MIKE MILLER @ WASHPOST EXPOSES “TURNSTILE JUSTICE” AT BORDER US DISTRICT COURT: US Magistrate Presides Over “Clown Court” Where Traumatized, Bewildered, Migrants Are Coerced Into Pleading Guilty To Crimes Without Understanding The Consequences — Assistant US Attorney “High Fives” Speedy Finish, Turning “Trials” Into A “Sporting Event” — Even The Public Defender Partakes Of The Clown Show By Purporting To Represent 71 Individuals Simultaneously! — Come On, Folks, Whatever Happened To Due Process, Ethics & Professional Responsibility?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/they-just-took-them-frantic-parents-separated-from-their-kids-fill-courts-on-the-border/2018/06/09/e3f5170c-6aa9-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html

Miller writes:

The words “all rise” were still ringing in the brightly lit South Texas courtroom last week when Peter E. Ormsby slipped unceremoniously into his seat.

“Good morning,” the 62-year-old federal magistrate said as the courtroom filled with the clanking of shackled defendants returning to their wooden benches. “We’re here to take up a number of criminal cases that allege that the defendants violated the immigration laws of the United States.”

Seated in front of Ormsby were 71 disheveled immigrants caught illegally crossing the Rio Grande. The number of defendants has soared amid President Trump’s crackdown on a new surge of border crossers. But the mass hearing was remarkable less for its size than for who it included: parents.

For the first time, federal courtrooms here and across the Southwest are being flooded with distraught mothers and fathers who have been charged with misdemeanor illegal entry and separated from their children — a shift in policy touted by the administration as a way to stop families from trying to reach the United States but decried by critics as traumatizing and inhumane. Last month a Honduran father separated from his wife and 3-year-old son killed himself in a Texas jail cell, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

In McAllen alone, 415 children had been stripped from their parents between May 21 and June 5, according to federal public defenders.

Now, on the morning of June 6, 14 more parents from Central America were facing an agonizing choice with uncertain consequences. They could plead guilty in the hope of speeding up their reunification with their children, but risk damaging their chances of receiving asylum in the United States. Or they could plead innocent and head to trial, a process that could take days or weeks and prolong their separation from their kids.

Seven miles from Mexico and surrounded by brushlands that are home to the border’s busiest smuggling routes, the Bentsen Tower federal courthouse has become one of the anguished epicenters of family separation.

On Wednesday morning, the evidence of that was the tears on the parents’ faces. Many clutched fliers with a phone number they could call to try to get their kids back from the increasingly crowded federal shelters where they are being housed.

. . . .

By day’s end, he would sentence more than 100 people, including 28 parents. Most would receive the lightest punishment possible — time served — before they were handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The frenzied pace of the proceedings was no accident. As Moody emerged from court in the afternoon, she and a colleague exchanged a high-five.

“I said I’d get done by 3:20,” the prosecutor said, checking the time to see she was only nine minutes behind schedule.

‘Prosecuting everybody’

Aleman-Bendiks had arrived at the tall, dark glass courthouse shortly after dawn that morning. After preparing for an hour in an office decorated with her diplomas from Rice University and Harvard Law, the 52-year-old federal public defender headed upstairs to the courtroom, where the air smelled like sweat and the 71 immigrants were already seated. She was representing all of them.

“How many of you were traveling with children?” she asked in Spanish. More than a dozen hands shot up.

“How did they separate you?” she said to a Guatemalan woman whose 8-year-old daughter was taken away.

“How long since you saw her?” she asked a Honduran separated from her 6-year-old girl.

“They just took them?” she said to a Salvadoran whose two daughters were gone.

This is what Trump’s zero-tolerance policy looked like to Aleman-Bendiks and scores of other federal public defenders along the border.

. . . .

For Meyers, the challenge is not only logistics but the wrenching stories of families being torn apart. In a conference call with her assistant federal public defenders last month, she said she told them to force judges to confront the issue.

“We think it’s important for the court and everybody to hear what’s happening,” she said.

On May 22, Aleman-Bendiks asked Ormsby in court to pressure the government to provide more information about the fate of families being separated. On May 31, she and her boss, Kyle B. Welch, met with ten officials from ICE, Border Patrol, the Justice Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for the children separated from their parents as well as “unaccompanied minors”who arrived in the United States on their own.

“The idea was to try and give us a sense of what’s happening here,” Aleman-Bendiks said, but the meeting delivered little clear information.

