Washington Post – Page 19 – immigrationcourtside.com

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!

Catherine writes in the Washington Post:

You’ve heard of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, Poverty, even Women. Well, welcome to the War on Children.

It’s being waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing public officials, regardless of any claimed “family values.”

For evidence, look no further than the report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’s own inspector general. It details the trauma suffered by immigrant children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s evil “zero tolerance” policy.

Thousands of children were placed in overcrowded centers ill-equipped to provide care for them physically or psychologically. Visits to 45 centers around the country resulted in accounts of children who cried inconsolably; who were drugged; who were promised family reunifications that never came; whose severe emotional distress manifested in phantom chest pains, with complaints that “every heartbeat hurts”; who thought their parents had abandoned them or had been murdered.

Such state-sanctioned child abuse was designed to serve as a “deterrent” for asylum-seeking families, as then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other administration officials made clear.

Of course, they failed to recognize just how horrific are the conditions these asylum-seeking children are fleeing — conditions that further decreased HHS’s ability to adequately care for them.

“Staff in multiple facilities reported cases of children who had been kidnapped or raped” back in their home countries, the IG report states. Other children witnessed family members raped or murdered.

But hey, Trump believes these kiddos must be punished further for the crime of seeking refuge — a.k.a., the “invasion” of America.

Despite this and other abundant evidence that government facilities are not able to care for children for extended periods, last month, the administration also announced a new policy that would allow it to keep children (along with their families) in jail-like conditions for longer periods of time.

This is hardly the only way the administration has knowingly enacted policies that harm children.

In August, it finalized a rule that would make it more difficult for immigrants to receive green cards if they have used certain safety-net services they’re legally entitled to — or if government officials suspect they might ever use such services. Confusion and fear about the policy and whom it affects abound. This has already created a “chilling effect” for usage of social services, with immigrant parents disenrolling even their U.S.-citizen children just to be safe.

Last fall, for instance, I interviewed a green-card-holding mother who decided not to enroll her underweight newborn in a program that would have provided free formula (even though the program in question was not mentioned in the rule, and the baby is a U.S. citizen). Huge recent declines in children’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment are also believed to be at least partly a result of fears about this policy change.

If Your Dog Does This, It Could Be Them Signaling A Warning

And lest you think only immigrant or brown children are being targeted in this war: U.S. servicemembers’ children, of all sorts of backgrounds, are being hurt, too.

The Trump administration is siphoning billions from various defense projects to fund border wall construction, despite promises that Mexico would pay for it. This might sound unlikely to affect kids, but somehow the Trump administration found a way. Among the projects losing funds are schools for the children of U.S. servicemembers based in Kentucky, Germany and Japan, and a child-care center at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Trump’s proposed federal budgets have likewise axed funding for other programs that serve children, such as subsidized school meals and Medicaid. Indeed, both federal and state GOP officials more broadly are still working to kill the Medicaid expansion, as well as other Affordable Care Act provisions that benefit kids.

The GOP has likewise ignored the pleas of children who want their lives protected from gun violence, or who want their futures protected from a warming planet.

A year ago, I offered a suggestion : that Democrats make children the theme of their midterm campaign. They mostly ignored me and still did okay. Nonetheless, I’m re-upping it.

Because even without Trump’s baby jails and proposed Medicaid cuts, our country’s emphasis on children’s well- being is seriously deficient.

Last year, for the first time on record, we spent a greater share of the federal budget servicing the national debt than we did on children, according to an analysis out next week from First Focus on Children. Spending on children as a share of the federal budget is also expected to shrink over the coming decade, crowded out by both debt service and spending on the elderly.

This is despite the fact that spending on children (especially low-income children) has among the highest returns on investment of any form of government spending.

Whatever the opposite of Trump’s War on Children is, that’s what Democrats should be running on.

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Thanks, Catherine, for speaking out so clearly and articulately about what has become our #1 National Disgrace: Trump’s War On Human Decency & Future Generations and its sleazy cast of supporting characters like Pence, Kelly, Miller, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” Homan, Albence, Morgan, “Cooch Cooch,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, Cotton, Graham, and others with their glib immorality and disregard for truth, our Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human values.

Who thought the U.S. would ever stoop so low — to use our government’s power and might to abuse defenseless, already traumatized, and highly vulnerable children. (Catherine’s article does’t even get into how, with the help of scofflaw Attorneys General Sessions and Barr and some complacent Article III Judges, the Administration has manipulated asylum law and Immigration “Court” procedures to deny children and other asylum seekers the legal protection to which they are entitled under U.S. and international laws.)

There are many groups out there in the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day against this kind of outrageous behavior by our elected leaders, their corrupt cronies, and their many “go along to get along” enablers in the bureaucracy. Join or donate to one today!

The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

PWS

09-06-19

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Trump & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

LABOR DAY @ WASHPOST: The Toxic Hypocrisy Of Tru.mp & The Restrictionists On The Labor Issue!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-days-our-debate-over-labor-is-awash-in-hypocrisy/2019/09/01/d57e735c-c9a4-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

By Editorial Board

September 1 at 5:47 PM

A CYNIC, says a character in one of Oscar Wilde’s novels, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If that’s true, then the debate over the state of labor in the United States these days is awash in cynicism — or maybe it could just be called plain old hypocrisy. And in truth, it’s not so much a debate as a shouting match, largely over the inflamed issue of immigration.

Most of the noise comes from restrictionists, encouraged and shamelessly egged on, for the first time in memory, by a president of the United States. Such people recite figures they have assembled regarding the costs of immigration: its effects on wages, government spending and, of course, our “culture,” which some might take as a cover word for race or ethnicity or religion. But a lot of these compilations are questionable, both in their origins and their conclusions.

And beyond that, there is a great contradiction in such reasoning: It fails to take account of the work immigrants do in this country — the fruits of their labor, which are shared by the entire society. The skylines of metropolitan areas such as ours have been transformed over the past quarter-century by new construction, with immigrants providing a considerable share of the labor. Many of our hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, hotels, homes for the elderly and other institutions could not exist without immigrant employees, who made up about 17 percent of this country’s workforce in 2018, according to a government report.

A quarter of immigrants, in turn, are thought to be unauthorized. Although they are regularly slandered — by the president, among others — as a source of crime and as living off the dole, they are, for the most part, as law-abiding as the general population and are eligible for few government benefits. Not many people with personal knowledge of the matter would question their work ethic. Their labors in farm and field help feed the country; replacing them there would be a daunting task. They serve in some of the most demanding and often unpleasant jobs in our society: slaughtering animals, working long hours outdoors in punishing heat and cold, caring for the elderly, sick and mentally ill, cleaning four or five homes a day.

Strangely enough, this sort of thing is rarely discussed in any serious way on the cable outlets and social media. There is much in the way of insult and calumny toward impoverished immigrants (they “make our country poorer and dirtier,” said one popular TV opinionizer) but little constructive thought on how this country, with a static and aging native population and a tightening labor market, can continue to prosper without a reasonable amount of immigration.

Although unauthorized immigrants are routinely demonized by some in Congress and the media, there is a sizable part of the country, perhaps a majority, that does not consider their presence here to be criminal, that in fact sympathizes with them. There aren’t many other kinds of lawbreakers of whom that can be said. The recent immigration raid on agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, in which nearly 700 workers were rounded up, brought forth a wave of help and support for the workers and their families from people around the country, including churches and neighbors in Mississippi.

Practical and intelligent proposals are being made for dealing with the problems of immigration and work. But nothing can be done unless more of this country pays attention to the realities in working America in the coming election year and not to the dark maundering of demagogic doomsayers.

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Yup.

Largely what I’ve been saying all along on “Courtside.” The solution to the largely manufactured “immigration crisis” is staring us in the face.

Legalize those already in the labor force, so that they can be fully protected from exploitation by minimum wage, wage and hour, and OSHA laws, and reach their full economic potential in our society (which would also maximize tax revenues and Social Security contributions).

Then, provide many more legal immigration opportunities for workers and families, both permanent and temporary, to keep America great and prevent us from suffering the type of economic stagnation that has hit Japan and other “low immigration” countries.

The main things standing in the way of such rational and practical solutions are Trump and the hard core GOP restrictionists who prop him up.

Sadly, it also appears that some, not all, within the massive DHS bureaucracy have become invested in cruel and futile immigration enforcement which requires endless taxpayer money and bodies to maintain its cycle of inevitable, yet sometimes politically advantageous, “enforcement-only” failures.

PWS

09-02-19

LABOR DAY TRIBUTE: Carlos Lozada’s “Review of ‘A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century’ by Jason DeParle”

Carols Lozada — Carlos Lozada
Journalist

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/30/many-immigrants-family-separation-happens-long-before-border/

There is a family separation that occurs long before an immigrant reaches America’s borders. It is no less wrenching than the ruptures that the Trump administration inflicted on thousands of children and parents last year as part of its “zero tolerance” policy against illegal entry, and may at times be even more painful, since it happens voluntarily. That is, if acts born of despair can ever be described as entirely voluntary.

In “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” journalist Jason DeParle’s riveting multigenerational tale of one Filipino family dispersing across the globe, from Manila to Abu Dhabi to Galveston, Tex., and so many places in between, separation is a constant worry and endless toll. Parents leave their kids and country for years at a time so they can send back wages many multiples of what they previously earned. Children yearn for their parents, rebelling or wilting without them, while the youngest latch on to aunts and grandparents. Births, birthdays, weddings, illnesses, funerals — daily life slips by for the absent, imagined and unexperienced. Meanwhile, the government encourages the exodus; 1 in 7 laborers in the Philippines becomes an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), a status so common it rates not just an acronym but also an industry of private middlemen and government agencies managing a sector that accounts for one-10th of the country’s economy.

But the price is loneliness and longing. “The two main themes of Overseas Filipino Worker life are homesickness and money,” DeParle writes. “Workers suffer the first to get the second.” With immigration a central battleground in the Trump-era culture wars, and with the southern U.S. border and Hispanic influx dominating the political debate, this book provides crucial insight into the global scope, shifting profiles and, above all, individual sacrifices of the migrant experience.

DeParle, a New York Times reporter, tells the story of Emet, Tita and their daughter Rosalie, as well as their other children and grandchildren — a Manila family he first encountered and lived with for several months in the late 1980s. As a young reporter, DeParle wanted to better understand poverty, but in the Philippines, that meant learning about migration instead. The title of his book is also the Portagana family’s unofficial creed, a pained mix of self-affirmation and abnegation.

Emet cleaned pools in a government complex in the Philippines, earning $50 a month, barely enough to scrape by with his family in their Manila shantytown. When he has the chance to clean pools in Saudi Arabia for $500 per month, he takes it, while his wife of 14 years and their five children stay behind. “Ever since his orphaned childhood, all he had wanted was a family, but to support one, he had to leave it.” Tita cries when Emet departs, left to fend for herself and the family, rising at 4:30 a.m. to boil the breakfast rice, washing the school clothes every day, making every tough decision — does she pay for a doctor’s visit or for more food? — on her own.

When Emet first sends money, she cries again. “Tita stopped running out of fish and rice,” DeParle recounts. “She bought extra school uniforms so she didn’t have to wash every day. . . . After years of toothaches, she had seven teeth pulled and treated herself to dentures. . . . But the ultimate luxury was the family’s first bed.” She told Deparle how “I was ecstatic we could lay on something soft.”

New comforts are part of “migrant lore,” DeParle writes. Some analysts worry that remittances lead to consumerist splurges, but families receiving migrant income also invest in housing, health care and education. Migration serves as a tool of economic development, DeParle suggests, because of migrants’ enduring loyalty to the family back home. Of the 11 siblings in Tita’s own family, nine worked abroad, as did all five of Tita and Emet’s children. When DeParle returned to the Philippines two decades after having lived in Tita’s home, he saw that the family’s old straw huts had morphed into a compound of a dozen houses for various relatives — and the quality of the amenities bore a direct relationship to how long each owner had worked abroad. But an aging Emet still pondered the price, nostalgic for the days in the slum. “I was happier then,” he acknowledges, “because I was with my children.”

