☠️⚰️BORDER DEATHS: Opaqueness & Lack Of Accountability Common Threads According To New Reports!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/border-patrol-migrant-deaths.html

Eileen Sullivan reports in The NY Times:

By Eileen Sullivan

Jan. 9, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Angie Simms had been searching for her 25-year-old son for a week, filing a missing persons report and calling anyone who might have seen him, when the call came last August. Her son, Erik A. Molix, was in a hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he was strapped to his bed, on a ventilator and in a medically induced coma.

Mr. Molix had suffered head trauma after the S.U.V. he was driving with nine undocumented immigrants inside rolled over near Las Cruces, N.M., while Border Patrol agents pursued him at speeds of up to 73 miles per hour. He died Aug. 15, nearly two weeks after the crash; even by then, no one from the Border Patrol or any other law enforcement or government agency had contacted his family.

The number of migrants crossing the border illegally has soared, with the Border Patrol recording the highest number of encounters in more than six decades in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. With the surge has come an increase in deaths and injuries from high-speed chases by the Border Patrol, a trend that Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, attributes to a rise in brazen smugglers trying to flee its agents.

From 2010 to 2019, high-speed chases by the Border Patrol resulted in an average of 3.5 deaths a year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2020, there were 14 such deaths; in 2021, there were 21, the last on Christmas.

The agency recorded more than 700 “use of force” incidents on or near the southern border in the last fiscal year. Customs and Border Protection does not disclose how many of those ended in death, or how many high-speed chases take place each year.

Crossing the border without documentation or helping people do so is full of risk regardless of the circumstances, and stopping such crossings — and the criminal activity of smugglers — is central to the Border Patrol’s job. But the rising deaths raise questions about how far the agency should go with pursuits of smugglers and migrants, and when and how agents should engage in high-speed chases.

Customs and Border Protection has yet to provide Ms. Simms, a fifth-grade teacher in San Diego, with an explanation of what happened to her son. She saw a news release it issued two weeks after the crash; officials say it is not the agency’s responsibility to explain. She said she understood that officials suspected her son was involved in illegal activity, transporting undocumented immigrants.

“But that doesn’t mean you have to die for it,” she said.

Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has a policy stating that agents and officers can conduct high-speed chases when they determine “that the law enforcement benefit and need for emergency driving outweighs the immediate and potential danger created by such emergency driving.” The A.C.L.U. argues that the policy, which the agency publicly disclosed for the first time last month, gives agents too much discretion in determining the risk to public safety.

In a statement to The New York Times, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, said that while “C.B.P. agents and officers risk their lives every day to keep our communities safe,” the Homeland Security Department “owes the public the fair, objective and transparent investigation of use-of-force incidents to ensure that our highest standards are maintained and enforced.”

But previously unreported documents and details of the crash that killed Mr. Molix shed light on what critics say is a troubling pattern in which the Border Patrol keeps its operations opaque, despite the rising human toll of aggressive enforcement actions.

. . . .

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

ACLU of Texas Released the following related fact sheet:

https://www.aclutx.org/en/fact-sheet-deadly-trend-border-patrol-vehicle-pursuits

FACT SHEET: THE DEADLY TREND OF BORDER PATROL VEHICLE PURSUITSpastedGraphic.png

Vehicle pursuits may make for exciting movie scenes and reality TV, but in real life, police chases are dangerous and often deadly. Yet the United States Border Patrol, the largest law enforcement agency in the country, increasingly engages in vehicle pursuits that result in mounting injuries and deaths. The agency operates with almost no transparency. This culture of impunity puts lives and communities at risk of grave harm each time a chase occurs.

The ACLU of Texas and ACLU of New Mexico partnered to produce the following fact sheet on the disturbing trend of deadly Border Patrol vehicle pursuits. We analyzed Border Patrol’s recently released vehicle pursuit policy,  which reveals troubling discretionary authority given to agents. We also evaluate the department’s deeply flawed oversight and investigation protocols surrounding the pursuits, including the involvement of Border Patrol’s Critical Incident Teams –  internal investigative units tasked with protecting the agency from liability and further obscuring the truth behind deadly vehicle pursuits.

Click the link below to download and read the fact sheet.

STAY INFORMED

Email address *

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RELATED ISSUES

DOCUMENTS

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Read Sullivan’s complete article and get the full version of the ACLU fact sheet at the above links.

ACLU of Texas Attorney Shaw Drake is one of my former Georgetown Law “Refugee Law & Policy” students and a proud member of the New Due Process Army. Proud of you Shaw! 😎It’s what the “new generation of practical scholars” or “applied scholars” does!👍🏼⚖️

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-10-22

🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻☠️ARBITRARY, CAPRICIOUS, ILLEGAL, INHUMANE, DEADLY ⚰️ DEFINES BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S SOUTHERN BORDER POLICY! — Gross Failure To Stand Up For Constitution, Rule Of Law, Human Dignity!

Biden Muddled Liberty Message

Biden Muddled Liberty Message

Biden Border Message
“Border Message”
By Steve Sack
Reproduced under license

NBC News Reports from the “Law Free Zone” (“LFZ”) established by Biden Administration at the Southern Border:

https://apple.news/A355LpPmARmKZtO-iBa6C7A

Under Biden, crossing the U.S. border has become like a lottery. Timing is everything.

“Sometimes I ask myself why they [let me stay] and they deported others,” said a 20-year-old Nicaraguan man. “And I give thanks to God.”

by Julia Ainsley, Didi Martinez and Kenzi Abou-Sabe | NBC NEWS

Julia Ainsley
Julia Edwards Ainsley
Investigative Reporter, NBC News

. . . .

“We will see more deaths. And that’s the sad truth for us,” Copp said.

Immigration advocates also believe uncertainty surrounding the Title 42 policy is driving many migrants to take more dangerous routes to avoid being apprehended all together.

“The Biden administration’s retention of Title 42 and refusal to open the legal ports of entry is having the perverse effect of forcing desperate asylum seekers fleeing danger to cross between the ports, which is to nobody’s benefit,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project and a lead plaintiffs’ lawyer in a lawsuit challenging the use of Title 42.

For now, the Biden administration has made no promises of end dates for the Title 42 policy, even as Covid-19 restrictions ease across the country. Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that the policy is in place to protect both migrants, who would need to be kept temporarily in congregate care settings if allowed in, and agents.

Gelernt said the policy of only guaranteeing unaccompanied children entry forces some families to self-separate in order to give their children the best chance of seeking asylum in the U.S.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link. A “lottery” for human lives! What’s next for the Biden/Harris Administration, “Hunger Games V?

Mayorkas’s claim is pure BS! 💩 This inane, illegal, immoral, and unnecessary policy “protects” nobody except smugglers and traffickers! And, the idea that at this point, it is required by COVID is absurd on its face! 

By contrast, Lee Gelernt of ACLU, a long-time inspirational leader of the NDPA, speaks truth! The Southern Border can’t be regulated without repealing the illegal Title 42 restrictions and immediately re-establishing the rule of law. That includes timely professional screening by expert Asylum Officers working for USCIS; a fair, robust, generous, practical, due-process-oriented application of asylum and other protection laws by a radically reformed EOIR utilizing the services of real Immigration Judges who are experts in asylum law; and close cooperation and support from NGOs, local governments, religious, and private bar groups to provide universal representation to asylum seekers and to lead and implement resettlement efforts throughout the U.S.

Lee Gelernt
Lee Gelernt
Deputy Director
ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Program
PHOTO: ACLU

The expertise, practical problem solving ability, and resources are available. Most of it is in the private/NGO/academic sectors right now. These are the leaders and experts the Biden Administration should have brought into Government “right off the bat” to solve the problem, but has tragically failed to do so. Not like they were’t told well in advance!

It won’t happen with the bureaucrats and “tunnel visioners” the Biden Administration is relying upon  — folks committed to repeating the failures of the past who lack the experience, vision, courage, independence, and creative problem solving ability necessary to lead the way to a better future. Using the law (or lack thereof) as a “deterrent” and issuing threats won’t stop desperate refugees from coming. As we can see, it only “turns them off” on using our (unavailable and now largely defunct) legal system and drives them first into the hands of traffickers and smugglers and eventually into our underground “extralegal” population.

Human migration is eons older than our republic! It won’t be eradicated or turned off and on by the utterances and actions of politicos and law enforcement officials.  It requires a thoughtful, informed approach that has been largely absent from our government for decades, which is why the failures and resulting human trauma, wasted resources, and squandered human opportunities persist Administration after Administration, regardless of party and rhetoric.

Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions had no problem running all over the rule of law when he wanted to implement his illegal, White Nationalist, misogynist agenda and degrade asylum seekers with dehumanization and “Dred Scottification” of the other, primarily women, children, and  individuals of color.

Unfortunately, by contrast, the Biden Administration, is too weak-kneed to stand up for the rule of law and human dignity!

But, folks like Julia Ainsley and her team are making a permanent public record. As in the Trump Administration, the Biden Administration doesn’t appear to recognize the concept of accountability in Government, particularly as applied to itself. But, I doubt history will be as kind and as accommodating to those, regardless of political affiliation, carrying out these illegal, irrational,  inhumane, and “designed to fail” policies.

Perhaps, the “dead can’t speak!” ☠️⚰️ But, others certainly can and will speak for them and see that the abusers of humanity are held accountable.

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-02-21

😢👎🏻TRUMP’S UNFINISHED WALL: A MONUMENT TO CRUELTY, STUPIDITY, & WASTEFULNESS — “Border Patrol agents drive around the area in expensive trucks, on an expensive road, next to a barrier that cost billions of dollars, all to keep the poorest people on the planet from asking us for help. In 2018, I spent time volunteering with a migrant caravan that had arrived in Tijuana and watched U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees launch tear gas over this wall at kids who couldn’t afford shoes.” — “It would be funny if it weren’t so ugly and pointless.” — James Stout @ Slate

 

 

Wall
Attribution: Trump presidency metaphors by Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com. Republished under license.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/trumps-border-wall-construction-has-halted-but-the-harm-remains.html

James Stout reports for Slate:

On Jan. 21, minibuses of contractors in hi-viz vests were still bumping along the dirt road they had built for themselves in the high desert village of Campo, California, an hour east of San Diego. Less than 24 hours before, the newly inaugurated President Joe Biden had signed an executive order declaring that “the national emergency declared by Proclamation 9844 … is terminated and that the authorities invoked in that proclamation will no longer be used to construct a wall at the southern border.”

The Trump administration’s border wall project arrived in Campo in early 2020. The area is rugged and rolling, studded with oak trees and sagebrush. It couldn’t be more different from the bustling beaches and boardwalks most people associate with San Diego.

Into this landscape came contractors who were working with dynamite and heavy machinery 24 hours a day, with funding from both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The latter money came through the executive order rescinded by Biden, in which Trump had claimed an emergency that even he admitted was not necessary. In 2020, the emergency spending accounted for $676 million in San Diego and El Centro counties.

The borderlands in eastern San Diego County, like every inch of the United States, are the ancestral homelands of Indigenous people. San Diego County has the highest number of reservations in the country, and the Kumeyaay people lived on this land long before the border came. Over the past year, they have been fighting a 30-foot steel wall that tears through the fragile high desert and divides Kumeyaay living north of the wall from their relatives to the south.

From a vantage point on top of a peak in eastern San Diego County, the wall stretches out as a physical manifestation of the brutality and ugliness of Donald Trump’s vision of American greatness. Sagebrush bushes, which survive in a region that can kill you with heat in the summer and cold in the winter, are held back by a rusty barbed wire fence next to a double-wide dirt road which runs alongside the towering steel spine of the wall proper. The wall stands on a deep concrete foundation, backed by the empty brownness of the roadway. No effort has been made aesthetically or ecologically to make this wall belong here. It’s as if the land, plants, and animals have drawn back in revulsion at the intrusion. On the other side of the newly created dead zone, bushes and plants grow right up to the border.

