IT’S HERE! — IMMIGRATION HISTORY AT ITS BEST! — Months In The Making, The “Schmidtcast,” A 7-Part Series Featuring Podcaster Marica Sharashenidze Interviewing Me About My Legal Career “American Immigration From Mariel to Miller” — Tune In Now!

Marica Sharashenidze

Born in 1993, Marica was raised in Maryland and earned a B.A. in Sociology from Rice University. Marica worked in the past as a paralegal at Hudson Legal in Ann Arbor and most recently explored eGovernance based infrastructure projects on the Dorot Fellowship. In the past, she received the Wagoner Fellowship, from the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she completed a year long ethnographic research project. She is fluent in Russian and proficient in Spanish and Hebrew.

Hon. Paul Wickham Schmidt
U.S. Immigraton Judge (Ret.)
Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law
Blogger, immigrationcourtside.com

Judge (Retired) Paul Wickham Schmidt

Judge Schmidt was appointed as an Immigration Judge at the U.S. Immigration Court in Arlington, Virginia, in May 2003 and retired from the bench on June 30, 2016. Prior to his appointment as an Immigration Judge, he served as a Board Member for the Board of Immigration Appeals, Executive Office for Immigration Review, in Falls Church, VA, since February 12, 1995. Judge Schmidt served as Board Chairman from February 12, 1995, until April 9, 2001, when he chose to step down as Chairman to adjudicate cases full-time. He authored the landmark decision Matter of Kasinga, 21 I&N Dec. 357 (BIA 1996), extending asylum protection to victims of female genital mutilation. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lawrence University in 1970 (cum laude), and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin School of Law in 1973 (cum laude; Order of the Coif). While at the University of Wisconsin, he served as an editor of the Wisconsin Law Review. Judge Schmidt served as acting General Counsel of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (1986-1987; 1979-1981), where he was instrumental in developing the rules and procedures to implement the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. He also served as the Deputy General Counsel of INS for 10 years (1978-1987). He was the managing partner of the Washington, DC, office of Fragomen, Del Rey & Bernsen (1993-95), and also practiced business immigration law with the Washington, DC, office of Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue from 1987-92 (partner, 1990-92). Judge Schmidt also served as an adjunct professor of law at George Mason University School of Law in 1989 and at Georgetown University Law Center (2012-14; 2017–). He has authored numerous articles on immigration law, and has written extensively for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Judge Schmidt is a member of the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association, and the Wisconsin and District of Columbia Bars. Judge Schmidt was one of the founding members of the International Association of Refugee Law Judges (“IARLJ”). In June 2010, Judge Schmidt received the Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award from the Lawrence University Alumni Association in recognition of his notable career achievements in the field of immigration law. Since retiring, in addition to resuming his Adjunct Professor position at Georgetown Law, Judge Schmidt has established the blog immigrationcourtside.com, is an Americas Vice President of the IARLJ, serves on the Advisory Board of AYUDA, and assists the National Immigrant Justice Center/Heartland Alliance on various projects, as well as speaking, lecturing, and writing in forums throughout the country on contemporary immigration issues, due process, and U.S. Immigration Court reform.

Here are links:

https://pws.transistor.fm/

https://feeds.transistor.fm/the-life-and-times-of-the-honorable-paul-wickham-schmidt

And here are some “Previews with links to each episode:”

APRIL 23, 2020 • 66 MINUTES

Concluding Remarks

So, what now? Will the intentional cruelty, “Dred Scottification,” false narratives, and demonization of “the other,” particularly women, children, and people of color, by presidential advisor Stephen Miller and his White Nationalists become the “future face” of America? Or, will “Our Better Angels” help us reclaim the vision of America as the “Shining City on the Hill,” welcoming immigrants and protecting refugees, in good times and bad, while “leading by example” toward a more just and equal world?

APRIL 22, 2020 • 48 MINUTES

The Mariel Boatlift Crisis

The Refugee Act of 1980 feels like a huge success…for a short amount of time. The first test of the act comes when Fidel Castro opens Cuba’s borders (and Cuba’s prisons) and hundreds of refugees arrive on Florida shores. The Mariel Boatlift Crisis forced the U.S. government to realize that not all asylum processing can happen abroad. Unfortunately, it also left the public with the impression that “Open arms and open hearts” leads only to crisis.

APRIL 22, 2020 • 25 MINUTES

The Refugee Act of 1980

The year is 1980 and the war in Vietnam has displaced hundreds and thousands of people. The system of presidential parole doesn’t seem like it can handle the growing global refugee crisis. What is the answer to this ballooning need? Process most refugees abroad to streamline their entrance to the U.S. Codify asylum in the U.S. in legislation that puts human rights first. Increase prestige, improve overall government coordination, provide a permanent source of funding, and institutionalize refugee resettlement programs and assimilation. Have Ted Kennedy be the face of the effort. For once, things are actually working out for humanity.

APRIL 22, 2020 • 54 MINUTES

The 1990s BIA

In the 1990s, Judge Schmidt was BIA Chairman Schmidt. With the support of then Attorney General Janel Reno, he aspired to “open up” appellate judgeships to all immigration experts, and to lead the BIA to much-needed progressive steps towards humane asylum law, better scholarship, improved public service, transparency, and streamlined efficiency to reduce the backlog. However, progress seemed to stall at several points and certain types of behavior tended to be rewarded. The Board sits at the intersection between a court and an agency within the administration, which means its hurdles come both from structural issues with the U.S. Justice System and with entrenched government bureaucracy.

APRIL 22, 2020 • 48 MINUTES

Creating EOIR

In the 1980s, critics claimed that the federal agency in charge of immigration enforcement, the “Legacy” Immigration and Naturalization Service (“INS”), could not process quasi-judicial cases in a fair and just manner due to limited autonomy, non-existent technology, insufficient resources, haphazard management, poor judicial selection processes, and backlogs. The solution? Create a sub-agency of the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) just for the immigration courts, focused on “due process with efficiency” and organizationally separate from the agency charged with immigration enforcement. The Executive Office of Immigration Review (“EOIR”) was an ambitious and noble endeavor, meant to be an independent court system operating inside of a Federal Cabinet agency. Spoiler: despite significant initial progress it did not work out that way in the long run.

APRIL 21, 2020 • 36 MINUTES

The Immigration Reform and Control Act

In 1986, the United States was facing an immigration crisis with an overwhelmed INS and a record number of undocumented folks in the country. IRCA, a bipartisan bill, was created to solve the immigration crisis through a three-pronged approach: legalization, enforcement and employer accountability. However, it soon became apparent that some parts of IRCA were more successful than others. IRCA taught us relevant lessons for going forward. Because while pathways to citizenship are self-sustaining, enforcing borders is not.

APRIL 18, 2020 • 43 MINUTES

The Ashcroft Purge

Judges are meant to be impartial; but, U.S. Immigration Judges have political bosses who are willing and able to fire them while making little secret of their pro-enforcement, anti-immigrant political agenda. What are the public consequences of an Immigration Court with limited autonomy from the Executive Branch? We begin the podcast at one of the “turning points,” when Attorney General John Ashcroft fired almost all the most “liberal” Board Members of the BIA, all of whom were appointed during the Clinton Administration. What followed created havoc among the U.S. Courts of Appeals who review BIA decisions. The situation has continually deteriorated into the “worst ever,” with “rock bottom” morale, overwhelming backlogs, fading decisional quality, and the “weaponized”Immigration Courts now tasked with carrying out the Trump Administration’s extreme enforcement policies.

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Many, many thanks to Marica for persuading me to do this project and for doing all the “hard stuff.” I just “rambled on” — her questions and expert editing provided the context and “framework.” And, of course, Marica provided all the equipment (the day her brother “borrowed” her batteries) and the accompanying audio clips and written introductions.

Also, many thanks to my wife Cathy for the many hours that she and “Luna the Dog” (a huge “Marica fan”) spent trying not to listen to us working in the dining room, while adding many helpful suggestions to me, starting with “you sound too rehearsed” and “lose the ‘uhs’ and ‘you knows.’” She even put up with me playing some of the “original takes” while we were “on the road” to Wisconsin or Maine.

Happy listening!

Due Process Forever!

PWS😎

05-19-20

COMPLICITY HAS COSTS: Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/18/judges-meeting-trump/

Fred Barbash
Legal Reporter
Washington Post

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

By

Fred Barbash

Feb. 18, 2020 at 3:16 a.m. EST

The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.

Republicans defend Barr as Klobuchar looks forward to testimony

Lawmakers and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway commented Feb. 16 on President Trump’s tweets and the conduct of Attorney General William P. Barr. (The Washington Post)

On Sunday, more than 1,100 former Justice Department employees released a public letter calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case.

More than 1,100 ex-Justice Department officials call for Barr’s resignation

A search of news articles since the group’s creation revealed nothing like a meeting to deal with the conduct of a president or attorney general.

Rufe, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, could not be reached for comment late Monday.

The action follows a week of turmoil that included the president tweeting his outrage over the length of sentence recommended by career federal prosecutors for his friend Roger Stone and the decision by Barr to withdraw that recommendation.

In between, Trump singled out the judge in the Stone case, Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for personal attacks, accusing her of bias and spreading a falsehood about her record.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” Rufe said to USA Today. “We’ll talk all this through.”

Trump began disparaging federal judges who have ruled against his interests before he took office, starting with U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. After Curiel ruled against Trump in 2016 in a pair of lawsuits detailing predatory marketing practices at Trump University in San Diego, Trump described him as “a hater of Donald Trump,” adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.”