[Who gets to dream? America’s immigration battles go beyond walls and borders.]

Rosalie, their middle child, emerges as the book’s itinerant protagonist, not simply because she becomes the clan’s essential breadwinner as a nurse in America but because, for DeParle, she embodies the new face of migration. “Since 2008, the United States has attracted more Asians than Latin Americans, and nearly half of the newcomers, like Rosalie, have college degrees. Every corner of America has an immigrant like her.” Long male-dominated, migration has been increasingly feminized, in part because of the demand for caregiving workers in rich countries, a need that women have disproportionately filled. “By the mid-1990s when Rosalie went abroad, nearly half the world’s migrants were women — more than half in the United States — and they increasingly went as breadwinners, not spouses.”

Rosalie was a quiet child and an average student who considered religious life in Manila — not necessarily someone you’d pick to make it through nursing school, move to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for several years, and take and retake English-language tests until, after 20 years of working, she could obtain a visa to the United States, take on a night shift in a Galveston hospital and embrace suburban life. She is separated from her own children, just as she suffered years without Emet. Her eldest daughter grows attached to Rosalie’s sister Rowena as a sort of surrogate mother, calling her “Mama Wena” and struggling with her aunt’s absence after reuniting with Rosalie in Texas.

Having long operated as a far-flung family, Rosalie, her husband, Chris, and their three kids must not only learn to live in America — they have to learn to live together. DeParle’s examination of how the two daughters adapt to U.S. elementary schools, seeking to become more all-American than the Americans, even as their parents find solace in Texas’s Filipino immigrant networks, is a minor classic of the assimilation experience. He also reflects on the impact of communications technology on migrant communities: “Can assimilation survive Skype?” DeParle wonders, seeing how it eases transitions by helping relatives stay in touch across time zones but also lengthens and deepens immigrants’ ties with the old country.

After all, even when you’ve left, you’re never entirely gone. Any health crisis among her extended family in the Philippines results in new bills for Rosalie to cover from afar. Chronically exhausted at the hospital — where Filipino nurses feel they get shorthanded shifts and sicker patients — she must also deal with the insecurities of her suddenly stay-at-home husband, whose masculine self-perception suffers in the face of his provider-wife. (“Would you be ashamed of Daddy if I worked as a janitor?” Chris asks the kids as he seeks a job in Galveston.) DeParle highlights this “inversion” of traditional gender roles in the modern migrant experience. For women, “migration elevated their incomes, raised their status, and increased their power within their marriages,” he writes. “But it also took many away from their children, often to care for the children of others, and elevated the risks of abuse.”

DeParle has a gift for distilling complexity into pithy formulations. “Migration is history’s ripple effect,” he writes, noting how U.S. colonialism led to the establishment of the Philippines’ first nursing schools, an industry that would propel Rosalie to America a century later. He also aptly captures the United States’ conflicted feelings about immigrants, a mix of resentment and need. “Unwelcomed is not the same as unwanted,” he explains simply. And the ominous U.S. Embassy in Manila, the repository of so much hope and so many fears for Filipino visa seekers, is “the gateway to opportunity, but marines guard the gate.” The book is packed with insights masked as throwaway lines — lines that convey so much.

So I wish DeParle had conveyed more about his own role in the story of this remarkable family. “Our relationship defies easy categorization; it’s part author-subject, part old friends,” he writes, likening himself to a big brother for Rosalie and uncle to her kids. “This was a journalistic endeavor but not an entirely arm’s-length one,” DeParle admits. “Occasionally my presence shaped events I was trying to record.” Some of these events were crucial. He gets Rosalie an English tutor for her exams. He spends hours on the phone helping Rosalie practice for her interview with the Galveston hospital. Most essential, he intervenes when bureaucratic scheduling nearly derails a final visa approval. “I was there as a journalist, not an advocate,” he writes. “But Rosalie had been waiting for twenty years.” So he helps by speaking with a U.S. Foreign Service officer. It is an entirely humane impulse, and DeParle stresses that the determination that got Rosalie to America “is hers alone.” But the author’s unexpected appearances complicate and at times confuse his narrative.

“A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves” has political implications without being an overtly political work. Yes, DeParle’s sympathies are clear. “Rosalie’s experience was a triple win: good for her, good for America, and good for her family in the Philippines,” he writes. “Migration was her vehicle of salvation. It delivered her from the living conditions of the nineteenth century. It respected her talent, rewarded her sweat, and enlarged her capacity for giving.” He also stresses how Filipino immigrants thrive in America, with more education, higher employment, and lower poverty and divorce rates than the native-born.

Yet he mainly calls for calm and compromise around the immigration debates. “Be wary of seeing the issue in absolutist terms,” DeParle warns. He worries that if immigration becomes entrenched as another American culture war, like those over guns or abortion rights, its supporters will have more to lose. The warning comes under a Trump administration that has defined itself through its offensive against migrants, not just rewriting policies but seeking to write immigration out of the American tradition. On this point, DeParle offers a devastating rebuttal in another simple line.

“It’s good,” he concludes, “for your country to be the place where people go to make dreams come true.”

Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest essays and book reviews, . . . .

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This story reminds me of the dramatic presentation about her own family’s immigrant experience delivered by my friend and co-teacher Professor Jennifer Esperanza of Beloit College during our recent Bjorklunden Seminar on American Immigration. I’ve posted it before, but here it is again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEODrtuj_Pk&t=323s

One of the points Jenn makes is how she channeled the challenges of her childhood into learning that led to a lifetime of success and high achievement.

PWS

09-02-19

MAINE AND OTHER STATES ARE HURTING BECAUSE OF POPULATION LOSS — The Answer — More Legal Immigration Across The Board — Is Staring Us Right In The Face — But, Trump’s White Nationalist Nativist Agenda Stands In The Way Of Rational Solutions!

Boothbay Harbor, ME
Looking West from the Whales Tails Restaurant & Seafarer Pub

From the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rational-immigration-system-is-the-answer-to-us-worker-shortages/2019/08/25/b396bada-c5c4-11e9-b72f-b31dfaa77212_story.html

A rational immigration system is the answer to U.S. worker shortages

Add to list

By Editorial Board

August 25

OCCUPATIONAL AND physical therapists. Religious workers. Plant operators. Railway personnel. Construction workers. Maintenance and repair workers. Firefighters. Social workers. Nurses. Funeral workers. Truckers. That’s only a brief sampling of the jobs in the United States for which there are severe shortages of available employees, and way more openings than applicants.

A recent article in The Post detailed the heartbreaking effects of a drastic deficit in just one employment category — home health aides — in just one state, Maine, which has the nation’s second-highest percentage of people over age 65 . They and their relatives who cannot afford private home health aides (who charge roughly $50 an hour) are suffering. Nursing homes, similarly, are closing for want of workers. Even attempts to lure employees by raising wages have hit a brick wall; there simply aren’t enough job applicants in the state nor, apparently, enough people willing to move there.

Maine’s problems in that regard will soon be a national epidemic. Within a decade or so, at least a fifth of the population in roughly 28 states will be 65 or older. The effects of aging baby boomers will be compounded by a national fertility rate that has fallen to its lowest level in nearly five decades. That means younger people will not be available to replenish the ranks of older workers as they retire.

A rational immigration system, one that meets the labor market’s demands for workers in an array of skill categories and income levels, is the obvious antidote to chronic and predictable labor deficits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration, heedless of the pleas of employers, has implemented and proposed measures whose effect will deepen existing and future shortages. And it has done so even as the unemployment rate, now 3.7 percent, continues to bump along at near-historic lows.

A policy announced by the administration this month would impede large numbers of low-income legal immigrants from remaining in the United States, or coming in the first place, if they are judged likely to use public benefits to which they are entitled, including noncash ones such as housing subsidies and health care. The impact would be a dramatic reduction in newcomers, and in existing immigrants eligible to become legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, the final step before full citizenship. By targeting low-income and low-skilled migrants, the rule would perpetuate severe worker shortages in a variety of sectors.

Earlier this year, the administration unveiled a blueprint for legal immigration that, in a reversal, maintained overall levels of immigrants. That recognized that slashing immigration is a recipe for economic decline. However, the Trump plan, by favoring educated, skilled English speakers with strong earnings prospects over relatives of current residents, ignored the reality that retail, landscaping, food processing and dozens of other industries rely on relatively low-skilled labor — and are desperate for workers.

The critical role ICE plays in Trump’s immigration push

President Trump has found a crucial tool to carry out his sweeping immigration polices: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (John Parks, Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)

President Trump has leveraged nativist policies to his political advantage. He has been indifferent to their corrosive long-term economic impact. Far from making America great again, the president’s policies are likely to transform the United States into a second Japan, where an aging population and barriers to immigration have sapped the dynamism and prospects of what was once one of the world’s most dynamic economies.

Here’s a link to Jeff Stein’s August 14 article on the crisis in Maine:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-will-be-catastrophic-maine-families-face-elder-boom-worker-shortage-in-preview-of-nations-future/2019/08/14/7cecafc6-bec1-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

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One reason our current immigration system is failing is that it has ignored market forces both in the U.S. and in sending countries.

That’s particular true with what we consider “manual labor” (which usually takes skills that most Americans either lack or have no interest in developing).

Working with market forces, rather than futilely trying to override or reverse them, would be a win-win-win. It would benefit the migrants, our country, and would greatly reduce the amount of time and money we waste on cruel, controversial, legally questionable, and ultimately ineffective “civil enforcement” of unrealistic and unworkable restrictive immigration laws.

Even now, what if we welcomed qualified asylum seekers, screened and processed them rapidly for legal status, and worked with NGOs and states like Maine to place them in localities where their skills could be put to immediate use or they could be trained to make critical contributions to our society’s needs while improving their own situations?

Indeed, Maine already has an outstanding record of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Notwithstanding initial climate and cultural differences, an amazing number of forced migrants from Africa have resettled in Maine and contributed to their communities and the state’s well-being, as well as adapted to the “Maine way of life.” It’s a process of give and take integration that enriches both the immigrants and the communities in which they settle.

PWS

08-29-19

NEXT TIME “BIG MAC” LIES ABOUT THE “FLORES SETTLEMENT,” HERE’S JACLYN KELLEY-WIDMER WITH THE TRUTH!

Jacklyn Kelley-Widmer
Assistant Clinical Professor
Cornell Law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/24/new-trump-administration-rule-allows-children-be-detained-indefinitely-heres-what-you-need-know/

Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer writes in WashPost:

By Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer

August 24

On Wednesday, the Trump administration released a regulation that would allow it to detain migrant children indefinitely. The new rule, which is not yet in effect, would end the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, which put in place protections for migrant children who arrive at the border. The Flores agreement limits how long children can be detained and requires that they be placed in the least restrictive setting possible.

Many Americans first heard about the Flores agreement last summer, when the Trump administration began separating families at the border. The administration claimed that it had to separate children from their guardians because the Flores agreement would not let the government detain the families together long enough to resolve the parents’ immigration cases, which often takes months or years. Previous administrations usually released families until their cases were heard.

In response to public outrage, the Trump administration officially ended the family separation policy — but continued to separate hundreds of families under other rules. Meanwhile, the administration continued its efforts to do away with Flores altogether, culminating in this rule.

Here are four things to know about the new rule.

1. Long-term detention has lasting mental health effects on children

Acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan said that the rule sets guidelines for the care of detained families in “campus-like settings” where all needs are ostensibly met. These “family residential centers,” he said, will have “appropriate” facilities for “medical, educational, recreational, dining” and housing needs. However, there is good reason to doubt that detention conditions will be adequate, given recent reports of the lack of even basic necessities at some facilities.

