IMMIGRATION JUDGE V. STUART CROUCH SYMBOLIZES AMERICA’S GROSS DISREGARD OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS & WELFARE!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/opinion/child-poverty-democratic-debate.html

Nicholas Kristof writes in The NY Times:

When a 2-year-old Guatemalan boy had trouble staying silent in an immigration courtroom, the judge pointed his finger at him.

“I have a very big dog in my office, and if you don’t be quiet, he will come out and bite you,” the judge, V. Stuart Couch, a former Marine, yelled at the toddler in a 2016 hearing, according to a formal complaint shared by the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy and first reported this week by Mother Jones.

“Do you want him to bite you?” Couch asked.

The boy, his mom and their advocate were all soon sobbing. Couch later acknowledged that he “did not handle the situation properly,” according to the judge who investigated the complaint, Deepali Nadkarni.

Clearly, Couch didn’t have a child’s well-being in mind on that day. But ignoring the welfare of our young is a day-to-day problem in America, where our children are falling behind those in other wealthy countries.

On Thursday, 10 Democratic presidential candidates will debate. It would be a natural opportunity to provoke a national conversation on the subject. But a question about child poverty hasn’t been asked at a presidential debate in 20 years, not since a Republican primary debate in 1999, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

Presidential candidates have been asked about the World Series, about cursing in movies, even about flag lapel pins more recently than they have been questioned about child poverty. We’ve had 147 presidential debates in a row without a single question on the topic (here’s a petition calling for more questions on the issue). I hope Thursday’s debate won’t be the 148th.

UNICEF says America ranks No. 37 among countries in well-being of children, and Save the Children puts the United States at No. 36. European countries dominate the top places.

American infants at last count were 76 percent more likely to die in their first year than children in other advanced countries, according to an article last year in the journal Health Affairs. We would save the lives of 20,000 American children each year if we could just achieve the same child mortality rates as the rest of the rich world.

. . . .

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Read Kristof’s complete op-ed at the link.

Couch is one of America’s worst judges. One might therefore fairly ask why he recently was “rewarded” for his bias, unprofessionalism, and documented poor performance when Trump Sycophant Barr “elevated” him to the appellate bench? Perhaps, so he can abuse more women and children across the country?

But, as the Supremes and the GOP have decided to endorse and encourage child abuse, the question is whether the Dems can get it together to end the abuse before it’s too late for America and the world.

Child abusers like Trump, Couch, Barr, and the gang over at DHS are used to getting away with it. They are encouraged by a do nothing Congress, complicit Federal Judges, and a Trump base that has declared war on traditional American values and human decency. But, the consequences of their misconduct, and the unwillingness of the US political and legal system to stand up for children, won’t end well in the long run.

In the meantime, remember the names of the abusers and their enablers, some of them serving in our highest court and as GOP Senators and Representatives.

Child abuse is wrong!

PWS

09-12-19

CHILD ABUSERS ON THE LOOSE! — No Matter What Lies Trump, Big Mac, Cooch Cooch, Albence & The Gang Spew Out, The Truth Is Clear: Detention Is Child Abuse!

Leah Hibe; — Leah Hibel
Associate Professor
UC Davis

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/opinion/migrant-children-detention.html

By Leah Hibel and Caitlin Patler

NY Times

Dr. Hibel is a professor of human development and family studies. Dr. Patler is a professor of sociology.

The Trump administration last week announced a new regulation that would allow the government to indefinitely detain migrant families who cross the border. If it goes into effect, it would terminate an agreement known as the Flores settlement that has been in place since 1997 to ensure that children are kept in the least restrictive setting possible, receive certain standards of care, have access to lawyers, and are generally released within 20 days. The effect would be to extend the well-documented suffering of migrant children in detention centers.

. . . .

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Go to the link for the full story.

Why are children being abused and detained while the corrupt officials who promote and lie in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable remain free and supported by the “public dole?”

PWS

08-27-19

SENTENCED TO DEATH WITHOUT DUE PROCESS: Trump’s Legal Shenanigans Kill Innocent People!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/politics/expedited-deportation-trump-immigration.html

Beth Werlin writes in The NY Times:

The Trump administration’s expansion of the use of fast-track deportations through “expedited removal” will create a “show me your papers” regime nationwide in which people — including citizens — may be forced to quickly prove they should not be deported. This policy allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement to quickly deport someone without going before an immigration judge, undermining American principles of fundamental fairness and putting United States citizens, permanent residents and asylum-seekers at risk of wrongful deportation.

For 15 years, the government has been applying expedited removal in a limited way to those within 100 miles of the Canadian or Mexican border who have been in the United States for less than two weeks. The entire process consists of an interview with an immigration officer during which the burden is on the individual to prove a legal right to remain in the United States. One could be questioned, detained and deported very swiftly with little time to consult a lawyer or to gather evidence to prevent deportation. The extremely short timeline of the expedited-removal process increases the chances that a person who is legally entitled to stay in the United States can end up being removed anyway. The government now says it will apply it across the country for many people who cannot prove they have been present in the United States for two years or more. The expansion could affect thousands of people nationwide.

During just one year of the Trump administration, 27,540 citizens were questioned by ICE — five times more than the last year of the Obama administration. The expansion of the expedited removal process will further increase the number of people questioned, creating a heightened risk that citizens will be arrested, detained and wrongfully deported.

The process has many shortcomings. First, in expedited removal proceedings, immigration officers serve as both prosecutor and judge — charging someone as deportable and making a final decision to deport him, often all within a day. These rapid deportation decisions fail to take into account many critical factors that an immigration judge would consider, including whether the individual is eligible to apply for lawful status in the United States or whether he has citizen family members.

Second, there is generally no opportunity to consult with a lawyer. Having one can make all the difference. With a lawyer, a person is 10 times more likely to prevail in an immigration case. Moreover, there is typically no judicial oversight, with relatively low-level government officers authorized to issue the deportation orders.

Despite the backlogs in the immigration court system and even though the courts often fail to live up to expectations, they can help ensure a basic level of fair process. They safeguard against unlawful removals, afford people the opportunity to obtain counsel, and provide a streamlined appeal process.

This is particularly critical today, given that many people who will be subject to expedited removal are asylum seekers. These particularly vulnerable people could face serious harm or death in their countries of origin if they’re deported.

The lack of safeguards and information in expedited removal is compounded by well-documented abuse of the process. Immigration officers applying expedited removal are obligated to inform individuals of their opportunity to seek asylum and refer a person who expresses a fear of returning to their home country for a “credible fear interview.” Unfortunately, multiple investigations have revealed that officers at the border sometimes fail to fulfill these obligations.

One hallmark of the American justice system is a fair day in court before an impartial decision maker. This is the ultimate distortion of that system. Rather than strengthening the immigration court system, the administration is planning to bypass it entirely, and the human costs will be great.

Beth Werlin is the executive director of the American Immigration Council

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Trump’s cruel abuse of vulnerable refugees and his wanton destruction of the U.S. Immigration Court system are national disgraces!

PWS

07-27-19

WORDS FROM AMERICA’S KIDDIE GULAGS: As Dishonest Administration Pols Like McAleenan, “Cooch Cooch,” Morgan, Provost, & A Bevy Of Border Patrol Officials Lie To Congress, The Press, & The American People About What Is Happening In DHS Detention, Here’s The Truth About The Human Rights Abuses Being Committed Daily By Our Nation In Our Name, In The Words Of The Abused Kids Themselves, Read By Children In NY — Watch The Video!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/migrant-children-detention-border.html

New York children read the words of their peers held in U.S. Border Patrol facilities.

The New York Times

By The Editors

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

In the video Op-Ed above, children read testimonies given by young migrants detained in Customs and Border Protection facilities. They reveal harrowing stories of children living in cages, going hungry and tending to infants without their parents.

Border Patrol has been detaining thousands of children, sometimes for weeks, in conditions no child anywhere should suffer. At a June hearing before a federal appeals court, judges were stunned by the administration’s arguments that these children were kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities, as required by the Flores Settlement.

The overcrowding, long stays and inhumane, possibly illegal living conditions are a result of the Trump administration’s cruel immigration policies and mismanagement of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the border agency.

Barring exceptional circumstances, the legal limit for Border Patrol to detain children is 72 hours. The agency is then supposed to transfer children to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement for a maximum of 20 days. But the resettlement office has been keeping children far longer, creating a backlog across the entire system. As a result, Border Patrol centers have not been quickly processing unaccompanied children and migrant families, who have recently been crossing the border in record-breaking numbers.