Trump keeps lashing out at judges

President Trump has a history of denouncing judges over rulings that have negatively affected him personally as well as his administration’s policies. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)

Faced with more than 100 adverse rulings in the federal courts, Trump has continued verbal attacks on judges.

Rufe’s comments gave no hint of what the association could or would do in response.

Some individual judges have already spoken out critically about Trump’s attacks generally, among them U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a colleague of Jackson’s in Washington, and most recently, the chief judge of the court in Washington, Beryl A. Howell.

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In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

Will Trump & Barr eventually separate Article III Judges’ families or send them to danger zones in Mexico or the Northern Triangle to “deter” rulings against the regime? Will Mark Morgan and Chad Wolf then declare “victory?” Will their families be scattered to various parts of the “New American Gulag” with no plans to reunite them? Will they be put on trial for their lives without access to lawyers? Are there costs for failing to take a “united stand” for the rule of law, Constitutional Due Process, human rights, and the human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

Why does it take the case of a lifetime sleaze-ball like Roger Stone to get the “life-tenured ones” to “wake up” to the attacks on humanity and the rule of law going on under noses for the past three years?

Complicity has costs!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-18-20

U.S. JUDGE THWARTS (FOR NOW) TRUMP REGIME’S PERSECUTION/PROSECUTION OF HUMANITARIAN AID WORKERS – Regime’s Religious Hypocrisy Runs Deep!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-no-more-deaths-religious-liberty_n_5e3adf4ec5b6d032e76d1313

Carol Kuruvilla in HuffPost:

A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration, which often boasts about defending religious liberty, has violated the religious rights of a group of volunteers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration has spent years cracking down on the work of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a Unitarian Universalist ministry in Arizona that provides water and food to migrants crossing a treacherous stretch of desert along the border where dozens have died. Various members of No More Deaths have faced fines and even jail for what they consider to be faith-based, life-saving humanitarian aid.

But for the second time in months, a judge has ruled that the government shouldn’t be punishing these volunteers for putting their faith into practice.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez ruled Monday that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” As a result, the government substantially burdened the volunteers’ religious liberty by prosecuting them for this work, Marquez said.

“Given Defendants’ professed beliefs, the concentration of human remains on the [refuge], and the risk of death in that area, it follows that providing aid on the [refuge] was necessary for Defendants to meaningfully exercise their beliefs,” the judge wrote.

Márquez’s ruling reversed the decision of a lower court, where another judge dismissed the volunteers’ religious liberty claims and sentenced them to probation and fines last March.

A federal judge has ruled that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” From left, they are Natalie Hoffman, Madeline Huse, Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, and Oona Holcomb.

The case against the four volunteers ― Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick ― goes back to December 2017, a year when 32 sets of human remains were recovered from the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The volunteers were charged with misdemeanors for entering the wildlife refuge without proper permits and leaving behind jugs of water and cans of beans, which the government called abandonment of property.

The volunteers’ defense hinged on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The law states that if a defendant can prove that the government is substantially burdening her “sincerely held religious beliefs,” then the government has to show that it’s using the “least restrictive” path to achieving its goals.

This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe.Parker Deighan, spokesperson for No More Deaths

RFRA initially had broad bipartisan support. But more recently, the religious right has been using RFRA as a way to secure exemptions for conservative beliefs about abortion and LGBTQ rights. The evangelical Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores famously used RFRA to avoid paying for insurance coverage for contraception.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice has urged a narrow reading of RFRA claims made by people of faith who do not share the administration’s policy goals, according to Katherine Franke, faculty director of Columbia University’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project.

“The Trump Department of Justice has taken a biased approach to defending and enforcing religious liberty rights under RFRA, robustly protecting the rights of conservative Evangelical Christians while prosecuting people whose faith moves them to oppose the government’s policies,” Franke told HuffPost in an email.

Michael Bailey, the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for Arizona, said his team has no issue with Márquez’s finding that strong religious beliefs motivated the defendants’ acts.

“We highly value religious freedom without regard to where on the spectrum one’s beliefs might fall,” Bailey told HuffPost in a statement.

A volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths delivers water along a trail used by undocumented immigrants in the desert on May 10, 2019 near Ajo, Arizona.

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No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist ministry. But all four volunteers are technically religiously unaffiliated, which means they are part of a growing group of Americans who decline to identify with any specific religious tradition.

During testimonies, the four described feeling a spiritual calling to volunteer, inspired by beliefs about the sanctity of human life. They also spoke about taking moments of silence in the refuge to reflect on the suffering of those crossing the desert.

Holcomb said that she had constructed a “personal altar” at her home that included a ring of water bottles she picked up in the desert.

“There is … for me, I will say, like a deep spiritual need and a calling to do work based on what I believe in the world,” Holcomb testified, according to the judge’s opinion.

In its response to the volunteers’ appeal, the government argued that their beliefs were not truly religious because they didn’t explain how they fit into a “particular system of religious or spiritual beliefs.” The government also asserted that the volunteers were “draping religious garb” over “secular philosophical concerns.”

In her opinion, Márquez said that the volunteers’ RFRA claims can’t be dismissed just because they described their beliefs in broad terms and don’t belong to an established religion. She pointed out that religious and political motivations overlapped in the Hobby Lobby case. ThatSupreme Court verdict has shown that government faces an “exceptionally demanding” obligation to be minimally restrictive while imposing on a person’s religious exercise, Márquez said.

Ultimately, the government had failed to demonstrate that prosecuting the volunteers was the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling governmental interest, the judge said.

Scott Warren, a volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, walks into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to deliver food and water along remote desert trails used by undocumented immigrants on May 10, 2019, near Ajo, Arizona.

Márquez’s decision comes months after another No More Deaths volunteer, Scott Warren, was acquitted of a federal misdemeanor charge for leaving water jugs in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for migrants. The judge in that case also acknowledged that Warren’s action was protected by his right to religious freedom. That was one of the first times progressive religious beliefs related to immigration have been protected in this way, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project told HuffPost in November.

Franke said there are other cases where progressive people of faith are making religious exemption claims. The Rev. Kaji Douša, a New York pastor and immigrant rights activist, claims the federal government violated her religious freedom when she was detained and placed on a watch list for ministering to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The government has “trivialized” Douša’s RFRA claims and urged the court to dismiss them, Franke said.

In Philadelphia, the DOJ is trying to prevent a faith-based overdose prevention organization from opening a safe injection site, arguing that its “true motivation is socio-political or philosophical — not religious — and thus not protected by RFRA.”

Franke said that when Congress passed RFRA in 1993, the statute was meant to protect the religious liberty of people across a wide spectrum of beliefs, “not just some, and certainly not only those who hold religious beliefs that were shared with the current federal administration.”

Parker Deighan, a spokesperson for No More Deaths, told HuffPost that Márquez’s ruling on Monday reaffirms that “providing humanitarian aid is never a crime.”

“This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe,” she said. “We hope that that Judge Marquez’s ruling signifies a shift towards religious freedom exemptions being used to protect the work of people and organizations fighting on the side of justice, such as migrant solidarity organizations and indigenous peoples fighting for protection of their sacred lands and traditions, rather than protection for discrimination and bigotry.”

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So, here’s the deal.

The Trump (the least religious and most immoral President in U.S. History) regime uses a bogus “religious protection” rationale to cloak far-right programs of hate, intolerance, dehumanization, marginalization, and cruelty directed at people of color, the LGBTQ community, migrants, refugees, women, children, Muslims, Jews, and other vulnerable groups. According to the regime, “religious freedom” is limited to the “extremist religious right.”

Then, the regime attempts to misuse “the law” to punish those who actually “show Christ-like love in word and in deed.” To her credit, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez “just said no” to this disingenuous nonsense.

The only way to stop the intellectual dishonesty, mockery of religious humanitarian principles, and misuse of our laws is to oust Trump and his enablers from office at every level. Otherwise, we can expect the persecution and cruelty to continue.

And don’t be surprised if the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes find a way to manipulate the system to enable the persecution of others to continue and grow worse. It’s what complicit “judges” do in the face of tyrants.

While the regime is using your tax dollars to pervert the law to persecute humanitarian workers, they are simultaneously violating our Constitution, our statutes, and our international obligations, with the connivence of the Supremes and Federal Appeals Courts who choose to look the other way rather than standing up for individuals’ rights against authoritarian overreach.

It’s time to stand up for our Constitutional rights, human rights, and human decency. Throw the corrupt and immoral GOP and their collaborators out of office at the next election, and bring in Government officials, legislators, and life-tenured judges who are willing and able to stand up for their oaths of office!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-06-20

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations!

https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/05/deported-danger/united-states-deportation-policies-expose-salvadorans-death-and

February 5, 2020

Deported to Danger

United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse

Summary

February 5, 2020

US: Deported Salvadorans Abused, Killed

Stop Deporting Salvadorans Who Would Face Risks to Their Safety, Lives

The US government has deported people to face abuse and even death in El Salvador. The US is not solely responsible—Salvadoran gangs who prey on deportees and Salvadoran authorities who harm deportees or who do little or nothing to protect them bear direct responsibility—but in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm’s way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely.

Of the estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans living in the United States who are not US citizens, just under one-quarter are lawful permanent residents, with the remaining three-quarters lacking papers or holding a temporary or precarious legal status. While Salvadorans have asylum recognition rates as high as 75 percent in other Central American nations, and 36.5 percent in Mexico, the US recognized just 18.2 percent of Salvadorans as qualifying for asylum from 2014 to 2018. Between 2014-2018, the US and Mexico have deported about 213,000 Salvadorans (102,000 from Mexico and 111,000 from the United States).

