterilization to death.

In Grant’s day, eugenics attracted the rich and famous — Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Kelloggs of Corn Flakes fame. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, saw birth control work as eliminating “human weeds” and Alexander Graham Bell presided over the scientific directors of the Eugenics Records Office, a research institute in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Eugenics is very much in vogue among white nationalists and far-right groups worldwide, though refashioned now into broader conspiracies like “replacement theory,” which originated in France with the writings of Renaud Camus and proposes that U.S. and European whites are being intentionally “replaced” through low birth rates and liberal immigration policies.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in 2017. A gunman in Norway who murdered 80 people in 2011 portrayed the act as a defense of the Nordic race from the scourge of Islamic immigration. Similar “replacement theory” fears influenced mass shooters in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Charleston.

Surprisingly, Grant was as an early conservationist who saw in the fate of endangered species — the moose, the buffalo, the redwood tree — a similar fate awaiting his “Nordics.” He helped establish the U.S. National Park system. Modern-day environmental and climate movements have roots in Grant’s work, leading to a convoluted, bizarre specter:

The U.S. and European countries that Grant lauded manufacture the “greenhouse gases” threatening the environment that Grant sought to protect. Meanwhile, the climate crisis produces refugees from countries that Grant abhorred, seeking shelter in countries with draconian immigration policies that Grant helped to create.

Yet Grant was right. His “great race” is passing. Studies cite 2050 as the tipping point, when U.S. whites will become a statistical minority, and most Americans will be people of color. Whether crafted in overtly racist language or couched in covertly racist immigration policies, fear of the “great race” passing is used to win elections, cling to power, manipulate public opinion and grow organizational membership.

Immigrants built America. This new wave is no different. They are the face of the future, deserving new lives in a country that helps them succeed.

Yes, the “great race” is passing. Good riddance. And we should turn to finding ways to help everyone accept this inevitability — and thrive from it.

Clyde W. Ford is the author of “Think Black,” a memoir about his father, the first black software engineer in America.

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Like those who were behind or “went along to go along” with horrible parts of our history like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, or Jim Crow, Trump’s supporters and enablers eventually will have much to answer for in the “court of history.”

“Fake news.” “alternative facts,” false narratives, and internet myths might be gospel to Breitbart, Fox News, GOP sycophants, and Trump voters, but eventually, particularly in an age of information and documentation, “truth will out.” And, it won’t be pretty for the “Modern Day Jim Crows” any more than it was for the segregationists and other racists who preceded them.

PWS

01-10-20

 

FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

Frank Rich
Frank Rich
Writer-At-Large
NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.html

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

By Frank Rich

@frankrichny

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Photo: Getty Images

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.

Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.

That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).

. . . .

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Read the rest of Rich’s article at the link.

“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!

Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .

But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.

I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”

PWS

01-09-20

EXILED: HOW THE TRUMP REGIME’S JUDICIALLY-ENABLED TRASHING OF ASYLUM LAW & DUE PROCESS HAS LEFT AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF LEGAL ASYLUM SEEKERS MAROONED IN A STRANGE & DANGEROUS LAND — “With The List’s queue regularly stretching longer than six months, many migrants fall victim to predatory robbery, kidnapping or murder before they can find refuge; others find the wait in one of the most dangerous cities in the world simply unendurable. . . . But for many people . . . going home is not an option.”

Jack Herrera
Jack Herrera
Independent Reporter covering Migration & Human Rights

Someone using POLITICO for iOS wants to share this article with you:

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How Trump Created a New Global Capital of Exiles

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By Jack Herrera

TIJUANA, Mexico—If you go early in the morning to the plaza in front of El Chaparral, the border crossing where a person can walk from Mexico into the state of California, you’ll hear shouts like “2,578: El Salvador!” and “2,579: Guatemala!”—a number, followed by a place of origin. Every day, groups of families gather around, waiting anxiously underneath the trees at the back of the square. The numbers come from La Lista, The List: When a person’s number is called, it’s their turn to ask for asylum in the United States.…

READ FULL ARTICLE ON POLITICO.COM »

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“Going home is not an option.” My friend and colleague on the Round Table of Retired Immigration Judges, Judge Jeffrey S. Chase used a similar observation as the lead in his recent blog: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/23/hon-jeffrey-s-chase-crime-refugee-protection-the-implication-that-refugees-should-either-stay-or-return-home-ignores-the-impossibility-of-such-request-as-refugees-by/.

We should never forget the life-tenured Article III judges, mostly on the appellate level including the Supremes, whose abandonment of both their oaths of office and their humanity has enabled the Trump Regime’s all-out assault on the rule of law and our democratic institutions to succeed to the extent it already has. 

Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. justice system and all the laws he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to follow counts heavily on the complicity or the outright assistance off Article III Federal Judges. To date, notwithstanding some wimpy disingenuous protests from Chief Justice Roberts, bemoaning the predictable lack of respect for the judicial system that he and his colleagues enabled by their complicity, the higher level Article IIIs haven’t disappointed Trump. That’s how the regime’s scofflaws can, without any legislative action, create “exile cities” in “unsafe third countries” right at our border, in violation of both the guarantees of our asylum laws and the Constitutional right to Due Process!

I spent many years of my career dealing daily with the results of failed states, authoritarian regimes, and fallen democracies. I know a lot about how oppression works and how democracies and constitutional republics fail.

I have some very bad news for the “life-tenured ones” in their ivory towers: failed states, authoritarian regimes, and failed democracies ultimately have no use for anything approaching an independent judiciary. Maybe those Article III appellate judges should think and reflect before they cast their next votes to empower autocracy over democracy.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-07-20

 

REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

Julia Edwards Ainsley
Julia Edwards Ainsley
NBC News Correspondent

https://apple.news/AXSXjJIOxRUSM4ZOgQm9plQ

 

Trump admin announces rule further limiting immigrants’ eligibility for asylum

DUIs, drug paraphernalia possession and unlawful receipt of public benefits would be among seven triggers barring migrants from even applying for asylum.

 

by Julia Ainsley | NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a new rule Wednesday that would further limit immigrants’ eligibility for asylum if they have been convicted of certain crimes, including driving under the influence and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The rule, if finalized, would give asylum officers seven requirements with which to deem an immigrant ineligible to apply for asylum.

Other acts that would make an immigrant ineligible for asylum under the new rule include the unlawful receipt of public benefits, illegal re-entry after being issued a deportation order and being found “by an adjudicator” to have engaged in domestic violence, even if there was no conviction for such violence.

The rules could eliminate large numbers of asylum-seekers from ever having their cases heard in court. Currently, immigration courts have a backlog of over 1 million cases, according to data kept by Syracuse University.

In a statement, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security said the new rule would “increase immigration court efficiencies.”

Andrew Free, an immigration attorney based in Nashville, said the new regulation is “calculated to enable the denial of as many claims as possible.”

Free said the most common charges he sees for his immigrant clients are driving under the influence, domestic violence and driving without a license. Driving without a license is particularly common for immigrants who have had to use fake travel documents to enter the U.S. and live in states that do not give licenses to undocumented migrants.

“People who are fleeing persecutions and violence are not going to be able to get travel documents from the governments inflicting violence upon them. If you have to resort to other means of proving your identity, you won’t be eligible [for asylum,]” Free said.

The Trump administration has unveiled a number of new requirements meant to curb asylum applications this year. The most successful of those policies has been “Remain in Mexico” or MPP, that requires lawful asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions, until their court date in the United States. Over 60,000 asylum-seekers are currently waiting in Mexico for a decision to be made in their case, a process that can take over a year.

 

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Kevin R. Johnson
Kevin R. Johnson
Dean
U.C. Davis Law


The Beat Goes On! Joint Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Restrict Certain “Criminal Aliens'” Eligibility for Asylum

By Immigration Prof

 Share

 

Consistent with the efforts to facilitate removal of “criminal aliens,” the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security released the announcement below today:

“The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security (collectively, “the Departments”) today issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would amend their respective regulations in order to prevent certain categories of criminal aliens from obtaining asylum in the United States. Upon finalization of the rulemaking process, the Departments will be able to devote more resources to the adjudication of asylum cases filed by non-criminal aliens.