Detained children provided the testimonies read in this video last month to lawyers who visited Border Patrol centers as part of an ongoing investigation of detention facilities.

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Go to the above link for the video showing how we intentionally abuse children who seek our protection. Do we really want to be known and remembered as a “Cowardly Nation of Child Abusers.” That’s what Trump and his “New GOP,” the party of unapologetic White Nationalist racism, is turning us into.

Just yesterday, McAleenan was lying and covering up before Congress, trying to deny the abuses taking place on his watch every day. He also had the gall to blame this entirely avoidable situation on not enough money from Congress, bad laws (which the Administration doesn’t follow anyway), and the very vulnerable individuals seeking legal protection under our laws, many of them kids.

Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-MD) finally had enough and rightfully blew up at him. But, that’s not going to stop the daily abuse and the stream of lies, false narratives, and cover-ups being promoted by McAleenan and his cohorts.

How does McAleenan claim that they are doing the best they can when the DHS’s own Inspector General says exactly the opposite? How does he claim that reports have been exaggerated when Inspector General reports confirming the horrible treatment were in his own hands some time ago? How do Republicans in Congress justify the racist-driven human rights abuses that they are promoting?

America’s future depends on “regime change.” The only question is whether it will come soon enough to save our country and our souls. For Trump’s racism and the abuse he, his followers, and his apologists (like the ever toxic and irresponsible Sen. Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham) are heaping on children, asylum seekers, and other migrants truly diminishes the humanity of all of us!

PWS

07-19-19

ECONOMIST PAUL KRUGMAN ON TRUMP’S CRUELTY: Political Strategy & A Way Of Rewarding Corrupt GOP Corporate Cronies Who Profit From Human Misery! — “Oh, and save the fake outrage. Yes, they are atrocities, and yes, the detention centers meet the historical definition of concentration camps.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opinion/trump-migrants-detention-centers.html

Paul Krugman writes in The NY Times:

Is it cruelty, or is it corruption? That’s a question that comes up whenever we learn about some new, extraordinary abuse by the Trump administration — something that seems to happen just about every week. And the answer, usually, is “both.”

For example, why is the administration providing cover for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, who almost surely ordered the murder of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi? Part of the answer, probably, is that Donald Trump basically approves of the idea of killing critical journalists. But the money the Saudi monarchy spends at Trump properties is relevant, too.

And the same goes for the atrocities the U.S. is committing against migrants from Central America. Oh, and save the fake outrage. Yes, they are atrocities, and yes, the detention centers meet the historical definition of concentration camps.

One reason for these atrocities is that the Trump administration sees cruelty both as a policy tool and as a political strategy: Vicious treatment of refugees might deter future asylum-seekers, and in any case it helps rev up the racist base. But there’s also money to be made, because a majority of detained migrants are being held in camps run by corporations with close ties to the Republican Party.

And when I say close ties, we’re talking about personal rewards as well as campaign contributions. A couple of months ago John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, joined the board of Caliburn International, which runs the infamous Homestead detention center for migrant children.

Which brings us to the issue of private prisons, and privatization in general.

Privatization of public services — having them delivered by contractors rather than government employees — took off during the 1980s. It has often been justified using the rhetoric of free markets, the supposed superiority of private enterprise to government bureaucracy.

This was always, however, a case of bait-and-switch. Free markets, in which private businesses compete for customers, can accomplish great things, and are indeed the best way to organize most of the economy. But the case for free markets isn’t a case for private business where there is no market: There’s no reason to presume that private firms will do a better job when there isn’t any competition, because the government itself is the sole customer. In fact, studies of privatization often find that it ends up costing more than having government employees do the work.

Nor is that an accident. Between campaign contributions and the revolving door, plus more outright bribery than we’d like to think, private contractors can engineer overpayment on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of public-sector unions.

And what about the quality of the work? In some cases that’s easy to monitor: If a town hires a private company to provide garbage collection, voters can tell whether the trash is, in fact, being picked up. But if you hire a private company to provide services in a situation where the public can’t see what it’s doing, crony capitalism can lead to poor performance as well as high costs.

Many people have, I think, forgotten about the disastrous Bush administration occupation of Iraq, but the incompetence and abuses of politically connected private contractors, like Erik Prince’s security company Blackwater, played a major role in the debacle. Did I mention that Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education and a key defender of for-profit education, is Prince’s sister?

And running a prison, which is literally walled off from public view, is almost a perfect example of the kind of government function that should not be privatized. After all, if a private prison operator bulks up its bottom line by underpaying personnel and failing to train them adequately, if it stints on food and medical care, who in the outside world will notice? Sure enough, privately run prisons have a far worse security record than public prisons.

Yet the number of inmates in private prisons has grown by leaps and bounds — especially in the area of immigrant detention. The Obama administration finally tried to begin a phaseout of federal use of private prisons, and a number of Democratic presidential candidates have called for an end to their use. (Prison operator stocks fell sharply last month, when Elizabeth Warren laid out a plan to eliminate the industry.)

But Trump, of course, reversed the Obama moves. And the surge in immigrant detention has been a major new source of private-prison-industry profits.

How much of a role has this played in policy? It would, I think, be going too far to claim that the private-prison industry — merchants of detention? — has been a driving force behind the viciousness of Trump’s border policy. But the fact that crony capitalists close to the administration profit from the viciousness surely greases the path.

And this fits the general pattern. As I suggested at the beginning, cruelty and corruption are intertwined in Trump administration policy. Every betrayal of American principles also seems, somehow, to produce financial benefits for Trump and his friends.

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Cruelty and corruption are staples of the Trump Administration. And those who helped empower and continue to prop up this corrupt mess can’t escape accountability for what they have done and continue to do.

PWS

07-12-19

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.

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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

AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!

Professor Kate Cronin-Furman writes in the NY Times:

The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.

At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Tex., in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children. As a human rights lawyer and then as a political scientist, I have spoken to the victims of some of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, in places ranging from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sri Lanka. What’s happening at the border doesn’t match the scale of these horrors, but if, as appears to be the case, these harsh conditions have been intentionally inflicted on children as part a broader plan to deter others from migrating, then it meets the definition of a mass atrocity: a deliberate, systematic attack on civilians. And like past atrocities, it is being committed by a complex organizational structure made up of people at all different levels of involvement.

Thinking of what’s happening in this way gives us a repertoire of tools with which to fight the abuses, beyond the usual exhortations to call our representatives and donate to border charities.

Those of us who want to stop what’s happening need to think about all the different individuals playing a role in the systematic mistreatment of migrant children and how we can get them to stop participating. We should focus most on those who have less of a personal commitment to the abusive policies that are being carried out.

Testimony from trials and truth commissions has revealed that many atrocity perpetrators think of what they’re doing as they would think of any other day job. While the leaders who order atrocities may be acting out of strongly held ideological beliefs or political survival concerns, the so-called “foot soldiers” and the middle men and women are often just there for the paycheck.

This lack of personal investment means that these participants in atrocities can be much more susceptible to pressure than national leaders. Specifically, they are sensitive to social pressure, which has been shown to have played a huge role in atrocity commission and desistance in the Holocaust, Rwanda and elsewhere. The campaign to stop the abuses at the border should exploit this sensitivity and put social pressure on those involved in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Here is what that might look like:

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos. These agents’ actions should be publicized, particularly in their home communities.

This is not an argument for doxxing — it’s about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about. The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements. For those who won’t (or can’t) quit, it may induce them to treat the vulnerable individuals under their control more humanely. In Denmark during World War II, for instance, strong social pressure, including from the churches, contributed to the refusal of the country to comply with Nazi orders to deport its Jewish citizens.

The midlevel functionaries who make the system run are not as visibly involved in the “dirty work,” but there are still clear potential reputational consequences that could change their incentives. The lawyer who stood up in court to try to parse the meaning of “safe and sanitary” conditions — suggesting that this requirement might not include toothbrushes and soap for the children in border patrol custody if they were there for a “shorter term” stay — passed an ethics exam to be admitted to the bar. Similar to the way the American Medical Association has made it clear that its members must not participate in torture, the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession. This will deter the participation of some, if only out of concern over their future career prospects.

The individuals running detention centers are arguably directly responsible for torture, which could trigger a number of consequences at the international level. Activists should partner with human rights organizations to bring these abuses before international bodies like the United Nations Human Rights Council. They should lobby for human rights investigations, for other governments to deny entry visas to those involved in the abuses, or even for the initiation of torture prosecutions in foreign courts. For someone who is “just following orders,” the prospect of being internationally shamed as a rights abuser and being unable to travel freely may be significant enough to persuade them to stop participating.