. . . .

Border Patrol agents drive around the area in expensive trucks, on an expensive road, next to a barrier that cost billions of dollars, all to keep the poorest people on the planet from asking us for help. In 2018, I spent time volunteering with a migrant caravan that had arrived in Tijuana and watched U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees launch tear gas over this wall at kids who couldn’t afford shoes.

Passages for the wall have been blasted out of the fragile landscape of California’s desert, causing drainage problems, disrupting migration pathways for the area’s wildlife, and leaving huge piles of rubble. Further east, there are half-finished roads that lead to nowhere, designed to allow contractors to deploy huge machinery against the defenseless landscape. They’re now just even-more-obvious illustrations of the ridiculous nature of the whole project.

pastedGraphic.png

Even before the roads run out, there are gaps in the wall. Construction stepped up in the months before the election to allow for Trump to make ever more ridiculous claims about miles of wall built, sometimes this meant harder-to-build areas were skipped or two crews worked on a wall that didn’t quite meet in the middle. It would be funny if it weren’t so ugly and pointless.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

The unfinished wall is also a monument to:

  • The failure of the Supremes to stand up for democracy and the rule of law in the face of tyranny “supported” by blatantly bogus “pretexts;” and
  • The failure of our national values. 

With respect to the latter, there is nothing that will bring the world’s greatest and richest “superpower” to its knees more quickly than a ragtag band of desperate unarmed humans yearning to breathe free 🗽and seeking legal protection ⚖️🧑🏽‍⚖️under our system! How dare they assert their legal rights and their humanity!

⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-03-21

NATION WITHOUT LAWS: With The Supremes’ “J.R. Five” Firmly In His Pocket, Trump Suspends The Constitution, The Rule Of Law, & International Treaties To “Orbit” Asylum Seekers To Who Knows Where! — Contempt For Humanity On Full Display During Time of Plague!

Nick Miroff
Nick Miroff
Reporter, Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trump-administration-has-expelled-10000-migrants-at-the-border-during-coronavirus-outbreak/2020/04/09/b177c534-7a7b-11ea-8cec-530b4044a458_story.html

Nick Miroff reports for the WashPost:

The Trump administration has carried out nearly 10,000 summary deportations or “expulsions” since March 21, using emergency public health measures that have given U.S. Customs and Border Protection broad authority to bypass immigration laws, CBP officials said Thursday.

The measures have allowed the agency to quickly turn away most unauthorized migrants —  sending them back across the Mexican border. The moves have dramatically slashed the number of detainees held in border stations, where they fear the coronavirus could spread, the officials said. CBP currently has fewer than 100 detainees in custody, down from nearly 20,000 at this time last year during last year’s border crisis, officials said.

[[Under coronavirus immigration measures, U.S. is expelling border-crossers to Mexico in an average of 96 minutes]]

Since the implementation of the rapid expulsions, unlawful border crossings have dropped 56 percent, said acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan. Morgan also acknowledged that the United States has all but closed its borders to asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution, including those who attempt to enter legally at U.S. ports of entry.

“Those who are undocumented or don’t have documents or authorization are turned away,” Morgan said.

Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of defying U.S. laws and exceeding the authority of the coronavirus public health order, but Morgan defended the emergency measures as a necessary step to stop the spread of the disease.

“This is not about immigration,” Morgan said. “This is about public health. This is about putting forth aggressive mitigation and containment strategies.”

[[Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.]]

CBP said the number of migrants detained at the border fell to 33,937 in March, down 7 percent from February. Single adults from Mexico accounted for 70 percent to 75 percent of those taken into custody, and most of the remainder were from Central America’s Northern Triangle countries: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

The Mexican government has agreed to accept the rapid return of migrants from those nations at the border under an agreement reached with the Trump administration last month.

The recent expulsions include children who would otherwise be protected from rapid removal by U.S. anti-trafficking laws. Since the emergency order took effect, the United States has expelled nearly 400 underage migrants, according to the most recent tally by the Reuters news agency. The minors were released into Mexico or boarded onto planes and flown back to Central America without being transferred to the care of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

. . . .

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

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

It’s going to take more than a letter from Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) and other Dems to restore the Constitution and the rule of law. Indeed, with the help of J.R. and his Trumpist GOP majority on the Supremes, I would expect that asylum laws, like voting rights, Due Process, and other individual rights will remain a “dead letter” until we get both 1) regime change; and 2) reform in the appointment of Article III Judges.

There is little, if any, data right now to support the view that asylum seekers at the Southern Border have been a significant source for the initial spread of coronavirus in the U.S.; however, their arbitrary removal to other countries might have helped the worldwide spread of the disease.

Moreover, as COVID-19 spreads into the Gulag and the Immigration Courts from the rest of America, infections in those locations could help spread the virus, given the lawyers, Government employees, and contractors exposed at those dangerous locations. Nor were Asian Americans responsible.

We do, however, have some data to show that U.S. citizens and other travelers returning from Europe were inadvertently a source of the virus’s spread in New York, and that Trump’s ineptness and failure to heed early warnings contributed to the spread. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html?referringSource=articleShare

But, science and truth seldom have any meaning for Trump and his toadies. And, we also know that while Trump often falsely claims “victories” that are either fabricated or largely someone’s else’s, he never takes responsibility for his own many mistakes and shortcomings.

PWS

04-09-20

DARA LIND @ PRO PUBLICA: Trump & His White Nationalists Always Hated Asylum Laws — Now With CBP’s Help, They Have Simply Decided To Repeal Them By Memo — No Real Pushback From Broken Legal System & Feckless Congress!

Dara Lind
Dara Lind
Immigration Reporter
Pro Publica

https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-border-patrol-memo-tells-agents-to-send-migrants-back-immediately-ignoring-asylum-law

Dara writes in Pro Publica:

Citing little-known power given to the CDC to ban entry of people who might spread disease and ignoring the Refugee Act of 1980, an internal memo has ordered Border Patrol agents to push the overwhelming majority of migrants back into Mexico.

For the first time since the enactment of the Refugee Act in 1980, people who come to the U.S. saying they fear persecution in their home countries are being turned away by Border Patrol agents with no chance to make a legal case for asylum.

The shift, confirmed in internal Border Patrol guidance obtained by ProPublica, is the upshot of the Trump administration’s hasty emergency action to largely shut down the U.S.-Mexico border over coronavirus fears. It’s the biggest step the administration has taken to limit humanitarian protection for people entering the U.S. without papers.

The Trump administration has created numerous obstacles over recent years for migrants to claim asylum and stay in the United States. But it had not — until now — allowed Border Patrol agents to simply expel migrants with no process whatsoever for hearing their claims.

The administration gave the Border Patrol unchallengeable authority over migrants seeking asylum by invoking a little-known power given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. public health agency, to ban the entry of people or things that might spread “infectious disease” in the U.S. The CDC on March 20 barred entry of people without proper documentation, on the logic that they could be unexamined carriers of the disease and out of concern about the effects if the novel coronavirus swept through Customs and Border Protection holding facilities.

U.S. immigration law requires the government to allow people expressing a “well-founded” fear of persecution or torture to be allowed to pursue legal status in the United States. The law also requires the government to grant status to anyone who shows they likely face persecution if returned to their homeland.

“The Trump administration’s new rule and CDC order do not trump U.S. laws passed by Congress and U.S. legal obligations under refugee and human rights treaties,” Eleanor Acer, of the legal advocacy group Human Rights First, told ProPublica. “But the Trump administration is wielding them as the ultimate tool to shut the border to people seeking refuge.”

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration hastily put in place a policy, which the internal guidance calls Operation Capio, to push the overwhelming majority of unauthorized migrants into Mexico within hours of their apprehension in the U.S.

The Trump administration has been publicly vague on what happens under the new policy to migrants expressing a fear of persecution or torture, the grounds for asylum. But the guidance provided to Border Patrol agents makes clear that asylum-seekers are being turned away unless they can persuade both a Border Patrol agent — as well as a higher-ranking Border Patrol official — that they will be tortured if sent home. There is no exception for those who seek protection on the basis of their identities, such as race or religion.

Over 7,000 people have been expelled to Mexico under the order, according to sources briefed by Customs and Border Protection officials.

The guidance, shared with ProPublica by a source within the Border Patrol, instructs agents that any migrant caught entering without documentation must be processed for “expulsion,” citing the CDC order. When possible, migrants are to be driven to the nearest official border crossing and “expelled” into Mexico or Canada. (The Mexican government has agreed to allow the U.S. to push back not only Mexican migrants, but also those from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; the four countries account for about 85% of all unauthorized border crossings.)

Under the Refugee Convention, which the U.S. signed onto in 1968, countries are barred from sending someone back to a country in which they could be persecuted based on their identity (specifically, their race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group”).

The Trump administration has taken several steps to restrict the ability of migrants to seek asylum, a form of legal status that allows someone to eventually become a permanent U.S. resident. Until now, however, it has acknowledged that U.S. and international law prevents the U.S. from sending people back to a place where they will be harmed. And it has still allowed people who claim a fear of persecution to seek a less permanent form of legal status in the U.S. (In the last two weeks of February, 2,915 people were screened for humanitarian protection, according to the most recent statistics provided by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.)

The Border Patrol guidance provided to ProPublica shows that the U.S. is acting as if that obligation no longer applies.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, said it would not comment on the document provided to ProPublica. Asked whether any guidance had been provided regarding people who expressed a fear of persecution of torture, an agency spokesperson said in a statement, “The order does not apply where a CBP officer determines, based on consideration of significant law enforcement, officer and public safety, humanitarian, or public health interests, that the order should not be applied to a particular person.”

That language does not appear in the guidance ProPublica received. Instead, it specifies that any exception must be approved by the chief patrol agent of a given Border Patrol sector. One former senior CBP official, who reviewed the guidance at ProPublica’s request, said that because there are so many levels of hierarchy between a chief patrol agent and a line agent, agents would be unlikely to ask for an exemption to be made.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Shows how fragile our legal system and our democratic institutions are. Contrary to “popular liberal myth” they have not “been holding up well” in the age of Trump.  A GOP Senate, of course, deserves much of the blame. But, it’s not like the Democrats have exactly put protecting the rule of law and Constitutional Due Process for the most vulnerable among us at the forefront.

We can also trace the disintegration of the legal system under Trump directly to the the failure of Roberts and the GOP majority on the Supremes to stand up for separation of powers, racial and religious justice, and Executive accountability. By ignoring a very clear record of invidious racial, religious, and political bias behind Trump’s Executive actions, and allowing a transparently contrived “national security” rationale to be used, in the so-called “Travel Ban Case” the Supremes’ majority basically signaled they had no intention of halting a White Nationalist assault on our Constitution and the rights of vulnerable minorities, particularly migrants. In other words, Roberts & Co. said: “It’s OK to ‘Dred Scottify’ away, we’ll never stand in your way.”  And, true to their word, the “J.R. Five” have been more than happy to ignore the law and “green light” the White Nationalist nativist immigration agenda.

So, four decades of painstakingly hard cooperative work by “good government” advocates, NGOs, the private sector, and the international community to reach an imperfect, yet basically workable, consensus that saved countless lives and helped fuel our economic success, the Refugee Act of 1980 lies in tatters. Decades of progress destroyed in a little over three years. That’s “institutional failure” on a massive scale!

Don’t look for the Refugee Act or the rule of law to be resurrected any time soon. Under Trump and his would-be authoritarian kakistocracy, the “emergencies,” real and fabricated, will never end until democracy and human decency are dead and buried. And, don’t count on Mitch McConnell or John Roberts to stand in the way.