Asylum is a discretionary immigration benefit that generally can be sought by eligible aliens who are physically present or arriving in the United States, irrespective of their status, as provided in section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1158. However, in the INA, Congress barred certain categories of aliens from receiving asylum. In addition to the statutory bars, Congress delegated to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to establish by regulation additional bars on asylum eligibility to the extent they are consistent with the asylum statute, as well as to establish “any other conditions or limitations on the consideration of an application for asylum” that are consistent with the INA. Today, the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security are proposing to exercise their regulatory authority to limit eligibility for asylum for aliens who have engaged in specified categories of criminal behavior. The proposed rule will also eliminate a regulation concerning the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications in limited cases.

The proposed regulation would provide seven additional mandatory bars to eligibility for asylum. The proposed rule would add bars to eligibility for aliens who commit certain offenses in the United States.Those bars would apply to aliens who are convicted of:

(1) A felony under federal or state law;

(2) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A) or § 1324(a)(1)(2) (Alien Smuggling or Harboring);

(3) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1326 (Illegal Reentry);

(4) A federal, state, tribal, or local crime involving criminal street gang activity;

(5) Certain federal, state, tribal, or local offenses concerning the operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence of an intoxicant;

(6) A federal, state, tribal, or local domestic violence offense, or who are found by an adjudicator to have engaged in acts of battery or extreme cruelty in a domestic context, even if no conviction resulted; and

(7) Certain misdemeanors under federal or state law for offenses related to false identification; the unlawful receipt of public benefits from a federal, state, tribal, or local entity; or the possession or trafficking of a controlled substance or controlled-substance paraphernalia.

The seven proposed bars would be in addition to the existing mandatory bars in the INA and its implementing regulations, such as those relating to the persecution of others, convictions for particularly serious crimes, commission of serious nonpolitical crimes, security threats, terrorist activity, and firm resettlement in another country.

Under the current statutory and regulatory framework, asylum officers and immigration judges consider the applicability of mandatory bars to asylum in every proceeding involving an alien who has submitted an application for asylum. Although the proposed regulation would expand the mandatory bars to asylum, the proposed regulation does not change the nature or scope of the role of an immigration judge or an asylum officer during proceedings for consideration of asylum applications.

The proposed rule would also remove the provisions at 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) regarding reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum. The removal of the requirement to reconsider a discretionary denial would increase immigration court efficiencies and reduce any cost from the increased adjudication time by no longer requiring a second review of the same application by the same immigration judge.” (bold added).

KJ

December 18, 2019 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

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What total, unadulterated BS and gratuitous cruelty!

For example, 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) are humanitarian provisions that seldom come up except in highly unusual and sympathetic cases. The idea that they represent a “drain” on IJ time is preposterous! And, if they did, it would be well worth it to help to keep deserving and vulnerable refugee families together!

I had about three such cases involving those regulations in 13 years on the bench, although I cited the existing regulation for the proposition that discretionary denials are disfavored, as they should be under international humanitarian laws. Federal Courts and the BIA have held that asylum should not be denied for “discretionary reasons” except in the case of “egregious adverse factors.” Therefore, an Immigration Judge properly doing his or her job would very seldom have occasion to enter a “discretionary denial” to someone eligible for asylum. Obviously, the regime intends to ignore these legal rulings.

One of my colleagues wrote “they are going to capture a lot of people and force IJs to hear separate asylum applications for each family member. So counterproductive.”

Cruelty, and more “aimless docket reshuffling” is what these “maliciously incompetent gimmicks” are all about.

I note that this is a “joint proposal” from EOIR and DHS Enforcement, the latter supposedly a “party” to every Immigration Court proceeding, but actually de facto in charge of the EOIR “judges.” That alone makes it unethical, a sign of bias, and a clear denial of Due Process for the so-called “court” and the “Government party” to collude against the “private party.”

When will the Article IIIs do their job and put an end to this nonsense? It’s not “rocket science.” Most first year law students could tell you that this absurd charade of a “court” is a clear violation of Due Process! So, what’s the problem with the Article IIIs? Have they forgotten both their humanity and what they learned in Con Law as well as their oaths of office they took upon investiture?

Right now, as intended by the regime with the connivance and complicity of the Article IIIs, those advocating for the legal, constitutional, and human rights of asylum seekers are being forced to divert scarce resources to respond to the “regime shenanigan of the day.” It’s also abusing and disrespecting the Article III Courts. Why are they so blind to what’s REALLY going on when the rest of us see it so clearly? These aren’t “legal disputes” or “legitimate policy initiatives.” No, they are lawless outright attacks on our Constitution, our nation, our human values, and our system of justice which Article III Judges are sworn to uphold!

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect our democracy from the White Nationalist Regime and the complicit life-tenured judges who enable and encourage it!

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” & Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-21-19

CONFRONTING THE “AMERICAN STAR CHAMBER” — Innovation Law Lab, SPLC, CLINIC, & Others Force Article III Courts To Face Their Judicial Complicity In Allowing EOIR’s “Asylum Free Zones” & Other Human Rights Atrocities To Operate Under Their Noses

Tess Hellgren
Tress Hellgren
Staff Attorney/Fellow
Innovation Law Lab

My friend Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney/Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow @ Innovation Law Lab reports:

 

Hi all,

 

As some of you are already aware, I am very pleased to share that Innovation Law Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit this morning challenging the weaponization of the nation’s immigration court system to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.  More information is available below and at http://innovationlawlab.org/faircourts/.

 

I would like to thank all of you again for participating in our IJ roundtable and sharing your experiences for our report on the immigration court system (you will see a reference to it in our press release below). The insights we gained over the course of that report were vital in helping us identify and understand the problems in the immigration courts under the current administration.

 

Sincerely,

 

Tess

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 18, 2019

 

Contact:
Marion Steinfels, marionsteinfels@gmail.com / 202-557-0430

Ramon Valdez, ramon@innovationlawlab.org / 971-238-1804
Immigration Advocates File Major Lawsuit Challenging

Weaponization of the Nation’s Immigration Court System

Advocates Launch Immigration Court Watch App to Ensure

Greater Accountability, Transparency in Courts

 

WASHINGTON, DC – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Innovation Law Lab (Law Lab),  Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP) have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the weaponization of the nation’s immigration court system to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.

 

“Under the leadership of President Trump and the attorney general, the immigration court system has become fixated on the goal of producing deportations, not adjudications,” said Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab. “The system is riddled with policies that undermine the work of legal service providers and set asylum seekers up to lose without a fair hearing of their case.”

 

The complaint outlines pervasive dysfunction and bias within the immigration court system, including:

 

  • Areas that have become known as “asylum-free zones,” where virtually no asylum claims have been granted for the past several years.
  • The nationwide backlog of pending immigration cases, which has now surpassed 1 million — meaning that thousands of asylum seekers must wait three or four years for a court date.
  • The Enforcement Metrics Policy, implemented last year, which gives judges a personal financial stake in every case they decide and pushes them to deny more cases more quickly.
  • The “family unit” court docket, which stigmatizes the cases of recently arrived families and rushes their court dates, often giving families inadequate time to find an attorney and prepare for their hearings.

 

“The immigration courts make life-and-death decisions every day for vulnerable people seeking asylum – people who depend on a functioning court system to protect them from persecution, torture, and death,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “While prior administrations have turned a blind eye to the dysfunction, the Trump administration has actively weaponized the courts, with devastating results for asylum seekers and the organizations that represent them.”

 

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six legal service providers whose work for asylum seekers has been badly impaired as a result of the unjust immigration court system.

 

“As the political rhetoric surrounding immigrants has become sharper, we’ve noticed a decline in the treatment our clients receive in immigration court,” said Linda Corchado, Director of Legal Services, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “While asylum seekers are entitled to a full and fair hearing, their proceedings are too often rushed, and judges deny our requests for time to properly prepare their cases and collect and translate crucial evidence from across the world.”

 

In addition to filing on behalf of their own organizations, plaintiffs include Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP).

 

The complaint can be viewed here and here: http://innovationlawlab.org/faircourts.

 

In an effort to ensure greater transparency and accountability in the nation’s immigration courts, Innovation Law Lab also announced the full launch of an Immigration CourtWatch app, which enables court observers to record and upload information on the conduct of immigration judges.

 

The new tool allows data on immigration judge conduct to be gathered and stored in both individual and aggregate forms. This will provide advocates with valuable information to fight systemic bias and other unlawful court practices. This data can be used to bolster policy recommendations, along with advocacy and legal strategies.

 

Advocates, attorneys and other court watchers are encouraged to download and access the app available here: http://innovationlawlab.org/courtwatch.

In June, Law Lab and SPLC released a report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, on the failure of the immigration court system to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case review. The report can be accessed here: The Attorney General’s Judges:  How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.