When those directly involved in atrocities can’t be swayed, their enablers are often more responsive. For-profit companies are supplying food and other material goods to the detention centers. Boycotts against them and their parent entities may persuade them to stop doing so. Employees of these companies can follow the example of Wayfair workers, who organized a walkout on Wednesday in protest of their company’s sale of furniture to the contractor outfitting the detention centers. Finally, anyone can support existing divestment campaigns to pressure financial institutions to end their support of immigration abuses.

Many Americans have been asking each other “But what can we DO?” The answer is that we call these abuses mass atrocities and use the tool kit this label offers us to fight them. So far, mobilization against what’s happening on the border has mostly followed standard political activism scripts: raising public awareness, organizing protests, phoning our congressional representatives. These efforts are critical, but they aren’t enough. Children are suffering and dying. The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.

Dr. Cronin-Furman is an assistant professor of human rights.

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“The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.”

That includes attorneys who defend indefensible policies in Federal Court as well as Federal Judges all the way up to the Supremes who fail to stand up for Due Process for individuals, and who insist on treating Trump’s overt attacks on our Constitution, democracy, and human dignity as within the scope of “normal” Executive actions rather than intentional and dishonest abuses requiring censure and strong, courageous, unconditional disapproval.

PWS

06-30-19

DON’S KILLER DEAL: Salvadoran Teenage Girl First Casualty Of Trump’s “Make ‘Em Die In Mexico” Deal — As Investigation Continues, One Thing Is Clear: This Is Just The First Of Many Deaths & Human Tragedies That Will Result From Trump’s “Malicious Incompetence” & Unwillingness To Comply With Asylum Laws!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/world/americas/mexico-migrant-death.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

By Kirk Semple and Paulina Villegas

June 21, 2019

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican authorities are investigating the death of a teenage migrant from El Salvador who was shot and killed after the truck she was in ran a government checkpoint.

Witnesses have told investigators in the state of Veracruz, where the shooting happened last Friday, that a truck carrying the 19-year-old woman and other migrants bound for the United States border passed through a government checkpoint and that people wearing police uniforms gave chase in a police car and shot at the truck, said Jorge Winckler Ortiz, the attorney general of Veracruz.

Two other migrants in the truck were wounded in the shooting, officials said.

The incident occurred amid a Mexican government deployment of security forces to assert greater control of migration toward the United States, part of a dealthat President Andrés Manuel López Obrador struck with President Trump earlier this month to fend off a threat of tariffs.

The possibility that the Mexican police may have killed the teenager has reaffirmed the fears of migrants’ advocates and human rights experts, who worry that the security forces, being rushed into migration control, are ill-prepared for the task.

“To give a green light to any police force to detain or chase migrants opens up many more dangers and increases the risks migrants face, like grave human rights violations, horrible accidents or crimes like this,” said Ruben Figueroa, an activist with the migrant rights’ group Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, in an interview Friday.

Mexico’s security secretary, Alfonso Durazo, has also confirmed that his ministry was investigating the shooting.

In a news conference this week, Mr. Winckler said that according to testimony from witnesses, 17 migrants from El Salvador were traveling in a four-door pickup truck through the state of Veracruz when they encountered the checkpoint.

The driver slowed down as he passed through the checkpoint, but hearing sirens, he sped away. A high-speed chase ensued, lasting 20 minutes, Mr. Winckler said, according to the preliminary investigation based on interviews with witnesses.

After shots were fired from the police vehicle, the truck pulled to a stop and three men “dressed as police” stepped out of the police vehicle, Mr. Winckler recounted.

His language allowed for the possibility that the assailants were not legitimate police officers. In Mexico, criminals have been known to disguise themselves in the uniforms of the nation’s security forces to conduct crimes, though corruption also permeates Mexico’s police forces, and some police personnel have developed close ties with organized crime.

As the three men beat up the driver of the truck, the other migrants ran away, Mr. Winckler said. The men in police uniforms hauled the driver away, leaving behind the dead migrant and her two wounded companions, one of whom had been shot in a hand and the other in his leg, Mr. Winckler said, citing witness testimony.

One of the wounded migrants told The Washington Post that the occupants of the patrol car had first shot at the migrants’ vehicle from behind, before pulling ahead and shooting through the windshield. The wounded migrant, who was recovering in a hospital in Veracruz, said he saw all three men wielding weapons.

The deployment of security forces by the Mexican government, after the deal announced on June 7 with the Trump administration, was supposed to be concentrated in Mexico’s southern states. Officials initially promised to send 6,000 members of the newly formed National Guard to the southern border region to help migration officials intercept undocumented migrants entering from Guatemala.

But the mobilization has been halting at best. In recent days, officials said that only a portion of those 6,000 would be members of the National Guard, with the rest drawn from other security forces, and that only about 40 percent of them would be sent to the southern region.

Still, the deal has already resulted in more government checkpoints along major roadways leading from the border with Guatemala into the interior of the country, and more aggressive patrols.

Human rights experts, migrants’ advocates and security analysts have warned about possible hazards, such as human rights violations, that could be caused by the quick deployment of the security forces, which may not have received proper training in migration enforcement.

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

Trump likely figures that the dead bodies he is responsible for will stay in Mexico (or Guatemala) and thus below the radar screen. So, it’s important for reporters to keep focusing on the body count so that he can be held accountable for the deaths and tragedies he is causing with his incompetent, racist, anti-refugee policies.

ANALYSIS: Trump Lays Another Egg On Immigration — Everybody Loses, But It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse

By Paul Wickham Schmidt for immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandria, VA, June 9, 2019. After a week of petulance, threats, and self-created drama, Trump produced a resounding trade and immigration dud. Faced with advisors telling him that he was endangering the economy, the only thing propping up his sagging popularity, a potential rebellion among GOP legislators, and an unexpectedly tough and resolute Mexico, Trump backed off of his insane and blatantly illegal plan to ignore U.S. asylum obligations and thereby rocket the U.S. to the upper echelons of international scofflaws and human rights violators.

The latter scheme, known as “safe third country,” would have mis-designated Mexico and, incredibly, Guatemala, two clearly “unsafe” countries to do the U.S.’s job by processing tens of thousands of asylum applications from those fleeing the Northern Triangle. Neither of the two countries has a viable, fair, and effective asylum adjudication system and both have major safety and human rights issues.

Instead, Trump accepted a vague compact by which Mexico and the U.S. basically agreed to do what they had already been doing without taking any decisive or effective action to address the actual humanitarian crisis in the Northern Triangle that Trump and his flunkies have consistently mischaracterized as a “law enforcement emergency.” Indeed, the New York Times reported that most of Mexico’s “unprecedented steps” had already been worked out in secret with deposed DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen months ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/us/politics/trump-mexico-deal-tariffs.html. Those interested can read the summary of the agreement prepared by Trump’s own State Department here. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-us-mexico-tariffs-declaration-20190607-story.html.

To be sure, desperate and vulnerable asylum seekers, particularly women and children, will continue to abused, raped, beaten, extorted, obscenely tortured, and killed with impunity and little if any recourse as a result of this week’s actions. But, at least for now, the U.S. and Mexico are maintaining much of the basic framework of domestic and international protection laws.

Contrary to the lies and false narratives spread by Trump and his DHS cronies, U.S. law is not filled with “loopholes.” Rather, it is a fairly straightforward implementation of the international protection regime and treaties that have been in effect since World War II to prevent another holocaust from occurring on our watch.

If anything, since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has watered down its asylum commitment somewhat by adding a legally tenuous “credible fear” process to “pre-screen” arriving asylum applicants in mass migration situations. However, to date, the DHS under Trump has been too incompetent, misdirected, and frankly downright stupid to utilize this streamlined screening process fairly and efficiently.

By treating a somewhat predictable humanitarian refugee flow as a bogus “law enforcement problem” and mindlessly shoving cases into a “captive” court system that they already had abused, mismanaged, and destroyed, the Administration lost effective control. In panic, they have tried to blame the refugees, Democrats, Mexico, Obama, judges, the media, and even the truly hapless failed states of the Northern Triangle for their largely self-created human and operational disaster.

The first of the “unprecedented steps,” involves Mexico sending approximately 6,000 National Guard troops to the Guatemalan border to control illegal crossings. Never mind that the Mexican National Guard is a recent creation that exists largely on paper. Also, forget that Mexico has a questionable record of controlling corruption and systematic human rights abuses among its existing police and military forces.