One Border Patrol official did say agents in and around McAllen had a policy of not separating children under 5 from their parents — although that policy does not appear to be in place elsewhere along the border. Children as young as 18 months have been taken from their parents.

On Wednesday, Aleman-Bendiks asked Ormsby to order the government to hand over lists of children separated from their parents so that immigration attorneys could ensure they were reunited.

“My concern is that there are lost children here in the system,” she said. “We are hearing it every day, your honor, and it’s not right.”

Ormsby noted that “children are not within the jurisdiction of this court. These people are here because they have a criminal case here.”

He invited her to prepare a brief on how he could order the government to provide lists. “But on its face,” he added, “it seems questionable to me that the court would have the authority to do that.”

. . . .

But immigration advocates aren’t so sure. “They are now convicted of a crime,” said Leah Chavla of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Under U.S. law, that could be a bar to them receiving asylum, so they’d have to get a waiver.”

In the end, those complications mattered less to the parents in Ormsby’s courtroom than seeing their kids again. All of them pleaded guilty to illegally crossing the border and were sentenced to time served.

“Obviously, in each of your situations, you committed a crime and so the government was within their rights to pursue that,” the magistrate said. “Whether or not they should exercise their discretion that way is something that is obviously being debated.”

“As someone who has children myself,” he added, “it would be a terrible situation to be separated under those conditions.”

Then the guards put handcuffs back on the parents and led them out of the courtroom, where their future remained as unclear as the location of their children.

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

Read Mike’s complete report at the above link.

As described in Mike Miller’s article, U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby appears to preside over a “court” where “justice” for traumatized, obviously bewildered, and coerced migrants is a cross between a sporting event and a bad joke.

The U.S. Supreme Court held that understanding the immigration consequences of a conviction is a critical element in a migrant’s voluntary decision to plead guilty. Many of these migrant defendants obviously wanted to know whether a guilty plea would 1) free them from detention, 2) reunite them with their children, and 3) adversely affect their asylum cases. Neither Judge Ormsby nor anyone else in his courtroom was able to answer accurately. Judge Ormsby had the authority to defer accepting the pleas until the Assistant U.S. Attorney provided the answers. Yet, he did not do so. These guilty pleas appeared to be neither informed nor voluntary. A federal judge therefore should not have accepted them.

No wonder the prosecuting Assistant U.S Attorney “high fived” at the end of this farce. Likewise, the Public Defender’s claim to simultaneously represent 71 non-English-speaking defendants was a remarkable twist on the canons of ethics and professional responsibility.

Would a group of white, middle class, mostly first-time misdemeanor defendants have been treated this way in federal court? I doubt it. Yet, due process applies equally to everyone in the U.S. regardless of status.

PWS

06-10-18

 

WASHPOST: MICHAEL E. MILLER & JON GERBERG REPORT — Nation Of Shame — How The Trump Administration Stomps On The Human Rights Of The Most Vulnerable Refugees Every Day!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/wheres-mommy-a-family-fled-death-threats-only-to-face-separation-at-the-border/2018/03/18/94e227ea-2675-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html

Miller & Gerberg report:

They had come so far together, almost 3,000 miles across three countries and three borders: a mother with three children, fleeing a gang in El Salvador that had tried to kill her teenage son.

But now, in a frigid Border Patrol facility in Arizona where they were seeking asylum, Silvana Bermudez was told she had to say goodbye.

Her kids were being taken from her.

She handed her sleeping preschooler to her oldest, a 16-year-old with a whisper of a mustache whose life had been baseball and anime until a gun was pointed at his head.

“My love, take care of your little brother,” she told him on Dec. 17.

“Bye, Mommy,” said her 11-year-old daughter, sobbing.

And then her children were gone.

Once a rarity, family separations at the border have soared under President Trump, according to advocacy groups and immigration lawyers.

The administration first put forth the idea a year ago, when John F. Kelly, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he was considering separating parents from their children as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

Kelly, now the White House chief of staff, quickly walked back his comments after they triggered public outrage, and the controversy ebbed as illegal immigration plunged to historic lows.

But when border apprehensions began to rise again late last year, so, too, did reports of children being stripped from their parents by Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Separating children from their parents is unconscionable and contradicts the most basic of American family values,” 71 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to DHS in February.

The separation of a Congolese mother from her 7-year-old daughter generated headlines and spurred a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union this month.

“We are hearing about hundreds of families,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

“DHS does not currently have a policy of separating women and children,” according to an agency statement released this month, but retains the authority to do so in certain circumstances, “particularly to protect a child from potential smuggling and trafficking activities.”

