US DISTRICT COURT SLAMS DHS FOR NOT FOLLOWING DACA REVOCATION PROCEDURES! — TORRES V. DHS

DACA-TOPRRES-SDCA

Torres v. DHS, SDCA, 09-29-17, Hon. Torres v. DHS United States District Judge

KEY QUOTE FROM JUDGE MILLER’S OPINION:

“Defendants broadly argue that the DHS possesses such broad prosecutorial discretion that they need not follow the DACA SOP in terminating the status of DAC recipients. The court categorically rejects this proposition. While Defendants are granted broad discretion to commence, adjudicate, and execute removal orders, a fundamental principle of federal law is that a federal agency must follow its own procedures. Morton v. Ruiz, 415 U.S. 199, 233-35 (1974) (“[W]here the rights of individuals are affected, it is incumbent upon agencies to follow their own procedures.”); Nicholas v. INS, 590 F.2d 802, 809 (9th Cir.1979) (holding that INS violated its own regulation in processing a non-citizen’s request for immigration records); United States v. Heffner, 420 F.2d 809 (4th Cir. 1969) (courts must overturn agency actions which do not scrupulously follow the regulations and procedures promulgated by the agency itself). In Accardi, 347 U.S. 260, the petitioner alleged that the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) failed to exercise its discretion in determining his application for suspension of deportation. Id. at 261. Petitioner alleged that the BIA deferred to the decision of the Attorney General and, therefore, did not exercise its own regulatory discretion in determining his application. The BIA denied petitioner’s application allegedly because petitioner’s name was on a list of immigrants the Attorney General wanted deported. The regulatory scheme required the BIA to exercise its own judgment when considering immigration appeals, and not to rely upon the Attorney General’s determinations. The Supreme Court reversed the BIA’s denial of the application and remanded for further proceedings because the BIA allegedly failed to exercise its own discretion as required by its own relevant regulations.”

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Read the complete decision at the link.

Judge Miller found that the DHS “acted arbitrarily, capriciously, and abused their discretion.” Sadly, arbitrary, capricious, and abusive actions that sow fear and uncertainty in migrant communities are at the heart of the Trump-Sessions “Gonzo Enforcement Program.” But, they don’t always manifest themselves in ways so easy to prove to an Article III Judge.

Still, there is some good language here on the limits of DH/S prosecutorial discretion.That issue is likely to be tested over and over again in the Article III Courts.

PWS

10-03-17

NYT: THE “ANTI-DREAMERS'” (KNOWINGLY) FALSE NARRATIVE!

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/us/politics/why-common-critiques-of-daca-are-misleading.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Linda Qiu writes:

“Defenders of President Trump’s decision to rescind an Obama-era immigration policy that shielded young immigrants from deportation have offered misleading critiques of the program.

They say the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, known as DACA, led to a humanitarian crisis on the border, put native-born Americans out of work and conferred legal status to recipients. Here’s an assessment.

DACA does not specifically grant legal permanent residency or citizenship, but there are pathways for recipients.
Conservative news personalities have suggested that DACA leads to citizenship or that recipients are eligible. These claims require more context.

DACA grants recipients work permission and protects them from deportation, but it alone does not confer citizenship or legal permanent resident status. They are not granted legal status, according to the Department of Homeland Security, though their removals are deferred.

But, according to immigration data, just under 40,000 DACA recipients have obtained “green cards,” or legal permanent residency, and over 1,000 have become American citizens. This is possible because DACA recipients can change their immigration status through a legal basis other than DACA (like marrying an American citizen).

While immigration law bars people who overstayed their visa from returning to the United States for three or 10 years, depending on how long they have resided here unlawfully, DACA halts recipients’ accrual of “unlawful presence.” So someone who obtained DACA status before the re-entry penalty was triggered would remain protected from it.

DACA recipients who entered the country illegally cannot apply for residency the same way as people who entered legally and overstayed their visas. They can, however, apply for “advance parole,” which gives recipients permission to travel outside the United States under special circumstances and is not specific to DACA. When they return to the United States, they enter legally, opening up other avenues for legal status.

It’s misleading to suggest that DACA triggered a wave of migration from Central America.
In a statement, Mr. Trump blamed DACA for spurring “the massive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America,” a claim echoed by his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and other Republican lawmakers. But the link between DACA and the humanitarian crisis in 2014 is largely anecdotal and overstated.

Nearly 70,000 children, overwhelmingly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, tried to cross the United States border alone in the 2014 fiscal year. They would not have qualified for DACA, a program for undocumented immigrants brought in before age 16 who had been living in the United States since 2007.

There were certainly reports of children who listed American immigration policy as having prompted their solo journeys. The Obama administration’s clarification that the minors were not eligible for DACA also suggests a need to swat away the notion. And researchers have noted the possibility that DACA might have given migrants hope that the United States could provide future reprieve from deportation.

Still, it’s a stretch to say DACA was the single or even the main motivating factor behind the surge in migrant children reaching the border. For one, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran applications for asylum to other Central American countries increased by 1,185 percent from 2008 to 2014, showing that the children were seeking relief not only in the United States.

More significant drivers of the migration were violence, poverty, gang presence, economic opportunity and the desire to be reunified with family, and “it remains unclear if, and how, specific immigration policies have motivated children to migrate to the United States,” according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report.

Department of Homeland Security data also shows that the surge in unaccompanied minors preceded President Barack Obama’s June 2012 DACA executive order. The number of apprehensions began to rise in January 2012 and plateaued from June 2012 to January 2013, before increasing and then peaking in May and June of 2014.