The U.S., a much larger, better organized, and more prosperous country than Mexico, has resorted to militarizing the border, mass incarceration, family concentration camps, kids in cages, malicious criminal prosecutions, family separations, walls, fences, overt political interference in the asylum adjudication system, and violating international protection norms. These “gonzo” enforcement efforts not only failed to stem the tide, but have actually aided smugglers and traffickers and increased the flow of migrants.

Will newly minted, untrained Mexican troops succeed where the might of the U.S. has failed miserably? Don’t count on it.

Also, the last time I checked, it appeared that most of the Mexican coast and some parts of the U.S. are reasonably accessible by boat from the Northern Triangle. So, assuming that the Mexicans could “shut down” their land border with Guatemala, why wouldn’t smugglers “take to the sea?” How’s that Mexican Navy?

The second “unprecedented step,” is a continuation and expansion of the existing “Remain in Mexico Program.” This toxic gimmick punishes those who have been legally determined to have a “credible fear” of persecution by making them remain in some of the most dangerous locations in the world where they are intentionally and illegally impeded in many ways from pursuing their U.S. asylum claims from Mexico. To date, this program has only been implemented in a few locations, like San Diego where it has been an unmitigated failure according to a report from Kate Morrissey of the San Diego Union-Tribune. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/06/06/cruel-yet-really-stupid-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-denies-due-process-while-creating-court-chaos-enfeebled-judges-fume-as-aimless-docket-reshufflin/.

The results of this ill-advised effort by Trump to circumvent U.S. asylum laws reads like a “legal toxicology report:” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” mass confusion, lack of information, insufficient and deficient hearing notices, massive violations of the statutory right to be represented by counsel, no opportunity to fairly prepare, document, and present asylum claims, interference with the attorney-client relationship by DHS, and few actual case completions to name just a few of the many abuses. And, how will an already dysfunctional EOIR deal with yet another round of “new priorities” and more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling?”

A Federal District Judge actually enjoined this circus before it could get rolling. But, a “tone-deaf panel” of the Ninth Circuit allowed Trump’s assault on the rule of law to go forward, at least for now.

Nevertheless, the case remains pending with the Ninth Circuit. As EOIR’s rushed and sloppy work product starts to accumulate on their docket and the bodies and horror stories start to pile up in Mexico, more responsible Circuit Judges might actually force the Administration to comply with the law and the Constitution, not to mention simple human decency.

Mexico has pledged to “accept and protect” those sentenced to remain there. But, the Mexican border locations to which individuals are forced to return are dangerous for a reason. Presumably, if Mexican can’t maintain safety and order for its own citizens, it won’t do any better for vulnerable asylum seekers.

Finally, in third “unprecedented step,” Mexico and the U.S. agreed to promote the “Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the government of Mexico in concert with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” to create “prosperity, good governance and security in Central America.” This part of the agreement makes the most sense. But “promoting” in this case appears limited to using development funds that were “already in the pipeline” in both countries. In other words, nothing really new here.

This was a golden opportunity for the U.S. to show real leadership by dramatically increasing its investment in bringing stability and prosperity to Mexico and Central America. Additionally, we could have created incentives (rather than threats) and benchmarks for Mexico to improve its asylum adjudication system and human rights performance. Partnering with non-governmental-organizations and legal assistance groups on both sides of the border also would bring much needed expertise in resolving asylum issues to the table.

But, that would have taken a President with vision, empathy, compassion, courage, competency, intelligence, and creative problem solving ability. Trump is the exact antithesis of all of these qualities.

Consequently, sooner or later we can expect Trump’s “latest egg” to fail, like all of his other gimmicks and maliciously incompetent schemes on immigration. Our “child president” will undoubtedly then embark on a new barrage of lies, false narratives, idiotic tweets, idle threats, blame shifting, insults, racist dog whistles, and general nonsense aimed at diverting attention from his own failures as a leader and more critically, as a human being.

Innocent people will be harmed and die, America and Mexico will be embarrassed and diminished, and the world will be a worse place. But, until America figures out how to use its democratic institutions to remove the kakistocracy, the disaster will continue. That it could have been worse, is only small consolation.

Why not strive to be the “best that we can be,” rather than just “not as bad as we might have been?”

RUDE AWAKENING? — Some In GOP Finally Concerned About Idiotic Actions Of White Nationalist “Tariff Man” — But Don’t Expect Much Action Given GOP’s Endemic Cowardice In The Face Of Trump!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/us/politics/republicans-mexico-tariffs.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fcatie-edmondson&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

Catie Edmonson & Maggie Haberman report for the NY Times:

June 4, 2019

WASHINGTON — Republican senators sent the White House a sharp message on Tuesday, warning that they were almost uniformly opposed to President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Mexican imports, just hours after the president said lawmakers would be “foolish” to try to stop him.

Mr. Trump’s latest threat to impose 5 percent tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico, rising to as high as 25 percent until the Mexican government stems the flow of migrants, has prompted some of the most serious defiance in the Republican ranks since the president took office.

Republican senators emerged from a closed-door lunch at the Capitol angered by the briefing they received from a deputy White House counsel and an assistant attorney general on the legal basis for Mr. Trump to impose new tariffs by declaring a national emergency at the southern border.

“I want you to take a message back” to the White House, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, told the lawyers, according to people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Cruz warned that “you didn’t hear a single yes” from the Republican conference. He called the proposed tariffs a $30 billion tax increase on Texans.

“I will yield to nobody in passion and seriousness and commitment for securing the border,” Mr. Cruz later told reporters. “But there’s no reason for Texas farmers and ranchers and manufacturers and small businesses to pay the price of massive new taxes.”

The president’s latest foray into a global trade war has troubled economists and roiled stock and bond markets. The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, hinted on Tuesday that the central bank could cut interest rates if the trade war started to hurt the economy. The remarks sent stocks higher for their strongest day in months.

But senators were mindful of the long-term stakes for their home states.

[Mr. Powell’s comments sent a signal that the central bank was watching Mr. Trump’s trade wars warily.]

Texas would be hit the hardest by the proposed tariffs on Mexican products, followed by Michigan, California, Illinois and Ohio, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A 25 percent tariff would threaten $26.75 billion of Texas imports.

“We’re holding a gun to our own heads,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

If Mr. Trump were to declare an emergency to impose the tariffs, the House and the Senate could pass a resolution disapproving them. But such a resolution would almost certainly face a presidential veto, meaning that both the House and the Senate would have to muster two-thirds majorities to beat Mr. Trump.

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said he warned the lawyers that the Senate could muster an overwhelming majority to beat back the tariffs, even if Mr. Trump were to veto a resolution disapproving them. Republicans may be broadly supportive of Mr. Trump’s push to build a wall and secure the border, he said, but they oppose tying immigration policy to the imposition of tariffs on Mexico.

“The White House should be concerned about what that vote would result in, because Republicans really don’t like taxing American consumers and businesses,” Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Trump, just hours before at a news conference in London with the British prime minister, Theresa May, said he planned to move forward with imposing tariffs on Mexican imports next week as part of his effort to stem the flow of migrants crossing the southern border.

“I think it’s more likely that the tariffs go on, and we’ll probably be talking during the time that the tariffs are on, and they’re going to be paid,” Mr. Trump said. When asked about Senate Republicans discussing ways to block the tariffs, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think they will do that.”

He said, “I think if they do, it’s foolish.”

Republicans are still holding out hope that the tariffs can be avoided. Mexico’s foreign minister is leading a delegation to Washington this week to try to defuse the situation with the Trump administration. A White House meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday could prove pivotal.

“There is not much support for tariffs in my conference, that’s for sure,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. “Our hope is that the tariffs will be avoided, and we will not have to answer any hypotheticals.”

A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

Leaving the lunch, lawmakers complained they were facing too many such hypotheticals. Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, asked the lawyers what the precedent for imposing tariffs through an emergency declaration would be. His question was left unanswered. In fact, since the National Emergencies Act was signed in 1976, it has never been used to impose tariffs on a single country.

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said he “would not be inclined to vote on a tariff against a friend,” but ventured that “what you’re likely to see is the Mexican government and our government finding some way to work on this collaboratively and not reach a tariff.”

Others were less convinced.

“He’s committed to this,” said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, who spoke with Mr. Trump on Sunday and was sure the president would proceed with the tariffs, regardless of the concerns. “He’s serious as four heart attacks and a stroke. He’s moving forward.”

Opponents of the tariffs would use the same motion of disapproval that they tried to use to block the president from grabbing federal money for a border wall that was not appropriated for that purpose. That motion did pass Congress with significant Republican support, but not enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s veto.