No government, UN agency, or nongovernmental organization has systematically monitored what happens to deported persons once back in El Salvador. This report begins to fill that gap. It shows that, as asylum and immigration policies tighten in the United States and dire security problems continue in El Salvador, the US is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm.

Some deportees are killed following their return to El Salvador. In researching this report, we identified or investigated 138 cases of Salvadorans killed since 2013 after deportation from the US. We found these cases by combing through press accounts and court files, and by interviewing surviving family members, community members, and officials. There is no official tally, however, and our research suggests that the number of those killed is likely greater.

Though much harder to identify because they are almost never reported by the press or to authorities, we also identified or investigated over 70 instances in which deportees were subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm, usually at the hands of gangs, or who went missing following their return.

In many of these more than 200 cases, we found a clear link between the killing or harm to the deportee upon return and the reasons they had fled El Salvador in the first place. In other cases, we lacked sufficient evidence to establish such a link. Even the latter cases, however, show the risks to which Salvadorans can be exposed upon return and the importance of US authorities giving them a meaningful opportunity to explain why they need protection before they are deported.

The following three cases illustrate the range of harms:

In 2010, when he was 17, Javier B. fled gang recruitment and his particularly violent neighborhood for the United States, where his mother, Jennifer B., had already fled. Javier was denied asylum and was deported in approximately March 2017, when he was 23 years old. Jennifer said Javier was killed four months later while living with his grandmother: “That’s actually where they [the gang, MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha-13)] killed him.… It’s terrible. They got him from the house at 11:00 a.m. They saw his tattoos. I knew they’d kill him for his tattoos. That is exactly what happened.… The problem was with [the gang] MS [-13], not with the police.” (According to Human Rights Watch’s research, having tattoos may be a source of concern, even if the tattoo is not gang-related).

In 2013, cousins Walter T. and Gaspar T. also fled gang recruitment when they were 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were denied asylum and deported by the United States to El Salvador in 2019. Gaspar explained that in April or May 2019 when he and Walter were sleeping at their respective homes in El Salvador, a police patrol arrived “and took me and Walter and three others from our homes, without a warrant and without a reason. They began beating us until we arrived at the police barracks. There, they held us for three days, claiming we’d be charged with illicit association (agrupaciones ilícitas). We were beaten [repeatedly] during those three days.”

In 2014, when she was 20, Angelina N. fled abuse at the hands of Jaime M., the father of her 4-year-old daughter, and of Mateo O., a male gang member who harassed her repeatedly. US authorities apprehended her at the border trying to enter the US and deported her that same year. Once back in El Salvador, she was at home in October 2014, when Mateo resumed pursuing and threatening her. Angelina recounted: “[He] came inside and forced me to have sex with him for the first time. He took out his gun.… I was so scared that I obeyed … when he left, I started crying. I didn’t say anything at the time or even file a complaint to the police. I thought it would be worse if I did because I thought someone from the police would likely tell [Mateo].… He told me he was going to kill my father and my daughter if I reported the [original and three subsequent] rapes, because I was ‘his woman.’ [He] hit me and told me that he wanted me all to himself.”

As in these three cases, some people deported from the United States back to El Salvador face the same abusers, often in the same neighborhoods, they originally fled: gang members, police officers, state security forces, and perpetrators of domestic violence. Others worked in law enforcement in El Salvador and now fear persecution by gangs or corrupt officials.

Deportees also include former long-term US residents, who with their families are singled out as easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse. Former long-term residents of the US who are deported may also readily run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.

Nearly 900,000 Salvadorans living in the US without papers or only a temporary status together with the thousands leaving El Salvador each month to seek safety in the US are increasingly at risk of deportation. The threat of deportation is on the rise due to various Trump administration policy changes affecting US immigration enforcement inside its borders and beyond, changes that exacerbated the many hurdles that already existed for individuals seeking protection and relief from deportation.

Increasingly, the United States is pursuing policies that shift responsibility for immigration enforcement to countries like Mexico in an effort to avoid any obligation for the safety and well-being of migrants and protection of asylum-seekers. As ever-more restrictive asylum and immigration policies take hold in the US, this situation—for Salvadorans, and for others—will only worsen. Throughout, US authorities are turning a blind eye to the abuse Salvadorans face upon return.

Some people from El Salvador living in the United States have had a temporary legal status known as “Temporary Protected Status” or “TPS,” which has allowed those present in the United States since February 2001 (around 195,000 people) to build their lives in the country with limited fear of deportation. Similarly, in 2012, the Obama administration provided some 26,000 Salvadorans with “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or “DACA” status, which afforded some who had arrived as children with a temporary legal status. The Trump administration had decided to end TPS in January 2020, but to comply with a court order extended work authorization to January 2021. It remains committed to ending DACA.

While challenges to both policies wend their way through the courts, people live in a precarious situation in which deportation may occur as soon as those court cases are resolved (at the time of writing the DACA issue was before the US Supreme Court; and the TPS work authorization extension to January 2021 could collapse if a federal appellate court decides to reverse an injunction on the earlier attempt to terminate TPS).

Salvadoran asylum seekers are also increasingly at risk of deportation and return. The Trump administration has pursued a series of policy initiatives aimed at making it harder for people fleeing their countries to seek asylum in the United States by separating children from their parents, limiting the number of people processed daily at official border crossings, prolonging administrative detention, imposing fees on the right to seek asylum, extending from 180 days to one year the bar on work authorization after filing an asylum claim, barring asylum for those who transited another country before entering the United States, requiring asylum seekers to await their hearings in Mexico, where many face dangers, and attempting to narrow asylum.

These changes aggravated pre-existing flaws in US implementation of its protection responsibilities and came as significant numbers of people sought protection outside of El Salvador. In the decade from 2009 to 2019, according to government data, Mexican and United States officials made at least 732,000 migration-related apprehensions of Salvadoran migrants crossing their territory (175,000 were made by Mexican authorities and just over 557,000 by US authorities).

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the number of Salvadorans expressing fear of being seriously harmed if returned to El Salvador has skyrocketed. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of Salvadoran annual asylum applicants in the US grew by nearly 1,000 percent, from about 5,600 to over 60,000. By 2018, Salvadorans had the largest number (101,000) of any nationality of pending asylum applications in the United States. At the same time, approximately 129,500 more Salvadorans had pending asylum applications in numerous other countries throughout the world. People are fleeing El Salvador in large numbers due to the violence and serious human rights abuses they face at home, including one of the highest murder rates in the world and very high rates of sexual violence and disappearance.

Despite clear prohibitions in international law on returning people to risk of persecution or torture, Salvadorans often cannot avoid deportation from the US. Unauthorized immigrants, those with temporary status, and asylum seekers all face long odds. They are subjected to deportation in a system that is harsh and punitive—plagued with court backlogs, lack of access to effective legal advice and assistance, prolonged and inhumane detention, and increasingly restrictive legal definitions of who merits protection. The US has enlisted Mexico—which has a protection system that its own human rights commission has called “broken”—to stop asylum seekers before they reach the US and host thousands returned to wait for their US proceedings to unfold. The result is that people who need protection may be returned to El Salvador and harmed, even killed.

Instead of deterring and deporting people, the US should focus on receiving those who cross its border with dignity and providing them a fair chance to explain why they need protection. Before deporting Salvadorans living in the United States, either with TPS or in some other immigration status, US authorities should take into account the extraordinary risks former long-term residents of the US may face if sent back to the country of their birth. The US should address due process failures in asylum adjudications and adopt a new legal and policy framework for protection that embraces the current global realities prompting people to flee their homes by providing “complementary protection” to anyone who faces real risk of serious harm.

As immediate and first steps, the United States government should adopt the following six recommendations to begin to address the problems identified in this report. Additional medium- and long-term legal and policy recommendations appear in the final section of this report.

The Trump administration should repeal the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP); the two Asylum Bans; and the Asylum Cooperation Agreements.

The Attorney General of the United States should reverse his decisions that restrict gender-based, gang-related, and family-based grounds for asylum.

Congress and the Executive Branch should ensure that US funding for Mexican migration enforcement activities does not erode the right to seek and receive asylum in Mexico.

Congress should immediately exercise its appropriation power by: 1) Refraining from providing additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless and until abusive policies and practices that separate families, employ unnecessary detention, violate due process rights, and violate the right to seek asylum are stopped; 2) Prohibiting the use of funds to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Asylum Bans,” or the Asylum Cooperation Agreements, or any subsequent revisions to those protocols and agreements that block access to the right to seek asylum in the United States.

Congress should exercise its oversight authority by requiring the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General to produce reports on the United States’ fulfilment of its asylum and protection responsibilities, including by collecting and releasing accurate data on the procedural experiences of asylum seekers (access to counsel, wait times, staff capacity to assess claims, humanitarian and protection resources available) and on harms experienced by people deported from the United States to their countries of origin.

Congress should enact, and the President should sign, legislation that would broadly protect individuals with Temporary Protected Status (including Salvadorans) and DACA recipients, such as the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, but without the overly broad restrictions based on juvenile conduct or information from flawed gang databases.

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

History will neither forget nor forgive the many Article III Judges who have betrayed their oaths of office and abandoned humanity by allowing the Trump regime to run roughshod over our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency.