This is exactly how democracies die. But, we do have the remaining power to remove the kakistocracy at all levels of our government and start rebuilding America. Yes, Roberts and his gang have life tenure. But, with “regime change,” we can start appointing better judges who will aggressively push back against the far-right, anti-democracy judicial agenda! Folks who believe in Due Process, fundamental fairness, the rule of law, racial equality, human decency, and equal justice for all! Vote to save our nation in November!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-03-20

CHILD ABUSE: A TRUMP ADMINISTRATION “STRATEGY” – “[T]he backup also was a result of policy decisions that officials knew would ensnare unaccompanied minors in bureaucratic tangles and leave them in squalid conditions.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/a-trump-administration-strategy-led-to-the-child-migrant-backup-crisis-at-the-border/2019/11/12/85d4f18c-c9ae-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html

Neena Satija
Neena Satija
Investigative Reporter
Washington Post
Karoun Demirjian
Karoun Demirjian
Congressional/
National Security Reporter
Washington Post
Abigail Hauslohner
Abigail Hauslohner
National Immigration Reporter, Washington Post
Josh Dawsey
Josh Dawsey
White House Reporter
Washington Post

From the WashPost:

By

Neena Satija,

Karoun Demirjian,

Abigail Hauslohner and

Josh Dawsey

November 12, 2019 at 12:13 p.m. EST

When thousands of migrant children ended up stranded in U.S. Border Patrol stations last spring, President Trump’s administration characterized the crisis as a spontaneous result of the record crush of migrants overwhelming the U.S. immigration system. But the backup also was a result of policy decisions that officials knew would ensnare unaccompanied minors in bureaucratic tangles and leave them in squalid conditions, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents viewed by The Washington Post.The policies, which administration officials began pursuing soon after Trump took office in January 2017, made it harder for adult relatives of unaccompanied minors to secure the children’s release from U.S. custody. Enhanced vetting of sponsors — including fingerprints and other paperwork — and the sharing of that information between child welfare and immigration authorities slowed down the release of children and exposed the sponsors to deportation.

The government knew the moves would strain child shelters, according to documents and current and former officials, but it was aimed at sending a message to Central American migrants: Coming to the United States illegally has consequences.

Administration officials said the policy was designed to protect children from potential abusers or criminals, but they also wanted to create a broad deterrent effect; they reasoned that undocumented migrants might hesitate to claim their children for fear of being deported. Authorities weighed deterrence — a central aspect of U.S. immigration policy under both President Barack Obama and Trump — against the possibility of children crowding into border stations. And they chose to push forward, knowing what would result.

“This will strain bed capacity,” authorities wrote in a discussion paper in February 2018.

The approach caused thousands of unaccompanied minors to be stranded in U.S. custody and exacerbated the appearance of a crisis on the southern border — a major element underlying the administration’s public request for billions of dollars in additional funding from Congress.

A boy sits in the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen, Tex., in August. Border facilities were overwhelmed this year as a record number of Central American migrant families crossed the southern border. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Lawyers were allowed to visit children in the border stations, and Democratic lawmakers were invited to tour the facilities when they were at their worst. They witnessed — and shared with the public — scenes of desperate children held in crowded cells without basic necessities.

According to current and former government officials, and emails and memos detailing the Trump administration’s strategy, it is clear they knew that without enough beds in government shelters, children would languish in Border Patrol stations not equipped to care for them, making the government a target of lawsuits and public criticism — both of which occurred.

One of the key figures in that strategizing, Chad Wolf, is set to take the helm at the Department of Homeland Security. Senators on Tuesday are expected to first vote on Wolf’s confirmation to his current job as undersecretary for strategy, policy and plans. Wolf is Trump’s favored pick to then take over as acting head of the agency, just as officials brace for what could be another increase in migrant crossings.

Top DHS officials have warned that the reprieve from the record influx of migrants in recent months is probably temporary. Acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan said last month that the number of people crossing the border is still higher than at the same time last year and remains a “crisis.” Migration also typically increases in the spring, and the U.S. government is preparing for another surge of families and unaccompanied minors.

Such a potential wave of children is what inspired the early discussions about policy changes within the Trump administration in 2017 — along with debate about the policy’s effects.

The Trump administration’s wildly contradictory statements on family separation

The Trump administration changed its story on immigrant family separation no fewer than 14 times in one week. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

‘Safety’ vs. ‘anguish’

Staff at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is in charge of caring for unaccompanied migrant children, argued against the policy in weekly memos during the summer of 2017. Jonathan White, then deputy director of the ORR’s children’s program, warned in a July 2017 memo that the administration’s plan to separate children from their families and to alter the process of handing children over to sponsors would “result in significant increases” in how long children would be held.

White wrote that children would spend an average of 95 days in federal custody and that the department would need at least 6,500 additional beds in just three months. White declined to comment for this story.

Documents reviewed by The Post show that officials also estimated that HHS would need an additional $686 million in funding — more than 50 percent above its planned budget — to accommodate the policy and create additional bed space.

But the administration did not formally request extra money for that purpose at the time, according to senior Democratic and Republican congressional aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Mark Weber, an HHS spokesman, did not dispute those details but maintained that the border backups resulted from a historic influx of unaccompanied children. In May alone, 9,000 children were referred to the government’s care, he said.

Migrants are gathered behind a fence at a makeshift detention center in El Paso on March 27, when U.S. authorities said the immigration system was at a breaking point. (Sergio Flores/For The Washington Post)

Administration officials also thought the backlog would be short-lived.

“At some point in FY19, the deterrent effect of the new policy should stop families and unscrupulous adult aliens from using the reunification process, normalizing and reversing the volume trend” of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border, authorities wrote in a discussion paper that the National Security Council shared with senior administration officials. The paper was shared with an interagency group that met regularly in the White House Situation Room to discuss immigration and border security.

Some senior officials acknowledged in interviews that they expected some children to remain in custody for longer periods of time, but they said the policy was developed with child safety in mind; they did not want children to be released to smugglers or criminals.

“My number one concern on this was making sure that kids were safe,” Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview. “I know it’s a tough decision. It was never easy. You have to weigh the operational concerns, and the humanitarian concerns, and how long they’re going to stay in detention. . . . Yeah, it was going to increase the bed stay, but it wouldn’t be like twofold, threefold, fourfold. We thought it was worth a try, and it if doesn’t work, we can always pedal back and change gears.”

Acting ICE director Matthew Albence said the policy was part of the “deterrent effect” the government was seeking: “The goal was to prevent these children from coming on this dangerous journey.”

Almairis Guillen and her son, Miguel de Jesus Oseguera, 4, sweep with a homemade broom where they and other members of a migrant caravan were resting in Juchitan, Mexico, in October 2018. Thousands of people were part of their caravan, which was heading north to the U.S. border. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)The shadows of minors awaiting processing darken the floor of the U.S. Border Patrol center in McAllen on Aug. 12. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Albence, Homan and other Trump administration officials say the backlog arose because of Washington politics, blaming Democrats in Congress for being too slow to authorize funding for more shelter beds at facilities designed to care for children.

“No one who values child welfare and safety would argue smuggled, exploited and unaccompanied children at the southern border should be handed over to illegal alien ‘sponsors’ without reliable identity confirmation and background checks,” said deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley. “The only ones responsible for crowded shelters are Democrats who want to preserve and expand loopholes used by child smugglers for purely political purposes.”

A few months after the policy was implemented, HHS officials determined that it was not improving child safety. They concluded that the added vetting was redundant and needlessly extended the time children remained in custody, according to internal documents that ORR Deputy Director Jallyn Sualog presented to Congress, and to testimony on Capitol Hill.

Advocates saw a darker motive in policies that they say were “intentionally developed to inflict maximum anguish on children,” said Heidi Altman, of the National Immigrant Justice Center. She said officials knew that their plans “would trigger a chain of events that left children hungry, abused and sick in overcrowded CBP facilities.”

Democrats likewise have argued that the White House set up the crisis. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), presiding over a House Oversight subcommittee hearing last month, noted that it had always been possible for the government to ease conditions but that officials chose not to.

“We did not have to have a backlog. We did not,” DeLauro said. “That was created.”

Wrapped in foil blankets, migrants try to stay warm while waiting to be processed and transported by the Border Patrol in El Paso in February. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Tightening the rules

The Department of Homeland Security did a test run of the policy in the summer of 2017, instructing border agents to interview young migrants about the relatives they wanted to live with in the United States. They then created “target folders” for those adults that could be used to take action against them, according to internal emails that the American Immigration Council obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and made available online.

 

At the ORR, then-director Scott Lloyd was thinking about the administration’s “moral imperative” to protect children from smugglers and to ensure that gangs were not exploiting the child shelter system to enter the country.

“Our legal responsibilities are child welfare,” Lloyd said in an interview. “But even from a child welfare perspective, it’s desirable to deter people from taking that risk, putting their kids in that type of harm.”

Lloyd said he and his staff agreed that better communication between his agency and DHS was the best way to address those concerns.

“We needed to know if a kid had any gang ties or gang ties in their family — we needed to make sure that DHS had that information and that we had that information,” Lloyd said.

The partnership was formalized in an agreement that mandated significantly stricter fingerprinting and screening requirements for all adults who hoped to sponsor a migrant child or who lived in a house where a migrant child might stay.

“If this could get finalized and implemented soon, it would have a tremendous deterrent effect,” Gene Hamilton, counsel to then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, wrote in notes he sent by email in December 2017 to Wolf, the senior DHS official who is now in line to take over as acting secretary. The existence of the notes — but not the identity of the authors or the recipients — was first reported by NBC News.

Wolf declined to comment.

Alexei Woltornist, a Justice Department spokesman, said the agreement was just one of “numerous steps” to prevent the victimization of children: “Ending the trauma these children can face requires taking action against all parties who entrust criminals and cartels to transport their children across the border.”

HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — the two department heads tasked with carrying out the policy — voiced serious concerns, according to two officials familiar with the discussions. They worried that the agreement would be impossible to implement, could lead to longer detention times for children and would be viewed publicly as unnecessarily harsh, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations.

Caitlin Oakley, an HHS spokeswoman, did not dispute that account, but she said in a statement that Azar “supports the Trump administration’s goal of enforcing immigration laws and securing the border.”

“The backup at the border of minors witnessed this summer was the consequence of a broken immigration system,” Oakley added.

Nielsen declined to comment.

One HHS employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters recalled Lloyd telling staffers that the White House wanted them “to do everything you can to prevent backups into border stations. But it is better that there be a backup in a border station than that we not enforce immigration laws and that we not deter migration.”

Lloyd denied that account.

“I don’t ever recall holding, even temporarily, the idea that backups at border stations was a remotely acceptable scenario,” Lloyd said.

Migrants wait inside the fence of a makeshift detention center in El Paso in March. (Sergio Flores/For The Washington Post)

Internal memos show that for months before implementing the policy, government lawyers worried about lawsuits and discussed ways to claim that the policy would make children safer. In a January 2018 draft memo, viewed by The Post, Justice Department lawyers proposed defending the plan to conduct enhanced background checks and share them with enforcement agents as a means of protecting migrant children from witnessing the eventual deportation of their parents or relatives.

“We can argue that whether a proposed sponsor is subject to removal is a key factor in determining suitability, given the impact that immigration enforcement against, or detention of, a sponsor would have on the circumstances faced by” unaccompanied minors living with the sponsor, Justice Department lawyers wrote in January 2018 correspondence with DHS and HHS officials as part of an “analysis of litigation risk” associated with the agreement.

Federal judge blocks Trump administration from detaining migrant children for indefinite periods

The administration also developed and rolled out its family separation policy in the spring of 2018, part of its “zero tolerance” approach at the border. The months-long initiative, which separated thousands of children from their parents, compounded the need for shelter space. After a public outcry, the administration ended the policy.