Mr. Johnson warned White House officials that they should not count on a veto override vote going the same way. But Mr. Trump has supporters, and Republicans, especially in the House, have been loath to oppose him on immigration. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, once a moderate on immigration policy, took to Twitter to say the president was within his rights to use tariffs to force Mexico’s hand.

Marco Rubio

✔@marcorubio

The law provides @potus broad authority to control transactions with other nations if there is an unusual & extraordinary threat to the national security &/or economy of the U.S.. Unlawful migration & drug flow transiting through #Mexico into U.S. clearly poses such a threat.

1,347

6:28 PM – Jun 3, 2019

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Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, expressed support for the president, as did Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is up for re-election in 2020 and faced blistering criticism after flip-flopping this year on whether he would vote to disapprove the president’s emergency declaration to build the wall.

“I think Mexico could help us solve the crisis down at the border,” Mr. Tillis told reporters. “What’s the tax on handling 80,000 additional illegal immigrants coming across the border, housing them, adjudicating them? You’ve got to look at the total cost of the prices.”

If a revolt comes to pass, it would start in the Senate, but House Republicans would have to join the effort to overturn a veto.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, declined to forecast whether the House would try to block the tariffs on Mexico.

“The administration’s tariff policy is erratic and all over the place,” he said. “We will see what the Senate Republicans ultimately decide to do, but we will certainly strongly consider proceeding in a way that is appropriate and consistent with our legislative powers.”

Mr. Trump seemed unimpressed when a reporter noted that Mexican officials said that they had increased the number of migrants they had apprehended coming into their country from elsewhere in Central America. He offered no specifics on what it would take to keep the tariffs from being imposed.

“Look, millions of people are flowing through Mexico,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s unacceptable.”

Catie Edmondson reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from London. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Emily Cochrane and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting from Washington.

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

Rubio’s pro-Trump tweet seems pretty off-base. Other than the fact that Trump is incompetently using Border Patrol on a self-created emergency that could be handled by Inspectors and Asylum Officers at ports of entry, allowing Border Patrol Officers to focus on more important law enforcement duties, there doesn’t appear to be any known connection between families from the Northern Triangle turning themselves in and applying for legal asylum under our laws and “drug smuggling.” Nor do such individuals who turn themselves in present any known threat to either national security or our economy (particularly since Trump plans to bar them from working unless and until they actually receive asylum under a system he has intentionally skewed against them). Indeed, smugglers would have to be pretty stupid to use individuals who intended to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol at the border as “drug couriers.”

On the other hand, Trump’s incompetent handling of the border situation, his gross misuse of national emergency and tariff authorities, and his attacks on trade with Canada and Mexico, two of our major allies and trading partners, does promise to threaten both our econommy and our national security. Rather ironic that the asylum applicants are the ones using our legal system while Trump is the one trashing it in multiple ways.

Sen. Tillis also seems out of bounds. Individuals have a right to apply for ayslum. Undoubtedly, the number of individuals now applying could be processed fairly and legally for much less than Trump’s tariffs would cost U.S. consumers, not to mention the money wasted on useless walls, unnecessary detention, and misuse of American troops. Even spending some money on helping Mexico improve its system and joining Mexico’s initiative to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle would be more cost effective than tariffs.

Why would Tillis expect Mexico, a smaller and poorer country, to do a better job of stopping the flow than the U.S. has? How would he expect Mexico to process all the migrants without major human rights violations? Wouldn’t wrecking the Mexican economy, along with our own, restart the flow of Mexicans going north that actually has been reversed in recent years? Pretty scary how little the GOP understands about migration and sound immigration policies.

When policy is made based on irrational factors such as White Nationalism, racism, contempt for foreign countries, and disregard for human rights, bad things are going to happen. But, I’m still not betting on the GOP to stand up to Trump. Lots of grumbling; but, in the past, such grumbling has seldom been turned into action.

PWS

06-05-19

“FALSE COURTS” OPERATING UNDER UNETHICAL & INAPPROPRIATE EXECUTIVE CONTROL KEY TO GULAG’S PURPOSE OF EXTINGUISHING DUE PROCESS THROUGH DURESS, MISTREATMENT, & DEHUMANIZATION — Would A “Real” Court System Participate In Such a Charade? — “America’s immigration system takes the myth of due process and turns it on its head.“

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/power-asylum-seekers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Former Border Patrol Agent and author Francisco Cantu writes in the NY Times:

Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison

Power is condemning lawful asylum seekers to a system designed for criminals.

By Francisco Cantú

Mr. Cantú is a former Border Patrol agent and an author.

May 31, 2019

For more than seven months, Ysabel has been incarcerated without bond at an immigrant detention center in southern Arizona, part of a vast network of for-profit internment facilities administered by private companies under contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

I visit Ysabel (who has asked not to be identified by her real name for her protection) every two weeks as a volunteer with the Kino Border Initiative, one of ahandful of migrant advocacy groups running desperately needed visitation programs in Arizona, including Mariposas Sin Fronteras and Transcend. As volunteers, our primary role is to provide moral support; facilitate communication with family members and legal service providers; and serve as a sounding board for frustration, confusion and, often, raw despair.

Ysabel and the other asylum seekers we visit often ask for simple forms of support, such as small deposits into their commissary accounts to let them call relatives or purchase overpriced goods like dry ramen, tampons, shampoo or headphones for watching telenovelas. They often ask us to send them books in Spanish — one of the few things that they are permitted to receive through the mail without clearance from a property officer. Large-print Bibles are the most popular, along with books of song and prayer, bilingual dictionaries and English course books, romance novels, and other books that provide ways to pass the time — word puzzle collections, coloring books, books for learning how to draw and instruction manuals for making origami figurines.

Ysabel arrived at the United States border last October after leaving her home and two children in eastern Venezuela. The region she fled was plagued by disorder long before the more widely reported upheavals of recent months, suffering frequent power outages, widespread violence and unrest, and severe shortages of food, water and medication. In the years leading up to her flight from the country, Ysabel told me that she had been kidnapped, robbed at gunpoint multiple times and shot at during an attempted carjacking.

Like millions of her compatriots, Ysabel became disillusioned after her government failed to provide even the most basic security and public services. She joined a local opposition movement, and after participating in several antigovernment demonstrations, she was marked as an enemy of the governing regime. After her house was raided by Venezuelan intelligence forces, she decided to leave for good.

To get to the United States, Ysabel went to Caracas before embarking on nearly three weeks of circuitous travel via airplane, car, bus and taxi. She journeyed through Panama City, Bogotá, Cancún, Mexico City and Mexicali, before finally arriving in San Luis Rio Colorado, a Mexican border town adjacent to Yuma, Ariz., where she presented herself to be considered for asylum at the designated port of entry.

Image

CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Ysabel, it should be noted, has now been detained for more than half a year despite following American immigration and asylum laws to the letter. When interviewed by officials from the Department of Homeland Security, she was quickly found to have a legitimate fear of returning to Venezuela. Nevertheless, like tens of thousands of asylum seekers like her, she has been made to endure the suffocating precarity of our criminal justice system despite never having committed, nor ever being accused of, a crime.

THE BIG IDEAS: WHAT IS POWER?

A special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen notable thinkers and writers answer the question, “What is power?” The entire series can be read here.

Instead of appearing in criminal court, those who seek asylum in the United States undergo civil proceedings. Public defenders are not provided in civil court, so most migrants and asylum seekers receive no legal counsel as they fight their immigration cases, instead relying entirely on pro-bono legal services like The Florence Project, Arizona’s only nonprofit dedicated to representing migrants. According to a 2016 report by the American Immigration Council, only 14 percent of immigrant detainees are represented by an attorney — a number that has likely fallen with recent increases in asylum seekers arriving at the border. The overwhelming majority of those without lawyers — almost 91 percent — have their cases rejected

America’s immigration system takes the myth of due process and turns it on its head. Instead of a presumption of innocence, migrants face the assumption of inadmissibility. They are tasked with demonstrating that they face a certifiable risk to their lives, though in most of their home countries there are few tangible ways to document their plight. Asylum seekers are thus saddled with a confounding burden of proof in an entirely unfamiliar legal system.

Image

CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Our detention and deportation system is further obscured by a Kafkaesque, multi-agency bureaucracy that must be navigated in a language foreign to most of those ensnared in it. Even along the border with Mexico, prison guards and judges often do not speak or understand Spanish, distancing them even further from the population over whom they wield staggering control. This, in turn, exacerbates the vulnerability of detainees and their families, who are commonly preyed upon by lawyers, bail bondsmen and a microeconomy of individuals offering dubious document preparation, translation support and myriad other “services.”