“The truth is that whether they call it a policy or not, they are doing it,” Gelernt said.

For Silvana’s children, the separation was bewildering and frightening.

They had no idea where their mother was. Did their father, who had fled to the United States months earlier, know where they were? They were told they’d join their family in a few days, but days turned into weeks.

Surrounded by strangers in a strange place, they wondered: Would they ever see their parents again?

‘My soul left me’

The family’s crisis began a year ago, when Silvana’s husband, Yulio Bermudez, refused to help MS-13 members in San Salvador escape from police in his taxi. The gang beat him and threatened to kill him.


Silvana Bermudez weeps on March 16 as she watches a video of her children during their separation. (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)

Yulio fled north and crossed illegally into Texas, where the 34-year-old claimed asylum and eventually joined relatives.

Then one night in November, Silvana sent her oldest son — Yulio’s stepson — to a pupuseria down the block. As he was walking, the teenager saw a car pull up. A member of MS-13’s rival, the 18th Street gang, peppered the restaurant with gunfire.

The gang member then turned his gun on the teen, who was frozen with fear. But when he pulled the trigger, there was only the click of an empty chamber.

“Must be your lucky day,” the gangster said and sped off.

Silvana, 33, and her son reported the incident to police, also describing Yulio’s run-in with MS-13. Within days, MS-13 members showed up to their door to tell Silvana she’d pay for snitching, she would later tell U.S. immigration officials. And when the 18th Street member saw her in the street, he pointed his finger at her like a gun.

“It was a clear sign that he was on to us and he wanted to hurt me and my child,” she said in immigration court filings.

Relatives drove Silvana and her kids to the border with Guatemala, where they caught the first of many buses on their way to America.

When they arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border several days later, Silvana and her children followed a group of migrants through the night to a tall brick wall.

“When I saw they were jumping a wall, I said, ‘Oh my God, where do I go from here?’ ” Silvana recalled in an interview. But it was too late to turn back, so she ushered her daughter forward and watched as the 11-year-old disappeared over the wall. Then she handed up her 3-year-old.

“My soul left me, because the wall was very high,” she recalled. Out of sight on the other side of the wall, migrants caught the boy using a blanket.

They had been walking through the desert for a few minutes when they were caught and taken to a “hielera,” or ice box, the nickname for the cold, barren Border Patrol facilities along the frontier where detained migrants sleep dozens to a room.

There, Silvana was told she was being separated from her kids because she had tried to enter the country illegally a decade earlier. Border Patrol agents said she would be charged with “illegal reentry” — a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison — and that her children could not join her in court, she recalled later. (The Washington Post is not naming the children because of the family’s fears about their safety.)

Instead, the kids were loaded onto a van and driven for four hours. As his baby brother slept in his arms, the 16-year-old could hear his sister crying out for their mom. He tried to comfort her, but a metal divider stood between them.

The desert gave way to neighborhoods, and the 11-year-old said she began to believe they were being taken to their dad’s house. When the van finally stopped in front of a large building on the outskirts of Phoenix, she thought: My dad lives in a hotel?

But the building wasn’t a hotel. It was La Hacienda del Sol, one of dozens of shelters around the country for unaccompanied minors. And it was surrounded by a six-foot fence.

Silvana’s sons were given bunk beds in a room with several other boys. The windows were equipped with alarms, which often went off during the night. Each evening, the 16-year-old would lie awake worrying about their fate.

And each morning, the 3-year-old would wake up and ask the same question.

“Where’s Mommy?”

“She had to go to work,” his older brother would say. “She had to go shopping.”


Silvana’s Bermudez’s 3-year-old son kept asking, “Where’s Mommy?” during their long separation. (Michael E Miller/The Washington Post)

The boys had each other, but their sister was by herself in a wing for girls. They only saw her at meals and for a few hours in the evening, when they would play Battleship or Connect 4.

Silvana had given her oldest son a scrap of paper with his stepdad’s phone number on it. But he’d lost it. There was no Internet at the shelter, and when the teen asked to access Facebook to contact Yulio, he said he was told he’d have to make an official request.

Days passed as the children waited for Yulio or Silvana to find them. They took classes, spoke to therapists and received vaccinations. All the while, there was a constant churn of children around them. They would make new friends, only to lose them a few days later, writing their names in notebooks in the hopes of one day re-connecting.