By the fall of 2018, most of the families had been reunited, and the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border had fallen, but the population of children in the shelters continued to grow, according to HHS data. By October 2018, migrant children were spending an average of more than 90 days in federal custody — exactly as White had predicted — more than twice the length of stays two years earlier.

While some adult migrants were afraid to come forward to claim their children, the contractors tasked with carrying out the background checks and fingerprinting were overwhelmed, according to current and former HHS officials. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates filed lawsuits challenging the policy, arguing that parents waited months for fingerprinting results.

Migrant teens walk through a camp in Tornillo, Tex., in December 2018. The Trump administration announced in June 2018 that it would open a temporary shelter for up to 360 migrant children in this remote corner of the Texas desert. Six months later, the facility had expanded into a camp holding thousands of teenagers. (Andres Leighton/AP)

Time in custody grows

Kevin Dinnin, the head of the nonprofit that operated a shelter for migrant children in Tornillo, Tex., said the crush of minors became increasingly severe through late 2018, and he told the agency he could not continue. Images of teenagers behind chain-link fences shuffling single-file from tent to tent had drawn public outrage, and Dinnin could not understand why children continued arriving at the shelter even though migrant crossings had slowed and family separations had ended.

“The problem was, kids were coming and not being discharged,” Dinnin said. “The average length of stay just kept increasing.”

An HHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy decisions said the agency would never have opened the Tornillo shelter had it not been for the agreement with DHS.

“It was the increase in average length of care that created a need for thousands of beds,” the official said.

U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded border facility as HHS says it is out of space

HHS career staff members decided that the agency had no choice but to eliminate some aspects of the background checks to relieve the pressure on the system. To avoid roiling the White House, they slowly rolled back the policy through several “operational directives” over a period of months, according to current and former HHS officials.

The agency announced that it would stop fingerprinting all adult members of a sponsor’s household in December 2018, and the government then quickly released thousands of children from custody. The Tornillo shelter closed a few weeks later.

But with the agency still fingerprinting sponsors, some children continued to languish in custody for months, especially when migrant crossings surged again in the spring. Children apprehended at the border were left in Border Patrol stations as a result.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) addresses the media July 1 after touring the Clint, Tex., Border Patrol facility. Reports of inhumane conditions plagued the facility, where migrant children were being held. (Christ Chavez/Getty Images)Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), center, departs after a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on family separation and detention centers on July 12. She gave an impassioned speech, shedding tears while describing the conditions she witnessed along the border. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)

Democratic lawmakers, lawyers and advocates toured Border Patrol stations in late spring and early summer and delivered scathing descriptions of the suffering they witnessed. DHS and HHS officials pleaded with Congress for more money, saying they had been blindsided by the numbers. HHS canceled English classes, soccer and legal aid for migrant children, citing inadequate funds.

In June, Congress approved a $4.6 billion emergency border spending package, shortly after hearing the government’s pleas about what they described as a humanitarian crisis at the border.

Officials credited the subsequent release of hundreds more children to the aid package. But in court documents and congressional testimony, they acknowledged that moves to scale back the enhanced background checks had made the difference. Those included a final directive in June to stop fingerprinting aunts, uncles and grandparents seeking custody of migrant children, speeding up the release of more than 1,000 children in a matter of weeks and allowing the emergency shelter in Homestead, Fla., to close.

“I do support the four operational directives in order to expedite the release of children to properly vetted sponsors,” ORR Director Jonathan Hayes said at a congressional hearing in July. “I want to see the children back with their families.”

Officials have argued that shortening the time that children are held in federal custody will boost the incentive for migrant families to seek entry into the United States.

“The shorter the stay, the more likely they’re willing to take it on,” Homan said. “If I think I’ll be detained for a year, I might not come. But if I’ll be detained for a week and be released, that may convince me to make that trip.”

Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, Paul Kane and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.

 

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

The Trump Administration continues to intentionally misrepresent the conditions in the Northern Triangle that are sending families and children in flight to the U.S., notwithstanding their knowledge of the dangers and the overt cruelty and racism of the Trump Administration directed against them.

While the Trump Administration keeps on putting forth the knowingly false narrative that this “crisis” is caused by “loopholes” in U.S. law, that’s demonstrably untrue. Over 50% off the nearly 26 million refugees worldwide are children under the age of 18.  https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.   

Obviously, the increasing number of child refugees is part of a tragic worldwide phenomenon having no causal relationship to U.S. laws or court decisions. It’s a result of conditions in the sending countries and won’t be stopped or prevented by unilateral actions on the part of receiving countries, even extreme cruelty.  The phenomenon might, however, be increased by the overtly anti-refugee policies and statements of the Trump Administration and the actions of the Trump Administration in coddling dictators and tyrants, which actually produces more child refugees.

Also, what about the criminals over at HHS who have abandoned their Congressionally-assigned duty to protect and look out for the best interests of children for a White Nationalist, racist, nativist enforcement policy that targets kids. When folks like Alex Azar & company are sent packing from Government some day, remember for what they really stand!

We’re allowing shameless thugs to run our national immigration policies. There will be consequences!

 

PWS

11-13-19

“FLOATERS” IN THE RIO GRANDE: How Is This An Appropriate Response Of World’s Most Prosperous Country To Individuals Seeking Protection Under Our Laws Or, At Worst, A Better Life?

“Floaters”
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers”
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Abigail Hauslohner
Abigail Hauslohner
National Immigration Reporter, Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/border-patrols-september-on-the-rio-grande-bodies-cartel-lookouts-footprints-in-the-mud-and-fewer-migrants/2019/09/23/26cf9884-d40a-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html

Abigail Hauslohner reports for WashPost:

ABRAM, Tex. — The dead man was face down near the riverbank, visible mostly because of the slivers of red on the soles of his sneakers.

“We’ve got a floater,” U.S. Border Patrol agent Deborah Villarreal called out to the rest of her unit. She swung the patrol boat around to get a closer look.

It was predawn, early in Villarreal’s shift, and the purplish-pink sky reflected in the placid waters of the Rio Grande. She furrowed her brow at the grim start to her day, and she thought about the family out there somewhere, missing this man, wondering where he was, not knowing he was dead.

“I hate to see that,” she said.

Villarreal sees dead bodies regularly, floating in this river that separates Mexico from the United States. This was the second her unit had spotted along this particular stretch in about a week.

By the end of her day, she would have steered the boat up and down the river a couple dozen more times, passing the body again and again before Mexican authorities arrived to take it away. She would pass the same series of concrete sheds — holes drilled into the sides so the drug cartels can use them as lookout points — and the same run-down riverfront cafe, where a black car loitered, and a man watched the boat pass. She would wave to the Mexican national guardsmen at their sleepy encampment, push through a cloud of skunk odor — it was their mating season — scour the river reeds for signs of footsteps into the United States, and send her agents up the bank and into the brush after a pair of Mexican migrants, ultimately catching up to them on the edge of a cane field.

This, relative to recent months, was a slow day in the Rio Grande Valley.

The winding body of the river here in South Texas — with its submerged remnants of rafts, its banks trampled by migrant families and cartel workers, and now, by Mexican forces — is a microcosm of all the ebbs and flows of the nation’s approach to immigration. This sliver of the 1,954-mile border with Mexico is primed to deliver a verdict on the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s border policies.

It is here that the spring influx of migrant families and children reached its peak, inundating U.S. Border Patrol stations with too many detainees. But apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley have dropped 55 percent since May, down from nearly 50,000 to just more than 22,000 in August. Though this area still sees more migrant crossings than any other sector of the border, border agents here have witnessed how Washington policies aimed at decreasing the flow have played out in real time.

To them, it is President Trump’s deal with Mexico to intercept migrants before they cross into the United States that has seemed to have the most impact. They do not know the details of the accord or how long it will last, but they can see the Mexican forces on the other side of the Rio Grande.

“You see a difference,” said Ryan Ansbro, a Border Patrol agent who works alongside Villarreal.

Villarreal and her team, who patrol the river by boat, rush to intercept migrants and smugglers before they cross, and they pluck people from the water when they wind up in it. The precipitous summer decline in migrant crossings has meant quieter shifts on a river that is suddenly more manageable, less frantic.

But the constants remain: the desperation that cannot be deterred by danger; the drug cartels that devise new methods as fast as authorities try to thwart them; the everyday logistical challenges facing the Border Patrol, even as Trump focuses money and rhetorical energy on a border wall.

Though lower than earlier in the year, last month still saw more crossings than any other August in a decade. Will large groups of families and children — sometimes as many as 300 people at once — again pull agents away from their patrol duties, forcing them to become processors and jail guards? Will Mexican troops be able to sustain their effort?

“We’re all in limbo,” Villarreal said. “We don’t know if it’s going to skyrocket again or if this is going to be what helps us. It’s just an unknown.”

The chase is always on

On the river, the chase is always on. Cartel scouts along the Mexican side keep watch for the Border Patrol, launching rafts to the United States full of migrants or drugs whenever they find a gap.

The agents, in turn, speed back and forth, hoping to keep up. They rely heavily on eyes in the sky: helicopters, blimps with cameras, and stationary surveillance technology mounted on the edges of walls and fields to warn them of a raft hitting the water. If they get to the launch point quickly enough, the rafts often double back — sometimes tossing migrants into the water as they do.

“Our job is more of a deterrence unit,” Villarreal said. “And we are involved in a lot of rescues.”

The pale-green water in this region is flat and still, its current barely discernible from the boat deck, as it winds snakelike through the thick scrubland, with curves and switchbacks. Some of the narrowest areas and favored crossing points are less than a football field wide. But the water can be deceiving.

“You look at it right now, and you think there’s no current,” Ansbro said. “But you get in, and you find out there is a current. And a lot of them can’t swim,” he said of the migrants. Others get disoriented in the thick brush on the U.S. side, and in their exhaustion, they try to swim back.

Thick tangles of reeds, known locally as carrizo cane, create dense jungles that stretch from the riverbanks inland, thwarting the movements of migrants and the Border Patrol agents seeking to apprehend them.

The Border Patrol agents tell stories of the people they have found: the 18-year-old who medic Salvador Pastran discovered face up and arms spread in the middle of a dirt road a few years ago, the body reminding him of a snow angel; the young woman and three babies that agent Sheymarie Rosa and colleagues spotted recently, so close to a road, but all dead; or the group of 20 children and adults who Villarreal and her team rescued from the reeds at the water’s edge earlier in the summer.

In three days on the river this month, agents from the McAllen Border Patrol station, including Villarreal’s unit, encountered migrants during every shift who were suffering from heat exhaustion in the cane fields and citrus orchards between the river and the roads, even though the weather was cooler — in the 80s — than it had been in weeks.

‘This is the new Ellis Island, and we are turning people away’: A lawyer struggles to help migrants

(Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

There was a Nicaraguan man who told agents he had lost consciousness in the brush after being deposited there by smugglers early in the morning. Hours later, he came to and crawled out onto a levee, where he was able to seek help from two U.S. National Guardsmen who have been deployed to the border in recent months to assist the Border Patrol.

There was another migrant, who agents believed to be a Chinese national, who began vomiting incessantly — a common symptom of heat exhaustion, Pastran said — shortly after they gave him water to drink.

Many of the migrants are leaving behind abject poverty, gangs, violence — and the dangers of a northbound trek and a hazardous crossing do not dilute the potential promise of life in the United States.

“The conditions here are still better,” Ansbro said.

Echoing the broad contours of arguments the Trump administration has made about why it is necessary to more aggressively deport those who are in the country illegally, Villarreal, Ansbro and other agents said they believe little can be done to stop the flow of migrants without tightening the laws to make it more difficult for asylum seekers and illegal entrants to remain in the United States.

“If they think they can come and stay, they’re going to do it,” Villarreal said.

Policies such as the administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which pushes asylum seekers back into Mexico to await U.S. court hearings, and other restrictions such as requiring migrants to first seek asylum in countries they transit on their way to the United States, are aimed at preventing people from even attempting a crossing.