Detention is likely to have a lasting detrimental impact on children’s mental health. A 2017 American Academy of Pediatrics report concluded that detained immigrant children experience high levels of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder during and after detention. Detaining children with their families does not significantly mitigate the severe mental health impact. Any detention is especially traumatic for children; long-term detention only increases the likelihood of lasting effects.

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In the week I spent earlier this year in the family detention center in Dilley, Tex., law students and I observed that the environment created continuing trauma for the children and families. One child I met cried silent tears throughout the legal meeting I held with her mother. A detained teenager was entertaining thoughts of suicide and refusing food.

[Does separating families at the border deter immigration? Here’s what the research says.]

2. The United States already detains some children for far longer than permitted by Flores

Flores imposed a 20-day limit for detaining migrant children, unless the parent opts to waive the child’s right to be released. The government already flouts this limit.

Children are detained more than 20 days when bureaucratic hurdles block their release. For example, in December 2018, the average stay in the children’s detention facility at Tornillo, Tex., was 50 days. Such waits are caused by a Trump-era Department of Homeland Security policy that requires background checks of the relative waiting to take in the child and also of every person in that relative’s home. Cornell Law School faculty members have met children detained in Brownsville, Tex., for up to 10 months.

3. The rule will not deter desperate families

McAleenan claimed that the rule will discourage adults from bringing children to the United States, whether those adults are the children’s parents, other relatives or smugglers. But such deterrence policies rarely work, researchers find. Pushed out of dangerous home countries by poverty, crime or other threats, migrants simply look for other ways into the United States.

For example, the Trump administration’s new Migrant Protection Protocols require migrants who present themselves at an official border point of entry to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearing. Knowing this, many detained women I spoke to in Dilley had avoided the point of entry. Instead, they crossed the Rio Grande at night on inflatable rafts, clutching their toddlers. They asked for asylum when Border Patrol apprehended them.

[How deporting immigrants from the U.S. increases immigration to the U.S.]

4. The rule faces several potential legal challenges

The administration published the rule in the Federal Register on Friday. It could take effect in 60 days, but only if it’s approved by federal judge Dolly M. Gee, who oversees the Flores agreement. Once the rule is published, the government has seven days to file a brief to obtain her approval. Last year, she denied the government permission to modify Flores to permit indefinite child detention. If she denies this request as well, the government will probably appeal.

Even if Gee grants the government’s request, the rule will probably be delayed by legal challenges from advocacy groups such as the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which originally filed the Flores case and continues to litigate it today. Advocates are likely to argue that the new rule violates Flores, putting the government in contempt of the court’s order.

If the rule does go into effect, advocates will probably bring a new class-action suit under some of the principles of the original 1985 Flores complaint, arguing that indefinite detention is a violation of due process and equal protection under the Constitution. They may also argue that the policy violates certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Further, advocates could turn to international human rights law, arguing that the rule violates the right to personal liberty and security enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Lawyers for detained children may also file individual writs of habeas corpus, a legal term for petitions for release alleging that the detention is an unconstitutional deprivation of freedom. Immigration attorneys have increasingly been filing habeas corpus petitions for immigrants in prolonged detention — at times successfully obtaining their clients’ release.

Beyond legal action, the indefinite child detention policy may again spark public outrage, as happened last summer over family separation. Collective public action could also prompt policy change.

Don’t miss anything! Sign up to get TMC’s smart analysis in your inbox, three days a week.

Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer is an assistant clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, where she teaches lawyering and directs the 1L Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic

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So, why are guys like Big Mac, “Cooch Cooch,” Barr, and Stephen Miller still on the “public dole” rather than in jail for abusing children, lying about it, and knowingly and intentionally abusing our legal system with frivolous false claims?

These aren’t legitimate legal and policy disputes. They are blatant attempts, fueled by outright lies and racist-inspired knowingly false narratives, calculated to “break” our legal system and improperly punish individuals for exercising their legal rights.

PWS

08-25-19

CRUEL & SELFISH TRUMP ENCOURAGES RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Mistreating The Younger Generation, Whether Or Not They Are “Ours,” Will Come Back To Haunt Us!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-how-we-treat-other-peoples-children-that-matters/2019/08/23/24fcf982-c4f8-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html

Nancy Gibbs writes in WashPost:

Nancy Gibbs is director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and a former editor of Time.

It is not an act of particular virtue to love your children and treat them well; instinct and evolution privilege our own kids, and from the moment they blink into the world, we would risk anything for their safety, sacrifice anything for their happiness.

It’s how we treat other people’s children that measures and tests us today. And here, as we shudder at the impact of his immigration policies on families, I can’t help but think that President Trump is channeling parents on both the right and the left who’ve decided that other people’s children don’t matter, as long as their own get ahead.

Anyone asserting the existence of certain universal values could always default to this: No decent society would ever argue that it’s okay to torture children. Which made it all the more chilling when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Mississippi swept up about 680 undocumented workers, leaving some children to return from the first day of school to locked houses, missing parents and shattered families. The spectacle — and it was flaunted as a spectacle, the largest one-state immigration enforcement effort in U.S. history — does not just challenge us on how best to balance politics, economics and justice. It asks us, “When is it okay to torment other people’s kids?”

CONTENT FROM VIRGINIA HOSPITAL CENTER

Treating America’s back pain problem

Doctors are finding new ways to address the condition, which impacts 80 percent of people in the U.S.

For Trump, the answer was clear and blithely callous: “This serves as a very good deterrent,” he declared. What parent watching the sobbing children would dare step foot across a border illegally? “I just hope to keep it up,” he said.

You don’t have to be an apologist for open borders to conclude that there are ways to promote security that stop short of emotional torture. Yes, children often suffer when parents commit crimes, but that is the collateral damage of enforcement, not its goal.

Still, the mentality that justifies harming children so long as they’re not your own is not unique to the president. From the beginning of this year to mid-August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed more than 1,200 cases of measles, the most since 2000. Arrogance plus ignorance takes its toll: Parents who won’t “risk” vaccinating their own children discount the risk to others. If they think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, they should hope other parents stop vaccinating, as well. But more likely they are counting on others to comply so that their own children can have the best of all worlds: no vaccine and little chance of exposure to disease.

CONTENT FROM SAFEWAY

Back-to-school lunch tips for parents

How to pack a simple, wholesome, school-approved lunch that your kids will love.

In a different way but in the same spirit, the psychotically ambitious parents of the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal did not care who they deprived of a spot at Stanford or the University of Southern California as long as their children succeeded. Unlike many things in life, college admissions is zero-sum; an unqualified student who bribes her way in takes a spot from someone who tried to earn it. Need extra time for the SAT? Get a doctor to diagnose a learning disability. Between 2009 and 2016, the number of students getting special accommodations more than doubled, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. At one school in affluent Westchester County, N.Y., nearly 1 in 5 students had special testing privileges, which was nearly 10 times the national average.

These are starling parents, like the birds that destroy other birds’ eggs to take their nests and protect their own. For if every parent puts his or her child first at all costs, communities degrade, schools can’t function, society becomes ungovernable. And while they are not natural objects of sympathy, the cheaters’ children suffer, as well. The most obvious victims are the ones who end up sick or disabled by infections that could have been avoided. But moral infection eats you from the inside, rots relationships, wounds self-worth. As the college admissions scandal unfolded, I kept wondering what scars the parents’ ambitions left on their children. “The ruin of a nation,” a Ghanian proverb warns, “begins in the homes of its people.”

Which brings us back to our larger family. America’s identity derives from ideals that set us apart from the places we left to come here: freedom and fairness, justice and mercy, where anyone with moxie and muscle can build a future. We care for our neighbors; we honor service and sacrifice. Soldiers died for these values; parents watched sons and daughters go to war, sacrifice that which was most precious, to defend something bigger than ourselves.

This president doesn’t seem to think very much of our national character. He discounts our instinctive generosity to those in need, our compassion not just for our own children but all children, our confidence that we can succeed together, not just at each other’s expense.

What happens when nothing is bigger than oneself, no value is worth sacrificing for and it’s every man for himself? We are finding out.

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

Trump constantly preaches a foul doctrine of “beggar thy neighbor.”

PWS

O8-25-19

WASHPOST: Catherine Rampell Takes The Measure Of Stephen Miller’s Neo-Nazi View Of American Immigration History – Exposing A Lifelong Hater’s Knowingly False, Misleading & Existentially Dangerous Narrative!

WASHPOST: Catherine Rampell Takes The Measure Of Stephen Miller’s Neo-Nazi View Of American Immigration History – Exposing A Lifelong Hater’s Knowingly False, Misleading & Existentially Dangerous Narrative!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/20/stephen-miller-is-right-about-immigration-not-way-that-he-means/

By Catherine Rampell

Columnist

August 20 at 4:58 PM

In a Post profile over the weekend, White House senior policy adviser and de facto immigration czar Stephen Miller explained why he cares so much about immigration policy:

“Immigration is an issue that affects all others,” Miller said, speaking in structured paragraphs. “Immigration affects our health-care system. Immigration affects our education system. Immigration affects our public safety, it affects our national security, it affects our economy and our financial system. It touches upon everything, but the goal is to create an immigration system that enhances the vibrancy, the unity, the togetherness and the strength of our society.”

Miller is right: Immigration does touch all those realms. Though perhaps not in quite the way he suggests.

For instance, immigration affects our health-care system in many ways — including by supplying it with talent.

In fact immigrants are overrepresented in the health industry. About 16.6 percent of the health industry is foreign-born, 13.7 percent of the U.S. population overall. A whopping 29.1 percent of physicians are foreign-born, according to a recent analysis of Census Bureau data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Immigrants also are overrepresented among dentists (23.7 percent); pharmacists (20.3 percent); registered nurses (16 percent); and nursing, psychiatric and home health aides (23.1 percent).

Immigration also plays an important role in our education system. International students, who generally pay full freight, have helpedkeep public universities afloat even as state legislatures have slashed their budgets. Their tuition dollars help schools cross-subsidize in-state students. Immigrants also have populated the STEM study programs that Americans show little interest in, especially at the graduate level — where many of those same immigrant students help educate American undergrads.

Here’s the share of students in a selection of STEM graduate programs who are in the United States on temporary visas, according to the National Science Foundation’s Science & Engineering Indicators 2018 report. Note that this measure likely understates the fraction of students who are foreign-born, as it does not include those who are permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

Source: National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, special tabulations (2016), 2015 Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. (Washington Post)

As for the relationship between immigration and public safety, the data suggest you might conclude that greater immigration leads to greater public safety.

ADVERTISING

At least, a study of immigration and crime trends across 200 metropolitan areas over four decades found that “immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.” Other studies have found a similar relationship between the two trends. We don’t know that the link is actually causal, of course, but we do have evidence thatundocumented immigrants commit (non-immigration-related) crimes at lower rates than do native-born Americans.

With respect to national security, Miller might do well to remember that immigrants serve in our military. As of 2018, there were 527,000 foreign-born veterans, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis of Census Bureau data. About 1.9 million veterans are the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

Some of those noncitizen military members with in-demand skills were expecting that their service would expedite their naturalization process, under a program launched in 2008 called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest. However, changes in recent years, under first the Obama administration and then under Trump, have effectively frozen that program.

What about our economy?

There’s a lot to be said about how immigrants contribute to the economy, including through high rates of entrepreneurship. For example, immigrants have started more than half of the United States’ start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more, according to a National Foundation for American Policy study. They start lots of smaller companies, too, at much higher rates than native-born Americans, according to data from the Kauffman Foundation.

Without immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be falling, which would weigh on economic growth. (Just look at Japan’s struggles). And as I’ve written elsewhere:

There’s reason to believe that new immigrants may depress wages for earlier waves of immigrants who have similar skill sets. However, recent studies suggest that immigration (both authorized and unauthorized) actually boosts labor force participation rates, productivity and wages and reduces unemployment rates for native-born American workers, whose skills these immigrants tend to complement.