Future generations must inject integrity, courage, and human decency into the process for appointing and confirming Article III Judges. Obviously, there is something essential missing in the legal scholarship, ethical training, and moral integrity of many of our current batch of shallow “go along to get along” jurists! Human lives matter!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-06-20

NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

Sebastian Murdock
Senior Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-anti-immigration-op-ed-hate-group_n_5e21d9d8c5b673621f752f9c

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, is categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

BY SEBASTIAN MURDOCK

SENIOR REPORTER

HIUFFPOST

The New York Times published an op-ed decrying immigration by an author claiming to be a “liberal restrictionist” who is in fact attached to a known hate group.

The column, published Friday, was written by , “a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,” according to the biography listed under his byline.

CIS, which calls itself “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” is a known hate group that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant movement that hires racist writers and associates with white nationalists.

“I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” Kammer’s headline reads. The piece begins with an anecdote about how immigrants take the jobs of American-born workers and later claims “many liberal Democrats” want illegal immigration to run rampant:

Now many liberal Democrats, including those who call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seek to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Under the banner of inclusiveness, equality, human rights, racial reconciliation and reparations for American interventions in the third world, those liberals demand sanctuary for those who make it past the Border Patrol or overstay a visa. Few speak openly of open borders, but that is essentially what they are calling for.

Throughout the piece, Kammer seems set on reminding readers that he is liberal, even if his views might suggest otherwise.

“That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist,” Kammer, a former journalist, writes. “I have long considered myself a moderate liberal, in part because Democrats have always been the allies of working people.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, has cited CIS when speaking about immigration, and in 2011, the group released a report attempting to connect immigration with the creation of future terrorists, calling them “terror babies.”

The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science “research” papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language. According to the SPLC, “longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements.”

Running a column by an author employed by a known hate group is the latest in the Times’s run of publishing racist pieces in its opinion section. In December, columnist and known bedbug Bret Stephens cited a study by a white nationalist that falsely claimed Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other races. The study he cited “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the SPLC.

Do better, New York Times.

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

Ben Mathis-Lilley
Chief News Blogger
SLATE

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/times-op-ed-white-nationalist-center-for-immigration-studies.html

THE SLATEST

Times Taps White Nationalist Organization for Thought-Provoking Perspective on Immigration

By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY

JAN 17, 20206:42 PM

The New York Times opinion section under editor James Bennet ostensibly aims to challenge the paper’s predominately liberal readers by presenting them with thoughtful critiques of their worldview. In practice, it runs pieces like this recent argument that launching a war against Iran would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East—which was written by a veteran of the Bush administration who had predicted confidently in a 2003 piece also published by the Times that launching a war against Iraq would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East. There was no acknowledgment in the new piece of the old one, as an opinion section committed to intellectual honesty might require, nor was it particularly challenging in the sense of being difficult to rebut. But it did make people on the left feel bad, and like they were losing their minds, which is the bar that Bennet’s section requires an argument to clear.

The essay “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” published in the Times Thursday, may represent the nadir of this approach. It makes a familiar argument: that “the left” believes in a “post-national” system of open borders which sacrifices the interests of native-born working Americans to the interests of low-skilled foreign immigrants who drive down wages and disrupt the cultural cohesiveness of their communities. It argues for respecting a distinction between legal and illegal immigration and asserts that Donald Trump’s position on immigration can be appreciated, in a non-racist way, as “a patriotic battle to defend common people.” It accuses Trump’s critics of having had their minds addled by “tribal passions” and a fetish for conflict “between ethnic groups,” and it proposes a “conciliatory” policy that would offer amnesty to existing undocumented workers but institute a crackdown regime of visa enforcement that would prevent future undocumented individuals from finding jobs.

The familiarity of the article’s arguments is matched by the familiarity of its flaws. While large-scale immigration is, in fact, believed by some non-racists to flatten wages at the bottom of the pay scale, it’s also known to accelerate rather than retard economic expansion overall, and tends to be supported by progressives who advocate for other means of increasing working-class wages and sharing the benefits of GDP growth. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some ancient, race-agnostic pillar of global affairs, but rather a concept that was instituted in the United States in the early 20th century to explicitly discriminate against Asian, southern European, and eastern European individuals and expanded in the 1960s to explicitly discriminate against Mexicans. Trump’s support is strongest in areas where there are fewer undocumented immigrants, not more, and he lost four of the five states that have the highest undocumented populations per capita. Many of the most immigration-heavy and ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. are also the safest and wealthiest and are considered so desirable to live in by migrating native-born Americans that they are experiencing housing crises.

As to whether criticizing an administration that instituted the premeditated, systematic separation of young children from their parents after they applied legally for asylum is a matter of unseemly “tribal passions,” or whether support for the principles of inclusive American citizenship described on the Statue of Liberty constitutes “post-national” anti-patriotism, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

More concerning than any of these specific problems, though, is the piece’s provenance: It’s written by someone named Jerry Kammer, a fellow at a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies. Kammer has made a career out of covering immigration policy, he writes, for two reasons: “I was fascinated by its human, political and moral complexity. I also wanted to push back against the campaign by activist groups to label restrictionism as inherently racist.” He expresses regret that “odious people” with white-power affiliations have given the cause of cutting back on immigration a “bad name.”

What neither Kammer nor the Times discloses is that the Center for Immigration Studies was in fact founded by these people, most prominent among them a white nationalist named John Tanton who died last year. Tanton, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, believed that the United States needed to maintain a “European-American majority, and a clear one at that”; he founded CIS, he wrote in the 1980s, in order to give his ideas the appearance of independent “credibility.”

Kammer does write that he disagrees with “some of the center’s hard-line positions.” Among his more hard-line colleagues at CIS are a writer named Jason Richwine, who contributed to a journal founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer and who has said that “IQ” is the “most important” difference between racial groups. (As the SPLC has documented, CIS has circulated literally hundreds of articles by explicit white supremacists like Spencer via links in its weekly newsletter. Its director once accused Barack Obama of trying to “foment race war.”) A statement of purpose on the CIS website is credited to longtime Tanton collaborator Dan Stein, who once complained that mass immigration was a tool developed by “Ted Kennedy and his political allies” in approximately 1958 to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.”

In 1997, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Tanton in a piece called “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism.” It was a scathing article which noted that Tanton had once described the immigrant’s contribution to society as “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” The piece expressed concern that “otherwise sober-minded conservatives” and “reasonable critics of immigration” were affiliating themselves with his ideas. The author of that WSJ article, a 28-year-old journalist named Tucker Carlson, has since made the career-advancing decision to embrace Tanton-style nativism; he was in the news not too long ago for complaining in his role as a Fox News host that immigrants make the United States physically “dirtier.”

Whatever space ever existed between mainstream conservatism and white-power nationalism, Carlson demonstrates, has collapsed. And it turns out that the “odious people” that Kammer references in the Times are actually his colleagues and forebears, who created his organization so that policies intended to perpetuate “European-American” and “Anglo-Saxon” superiority could be laundered into the respectable discourse. What else is there to say but: It worked!

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

So, we have a White Nationalist in the White House assisted by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller actually turning nativism into “Government policy.” Other white supremacists are scattered in key positions throughout the Government, particularly the immigration bureaucracy. Trump tweets and right-wing media put out a constant barrage of nativist lies, misrepresentations, false narratives, and racial, ethnic, and religious slurs.

So, just why is it that the “mainstream media” owes White Nationalists yet another forum to spread their nativist propaganda?

It’s not limited, of course, to just the Times. The WashPost regularly publishes largely fact and value free right-wing blather from professional shills like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt under the guise of “op-eds.”

And Chuck Todd regularly invites GOP congenital liars and Trump toadies like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to spread their lies, false narratives, and debunked “conspiracy theories” from the “bully pulpit” of “Meet the Press.” To top it off, Chuck then appears to be flabbergasted that when he confronts these guys with truth and facts, they “double down” continuing to lie to his face, ignore established facts, and spread Putinesque conspiracy theories.

Fact is, most of the Trump agenda is corrupt, counterfactual, unethical, inhumane, divisive, and corrosive to American democracy. We receive enough of it from lots of sources every day, pretty much 24-7-365. Is it really necessary for those supposedly dedicated to truth and democracy to give more free “air time” to nativist shills spreading their racially corrosive, divisive, anti-democracy propaganda?

PWS

01-18-20

83% OF AFRICAN AMERICANS SAY TRUMP IS A RACIST: What Planet Has The Other 17% Been Living On? — “He has taken hatred against people of color, in general, from the closet to the front porch.”

https://apple.news/ABd8vQaHZQJm6eDhvbK3j0Q

The WashPost reports:

BY CLEVE R. WOOTSON JR., VANESSA WILLIAMS, DAN BALZ AND SCOTT CLEMENT

President Trump made a stark appeal to black Americans during the 2016 election when he asked, “What have you got to lose?” Three years later, black Americans have rendered their verdict on his presidency with a deeply pessimistic assessment of their place in the United States under a leader seen by an overwhelming majority as racist.

The findings come from a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans nationwide, which reveals fears about whether their children will have a fair shot to succeed and a belief that white Americans don’t fully appreciate the discrimination that black people experience.

While personally optimistic about their own lives, black Americans today offer a bleaker view about their community as a whole. They also express determination to try to limit Trump to a single term in office.

More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.

The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans.

Courtney Tate, 40, an elementary school teacher in Irving, Tex., outside Dallas, said that since Trump was elected, he’s been having more conversations with his co-workers — discussions that are simultaneously enlightening and exhausting — about racial issues he and his students face everyday.