In Arizona, the immigration judges who decide cases inside detention facilities are often notorious for their hard-line approach. For instance, from 2013 to 2018, one southern Arizona judge, John W. Davis, denied 96.9 percent of his cases, granting only nine asylum claims out of the 291 that came before him (the nationwide denial rate during this same period was dramatically lower, at 57.6 percent). In one two-year stretch, Judge Davis ordered the deportation of every single asylum seeker who entered his courtroom.

Despite all the odds stacked against her, Ysabel was granted asylum by a federal immigration judge in February, winning her case even without a lawyer. When I visited her a few days after the decision, she was visibly changed, carrying herself with a lightness I have rarely seen inside the walls of the detention center. After half a year suffering the oppression of uncertainty, a path had finally been laid out before her. Any day now, she told me, she would be released, the exit door into America finally opened.

Days and weeks passed, however, and still the door remained inexplicably shut. Week after week, I arrived at the detention center expecting Ysabel’s name to have disappeared from our list, only to find her sitting again in the visitation room among the other women seeking refuge — mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters. Each time we spoke, her freedom seemed to be slipping further away. The government had asked that her release be delayed while officials prepared an appeal. The deadline to file came and went without Ysabel receiving any updates regarding her case. Finally, she heard that the government had indeed filed its appeal, but she was given no follow-up court date — the one piece of information that allows detained asylum seekers to build a potential timeline for their near future, the single point around which some glimmer of hope might coalesce.

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Opinion | Francisco Cantú

Cages Are Cruel. The Desert Is, Too.

June 30, 2018

Ysabel’s case, I later determined after an hour of being referred from one phone line to another, had been transferred to the Board of Immigration Appeals — America’s highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration law. When I finally got ahold of someone from the office to inquire whether a court date had been set for Ysabel’s case, I was told that there was none. Instead of holding hearings, the court decides most cases behind closed doors, usually based solely on “paper review.” When I asked if the office could estimate how long it might take for a decision to be reached, I was told bluntly “there’s no timeline for the board.”

The power the government wields over Ysabel’s fate is difficult to fully grasp. The purgatory she and other asylum seekers are made to endure often lasts for months or even years. All across the country, migrants like her are being shut off from public view in hundreds of facilities that are largely unaccountable to the outside world. Few other countries are engaged in imprisoning noncriminals at such a scale: According to the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, the American immigration detention system is the largest in the world, and one of the few that locks up migrants in criminal-style prisons.

An internal report conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009 plainly states that the agency’s detention model “relies primarily on correctional incarceration standards designed for pretrial felons,” standards that, ICE admits, “impose more restrictions and carry more costs than are necessary.” But these costs represent immense profits for the private detention industry: In fiscal year 2016, roughly two-thirds of all detained migrants (more than 260,000 people) were held in for-profit facilities, generating more than $4 billion in revenue.

Prolonged detention magnifies the most dehumanizing elements of the migrant experience — the commodification of bodies that occurs as migrants are trafficked, the dangers they endure along our militarized border and the criminalization thrust upon them from the moment they cross it. All of that is concentrated within the walls of the detention center. The women I meet feel this keenly. “I hope I can soon leave these four walls,” they tell me, because within them, “it’s like we are animals.”

The acute power of this dehumanization is also meant to serve as a tool of deterrence. Deterrence, after all, has become the underlying philosophy of border enforcement — the ever-growing danger and expense of crossing our Southwestern deserts, the horrifying prospect of parents being separated from their children, the destabilizing uncertainty of being imprisoned with no end in sight. All of it is meant to discourage, dissuade and ultimately break the spirit of the would-be migrant.

One of the women I visit regularly, a 57-year-old grandmother from Guatemala, recently admitted to me that she was considering dropping her asylum claim in order to be deported as soon as possible. The power she felt crushing her after more than half a year of detention was becoming even more unendurable than the overwhelming fear that led her to flee her home in the first place. “No puedo aguantar mas,” she told me — “I can’t take it any longer.”

This, I wanted to tell her, was the system working as it was designed. Instead, I told her not to lose faith, not to give up, wondering all the while if the refuge she sought here might be withheld from her forever.

Francisco Cantu is a former Border Patrol Agent and the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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

Beneath all of the Trump Administration’s diversionary tactics and overt White Nationalist racism is an even more disturbing truth: our country is systematically denying due process, fundamental fairness, and humane treatment to those who, unlike Trump and his scofflaws, are actually following our laws and deserve a “fair shot” at receiving life-saving protection.

Folks like Yasabel pose no “threat” to the United States other than the color of their skin. But, Trump, Stephen Miller, Bill Barr, and the rest of the Trump sycophants, their supporters, and their GOP enablers, pose an existential threat to our continued existence as a nation.

Outrageously, the U.S. Immigration Courts, supposedly a courageous bastion of protection for the legal and constitutional rights of asylum applicants and others against Government overreach, have become “weaponized” under Barr and Sessions. Now, they function as tools of repression, not justice.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the United States will escape the eventual consequences of the systemic abuses of our legal system and human dignity being carried out under our noses by the Trump Administration through the seriously corrupted Immigration “Court” System.

Yes, 1939 can happen in America, and it’s coming closer all the time! Trump’s disgusting rhetoric is the same as fascists before him: hate, shame, blame, vilification and dehumanization of the innocent and most vulnerable.

Wake up, before it’s too late! Join the New Due Process Army and fight against this Administration’s vile White Nationalist Plan to destroy our country!

PWS

06-01-19

CHIEF CLOWN VOWS TO “MAKE AMERICA PAY” FOR HIS FAILURES: With His “Maliciously Incompetent” Immigration Policies in Shambles, Trump Promises To Punish American Consumers & Businesses With Tariffs On Mexico Having Nothing to Do With Trade!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/politics/trump-mexico-tariffs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Annie Karni and Ana Swanson report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that he planned to impose a 5 percent tariff on all imported goods from Mexico beginning June 10, a tax that he said would “gradually increase” until Mexico stopped the flow of undocumented immigrants across the border.

The announcement, which Mr. Trump hinted at on Thursday morning and announced on his Twitter feed, said the tariffs would be in place “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.”

In a presidential statement that followed, he said that tariffs would be raised to 10 percent on July 1 “if the crisis persists,” and then by an additional 5 percent each month for three months.

“Tariffs will permanently remain at the 25 percent level unless and until Mexico substantially stops the illegal inflow of aliens coming through its territory,” the statement said.

Mr. Trump’s anger over undocumented immigrants has been steadily increasing since January, after he failed to force Democrats to give him billions of dollars to build his long-promised wall along the southwestern border. Since then, he has moved to cut off all foreign aid to countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and threatened to completely seal off the border with Mexico, in an attempt to punish countries he blames for the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States.

His growing frustration of his own administration’s handling of immigration issues this year led to a purge of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including its secretary, Kirstjen M. Nielsen.

Mr. Trump has previously threatened to tax cars flowing across the border with Mexico, saying in April that he would take such action if Mexico did not stop the flow of migrants and drugs into the United States.

“If the drugs don’t stop, or largely stop, we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars — the whole ballgame is cars. And if that doesn’t stop the drugs, we close the border,” he said at the time.

Mr. Trump’s announcement of tariffs came the same day that his administration told Congress it planned to seek congressional approval of the new trade pact with Mexico and Canada, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The president has used the threat of tariffs to try to pressure foreign leaders into taking a wide array of actions, like renegotiating trade deals as well as limiting the amount of metal or cars they ship to the United States.

In April, he threatened to place a 25 percent tariff on Mexican cars if the country would not take action to stem the flow of migrants through the southwestern border, walking back a promise he had made in the revised North American trade agreement to exempt Mexico from such a measure.

The president has told his advisers that he likes tariffs because they can be done immediately and unilaterally. But tariffs are typically used to counter trade-related violations.

Such a move would also risk derailing relations with Mexico and Mr. Trump’s revised North American trade pact, which preserves the ultralow tariffs the original deal put into place.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration started a congressional process on Thursday that both clears a procedural hurdle toward having Congress vote on the agreement and ramps up pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who have called for substantial changes to the pact before it is ratified.

The White House sent a draft “Statement of Administrative Action” to Congress on Thursday. Under congressional rules, that clears the way for the administration to submit an enforcement bill to Congress after 30 days, which in turn starts a 90-day clock for an up-or-down vote on the pact.

That is likely to come as a challenge to Ms. Pelosi, who has recently told other lawmakers and union officials that Democrats are planning a study of the pact that could drag on well into the fall. In a statement, Ms. Pelosi described the move as “not a positive step. It indicates a lack of knowledge on the part of the administration on the policy and process to pass a trade agreement.”