The evidence that DACA recipients have displaced native-born workers is lacking.
According to Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, more than four million unemployed Americans in the same age group as DACA recipients “could possibly have those jobs” held by DACA recipients. And Mr. Sessions was more emphatic: The executive order “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”

While it’s certainly possible that there are individual cases of an employer hiring a DACA recipient instead of an American citizen, the claim of a widespread trend is unproved.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that trends in foreign-born and native-born unemployment rates have not changed with DACA. For example, the unemployment rate for natives who had attended college was lower than their foreign-born peers both before and after 2012, while the unemployment rate for natives without a high school diploma has consistently been higher than the foreign-born population.

Similarly, DACA appears to have had no discernible effect on the number of total job openings or those specifically in white collar industries — where DACA recipients are more commonly employed — which have been steadily rising since mid-2009. Economists dispute the overarching argument that less immigration leads to more jobs for Americans.

The defense that Mr. Trump’s order does not open up DACA recipients to deportation is false.
Rescinding DACA will not lead to the “mass deportation of people,” the conservative radio host and author Laura Ingraham said in an interview on Fox News. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argued on CNN that the “only folks that are subject to deportation right now are those that have engaged in criminal activity.”

Mr. Jordan’s claim is false. The Department of Homeland Security has been clear that officials will potentially arrest and deport any undocumented immigrant without protected status, regardless of a criminal record. Though undocumented immigrants with criminal records still make up the majority of immigration arrests, noncriminal arrests more than doubled in Mr. Trump’s first 100 days as president, compared to the same time period in 2016.

Immigration lawyers say it’s too early to tell whether DACA recipients, who had to provide personal information to officials to apply for the status, will especially be at risk after Mr. Trump’s order. Previously, their information was “protected from disclosure” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection for the purpose of enforcement. The order, however, notes that information “will not be proactively provided to ICE and CBP,” and the president has said that former recipients would not be a priority for deportation.

“It’s very unclear to me whether U.S.C.I.S. will share that information if ICE affirmatively asks,” said Kate Voigt of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, referring to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. It is clear, though, that Mr. Trump’s order rescinding DACA opens recipients up to deportation.”

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Truth is that DACA is good for the U.S. But, truth seldom, if ever, enters into the restrictionist White Nationalist narrative.

PWS

09-10-17

IN HARVEY’S WAKE: GONZO’S ANTI-DREAMER POLICIES LIKELY TO CAUSE MORE LASTING DAMAGE TO HOUSTON THAN STORM: Homes & Businesses Can Be Rebuilt — Ruined Lives, Dashed Dreams, & Destroyed Trust Can’t: “how suffering can needlessly be inflicted!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/opinion/daca-trump-hurricane-harvey-.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region%C2%AEion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Lacy M. Johnson writes in the NY Times:

“HOUSTON — As the floodwaters rose in my west Houston neighborhood after Hurricane Harvey landed, my husband and many of our neighbors pulled boats through waist-high water, knocked on doors and plucked people from their submerged houses. They rescued elderly couples, young roommates, families who do not speak English. There was no checking of IDs, no debate on whether a life was worth saving.

All across the city, as catastrophic flooding threatened to drown us, regular people risked their lives to help others. Alonso Guillen, a radio host and D.J. who lived in Lufkin, Tex., two hours from Houston, brought a boat and a group of friends here to join in those efforts. He was on that boat, saving people he had never met before, when it capsized last Wednesday and he drowned. Alonso Guillen died a hero, if not an American citizen. He was a Dreamer, a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and like the nearly 141,000 other Dreamers in Texas, he followed the requirements of the program — to stay in school or be gainfully employed — and had never been convicted of a crime. More than that, Texas was his home.

Around the time Alonso Guillen was buried in Lufkin, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced President Trump’s decision to cancel the DACA program, saying that “enforcing the law saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering.” Instead, what the announcement shows is how suffering can needlessly be inflicted.

The end of DACA means that hundreds of thousands of people nationwide will lose their eligibility to work. As many as 80,000 Dreamers in the greater Houston area alone could be deported to countries where they have no relationships, where they do not even speak the language. It is the disaster of this decision — more than the hurricane — that threatens to tear our city apart.

. . . .

Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the choice to end DACA “the compassionate thing.” But this decision doesn’t look like any kind of compassion I’ve seen in Houston, where everyone I know has chosen to open their homes to strangers, to feed them, clothe them, raise money for the restoration of their homes. Even people whose own houses were destroyed are helping others in the ways they can.

. . . .

The conversation about what comes next, how to rebuild and how to engineer a more equitable city, is a long one and is now only beginning. Tomorrow, some of us will choose to prepare meals, to join a work crew, to deliver donations on a flatbed truck. We’re planning to fight like hell for every single one of our Dreamers — to keep them where they are already home.”

Lacy M. Johnson is the author of “The Other Side: A Memoir” and the forthcoming essay collection “The Reckonings.”

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Hurricanes are “acts of God” (aggravated by anti-science politicians and unwise, greed-driven choices in urban development). But, empowering White Nationalist restrictionists and their gonzo views and policies on immigration is purely a man-made disaster that can be reversed at the ballot box.  (That’s why White Nationalist Kris Kobach and his Voter Suppression Commission is working so hard to restrict suffrage!)

PWS

09-08-17

 

NYT EDITORIAL ON DACA: Trump Is A Coward & Sessions Is A Liar

“President Trump didn’t even have the guts to do the job himself. Instead, he hid in the shadows and sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do the dirty work of telling the country that the administration would no longer shield from deportation 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children.