“As a black person, you’ve always seen all the racism, the microaggressions, but as white people they don’t understand this is how things are going for me,” said Tate, who said he is the only black male teacher in his school. “They don’t live those experiences. They don’t live in those neighborhoods. They moved out. It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country.”

Francine Cartwright, a 44-year-old mother of three from Moorestown, N.J., said the ascent of Trump has altered the way she thinks about the white people in her life.

“If I’m in a room with white women, I know that 50 percent of them voted for Trump and they believe in his ideas,” said Cartwright, a university researcher. “I look at them and think, ‘How do you see me? What is my humanity to you?’ ”

The president routinely talks about how a steadily growing economy and historically low unemployment have resulted in more African Americans with jobs and the lowest jobless rate for black Americans recorded. Months ago he said, “What I’ve done for African Americans in two-and-a-half years, no president has been able to do anything like it.”

But those factors have not translated positively for the president. A 77 percent majority of black Americans say Trump deserves “only some” or “hardly any” credit for the 5.5 percent unemployment rate among black adults compared with 20 percent who say Trump deserves significant credit.

In follow-up interviews, many said former president Barack Obama deserves more credit for the improvement in the unemployment rate, which declined from a high of 16.8 percent in 2010 to 7.5 percent when he left office.

Others said their personal financial situation is more a product of their own efforts than anything the president has done.

“I don’t think [Trump] has anything to do with unemployment among African Americans,” said Ethel Smith, a 72-year-old nanny who lives in Lithonia, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. “I’ve always been a working poor person. That’s just who I am.”

Black Americans report little change in their personal financial situations in the past few years, with 19 percent saying it has been getting better and 26 percent saying it has been getting worse. Most, 54 percent, say their financial situation has stayed the same.

A similar 56 percent majority of African Americans rate the national economy as “not so good” or “poor,” contrasting with other surveys that find most Americans overall rate the economy positively, although there are sharp political divides on this question.

Beyond questions about the economy, African Americans see a range of concerns impacting the country overall as well as their own communities.

Just 16 percent of black Americans believe that most black children born in the U.S. today have “a good opportunity to achieve a comfortable standard of living.” A 75 percent majority think most white children have such an opportunity.

More than 8 in 10 say they do not trust police in the United States to treat people of all races equally, and 7 in 10 distrust police in their own community.

Black Americans also widely sense that their experiences with discrimination are underappreciated by white Americans. Just about 2 in 10 say that most white Americans understand the level of discrimination black Americans face in their lives, while nearly 8 in 10 say they do not.

The starkly negative outlook appears to be a turnabout from previous points during both the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies, according to surveys asking related questions. A 2011 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey found 73 percent of black women said it was a “good time” to be a black woman in America, while a similar survey in 2006 found 60 percent of black men saying it was a good time to be a black man.

Yet the Post-Ipsos poll also finds that 65 percent of black Americans say they feel optimistic about their own lives most or all of the time. This positive personal outlook crosses age and political groups, and while it peaks among those who are older and with higher incomes, roughly half of black Americans with incomes under $35,000 annually say they feel optimistic about their own lives.

Dana Clark, a father of 11 children in Ontario, Calif., said he tells all of his children that it’s possible to succeed in America, but that they’ll have to work harder than the white children they encounter.

“I tell them we’re going to set this plan up. Whatever you want to do you’re going to be able to do it,” he said. “But it ain’t going to be easy, especially if [you] want to make some money because you’re going to be in a world where they’re not going to expect you to be there. You can get what you want, but you’ve got to work harder, faster and stronger.”

The survey, by The Post and Ipsos, a nonpartisan research firm, is one of the most extensive recent surveys focused on views of the country and President Trump among black Americans, who are often represented by only small samples in customary national polls. It was conducted among 1,088 non-Hispanic black adults, including 900 registered voters, drawn from a large online survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households.

Few black voters responded positively to Trump’s campaign appeal for their votes. Exit polls taken during the 2016 election showed just 8 percent of African Americans supported Trump and 89 percent backed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, although black turnout was significantly lower than in 2008 and 2012 for the election and reelection of Obama, the country’s first black president.

In the Post-Ipsos poll, roughly three-quarters of black adults say the things that Trump is doing as president are “bad for African Americans,” while a similar majority says Obama’s actions as president were good.

Kenneth Davis, a truck driver who lives outside Detroit, said that when Trump was elected, co-workers who secretly harbored racist thoughts felt emboldened to publicly express them.

“One gentleman is waving the Confederate flag on the back of his pickup truck,” said Davis, 48, who is a Marine Corps veteran. “He was very brave to say ‘Trump’s president, I’m going to get my window (painted).’ ”

Retired federal prison warden Keith Battle said the political climate has exposed “unresolved racial issues” and that Trump has emboldened white supremacists. Battle, who lives in Wake Forest, N.C., said white supremacists “are not the majority of whites in America, but there is a significant amount still, I’d say 30 percent, and I think they’re just leading the country down a path of, eventually, chaos. They’re feeling jeopardized of losing their white privilege.”

Survey respondents were asked to say how Trump’s presidency has affected them personally or African Americans in general. The responses illuminated the data in the poll.

“Donald Trump has not done anything for the African American people,” said one person.

“He has created an atmosphere of division and overt racism and fear of immigrants unseen in many years,” said another.

A third said, “He has taken hatred against people of color, in general, from the closet to the front porch.”

Others echoed that sentiment, saying that the president has emboldened those with racially prejudiced views and therefore set back race relations for years. “I sense a separation between myself and some of my white associates,” one person wrote.

Trump’s overall approval rating among black Americans stands at 7 percent, with 90 percent disapproving, including 75 percent who disapprove “strongly.”

Similarly large majorities of black men and women disapprove of Trump, as do black Americans across different age, education and income levels. Trump receives somewhat higher marks among self-identified black conservatives, with 25 percent approving of his performance, compared with 5 percent of moderates and 3 percent among liberals.

Few black Americans appear open to supporting Trump’s bid for reelection at this point. He receives between 4 and 5 percent support among black registered voters in head-to-head matchups against eight potential Democratic nominees. But the level of Democratic support depends on who is the party’s nominee, peaking at 82 percent for former vice president Joe Biden and falling to 57 percent for former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The Post-Ipsos survey was conducted Jan. 2-8, 2020, through Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a large online survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among the sample of 1,088 black adults overall, and four points among the sample of 900 registered voters.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

Cleve R. Wootson Jr. is a national political reporter for The Washington Post, covering the 2020 campaign for president. He previously worked on The Post’s General Assignment team. Before that, he was a reporter for the Charlotte Observer.

Vanessa Williams is a reporter on the National desk.

Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s deputy national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.

Scott Clement is the polling director for The Washington Post, conducting national and local polls about politics, elections and social issues. He began his career with the ABC News Polling Unit and came to The Post in 2011 after conducting surveys with the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life

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

Unfortunately, it’s painfully simple. The GOP is the “21st Century Party of Jim Crow.” Those of us who believe in the 14th Amendment, equal justice, and human decency had better hang together to remove Trump and as many of his GOP toadies as possible from office in 2020.

Otherwise, we’ll all be reliving one of the worst chapters in American history. And that will be tragic for future generations of Americans of all races.

Make America REALLY great by voting Trump and his White Nationalist kakistocracy out of office on every level of our political system. There are enough of us out there in the majority to get the job done this time — if we only hang together and get out the vote everywhere!

PWS

01-17-20

POLITICS: DANIEL DENVIR @ LITERARY HUB: The Case Against Immigration Centrism – Liberals Inevitably Get Co-Opted Into “Nativism Lite” & The Result Is Donald Trump & His Overtly White Nationalist GOP!

https://apple.news/ASCSwefgISM2mLjzRVdJeWQ

When It Comes to Immigration, Political Centrism is Useless

With Trump in office, things can seem absurdly bleak. But after Republicans lost the House, it became clear that Trump’s first two years were for nativists a critical opportunity to reshape the contours of the American demos. And they blew it: Republicans had total control of government yet legislative cuts to legal immigration went nowhere. Meanwhile, Democratic voters are moving sharply left in the face of accelerating Republican extremism. The percentage of Americans calling for a decrease in legal immigration has plummeted since the early 2000s—particularly but not exclusively among Democrats. Indeed, since 2006 Democratic voters have swung from a strong plurality supporting legal immigration cuts to a stronger plurality backing increased legal immigration.

In promoting attacks on “illegal immigration” and militarizing the border, establishment politicians from both major parties inflamed popular anti-immigrant sentiment. But they helped move the Overton window so far right that it snapped loose of its bipartisan frame, prompting vociferous resistance on the left. The war on “illegal immigrants” was based on a bipartisan consensus. It is becoming very partisan. That’s good.

As nativists well know, immigration means that we the people is increasingly made up of people who don’t look like Trump and his base. And they correctly worry that immigration is driving a large-scale demographic transformation that could ultimately doom the conservative movement—a prospect that the most honestly racist figures on the far-right call “white genocide.” Non-white people disproportionately vote Democrat—a trend gravely exacerbated by unconstrained Republican racism that has alienated even wealthy and economically conservative non-white people. Demographics aren’t destiny. But thanks to the foundational role that racism plays in American capitalism, they do mean quite a bit.

In August 2019, Trump finally implemented an aggressive attack on legal immigration, expanding the definition of what makes an immigrant “likely to become a public charge” and thus excludable from the country.28 The rule further empowers immigration officers to deny entry to poor and working-class immigrants, particularly from Latin America, or to deny immigrants already in the country a green card. The rule radically expands a provision of US immigration law dating back to the Immigration Act of 1882 and, before that, to New York and Massachusetts’s enforcement targeting Irish paupers. The Migration Policy Institute predicts that the rule “could cause a significant share of the nearly 23 million noncitizens and U.S. citizens in immigrant families using public benefits to disenroll.” And visa denials under Trump had already skyrocketed before the new rule was in place.