###

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org and follow us on social media: Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook and @splcenter on Twitter.  

 

Innovation Law Lab, based in Portland, Oregon with projects around the country and in Mexico, is a nonprofit organization that harnesses technology, lawyers, and activists to advance immigrant justice. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.

 

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

Hon. Ilyce Shugall
Hon. Ilyce Shugall
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Retired)
Director, Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco.

 

And, here’s a statement in support of this much-needed litigation action from my distinguished Round Table colleague Judge (Ret.) Ilyce Shugall:

 

These were my remarks during the press conference:

 

I am Ilyce Shugall, a former immigration judge.  I became an IJ in 9/2017 and resigned in 3/2019.  I was sworn in by then-Chief IJ Mary Beth Keller.  She has also resigned.  I swore to uphold the constitution at my investiture.  When the administration made it impossible to continue to do so, I resigned.

 

I defended immigrants in immigration court for 18 years before I became an immigration judge, so I understood the inherent problems and limitations on judicial independence in a court system housed inside the Department of Justice, a prosecuting arm of the executive branch.  However, as Melissa said, this administration’s policies have entirely eroded what independence and legitimacy remained in the immigration court system.

 

As an immigration judge, I watched independence being stripped from the judge corps on a regular basis.  The attorney general ended administrative closure, taking away a vital docketing tool from the judges, while simultaneously contributing to the court’s ever-growing backlog.  The attorney general also significantly limited the judges’ ability to grant continuances.  Then, the attorney general and EOIR director implemented performance metrics which required judges complete 700 cases per year and created time limits on the adjudication of cases.  And this was only the beginning.  These policies have had a drastic impact on those appearing in immigration court, particularly those fleeing horrific violence who have been preventing from effectively presenting their cases.

 

New policies, memoranda, and regulations are being published regularly by this administration. Each one, an attack on the system, and each one with the goal to eliminate due process and expedite deportations.  I hope this lawsuit will eventually lead to a truly independent immigration court system, where judges can uphold their oaths and therefore immigrants receive the due process they are entitled and deserve.

 

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

 

Every one of us in America is entitled to Due Process; every day, vulnerable asylum applicants and other migrants are being dehumanized and denied their Due Process rights by an ridiculously unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system operating with the complicity of life tenured Federal Judges, all the way up to the Supremes, who are failing to live up to their oaths of office.

 

The grotesque, constant, open abuse of the legal and constitutional rights of the most vulnerable among us threatens the rights of each of us, including those individuals responsible for putting the Trump regime in power, maintaining it, and the Article III judges who are failing to stand up to the regime’s unconstitutional cruelty and mocking of our the rule of law. Enough! It’s long past time for the Article IIIs to live up to their responsibilities and stand up for the victims of tyranny!

The case is

LAS AMERICAS IMMIGRANT ADVOCACY CENTER, et. al v. TRUMP  (D OR)

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

 

PWS

 

12-18-19

 

MICHAEL GERSON @ WASHPOST HAS SOME VERY BAD NEWS FOR AMERICA: The GOP Now Has Two Major Cohorts: Bigots & Cowards Who Won’t Stand Up To Them!

Michael Gerson
Michael Gerson
Columnist
Washington Post

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sure-not-all-republicans-hate-outsiders-but-many-defer-to-the-hater-in-chief/2019/12/12/6bb61b58-1d16-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

 

By

Michael Gerson

Columnist

Dec. 12, 2019 at 3:36 p.m. EST

Certain questions haunt many of us who care about the nature and future of the Republican Party. Is the GOP as it currently appears — defined by white identity and excited by cruelty and exclusion — really the way it has always been? Does Trumpism represent a hostile takeover of Republicanism or its natural outworking?A recent study by political scientists Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski and John V. Kane sheds some interesting light on these matters. They compare a Democracy Fund voter survey conducted in 2011 with a survey of the same voters done in 2017. And they analyze the factors in the 2011 group that predict current approval for the Democratic Party, for the Republican Party and for President Trump.

Mason, Wronski and Kane found that support for the Democratic Party is associated with warmer feelings toward African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and LGBT people. This type of “in-group love” is what you’d expect. “Put simply,” said the authors, “when you like the people who make up the party, you like the party.”

 

The results concerning the GOP were more mixed, but similar. Warmer opinions about whites and Christians in 2011 predicted later support for the GOP — the Republican version of “in-group love.” But hostility toward African Americans and Hispanics did not drive future Republican support (though negative feelings toward Muslims and LGBT people did have limited predictive value).

Support for Trump, in contrast, was strongly associated with “out-group hatred” of African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and LGBT people. “In every case, the people who felt hostile towards Democratic groups in 2011 are most likely to be Trump supporters today. The same cannot be said of Republican partisans.”

What to make of these distinctions? “In-group love” of whites and Christians for other whites and Christians is hardly a noble political motivation. “Love your white neighbor as yourself” doesn’t have quite the same moral ring to it. What Mason calls the “social sorting” of the parties — in which partisan identities are closely associated with ideological, racial and cultural identities — is a source of deep and damaging polarization.

 

Yet it comes as a relief to some of us that Republican partisans and Trump supporters can be distinguished from each other at all. And “in-group love” is certainly better than an “out-group hatred” of anyone who looks and thinks differently.

There is evidence, it appears, that the party of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney was not merely the party of Trump in waiting. “Trump support,” say the authors, “is uniquely dependent upon out-group hatred.” This is not a normal sort of partisanship. It is partisanship supercharged by prejudice and contempt. This fits the experience of elected Republicans I have interviewed, many of whom no longer recognize the political party they rose within. The players and attitudes in many states and districts have shifted. Something different and disturbing is taking place.

Trump did not create this out-group animosity; he exploited it, organized it and sent it into political battle. “Even in the 2016 Republican presidential primary,” the authors note, “out-group hatred predicted support for Trump, but not for [Ted] Cruz, [Marco] Rubio or [John] Kasich.” They go on: “We tend to think of partisans as being generally intolerant of outsiders, but our findings suggest that Trump supporters are unique in terms of their out-group hatred.”

This offers the comfort of knowing that the whole GOP is not united and defined by contempt for outsiders. But the indictment of the Republican non-haters is still quite damning. In every way that matters politically, they have accepted the leadership of a president and a movement that cultivate hatred as a strategy. The GOP non-haters — say, business conservatives and social conservatives — have deferred to the hater in chief. They have (for the most part) held his coat, carried his water and licked his boots — which are not easy to do simultaneously.

All of which raises another vexing question: Which is worse, bigotry or cowardice in the face of bigotry?

Whatever the answer, we should prepare ourselves for an especially ugly and destructive 2020 presidential election. Trump seems to believe, with some justification, that the cultivation of anger against outsiders won him the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2016. We should expect more of the same, and worse. The racism, misogyny and dehumanization — the assault on migrants, Muslims and refugees — have only begun. And those who enable it are equally responsible for it.

 

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

The GOP’s toxic combination of outright bigots and sleazy dishonest bootlickers willing to cover for corruption and bigotry has never been more on display than in this week’s “fact free, value free defense” of the indefensible before the House Judiciary. And, as I mentioned previously this week, it also explains why neo-Nazi White Nationalist hate monger Stephen Miller will be in the White House as long as Trump is, unless he falls out of favor with Trump for some reason unrelated to his odious views.

It also illustrates what I’ve been saying about the recent performance of the higher level Federal Courts. Trump’s war on migrants, non-Christian religions, women, the poor, journalists, lawyers, political opponents, and individuals of color has nothing to do with “normal legal issues.” It’s an existential struggle by the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump and don’t agree with his authoritarian White Nationalism to preserve our republic against a fascist-style authoritarian regime that is running roughshod over our Constitution, our laws, and ethical and moral norms that have developed over many years. Those who won’t stand up and defend our republic and our individual rights are enabling the bigoted destroyers. There really is no “middle ground” in this battle.

To put it in Michael’s terms: “The racism, misogyny and dehumanization — the assault on migrants, Muslims and refugees — have only begun. And those [sitting on the Supreme Court and the Federal Appellate Courts] who enable it are equally responsible for it.”

Innocent folks are being harmed and abused every day, while the judicial enablers are drawing their pay!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-13-19

 

ROLLING STONE: HOW STEPHEN MILLER & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST CABAL TOOK OVER OUR GOVERNMENT’S IMMIGRATION APPARATUS: “We used [CIS material] to spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” McHugh told Hatewatch. “We never fact-checked anything. We never called up other organizations to get any other perspective about those studies…. It was understood. You just write it up.”