Mr. Sessions, a longtime anti-immigrant hard-liner, was more than up to the task. In a short, disingenuous speech, he said a program set up by President Barack Obama in 2012 — known as DACA, for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was a lawless policy that “yielded terrible humanitarian consequences” and denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of American citizens. (Mr. Trump echoed these claims in a statement released by the White House.) Mr. Sessions called DACA “an unconstitutional exercise of authority” and said “failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and terrorism.”

False, false, false and false.

DACA recipients are not threats to public safety or national security; to the contrary, they must have a nearly spotless record to be eligible in the first place. They do not receive legal status in this country, only a two-year, renewable deferral of deportation along with a work permit and eligibility for other government benefits down the road. And they are not taking jobs from native-born Americans, whose declining levels of employment can be chalked up to other factors.

As for the policy’s legality, there’s no question that the president has the authority to set immigration-enforcement priorities. Presidents of both parties have done that for decades, and President Obama did it by focusing on people with criminal records and not on those brought to this country as children. For most of this latter group, the United States is the only home they’ve ever known. About 9 in 10 are working taxpayers, and deporting them could reduce the gross domestic product by over $400 billion over the next decade.

In short, DACA is morally right, legally sound and fiscally smart policy. It was also the only humane choice Mr. Obama had in the face of Congress’s failure to pass any meaningful immigration reform in the last two decades.

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If all that weren’t enough, DACA remains overwhelmingly popular among Americans of all political stripes. Polls put its approval rating at roughly double that of President Trump himself. Even the Chamber of Commerce, usually a reliable backer of the Republican legislative agenda, called the decision to end DACA “contrary to fundamental American principles.”

The only bad thing that could be said about DACA is that, because it was a presidential memorandum, it was always vulnerable to being undone by a shortsighted administration playing to its base.

Now that that has happened, 800,000 people — all of whom gave their personal information and immigration status to the government, believing it would not be used against them — face the prospect of being shipped back to a country they may have no connection to or even remember.

This wouldn’t be a concern if Congress had done its job and passed the Dream Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for people brought to this country as children, and which has kicked around Capitol Hill for 16 years. Even though it has been stymied mainly by Republican opposition at every turn, it’s still theoretically on the table. But there’s little sign the dwindling Republican moderates in Congress have the stomach to confront their party’s nativist core. Mr. Trump called on Congress to act, but didn’t have the courage to tell it what he wanted it to do.

Contrast that with President Obama’s willingness to defend a policy that has always had detractors. “Ultimately, this is about basic decency,” Mr. Obama wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. “This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated.”

Mr. Trump has no good rejoinder. That’s partly because there isn’t one and partly because, as is so often the case, he doesn’t fully understand the scope of what he’s done. One would hope that the widespread outrage at Tuesday’s announcement, and the impending suffering of hundreds of thousands of people who’ve done nothing but try to become contributing members of society, might impress it upon him.”

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Amen!

 

PWS

09-05-17

VOX NEWS: Four Lies (And A Misleading Statement) About DACA From General Gonzo —

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/5/16255436/lies-jeff-sessions-daca

VOX reports:

 

“On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced the Trump administration will rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields nearly 800,000 young, unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Explaining why the Trump administration is ending the program, Sessions made several dubious claims about DACA, including how it has impacted immigration and the American economy. We fact-checked some of those claims.

DACA recipients are mostly “adult illegal aliens”
“The DACA program was implemented in 2012 and essentially provided a legal status for recipients for a renewable two-year term, worker authorization and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program, to 800,000 mostly adult illegal aliens.”

The majority of DACA recipients are adults now, but the whole reason they were given DACA status in the first place is because they were brought to the United States as children — on average, arriving at the age of 6. The whole point of DACA and the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (also known as the DREAM Act, which has been introduced several times in Congress but never passed) was that it was a way for immigrant children who were brought to the US by their parents to have a pathway to school and work. DACA was offered to those immigrants precisely because they were young and had the potential to pursue education, get jobs, and become productive members of American society.

When the Obama administration first implemented DACA in 2012, it set a specific age range. In order to apply, immigrants had to arrive in the US before 2007. They needed to have been 15 or younger when they arrived and younger than 31 when DACA was created in June 2012. While DREAMers are often referred to as “kids,” most of them are currently in their 20s, and some are as old as 35. Some now have kids of their own, who are American citizens.

DACA contributed to a “surge of minors” streaming across the border
“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border with humanitarian consequences.”

 

While it’s true there has been a surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the border in recent years, there’s a lot of disagreement on whether it has anything to do with DACA. The program was implemented in 2012, while the border surge started a year earlier, in 2011. One study by San Diego State University researchers in 2015 found the surge had much more to do with increasing violence and worsening economic conditions in Central American countries, which were forcing people to flee.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and San Diego State conducted separate surveys of children crossing the border around this time and found that a very small percentage knew anything about DACA or how it could benefit them. Only one out of 400 refugee children surveyed by the UN had ever heard of it. About 15 children out of the 400 surveyed by San Diego State believed they would be treated differently by US border patrol agents, but they didn’t know the specifics of the DACA program. If children were unable to tell border patrol agents that they would be in danger if they were sent back, they were still vulnerable for deportation.

DACA granted unauthorized immigrants the same benefits as Americans, including Social Security
“… and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program …”

This statement is true, but it could easily be misinterpreted: No DACA immigrant is yet eligible to draw Social Security benefits.

By saying “other benefits,” Sessions seems to imply that immigrants with DACA protection are getting the same public benefits as ordinary American families. That’s not true. DACA workers are not eligible for Obamacare subsidies, Medicaid, food stamps, or cash assistance. The statement also makes it sound like DACA workers are depleting Social Security funds, when in fact the opposite is happening.