But don’t these people drain the public coffers?

Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, pay taxes — taxes that fund government benefits that in many cases they are not legally eligible to collect.

A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that the net fiscal impact of first-generation immigrants, compared to otherwise similar natives, is positive at the federal level and negative at the state and local levels. That’s due mostly to the costs of educating their children. When their children grow up, though, they are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.” In other words, by the second generation, immigrants are net-positive for government budgets at all levels.

What about the most destitute immigrants who come here, though? Surely they’re sucking the government dry!

Nope.

An internal government report commissioned by Trump found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in tax revenue over the past decade than they cost the government. Finding those results inconvenient, the administration suppressed them, though they were ultimately leaked to the New York Times last year.

So by all means, Miller, please remind the public that immigration has consequences for the broad policy landscape. But remembering the directionality of those consequences seems pretty important, too.

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

Thanks, Catherine, for setting the record straight!

Catherine’s wonderful article would have fit well within the readings for the Bjorklunden Seminar that Professor Jenn Esperanza and I did earlier this month. Basically, those who oppose and demean immigrants have forgotten that we are all immigrants, we are all very similar, and without immigrants there would be no America.

No, our country isn’t “full” by any means and no, the “quality” of recent immigrants hasn’t “dropped off.” If anything, we are more dependent on the skills, hard work, and loyalty (sometimes hard to fathom, considering how they are treated) of recent immigrants, both documented and undocumented, than at any time in our history since the founding.

Unlike Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” Pence, Trump himself, and the other political hacks charged with making immigration policy these days, I actually spent years dealing face to face with migrants of all types, races, religions, backgrounds, and situations in performing my duties as a U.S. Immigration Judge. Contrary to the false narratives promoted by the “Millers of the world,” most of them wanted just three things 1) the chance to live a relatively safe and stable life; 2) an opportunity to use their skills to support themselves and others; and 3) a better future for their children.

That’s largely what I wanted out of life and accurately describes the aspirations of probably 90%+ of the people I have known as I move into my seventh decade of life.

I don’t know what entitles folks like Trump, Miller, and their followers to demean and dehumanize the contributions of other humans who are just as, or in many cases more, worthy as they are – simply because they didn’t have the same fortune of birth or circumstances.

Undoubtedly, there is somewhere out there a point at which admitting larger numbers of refugees and other types of immigrants would be counterproductive, at least for our country, if not for the migrants themselves. Even then, there might still be moral and religious arguments for helping our fellow men even when it ceases to demonstrably benefit our economy and our society.

But, the factual and moral bankruptcy of the “case for fewer immigrants” put forth by Trump, Miller, and the White Nationalists shows that whatever that “magic number’” might be, it’s multiples of the number of legal immigrants we are admitting at present. That’s why Trump, Miller, and the White Nationalists don’t want to have the real national dialogue that we should be engaging in: How do we expand our current refugee and legal immigrant admission systems to more realistically reflect the market forces that cause migration, and how do we as a country put ourselves in the best position to benefit from the ongoing phenomenon of human migration?

The longer we screw around with and are diverted by the racist myths of the Trumps and Millers, the longer it will take us to get around to the hard work of addressing immigration issues in a smart, humane, and realistic way that benefits the immigrants, our country, and humanity as a whole.

PWS

08-21-19

“DUH” ARTICLE OF THE DAY: Eugene Robinson @ WashPost: “Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration turns out to be a lie”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-claim-that-he-supports-legal-immigration-turns-out-to-be-a-lie/2019/08/12/66f09920-bd32-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

The erratic Trump administration has had just one consistent policy principle, one guiding North Star: punitive and often sadistic treatment of nonwhite immigrants.

President Trump’s claim that he supports legal immigration, as opposed to the undocumented “invasion” he rails against, turns out to be — big surprise — a lie. On Monday, the administration proved its antagonism toward those who “stand in line” and “come in the right way” by issuing a new rule forcing many legal immigrants to make an impossible choice: accept needed government benefits to which they are fully entitled, or preserve their chances of obtaining permanent residence.

Say you’re an immigrant from Mexico who came here legally to join family members who are already permanent residents or citizens. Say you’re working a full-time minimum-wage job, plus odd jobs nights and weekends. You are a productive member of society. You are paying payroll taxes, sales taxes, vehicle registration fees and other government levies. Still, as hard as you work, you can’t make ends meet.

You may be legally entitled to health care through Medicaid. You may be entitled to food assistance through the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. You may be entitled to housing assistance. But according to the new Trump administration rule — set to take effect in two months — if you use any of these programs, you might forfeit the opportunity to ever obtain a green card making you a permanent resident. That means you also forfeit the chance of ever becoming a citizen.

Long advocated by White House adviser Stephen Miller, the Torquemada of the immigration inquisition, the new policy is a major step in Trump’s crusade to Make America White Again. If it survives court challenges, the new rule could dramatically reduce legal — I repeat, legal — immigration from low-income countries. Not just coincidentally, I am sure, this means fewer black and brown people would be granted resident status.

Trump’s message to the world: Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As he memorably and disgracefully put it: “Our Country is FULL!”

A Homeland Security Investigations officer guards detained workers Aug. 7 after immigration raids at seven work sites across Mississippi. (Handout/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AFP/Getty Images)

This is part of a well-established pattern. Trump often uses immigrants as scapegoats, encouraging his supporters to blame them for any and all problems they face. But beneath the cynical posturing there appears to be genuine animus.

Does the president hate all immigrants? He did once allegedly muse about wanting more newcomers from Norway. But those who are not white are treated, by this administration, as if they were not fully human.

How else to characterize a policy of cruelly separating children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border? Of keeping children in cages and denying them toothbrushes or soap? Of cramming adults into overcrowded lockups when their only crime was to lawfully seek refuge from violence and persecution?

Last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement staged what was apparently the biggest one-day immigration raid in modern American history. Approximately 680 men and women classified as “removable aliens” were arrested at seven work sites in Mississippi. Taken from their job sites, many left young children waiting in vain, and in anguish, for their parents to pick them up from school or day care.

ICE has limited resources — certainly nowhere near enough to go after all the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The only policy that makes sense is to prioritize the capture and removal of those who pose a genuine danger, such as MS-13 gang members. But that’s not who you find punching a clock for minimum wage at a chicken plant in Mississippi. Instead, you find hard-working people trying to put food on the table for their families.

The raid was a demonstration, a warning, a show of force. If the administration were serious, it would have gone after the employers, who were not immediately hit with charges or sanctions — and are already looking for replacement workers. The message to undocumented migrants was: You are weak. We can hurt you whenever we want.

Sensible immigration reform would provide the law-abiding undocumented with a pathway to legal status and citizenship. But the Republican Party blocks action because it is terrified that these immigrants would eventually become Democrats. I wonder why.

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

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

KEY QUOTE:

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

So, why is it OK to have mindless cruelty be the “official policy” of the US? If it isn’t “OK,” what is each of us doing to remove this cancer that is eating away the fabric of America under the incredibly bogus and insulting mantra of “Making America Great Again?”

Is cruelty great? Is stupidity great? Is dumping on our fellow man great? Is environmental degredation great? Is blatant racism great? Is misogyny great? Is beating up on children great? Is corruption great? Is lying great? Is cowardice great? Is selfishness great? Is White Nationalism great? Is encouraging gun violence great? Are out of control deficits great? Is turning our backs on vulnerable refugees great? Is bullying other countries great? Is insulting our allies great? Are useless “trade wars” great? Is sucking up to the world’s worst dictators great? Is nuclear proliferation great? Is wiping entire species from the earth great? Is less health care great? Is election minipultion by Putin great? Are collasing bridges and deteriorating roads great? Is using public office for private gain great? Is nepotism great? Is failing to pay taxes great? Just what part of Trumpism does the “MAGA Crowd” think is “great?”

It’s not rocket science. Trump, Miller, ”Cooch Cooch,” & company are the vilest racists since the supposed end of Jim Crow (as we’re now seeing, that was an illusion; it never ended for the GOP and the Trumps of the world). The DHS and disgraceful and disingenuous cowards like McAleenan, Morgan, Albence, and Provost are their “handmaidens.” Barr is their enforcer. And the GOP is the racist party of the “New Jim Crow.”

It’s not just immigrants, Eugene. Once Trump and his neo-Nazi gang are done “Dred Scottifying” migrants, they are going after you and every other person of color and minority in the U.S. who dares to stand up to up to them.

Ironically, it’s a small handful of truly bizarre African Americans and Hispanic Americans who continue to support Trump, wrongly thinking that they are now “De Facto White” and consequently the “railroad cars will never be coming for them,” along with those who don’t vote, who could give Trump the electoral college edge he needs to remain in office (while likely losing the popular vote by an even larger margin than in 2016) and seal their own eventual demise and that of their families.

Some German Jews had converted to Lutheranism or Catholicism before World War II thinking that it would save them from Hitler and the anti-Semites. How did that work out for them?

Trump and today’s GOP are unapologetic racists as well as congenital liars lacking in any type of fundamental values. Their lies are many, selfishness rampant, and their policies and pronouncements vile. But, they must be taken seriously for the existential threat they are to the rest of us. To treat them as anything else or to express surprise when they turn out to be “as advertised,” is to push America and the world ever closer to the abyss.

Treating Trump as “normal” or a “legitimate” U.S. President, as too may Federal Judges, legislators, and some members of the media do, is a potentially fatal mistake. He’s a 24-caret fraud, but every bit as much of a threat to our nation’s future as George III was when the Declaration of Independence was written; probably greater, because he’s here on our shore, in person –trying to satisfy his own insatiable ego while destroying our nation.

PWS

08-13-19

COURTSIDE HAS BEEN SAYING IT FOR YEARS: For Survival As A Nation, We Need To Keep All The Law Abiding (95+%) Legal & Undocumented Immigrants Already Here, PLUS Enact A Robust Increase In Legal Immigration In All Categories & Allow Many More Legally Admitted Refugees & Asylees — Unless & Until Congress Works Up The Courage (E.G., “Balls”) To Do This, Even Over The Objection Of The White Nationalist Racist Restrictionists, Large Scale “Civil” Immigration Enforcement Is A Beyond Stupid, Highly Unprofessional, Cruel Hoax — An Abuse Of Authority, & A Grotesque Waste Of Taxpayer Resources That Makes America Infinitely Worse As A Nation — FINALLY, THE SO-CALLED “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” IS STARTING TO “GET IT!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ice-sweeps-are-cruel-without-immigration-reform-theyre-pointless-too/2019/08/11/88d212b8-bad4-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html

From the WashPost Editorial Board:

By Editorial Board

August 11

THE DEPORTATION sweep Wednesday by hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at several food processing plants in Mississippi left a trail of tears, business jitters and widespread anxiety in places where undocumented immigrants are so tightly woven into communities that the towns would struggle to exist without them. The raids inflicted predictable suffering — especially among children whose parents were suddenly carted off — to such a degree that just 24 hours afterward, ICE had released some 300 of the 680 migrants it had arrested, including those who had no criminal records.

President Trump, whose own family business has for many years employed migrants who entered the country illegally , pronounced the Mississippi action a “very good deterrent ” to unauthorized immigration. The evidence for that assertion is nil. Still, the sweep provided some useful reminders, not least that the United States cannot deport its way out of a dysfunctional immigration system.

First, the raids underline American agriculture’s deep dependency on undocumented workers, who in 2014 accounted for 17 percent of employees in the sector — and considerably more than that on farms and in many food processing plants. Little wonder that plant managers and local residents in towns targeted by ICE last week worried that the raids would sap their businesses and vitality.

The fact is that relatively few Americans want dirty, dangerous jobs that pay $12 per hour, while requiring some employees to report to work at 3 a.m. One study commissioned by the dairy industry suggested 3,500 dairy farms would close if half the country’s foreign-born workers were deported; another survey, from North Carolina, showed that in 2011, a minuscule number of the state’s nearly half-million jobless workers applied for 6,500 available farm jobs, and most of those who were hired couldn’t hack the work; most of the jobs were then filled by Mexicans.