But the Mexican forces are the only policy that the agents on the river can see for themselves.

Change on the Rio Grande

The change came earlier this summer.

Early one morning, Villarreal and her unit caught a glimpse of something unusual in the dark. There, on the Mexican side of the river, was a collection of colorful tent canvases, like a family campsite at a national park. But this was the bank of the Rio Grande, just north of the Mexican city of Reynosa, where the government had notoriously little authority in the face of cartel control. It was only after the tents’ occupants came to life under the beams of the Border Patrol’s flashlights that Villarreal and her agents realized what they were seeing.

“Oh, it’s the Mexican military,” she said, recalling her surprise, referring to the Mexican national guard forces. “We woke those poor guys up.”

There is little direct communication between the agents and the Mexican authorities. An international liaison handles that.

But on this day, Villarreal waved to the men in fatigues as her boat passed. We haven’t seen much today, she calls out to them in Spanish through the boat’s loudspeaker, “but we’ll let you know if we do.”

Two of the men responded with a thumbs-up.

When a late morning call came in over the radio about a group crossing downriver, the intelligence was coming from an agent watching an aerial camera, and Villarreal’s boat unit took off at 47 mph, past the inlet where agents have seen alligators, and past the remnants of a dozen green plastic rafts snagged on tree branches in the shallows.

“Mira,” Rosa told Villarreal in Spanish. “Look.”

The boat slowed next to a forested bank across from an empty Mexican cafe.

“There’s a guy right there.” Across the river, a man was watching them.

They moved up and down along the river bank, searching for signs of trampled reeds. The raft had already crossed. Finding fresh footprints in the mud, Ansbro and Rosa set off in pursuit through the brush, where their uniforms snagged on blades of cane and the air felt heavy and suffocating.

They followed the tracks out to a dirt road along another dense field of cane, and up the road, a snake slipping over the sandy berm to get out of their way. A helicopter moved in overhead.

“Fifty yards ahead of you, there’s going to be two of them,” came a voice from the helicopter over the radio after several minutes. “Right shoulder. Go into the field right there.” And the agents plunged into the cane, emerging seconds later with two muddied men handcuffed together.

They sat them down on the road to collect their belongings and to begin the typical questioning. One was a 44-year-old fisherman from the southern Mexican state of Veracruz. The other was a 32-year-old from Guerrero. Both were fathers of three. Both were exhausted.

They had not eaten in two or three days, the fisherman said. They had come to the United States to look for work.

The agents led them back to the boat, took them upriver, and handed them off to another agent with a truck. They would likely face swift deportation.

In the afternoon, the tiny boat Villarreal had been waiting for since dawn appeared around a river bend. Two bomberos — Mexican firefighters in red vests — stood side-by-side as they steered upriver. Villarreal’s team guided them to the body they had reported that morning.

The man, whose name they would likely never know, was just as they had left him, the red of his sneakers still peeking above the murky green in the shadow of the reeds. They guessed he had been dead for days, and Villarreal furrowed her brow again, this time in pity for what the firefighters would have to do.

“I feel bad for the bomberos. They pay them nothing,” she said as she watched them delicately tie the body to a rope attached to their boat.

When bodies end up on the U.S. side of the border, agents call the local sheriff’s office or justice of the peace to handle the remains and seek identification. When they are on the Mexican side, it is up to the bomberos.

Ansbro and Rosa asked what would become of him. Villarreal shrugged. If he has no identification, she said, he rwill probably be placed in a grave of unknowns.

The bomberos motored away, dragging the man in the boat’s wake.

Villarreal picked up the radio.

“The body has been recovered.”

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

“Floaters” were actually once live human beings, like you and me.

Dehumanization of migrants and forcing them into life-threatening situations is a morally and legally unacceptable means of “deterrence.” To what depths will we sink under Trump?

PWS

09-30-19

AS U.S. COURTS FAIL, DARTH VADER TAKES OVER ASYLUM OFFICE – Use Of CBP Agents As “Asylum Officers” Over Objection Flies In Face Of Statute & Shows Administration’s Utter Contempt For Cowardly ARTICLE IIIs Afraid To Stand Up For The Rule Of Law & For The Rights Of Vulnerable Asylum Seekers! — “They’re not trained and geared toward refugee protection, any more than I’m trained to go look for tracks in the desert and chase people.”

Molly O’Toole
Molly O’Toole
Immigration Reporter
LA Times
Darth Vader
D. Vader
Minister of Justice
Banana Republic of Trump

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=34ad22a1-b89c-4dd4-8b5f-ac66ea536940&v=sdk

Molly O’Toole reports for the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — Border Patrol agents, rather than highly trained asylum officers, are beginning to screen migrant families for “credible fear” to determine whether applicants qualify for U.S. protection, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The first Border Patrol agents arrived in Dilley, Texas, last week to start training at the South Texas Family Residential Center, the nation’s largest immigrant family detention center, according to lawyers working there and several employees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The move expands the Trump administration’s push for Border Patrol agents to take over the interviews that mark the first step in the lengthy asylum process. Border Patrol agents began training to conduct asylum interviews in late April, but agents have now deployed to family detention facilities for the first time.

As a result, Border Patrol agents — law enforcement personnel who detain migrant families at the border — will also have authority to decide whether those families have a “credible fear” of being persecuted in their home countries.

Customs and Border Protection has provided few details about the Border Patrol asylum training and has not publicly acknowledged whether agents have yielded significantly lower approval rates than federal asylum officers, but internal communications and other official documents obtained by The Times indicate early problems with the program.

The Citizenship and Immigration Services personnel requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Neither the agency nor Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, responded to requests for comment by deadline.

Agents at Dilley are not wearing the Border Patrol’s well-known olive-green uniforms, and are identifying themselves to migrant families and children as asylum officers, said Shay Fluharty, an attorney with the Dilley Pro Bono Project, who has been in interviews conducted by the agents.

“It’s creating significant strain for our clients — not just because [agents are] unprepared and untrained,” Fluharty told The Times. “We understand that the intention is to significantly limit asylum officers who are conducting these interviews and have them be primarily conducted by Border Patrol.”

The Trump administration’s ultimate goal with the Border Patrol training program is to make it more difficult for migrants to win asylum, according to asylum officers, officials and lawyers, because White House officials believe agents will be more adversarial and less likely to approve asylum requests. Actual asylum officers work under Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that administers the legal immigration system and benefits.

Under Homeland Security regulations, the credible-fear interview must be conducted in a “non-adversarial manner.”

Michael Knowles, special representative for the federal asylum officers’ union, said many members are concerned about the use of law enforcement personnel for crucial interviews with people seeking refuge. Neither the union nor its officers have been given official notice of or explanation for the shift, Knowles said.

“I don’t mean to denigrate the proper and legitimate role of Border Patrol, but it’s different,” Knowles said. “They’re not trained and geared toward refugee protection, any more than I’m trained to go look for tracks in the desert and chase people.”

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, confirmed that agents were undergoing training in which they conducted credible-fear interviews with family units. But he pushed back against the idea that Border Patrol agents would be “tougher” against asylum seekers.

“I’ve personally had conversations with both President Trump and Stephen Miller,” Judd said. “It’s always been my understanding that the reason to have Border Patrol agents do the credible-fear interviews is to ensure the asylum process begins at the earliest practicable moment…. The narrative being painted that Border Patrol agents will deport more persons doesn’t hold water.”

According to a Customs and Border Protection training timeline obtained by The Times, 10 Border Patrol agents from the El Centro sector in California began training to do credible-fear interviews in April, and by August a total of 60 agents were due to conduct their first credible-fear interviews. A new group started training in early September, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services personnel.

The agents are all “nonbargaining employees,” meaning they are not members of a union.

The timeline states three times that “additional training will be required” if the Border Patrol role in asylum interviews expands to family units. Homeland Security officials also assured congressional staffers in August that the Border Patrol was not going to cover family units because of that requirement, a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee aide told The Times. Department officials did not inform the committee they’d be deploying agents to family detention centers.

It’s unclear whether the agents sent to the detention center in Dilley received additional training, or whether any Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers will remain at the facility after they finish instructing the agents. Several officers have already been reassigned.

According to separate records obtained by The Times, as of last month, Border Patrol agents had completed 178 credible-fear screenings with asylum seekers from more than 15 countries — all of whom were single adults. Agents determined 54% met the credible-fear standard and 35% did not. They closed 11% of the cases without making a determination.

While the newly trained Border Patrol agents have yet to complete many screenings, that’s a far lower approval rate than is typical for initial interviews. Congress deliberately set a low standard for “credible fear” in order to ensure that the U.S. government did not return people to potential harm, and roughly 80% of asylum seekers pass the first interview.

Ultimately, only about 1 in 5 asylum seekers wins their case, according to the Justice Department. The Trump administration cites that disparity to argue that most asylum seekers have fraudulent cases, and the president frequently disparages asylum as a “hoax.” He also has lamented that Border Patrol and military personnel are restricted from getting “rough” with migrants.

Advocates argue that the disparity only shows how difficult it is to win the right to stay in the United States. With the backlog of immigration cases now surpassing 1 million, a final decision can take years.

The asylum division at Citizenship and Immigration Services has faced heavy pressure from the White House and from Ken Cuccinelli, who was named acting director of the agency in June.

John Lafferty, asylum division chief for six years, recently was reassigned to a service center and replaced on an acting basis by Andrew Davidson, who oversaw fraud detection.

Lafferty was outspoken about his directorate being forced to implement dramatic changes to U.S. immigration policy with what he said was little to no advance notice or consultation. Knowles, the union representative, called Lafferty’s reassignment “diplomatic exile.”

All decisions made so far by Border Patrol agents at the “credible fear” stage have been reviewed by a supervisory asylum officer before they were issued, according to the records obtained by The Times.

But critics of the training program worry that the administration will use it to get around requirements for asylum officers and supervisors to have special training and extensive experience — with comparatively inexperienced and less-trained Border Patrol agents in effect policing themselves rather than having their decisions reviewed by a Citizenship and Immigration Services supervisory officer.

Based on internal communications obtained by The Times, Border Patrol agents appear to have already stepped outside their allowed roles.

Last week, Ashley Caudill-Mirillo, deputy chief of the asylum division at Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote to leaders in the field stressing that agents could only screen credible-fear claims from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and “under no circumstances” should they interview Cubans.

“There are no exceptions to this rule,” she said, adding that officials “may follow up with you if it is found these assignments occurred in the event we are asked to explain.”

Fluharty said she and her colleagues have witnessed a range of issues. The handful of Border Patrol agents deployed to Dilley are all male, effectively preventing clients who’ve suffered from severe sexual or gender-based violence from requesting a female asylum officer.

Some agents are conducting interviews over the phone — a first at Dilley, where all screenings had previously been in-person — and with children as young as 6 years old. Other screenings are lasting far longer than normal, more than six hours.

And agents are consistently asking irrelevant questions, while leaving out the most critical ones, she said.

“It’s most difficult for families who have to share really traumatic experiences under really stressful circumstances,” she said, “And now with someone without the appropriate knowledge or training.”

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

Simply outrageous! This is a direct result of the stunning cowardice of the Supremes’ majority and U.S. Circuit Court Judges who have “tanked” by failing to take a strong stand against the Administration’s constant perversion of immigration statutes and constitutional Due Process and Equal Protection.

 

How spineless! Asylum Officers (and some U.S. Immigration Judges), who are mere Civil Servants, are willing to put their careers and livelihood on the line to speak up against the Administration’s abuses, but life-tenured Federal Judges who, unlike Asylum Officers, are protected from political retaliation are afraid to do their sworn duty!

 

The specific intent behind the Asylum Officer statutory requirement was to insure that impartial, specially trained asylum professionals, oriented toward protection, NOT LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS, handle the “credible fear” process.