It is unclear how profoundly the rule will reshape either the size or the class, national, and racial makeup of legal immigration. But regardless, the new rule is a reflection of Trump’s inability to secure cuts or changes to legal immigration in Congress. The rule will very likely be rolled back under even a milquetoast Democratic president. The same holds true with Trump’s deep cuts to refugee admissions, and the draconian proposal pushed by some in his orbit to cut admissions to zero. Trump is effectively terrorizing migrants in the present but failing to secure the enduring legislative change that would outlast his presidency.

There is no majority constituency today for enacting such legislation—nor any viable institutional vehicle for it. Whatever opportunity existed to leverage a white-grievance-fueled presidency toward a full nativist program has faded even as the right clings to power thanks to the system’s profoundly anti-democratic features. The left is nowhere near winning. But it is at long last emerging as a real force in clear conflict with both the Trumpist right and the center that facilitated its rise.

For Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Feinstein, Schumer, and a host of other Democrats, a measure of nativism was useful. Quite a bit more than that has proven necessary for Republicans. But too much nativism is a problem: no rational capitalist favors shutting out exploitable migrant labor. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, political stances that seem rooted in principle are in reality founded—if often in indirect, unconscious, and obscure ways—in “material conditions of existence.” This is no doubt the case here.

The United States has undergone decades of enforcement escalation, fashioning a useful scapegoat for neoliberalism and empire while maintaining a segmented labor market. But business frequently lost too, most spectacularly with the repeated defeat of comprehensive immigration reform. Business wants the undocumented to be legalized and guest workers who provide the benefits of undocumented labor without the risk. But what perhaps best reflects—but by no means exclusively reflects—the power of business is what hasn’t happened: deep legislative cuts to authorized immigration have been consistently off the table for more than two decades. This has been the case since the 1996 legislation to slash legal immigration was defeated in favor of a law to persecute undocumented immigrants and “criminal aliens.” The immigration debate has taken on a bizarre and contradictory life of its own. The unspeakability of cuts to authorized immigration, and the failure to impose effective employer sanctions and employment verification systems reveal that immigration policy was still tethered, narrowly but firmly, to the interests of capital. With Trump, full nativism is spoken. But substantial immigration reductions still cannot pass Congress.

A full examination of the complex role of business, the rich, and their various factions during the past two decades of immigration politics is yet to be written. Some of its basic contours, however, are clear. For one, the capitalist class has become recklessly polyphonic. Lumpen-billionaires like the Mercer family and the Koch brothers have spent vast amounts to promote their ideologically distinct priorities rather than those of the collective. The Tanton network is a case in point: it received more than $150 million since 2005 from the Colcom Foundation, founded by the late Mellon heir Cordelia Scaife May. Ironically, independent right-wing oligarchs who pursue idiosyncratic agendas now rival the Chamber of Commerce for influence thanks to the policy achievements of groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which helped those oligarchs make and keep their billions. But does establishment big business even care about immigration anymore?

Political scientist Margaret Peters argues that productivity gains and globalization’s facilitation of an overseas supply of low-wage labor has led to a lessening of business’s need for immigrant workers, resulting in more restriction. The evidence for this, however, is mixed. On the one hand, business has not won a major legislative expansion of immigration since 1990. But it has also not suffered a major defeat. What’s clear is that business can tolerate border security theatrics and the demonization of “criminal aliens,” and is content to exploit undocumented workers. As anthropologist Nicholas De Genova writes, “It is deportability, and not deportation per se, that has historically rendered undocumented migrant labor a distinctly disposable commodity.”34 Business opposes dramatic cuts to authorized immigration, effective employer sanctions, and mandatory employee verification. Business prefers legalization, but that doesn’t rival priorities like tax cuts and deregulation; if it did, business would abandon the Republican Party. The roles played in immigration politics by business interests with various and often bipartisan attachments require further research, which will in turn help to clarify the woefully under-studied sociology of ruling class power more generally.

Meanwhile, business’s hold on the Democratic Party has come under intense assault. The war on “illegal immigrants” that accelerated in the 1990s is facilitating a realignment of left-of-center politics in favor of a diverse, immigrant-inclusive working class in opposition to war, neoliberal oligarchy, and hard borders. The post–Cold War dominance of carceral neoliberalism had made such a popular coalition impossible; the exhaustion of that model signaled by the 2008 crisis has made it astonishingly credible. Record deportations and a radicalizing racist right triggered a revolt among the Democratic Party’s young and increasingly diverse base. That base has along with much of American public opinion moved to perhaps the most staunchly pro-immigrant position in American history—and, in doing so, toward a radically inclusive vision of the American working class. Amid a post-Recession boom in labor militancy, that portends trouble for the entire political establishment and the racist and oligarchic order it protects.

Trump’s election set that trajectory into overdrive, rendering opinions on immigration a basic proxy for one’s partisan allegiance. Border militarization that once garnered bipartisan support is now the polarizing Wall. Obama’s brutal migrant detention centers have under Trump been labeled “concentration camps.” The number of Republicans who believe that the United States risks losing its national identity if the country welcomes immigrants from the world over has increased since Trump’s election.35 At the same time, Democrats have become more hostile to enforcement. In 2010, 47 percent of Democrats said that they equally prioritized a pathway to legalizing undocumented immigrants and “better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws,” while just 29 percent prioritized a pathway to legalization alone. By 2018, the number prioritizing legalization alone skyrocketed to 51 percent. As the war on immigrants kicked into high gear in 1994, just 32 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed that immigrants strengthened the country. By 2016, the share of Democrats who said so had surged to 78 percent.

Extreme polarization, the establishment’s bête noire, is in fact the only solution to the long-standing bipartisan agreement that immigration is a problem for enforcement to solve. Demanded and rejected, oppressed and expelled, this country’s many others have long insisted that the promise of American freedom, designed for if never truly delivered to white settlers, belongs to them too because they too are the people. And contrary to what Trump’s presidency might suggest, a growing number of Americans agree and are turning against nativism and war. Racism is, as the remarkable number of Americans embracing socialism understand, an obstacle to freeing everyone.

The issue of borders is, in turn, a simple one in principle for socialists: borders are a nationalist enterprise and thus incompatible with an internationalist workers’ creed. Migration is a symptom of social violence when it is compelled by poverty, war, or climate change. But moving to faraway and strange places is often a beautiful journey too, one nurtured by love, adventure, and the drive for self-determination and realization. Migration should be free and the choice to migrate should be freely made. The border does not protect Americans against cultural change, economic insecurity, and terrorism. It bolsters a system of global inequality that harms people everywhere by dividing them.

Even with public opinion moving rapidly to our side, border controls will not fall anytime soon. To chip away at them, we must understand their historical particularity. The legal right to travel was, for most white people, a basic one for much of American history. It remains so for wealthy people, particularly those with passports from rich countries. Border controls arose in the United States not out of any neutral law enforcement principle but to exclude Asians, Jews, Italians, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, and other Others in the service of an exploitative and expansionist empire. Our land borders began to harden only alongside the rise of industrial capitalism, and were only militarized in recent decades.

If Democrats stick to the center on immigration, they will find themselves fighting on two fronts. A fight against Republicans, with the left at their back, will be far easier to win—and a more noble victory. Simple realism dictates that no legislation to grant citizenship to millions will be passed until Republicans are defeated. There’s no use trying to appease them. The bipartisan consensus supporting harsh immigration and border enforcement has fractured. Democratic elected officials need to catch up or be defeated too. It’s the task of the left to accelerate the nascent split, demanding radical reforms that correspond to our dream of a world where no human being is illegal. We must transform nation-states so that they no longer divide workers but instead are conduits for the democratic control of our social, economic, political, and ecological futures.

We must urgently develop demands for policies that will not create an open border overnight but a radically more open border soon. The border must be demilitarized, which would include demolishing the hundreds of miles of already existing wall and dramatically downsizing the Border Patrol. Criminal sanctions on illegal entry and reentry and the public charge rule must be repealed. Links between ICE and local law enforcement created by Secure Communities and 287(g) must be broken. Opportunities for legal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, must be expanded. The right to asylum must be honored. And citizenship for those who reside here must be a stand-alone cause, unencumbered by compromises that are not only distasteful but also politically ineffectual—and that today would provoke opposition from both the nativist right and the grassroots left.

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

The nativists start with lies, myths, and distortions. The liberals start with truth and humane values. They used to meet in the “center right” which is “nativism lite” and bad news for migrants and for humane values.

With some logic, Denvir argues that the nativist right has now come “out of their shell” and just advocates against all foreigners and for maximum human cruelty. In other words, complete dehumanization and abandonment of the common good: A trashing of the “Statute of Liberty” (see, e.g., Stephen Miller & “Cooch Cooch”) and an obliteration of the real, diverse America, a nation of immigrants, in favor of a mythical “Whitbread” version that never really existed (as American has always been heavily reliant on the labor of non-white immigrants — but they often were intentionally kept without social standing or political power).