Second, any large-scale enforcement action will inevitably result in families being broken apart — including those whose children are U.S. citizens. In 2017, two-thirds of unauthorized adult migrants had lived in the United States for more than a decade, according to the Pew Research Center; their median duration of residence was 15 years. Officials may not like the optics of crying toddlers and preteens whose parents have been taken away, but they shouldn’t be surprised.

Third, businesses like the ones in Mississippi that employ undocumented workers are subject to federal prosecution. But it was Republican leaders in the House of Representatives last year, on Mr. Trump’s watch, who blocked legislation that would have required private employers to use E-Verify, a data system used to check whether employees are legally present in the country. Farm groups, including those who represent major employers in Republican districts in California and elsewhere, are dead set against requiring E-Verify, knowing it would produce severe labor shortages.

ICE officials and federal prosecutors are right that deportation sweeps are within their purview as lawful enforcement actions. The problem is that the law is so blatantly misaligned with economic, social and political realities that it is magical thinking to believe that enforcement alone, in the absence of sweeping reform of existing laws, can make a dent in the nation’s population of 10.5 million undocumented immigrants.

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

Best Point: Immigrants at the “lower levels” of our economic ladder make just as much, probably more, contribution to the national prosperity, continued existence, and welfare as those at the top. And, certainly they do more for the good of the nation than Trump and the useless civil enforcement authorities at DHS.

While I’m not going to turn away a “rocket scientist” who wants to immigrate, we certainly need more qualified agricultural, home health care, and construction workers than “rocket scientists.” And, yes, logical choices to enforce and administer the law in a rational manner, including declining to enforce useless and counterproductive provisions, and to resist political pandering stemming from racist motives are well within the lawful discretion of all law enforcement agencies.

Quibble: Just because enforcement is technically “lawful” does not mean that it’s prudent or appropriate. Most of today’s civil immigration enforcement is immoral, wasteful, and corruptly intended to support racism and White Nationalism.

I suspect that the majority of the criminal statutes and ordinances now on the books in the U.S. are largely unenforced or only sporadically enforced. That’s good policing, good public policy, and poor legislating.

What if your local police devoted 100% of their resources to “busting” anyone who drove 1 mile over the speed limit while failing to investigate and prosecute homicide, rape, robbery, and other violent felonies? That’s technically “legal,” but both inane and fundamentally corrupt. Those responsible would likely be quickly removed from office.

And, let’s be clear: While DHS resources are being concentrated on White Nationalist nonsense like the “Mississippi Raids,” REAL CRIMES, such as fraud, wage and hour violations, abuse of migrants, hate crimes directed at migrants, human trafficking, drug trafficking, domestic violence, rape, bribery, soliciting of sexual favors by DHS agents, extortion, perjury, tax evasion, and other felonies are NOT being aggressively investigated or prosecuted by Trump’s White Nationalist regime.

That’s basically the way the immigration laws are being (mal)enforced in Trump’s name by folks like McAleenan, Albence, Morgan, Provost, and others. Don’t fall for their nonsensical apologist “we’re only enforcing the law” BS. (Also, what about the laws protecting refugees, asylum seekers, and encouraging legal immigration that these complicit clowns are unlawfully perverting or failing to enforce?)

Instead, vote to insure they and everyone associated with Trump are removed from office, required to make an honest living in the future, and replaced with competent, humane, and ethical folks who will resist and when necessary “out” racism and White Nationalism in all of its toxic forms. Just because enforcement of obsolete, unworkable, and discriminatory laws might be technically “legal” doesn’t make it right, sensible, or moral. And, in the case of the Trump Administration, it’s downright immoral, dishonest, and counterproductive.

PWS

08-12-19

NO MISSION, NO CREDS, NO SHAME: DHS Abandoned Our “National Security” When Trump Took Power — Now (Wittingly or Not) It’s Largely A White Nationalist Tool With A Huge Racism Problem Whose Highest Profile Activities Harm America, Rip Off Taxpayers, & Have Little Or No Relation To Real Law Enforcement — In Plain Terms, A Dangerous & Unnecessary Internal Political Police Force!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/09/poultry-industry-recruited-them-now-ice-raids-are-devastating-their-communities/

Angela Stuesse writes in the Washington Post:

By Angela Stuesse

Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. To learn more about immigrant and U.S.-born workers in Mississippi’s poultry industry, pick up her book, “Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.”

August 9 at 6:00 AM

On Wednesday people across the United States were shocked by the news that ICE raids at a handful of Mississippi chicken plants had resulted in the largest single-state immigration enforcement action in U.S. history, with nearly 700 people detained. As surprising as the news was, coming on the heels of a deadly mass shooting that targeted Latinos, perhaps just as surprising was the location of the raids in the deep, rural South.

The prominence of Latinos in Mississippi’s chicken plants and communities today was not accidental. It was calculated, strategic and intimately related to deeply rooted structures of labor exploitation in the region. Beginning in the 1990s, Latin American immigrants were recruited to the state by the poultry industry, where they arrived to work in some of the lowest-paid and most dangerous jobs in the country. This week’s raids target deeply rooted workers and families and leave behind a devastated community, while also terrorizing many others across the country.

The roots of the heavily Latino workforces in Southern poultry plants lie in the growing American appetite for chicken during the 1990s, and the stirrings of a labor movement by African American plant workers. As poultry production expanded, workers’ pay and opportunities remained stagnant. As a result, labor organizing among the plants’ predominantly African American workforce began to gain traction.

Facing the prospect of its first union contract negotiations and in search of more “flexible” (read: exploitable and expendable) workers, in 1994 a chicken plant in Morton, Miss., headed to Miami in search of immigrant labor.

Advertising in Cuban stores and local papers, it took the poultry processor just one week to fill a Greyhound bus of immigrants eager for work. This experiment marked the beginning of the plant’s formal Hispanic Project, which included not just recruitment and transportation from Florida but also the provision of housing — mostly in dilapidated and overcrowded trailers — as well as local transportation and leisure activities, all for fees deducted from workers’ paychecks that often reduced their meager earnings to below minimum wage.

In its roughly four years of operation, the Hispanic Project recruited nearly 5,000 workers to two Mississippi towns with a combined population of less than 10,000. Not everyone stayed, but this scheme caught on, and other plants began recruiting Latinx immigrant workers from Florida, Texas and even farther afield.

Getting creative, one poultry processor offered its workers $600 for each new employee they recruited who stayed at least three months. Entrepreneurial individuals took full advantage of this incentive to recruit family, friends and others in their social networks in the United States and in their home countries. Once these connections were made, the plants no longer had to leave the state to recruit foreign workers. In the words of the architect of the Hispanic Project, “They were right here.”

By the time I arrived to work in Mississippi’s poultry communities alongside the Mississippi Poultry Workers’ Center in 2002, over half of the country’s quarter-million poultry workers were immigrants, most of them in the South. A mapping of poultry production and Latino population growth shows that poultry has been a major driving force of a demographic transformation in the region. In Mississippi, it was the driving force, increasing the Latino population in some poultry towns by over 1000 percent in the 1990s.

And this transformation of the poultry workforce has only continued over time. Today’s Mississippi poultry workers are from nearly every part of the continent, hailing from Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba, Honduras, Venezuela and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. They are doing work that is hazardous, painful and often degrading. They work long hours for low pay, scratching out a living so that the rest of us can buy cheap chicken.

And they do so because they were literally invited, recruited and incentivized to come. For ICE to be conducting raids in Mississippi ignores this history and ignores how the poultry workers recruited to these towns a quarter century ago have laid down roots. They have made Mississippi home and raised families.

Though industry leaders didn’t predict it at the time, the Hispanic Project changed the landscape of Mississippi and the rural South. In poultry towns across the region, today you can find authentic Mexican food, pickup soccer games, an abundance of Spanish-language churches, and schools brimming with bright and eager young Latinx Americans, U.S. citizens who are growing up as Southern as their peers.

Rooted members of the community, regardless of immigration status, deserve better than to be ripped away from their jobs and loved ones. Although neighbors and community organizations like the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance are working to support affected children and families, these raids ripple through communities, devastating individuals and families, and the most vulnerable people pay the highest price. As the alt-right celebrates this wreckage as another win for white nationalists, let us keep in view that these immigrants are here because 25 years ago one Mississippi poultry executive conceived an inventive idea, to flood the processing lines with eager and compliant immigrant workers.

And while they come at enormous costs to thriving, vibrant communities, these raids do little to affect immigration trends; people continue to migrate to the United States to survive. What they do affect is the working conditions for everyone. With the threat of family separation, detention and deportation hanging over people’s heads, immigrant workers are less likely to organize and less likely to speak out against poor conditions — and employers are more likely to take advantage of them. This ripples through the economy, depressing wages for U.S.-born workers, as well. The mounting threat of deportation and rising xenophobia help keep workers compliant, serving owners’ interests and consumers’ pocketbooks — but harming the people who prepare our food.

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

Today, DHS has morphed into an agency without legitimate purpose, direction, values, or decency. It operates largely without regard for strategically effective use of limited public resources. It’s also horribly managed, mostly by “malicious incompetents.”

Undoubtedly, there are many necessary and legitimate functions within the “DHS mess.” And probably the majority of DHS employees are dedicated public servants, trying to do the best they can under the circumstances. But, the “DHS experiment” has miserably failed. Time to cut our losses as a nation.

The DHS should be dissolved, ridded of its racist culture, and the essential security, public service, and law enforcement functions reassigned to other agencies with legitimate missions, workable management structures, and proven competence (e.g., FBI, HHS, State, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, etc.).

The “civil” immigration enforcement function likely could be sharply reduced in terms of both funding and personnel without any adverse effect on true “national security.” Indeed, elimination of the current misdirection of resources toward cruel, inhumane, and overwhelmingly unnecessary “civil detention,” mindless enforcement of provisions that often defeat the national interest (like the cruelly inane operation described in this article), failure to exercise prosecutorial discretion in a rational and professional manner, and racist grandstanding would greatly increase our actual national security while allowing resources to be directed in a more efficient and effective manner. And safeguards and oversight should be put in place to ensure that immigration enforcement and adjudication never again become tools of White Nationalism, racism, and neo-fascism.

A focus on election security and stopping White Supremacist domestic terrorism, missions that DHS has shamefully swept under the table, at best, and actively undermined, at worst, is also essential.

PWS

08-09-19

TRUMP SEES MASS MURDER AS OPPORTUNITY TO SPREAD LIES, HATE, RACISM, & DIVISION, WHILE TOUTING HIS “PERSONALITY CULT” — Hits On Leaders of Dayton, El Paso, While Upping Racial Tensions That Undoubtedly Will Lead To More White Supremacist Domestic Terror In The Near Future!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lashes-out-at-beto-orourke-and-the-media-ahead-of-visits-to-el-paso-and-dayton/2019/08/07/b0aa8afc-b8fb-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

Ashley Parker
White House Reporter
Washington Post

From the Washington Post:

By Ashley Parker ,

Philip Rucker ,

Jenna Johnson and

Felicia Sonmez

August 8 at 12:01 AM

EL PASO — On a day when President Trump vowed to tone down his rhetoric and help the country heal following two mass slayings, he did the opposite — lacing his visits Wednesday to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, with a flurry of attacks on local leaders and memorializing his trips with grinning thumbs-up photos.

A traditional role for presidents has been to offer comfort and solace to all Americans at times of national tragedy, but the day provided a fresh testament to Trump’s limitations in striking notes of unity and empathy.

When Trump swooped into the grieving border city of El Paso to offer condolences following the massacre of Latinos allegedly by a white supremacist, some of the city’s elected leaders and thousands of its citizens declared the president unwelcome.