Since the program went into effect in 2012, DACA workers and their employers have contributed billions of dollars to the Social Security system through payroll taxes. That means that ending DACA could cost the federal government $19.9 billion in Social Security revenue over ten years, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Meanwhile, DACA recipients can’t currently collect Social Security benefits. For one, they have to work (legally) at least 10 years to be eligible for them, and DACA has only been around for five years. Second, all DACA recipients are under 36, so they are nowhere near retirement age. For now, then, DACA workers are giving a needed boost to the Social Security system and helping fund the retirements of millions of Americans.

DREAMers took jobs from “hundreds of thousands of Americans”
“It denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”

This is almost certainly false. The economic evidence is very clear that immigration is a huge boon for Americans as a whole. In part that’s because of complementarity: Immigrants don’t take jobs from Americans; they let Americans take higher-skill jobs (ones requiring English language fluency, for instance) and complement their labor. America’s past experience confirms this. When the US ended a guest worker program that let Mexican laborers work on US farms in the early 1960s, wages for US farm workers didn’t rise at all, nor did more Americans get jobs. Companies simply bought more machines to make up for the lost workers.

Ending DACA will be good for immigrants
Ending DACA “will enable our country to more effectively teach new immigrants about our system of government and to assimilate them.”

This assertion has the virtue of being impossible to officially prove wrong. It’s rooted in the theory that anything the government does to regularize unauthorized immigrants, ever, will send a message to all would-be future immigrants (now and forever) that they don’t need to follow the law — so the only way to protect the rule of law is to send the message that the rule of law is respected.

Sessions and other immigration hardliners use the idea of “sending a message” to link the government’s policy at the border to its policies toward unauthorized immigrants who are currently in the US. It’s a clever move politically: the majority of Americans want DACA recipients to stay in the US, but they also want the border secure. If they think that doing the former puts the latter in jeopardy, they’re less likely to push for it.

But this theory isn’t just wrong in the particulars (see Sessions’s earlier claims about the link between DACA and the Central American border crisis of 2014). It’s a total misunderstanding of who, exactly, is in the US and would need to be “assimilated.”

The 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the US are, for the most part, a settled population. The average unauthorized immigrant has been in the US for over 10 years; the average DACA recipient has been in the US for 20 (having come at an average age of 6, and being on average 26 years old now).

Ironically, those immigrants settled in the US in large part because the US/Mexico border became more tightly patrolled over the 1990s and 2000s. And because they aren’t able to leave the country and return safely, they are less likely to have gone back to their home countries than legal immigrants are.

The result is that unauthorized immigrants are actually much more settled and rooted in the US than their legal-immigrant counterparts.

Ending DACA doesn’t necessarily change that. Immigrants haven’t yet “self-deported” in any large numbers. But ending DACA does make it harder for the immigrants who are settled here — and their US-born children — to fully integrate. Sessions is using the assimilation of hypothetical future immigrants to deny “assimilation” to the immigrants who are here now.

ress but never passed) was that it was a way for immigrant children who were brought to the US by their parents to have a pathway to school and work. DACA was offered to those immigrants precisely because they were young and had the potential to pursue education, get jobs, and become productive members of American society.

When the Obama administration first implemented DACA in 2012, it set a specific age range. In order to apply, immigrants had to arrive in the US before 2007. They needed to have been 15 or younger when they arrived and younger than 31 when DACA was created in June 2012. While DREAMers are often referred to as “kids,” most of them are currently in their 20s, and some are as old as 35. Some now have kids of their own, who are American citizens.

DACA contributed to a “surge of minors” streaming across the border
“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border with humanitarian consequences.”

 

While it’s true there has been a surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the border in recent years, there’s a lot of disagreement on whether it has anything to do with DACA. The program was implemented in 2012, while the border surge started a year earlier, in 2011. One study by San Diego State University researchers in 2015 found the surge had much more to do with increasing violence and worsening economic conditions in Central American countries, which were forcing people to flee.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and San Diego State conducted separate surveys of children crossing the border around this time and found that a very small percentage knew anything about DACA or how it could benefit them. Only one out of 400 refugee children surveyed by the UN had ever heard of it. About 15 children out of the 400 surveyed by San Diego State believed they would be treated differently by US border patrol agents, but they didn’t know the specifics of the DACA program. If children were unable to tell border patrol agents that they would be in danger if they were sent back, they were still vulnerable for deportation.

DACA granted unauthorized immigrants the same benefits as Americans, including Social Security
“… and other benefits, including participation in the Social Security program …”

This statement is true, but it could easily be misinterpreted: No DACA immigrant is yet eligible to draw Social Security benefits.

By saying “other benefits,” Sessions seems to imply that immigrants with DACA protection are getting the same public benefits as ordinary American families. That’s not true. DACA workers are not eligible for Obamacare subsidies, Medicaid, food stamps, or cash assistance. The statement also makes it sound like DACA workers are depleting Social Security funds, when in fact the opposite is happening.

Since the program went into effect in 2012, DACA workers and their employers have contributed billions of dollars to the Social Security system through payroll taxes. That means that ending DACA could cost the federal government $19.9 billion in Social Security revenue over ten years, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Meanwhile, DACA recipients can’t currently collect Social Security benefits. For one, they have to work (legally) at least 10 years to be eligible for them, and DACA has only been around for five years. Second, all DACA recipients are under 36, so they are nowhere near retirement age. For now, then, DACA workers are giving a needed boost to the Social Security system and helping fund the retirements of millions of Americans.