Andy Kroll
Andy Kroll
Washington Bureau Chief
Rolling Stone

 

https://apple.news/Ai9__HexTRd-ZH51tL17Maw

 

Andy Kroll reports for Rolling Stone:

 

New Emails Expose How Stephen Miller and His Pals Push Trump’s Agenda

For nearly three years, Stephen Miller has used his White House seat to orchestrate the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in almost a century. But he hasn’t done it alone.

A loose network of lawyers and advisers embedded throughout the Trump administration has worked closely with Miller to carry out the daily effort of pushing through draconian and often inhumane policies like separating migrant families at the border, detaining young migrants in cagelike facilities, and drastically reducing the number of immigrants allowed entry into the country. In other words, Miller, with his white-nationalist mindset and fervor to enact xenophobic policies, is far from an isolated actor. He’s the leader of a broad operation spread across the federal government.

Newly released emails provided to Rolling Stone offer a glimpse of the working relationship between Miller and one of his internal allies and fellow ideologues: a senior adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement named Jon Feere. Feere has been a fixture in Miller’s immigration working group where new ideas for cracking down on immigration get conceived. Reading the emails, Feere comes across like Miller’s point man inside ICE, enjoying unfettered access to arguably the most influential aide in the Trump White House, working long hours to advance the administration’s extreme and often inhumane immigration policy.

In the emails, Feere strategizes with Miller about how to use the federal government to amplify their anti-immigration message; tees up potential attacks on prominent Democratic politicians; directly briefs Miller in great detail about upcoming enforcement actions and policy changes in the works; and recommends to Miller people the administration should hire to expedite its immigration agenda. The emails also show that on at least one occasion Feere bypassed his superiors at ICE to deliver updates and advice directly to Miller.

Related

Trump Caves to Kim Jong-un (Again)

Democrats Charge Trump with Abuse of Power and Defying Congress in Two Articles of Impeachment

“Stephen Miller didn’t cut ties with the extremists when he joined the government — he brought them with him,” says Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a government watchdog group run by former members of the Obama administration. American Oversight first obtained Feere’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request and provided them to Rolling Stone.

ICE and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Before he joined the administration, Feere’s bio says he worked for more than a decade at the rabidly anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, which has played an instrumental role in shaping the administration’s immigration policies. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled CIS an active hate group. (In January, CIS filed a civil racketeering suit against SPLC’s leaders, but a district judge dismissed the suit.) As a policy analyst there, Feere took hardline positions critical of birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and of President Obama’s policies like DACA. He accused Obama of opening the border “to more STDs,” and gave testimony to Congress about restricting birthright citizenship. He wrote favorably of Arizona’s infamous “Show Us Your Papers” law and condemned the DREAM Act, cities that adopt sanctuary status, and Obama’s DACA policy. In 2015, he penned an op-ed titled “How Trump Could Change Birthright Citizenship.”

Feere’s outspokenness didn’t go unnoticed: He advised the 2016 Trump campaign on immigration for several months before taking a job inside the administration. On the morning of Trump’s inauguration, he hit send on a tweet: “It’s time to make immigration policy great again.”

The partnership between Feere and Miller was a natural one. Miller is a big fan of the Center for Immigration Studies. During a keynote address at a CIS event in 2015, he applauded the group for spurring “a debate that far too often operates, like illegal immigrants, in the shadows.” A recent investigation by SPLC’s Hatewatch revealed that Miller shaped Breitbart News’ immigration coverage leading up to the 2016 election by sending at least 46 emails that mentioned CIS research, employees, or contributors to a Breitbart editor named Katie McHugh. Miller sent McHugh the phone number of CIS’s research director and pushed McHugh to use CIS research in her stories, which she often did. (Breitbart fired McHugh in 2017. She says he has since disavowed right-wing extremist politics.)

“We used [CIS material] to spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” McHugh told Hatewatch. “We never fact-checked anything. We never called up other organizations to get any other perspective about those studies…. It was understood. You just write it up.”

After Trump’s victory, Miller brought fellow immigration hardliners with him into the new administration. In addition to Feere, there was Julia Hahn, a Breitbart writer who took a job in the White House, and Julie Kirchner, a former staffer at another prominent anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), who became an adviser to the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and later the top ombudsman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Because Feere, Hahn, and Kirchner took advisory roles, that meant they didn’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, where they probably would’ve faced harsh questioning for their extreme views.

An active Twitter user before he went into government, Feere’s account went dark after his Inauguration Day tweet. That’s why the emails between Feere, Miller, and other Trump administration officials are useful — they give a rare glimpse at how key figures in the administration have worked behind the scenes to enact the largest crackdown on immigration in this country since the 1920s and ’30s.

“We’ve had quite draconian politics in the past,” says Daniel Tichenor, a professor at the University of Oregon. “But I don’t think we have ever had a modern presidential administration that looked back so longingly to the 1920s and ’30s as the good old days.”

The Feere-Miller emails released to American Oversight run to nearly 500 pages and are heavily redacted. But they’re still one of the few opportunities to see the administration and some of its most hardline members in action on the policy that Trump will be most remembered for: immigration.

One of the most striking emails is a December 22th, 2017, message that Feere sent to Miller and three other administration staffers. It’s a 10-point bulleted memo in which he updates Miller on a slew of different actions underway that he and his colleagues had worked on in the preceding week. The memo is notable because it appears to show how much latitude Feere has at ICE to not only brief the White House but drive forward the administration’s immigration agenda.

Feere says he led a meeting about crafting a new agreement between ICE and the Department of Labor on worksite immigration enforcement actions that would be “more favorable to ICE’s mission” of tracking down and deporting undocumented residents. He describes helping plan an upcoming ICE raid in the Bay Area, and tasking a field office to investigate a New York-based Pakistani American accused of supporting ISIS with bitcoin. He says he stopped an administration response to Amnesty International report on immigration enforcement; located ICE officers and operations “worth highlighting in speeches” for White House speechwriters; and assisted a Fox News contributor and “friendly NGO” on messaging after a draft proposal about separating migrant families had leaked to the media.

What’s notable as well about Feere’s December 22nd memo to Miller is that, according to emails, Feere apparently sent the message straight to Miller and other White House officials without clearing it by his bosses at ICE, who learned about the memo after the fact. “Here is Jon providing a weekly report to [redacted] that neither you or I saw before he sent it,” reads a follow-up email sent to ICE Acting Director Tom Homan by what appears to be Homan’s chief of staff, Tom Blank. (The redacted name is likely Miller’s. Homan declined to comment for the story.)

John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under Obama and reviewed the emails between Feere and Miller, says it’s not uncommon for an agency official like Feere to aggressively try to get credit for accomplishments and make the White House aware of what he’s doing. But Sandweg adds that it’s “a little strange” to see an adviser like Feere delivering updates and advice directly to the White House, as Feere did.

“You might have someone like [Feere] coordinating it, doing the grunt work, preparing it,” Sandweg says. “But going directly from him to the White House — that’s unusual. If you’re reporting that kind of detail to the White House, the director wants to sign off on that.”

In another email, sent on February 26th, 2018, Feere appears to forward the name and résumé of a Treasury Department employee for an opening at the Social Security Administration. In a follow-up email, Feere writes: “If we can get [name redacted] into SSA, it would help with information-sharing issues.” Greater access to Social Security information, immigration experts say, could assist ICE in its efforts to track down and deport undocumented residents in the U.S. Feere recommends to Miller that the applicant get a title of “Senior Advisor or similar [which] will ensure he has some clout over there.”

Other emails, while heavily redacted, show Feere’s efforts to build the case against DACA, which defers deportation for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children and allows them to receive temporary work permits. He writes in one memo: “DACA recipients include murderers, child molesters, individuals involved in fraud schemes, gang members, and many other types of criminals.” In another email, he writes to Miller on November 30th, 2017, to say that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom were “silent” on the acquittal of an undocumented resident who was alleged to have shot and murdered 32-year-old Kate Steinle in July 2015, teeing up a potential attack on two nationally known Democrats.

And still other messages show a close working relationship and rapport between Feere and Miller. In one message, Feere asks Miller for a public defense of ICE’s then-acting director, Tom Homan, after Breitbart had published a series of stories that were critical of Homan, who had previously worked in the Obama administration. In another email Miller sends Feere his cellphone number and tells him to call over the weekend. In another, Feere gives Miller a list of “ideas for swift action,” at 7:30 p.m. (The substance of that email is redacted.) And in yet another message, with the subject line “Appropriations,” Miller thanks Feere for his work and tells him to “keep pushing.”