In many ways, the right’s abandonment of the “pro-immigration, anti-illegal immigration” false narrative frees liberals to explore more robust, realistic immigration policies that would serve the national interest, recognize the truth of American as a rich and diverse nation of immigrants, and, perhaps most helpfully, sharply reduce the amount of time, effort, and goodwill squandered on ultimately unrealistic and impractical immigration enforcement schemes and gimmicks (see e.g., “The Wall” & “The New American Gulag”). In that context, immigration enforcement could be rationalized and made more efficient to serve the actual national interests rather than the political (and sometimes financial) interests of the far-right nativist minority.

Interesting thoughts to ponder.

PWS

01-17-20

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
Immigration 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.

. . . .

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

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

WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!

yhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-us-is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre-going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-11ea-a1ff-c48c1d59a4a1_story.html

Kevin Sieff reports from Guatemala for WashPost:

By

Kevin Sieff

Jan. 14, 2020 at 4:21 p.m. EST

GUATEMALA CITY — The chartered U.S. government flights land here every day or two, depositing Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers from the U.S. border. Many arrive with the same question: “Where are we?”

For the first time ever, the United States is shipping asylum seekers who arrive at its border to a “safe third country” to seek refuge there. The Trump administration hopes the program will serve as a model for others in the region.

But during its first weeks, asylum seekers and human rights advocates say, migrants have been put on planes without being told where they were headed, and left here without being given basic instruction about what to do next.

When the migrants land in Guatemala City, they receive little information about what it means to apply for asylum in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. Those who don’t immediately apply are told that they must leave the country in 72 hours. The form is labeled “Voluntary Return.”

“In the U.S., the agents told us our cases would be transferred, but they didn’t say where. Then they lined us up to get on the plane,” said a woman named Marta, 43, from Honduras. She sat in a migrant shelter here with her 17-year-old son, who nursed a gunshot wound in his left cheek — the work, both say, of a Honduran faction of the MS-13 gang.

“When we looked out the window, we were here,” she said. “We thought, ‘Where are we? What are we supposed to do now?’ ”

After the volcano, indigenous Guatemalans search for safer ground — in Guatemala, or the United States

Human rights organizations in Guatemala say they have recorded dozens of cases of asylum seekers who were misled by U.S. officials into boarding flights, and who were not informed of their asylum rights upon arrival. Of the 143 Hondurans and Salvadorans sent to Guatemala since the program began last month, only five have applied for asylum, according to the country’s migration agency.

“Safe third country” is one of the Trump administration’s most dramatic initiatives to curb migration — an effort to remake the U.S. asylum system. President Trump has called it “terrific for [Guatemala] and terrific for us.”

But an Asylum Cooperation Agreement is bringing migrants to a country that is unable to provide economic and physical security for its own citizens — many of whom are themselves trying to migrate. In fiscal 2019, Guatemala was the largest source of migrants detained at the U.S. border, at more than 264,000. The country has only a skeletal asylum program, with fewer than a dozen asylum officers.

Trump wants border-bound asylum seekers to find refuge in Guatemala instead. Guatemala isn’t ready.

As the deal was negotiated, it drew concerns from the United Nations and human rights organizations. But its implementation, advocates say, has been worse than they feared.

“It’s a total disaster,” said Thelma Shau, who has observed the arrival of asylum seekers at La Aurora International Airport in her role overseeing migration issues for Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman.

“They arrive here without being told that Guatemala is their destination,” she said. “They are asked, ‘Do you want refuge here or do you want to leave?’ And they have literally minutes to decide without knowing anything about what that means.”

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet in the Oval Office last month with then-President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Guatemalan government says that it explains asylum options and that migrants are simply choosing to leave voluntarily.

“Central American people are given comprehensive attention when they arrive in the country, and respect for their human rights is a priority,” said Alejandra Mena, a spokeswoman for Guatemala’s migration agency. “The information provided is complete for them to make a decision.”

In Guatemala, lenders that were supported by USAID and the World Bank are now funding illegal migration.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. The United States has signed similar “safe third country” agreements with El Salvador and Honduras, but they have not yet been implemented. In recent days, Trump administration officials have said they are considering sending Mexican asylum seekers to Guatemala to seek refuge.

Human rights groups in Guatemala that have observed the process say migrants here are not given key information about their options — such as what asylum in Guatemala entails and where they would stay while their claims are being processed. Many migrants are aware that Guatemala suffers from the same gang violence and extortion that forced them from their home countries.

Migrants from Guatemala disembark from a raft in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, in June. (Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

Paula Arana observed the orientation as child protection liaison for the human rights ombudsman.

“It’s clear that the government is not providing enough information for asylum seekers to make a decision, especially in the three minutes they are given,” she said. “Instead, they are being pushed out of the country.”

The United States had suggested that it would begin implementing the agreement by sending single men to Guatemala. But less than a month after it began, families with young children are arriving on the charter flights. Last week, Arana said, a 2-year-old arrived with flulike symptoms.

On Thursday, a man named Jorge, 35, his wife and two daughters, ages 11 and 15, landed here. A day later, they were clustered together at the Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Guatemala City where government officials took them in a bus. They had been given the papers with 72 hours’ notice to leave Guatemala, and couldn’t figure out what to do.

The family had fled multiple threats from gangs in Honduras, which started with an interpersonal dispute between Jorge’s wife and one of the gang’s leaders. Jorge was certain that going back would mean certain death. Like Marta, Jorge did not want his last name to be published out of fear for his family’s safety.

“We’re thinking about our options. We know we can’t stay here. What would I do? Where would we stay?” he said. “Maybe we need to try to cross to the United States again.”

In western Guatemala, cultivating coffee was once a way out of poverty. As prices fall, growers are abandoning their farms for the United States.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is not participating in the program. But officials say they’re aware of problems with its implementation.

“UNHCR has a number of concerns regarding the Asylum Cooperation Agreement and its implementation,” said Sibylla Brodzinsky, UNHCR’s regional spokeswoman for Central America and Mexico. “We have expressed these concerns to the relevant U.S. and Guatemalan authorities.”

Human rights advocates who have interviewed the asylum seekers, known locally as “transferidos,” say many have decided that their best option is to migrate again to the United States. Smugglers often offer their customers three chances to make it across the border.

Migrants at the Casa del Migrante described spending a week in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the United States, where they had intended to make their asylum claims. Many carried binders full of evidence they assumed would bolster their cases. On her phone, Marta saved avideo of her son being tortured by MS-13 gang members.

But in their brief conversations with U.S. immigration officials, they were told they would not be given a chance to apply for asylum in the United States.

“We had all this information to show them,” Marta said, leafing through photos of her son’s scars and Honduran court documents. “They said, ‘That’s not going to help you here.’ ”

This school aims to keep young Guatemalans from migrating. They don’t know it’s funded by the U.S. government.

In interviews with The Washington Post, some migrants said they were told vaguely that their cases were being “transferred.” Others were told they were going to be returned to their countries of origin.

“One agent told me, ‘You’re going back to Honduras,’ ” Marta said. But then they arrived in Guatemala City.

“When we looked out the window, we just assumed it was a stop,” her son said.

Marta thought Guatemala might be even more dangerous. They had no connection to the country and nowhere to stay beyond their first few days. When she left the migrant shelter to buy food Friday morning, she said, she stumbled upon a crime scene with a dead body a few blocks away.

During their nine-day detention at an ICE facility in Texas, she said, the family shared a cell with a Guatemalan family that was fleeing violence perpetrated by a different MS-13 group based here.

Agronomy students, some hooded, block a street outside a Guatemala City hotel before lawmakers voted on the deal that made Guatemala a “safe third country” for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. (Oliver De Ros/Associated Press)

“Why would they send us to a country where the same gangs are operating?” she asked.

In the absence of a thorough explanation of their asylum rights in Guatemala, El Refugio de la Niñez is offering a short tutorial to the asylum seekers. So far, 45 have attended.

“The Guatemalan government is completely absent in this whole process,” said Leonel Dubon, the director of the U.N.-funded center. “It sends a clear message. The government isn’t here to offer shelter, it’s here to push people out as quickly as possible.”

The Trump administration negotiated the “safe third country” agreement last year with lame-duck Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales.

As Guatemala pursues war criminals, a dark secret emerges: Some suspects are living quiet lives in the U.S.

Guatemala’s constitutional court initially blocked the deal. Then Trump threatened tariffs on the country and taxes on remittances sent home by Guatemalans living in the United States. It was eventually signed in July.

The new Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, was sworn in Tuesday. He has raised concerns about the agreement, saying he hadn’t been briefed on its details.

At the signing ceremony, Trump said it would “provide safety for legitimate asylum seekers, and stop asylum fraud and abuses [of the] system.”

U.S. asylum officers do not vet the cases of migrants before they are sent to Guatemala.

In her brief conversations with U.S. immigration agents, Marta tried to get them to look at her binder full of documents and photos.

“They weren’t interested,” she said. “They just kept saying that your case will be transferred to an institution that can handle it.”

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

Kevin writes about a tragically absurd situation that seems to have fallen “below the radar screen” of public outrage or even discourse. This is wrong! Most days I can’t believe that the county that I proudly served for more than 35 years is engaging in this type of abusive behavior that would be below the level of even some Third World dictatorships.

And, it isn’t just “occasional abuse” — it’s systemized, institutionalized abuse and dehumanization on a global and regular basis — all approved or de facto enabled by feckless and spineless Federal Appellate Courts, all the way up to the Supremes! These are folks who should know better and really have no other meaningful function in our “separation of powers” system other than to protect our individual rights. Authoritarian governments and dictators hardly need “courts” to enforce their will, even if some find it useful to “go through the motions” of creating and employing complicit “judges.” As one of my Round Table colleagues succinctly put it “there appears to be no bottom!”