DREAMers took jobs from “hundreds of thousands of Americans”
“It denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”

This is almost certainly false. The economic evidence is very clear that immigration is a huge boon for Americans as a whole. In part that’s because of complementarity: Immigrants don’t take jobs from Americans; they let Americans take higher-skill jobs (ones requiring English language fluency, for instance) and complement their labor. America’s past experience confirms this. When the US ended a guest worker program that let Mexican laborers work on US farms in the early 1960s, wages for US farm workers didn’t rise at all, nor did more Americans get jobs. Companies simply bought more machines to make up for the lost workers.

Ending DACA will be good for immigrants
Ending DACA “will enable our country to more effectively teach new immigrants about our system of government and to assimilate them.”

This assertion has the virtue of being impossible to officially prove wrong. It’s rooted in the theory that anything the government does to regularize unauthorized immigrants, ever, will send a message to all would-be future immigrants (now and forever) that they don’t need to follow the law — so the only way to protect the rule of law is to send the message that the rule of law is respected.

Sessions and other immigration hardliners use the idea of “sending a message” to link the government’s policy at the border to its policies toward unauthorized immigrants who are currently in the US. It’s a clever move politically: the majority of Americans want DACA recipients to stay in the US, but they also want the border secure. If they think that doing the former puts the latter in jeopardy, they’re less likely to push for it.

But this theory isn’t just wrong in the particulars (see Sessions’s earlier claims about the link between DACA and the Central American border crisis of 2014). It’s a total misunderstanding of who, exactly, is in the US and would need to be “assimilated.”

The 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the US are, for the most part, a settled population. The average unauthorized immigrant has been in the US for over 10 years; the average DACA recipient has been in the US for 20 (having come at an average age of 6, and being on average 26 years old now).

Ironically, those immigrants settled in the US in large part because the US/Mexico border became more tightly patrolled over the 1990s and 2000s. And because they aren’t able to leave the country and return safely, they are less likely to have gone back to their home countries than legal immigrants are.

The result is that unauthorized immigrants are actually much more settled and rooted in the US than their legal-immigrant counterparts.

Ending DACA doesn’t necessarily change that. Immigrants haven’t yet “self-deported” in any large numbers. But ending DACA does make it harder for the immigrants who are settled here — and their US-born children — to fully integrate. Sessions is using the assimilation of hypothetical future immigrants to deny “assimilation” to the immigrants who are here now.”

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America’s leading xenophobe racist continues to roll out the false White Nationalist narrative.

PWS

09-05-17

MORE BETTER ANGELS: A Message From AYUDA Executive Director Paula Fitzgerald

AYUDA STANDS WITH DREAMERS

September 5, 2017
Dear Arleen:
The Trump Administration announced at 11:00 am this morning its decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program. A centerpiece of U.S. immigration policy under President Barack Obama, who started the program by Executive Order seven years ago, DACA permitted young immigrant “Dreamers” to stay in the United States to go to school and work without fear of deportation.
As of today, the Department of Homeland Security will no longer accept new DACA applications. Only those individuals with less than six months of status remaining will be permitted to continue to renew their work permits until October 5, 2018.
In the Washington, D.C. region, more than 40,000 Dreamers will be affected. For the majority of these Dreamers, the United States is the only home they’ve known.
We believe a policy decision to threaten Dreamers with deportation and prevent them from obtaining legal employment in the United States harms children and families, undermines our shared values as a nation, and threatens the strength of our communities and economy.
Immigrants turn to Ayuda in their greatest hour of need. In this uncertain time, you will find us where we must be: in trusted consultation with the immigrants whose lives are at stake, providing honest guidance, fearless representation, and holistic support. Our team of attorneys, social workers, language access program partners, and volunteers stand ready. We are under no illusion about the magnitude of the challenge facing young immigrants nor the potential threat it poses to their safety, stability, and livelihoods. It will take the entire Ayuda community coming together to ensure that immigrants do not walk this path alone.
As a member of the Ayuda community, you are, and will continue to be, a source of strength for Ayuda and for the immigrant families we serve. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Paula Fitzgerald
Executive Director

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Thanks, Paula, to you and everyone at AYUDA for your unwavering support and efforts in behalf of the “Good Hombres.”

PWS

09-05-17

I am a member of AYUDA’s Advisory Council.

SLATE: “Jeff Sessions Spews Nativist Lies While Explaining Why Trump Is Killing DACA!”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/05/sessions_daca_speech_was_full_of_nativist_lies.html

Mark Joseph Stern writes:

“Many Republicans have made clear in recent weeks that they favor the basic policy DACA enshrined, and merely oppose its executive implementation. Sessions, who helped persuade Trump to kill the program, is not one of those Republicans. In his remarks, he directly denounced the very idea of granting any kind of amnesty to undocumented individuals brought to the U.S. as children through no fault of their own. At the heart of his speech were two lies, straight from Breitbart, explaining why DACA must end:

The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.

Let’s examine these falsehoods in turn.

First: Sessions claimed that DACA “contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border.” This allegation, often touted by far-right xenophobes, is false. A study published in International Migration, a peer-reviewed academic journal, found that the surge in unaccompanied minors actually began in 2008. (DACA was announced in 2012.) The authors pointed to a host of factors contributing to this phenomenon, including escalating gang violence in Central America, as well as drug cartels’ willingness to target and recruit children in Mexico. But the study found that DACA was not one of these factors. Its authors concluded that “the claim that DACA is responsible for the increase in the flow of unaccompanied alien children is not supported by the data.”