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, a Penn State law professor and director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, says that Feere’s and CIS’s role in carrying out the administration’s immigration policy marks an ascent to power for one of the most extreme voices — a rise that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. “They used to be called the loud minority,” Wadhia says. “The fact they’re now helping make immigration policy should be concerning to everyone.”

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

Remember: When Article III Federal Judges use concepts like “jurisdiction,” “deference,” “textualism,” “delegation,” “plenary power,” “discretion,” and “national security” to uphold the Trump/Miller assault on migrants, the rule of law, and our Constitution, what they are really doing is knowingly advancing the White Nationalist agenda while disguising their actions or inactions with often opaque legalisms. How can you rewrite the laws without Congress and in clear disregard of the Constitution, Due Process, Equal Protection, and prohibitions on racial and religious discrimination? Easy, when when the judges who are supposed to stand up for the law against tyranny instead look the other way.

How do you think that Jim Crow survived for at least a century with nary a peep from the Article IIIs about its obvious racist unconstitutionality? That’s the same type of corrupt judicial complicity that Trump, Miller, Barr, and the rest of the White Nationalist gang are counting on here. And, recently, they have been “right on.”

It’s also why despite all the recent revelations and calls by Democrats and opinion writers for his removal, Stephen Miller and his White Nationalist agenda aren’t going anywhere. Much as most Democrats and most pundits don’t want to admit it, Miller now represents the “real” GOP. The idea that GOP politicos will some morning wake up and find themselves appalled by illegality, racism, misogyny, and pandering to the hate agenda, and rediscover human decency, is a dangerous myth.

Note that no matter how outrageously racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, misogynist, or otherwise hateful and demeaning Trump’s or Miller’s utterances might be, they draw no real condemnation from the GOP. At most, a smattering from the GOP might mutter something like “not useful” or “I wish he had chosen different words.”

And these days, most Federal Appeals Courts find ways to “go along to get along” without acknowledging what’s really going on here. I guess too many Federal Appellate Judges are incapable of seeing themselves and their families as being on the same level of humanity as Trump’s and Miller’s current targets. So, dehumanization and “Dred Scottification” of  “the other” is OK by them. That’s both a shame and a national disgrace.

 

PWS

12-11-19

 

 

 

 

 

FOR DECADES HE HID HIS RADICALLY SUBVERSIVE  MESSAGE OF INTOLERANCE, INJUSTICE, & FASCIST DEVOTION TO AUTHORITY BEHIND DARK SUITS AND CONSERVATIVE TIES IN THE WORLD OF BIG LAW AND CORPORATE BOARDROOMS — Then Billy Barr Unleashed His Anti-Americanism & Contempt For Our Constitution & Humanity On Our Republic & Those Courageously Defending It Against A Lawless Executive!

These articles say it all about Barr’s unprincipled attacks on American democracy and his bizarre, yet frightening, rewrite of American history.

Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson
Historian
Professor, Boston College

First, from American historian and Professor at Boston College Heather Cox Richardson:

November 16, 2019

7 hr Public post 49

Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.

The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.

In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”

Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)

Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.

But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.

Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)

Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.

The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.

Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.

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

Samantha Michaels
Samantha Michaels
Reporter
Mother Jones

Here’s Samantha Michaels @ Mother Jones:

https://apple.news/AIHrb7Qk7R5yRbYg7kHgTwg

Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives

As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.

“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.

The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.” 

. . . .

Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.

. . . .

“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”

. . . .

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

Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.

Amy Russo
Amy Russo
Reporter
HuffPost

And here’s Amy Russo @ HuffPost:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/attorney-general-william-barr-federalist-society-speech_n_5dd03689e4b01f982f02dd62

Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”

In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.

“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”

Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.

“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”

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Max Boot
Max Boot
Columnist
Washington Post

Here’s Max Boot in the WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/17/william-barrs-chilling-defense-virtually-unlimited-presidential-power/

President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.

Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.

Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.

Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”

Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”

Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.

As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.

The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.

Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.

Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.

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

Mary Papenfuss
Mary Papenfuss
Contributor
HuffPost

Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/william-barr-impeachment-federalist-society-speech_n_5dd0775fe4b0294748185c6c

Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.

Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.

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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker. 

Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.  According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?

One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!

But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.

Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” 

Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.

George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”

Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation. 

But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.

Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.

PWS

11-18-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO WATCH” — CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE: U.S. ASYLUM OFFICERS REFUSE TO CARRY OUT ILLEGAL & IMMORAL ANTI-ASYLUM PROGRAM! — “You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

Molly O’Toole
Molly O’Toole
Immigration Reporter
LA Times

https://apple.news/ABLpJrjGFTROOJbP0K3fAGg

Molly O’Toole reports in the LA Times:

Asylum officers rebel against Trump policies they say are immoral and illegal

In collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at a much-criticized Trump administration policy to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers implementing it. 

It only took Doug Stephens two days to decide: He wasn’t going to implement President Trump’s latest policy to restrict immigration, known as Remain in Mexico. The asylum officer wouldn’t interview any more asylum seekers only to send them back to danger in Mexico.

As a federal employee, refusing to implement the government policy probably meant that he’d be fired, and an end to his career as a public servant. He’d only been assigned five of the interviews so far. But it was five too many — to the trained attorney, the policy officially termed “Migrant Protection Protocols” was not only unethical, it was against the law.

When Stephens told his supervisor in San Francisco his decision, he said he was stunned.

“I told him, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not doing these interviews,’” Stephens said, speaking publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview. “I think they’re illegal. They’re definitely immoral. And I’m not doing them.’”

Stephens is believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to conduct interviews under the program, according to Michael Knowles, a spokesman for the National CIS Council, the union that represents some 13,000 asylum officers and other employees of Citizenship and Immigration Services worldwide.

But he isn’t alone. Across the country, asylum officers are calling in sick, requesting transfers, retiring earlier than planned and quitting, all to resist this and other Trump administration immigration policies that they view as illegal, according to Stephens, as well as other asylum officers and officials.

In a collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at one of the Trump administration’s most successful policies to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers forced to implement it.

The asylum officers’ primary job is to make sure that the U.S. government is not returning people to harm in their home countries, a foundational principle in both U.S. and international law. But under MPP, instead of allowing asylum seekers who come to the southern border to wait in the U.S. for their immigration hearings, U.S. officials are forcing them to wait in Mexico.

Since the Trump administration announced the policy in December, U.S. officials have pushed roughly 60,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico, to wait in areas that the U.S. State Department considers some of the most dangerous in the world.

While U.S. officials downplay the danger in Mexico, kidnappings, rape and other violence against asylum seekers under the program are widespread and well documented, according to other officials, advocates, lawyers and academic researchers.

Homeland Security officials concede that the program is designed to discourage asylum claims. The president is running for reelection on renewed promises to limit immigration. Under the policy, only 11 asylum seekers have been granted some kind of relief, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database. 

The half-dozen asylum officers interviewed by The Times say that in almost every interview they’ve conducted under the policy, the asylum seeker expressed a fear of returning to Mexico — many said they’d been harmed there already. But under the new standards, the officers say they had to return them anyway.

“What’s my moral culpability in that?” said an asylum officer who’s conducted nearly 100 interviews. She requested anonymity because she feared retaliation. “My signature’s on that paperwork. And that’s something now that I live with.”

The asylum officers rebelling against Trump’s immigration policies say they run counter to the laws passed by Congress, as well as their oath to the Constitution and extensive training, which includes how to detect fraud or any potential national security concerns.

Under U.S. law, migrants have the right to request asylum. Some 80% of asylum seekers pass the first step in the lengthy process, an interview with an asylum officer that’s known as a credible-fear screening. Congress set a low standard for the officers to use at this initial stage, to minimize the risk of sending someone back to harm, or even death. But ultimately, only about 15% of applicants win asylum before an immigration judge.

Trump and his top officials use this difference between the percentage of asylum seekers who pass the first step versus the percentage who ultimately win asylum to claim that asylum itself is a “hoax” or “big fat con job.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, has publicly criticized the officers, saying they approve too many requests and oppose Trump’s initiatives for partisan reasons. On Wednesday, Cuccinelli was named acting deputy Homeland Security secretary.

Cuccinelli’s spokesperson stopped responding to requests for an interview. But The Times asked Cuccinelli during an October media breakfast about concerns from officers.