At one point, the 11-year-old’s only roommate was a 4-year-old. Shelter employees asked her to help care for the girl by warming up her bottle and putting her to sleep.

“She was alone,” Silvana’s daughter said. “Without her mom. Without anyone.”

Christmas arrived without word from their parents. Instead of dinner with family and fireworks in the streets of San Salvador, there was pizza and a shelter employee dressed as Santa Claus dispensing winter hats and plastic yo-yos. When Silvana’s daughter began shimmying to Latin music like she had in her dance troupe in El Salvador, she was told to tone it down. And a no-touching rule meant she wasn’t allowed to hug her older brother, even when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.

The 11-year-old began to despair.

“At first I thought it’d only be a few days before I saw my dad,” she recalled. “But after a month there, I was going crazy, thinking, When? When? When?”

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

Go to the link to read the rest of the article.

This story should be appalling to every American on two levels. First, the unnecessarily cruel policy of separating families, which has frequently been in the news lately.

But, additionally, these folks are refugees who should be granted protection under U.S laws. However, because of unrealistically restrictive politically influenced decisions by the “captive” Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) in the U.S. Department of Justice, and undue deference given to BIA by the Federal Courts under the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” individuals like this basically face a “crap shoot” as to whether protection will in fact be granted.

With a good lawyer, time to prepare and document their case, the right U.S. Immigration Judge, the right BIA “appellate panel,” and the right Court of Appeals panel, protection can be granted under the law in these cases. But, because there are no appointed counsel in Immigration Court cases, most families like this don’t get the top flight legal help that they need to understand the unduly and intentionally overcomplicated law and prepare a winning case. Moreover, too many Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate levels are biased against or unreceptive to asylum cases from the so-called “Northern Triangle” involving gang violence. Some Circuit Court of Appeals panels care and take the time to carefully review BIA findings; others view their “Ivory Tower Sinecures” as an excuse to merely “rubber stamp” the BIA result without giving it much, if any, apparent thought. And this was happening before the Trump Administration took over.

Now, with the biased, White Nationalist, anti-asylum, restrictionist Jeff Sessions actually in charge of our Immigration Courts it’s basically “open season” on the most vulnerable asylum seekers. Sessions rapidly is moving to make the entire U.S. asylum process basically a “Death Train” with the Immigration Courts and the BIA as mere “whistle stops on the deportation railway.”

Outrageously and shamelessly, Sessions has moved to make it difficult or impossible for individuals to obtain counsel by detaining them in out-of-the-way locations specifically selected for lack of availability of legal services and harsh conditions; separated families to demoralize, punish, and terrorize applicants; cranked up the pressure on already overburdened U.S. Immigration Judges in a system already collapsing under 670,000 pending cases to turn out more mindless removal orders; limited the rights of asylum applicants to full hearings — for all practical purposes a “death sentence” for the majority of those who are unrepresented; and indicated an intention to strip particularly vulnerable women, children, gays, and other asylum applicants similar to this family of the bulk of the already merger substantive legal protections they now possess.

Yes, Sessions’s evil and idiotic plan — which reverses decades of settled administrative precedents — is likely to tie up the Federal Courts for years if not generations. But, not everyone in the position of these families has the time, resources, and know how to navigate the Courts of Appeals to obtain justice. That’s particularly true when folks are held in detention in deliberately substandard conditions.

Because Congressional Republicans have long since abandoned any pretensions to human decency or to care about the Constitutional and statutory rights of migrants, Sessions is running roughshod over the laws, the Constitution, and human rights, and wasting taxpayer money by grossly mismanaging the Immigration Courts, without any meaningful oversight whatsoever.

No, folks like the Bermudez family aren’t “fraudsters,” “terrorists,” “frivolous filers,” “economic refugees,” “job stealers,” “system abusers,” “dangerous criminals,” “gangsters” or any of the other litany of false and derogatory terms that Sessions and his ilk intentionally and disingenuously use to describe refugees and asylum seekers. They are frightened, yet courageous, human beings fighting for their legal rights and their very lives in a system already intentionally and unfairly stacked against them. 