Even without the study, it should be obvious that DACA played no role in this surge of unaccompanied minors because the theory itself makes no sense. Undocumented children who arrived in the United States following DACA’s implementation would not qualify for the program. Only those individuals who “have continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007” and “were physically present in the United States on June 15, 2012” could receive DACA status. Why would parents send their children to the U.S. to participate in a program in which they are not legally permitted to participate?

Second: Sessions alleged that DACA has “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.” This line is obviously drawn from the false narrative that immigrants steal jobs from American citizens. There is no actual evidence that DACA recipients have taken jobs from any Americans, let alone “hundreds of thousands.” There is, however, strong evidence that killing DACA will significantly damage the economy—a fact that Sessions conveniently omitted from his speech.

Once DACA is fully rescinded, its former recipients will lose their work permits (and thus their jobs) and face possible deportation. According to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, about 30,000 people will lose their jobs each month as their DACA status expires. The loss of these workers could reduce the national GDP by $280 billion to $433 billion over the next decade. According to estimates by the libertarian Cato Institute, DACA’s demise will cost employers $2 billion and the federal government $60 billion. Trump’s decision to end DACA isn’t a job-saver; it’s a job-killer.

Toward the end of his speech, Sessions praised the RAISE Act, a Republican-backed bill that would tightly curtail immigration into the U.S. Sessions claimed the act would “produce enormous benefits for our country.” In reality, the measure marks an effort to return America to an older immigration regime that locked out racial and ethnic minorities. Sessions has praised the 1924 law that created this regime—a law whose chief author declared that his act was meant to end “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.” On Tuesday, Sessions revived this principle in slightly more polite language.

The attorney general’s utterly gratuitous defamation of young Latino immigrants tells you everything you need to know about the decision to kill DACA. Before Tuesday, the Trump administration seemed eager to frame its DACA decision as respect for constitutional separation of powers: Congress, it insisted, not the president, must set immigration policy. But after Sessions’ speech, it is difficult to view this move as anything other than an attempt to implement the white nationalism that Trump and Sessions campaigned on.”

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Read the full report at the link.

It shouldn’t be news by now that “Gonzo Apocalypto” is a lifelong racist and White Nationalist totally unfit to serve as Attorney General. That’s what Liz Warren and others said during the confirmation process when Sessions’s GOP “fellow travelers” were so eager to brush over his un-American record and his anti-American views.

Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Jews and other American minorities need to unite with those of us who don’t want a return to the “Jim Crow” American South of the earlier 20th Century (which spawned the likes of Sessions and where the white GOP population is still racially and culturally tone deaf) behind some good candidates, get out the vote, and throw the White Nationalists and their GOP enablers and apologists (guys like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and most of the rest of the today’s GOP legislators who take responsibility for nothing while encouraging the Trump Administration’s outrageous conduct by refusing to join with Congressional Democrats to “just say no'”) out of office at the ballot box.  Otherwise, there won’t be an America in the future. We’ve got to stop letting “the “30%” who either never knew or have forgotten what it means to be a real American run roughshod over our country and particularly our kids. It’s going to be a long four years. Feels like it already.

PWS

09-05-17

BREAKING: “GONZO APOCALYPTO” IS POLITICAL POINT MAN FOR ENDING DACA — TRUMP HIDES DURING ANNOUNCEMENT — AG Doesn’t Know Enough Law To Defend African American Voters Or American Kids — Other AGs Able To Do Both — Time For A “Competency Check?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09/05/trump-administration-announces-end-of-immigration-protection-program-for-dreamers/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_daca-1110a-duplicate%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.7cbb30e0641e

David Nakamura reports for the Washington Post:

“In announcing the decision at the Justice Department, Attorney General Sessions said that former president Barack Obama, who started the program in 2012 through executive action, “sought to achieve specifically what the legislative branch refused to do.”

He called it an “open-ended circumvention of immigration law through unconstitutional authority by the executive branch,” and said the program was unlikely to withstand court scrutiny.

 

The Department of Homeland Security said it would no longer accept new applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has provided renewable, two-year work permits to nearly 800,000 dreamers. The agency said those currently enrolled in DACA will be able to continue working until their permits expire; those whose permits expire by March 5, 2018, will be permitted to apply for two-year renewals as long as they do so by Oct. 5.

New applications and renewal requests already received by DHS before Tuesday will be reviewed and validated on a case-by-case basis, even those for permits that expire after March 5, officials said.

Trump administration officials cast the decision as a humane way to unwind the program and called on lawmakers to provide a legislative solution to address the immigration status of the dreamers. Senior DHS officials emphasized that if Congress fails to act and work permits begin to expire, dreamers will not be high priorities for deportations — but they would be issued notices to appear at immigration court if they are encountered by federal immigration officers.

. . . .

Sessions wrote a memo Monday calling DACA unconstitutional, leading acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke to issue a memo Tuesday to phase out the program. The decision came on the day set by Texas and several other states to pursue a lawsuit against the Trump administration if it did not terminate DACA.

It is unclear whether the states will still move forward with legal action.

“As a result of recent litigation,” Duke said in a statement, “we were faced with two options: wind the program down in an orderly fashion that protects beneficiaries in the near-term while working with Congress to pass legislation; or allow the judiciary to potentially shut the program down completely and immediately. We chose the least disruptive option.”

. . . .

The fight now could shift to Congress to act on a bill to grant permanent legal status to the dreamers. A bill called the Dream Act that would have offered them a path to citizenship failed in the Senate in 2010. Several new proposals have been put forward, including the Bridge Act, a bipartisan bill with 25 co-sponsors that would allow extend DACA protections for three years to give Congress time to enact permanent legislation.