“So long as we’re in the position of putting in place what we believe to be legal policies that haven’t been found to be otherwise,” Cuccinelli said, “we fully expect them to implement those faithfully and sincerely and vigorously.”

Citizenship and Immigration Services also declined requests for data on staffing for the Homeland Security agency, and the asylum section specifically, to try to quantify what officers and officials called an “exodus” primarily because of the policy.

In another sign of widespread discomfort among the asylum officers, the union representing them has filed “friend of the court” briefs in lawsuits against the administration, arguing that its immigration policies — including MPP — are illegal.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the ongoing litigation against the policy. The panel’s ruling on whether the policy is legal is pending.

When Stephens refused to do the interviews, his supervisors started disciplinary proceedings, issuing him formal warnings, he described at the time. He decided to quit, but not before he sent out a legal memo he’d drafted arguing why the policy violates the law, which he sent to his entire San Francisco office, supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator. He later got his own legal representation, at Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit. 

He says he’s still trying to draw attention to the program, encouraging others to speak out against it. 

“You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

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

So, what happened to the integrity of 9th Circuit Appellate Judges and Congress? Why are they OK with blatant violations of our laws, our Constitution, and human rights that actually kill people? You could call it “accessory to murder.”

Folks like Doug Stephens, Molly O’Toole, and many other courageous, dedicated members of the “New Due Process Army” are making a public record. While the cowardly abusers might be “getting away with murder” in “real time,” they will eventually be held accountable by history for their illegal, immoral, and unconscionable actions. And, that includes not only the “perpetrators” in the Trump Administration, but also their many disgraceful enablers in the judiciary and Congress. 

Many innocent people might die or be sent to oblivion. But, their bloodstains won’t be washed away, even by time.

PWS

11-16-19

“CONSTITUTIONAL CASTRATION”– CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: HOW THE FECKLESS GOP CONGRESS IS SCREWING THE MOST VULNERABLE AMONG US BY LETTING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TRASH THE IMMIGRATION LAWS AND END-RUN THE CONSTITUTION WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL PARTICIPATION! – “The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?”

 

Catherine Rampell
Catherine Rampell
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-bulldozed-over-congress-on-immigration-will-lawmakers-ever-act/2019/11/14/67401466-0722-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

 

Catherine writes @ WashPost:

 

By

Catherine Rampell

Columnist

November 14, 2019 at 7:09 p.m. EST

Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.

The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.

To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.

Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.

Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.

Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.

Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.

Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. This would have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.

Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.

But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.

Take asylum law.

“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.

But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.

Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.

This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”

“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.

A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.

The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?

 

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

Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?

It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.

Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!

 

PWS

11-15-19

 

 

PROFILES IN WHITE NATIONALIST COWARDICE: At Time Of World’s Greatest Need, Trump Administration Resettled Zero (0) Refugees In October – “There couldn’t be a worse time for it. The UN estimates there are around 26 million refugees worldwide, many of whom are victims of torture or women and girls fleeing persecution or violence.”

Natasha Frost
Natasha Frost
Reporter
Quartz

https://apple.news/A9iGP0BvrTqCp47JtaKz2Wg

 

Natasha Frost reports for Quartz:

 

ACCESS DENIED

Not a single refugee was resettled in the US last month

The nosedive is the result of a State Department freeze on admissions, according to a World Relief press release, resulting in hundreds of canceled flights and yet more uncertainty for the thousands of refugees hoping to resettle in the US. The department has issued an admissions ceiling of 18,000 for the financial year 2020—the lowest in almost 30 years, and well below the number of displaced people already in the pipeline to be resettled in the US. (Ceilings for 2018 and 2019 were 45,000 and 30,000, respectively.)

There couldn’t be a worse time for it. The UN estimates there are around 26 million refugees worldwide, many of whom are victims of torture or women and girls fleeing persecution or violence. Others may be victims of the war in Syria, where the withdrawal of US troops has generated chaos and further devastation. Barely half a percent of the 26 million will be resettled at all, and even then only after a process of intensive screening from admitting states, noted Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement released yesterday. “At a time of record forced displacement in the world, lower admissions constrain UNHCR’s ability to deliver on its refugee protection mandate and diminish our humanitarian negotiating power at the global level,” he added.

While states are barred from expelling asylum seekers or returning them “to any country in which they would face persecution,” they are under no legal obligation to accept any number of refugees. In the mid-1960s, the early years of modern refugee programs, according to the Center for Migration Studies, the US representative to the UN described the proper, legal treatment of refugees and asylum seekers as a “credit” to the US, rather than “a burden.” In recent years, however, the US government has come to see these obligations as a humanitarian headache—one that places an undue toll on US taxpayers.

In 1980, when records began, the US admitted more than 200,000 refugees to a country of around 270 million people. Nearly 30 years on, the US population has risen more than 40%, while the number of refugees resettled is down by more than 80%.

 

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

 

There is simply no end to the Trump Administration’s sleazy, selfish, cowardly, cruelty.  Under Trump, the U.S. has gone from a humanitarian beacon to the leader of the “race to the bottom.”

 

PWS

11-05-19

HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!

Tanvi Misra
Tanvi Misra
Immigration Reporter
Roll Call

 

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/doj-changed-hiring-promote-restrictive-immigration-judges?fbclid=IwAR2VfI3AKcttNoXlc_MX0sa-6X94bsOWF4btxb7tWDBz7Es4bvqB63oZA-0

 

Tanvi Misra reports for Roll Call:

 

DOJ changed hiring to promote restrictive immigration judges

New practice permanently placed judges on powerful appellate board, documents show

Posted Oct 29, 2019 2:51 PM

Tanvi Misra

@Tanvim

More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the borderDHS advances plan to get DNA samples from immigrant detaineesWhite House plans to cut refugee admittance to all-time low

 

Error! Filename not specified.

James McHenry, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, testifies before a Senate panel in 2018. Memos from McHenry detail changes in hiring practices for six restrictive judges placed permanently on the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Department of Justice has quietly changed hiring procedures to permanently place immigration judges repeatedly accused of bias to a powerful appellate board, adding to growing worries about the politicization of the immigration court system.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests describe how an already opaque hiring procedure was tweaked for the six newest hires to the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals. All six board members, added in August, were immigration judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates. Some also had the highest number of decisions in 2017 that the same appellate body sent back to them for reconsideration. All six members were immediately appointed to the board without a yearslong probationary period.

[More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border]

“They’re high-level deniers who’ve done some pretty outrageous things [in the courtroom] that would make you believe they’re anti-immigrant,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and past senior legal adviser at the board. “It’s a terrifying prospect … They have power over thousands of lives.”

Among the hiring documents are four recommendation memos to the Attorney General’s office from James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system.

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The memos, dated July 18, recommend immigration judges William A. Cassidy, V. Stuart Couch, Earle B. Wilson, and Keith E. Hunsucker to positions on the appellate board. McHenry’s memos note new hiring procedures had been established on March 8, to vet “multiple candidates” expressing interest in the open board positions.

A footnote in the memos states that applicants who are immigration judges would be hired through a special procedure: Instead of going through the typical two-year probationary period, they would be appointed to the board on a permanent basis, immediately. This was because a position on the appellate board “requires the same or similar skills” as that of an immigration judge, according to the memo.

Appellate board members, traditionally hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, are tasked with reviewing judicial decisions appealed by the government or plaintiff. Their decisions, made as part of a three-member panel, can set binding precedents that adjudicators and immigration judges rely on for future cases related to asylum, stays of deportation, protections for unaccompanied minors and other areas.

McHenry, appointed in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concludes his recommendation memos by noting that the judge’s “current federal service was vetted and no negative information that would preclude his appointment” was reported. He does not mention any past or pending grievances, although public complaints have been filed against at least three of the judges.

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These documents, obtained through FOIA via Muckrock, a nonprofit, collaborative that pushes for government transparency, and shared with CQ Roll Call, reflect “the secrecy with which these rules are changing,” said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. “It’s very hard to remove or discipline a judge that’s permanent than when it’s probationary, so this has long term implications.”

‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have left’: Migrant laments ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Volume 90%

 

The Department of Justice declined to answer a series of questions asked by CQ Roll Call regarding the new hiring practices, why exemptions were made in the case of these immigration judges and whether complaints against any of the judges were considered.

“Board members, like immigration judges, are selected through an open, competitive, and merit-based process involving an initial review by the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent, multiple levels of review by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ official wrote via email. “This process includes review by several career officials. The elevation of trial judges to appellate bodies is common in almost every judicial system, and EOIR is no different.”