Through articles like this and court cases, we are making a record of the human rights abuses of Sessions and the rest of the Trump Administration. The “New Due Process Army” will continue to fight injustice throughout our country! For those supporting, enabling, or consciously ignoring this Administration’s human rights atrocities, history will be the judge. Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-20-19

 

“GANGDOM” THRIVES IN VIEW OF CAPITOL — Michael E. Miller and Dan Morse @ WashPost Tell The Shockingly Ugly “Inside Story” Of How Gangs Terrorize The Undocumented Community In Langley Park, MD! — The Trump/Sessions “Gonzo” Approach To Immigration Seems Likely To Make Things Even Worse!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/people-here-live-in-fear-ms-13-menaces-a-community-seven-miles-from-the-white-house/2017/12/20/6cebf318-d956-11e7-b859-fb0995360725_story.html

Miller & Morse write:

‘People here live in fear’: MS-13 menaces a community seven miles from the White House
By Michael E. Miller and Dan Morse December 20 at 8:00 AM

Abigail Bautista, 34, of Langley Park, Md., describes what MS-13 did to her and then to her son. “People here live in fear,” she said. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
It took Abigail Bautista less than a month of living in Langley Park to learn that her new neighborhood in Maryland had its own set of laws, written not in statutes but in gang graffiti and blood.

The Guatemalan mother of five was pushing a cart of merchandise along University Boulevard one winter morning in late 2012 when three young men approached.

“Do you know who we are?” one asked her in Spanish.

Bautista shook her head.

“We are La Mara Salvatrucha,” he said. “And here, there are rules.”

Pay $60 “rent” per week or there would be trouble, he said. Undocumented and afraid of being deported if she went to police, Bautista began handing over the cash.

She had heard of the international street gang growing up in Central America, where MS-13, as it’s known, controls cities through brutality and corruption. But she had lived for the better part of a decade in the United States without crossing its path.

Now, she realized, she’d unwittingly moved into MS-13 territory a mere seven miles from the White House.

As the gang has grown in strength in recent years, so has its sway over communities across the country. From Boston to Northern Virginia to Houston, a string of grisly MS-13 murders has highlighted its resurgence, drawing a response from the White House.

“One by one, we’re liberating our American towns,” President Trump said this summer in Long Island, where MS-13 has been linked to more than a dozen recent killings.

Left out of Trump’s speeches, however, is the fact that most of the gang’s victims are not Americans but undocumented immigrants like Bautista. And when it comes to the gang’s infamous motto of “kill, rape, control,” it’s the third — enforced daily through extortion and intimidation — that defines life for some immigrants in places such as Langley Park.

“They are preying on the communities that they are living in,” said Michael McElhenny, a supervisory special agent for the FBI in Maryland.

More than a decade after a string of MS-13 killings shook the heavily Latino neighborhood, Langley Park is still struggling to shake off the gang’s influence. Despite aggressive policing, the area continues to be plagued by MS-13 drug dealing, prostitution, robbery, extortion and murder, according to court records and interviews with residents, activists, prosecutors and gang experts, as well as local and federal law enforcement officials.

. . . .

Federal authorities say the racketeering case and two other recent MS-13 indictments show they are serious about again dismantling the gang in Maryland. But Bautista won’t be satisfied until authorities lock up the man she suspects of leading MS-13 in Langley Park.

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Two weeks after her son’s body was found, and a few days before his vigil, she said, a letter was slipped under her door.

“If you keep talking, there will be consequences,” it warned in childlike handwriting, according to Bautista.

It was signed, she said, by the roofer.

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

Read the entire, much longer, article at the link.

One thing is clear: The gang problem isn’t going to be “solved” by having having clueless, anti-Hispanic, White Guys like Trump and Sessions uttering threats against the entire immigrant community from Washington.

No, the irony is that prosecutions and deportations, although they might rack up impressive statistics, really don’t bother gangs much. Gangs control big chunks of the prisons, both in the US and, even moreso, in the Northern Triangle. To some extent, a prison sentence is just a “temporary work reassignment.”

And, deportations: well that’s actually how the MS-13 grew, when the US deported LA gang members to El Salvador during the Reagan Administration without thinking about how to deal with the long term problem — how they would grow to control and terrorize the places to which they were being deported.

It doesn‘t take a “rocket scientist” (just someone smarter and less racist than Trump and Sessions) to figure out that the overheated anti-immigrant rhetoric that lumps gang members with generally law abiding workers and asylum applicants is a “made to order” recruitment tool for the MS-13 and other gangs.

”Trump and Sessions don’t respect you and don’t want you in America. They don’t even like the ‘good’ immigrants, so don’t waste your time on the false ‘American Dream.’ We’re you’re ‘REAL’ family that isn’t afraid of Trump, and will give you power, respect, and control, as long as you remain loyal to us. What’s Trump got to offer Hispanic youth?”