But the White House and conservative Republicans could hold out for additional provisions to boost border security, such as funding for Trump’s proposed border wall or new measures to restrict legal immigration.

If DACA is shuttered next year, more than 1,000 immigrants stand to lose their work permits each day once the program is rescinded, according to a recent study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Business leaders from major companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, had lobbied the White House not to terminate the program, citing the economic consequences.”

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

Gee, advance concern that a Federal Court might shut down a program is a new one for Gonzo and the Trumpsters. Didn’t seem to inhibit him from arguing some pretty off the wall positions in defense of the Travel Ban, Sanctuary Cities, or why the Voting Rights Act doesn’t protect voting rights.

And we all know how statements like “they aren’t an enforcement priority” work out in practice. The majority of this Administration’s removals are folks who aren’t “priorities.”

And, notably, neither Kelly nor Duke at DHS had the courage and backbone to rein in arbitrary, wasteful enforcement by immigration agents. So, in the end, it makes no difference what the DHS “fake priorities” are; the line agents will bust anybody the feel like busting — because they can. And, after all, busting law abiding members of the community, often when they show up at DHS to check in or seek relief, is easier than tracking down real criminals. Makes the numbers look good, particularly when you obscure the fact that behind each number is a human face that belongs to a real person. Mostly ordinary people, just like the rest of us.

Also, sticking them on the already overwhelmed Immigration Court dockets without some realistic court reform aimed at restoring due process and wise use of “prosecutorial discretion” to keep cases exactly like the Dreamers off the court dockets? It’s “gonzo!” Big time!

There was a time when the Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice stood up for justice for all Americans, including the most vulnerable. But, that was then, this is now. Liz was “right on.”

PWS

09-05-17

JENNIFER RUBIN IN WASHPOST: “Trump’s Most Evil Act” — “an act of uncommon cowardice.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/09/04/trump-ending-daca-would-be-cruelty-wrapped-in-a-web-of-lies/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.340f3e8f292a

Rubin writes in her “Right Turn” column:

“First, let’s not think Trump — who invites cops to abuse suspects, who thinks ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio was “doing his job” when denying others their constitutional rights and who issued the Muslim ban — cares about the Constitution (any of the “twelve” articles). Trump says, “We love the dreamers. … We think the dreamers are terrific.” But in fact he loves the applause he derives from his cultist followers more than anything. Otherwise he’d go to the mat to defend the dreamers and secure their legal status.

. . . .

No, if Trump cancels DACA, it will be one more attempt to endear himself to his shrinking base with the only thing that truly energizes the dead-enders: vengeance fueled by white grievance. And it will also be an act of uncommon cowardice. (“Should Trump move forward with this decision, he would effectively be buying time and punting responsibility to Congress to determine the fate of the Dreamers,” writes The Post.) Dumping it into the lap of the hapless Congress, he can try evading responsibility for the deportation of nearly 800,000 young people who were brought here as children, 91 percent of whom are working. (And if by chance Congress should save DACA, it will be Trump who is the villain and they the saviors, an odd political choice for a president who cares not one wit about the party.)

As for Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who talks about sparing the dreamers, will be sorely tested to overcome the objections of the hard-line anti-immigrant voices in his conference. Does he have the nerve to bring to the floor a bill that lacks majority support among Republicans? Tie it to a must-pass bill (e.g., Harvey funding, the debt ceiling, funding for the government)? In the Senate, will opportunistic right-wingers such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) grandstand, perhaps filibustering a measure into order to out-Trump Trump?

However this turns out, the GOP under Trump has defined itself as the white grievance party — bluntly, a party fueled by concocted white resentment aimed at minorities. Of all the actions Trump has taken, none has been as cruel, thoughtless or divisive as deporting hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve done nothing but go to school, work hard and present themselves to the government.

The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.”

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“Cowardice” is the hallmark of an Administration that glories in picking on and bullying the poor, the most vulnerable, minorities of all types, and even our foreign allies whose help and support we need. And, the GOP has firmly established itself as the party of cowards.

Trump’s glaring character flaws, naked prejudices, and obvious unsuitability for office, by nature of lack of knowledge, lack of experience, and lack of Presidential temperament, have been out there on display for all to see since the day he announced his candidacy. Yet, notwithstanding some “tisk-tisking” by a few “old timers,” the GOP again and again has in the end united behind Trump and his divisive agenda, preferring to flounder around attempting to govern within its own unruly caucus rather than reaching across the aisle to the Democrats (who, after all, did get the majority of the Presidential votes cast) to form a “union of the middle” to govern the country in a responsible, bi-partisan manner in the absence of Executive competence.

Yes, that would mean sacrificing large parts of the rightist “GOP agenda” in favor of saving the country from Trump’s excesses. But, it’s pretty clear by now that the “GOP agenda” is not going to be enacted into law any time soon anyway. So, why not just do something decent for a change and see how it plays out?

PWS

09-04-17

 

BREAKING: Trump Punts DACA To Congress — Will End Program In 6 Mo. Unless Congress Acts!

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/03/trump-dreamers-immigration-daca-immigrants-242301

Eliana Johnson reports for Politico:

President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises.

Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. He has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program and struggled with his own misgivings about targeting minors for deportation.

 

Conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program, the two sources said, though White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.

In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

This could be one of Trump’s shrewder political moves. He doesn’t really have to do anything right now, while getting the issue off his desk and putting pressure on the Dems and those more responsible Republicans who have urged him to retain the program to get their collective act together and legislate.