In his only public remarks during the trip, Trump lashed out at Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, both Democrats, over their characterization of his visit with hospital patients in Dayton.

“We had an amazing day,” Trump said in El Paso as he concluded his visit. “As you know, we left Ohio. The love, the respect for the office of the presidency.”

Trump also praised El Paso police officers and other first responders and shook their hands, telling one female officer, “I saw you on television the other day and you were fantastic.”

None of the eight patients still being treated at University Medical Center in El Paso agreed to meet with Trump when he visited the hospital, UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke said. Two victims who already had been discharged returned to the hospital with family members to meet with the president.

“This is a very sensitive time in their lives,” Mielke said. “Some of them said they didn’t want to meet with the president. Some of them didn’t want any visitors.”

Before Trump’s visit Wednesday, however, some of the hospitalized victims accepted visits from a number of city and county elected officials, as well as Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) and Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.).

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president and first lady Melania Trump met with “victims of the tragedy while at the hospital” and were “received very warmly by not just victims and their families, but by the many members of medical staff who lined the hallways to meet them. It was a moving visit for all involved.”

El Paso and Dayton were not merely the latest in the multiplying series of American mass shootings. The carnage in El Paso is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, with parallels between a racist manifesto posted minutes before the shooting and the president’s own anti-immigration rhetoric.

President Trump is greeted by Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio on Wednesday. (Ty Greenlees/AP)

This has thrust Trump into the center of a roiling political and societal debate, with some Democratic leaders saying the president has emboldened white supremacy and is a threat to the nation.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who is running to unseat Trump in 2020, said in a speech Wednesday, “We have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”

When the Mayor of Dayton first saw @realDonaldTrump tweet about her pic.twitter.com/Z8YdyeebXp

— Scott Wartman (@ScottWartman) August 7, 2019

Both in Dayton and El Paso, Trump kept almost entirely out of public view, a marked break with tradition, as presidents visiting grieving communities typically offer public condolences.

Trump avoided the Oregon district where the shooting in Dayton took place, and just a short drive from Miami Valley Hospital, which he did visit. Whaley said he would not have been welcome in the Oregon District, where scores of demonstrators congregated, holding anti-Trump signs and chanting “Do something!” in a call for stricter gun laws.

Brown and Whaley described the visit by the president and first lady in favorable terms.

“They were hurting. He was comforting. He did the right things. Melania did the right things,” Brown told reporters. “And it’s his job in part to comfort people. I’m glad he did it in those hospital rooms.”

Whaley added: “I think the victims and the first responders were grateful that the president of the United States came to Dayton.”

Both Brown and Whaley, however, were also sharply critical of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and Republican resistance to gun-control legislation.

Whaley later responded to Trump’s comments about her and Brown by calling him “a bully and a coward.” She said on CNN, “It’s fine that he wants to bully me and Sen. Brown. We’re okay. We can take it.”

The traveling press corps was not allowed to observe Trump’s visit with three victims who remained hospitalized. It fell therefore to White House aide Dan Scavino to proclaim in a tweet that Trump “was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital.”

[‘Hispanic invasion’: A white nationalist version of Texas that never existed]

Trump and the first lady also met with police officers, fire officials, trauma surgeons and nurses at the facility, which treated 23 victims of the shooting. The hospital invited victims who had already been released to come back and meet with the president and the first lady.

“It was an authentic visit,” hospital president Mike Uhl said, praising Trump as “attentive, present and extremely accommodating.”

Trump offered his own affirmation on Twitter: “It was a warm & wonderful visit. Tremendous enthusiasm & even Love.”

Grisham said journalists were kept out of the hospital visit because staff did not want it to devolve into “a photo op” and overwhelm the victims with media.

The White House, however, distributed its own photos of Trump smiling for pictures with first responders, along with a slickly produced video, helping make the president the center of attention.

Trump’s reception in El Paso was less hospitable, and not only because so many local leaders have said they believe his rhetoric inspired Saturday’s slayings at a shopping center near the U.S.-Mexico border. Although he won the state of Texas in the 2016 election, Trump captured just 25.7 percent of the vote in El Paso County, the worst performance recorded here by a major-party presidential candidate in at least two decades.

An ever-growing makeshift memorial has sprouted near the shooting scene that features piles of colorful flowers, a row of white crosses, a line of prayer candles, as well as messages to the president. “Mr. T, Respect our sorrow and grief. Do not ‘invade’ our city,” reads one note, a reference to Trump’s repeated warnings of a migrant “invasion” at the border.

Just before Trump arrived in El Paso — where he and the first lady met with law enforcement personnel at an emergency operations center following their hospital visit — several hundred people gathered in opposition to his trip .

Congregating under the hot midday sun in a baseball field for an “El Paso Strong” event, some held homemade signs. “Go home! You are NOT welcome here!” read one. “This was Trump-inspired terrorism,” read another. “Trump repent,” read a third.

At one point, the crowd chanted, “Send him back!” — a nod to the incendiary “Send her back!” chant about Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at one of Trump’s campaign rallies last month.

“We feel like right now we should be in mourning, and we feel like we should be collecting our thoughts, we should be doing vigils and we should be gathering together as a community. We believe it is an insult that the president is coming here,” said one of the organizers, Jaime Candelaria, a 37-year-old singer and songwriter.

[‘Be quiet!’: Trump claims Beto O’Rourke uses a ‘phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage’]

Escobar said onstage, “In this moment, someone is visiting … I felt it was important that we come together and not focus on the visitor, but focus on El Paso.” She added, “We will not stop resisting the hate! Resisting the bigotry! Resisting the racism!”

In the crowd at the El Paso Strong event was Shawn Nixon, 20, a Walmart employee who was at work restocking the school supplies area when the gunman opened fire Saturday morning. At the sound of the shots, Nixon said he fell to the ground, pulling with him a young child who had been shopping with his mother.

“All I’m just asking for Donald Trump, for the president, to do is to say ‘sorry,’ ” Nixon said. “He created this crime. He created it because of his words. Every time that he’s on TV, that’s what he’s doing.”

During his flight home from El Paso, Trump attacked Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), the twin brother of presidential candidate Julián Castro, tweeting that he “makes a fool of himself every time he opens his mouth.” The congressman has come under scrutiny for publicizing a list of San Antonio donors who have contributed to Trump and accusing them of “fueling a campaign of hate.”

On Saturday in El Paso, authorities said, a man opened fire inside the Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring two dozen others. At 1:05 a.m. Sunday, a gunman killed nine people and injured 27 others outside a bar in Dayton, police said.

All week, Trump has zigzagged between two competing instincts: unite and divide.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, Trump remained cloistered at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., issuing only short statements on Twitter. Back at the White House on Monday, the president delivered a scripted speech in which he preached harmony.

“Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside — so destructive — and find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters.

The president did not heed his own advice, however. Late Tuesday night, he took to Twitter to attack Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman running for president who has said Trump bears some responsibility for the shooting there because of his demonization of Latino immigrants.

Trump tweeted: “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement — & be quiet!”

Then, as he departed the White House on Wednesday morning en route to Ohio, Trump told reporters he would refrain from attacking his adversaries during the trip.

“I would like to stay out of the political fray,” the president said. Asked about his rhetoric, he said he thinks it “brings people together” and added, “I think we have toned it down.”

[Gannett building in McLean evacuated after reports of man with weapon]

That detente lasted only a few minutes. Answering a reporter’s question about Biden, Trump pounced. “Joe is a pretty incompetent guy,” the president said. “Joe Biden has truly lost his fastball, that I can tell you.”

By the time the president had left Dayton, he was back on Twitter and sniping at Democrats, a tirade triggered by his consumption of cable television news aboard Air Force One.

“Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech. Sooo Boring! The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks with this guy,” the president wrote.

Then he lashed out at Brown and Whaley, falsely accusing them of “totally misrepresenting” the reception he received at Miami Valley Hospital. He alleged that their news conference immediately after the president’s visit “was a fraud.”

But neither Brown nor Whaley said Trump received a poor reception at the hospital.

When Whaley first saw Trump’s tweets criticizing her and Brown, she paused for a moment to read them on a cellphone and said, “I don’t — I mean, I’m really confused. We said he was treated, like, very well. So, I don’t know why they’re talking about ‘misrepresenting.’

“Oh, well, you know,” the mayor added with a shrug. “He lives in his world of Twitter.”

Parker and Johnson reported from El Paso, and Rucker and Sonmez reported from Washington. Arelis R. Hernández in Dayton, Robert Moore in El Paso, and Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.

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

Totally lacking in human decency. Totally unqualified for any office, let alone the highest one in the land. Will enough folks ”wise up” and stand up to this cowardly bully before it’s too late for all of us?

PWS

08-09-19

CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS, DOCUMENTED OR NOT, HAVE CONTRIBUTED MUCH MORE THAN DONALD TRUMP TO 21st CENTURY AMERICA’S PROSPERITY (Indeed, They Are Even Responsible For Some Of Trump’s Few Actual Business Successes): So, How Do Trump, “Big Mac With Lies,” “Cooch Cooch,” & Other GOP Racists Get Away with Their False & Dehumanizing Attacks On Those Who Are ACTUALLY “Making America Great?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administrations-new-policy-again-shows-its-contempt-for-central-americans/2019/07/30/070b3b1a-b2ff-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html

The Washington Post Editorial Board:

HERE’S WHAT the State Department recommends for U.S. travelers to Guatemala: Do not walk or drive at night. Request security escorts. In the capital, Guatemala City, do not hail taxis on the streets and avoid 10 specific neighborhoods, including one around the airport.

Here’s what the Trump administration recommends to non-U.S. travelers to Guatemala, namely those from other Central American countries: Stay there and apply for asylum. Don’t even think about continuing north to the U.S. border.

The juxtaposition is absurd but no less so than the agreement the administration struck last week with Guatemala — that it be considered a “safe third country” to which the United States will return asylum seekers if they have not already sought refuge there. If the administration’s contempt for Central Americans fleeing violence, hardship and persecution was not already clear, this new policy clarified it.

The rule, set to take effect in the coming weeks if U.S. or Guatemalan courts don’t block it, is mainly aimed at migrants from El Salvador and Honduras. They constitute the second- and third-largest cohorts of asylum seekers crossing the U.S. southwestern border in recent months, and most of them traverse Guatemala on their trek northward. (The largest cohort is Guatemalans themselves, who accounted for a majority of the more than 100,000 migrants stopped at the border monthly this past spring.)

President Trump, irate at the migrant flow, has used slander — “these are bad people,” he told reporters — and a grab bag of legally dubious deterrent measures. He is right that Customs and Border Protection and other agencies are struggling to handle the tide, which resulted in nearly 700,000 apprehensions in the current fiscal year through June, compared with scarcely 400,000 the entire previous year. But it is morally indefensible to attack a migration problem by putting migrants themselves at risk. That is precisely what the administration’s new move would do.

The United States maintains a safe-third-country agreement with Canada, meaning that asylum seekers can be returned to that country to apply for refuge if they crossed the border from there. That makes sense because Canada is generally safe; Guatemala is anything but. And the retort of acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, who noted that parts of the United States are also unsafe, is risible. Guatemala’s crime rate dwarfs that of the United States; the homicide rate there is five times higher.

The probable result of the administration’s policy, if it goes into effect, will be to transform legal asylum seekers into undocumented immigrants. They are unlikely to seek refuge in Guatemala, which has no administrative mechanism to process thousands of asylum applications — and which agreed to the deal with the United States only after Mr. Trump threatened severe sanctions. Instead, many will likely cross illegally into the United States and live in the shadows.

Mr. Trump’s response is to build his border wall, which got a lift last week when the Supreme Court said construction could proceed while challenges to funding it continue in the courts. But walls can be scaled, tunneled under and circumnavigated; Mr. Trump’s wall would not stanch the flow of migrants nor improve the conditions that drive them from their countries.