Just think about the recent gender-based asylum grant described in yesterday’s blog.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/09/19/the-good-news-gender-based-asylum-claims-continue-to-win-in-the-post-a-b-era-the-bad-news-applicants-subjected-to-let-em-die-in-mexico-compl/

What’s the chance that a hastily trained Border Patrol Agent would recognize such a potentially successful claim in the “credible fear” process? Not much! This is a serious, life threatening, intentionally created defect in the system, reflecting malicious intent on the part of Trump and his DHS sycophants, that the Article IIIs are sweeping under the carpet by not requiring that the Trump Administration must follow the Constitution and the immigration statutes protecting asylum seekers.

PWS

 

09-20-19

 

 

 

 

COURTSIDE HAS BEEN SAYING IT FOR YEARS; THE NY TIMES FINALLY PICKS UP: Trump & Co’s White Nationalist Racist Immigration Policies Are Corrupting America!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/border-immigration.html

 

The NY Times Editorial Board writes:

 

Last year, as part of an effort to carry out President Trump’s promise of “extreme vetting” of visitors to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security began collecting social media account information from millions of people seeking to cross the border.

After all, a radical online could be a radical offline.

That’s why the stream of posts ricocheting around a 9,500-member Facebook group, comprising current and former Border Patrol agents as well as some people with no apparent connection to the Border Patrol, is so troubling. Members of the group, as documented by ProPublica this week, “joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.”

Of a 16-year-old migrant from Guatemala who died while in Border Patrol custody in May, a member of the group wrote, “If he dies, he dies.”

Customs and Border Protection said on Monday that it had informed the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general about the posts and had started its own investigation. The National Border Patrol union decried the posts as “inappropriate and unprofessional.”

A reckoning from their superiors is due for any border agents who dishonored their uniform by spreading vileness on social media. In June, when the Plain View Project, a nonprofit research effort, released documentation on dozens of police officers from eight departments across the country posting racist, misogynist and Islamophobic material, 72 police officers in Philadelphia were pulled off the streets and the top prosecutor in St. Louis said she would no longer accept cases from 22 officers.

In a larger sense, the Border Patrol Facebook posts reveal a worrying mind-set among some of those charged with administering the harshest crackdown on migrants and asylum-seekers in decades. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers,” Representative Joaquin Castro, who heads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told ProPublica.

The realities of that crackdown have created conditions that Americans would condemn if they were in another country.

While lawmakers refuse to compromise on emergency aid for the humanitarian needs at the border, “children are held for weeks in deplorable conditions, without access to soap, clean water, showers, clean clothing, toilets, toothbrushes, adequate nutrition or adequate sleep,” groups supporting the children wrote in a recent court filing. A judge on Friday ordered Customs and Border Protection to allow health workers into facilities where children are being held to ensure that conditions are “safe and sanitary.

On Monday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez toured facilities where migrants and asylum-seekers are being held. “Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets,” she tweeted.

As the congressional delegation arrived at one detention facility, they were heckled and cursed at by demonstrators, including one man wearing a Make America Great Again hat. (Another heckler hurled ethnic slurs at Representative Rashida Tlaib.)

Only a callous person could find mirth in the misery at the border. And only a desensitized nation could continue to permit the separation of children from their parents — and detaining all of them in atrocious conditions — as a morally acceptable form of deterrence.

 

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

The constant lies, false narratives, intentional inhumanity, and “deterrence only” of Trump’s self-created “border crisis” are merely the latest example of how White Nationalism demeans our nation. This Administration has all of the legal tools necessary to process arriving asylum seekers in a fair, timely, and orderly manner. They just refuse to use them as they were intended to solve, rather than intentionally create and aggravate, migration problems.

 

Contrary to Trump/GOP false narratives, that includes the present ability to establish a legitimate refugee application program in or near the Northern Triangle and to use it as an incentive for refugees to apply outside the United States rather than coming to the border to apply for asylum. However, to work as an incentive, rather than a failed deterrent, the refugee program must be administered in a fair and generous manner that would allow those who have legitimate fears of persecution on the basis of gender, actual or political opposition to gangs, ethnicity, or religious activities to be properly classified as refugees and resettled here or in some other truly safe location as determined in conjunction with the UNHCR and signatory countries outside the Northern Triangle who can actually provide at least a reasonable chance of safety.

That likely means a goal of admitting at least 50,000 to 100,000 refugees to the U.S. from Central America over the next year. That, along with robust aid to address the problems creating the refugee flow would be the legal and effective approach to the forced migration issue.

 

Additionally, the Administration has the ability to reauthorize and extend “Temporary Protected Status” (“TPS”) to qualified individuals from the Northern Triangle already present in the U.S. until such time as the conditions in their home countries can be stabilized. This would also have the advantage of tracking the presence of such individuals in the United States while reducing the pressure on the already backlogged U.S. Immigration Court system.

 

Of course, the Administration has no intention of using any of these tools to solve the problem. That would be inconsistent with their racist, restrictionist, White Nationalist agenda aimed primarily at keeping non-white individuals out of the United States and reducing the rights and political power of those who are already citizens. The purpose of refugee protection laws is actually to protect refugees, not, as this Administration posits, to kill as many of them as possible outside the U.S. or at our border to “deter” other refugees from coming.

 

Indeed, the Administration’s absurdly inhuman and unlawful  proposal to keep refugees from leaving the very countries where they are being persecuted, without addressing the conditions there, is basically that having them die, be tortured, or abused there is just fine with us. Whether folks like to face it or not, that is indeed a neo-Nazi philosophy. And, every day that Trump remains in the office for which he is so supremely unqualified further corrupts our nation.

 

PWS

 

07-02-19

 

 

 

DORIS MEISSNER @ MPI: Administration’s Failed Border Enforcement Policies Anchored In Past & Distorted By Xenophobia — Most Of Today’s Arriving Migrants Seek & Deserve Safety & Protection Unavailable In “Failed States” Of Northern Triangle!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/14/real-border-problem-is-us-is-trying-stop-wrong-kind-migrants/

Doris writes in the Washington Post:

No matter what happens with Thursday’s vote on President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, the real root of the difficulties at the U.S.-Mexico border won’t be addressed.

The whole approach the U.S. government takes at the border is geared to yesterday’s problem: Our border security system was designed to keep single, young Mexican men from crossing into the United States to work. Every day, more evidence mounts that it’s not set up to deal with the families and unaccompanied children now arriving from Central America — in search not just of jobs, but also of refuge. The mismatch is creating intolerable humanitarian conditions and undermining the effectiveness of border enforcement.

From the 1960s to the early 2000s, the reality of illegal immigration at the southwest border was overwhelmingly economic migration from Mexico. The U.S. responded, especially once the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted tighter security everywhere, by building up a well-resourced, modernized, hardened border enforcement infrastructure, with more staff and more sophisticated strategies. Successive Congresses and administrations under the leadership of both Democrats and Republicans have supported major investments in border security as an urgent national priority. About $14 billion was allocated in fiscal year 2017 for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a steep rise from $9.5 billion a decade earlier.

From a peak of 1.6 million apprehensions in fiscal 2000 — with 98 percent of those apprehended Mexicans — border apprehensions have fallen by about three-quarters, to 397,000 last year. More Mexicans now return to Mexico annually than enter the United States. The turnaround has been dramatic and is due to the combined effects of economic growth, falling fertility rates and improved education and job prospects in Mexico; job losses in the United States surrounding the 2008-2009 recession; and significant border enforcement successes.

At the same time, an entirely different type of migration became more common. Beginning in 2012, the number of unaccompanied minorsfrom Central America — principally El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — crossing the border illegally jumped sharply. Modest numbers of such migrants had been arriving for many years. However, by 2014, the arrival of unaccompanied children spiked to more than 67,000 and, for the first time, the number of non-Mexican apprehensions exceeded those of Mexicans.

By 2016, the Central American flows became predominantly families with young children. Some were fleeing their countries in search of economic opportunity, but many were seeking safety and protection from widespread violence and gang activity that especially targets young people approaching or already in their teens.

Last year, 40 percent of border apprehensions were either of migrant families or unaccompanied minors, as compared to 10 percent in 2012. The proportion has risen to 60 percent in recent months, and just-released numbers show 66,450 apprehensions last month, the highest February total in a decade.

The important story, however, is not so much the numbers, which remain well below earlier peaks, as it is the change in the character of the flow. Today’s migrants include especially vulnerable populations, a large share of whom are seeking safety. As my organization reported recently, more than one in three border crossers today is an unaccompanied child or asylum seeker, up from approximately one in 100 a decade ago.

Yet the U.S. government’s posture has not been recalibrated, remaining pointed toward an illegal immigration pattern that has largely waned.

Today, many people who cross the border illegally actively seek out and turn themselves in to enforcement officials so they can apply for asylum. Others have been presenting themselves at ports of entry, seeking protection. Ground sensors, camera towers and similar surveillance technology and infrastructure are less helpful as a result.

Border Patrol facilities are designed for holding people only for short periods because that used to be all they needed to do: Most Mexicans who are apprehended are processed and returned across the border within hours. The same is not the case for Central Americans and others from noncontiguous countries, increasing numbers of whom are arriving exhausted and in ill health after lengthy, arduous journeys. They can’t simply be driven back to Mexico, because they’re not from there in the first place.

Border Patrol stations are ill-suited for dealing with these vulnerable populations, as the tragedy of the two young children who died recently in Border Patrol custody sadly illustrates. The situation has been further taxed by the increasing numbers of what the Border Patrol refers to as large-group arrivals: In the first five months of this fiscal year, the Border Patrol encountered 70 groups of more than 100 migrants crossing illegally, up from 13 last year and two the year before.

Asylum officers and immigration judges, not Border Patrol and port-of-entry inspectors, make the decisions in asylum cases. The asylum and immigration court systems don’t have anywhere near the sustained funding spent on border enforcement programs. As larger shares of migrants have arrived claiming asylum, workloads have ballooned into huge backlogs as a result. And even in cases where resources have been provided, they are not always used: Congress has allocated funding for 534 immigration judges, and yet only 427 are serving. Children and families are vulnerable to physical and emotional health dangers that argue for minimal detention periods, but their cases can take months or years to decide. And policies that precipitated the separation of more than 2,700 children from their parents have only added to the trauma.

These and other factors point to the need for dramatically different border management policies and budget decisions from those made in the past, largely successfully, to deter illegal inflows from Mexico.

Testifying in Congress last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the situation at the border has reached a “breaking point.” There is a crisis, but it is a crisis of an asylum system that is severely overburdened by the major uptick in humanitarian protection claims.

The asylum system can only work effectively with timely, fair decisions about who is eligible for protection — and who is not, and therefore must be returned to their country of origin. More broadly, just as improved conditions in Mexico have been key to reducing illegal crossings of Mexicans, the best way to prevent Central Americans from fleeing their native countries must include attacking the violence, corruption and poverty driving them to leave home.

Yet the Trump administration has curtailed access to asylum and ended a program allowing some Central Americans to apply for protection from within the region to keep pressure off the border. Most recently, the administration rolled out a new policy that forces some asylum seekers to stay in Mexico in highly uncertain conditions to await asylum decisions, which they are told may take up to a year. Such measures seem only to be spurring on prospective migrants to journey to the U.S. before policies get even more restrictive.

This is not to say there are easy answers. Dealing with mixed flows is a challenge not only for the United States but for other major migrant destinations in Europe and beyond. Building systems that can sift through mixed flows to fairly and efficiently provide protection to those who truly qualify and identify and remove those who don’t is difficult.

But course corrections are well past due.