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Wow! Just think of how far we have fallen as a nation. Let’s imagine that Obama, Bush, or Clinton proposed such idiotic, incoherent, nonsense, blatantly exhibiting something between total derangement and gross incompetence.

Journalists would be stunned, economists horrified. Politicians of both parties would be “talking 25th Amendment!”

Yet with Trump, it’s merely “ho hum, another day in nut-land” with only our country’s and the world’s future at stake. After all, he’s always threatening to take utterly insane, totally illegal actions. And, he only follows through about half the time.

Can we really survive this type of Clown Kakistocracy? Why won’t Mexico, China, Canada, India, and the EU just get together, negotiate some sound trade agreements based on real economics and sane diplomacy, and let the U.S. wander off into never-never land?

Yeah, I know, the economy continues to blaze away, markets are high, and unemployment low. But, remember the little warning line at the bottom of the prospectus of your most successful financial investment: Past results are not a prediction of future returns.

Well, there is some good news. At least there won’t be any suspense on who gets the “Courtside Five Clown Award” for this week. Who else but the Chief Clown! He’s earned it, and you can’t say that about much else in his tawdry life.

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

PWS

05-31-19

ANNA FLAGG @ NY TIMES: More Bad News For White Nationalist Restrictionists: No Evidence Supports Bogus Claim Of Connection Between Undocumented Aliens & Crime! — “They tend to bring economic and cultural benefits to their communities. They typically come to America to find work, not to commit crimes.”

For years, all reputable statistical analyses have shown that the nativist restrictionists’ claim that immigration increases crime is just another White Nationalist myth. Not to be deterred, the nativists shifted to claiming that such studies didn’t break out “undocumented” immigrants as a separate group. Now, The Marshall Project’s data editor Anna Flagg writing in the N.Y. Times debunks that myth with what Trump and his White Nationalists fear most: facts!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/upshot/illegal-immigration-crime-rates-research.html

Is There a Connection Between Undocumented Immigrants and Crime?

It’s a widely held perception, but a new analysis finds no evidence to support it.

By Anna Flagg

May 13, 2019

A lot of research has shown that there’s no causal connection between immigration and crime in the United States. But after one such study was reported on jointly by The Marshall Project and The Upshot last year, readers had one major complaint: Many argued it was unauthorized immigrants who increase crime, not immigrants over all.

An analysis derived from new data is now able to help address this question, suggesting that growth in illegal immigration does not lead to higher local crime rates.

In part because it’s hard to collect data on them, undocumented immigrants have been the subjects of few studies, including those related to crime. But the Pew Research Center recently released estimates of undocumented populations sorted by metro area, which The Marshall Project has compared with local crime rates published by the F.B.I. For the first time, there is an opportunity for a broader analysis of how unauthorized immigration might have affected crime rates since 2007.

A large majority of the areas recorded decreases in both violent and property crime between 2007 and 2016, consistent with a quarter-century decline in crime across the United States. The analysis found that crime went down at similar rates regardless of whether the undocumented population rose or fell. Areas with more unauthorized migration appeared to have larger drops in crime, although the difference was small and uncertain.

(Illegal immigration itself is either a civil violation or a misdemeanor, depending on whether someone overstayed a visa or crossed the border without authorization.)

Most types of crime had an almost flat trend line, indicating that changes in undocumented populations had little or no effect on crime in the various metro areas under survey. Murder was the only type of crime that appeared to show a rise, but again the difference was small and uncertain (effectively zero).

For undocumented immigrants, being arrested for any reason would mean facing eventual deportation — and for some a return to whatever danger or deprivation they’d sought to escape at home.

There is no exact count of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. To create estimates, experts at Pew subtracted Department of Homeland Security counts of immigrants with legal status from the number of foreign-born people counted by the Census Bureau. Many organizations and agencies, including the D.H.S., use this residual estimation method; it is generally considered the best one available. As of 2016, there were an estimated 10.7 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, down a million and a half since 2007.

Jeffrey Passel, a Pew senior demographer, and his team estimated changes in undocumented populations for roughly 180 metropolitan areas between 2007 and 2016. For comparison, The Marshall Project calculated corresponding three-year averages of violent and property crime rates from the Uniform Crime Reporting program, and the change in those rates.

The results of the analysis resemble those of other studies on the relationship between undocumented immigration and crime. Last year, a report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that unauthorized immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than their native-born counterparts. A state-level analysis in Criminology, an academic journal, found that undocumented immigration did not increase violent crime and was in fact associated with slight decreases in it. Another Cato study found that unauthorized immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated.

At the more local level, an analysis by Governing magazine reported that metropolitan areas with more undocumented residents had similar rates of violent crime, and significantly lower rates of property crime, than areas with smaller numbers of such residents in 2014. After controlling for multiple socioeconomic factors, the author of the analysis, Mike Maciag, found that for every 1 percentage point increase in an area’s population that was undocumented there were 94 fewer property crimes per 100,000 residents.

More research is underway about the potential effects of undocumented immigration on crime. Robert Adelman, a professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, whose group’s research The Marshall Project and The Upshot have previously documented, is leading a team to expand on the Governing analysis. Early results suggest unauthorized immigration has no effect on violent crime, and is associated with lower property crime, the same as Mr. Maciag found.

Preliminary findings indicate that other socioeconomic factors like unemployment rates, housing instability and measures of economic hardship all predict higher rates of different types of crime, while undocumented immigrant populations do not.

Many studies have established that immigrants commit crimes at consistently lower rates than native-born Americans. But a common concern is whether immigrants put pressure on native-born populations in any number of ways — for instance, by increasing job competition — that could indirectly lead to more crime and other negative impacts.

According to Mr. Adelman and his team, however, the impact of undocumented immigrants is probably similar to what the research indicates about immigrants over all: They tend to bring economic and cultural benefits to their communities. They typically come to America to find work, not to commit crimes, says Yulin Yang, a member of the team.

The data suggests that when it comes to crime, the difference between someone who is called a legal immigrant and an illegal one doesn’t seem to matter.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for its newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebookor Twitter. Anna Flagg is a senior data reporter for The Marshall Project.

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Go to the original article at the above link for the accompanying charts and graphs.

PWS

05-15-19

TRUMP & HIS ENABLERS CLAIM THAT IT’S SAFE TO RETURN GUATEMALANS — THEY LIE! — The Facts “On The Ground” Tell A Far Different Story: “No wall will stop the flow of migrants. No raging about rapists or threats to separate families will stop it. No racism against brown people or fear of demographic change in 21st-century America will stop it. A broken American immigration system certainly won’t stop it. Not as long as Central Americans are desperate.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/border-immigration-crisis-guatemala.html

Roger Cohen writes in the NY Times:

VADO, N.M. — Rigoberto Pablo ran out of hope. There was no work, no decent schooling for his children. Nothing in the dried-out streams, wilting coffee plants and wafting sewage of his village in the western highlands of Guatemala gave him reason to think his family’s suffering would end. So late last year, he crossed the nearby Mexican border, U.S.A.-bound.

Three months later, in February, I met him in this small New Mexico town, a timid man with a gentle smile. Pablo, age 37, is in American limbo, like hundreds of thousands of migrants. Seated on a sofa in the home of his hosts, he reached down, turned up the hem of his pants and revealed the electronic ankle monitor that Immigration and Customs Enforcement affixed when it released him. A green light confirmed he was being tracked. “If I take it off,” he said, “they’ll come after me.”

His 14-year-old son, Alex, who crossed the border with his father on Nov. 14 and is now in seventh grade at a nearby school, gazed at the device. His dad, he said, is “not a rapist or murderer. He wants to work and I want to study.”

If only it were that simple. Rigoberto and Alex Pablo are part of a vast influx. Already, the 460,294 migrants apprehended at the southern border this year outnumber those for all of 2018. Since October, 1 percent of Guatemala’s total population — more than 160,000 people — have crossed. Many are children. Almost a year after President Trump ended his cruel “zero tolerance” policy that ripped kids from their parents, children, most from Central America, are still pouring in — some 40,000 in April alone, almost 9,000 of them unaccompanied by a parent. Last month Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16 years old, became the third Guatemalan child to die in federal custody in five months. The others were 7 and 8.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement fitted Pablo with an ankle bracelet when it released him.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times

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Mr. Pablo and his son Alex crossed into the United States from Guatemala together last year.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times

This situation is unconscionable. Americans of all political stripes should be able to agree on that. The United States has to reconcile being a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.