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

More confirmation of my observation that “Big Mac With Lies” is one of America’s most dangerous White Nationalist racist liars and enablers. Imagine what an ethical, honest public servant could do by having the courage and integrity to “blow the whistle” on Trump’s lies, fabrications, and racist attacks on the rule of law and on humanity!

Yes, the Post is right that “Big Mac’s” bogus claims about Guatemala are “risible,” meaning in plain English “laughable.” But there is nothing “funny” about a dishonest and cowardly public official whose lies and false narratives are killing innocent, vulnerable humans who (perhaps misguidedly) looked to the U.S. for legal protection.

Most outrageously, “Big Mac” and company think that they essentially can “get away with murder” (perhaps emboldened by Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in board daylight and escape accountability). While, thanks to the Supremes, public officials have insulated themselves from most legal accountability for many of their outrageous misdeeds, it’s up to history and future generations to insure that the legacy of McAleenan and his fellow “Germany 1939’ers” reflects their disingenuous disregard for the law, truth, and human values and their spineless support for the toxic policies of the worst and most immoral President in U.S. history. No, “just following orders” won’t be a defense for “Big Mac” before the Court of History.

PWS

07-31-19

ACLU COURT EVIDENCE SUGGESTS McALEENAN LIED TO CONGRESS WHILE VIOLATING COURT ORDER ON CHILD SEPARATIONS — Continuing Separations Appear To Be Part Of Intentional Misapplication & Misinterpretation Of Narrow “Exception” — “Best Interests Of Child” Buried Beneath A Web Of Deception

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/aclu-us-has-taken-nearly-1000-child-migrants-from-their-parents-since-judge-ordered-stop-to-border-separations/2019/07/30/bde452d8-b2d5-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html

Maria Sacchetti reports for the WashPost:

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union told a federal judge Tuesday that the Trump administration has taken nearly 1,000 migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border since the judge ordered the United States government to curtail the practice more than a year ago.

In a lengthy court filing in U.S. District Court in San Diego, lawyers wrote that one migrant lost his daughter because a U.S. Border Patrol agent claimed that he had failed to change the girl’s diaper. Another migrant lost his child because of a conviction on a charge of malicious destruction of property with alleged damage of $5. One father, who lawyers say has a speech impediment, was separated from his 4-year-old son because he could not clearly answer Customs and Border Protection agents’ questions.

Acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan has said that family separations remain “extraordinarily rare” and happen only when the adults pose a risk to the child because of their criminal record, a communicable disease, abuse or neglect. Of tens of thousands of children taken into custody at the border, 911 children were separated since the June 26, 2018, court order according to the ACLU, which cited statistics as of June 29 that the organization received from the government as part of ongoing legal proceedings.

During a July 12 tour of a detention center in McAllen, Tex., reporters saw almost 400 men being held in cages. They allegedly crossed the border illegally. (The Washington Post)While the judge recognized that parents and children might still be separated when a parent is found to pose a risk to their child, the ACLU and others say federal immigration and border agents are splitting up families for minor alleged offenses — including traffic violations — and urged the judge Tuesday to clarify when such separations should be allowed.Approximately 20 percent of the new separations affected children under 5 years old, the ACLU said, compared with about 4 percent last year.

“They’re taking what was supposed to be a narrow exception for cases where the parent was genuinely a danger to the child and using it as a loophole to continue family separation,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an interview. “What everyone understands intuitively and what the medical evidence shows, this will have a devastating effect on the children and possibly cause permanent damage to these children, not to mention the toll on the parents.”

[Accused of gang ties, separated parents struggle to get their kids back]

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment Tuesday.

The tally of child separations adds to the approximately 2,700 children who were taken from their parents during a chaotic, six-week period from May to June 20 last year, when a Trump administration border crackdown triggered one of the worst crises of his presidency.

The policy sought to deter a crush of asylum seekers, who were surrendering as families at the U.S. southern border, by prosecuting parents for the crime of illegal entry and sending their children to federal shelters. Reports of traumatized, crying children led to widespread demands to reunite the families.

Venezuelan migrant mothers and their children turn themselves in to law enforcement officials to seek asylum after illegally crossing the Rio Grande near Mission, Tex., on July 25. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)

Trump ordered federal officials to stop separating families on June 20, 2018, and said it is the “policy of this Administration to maintain family unity” unless the parent poses “a risk” to the child.

Six days later in San Diego, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ordered the Trump administration to reunite the families, a process that dragged on for months because the government had failed to track the parents and children after splitting them up. A still-unknown number of families were separated before the policy officially began.

McAleenan, who at the time signed off on the zero tolerance policy and carried it out as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May that family separations are “extraordinarily rare” and make up a tiny portion of the now more than 400,000 families taken into custody at the border since the court ruling.

Central American migrants walk along train tracks as they head toward the United States in Saltillo, Mexico, on July 24. (Daniel Becerril/Reuters)

At that time, he testified, about one to three family separations happened out of about 1,500 to 3,000 family members apprehended each day. He also said then that separations occur “under very controlled circumstances.”

Testifying before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee on July 18, McAleenan emphasized that the separation process is “carefully governed by policy and by court order” to protect the children.

“This is in the interest of the child,” he said. “It’s overseen by a supervisor, and those decisions are made.”

[IG: Trump administration took thousands more migrant children from parents]

Of the 911 child separations, 678 were for alleged criminal history, the ACLU said Tuesday, citing government records. Offenses included drunken driving, assault and gang affiliation, as well as theft, disorderly conduct and minor property damage.

Many cases lacked details about the alleged crimes, the ACLU said, and several charges were decades old. Among those separated because of concerns about parental fitness were an HIV-positive father of three young daughters and a mother who broke her leg and required surgery.

Child advocates and medical professionals have repeatedly warned that separating children from their parents can lead to lasting severe physical and emotional disorders.

“Forcibly separating children from their parents is like setting a house on fire,” Jack Shonkoff, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, said in an affidavit included in the ACLU’s motion. “Prolonging that separation is like preventing the first responders from doing their job and letting the fire continue to burn.”

Jennifer Nagda, policy director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a child advocate for unaccompanied and separated children, told the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform that the group represented about 120 children and found that nearly all separations were “contrary to the best interests of the child.”

“DHS officials with no child welfare expertise are making split-second decisions, and these decisions have traumatic, lifelong consequences for the children and their families,” Nagda said in her testimony. She also filed an affidavit in the ACLU’s case Tuesday.

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

It’s with very good reason that I consider “Big Mac With Lies” to be one of the most dishonest and dangerous public officials in America.

Some reporters seem to mistakenly “cut him some slack” because he: 1) served in the Obama Administration (which had its own very dismal record on treatment of families and children seeking asylum); and 2) unlike folks such as “Gonzo,” “Cooch Cooch,” Miller, Kobach, et al., he’s not a “lifelong White Nationalist ideologue.”

But, I don’t see how being a liar, apologist, “cover up artist,” and human rights abuser in support of a racist White Nationalist Administration is somehow “better” than being a “true believer” in White Nationalist racism. Falsely claiming that Guatemala and Mexico are “Safe Third Countries,” that asylum applicants won’t show up for hearings (when they almost always do, particularly when they are given access to lawyers and have the system properly explained to them), and falsifying stats to paint an untruly negative picture of asylum seekers from Central America is no less vile than Trump’s lies and racist tweets.

As a lawyer and a graduate of Amherst Collge and Chicago Law, “Big Mac” is cerainly smart enough to know that places like Guatemala and Mexico don’t come remotely close to satisfying the legal definition of a “Safe Third Country.” He also has enough Government immigration enforcement experience to know for sure that the extralegal, cruel, and ineffective “enforcement only” approach he disingenuously advocates as a “Trump toady” won’t come anywhere near to solving the problems driving forced migration or saving the lives of the vulnerable.

I actually have a better understanding of what drives the Trumps, “Gonzos,” Millers, and “Cooch Cooches” of the world than what drives corrupt public servants like McAleenan to violate their oaths of office and to pick on those whose rights and human dignity they should be standing up for, no matter how vile the leadership of the Administration they nominally serve (actually, they serve the American people, not any particular political leader) might be.”Big Mac” is a disgrace to honest Federal civil servants and to all Americans who believe in democracy and “good government.” History must hold him accountable.

PWS

08-01-19

FRAUD & ABUSE: TRUMP SEEKS DEATH AND DISRUPTION FOR REFUGEES: Claims To Have Duressed Guatemala, One Of The, Poorest, Most Corrupt, Most Dangerous REFUGEE SENDING Countries Into Outrageously Illegal “Safe Third Country” Agreement! — “Big Mac With Lies” Says Guatemala Not Much Different From U.S.!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-has-agreement-with-guatemala-to-help-stem-flow-of-migrants-at-the-border/2019/07/26/23bf0cba-afe3-11e9-b071-94a3f4d59021_story.html

Seung Min Kim
White House Reporter
Washington Post

Kevin Sieff
Latin American Correspondent, Washington Post

Abigail Hauslohner
National Immigration Reporter, Washington Post

From the Washington Post:

By Seung Min Kim ,

Kevin Sieff and

Abigail Hauslohner

July 26 at 6:45 PM

President Trump on Friday said he has struck a deal that would designate Guatemala as a safe third country for people seeking asylum in the United States — a plan that is facing significant legal hurdles in the Central American country as the Trump administration continues to struggle with the high number of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border.

The White House did not immediately release details of the agreement, and it is unclear how it would be implemented considering Guatemala’s constitutional court has ruled any safe third country agreement would require legislative approval and the proposal has been widely criticized there.

Trump announced the arrangement in a previously unscheduled appearance in the Oval Office with Enrique Degenhart, the Guatemalan minister of government, and acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan.

“We’ve long been working with Guatemala, and now we can do it the right way,” Trump said Friday. He claimed the agreement will put “coyotes and the smugglers out of business.”

He added: “These are bad people.”

Trump said the agreement will offer safe harbor for asylum applicants deemed legitimate, and that he plans to sign agreements with other countries soon.

The announcement comes just days after Trump threatened retaliation against Guatemala as discussions stalled over designating the Central American nation as a safe third country, which means migrants traveling through the country on their journey to the United States would be directed to first seek protection there.

The Trump administration has been seeking to sign these agreements to cut down on the number of Central American migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, which officials say is overwhelming the U.S. immigration system. The administration has come under heavy criticism from Democrats and immigration advocates who argue asylum seekers and other migrants face inhumane conditions in the U.S. facilities where they are being housed.

On a call with reporters Friday, McAleenan said the agreement with Guatemala would “be up and running in August,” after the two governments had completed several steps to ratify the deal. Under the agreement, Salvadorans and Hondurans would need to seek asylum in Guatemala, McAleenan said.

“If you have, say, a Honduran family coming across through Guatemala to the U.S. border, we want them to feel safe to make an asylum claim at the earliest possible point,” he said. “If they do instead, in the hands of smugglers, make the journey all the way to the U.S. border, [they would] be removable back to Guatemala.”

Guatemala’s only public statement about the agreement did not explicitly say it would serve as a safe third country, but alluded vaguely to “a plan that will be applied to Salvadorans and Hondurans.”

The statement said the United States would allocate temporary agricultural work visas to Guatemalans, adding that country’s president, Jimmy Morales, negotiated the deal “to counter grave economic and social repercussions.”

A proposal to designate Guatemala as a safe third country is already facing significant legal and logistical challenges. For one, the deal would force thousands of Hondurans and Salvadorans to apply for asylum in Guatemala, one of the region’s poorest countries, which has in some cities struggled to defeat transnational gangs, including MS-13.

Last year, Guatemala received 259 asylum applications, a tiny number compared with the United States and even Mexico. Of those, not a single application was approved, in part because the country is still building institutions to review those cases.