Clearly, the “Safe Third Country” exception was never intended by Congress, nor does the statutory language permit it, to be used to “orbit” asylum applicants to some of the most dangerous refugee sending countries in the world with thoroughly corrupt governments and non-existent asylum systems. So, why does the Trump regime have confidence that it can and will get away with these atrocities? Because they believe, correctly so far, that the Article III Federal Courts, many of them now stacked with Trump’s hand-selected “toady judges,” are afraid to stand up to tyranny and protect the rights of desperate, mostly brown-skinned, asylum seekers.

Obviously, from an institutional standpoint, the Article III Courts are saying:

“Who cares what happens to a bunch of brown-skinned foreigners. Let ‘em die, rot, or be tortured. Human rights, due process, and human dignity simply don’t matter when they don’t affect us personally, financially, or socially. That’s particularly true because the results of our abuses are taking place, thankfully, in foreign nations: out of sight, out of mind. Not our problem.”

Apparently, many Americans agree with this immoral and illegal approach. Otherwise, the “black robed, life tenured ones” would be pariahs in their communities, churches, and social interactions. They wouldn’t be offered those cushy teaching positions at law schools or a chance to expound before public audiences.

But, not speaking out against bad judges and not insisting on integrity and courage in the Article III courts could ultimately prove fatal for all of our individual rights. Judges who use their privileged positions to turn a blind eye to the oppression of others, particularly the most vulnerable humans among us, and the catastrophic failure of the rule of law and Due Process in the U.S. immigration system can hardly be expected to stand up for the individual rights of any of us against Government oppression.

After all, why should an exulted Federal Appellate Judge or a Supreme Court Justice care about what happens to you, unless your blood is about to spatter his or her pristine black robe? Many of those supportive of or complicit in Trump’s tyranny will personally experience the costs of a feckless Federal Judiciary when their “turn in the barrel” comes. And, the Trump regime’s list of those who’s “lives and rights don’t matter” is very, very long and continually expanding.

All I can say now is that some day, the full truth about what happens to those unlawfully and immorally turned away at our borders will “out.” Then, many Articles III judges will try to disingenuously protect their reputations by saying, similar to many judges of the Third Reich, “Gee, who knew,” or “I was powerless,” or “It was a political problem beyond our limited jurisdiction.”

My charge to the New Due Process Army: Don’t let the complicit judges get away with it in the “Court of History.” You see, know, and experience first-hand every day the results of Article III judicial complicity. Don’t ever forget what those judges have done and continue to do to human lives from their protected and “willfully clueless” ivory towers! Ultimately, you aren’t as powerless as the “complicit ones” think you are!

Due Process Forever; Feckless, Complicit, Immoral Federal Judges Never!

PWS

01-14-20

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

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

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

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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

We can’t 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.

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

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

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

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

Trumpism deserves to be called a cult

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds about right.

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

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

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

Twitter: @page88

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

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

PWS

01-11-20

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

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 . . . .”

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

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

ALAN CUMMING @ NBC NEWS: THE ANTI-IMMIGRATION MOVEMENT IS ALL ABOUT RACISM, PLAIN AND SIMPLE: “This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak.“

https://apple.news/A9MUmrFflRFuwxRgcWulUGQ

Opinion | The racism behind anti-immigration rhetoric is palpable to every immigrant. Including me.

America is such a young country: It’s only a few hundred years old, and no one who has been here for only a few generations is without an immigrant connection. So, from the outside — from a place like Europe — the idea that Americans are not connected to immigration and our immigrant pasts seems like we are denying ourselves. We sound very self-hating about the very notion of immigration, but we’re actually just confusing racism with a desire to fix the immigration system.

I see that all the time: Things that are being said about immigration and the ideals of immigration are basically just being used as a thinly veiled form of racism. It’s so blatant. The president himself actually said he doesn’t mind people coming from countries like Norway — white people; it’s the people from “shithole countries” he doesn’t want. It seems almost pedantic and obsolete to actually have to talk about the fact that it’s racism.

The contributions of all immigrants has been so derided by our present administration, so I felt that I needed to celebrate immigration rather than have it openly derided. Also, I wanted to try to make people stand back and just see the anti-immigration propaganda that they were being fed, and understand instead how this country is what it is because of immigration. That was the genesis of my cabaret show (now an Audible book) “Legal Immigrant.”

The whole point of the show was to tell my experience from my perspective as immigrant, but also to show that I’m feeling these negative things about being an immigrant and I’m a white man of privilege; I can’t imagine what it must be like for people of color or Muslims. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I would say that, the day I became an American, at least 75 percent of the other people being sworn in with me were people of color.

So I wanted to try and make people stand back from this vehemence and have some fun while analyzing what was going on. I don’t want to be didactic, though: I understand that there are problems with the immigration system; I understand there’s a massive refugee problem in the world. But I will not condone racism or bigotry as part of that debate.

That doesn’t mean I’m not open to dialogue. I like when people engage, that’s why I do theater. I don’t want to just be behind a screen; I actually enjoy the fact that I can hear how people are reacting to me. And I’ve been heckled doing the show — from both sides. I want to hear what people have to say and I totally engage with some people. A couple of times it got quite rowdy, but that’s why I wanted to do these cabarets. They’re good ways to get people to engage and be provoked, and to maybe change their minds … or at least consider other options. And, at the end of the show, I make everyone in the audience sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” so I’m obviously someone who likes bringing people together, even though I also like provoking them.

There’s a thing in this country right now: Any dissent against the president or any disagreement with his views is seen as a red flag and people immediately respond in an aggressive way. People are just screaming at one another right now; it makes it very difficult to engage. And so, aside from trying to celebrate immigration, I’m trying to get people to also stand back and try to not let the tropes of this awful rhetoric blind us to what is actually going on.

This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak. The idea that if you’re pro-immigrant, you’re anti-America, and if you’re anti-immigration, you are pro-America is completely wrong. That’s not just my opinion; if you stand back from it and look at the history of this country, you can’t deny that is the truth.

I really do believe that people have lost the power of analysis in this country because of the duality of the political system: Politics in this country is a team sport. I also think that, with people like Betsy DeVos running the Education Department, it’s going to take a long time before we have a generation who can regain the powers of analysis. It’s all a multilayered effort to dumb us down, in order to be able to brainwash us and feed us propaganda. We need to stand up and take heed before it’s too late.

As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.

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

Yup!

It’s hard to have a “debate” or a “dialogue” when one side is wedded to myths and bogus narratives, rather than facts: when one side is driven by what it wants to believe, egged on by those who find it politically advantageous, rather than truth.

One of the worst of the many horrible things about the Trump Regime is that supposedly responsible public officials spread the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee White Nationalist myths and false narratives (see, e.g., “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, “Cooch Cooch,” Mark “Fund My TGIF” Morgan, Matt Albence, EOIR, etc.).

PWS

12-01-19

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

OUR DISTINGUISHED PANEL:

Eileen Blessinger, Blessinger Legal

Lisa Johnson-Firth, Immigrants First

Andrea Rodriguez, Rodriguez Law

FBA Austin -Central America — Intro

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

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Federal Bar Association Immigration Conference

Austin, Texas

May 17, 2019

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

Welcome to the front lines of the battle for our legal system, and ultimately for the future of our constitutional republic. Because, make no mistake, once this Administration, its nativist supporters, and enablers succeed in eradicating the rights and humanity of Central American asylum seekers, all their other “enemies” — Hispanics, gays, African Americans, the poor, women, liberals, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, Democrats — will be in line for “Dred Scottification” — becoming “non-persons” under our Constitution. If you don’t know what the “Insurrection Act” is or “Operation Wetback” was, you should “tune in” to today’s edition of my blog immigrationcourtside.com and take a look into the future of America under our current leaders’ dark and disgraceful vision.

Before I introduce the “Dream Team” sitting to my right, a bit of asylum history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, that doesn’t count those offered prosecutorial discretion or “PD” by the DHS counsel. Sometimes, this was a humanitarian act to save those who were in danger if returned but didn’t squarely fit the somewhat convoluted “refugee” definition as interpreted by the BIA. Other times, it appeared to be a strategic move by DHS to head off possible precedents granting asylum in “close cases” or in “emerging circumstances.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Attorney General also sent strong messages to EOIR that hurrying folks through the system by “prioritizing” them, denying their claims, “stuffing” their appeals, and returning them to the Northern Triangle with a mere veneer of due process was an essential part of the Administration’s “get tough” enforcement program. EOIR was there to “send a message” to those who might be considering fleeing for their lives — don’t come, you won’t get in, no matter how strong your claim might be.

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

Hurry up scheduling and ADR also resulted in more “in absentia” orders because of carelessly prepared and often inadequate or wrongly addressed “notices” sent out by overwhelmed DHS and EOIR court staff. Sometimes DHS could remove those with in absentia orders before they got a chance to reopen their cases. Other times, folks didn’t even realize a removal order had been entered until they were on their way back.

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

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

But, just when many of us thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. The Trump Administration arrived on the scene. They put lifelong White Nationalist xenophobe nativists Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller in charge of eradicating the asylum process. Sessions decided that even artificially suppressed asylum grant rates weren’t providing enough deterrence; asylum seekers were still winning too many cases. So he did away with A-R-C-G- and made it harder for Immigration Judges to control their dockets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, we will return to the evolving protection of asylum seekers in the pre-2014 era and eradicate the damage to our fundamental values and the rule of law being done by this Administration’s nativist, White Nationalist policies.That’s what the “New Due Process Army” is all about.

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

05-20-19

Due Process Forever!

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