Now it depends on whether Trump can disengage without the usual barrage of xenophobic White Nationalist race baiting truth-challenged rhetoric that tends to accompany all of his immigration moves. That might be hard for Trump, given his normal need to pander to the basist biases of his base.

There is also the problem of what happens if Congress fails. There is no practical way of removing 800,000 American young people. It’s simply beyond the capacity of the system, not to mention that it would destroy our economy and rip apart our society.

REALITY CHECK: Many U.S. Immigration Courts are already setting “new” non-detained cases out to Individual Hearing dates in 2020 & 2021. As Judge Burman’s remarks in the preceding post suggest, those courts that claim not to be out as far might well be using ADR (“Aimless Docket Reshuffling”) techniques to mask the true extent of the backlog and docketing problem.

A few Dreamers got DACA after the entry of a final order of removal. But, the vast majority either 1) applied before being placed in Removal Proceedings; or 2) had their Removal Proceedings “Administratively Closed” (thereby removed from the Immigration  Court’s “active docket”) after DACA was granted. All of these cases would have to be initially docketed or re-docketed upon DHS motion.

The US Immigration Courts’ docket already extends beyond the end of Trump’s current term in 2021. By the time “Dreamer” cases get to Individual Hearings the next Presidential term likely will have expired. After all, even without Dreamers on the docket, and with additional US Immigration Judges on the bench, backlogs have continued to rise as a result of the Administration’s “gonzo” approach to immigration enforcement.

So far, the Administration has addressed the impracticality of unlimited enforcement of a broken immigration system with a pattern of “random acts of cruelty” intended to spread fear, create unease, and keep ethnic and migrant communities on edge.

Let’s hope Congress can get its act together and solve the problem in a bipartisan manner.  If not, more disruption, dislocation, disorder, and just plain downright arbitrary meanness are likely to follow.

“Bad things will happen” to a country that allows a xenophobic, racist, White Nationalist minority (two-thirds of Americans favor some type of relief for Dreamers) to overrule the majority and attack our country’s most precious asset: the young people who are America’s (and the world’s) future. It’s time for those of us in the majority who aren’t part of the “Trump base” to stand up and be heard in opposition to those who would destroy our country’s future and trash the lives of fine American young people in the process! And, politicians who oppose relief for Dreamers need to be removed from office through the electoral process.

PWS

09-03-17

DHS Wants To Assure Dreamers That They Should NOT Be Reassured — DACA Revocation Still Possible!

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/16/trump-daca-immigration-deportation-relief-program-239654?cid=apn

Ted Hesson writes in Politico:

“The future of an Obama-era deportation relief program remains undecided, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.

The announcement was meant to clarify the department’s position on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows nearly 788,000 undocumented immigrants to apply for work permits and live in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

“The future of the DACA program continues to be under review with the administration,” a DHS spokesperson said in a written statement. “The president has remarked on the need to handle the issue with compassion and with heart.”

DHS felt compelled to issue a statement on the program’s fate after POLITICO and other outlets reportedThursday on guidance posted to the DHS website that suggested DACA would remain on firm footing under the Trump administration.

The guidance came as the administration terminated a separate deportation relief program for parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents that had been blocked by federal courts since early 2015.

On its website, DHS assured that DACA would not be affected by the move. “No work permits will be terminated prior to their current expiration dates,” the guidance read.

The department said today that it intended only to clarify that DACA would not be immediately canceled. The guidance, DHS said, “should not be interpreted as bearing any relevance on the long-term future of that program.”

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Even when faced with an opportunity to do something nice for folks, that would also help DHS out in practical terms, the Trumpsters just can’t resist an opportunity to sow fear and uncertainty.

PWS

06-18-17

DACA Status Revoked — Woman Faces Removal!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/immigrant-daca-deportation.html?_r=0

Miriam Jordan reports in the NYT:

“Jessica Colotl embodied the debate over illegal immigration when she was locked up for 37 days and nearly sent back to Mexico after an Atlanta-area police officer caught her driving without a license in 2010.

To supporters, including her sorority sisters, the president of her college and the immigrant advocates who publicized her case, hers was an example of police overreach and the need to safeguard ambitious young students from deportation. To others, she was an illegal immigrant, plain and simple, who also was abusing the system by attending a public college at discounted tuition.

She returned to college — paying full price, because of a new Georgia law inspired by her case — completed her degree and qualified for a program started by President Barack Obama in 2012, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protects some undocumented youth from deportation.

“Since then, I have been working and doing well for myself,” Ms. Colotl, now 28, said in an interview this week. “I thought that all the legal battles were behind me.”

That was until Ms. Colotl, who was brought to the United States by her parents as a child, learned Monday that her DACA status had been revoked, thrusting her into the national immigration debate anew.

With a new president in the White House, she is once again facing deportation.

Dustin Baxter, Ms. Colotl’s lawyer, on Tuesday requested that a federal judge in Atlanta intervene and reinstate her DACA protection.

“We are taking an innocent girl who has done nothing but contribute to the society she has been a part of since she was 11 and making her a villain and poster child for Trump’s deportation policies,” Mr. Baxter said in an interview.

About 750,000 immigrants have benefited from DACA, and even as he has promised to crack down on illegal immigration, President Trump has said repeatedly that he will not target DACA recipients, also known as Dreamers.”

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Read the full story at the link.

The question is whether this is just a random action by DHS or does it represent a systematic program to essentially “re-adjudicate” all DACA approvals of individuals who had any arrests or other involvement with the criminal justice system?

PWS

05-13-17