“Guatemala’s asylum system isn’t prepared to increase its capacity to 50,000 in less than a year,” said one United Nations official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which currently supports Guatemala’s fledgling asylum system, was not consulted as part of the negotiations, officials said. McAleenan also likened the third party agreement to arrangements between European countries and Turkey to stem the Syrian migrant crisis in 2015. He declined to say whether the U.S. government would be providing any assistance to Guatemala to improve safety and security for Honduran and Salvadoran refugees.

When read the State Department’s description of the security situation in Guatemala, which includes notations that murder is “common,” gang activity is “widespread” and police are ineffective, McAleenan, the Homeland secretary, said one should not “label an entire country as unsafe,” and likened Guatemala to parts of the United States.

The announcement prompted immediate backlash from Democratic lawmakers and human-rights groups who warned that Guatemala did not have the capacity to accept all the migrants who would now be required to apply for asylum there, nor is such an arrangement legal.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who along with Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) toured Border Patrol facilities in El Paso on Friday, noted that Guatemala has one of the world’s highest homicide rates and that they had visited with families earlier in the day who said they had fled the country because of the danger.

“It’s just Kafkaesque to say about that country, ‘Oh, safe third country,’ ” Kaine said. “You can’t just attach a label of safe third country and make it so.”

The Trump administration has taken a variety of unilateral actions to address the challenges at the border, and it has also received an additional $4.6 billion from Congress to deal with the crisis.

In June, Customs and Border Protection apprehended 94,000 migrants at the southern border, a 29 percent drop from the 133,000 who were detained in May. Border crossings tend to drop as the temperature rises in the summer, but administration officials have pointed to the lower figures as a sign that Trump’s border plan is working.

For months, Morales dispatched members of his administration from Guatemala to Washington to negotiate a safe third country agreement with the United States. But earlier this month, shortly before Morales was scheduled to sign the agreement in the White House, Guatemala’s constitutional court ruled he did not have the authority to sign the deal without legislative approval.

The meeting with Trump was canceled. In a statement, Morales then denied he had ever attempted to negotiate such an agreement. He is in the twilight of his scandal-ridden presidency, with elections scheduled for Aug. 11.

But when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Guatemala and tax remittances, Morales resumed negotiations. Members of the country’s business community urged him on, raising alarm about the impact of tariffs, but most Guatemalans believe the country is wildly unprepared to offer asylum to thousands of Central Americans.

A number of Guatemalan congressmen and human rights officials said they would soon challenge the legality of Friday’s agreement in the country’s courts.

Jordán Rodas, Guatemala’s human rights prosecutor, said the country’s interior minister, who signed the deal on Friday, “does not have the power to sign an agreement of this nature.”

He said he was analyzing the agreement, and if he determined it was illegal, he would demand the constitutional court suspend its implementation.

“We are two weeks from an election,” said Edgar Gutierrez, one of five Guatemalan ex-foreign ministers who had earlier filed a petition in the court to block the signing of the agreement. “The signing of this accord will destabilize the country.”

Some Guatemalan analysts said the timeline for the agreement made it even more unrealistic.

“One month to be a safe country,” said Pedro Pablo Solares, a leading Guatemalan columnist who frequently writes about migration. “It couldn’t be more absurd.”

This year, for the first time in history, more Guatemalans have been apprehended at the U.S. border than citizens of any other country. It remains one of the region’s poorest countries, where migration is seen by many as the only way into a tiny middle class. In 2017, Guatemalans received a total of $8.2 billion in remittances, 11 percent of Guatemalan GDP.

Guatemalan politicians and analysts were taken aback by the agreement, which most discovered through a White House tweet.

“One characteristic of this government is that it does whatever it wants, in spite of what the law says. This is another example,” said Sandra Morán Reyes, a congresswoman from the Convergencia party.

Sieff reported from Mexico City. Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City and Bob Moore in El Paso contributed to this report.

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

Wow! Talk about turning the law, logic, and human morality on its head! “Safe Third Country” agreements are supposed to be between countries with fair, due process oriented asylum systems, like the existing agreement between the U.S. and Canada. They are not a gimmick for dishonest officials like Trump and McAleenan to “outsource” legal protection responsibilities to dangerous, poor, REFUGEE SENDING countries like Guatemala that can’t possibly live up to their international obligations under the U.N Convention.

This is nothing short of high level fraud that will result in death, torture, and abuse of asylum seekers! Not to mention that the presence of lots of deported asylum seekers will further destabilize the already unstable country of Guatemala. Trump is about to create an unmitigated international disaster by grossly unlawful conduct. Will we be able to stop him before it’s to late for us and for the rest of humanity?

PWS

07-27-19

SUPREMES’ CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY DELIVERS BRUTAL HIT TO CONSTITUTION: Uses Bogus “Cop Out” Standing Ground To OK Trump’s Fake “Emergency” Misappropriation Of Funds To Build Wall That Congress Pointedly Refused To Fund!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-says-trump-can-proceed-with-plan-to-spend-military-funds-for-border-wall-construction/2019/07/26/f2a63d48-aa55-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html

Robert Barnes reports for the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court Friday night on a 5 to 4 vote revived the Trump administration’s plan to use $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds to build part of the wall project along the southern border.

The court’s conservatives set aside a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruling for the Sierra Club and a coalition of border communities that said a reallocation of the Defense Department money would violate federal law.

The unsigned ruling by the Supreme Court said the government “made a sufficient showing at this stage” the groups did not have proper standing to challenge transfer of money.

In a 2-to-1 decision earlier this month, the 9th Circuit majority noted that a stalemate between Congress and President Trump over the issue prompted the longest government shutdown in history. The judges reasoned that Congress made its intentions clear by allocating only about $1.4 billion for enhanced border protection.

The lower court said the public interest was “best served by respecting the Constitution’s assignment of the power of the purse to Congress, and by deferring to Congress’s understanding of the public interest as reflected in its repeated denial of more funding for border barrier construction.

After Congress’s decision earlier this year, Trump announced plans to use more than $6 billion allocated for other purposes to fund the wall, which was the signature promise of his presidential campaign

Environmentalists and the Southern Border Communities Coalition immediately filed suit to block the transfer of funds. Democrats in the House of Representatives filed a brief supporting them.

U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court that the 9th Circuit ruling was wrong. “The sole basis for the injunction — that the Acting Secretary exceeded his statutory authority in transferring the funds — rests on a misreading of the statutory text,” Francisco wrote. He was referring to Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting secretary at the time.

Francisco said that the challengers did not have proper legal standing to challenge the transfer of funds. He added that even if they did, their “interests in hiking, birdwatching, and fishing in designated drug-smuggling corridors do not outweigh the harm to the public from halting the government’s efforts to construct barriers to stanch the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border.”

The money was transferred from DOD personnel funds in response to a request from the Department of Homeland Security. Federal law allows such transfers for “unforeseen” reasons and for expenditures not previously “denied by the Congress.”

The administration contends that Congress did not reject the specific expenditures at issue, which would fund projects in California, New Mexico and Arizona.

The challengers said Congress was clear.

“Congress recently considered, and rejected, the same argument defendants [the government] make here: that a border wall is urgently needed to combat drugs,” said the brief from lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the groups.

“If defendants were nonetheless permitted to obligate taxpayer funds and commence construction, the status quo would be radically and irrevocably altered.”

The brief from the U.S. House of Representatives agreed.

“The administration refuses to accept this limitation on its authority, as clearly demonstrated by Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s statement that President Trump’s border wall ‘is going to get built with or without Congress,’ ” House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter wrote. “Under our constitutional scheme, an immense wall along our border simply cannot be constructed without funds appropriated by Congress for that purpose.”

And Letter said that the administration’s view of who is within the “zone of interest” to have standing to sue is “in reality, an argument that no one can challenge the conduct at issue here.”

Francisco moved quickly after the 9th Circuit’s July 3 ruling to ask the Supreme Court to dissolve the lower court’s injunction. It asked the justices to rule before July 26, so the Defense Department would have time to finalize construction contracts before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Otherwise, he said, “the remaining unobligated funds will become unavailable.”

The challengers said the money already was unavailable.

The brief filed by the House said the money would not be lost, but would simply go back into the treasury, where the administration would again be free to make its request to Congress.

It noted there was no rush. “The administration has apparently completed only 1.7 of the 95 miles of border fencing Congress approved and appropriated funds for in fiscal year 2018,” it said.

The case is Trump v. Sierra Club, et al.

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

For those outside the legal community, “lack of standing” is often a legalistic ruse used by spineless judges who want to reach a particular result without explaining any real rationale on the actual merits of the case.

I just read another article by Andrew Sullivan about how our system is failing to hold Trump accountable for his lawless actions. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/andrew-sullivan-the-american-system-is-already-failing.html.

I don’t agree with everything Sullivan says. In particular, his criticism of Democrats seems over the top. While the party has its failings, they only control 1/6 of the Government. Trying to leverage that into a strategy that preserves the American Republic by defeating Trump in 2020 is an essential endeavor, not an exercise in tilting at windmills.

But, Sullivan’s “bottom line” might be disturbingly “on point:”

The awful truth is that the American constitutional system is failing on almost every level. The system, it turns out, is not even strong enough to withstand one Trump term, let alone two. Trump intuited this in 2016, and if he wins reelection, as he now has a good chance of doing, what’s left of liberal democracy will be under acute duress.

The “extinction-level event” that I feared in the spring of 2016 is already here. Look around you. And it wasn’t even a fight.

The Supremes’ majority’s failure to call out Trump both for his contempt for Constitutional separation of powers and his constant use of the S

upremes themselves to “short circuit” the lower Federal Courts in an unprecedented manner contributes mightily to the demise of the rule of law.

Chief Justice Roberts might self-righteously and self-servingly proclaim that there are no “Democratic Judges” or “Republican Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words, Chiefie!

The pathetic performance of Roberts and his fellow GOP appointees in this case gives lie to his claim. And Trump, for all his failings, sees and is willing to use the sad truth that Roberts denies in a never ending attack on our country and our supposedly governing principles.

It started with the “conservative” Justices’ outrageous abdication of duty in the “Travel Ban Case.” Rather than standing up to a President who spewed obvious lies, racism, and anti-Muslim venom in support of a political agenda that clearly violated Constitutional norms, the majority signaled that as long as Trump gave them “cover” by asserting clearly contrived and fabricated “national security” grounds, they would give him a free hand to destroy the nation. These “cowardly false conservatives” now find themselves presiding over the demise of our legal system.

And, while they might feel that they are above paying attention to the human carnage caused by the their intransigence and dereliction of duty, that misbegotten “Travel Ban” majority opinion has caused, and continues to cause, trauma and probably death to innocent refugees caught up in Trump’s unconstitutional racist onslaught.

Trump has a history of turning against those who have served him, but outlive their usefulness. Who will the “GOP Gang of Five Justices” look to for protection when the screw turns again and they become the “aliens,” stripped of their rights and humanity in Trump’s (Not So) “Brave New World?”

Those who fail to stand up to tyranny and protect the rights of others might find themselves unprotected in their hour of need!

PWS

07-27-19

The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!

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KEY QUOTE:

I’m betting that not a single unemployed steelworker or laid-off coal miner moves to Mississippi to take those jobs plucking poultry. Trump’s immigration policy isn’t a matter of economics. Nor is it a matter of principle or fairness.

Cruelty isn’t a sideshow in the way Trump deals with nonwhite immigrants. It’s the main event.

So, why is it OK to have mindless cruelty be the “official policy” of the US? If it isn’t “OK,” what is each of us doing to remove this cancer that is eating away the fabric of America under the incredibly bogus and insulting mantra of “Making America Great Again?”

It’s not just immigrants, Eugene. Once Trump and his neo-Nazi gang are done “Dred Scottifying” migrants, they are going after you and every other person of color and minority in the U.S. who dares to stand up to up to them.

Some German Jews had converted to Lutheranism or Catholicism before World War II thinking that it would save them from Hitler and the anti-Semites. How did that work out for them?

PWS

08-13-19

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