Reducing gang violence will require a nuanced, time consuming, labor intensive multi-cultural approach that:

  • Treats Hispanic youth, documented and undocumented, with respect and shows them they are valued by society;
  • Provides positive role models from the Hispanic community;
  • Gives youth viable alternatives to gangs;
  • Gains the trust of all members of the Hispanic community, whether documented or not;
  • Involves bilingualism, more Hispanic police officers, and potentially dangerous undocover operations in the community;
  • Recognizes and deals with the problems of gang control in US prisons;
  • Deals with the difficult question of what happens when we deport gang members back to the Norther Triangle.

With respect to the latter point, if we merely send U.S. gang members back to terrorize communities in the Northern Triangle, that will lead more terrorized community members to flee to the U.S. The cycle will continue.

The Trump Administration’s ham-handed immigration policies taken from the “White Nationalist restrictionist playbook” will likely only exaberrate the problem of gangs and gang violence in the long run.

PWS

 

 

GONZO MIGHT BE NEXT TO GO AFTER NEW BOMBSHELL REVELATIONS CAST FURTHER DOUBT ON HIS ALREADY SHAKY CREDIBILITY!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-discussed-trump-campaign-related-matters-with-russian-ambassador-us-intelligence-intercepts-show/2017/07/21/3e704692-6e44-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-high_sessions-7pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.3ade0f8bbe22

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller report in the Washington Post:

“Russia’s ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Sessions — then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump — were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials both in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

One U.S. official said that Sessions — who testified that he has no recollection of an April encounter — has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.

Sessions has said repeatedly that he never discussed campaign-related issues with Russian officials and that it was only in his capacity as a U.S. senator that he met with Kislyak.

“I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions said in March when he announced that he would recuse himself from matters relating to the FBI probe of Russian interference in the election and any connections to the Trump campaign.

Current and former U.S. officials said that assertion is at odds with Kislyak’s accounts of conversations during two encounters over the course of the campaign, one in April ahead of Trump’s first major foreign policy speech and another in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.

The apparent discrepancy could pose new problems for Sessions at a time when his position in the administration appears increasingly tenuous.”

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

“Contradicted by the evidence.” Hmmm, that seems to be the definition of “not credible” if not outright perjury. If Sessions were a migrant pleading for his life in one of his Immigration Courts, he would long ago have been sent packing based on his misleading statements and highly implausible explanations. And, don’t forget that this is a dude who has been peddling the White Nationalist agenda of lies and misrepresentations about immigrants and denying their fundamental contributions to America’s greatness, not to mention their fundamental humanity and rights, for years. He’s also squandering taxpayer dollars every day by picking unnecessary fights with states and localities trying to straighten out the shambles that Sessions and his cohorts have made out of immigration enforcement policy. He’s undone years of progress on voting rights, race relations, policing, forensic science, private prisons, transgender tolerance, prosecutions of minor crimes, sentencing, and protection of property rights, in addition to accelerating the destructions of due process in the U.S. Immigration Courts.

About the only decent thing he has done since assuming office has been, under pressure, properly to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. But, that single exercise of appropriate judgement under the law has gotten him in trouble with his Boss who was counting on a complete regime of lawlessness at the DOJ.

PWS

07-21-17

WashPost: GANGS — A Complicated Problem With No Easy Solution — Budget Cuts Undermine Some Local Programs!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/ms-13-gains-recruits-and-power-in-us-as-teens-surge-across-border/2017/06/16/aacea62a-3989-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_ms-13-1240pmm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.5745c22fb3d0

Michael E. Miller, Dan Morse, and Justin Jouvenal report:

“The increasing MS-13 violence has become a flash point in a national debate over immigration. President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have vowed to eradicate the gang, while immigrant advocates say the young people are being scapegoated to further an anti-immigrant agenda.

Danny’s case illustrates just how difficult the balance between compassion and safety can be. Was he a child who needed help? Or a gang member who shouldn’t have been here?

“Do you close the doors to all law-abiding folks who just want to be here and make a better life . . . and in the process keep out the handful who are going to wreak havoc on our community?” asked one federal prosecutor, who is not permitted to speak publicly and has handled numerous MS-13 cases. “Or do you open the doors and you let in good folks and some bad along with the good?”

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

Read the entire, much longer, article at the link.

it does seem short sighted to save a few bucks by cutting some of the few programs specifically designed to address this issue.

PWS

06-16-17