Homestead: On the front lines of the migrant children debate

Volume 90%

 

Opaque hiring process

When the department posted the six board vacancies in March, the openings reflected the first time that board members would be allowed to serve from immigration courts throughout the country. Previously, the entire appellate board worked out of its suburban Virginia headquarters.

In addition, the job posts suggested that new hires would be acting in a dual capacity: They may be asked to adjudicate cases at the trial court level and then also review the court decisions appealed to the board. Previously, board members stuck to reviewing appeals cases, a process that could take more than a year.

Ultimately, all six hires were immigration judges, although past board candidates have come from government service, private sector, academia and nonprofits.

“This was stunning,” MaryBeth Keller, chief immigration judge until she stepped down this summer, said in a recent interview with The Asylumist, a blog about asylum issues. “I can’t imagine that the pool of applicants was such that only [immigration judges] would be hired, including two from the same city.”

Keller said immigration judges are “generally eminently qualified to be board members, but to bring in all six from the immigration court? I’d like to think that the pool of applicants was more diverse than that.”

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who headed the board under President Bill Clinton, said the panel always had arbitrary hiring procedures that changed with each administration and suffered from “quality control” issues. But the Trump administration has “pushed the envelope the furthest,” he said.

“This administration has weaponized the process,” he told CQ Roll Call. “They have taken a system that has some notable weaknesses in it and exploited those weaknesses for their own ends.”

The reputation and track record of the newest immigration judges has also raised eyebrows.

According to an analysis of EOIR data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, each of these newest six judges had an asylum denial rate over 80 percent, with Couch, Cassidy, and Wilson at 92, 96, and 98 percent, respectively. Nationally, the denial rate for asylum cases is around 57 percent. Previous to their work as immigration judges, all six had worked on behalf of government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the military.

“It mirrors a lot of the concerns at the trial level,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). She said several new hires at the trial level have been Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys.

“Every day across the country, people’s lives hang in the balance waiting for immigration judges to decide their fate,” she said. “Asylum grant rates for immigration court cases vary widely depending on the judge, suggesting that outcomes may turn on which judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”

Immigration experts note that denial rates depend on a variety of factors, including the number and types of cases that appear on a judge’s docket. Perhaps a better measure of an immigration judge’s decision-making may be the rate that rulings get returned by the appeals board.

For 2017, the last full year for which data is available, Couch and Wilson had the third and fourth highest number of board-remanded cases — at 50 and 47 respectively, according to federal documents obtained by Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer. The total number of cases on their dockets that year were 176 and 416, respectively.

Some of the behavior by the newer judges also have earned them a reputation. In 2018, AILA obtained 11 complaints against Cassidy that alleged prejudice against immigrant respondents. In a public letter the Southern Poverty Law Center sent last year to McHenry, the group complained that Cassidy bullied migrants in his court. He also asked questions that “exceeded his judicial authority,” Center lawyers wrote.

Another letter, sent in 2017 by SPLC lawyers and an Emory University law professor whose students observed Cassidy’s court proceedings, noted the judge “analogized an immigrant to ‘a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood’ and asked the attorney if he would let that person in.”

SPLC also has documented issues with Wilson, noting how he “routinely leaned back in his chair, placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes” during one hearing. “He held this position for more than 20 minutes as a woman seeking asylum described the murders of her parents and siblings.”

Couch’s behavior and his cases have made news. According to Mother Jones, he once lost his temper with a 2-year-old Guatemalan child, threatening to unleash a dog on the boy if he didn’t stop making noise. But he is perhaps better known as the judge who denied asylum to “Ms. A.B.,” a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor, even after the appellate board asked him to reconsider. Sessions, the attorney general at the time, ultimately intervened and made the final precedent-setting ruling in the case.

Couch has a pattern of denying asylum to women who have fled domestic violence, “despite clear instructions to the contrary” from the appellate board, according to Johnson, the immigration lawyer who said Couch “has been prejudging all claims that have a history of domestic violence, and quite literally copying and pasting language he used to deny other domestic violence victims asylum.”

Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte-based immigration lawyer and second vice president at AILA, went to law school with Couch and called him “complex.” While he was reluctant to characterize the judge as “anti-immigrant,” he acknowledged “concerning” stories about the Couch’s court demeanor.

“In our conversations, he’s held the view that asylum is not the right vehicle for some individuals to immigrate to the U.S. — it’s one I disagree with,” McKinney said. “But I feel quite certain that that’s exactly why he was hired.”

Politicizing court system

Increasingly, political appointees are “micromanaging” the dockets of immigration judges, said Ashley Tabaddor, head of the union National Association of Immigration Judges. Appointees also are making moves that jeopardize their judicial independence, she said. Among them: requiring judges to meet a quota of 700 completed cases per year; referring cases even if they are still in the midst of adjudication to political leadership, including the Attorney General, for the final decision; and seeking to decertify the immigration judges’ union.

These are “symptoms of a bigger problem,” said Tabaddor. “If you have a court that’s situated in the law enforcement agency … that is the fundamental flaw that needs to be corrected.”

In March, the American Bar Association echoed calls by congressional Democrats to investigate DOJ hiring practices in a report that warned the department’s “current approach will elevate speed over substance, exacerbate the lack of diversity on the bench, and eliminate safeguards that could lead to a resurgence of politicized hiring.”

“Moreover, until the allegations of politically motivated hiring can be resolved, doubt will remain about the perceived and perhaps actual fairness of immigration proceedings,” the organization wrote. “The most direct route to resolving these reasonable and important concerns would be for DOJ to publicize its hiring criteria, and for the inspector general to conduct an investigation into recent hiring practices.”

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

One of the most disgusting developments, that the media sometimes misses, is that having skewed and biased the system specifically against Central American asylum seekers, particularly women and children, the Administration uses their “cooked” and “bogus” statistics to make a totally disingenuous case that the high denial rates show the system is being abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers. That, along with the “fiction of the asylum no show” been one of “Big Mac’s” most egregious and oft repeated lies! There certainly is systemic abuse taking place here — but it is by the Trump Administration, not asylum seekers and their courageous lawyers.

 

This system is a national disgrace operating under the auspices of a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts whose life-tenured judges are failing in their collective duty to put an end to this blatantly unconstitutional system: one that  also violates statutory provisions intended to give migrants access to counsel, an opportunity to fully present and document their cases to an unbiased decision maker, and a fair opportunity to seek asylum regardless of status or manner of entry. Basically, judges at all levels who are complicit in this mockery of justice are “robed killers.”

 

Just a few years ago, asylum seekers were winning the majority of individual rulings on asylum in Immigration Court. Others were getting lesser forms of protection, so that more than 60 percent of asylum applicants who got final decisions in Immigration Court were receiving much-needed, life-saving protection. That’s exactly what one would expect given the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in 1987 about the generous standards applicable to asylum seekers in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca.

 

Today, conditions have not improved materially in most “refugee sending countries.” Indeed, this Administration’s bogus designation of the Northern Triangle “failed states” as “Safe Third Countries” is absurd and shows their outright contempt for the system and their steadfast belief that the Federal Judiciary will “tank” on their responsibility to hold this Executive accountable.

 

As a result of this reprehensible conduct, the favorable trend in asylum adjudication has been sharply reversed. Now, approximately two-thirds of asylum cases are being denied, many based on specious “adverse credibility” findings, illegal “nexus” findings that intentionally violate the doctrine of “mixed motives”enshrined in the statute, absurdly unethical and illegal rewriting of asylum precedents by Sessions and Barr, intentional denial of the statutory right to counsel, and overt coercion through misuse of DHS detention authority to improperly “punish” and “deter” legal asylum seekers.

 

Right under the noses of complicit Article III Judges and Congress, the Trump Administration has “weaponized” the Immigration “Courts” and made them an intentionally hostile environment for asylum seekers and their, often pro bono or low bono, lawyers. How is this acceptable in 21st Century America?

 

That’s why it’s important for members of the “New Due Process Army” to remember my “5 Cs Formula” – Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make these folks with “no skin the game” feel the pain and be morally accountable for those human lives they are destroying by inaction in the face of Executive illegality and tyranny from their “ivory tower perches.”  

We’re in a war for the survival of our democracy and the future of humanity.  There is only one “right side” in this battle. History will remember who stood tall and who went small when individual rights, particularly the rights to Due Process and fair treatment for the most vulnerable among us, were under attack by the lawless forces of White Nationalism and their enablers!