Steps that could be taken now include devoting money and applying new strategies to the asylum and immigration court systems so they can effectively handle a burgeoning caseload, rather than greatly narrowing who can access them. Building suitable Border Patrol facilities for receiving children and families and training agents and other staff to spot and act upon medical and other emergencies would also be required. The government could foster networks of community-based monitoring and case management programs with legal representation that provide alternatives to detention so migrants are detained for minimal periods, at less overall expense and are treated more humanely, but still appear for their asylum interviews and deportation hearings.

Ramped-up anti-smuggling initiatives and intelligence cooperation with neighboring countries are a must. Affected communities on both sides of the border need support and new partnerships with government actors, especially in the face of caravans, a method of movement on the rise among Central Americans to gain safety in numbers but posing new logistical and political difficulties for governments. And U.S. policies must give greater priority to our geographic neighborhood in developing longer-term solutions with Mexico and Central America that are in our joint national interests.

Rather than unproductive political fights over walls and national emergency declarations, these steps would go a long way to restoring order at the border. It is past time for policymakers and the public to recognize there are no quick fixes but that, even with migrant arrivals on the rise, the border can be managed through an array of proven policy initiatives.

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

It’s no surprise to me that an Administration committed to a racist, White Nationalist political agenda, rather than governing in the public interest, will consistently fail to solve problems and will govern incompetently.

Families who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol at the first opportunity to apply for asylum are by no stretch of the imagination “law enforcement issues” except to the extent that Trump’s inappropriate unwillingness to process them fairly at ports of entry and to establish a robust refugee program for the Northern Triangle has created a misdirection of law enforcement resources.  To claim otherwise is totally disingenuous.

PWS

03-15-19

FORGET THE SHAMELESS LIES, EVASIONS, & VICTIM BLAMING BY NIELSEN AND MCALEENAN BEFORE CONGRESS – Vox’s Dara Lind Tells You Everything You REALLY Need To Know About What’s Happening At The Southern Border In 500 Words!

https://apple.news/A3s8h4IozRDGHLo1SJ6rPtg

Dara Lind reports in Vox News

In February 2019, 66,450 migrants crossed the US/Mexico border between official border crossings and were apprehended by US Border Patrol agents, committing the misdemeanor of illegal entry.

It’s a sharp increase from January and marks an 11-year high. But the number reflects an ongoing trend: record numbers of families coming to the US without papers.

The Trump administration reported that 76,103 people tried to enter the US without valid papers in February. That number combines people who came to official border crossings and migrants who were caught by Border Patrol after crossing illegally.

The total has alarmed conservatives; President Donald Trump has taken it as validation of his decision to declare a national emergency and appropriate more funding to build “a wall” along the border. (Construction of the wall would take months or years.)

But while current apprehension levels are higher than they’ve been in the last decade, they’re still way below pre-recession levels.

What is truly unprecedented is who the migrants are.

Almost two-thirds of Border Patrol apprehensions are of parents and their children. While we don’t have complete historical data, it seems likely that more families are coming to the US without papers than ever before. Additionally, a large share of migrants (both families and single adults) are expressing a desire to seek asylum.

Both groups are overwhelmingly coming from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The US immigration enforcement system was designed to swiftly detain and deport migrants who attempted to sneak into the US illegally. Asylum-seekers and families don’t fit that mold.

Border Patrol agents aren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families who travel through Mexico by bus and then turn themselves in at the border. This has arguably contributed to the deaths of multiple children in Border Patrol custody in recent months, and spurred Customs and Border Protection to expand medical care.

There are strict limits on how long immigrant children and families can be held in immigration custody; in practice, officials release most families pending an immigration hearing. Asylum seekers can’t be deported without a screening interview, and those who pass (by meeting a deliberately generous standard) are often eligible for release from detention while their cases are resolved.

Some of those migrants, either intentionally or accidentally, do not complete the asylum process or lose their cases, and live in the US as unauthorized immigrants. For many Trump officials, this is the heart of the crisis. Officials have spent the last year working on regulations and pushing Congress to expand family detention and reduce asylum protections.

Trump critics continue to insist that migration isn’t at crisis levels. To them, the more urgent issue is the administration’s treatment of families, children, and asylum seekers. They are urging the administration to allow more asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry legally. They are calling attention to the conditions in which migrants are being held in custody.

Asylum seekers cannot be barred from entry. The question is whether they should be treated as vulnerable migrants who the US is obligated to treat with kindness, or as deportable migrants until (if at all) they win legal status.

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

It’s really a question of whether we honor our legal and international obligations by fairly processing refugees, or choose to dehumanize and further victimize them. The totally disingenuous performance by Administration officials testifying before Congress on Tuesday tells you all you really need to know. This Administration has shown a slavish devotion to failed policies, dumb gimmicks, and just downright cruelty in a vain attempt to stop people from fleeing danger zones. Not surprisingly, their “built to fail” policies, scofflaw behavior,  and malicious incompetence has made things worse rather than better.

What if we had an honest Administration that admitted that this is a refugee flow that we had a significant role in creating? What if we used the existing law and legal mechanisms to take as many refugees as we could and worked with the UNHCR and the international community to help the others find viable resettlement alternatives? Wow, that would be making government work for the common good. something that’s just not in the “White Nationalist playbook.”

PWS

03-07-19

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INCREDIBLE INCOMPETENCE OVERSHADOWS EVERYTHING: DHS Is Nowhere Close To Filling EXISTING Border Patrol Vacancies — What Would They Do With More?

http://flip.it/8aoZM_

Molly O’Toole reports for the LA Times:

POLITICS
Trump ordered 15,000 new border and immigration officers — but got thousands of vacancies instead
By MOLLY O’TOOLE JAN 27, 2019 | 3:00 AM | WASHINGTON
A U.S. Border Patrol agent looks along the Rio Grande for people trying to enter the United States illegally. (Larry W. Smith / EPA/Shutterstock)
Two years after President Trump signed orders to hire 15,000 new border agents and immigration officers, the administration has spent tens of millions of dollars in the effort — but has thousands more vacancies than when it began.
In a sign of the difficulties, Customs and Border Protection allocated $60.7 million to Accenture Federal Services, a management consulting firm, as part of a $297-million contract to recruit, vet and hire 7,500 border officers over five years, but the company has produced only 33 new hires so far.
The president’s promised hiring surge steadily lost ground even as he publicly hammered away at the need for stiffer border security, warned of a looming migrant invasion and shut down parts of the government for five weeks over his demands for $5.7 billion from Congress for a border wall.
The Border Patrol gained a total of 120 agents in 2018, the first net gain in five years.
But the agency has come nowhere close to adding more than 2,700 agents annually, the rate that Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, has said is necessary to meet Trump’s mandated 26,370 border agents by the end of 2021.
“The hiring surge has not begun,” the inspector general’s office at the Department of Homeland Security concluded last November.
“We have had ongoing difficulties with regards to hiring levels to meet our operational needs,” a Homeland Security official told The Times on Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. He described the Border Patrol’s gain last year as a “a huge improvement.”
Border security agencies long have faced challenges with recruitment and retention of front-line federal law enforcement — in particular Border Patrol agents — much less swiftly hiring 15,000 more.
In March 2017, McAleenan said Customs and Border Protection normally loses about 1,380 agents a year as agents retire, quit for better-paying jobs or move. Just filling that hole each year has strained resources.
Beyond that, given historically low illegal immigration on the southern border, even the Homeland Security inspector general has questioned the need for the surge.
But administration officials argue an immigration system designed for single, adult Mexican men has become woefully outdated.
“The number of families and children we are apprehending at the border is at record-breaking levels,” another Homeland Security official said. “It’s having a dramatic impact on Border Patrol’s border security mission.”
Since 2015, CBP officers have been required to work overtime and sent on temporary assignments to “critically understaffed” points on the southwest border, Tony Reardon, president of the union representing about 30,000 CBP officers, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday.
After fighting for years for higher pay, staff and a better hiring process, Reardon said the agency needs to hire more officers for the 328 ports of entry.
“All of this contributes to a stronger border,” he said.
On Jan. 25, 2017, five days after Trump was inaugurated, he signed executive orders to hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, vowing to beef up border security and crack down on illegal immigration.
“Today the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said as he signed the orders.
Today, Customs and Border Protection — the Border Patrol’s parent agency — has more than 3,000 job vacancies, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
That’s about 2,000 more than when Trump signed the orders, according to a Government Accountability Office report on CBP’s hiring challenges.
Border Patrol staffing remains below the 21,360 agents mandated by Congress in 2016, which is itself 5,000 less than Trump’s order, according to the latest available data.
The CBP contract with Accenture, awarded in November 2017, has drawn special scrutiny for its high cost and limited results.
CBP officials told the House Homeland Security Committee in November that only 33 new officers had been hired. Under the terms of the contract, the company is paid about $40,000 for each one.
An entry-level Border Patrol agent is paid $52,583 a year.
In December, the Homeland Security inspector general’s office said Accenture and CBP were “nowhere near” filling the president’s hiring order.
It warned that if problems in the “hastily approved” contract are not addressed, CBP risks “wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.”
CBP subsequently scaled back the Accenture contract from $297 million to $83 million and issued a partial stop-work order. Officials said the agency will decide in March whether to cancel the rest of the contract.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the problem-plagued contract “reinforces my doubts” about CBP leadership.
“CBP cannot simply farm out its hiring and spend hundreds of millions without addressing systemic problems at the agency,” Thompson said.
Deirdre Blackwood, Accenture’s spokeswoman, told The Times, “We remain focused on fulfilling our client’s expectations under our contract.”
The first Homeland Security offical defended the contract. “You’ve got to be willing to innovate and try things. … In no way, shape or form was there fraud, waste or abuse.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement canceled a solicitation for a hiring contract with a similar pay structure to Accenture’s last May, citing delays in its hiring timeline and limited funding from Congress.
ICE said at the time it would restart the contracting process by the end of 2018 to help it meet Trump’s hiring order. It has yet to do so.
Homeland Security officials declined to say how much has been spent or how many people have been hired since Trump’s executive orders, saying the partial government shutdown prevented them from accessing the data.
The hiring surge foundered from the start.
In July 2017, six months after Trump signed his executive orders, the Homeland Security inspector general’s office said the agencies were facing “significant challenges” and could not justify the hiring surge.
Officials could not “provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional 15,000 additional agents and officers they were directed to hire,” the inspector general’s office wrote.
On Friday, Trump signed a bill to reopen the government until Feb. 15, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Tens of thousands of Border Patrol agents and CBP officers, among others, worked without pay.
Experts warned that previous attempts at a hiring surge led to greater corruption, a perennial problem for law enforcement on the border.
Drug cartels and other criminal groups target Border Patrol agents, offering bribes or even sexual favors to allow migrants, drugs and other contraband to cross the border.
To help fight corruption, the Border Patrol set strict vetting requirements, but those measures have slowed the hiring process.
Border Patrol applicants must pass cognitive, fitness and medical exams. They also must provide financial disclosure, undergo drug tests and pass a law enforcement background check and a polygraph test.
ICE doesn’t require the lie detector test, pays its agents more and places most of them in cities, not at isolated posts along the border.
Supporters of the CBP requirements call them necessary safeguards to prevent the scandals of past hiring surges. Critics view them as an impediment to putting more boots on the border.
CBP’s rigorous hiring requirements, including the polygraph test, were put in place by Congress in 2010 after the agency had doubled in size and Border Patrol notched an increase in corruption and a spate of deadly incidents.
The FBI still leads 22 border corruption task forces and working groups nationwide.
In recent years, some lawmakers tried to help CBP get rid of the polygraph test. In 2017, the agency got the green light to waive the requirement for certain military veterans and began to test a version that improved pass rates.
Partly as a result, CBP has increased hiring of “frontline personnel” by nearly 15% and increased its applicant pool by 40% in the last three years, according to a Homeland Security 2019 budget document.
The agency has also cut the time it takes to hire from roughly 400 days to about 270 days. The government’s goal for hiring is 80 days, but CBP has said that’s not feasible.
Part of the problem stems from the Trump administration’s funding disputes with Congress over border security.
“We have to hire to the money that we’re appropriated, at the end of the day,” the first Homeland Security official said.
After Trump signed his executive orders in 2017, ICE requested $830 million to hire about 3,000 new officers and build capacity to ultimately bring on 10,000, according to a Government and Accountability Office report.
Instead, Congress last year gave ICE $15.7 million for 65 new agents plus 70 attorneys and support staff.
Over the past two years, ICE has brought on 1,325 investigators and deportation officers, according to the agency. The agency typically loses nearly 800 law enforcement officers each year, so it has not kept pace and remains far behind the president’s order.
For its part, CBP requested $330 million to hire 1,250 Border Patrol agents and build capacity to ultimately hire 5,000, according to the GAO report.
Congress gave CBP about $65 million in 2017 to improve hiring practices and to offer incentives for agents to transfer to understaffed sites. In 2018, it provided $20 million more than the agency sought for recruitment and retention.
“CBP faced high attrition rates even before the Trump administration made it a polarizing organization,” said Thompson, the House Homeland Security chairman.