 

PWS

 

10-31-19

BIG MAC SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO PRESENT HIS LITANY OF LIES & TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS INVITATION TO “DIALOGUE” (ABOUT THE ENFORCEMENT PROGRAMS IMPLEMENTED BY DHS WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC “DIALOGUE” WHATSOEVER & AGAINST THE OVERWHELMING ADVICE OF PROFESSIONALS & EXPERTS, EVEN AT DHS)  — Then, He Should Have Been Questioned About His Knowingly False Restrictionist Narratives & Human Rights Abuses! – Here’s What He REALLY Stands For, & It’s Got Nothing To Do with “Dialogue!” — “This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,”. . . . People are living in squalor.”

Molly Hennessy Fiske
Molly Hennessy Fiske
Staff Writer
LA Times

 

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=d5727889-43e3-4481-bedb-dd0055e280af&v=sdk

 

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times from the Southern Border:

 

. . . .

 

In addition to the asylum seekers returned to Mexico to await their hearings, more than 26,000 are on waiting lists to enter U.S. border crossings and claim asylum, according to Human Rights Watch. Many on the lists are from Central America, but in recent weeks, large groups have been arriving from rural areas of Mexico’s interior, fleeing drug cartel violence.

The camp at the foot of the bridge in Matamoros has grown to hold more than a thousand migrants, most camped in scores of tents. Many have children and babies, and meals and water are sporadic, provided by volunteers.

“This Remain in Mexico program is a complete disaster,” Castro said after touring the camp next to the Rio Grande, where he saw migrants bathing near half a dozen crosses honoring those who drowned this summer while trying to make the dangerous crossing. “People should not be living like this.”

As Castro left the river, migrants standing in the reeds called to him in Spanish:

“Our children are sick!” said one man.

“We’ve been here for months!” said another.

“Our next court date isn’t until January!” said a woman.

“I’m sorry,” Castro replied in Spanish. “I know you’re suffering.”

Castro, who served as Housing and Urban Development secretary and San Antonio mayor, isn’t the first candidate to join asylum seekers at the border. In late June, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas met with migrants returned to Mexico at a shelter in Juarez. Days later, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker accompanied five pregnant women in the Remain in Mexico program across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.

Castro called on the Trump administration to end the Remain in Mexico policy, noting that he had met several vulnerable migrants who should not have been returned, including a woman who was seven months pregnant.

“This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,” he said. “People are living in squalor.”

By 5 p.m., all 12 asylum seekers who had crossed with Castro had been returned to Mexico.

“I feel so defeated,” said Rey, a 35-year-old Cuban who had joined the group only to find himself back in Matamoros by evening.

Dany was upset when she was returned to the camp at dusk. As migrants gathered, she told them that the U.S. official who had interviewed her by phone had been unsympathetic.

“I told him I was in danger in Matamoros. That didn’t matter to him,” she said. “There’s no asylum for anyone … the system is designed to end with us leaving.

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

Read Molly’s complete report at the link.

 

LGBTQ, sick, disabled, pregnant, the cruelty of the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” program touted by Big Mac and his flunkies knows no bounds.

 

One can only hope that someday, somewhere, in this world or the next, “Big Mac” and his fellow toadies carrying out the Trump/Miller unprecedented program of intentional human right abuses against the most vulnerable individuals (and actions directed against the pro bono lawyers and NGOs courageously trying to help them) will have to answer for their “crimes against humanity.”

 

How do you have a “dialogue” with someone like “Big Mac” whose insulting, condescending, false, and “in your face” prepared remarks, that he never got to give at Georgetown, in fact invited no such thing.

 

You can read Big Mac’s prepared compendium of lies that he never got to deliver here:

 

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2019/10/07/statement-department-homeland-security-following-acting-secretary-s-appearance

 

Here was my immediate reaction:

 

He falsely minimizes the powerful push factors, maximizes the pull factors (which his “maliciously incompetent” enforcement has contributed to), blames the legal system (the Constitution and refugee protection statutes that implement international treaties) and Congress (that is, Democrats, who have stood up for human rights), lies about failures to appear (this should be particularly galling to the many members of the Georgetown Community who have taken part in pro bono activities and know that pro bono representation actually solves that problem), ignores all reasonable solutions, and engages in mindless (and expensive) enforcement that maximizes the ability of oppressors while dehumanizing and killing some of the victims and virtually guaranteeing that there never will be a humane outcome. Seems like the “All-American solution” to me.

 

That being said, I wish folks had heard him out and asked him questions about his misstatements and lies during the Q&A. I actually would have liked to hear his answer when confronted by the studies that show that almost everyone who has a chance to be represented shows up for the hearings and why he is blocking, rather than facilitating, one of the key solutions — pro bono representation?  Why it’s OK to negotiate Safe Third Country agreements with countries that essentially are war zones and have no functioning asylum systems? Why he claimed that detention conditions were improving and more detention was necessary when his own Inspector General said just the opposite? Why he took a contemptuous position before Judge Dolly Gee that indefinite detention of families addressed her requirements, when it clearly didn’t? Why he blamed Judges and laws for problems he has either caused or aggravated? There wouldn’t have been enough time, I suppose.

 

Talking about free speech, it’s not like the Trump Administration engages in any type of dialogue with the public or professional experts before unilaterally changing policies. And, it’s not like they provide any forum for opposing views. Indeed, even U.S. Legislators, Judges, State Officials, and their own Asylum Officers who speak out against the Administration’s biased and wrong-headed views are routinely attacked, threatened, slandered, mocked, and denigrated.

 

Yesterday, I did a Skype training session for D.C. Affordable Law. There, I actually had a “dialogue” with those attorneys courageously and selflessly trying to help asylum applicants through the unnecessarily complicated and intentionally hostile environment in Immigration Court and at the BIA that Big Mac and his propaganda machine along with scofflaws Sessions, Barr, and McHenry have created. There are many “winnable” asylum cases out there, even after the law has intentionally been misconstrued and manipulated by the Trump Administration in a racist attempt to disqualify all asylum seekers from Central America.

One thing we all agreed upon was that nobody, and I mean nobody, without competent representation and a chance to gather necessary documentation would have any chance of getting asylum under the current hostile environment.  That means that when “Big Mac” and others tout “immediate decisions at the border” (sometimes by untrained Border Patrol Agents, no less, rather than professional Asylum Officers) what they REALLY are doing is insuring that few individuals have access to the necessary pro bono counsel and legal resources necessary to actually win an asylum case under today’s conditions. That’s an intentional denial of Constitutional, statutory, and human rights by Big Mac!

Then, Big Mac has the audacity and intellectual dishonesty to use bogus statistics generated by a system he and others have intentionally manipulated so as to reject or not even hear very legitimate asylum claims as “proof” that most of those claims are “without merit.” While I’m afraid it’s too late for those killed, tortured, or suffering because of Big Mac’s wrongdoing, I certainly hope that someday, someone does an assessment of all the improperly rejected, denied, and blocked asylum, withholding, CAT, SIJS, T,  and U claims that should have been granted under an honest interpretation of asylum law and a fair adjudication and hearing process.

A real dialogue on solving the Southern Border would start with how we can get the necessary professional adjudicators and universal representation of asylum seekers working to make the system function fairly and efficiently. And that probably would mean at least 20% to 25% “quick grants” of strong cases that would keep them out of the Immigration Court and Courts of Appeals systems without stomping on anyone’s rights. It would also enable asylees to quickly obtain work authorization and start making progress toward eventual citizenship and full integration so that they could maximize their great potential contributions to our society.

For the money we are now wasting on cruel, inhuman, and ultimately ineffective enforcement gimmicks being promoted by “Big Mac,” we could actually get a decent universal representation program for asylum seekers up and running. Under a fair system, rejections would also be fair and as expeditious as due process allows, making for quicker and more certain returns of those who are not qualified and perhaps even sending a more understandable and acceptable “message” as to who actually qualifies under our refugee and asylum systems.

It’s highly unlikely that there will ever be any real dialogue on immigration and human rights as long as Trump and neo-Nazi Stephen Miller are “driving the train” and “Big Mac with Lies” and other like him are serving as their “conductors” on the “Death Express.” Trump and his policies have intentionally “poisoned the well” so that debate and constructive solutions are impossible. As long as we start, as Big Mac does, with a litany of lies and fabrications, and reject all truth and knowledge, there is no starting point for a debate.

 

PWS

10-08-19