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The Trump Administration clearly is the “Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight!” So why would you give them more bullets with which to shoot themselves in the foot? They have also been totally unaccountable for how money is spent and what results they produce.

Let’s not forget that Trump’s original 15,000 number was totally bogus — made up out of thin air and actually questioned by the DHS Inspector General, given that border apprehensions had dropped significantly even before Trump took office.

And, the current “surge” is equally bogus. It’s not “illegal entrants.” No, it’s primarily family units seeking to legally apply for asylum who line up patiently at ports of entry or immediately turn themselves in to the nearest Border Patrol Agent.

So why does this humanitarian situation that has nothing to do with real law enforcement or the smuggling of drugs or contraband require a wall or more Border Patrol Agents? The answer is simple: It doesn’t! That’s particularly true because neither the wall nor the additional agents will arrive in time to have any effect whatsoever on the flow of legal asylum seekers? How gullible and misinformed can the American public be?

Even if they got the money, these clowns probably couldn’t get the wall built within the next decade. And, everyone forgets that walls don’t maintain themselves. The more they build, the more they will need to maintain and replace. Cartels and smugglers must be laughing their tails off at how Trump’s inane White Nationalist fixation on a largely cosmetic symbol is actually helping them and taking attention away from real law enforcement priorities.

 

PWS

01-26-19

 

SISTER NORMA PIMENTEL: A MESSAGE TO TRUMP FROM THE REAL BORDER

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/10/welcome-border-mr-president/

Sister Norma Pimentel in WashPost:

Norma Pimentel, a sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, is director of Catholic Charities for the Rio Grande Valley.

Dear Mr. President,

We welcome you to our community here in South Texas along the Rio Grande, which connects the United States to Mexico. I wish you could visit us. Our downtown Humanitarian Respite Center has been welcoming newcomers for the past four years.

When families cross the border, they are typically apprehended by authorities, held for a few days and released with a court date to consider their request for asylum. After they are released, we receive them at our respite center. By the time they find their way to our doors, most adults are wearing Border Patrol-supplied ankle bracelets and carrying bulky chargers to keep those devices powered up.

Helping these families has been our work since 2014, when tens of thousands of people, primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, crossed into the United States through the Rio Grande Valley Sector, creating a humanitarian emergency in our community. Before the respite center opened, dozens of immigrant families, hungry, scared and in a foreign land, huddled at the bus station with only the clothes on their back, nothing to eat or drink, and nowhere to shower or sleep. They waited hours and sometimes overnight for their buses.

Every day of the year, from morning to evening, families coming over the border are welcomed at our center with smiles, a warm bowl of soup, a shower and a place to rest. Most families are exhausted and afraid, carrying little more than a few belongings in a plastic bag. They come in all forms and at all ages. Few speak any English. Most are in great need of help. Some days, we see 20 people. Other days, it’s closer to 300. In recent weeks, it has been very busy. Some stay a few hours, but many spend the night before heading on to new destinations. Since we opened, more than 100,000 have come through our doors.

We work closely with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Rio Grande Valley Sector, and our team has cultivated a culture of mutual respect and dialogue. Our center staff, in communication with the Border Patrol, prepares to receive groups of immigrants who have been released. We try to meet the need. It is vital that we keep our country safe, and I appreciate the work of the men and women in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection who are vigilant as to who enters our country. I pray for them daily.

Later in the day, you will meet some of the children who are playing in our small play yard and the mothers and fathers who are watching over them. Some will be resting, as for many of them this is the first place since they left their home countries where they feel safe.

In the evening, another group of volunteers arrives to cook and serve a simple dinner of pizza or tacos, beans and rice, Sometimes local restaurants donate the dinner. Either way, the families who will remain for the night have a meal and prepare to sleep. In the morning, we send them on their way, a little better off but armed with a sign (that we give them) that reads: “ PLEASE HELP ME. I DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. WHAT BUS DO I TAKE? THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!”

As the Most Rev. Daniel E. Flores, bishop of our diocese, says, “We must put human dignity first.”

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This is a more accurate picture of Central American asylum seekers which reflects the inspirational qualities of courage, ingenuity,  perseverance, gratitude, and industry that I found in the most of the asylum-seeking individuals and families I came in contact with over my years at the Arlington Immigration Court.

Also, Sister Norma paints a more sympathetic picture of the U.S. Border Patrol which reflects some of my experiences when I worked with them at the “Legacy INS.”

Imagine what even a few billion (or even a few million) dollars invested in humanitarian assistance like that provided by Sister Pimentel and her organization could do as opposed to wasteful spending on more largely useless walls and wasteful and inhumane detention centers.

Walls, jails, prosecutions, threats, and disingenuous de-humanizing rhetoric are not effective or acceptable ways of dealing with a humanitarian crisis.

PWS

01-10-19

DACA MESS: GOP AGs FILE SUIT WITH “FRIENDLY” JUDGE TRYING TO FORCE SUPREME’S HAND ON DACA!

7 states sue to end DACA, potentially jumbling its legal future

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

The future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program got murkier Tuesday when the Texas attorney general made good on a threat to challenge it in court.

The lawsuit throws a wrench in an already-complicated legal morass for the DACA program, which protects young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children and which President Donald Trump has been blocked from ending, for the time being, by other federal courts.

The lawsuit has the potential to create a headache for the Justice Department and courts as it could potentially conflict with rulings from judges in three separate judicial regions of the country who have blocked the end of DACA and could force the government to take an awkward position in the case.

It may also potentially seal the issue’s path to the Supreme Court.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and six other states on Tuesday filed a lawsuit challenging the lawfulness of DACA, arguing that former President Barack Obama’s initial creation of DACA in 2012 violated the Constitution and federal law.

The move follows through on a threat from Paxton and what was originally nine other states to challenge DACA in court as part of a lawsuit regarding a similar but broader program that expanded upon DACA to include parents. Paxton issued an ultimatum to Trump: End DACA himself or defend it in court and face the prospect it is overturned by a judge that had already rejected the program’s expansion in that other lawsuit.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/politics/daca-lawsuit-challenge-texas/index.html

(Bonus link: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/us/border-patrol-agent-less-dangerous-than-being-police-officer-invs/index.html )

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The DACA kids aren’t going anywhere. It’s just a question of how much unnecessary pain and suffering can be inflicted on America’s future leaders and how much enmity from the growing Hispanic electorate Paxton and his White Nationalist cronies will create for the GOP. It figures to be lots.

Hopefully, enough to eventually lead to the GOP’s demise as a viable political force in US politics and the rise of a non-racist Conservative opposition party to take its place.

No, it’s not going to happen in my lifetime! But, hopefully in my kids or grandchildren’s. That’s really what the “New Due Process Army” is all about!

On the “bonus coverage,” it’s a shame that the false narratives about immigration and crime pushed by DHS and encouraged by the Trump Administration are eclipsing truth and understanding.

I’ll testify from my work representing and training Border Patrol Agents at the “Legacy INS” that it’s a difficult, dangerous, important, and thankless job. The vast majority of Border Patrol Agents perform it with courage, dedication, and professionalism. I had friends in the Patrol. Somewhere in the dusty recesses of the Schmidt attic among the remains of my Government career is a box of Border Patrol mementos and memorabilia.

Immigration law enforcement is also being hurt by the bogus White Nationalist “scare stories,” false crime narratives, and constant overt and covert messages of racism being delivered by Trump, Sessions, and their cronies. In the end their dishonest and distorted picture of immigrant communities, the asylum system, their denial of the contributions of all migrants, and their constant over hyping of the dangers of undocumented immigration (it’s been a net gain for the US, and would be an even greater net gain had we enacted a more rational and realistic legal immigration system) hurt everybody in the US, including law enforcement.

In this, as in most situations, a Government dedicated to truth rather than lies and exaggerations designed to divide our country and “fire up” a voter base would better serve the national interest and the interests of everyone concerned.

The Border Patrol’s mission can and should stand on its own merits. It doesn’t need inflated statistics and false narratives.

PWS

05-03-18

 

 

STEVE VLADECK: How U.S. Courts Undermine Our Constitution — A Constitution Without Remedy For Violations Is An Empty Document!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/increasingly-unenforceable-constitution.html

Vladeck writes in a New York Times op-ed:

For all of the attention that we pay to our constitutional rights, we devote stunningly little attention to the more legalistic — but no less important — topic of how those rights are enforced. And as a largely unnoticed rulinglast week by the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit demonstrates, the Supreme Court has quietly made it all but impossible for most victims of constitutional violations by the federal government to obtain relief.

Not only is this development antithetical to the core purpose of having an independent judiciary, but it will almost certainly lead to more unconstitutional conduct by even the most well-meaning federal officers, who, in most cases, no longer have to seriously worry about the specter of judicial review.

Image
Maria Guadalupe Guereca’s son was shot dead in Mexico near the border by a patrol agent on the U.S. side.CreditYuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The case that the New Orleans-based federal appeals court ruled on involved the fatal cross-border shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican national on Mexican soil by a United States Border Patrol agent standing on American soil. The family of the victim, Sergio Hernández, sued the responsible agent, Jesus Mesa, claiming that the shooting was unprovoked and violated the teenager’s rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Whether the Constitution protects a foreign national standing on foreign soil in a case like this is an interesting and still-open question. But rather than resolving that issue, the Court of Appeals held, by a 13-2 vote, that it didn’t matter; even if the shooting violated clearly established constitutional rights, the majority concluded, the federal courts should not recognize a remedy of damages for fear of intruding upon the legislative and executive branches of government.

. . . .

That’s a troubling conclusion, because government officers like Agent Mesa will have less of a reason to worry about the constitutional rights of those with whom they interact. But at a deeper level, our constitutional rights aren’t worth all that much if there’s no mechanism for enforcing them. One can only hope that sometime soon the Supreme Court comes to its senses and agrees.

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Go on over to the NYT at the link for the full op-ed.

I decried the Fifth Circuit’s dereliction of duty in a recent blog focusing on the much more persuasively reasoned and powerful dissent by Judge Edward Prado.  But, only one of his other 14 black-robed Ivory Towerists were willing to join Judge Prado, step up to the plate, and defend our constitutional rights. What kind of folks and jurists are getting these lifetime sinecures just to avoid controversy and not to stand up for what’s right?

Yup. Today it’s just some Mexican kid (who also happened to be a human being and someone’s son) who was shot by the Border Patrol. But, tomorrow it might be your son or daughter or you yourself whose rights are violated. And, who is going to step up and vindicate your constitutional rights? Certainly not the 13 judges of the Fifth Circuit majority in Hernandez v. Mesa who looked for and found ways to avoid their collective duty to uphold our Constitution.

PWS

03-29-18