Yet our immigration policy is mired in shameful congressional paralysis, with the great diversion of Trump’s sea-to-shining-sea wall serving only to fire up his base and fan political differences. His policy zigzags, and his revolving-door appointments and his threats (including the construction of a “contingency” detention center for migrants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba) do nothing to address the root of the immigration crisis: the implosion of Central America.

“This crisis is about children, their safety and the future of our region,” said Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, this month. Nothing he or Mark Morgan, Trump’s nominee to head ICE, does will work until the collapse of the region is addressed.

Guatemala is led by a former TV star (sound familiar?) named Jimmy Morales, who ran in 2015 on a slogan of “Neither corrupt nor a thief.” That is now a joke. He has tried to expel the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a United Nations-backed group. He wants to grant amnesty to the perpetrators of the 1980s genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, most of them indigenous people like the Pablo family. Meanwhile the state is failing to provide its people with basic food, health care, education and protection from narco-violence.

Trump says he wants to punish Guatemala and its neighbors for not doing enough to stop the migrants. “No money goes there anymore,” he said. But he has winked at Morales’s corruption, emboldening him to trash the rule of law that is Guatemalans’ only defense. State Department officers seethe at America’s abandonment of its values, but political appointees overrule them. Morales keeps Trump happy in various ways. Guatemala moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem immediately after the United States did.

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A sign calling President Jimmy Morales a “national shame” at a rally in January in Guatemala City.CreditMoises Castillo/Associated Press

No wonder people like Pablo are fleeing. He is planning to petition for asylum, though gaining it will prove difficult; poverty alone isn’t a justification. Nonetheless, the backlog in immigration court means he’ll probably be able to remain for two to three years before his case is heard. In the meantime, he can’t legally work. He’s living with Aurelio and Maria Aranda, a family he met through the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. His son is learning English, at least. Migrants bring children because it improves their chances of getting in, but also out of a fervid desire to give them a future.

Pablo told me about the hunger and fear on the weeklong road to the border. Meager rice and beans offered once a day. Being herded this way and that by coyotes — the smugglers he’d paid $5,000 in borrowed money. Running under a full moon, climbing eight-foot wire fences, passing babies beneath them and children over them, surrendering in the dawn to the United States Border Patrol.

He has no idea what will happen now. “My wife and three other children are back in the village,” Pablo told me. “I miss them. My youngest son was sick. I could not afford the medicine.”

The candor of his gaze was almost unbearable. I decided I had to go to his village of Aldea Las Guacemayas to see for myself what had propelled him northward.

It takes over nine hours to drive the roughly 220 miles from Guatemala City northwest to Pablo’s home. Volcanic mountains soar, dense with vegetation, browned from lack of rain. Neglect is everywhere: Subsiding hillside terraces are barren of cultivation, half-finished houses point rebar at the sky, unkempt shrines commemorate lives tipped over a precipice. Straight-backed indigenous women in bright fabric bestride this wounded landscape.

Guatemala is a beautiful, traumatized country, marked by centuries of white Criollo racism toward the Mayans and other indigenous people. During the early 1980s, military-backed death squads rampaged through entire communities, justifying a scorched-earth policy on the spurious principle that “indigenous villages were the rivers in which the leftist guerrillas swam,” as Edgar Gutiérrez, a former foreign minister, put it to me. Leftist Sandinistas had triumphed in Nicaragua. The United States, determined to prevent this from happening in Guatemala, supported the paramilitary marauders.

Some 200,000 people were killed, including 40,000 who disappeared. This was the Guatemalan genocide, an indelible wound. President Morales has encouraged the slogan “There was no genocide” — a tip of the hat to the military who support him. That Trump has embraced this government, given the past American military support that President Bill Clinton acknowledged as a “mistake,” underscores this administration’s contempt for human rights.

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Candelaria Sales Garcia, Pablo’s wife, in the courtyard of their home.CreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

Pablo’s wife, Candelaria Sales Garcia, greeted me outside the family’s hillside shack, where a duck pecked at a watermelon rind and a little dog called Dollar slept in the shade. In the kitchen, a wood fire heated beans in blackened pots.

Sales is a woman with a broad smile that can’t quite mask her obvious pain. Her husband and one son are gone to North America. Another son, 19-year-old Valdomero, struggles to find work. Her daughter, Gabriela, 12, sits idle because her schoolteachers are no-shows. Her youngest, an 8-year-old named Leo, has a cheek swollen from an intractable infection.

“I said nothing to my husband although he was leaving me behind here,” she told me. “Because I knew that there is nothing here.”

Nothing. I kept hearing the word. Nothing from the government, nothing to do — no water, no education, no health care, no jobs — “here there is nothing, nothing,” Valdomero declared, sweeping a hand across the sunbaked landscape. The state hardly bothers to collect taxes — they represent a smaller percentage of gross national product than remittances — and does little with them.

Listening to this bright, bilingual young man (he and his family speak the Mam dialect and Spanish), knowing that their brown skins make them invisible to their government, I was reminded of my South African father’s summation of why he could not stand apartheid and left: “The waste.”

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Candelaria Sales Garcia with two of her children, Gabriela and Leo Pablo.CreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

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A photo of Alex Pablo on his mother’s phoneCreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

Valdomero does the work his father used to do. He unloads concrete building blocks from trucks. He stacks them. For a day of this, he says, he is paid about $8: Hardly enough to keep the family in tortillas. You do this and do this and do this — and then one day, you have to get out.

As dusk fell, the young man suggested we take a walk up the mountain. It has changed since he was a child. The streams where he played and drank are gone. The birds are gone. So are the coffee trees. The mountainous amphitheater, visible from a ridge, is no longer verdant. For three or four years now, it has been dry and hot.

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Valdomero Pablo, right, on the mountains near his village.CreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

I have never been anywhere that conveyed such a palpable sense of the earth dying. President Trump thinks climate change is a joke. He should come here. He would understand another big migration driver.

The only sign of development is a couple of spindly red-and-white telecommunication towers on the ridges. A basic phone is cheap, and Guatemalans pay as they go: the 21st century’s bread and circuses for the masses.

The next morning, I drove into Mexico with Valdomero. White posts with an official stamp mark the frontier, but there is no control of any kind: no police, no customs or border agents, no barrier, nothing.

A Toyota Hilux roared up from the Mexican side but its driver, seeing a gringo, spun around. “Narcos,” Valdomero said. We continued some 15 miles into Mexico without being asked for a passport or papers.

Coffee, gasoline, corn, chickens and coffee are openly smuggled back and forth on that road. So are people and drugs, mainly cocaine. Only a tiny fraction of the estimated 1,400 tons of cocaine transiting the country annually is interdicted. Congressmen, mayors and police officers have been paid off by the cartels. Morales will soon be term-limited out; for the presidential election next month, his party has put forward a new candidate, Estuardo Galdámez, who recently posed for a photograph with a convicted drug trafficker.

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The border between Guatemala and Mexico, near Pablo’s home.CreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

Guatemala is sliding backward at an alarming rate. The passage from national trauma toward democratic decency is never easy. Here it began with the peace accords of 1996. For a dozen years now, democracy has been buttressed by the efforts of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or Cicig, established through a treaty between the United Nations and Guatemala.

Cicig is central to Guatemala’s efforts to establish an independent justice system. Morales’s two predecessors were jailed on charges of corruption. The United States last month arrested and charged Mario Estrada, a presidential candidate close to Morales, with conspiracy to import cocaine. Morales himself is being investigated in Guatemala for campaign finance irregularities, and his brother and son face fraud charges. Some of the country’s richest families are being investigated for the illegal financing of Morales’s political party.

Now President Morales has turned on Cicig, ordering its expulsion and unilaterally terminating its mission. He has banned Iván Velásquez, its head and a former Colombian prosecutor, from re-entering the country — all to scarcely a whimper from a Trump administration notoriously hostile to the United Nations and multilateralism.

Guatemala’s Constitutional Court has ruled Morales’s measures illegal. The president has said its judgment means nothing: So much for the rule of law. Cicig continues its work, with Velásquez leading it from abroad, but stripped of any police protection for its personnel, the organization is “in intensive care,” as one American official put it to me. When I visited its headquarters in Guatemala City, a ghostly air prevailed.

American support for Cicig had been critical. In 2013, Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, visited the courtroom where Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator, was tried. Montt was convicted through the bravery of survivors and Cicig-backed prosecutors, though the verdict was later vacated on a technicality. The message could not have been clearer: The United States is resolute in its support of an independent judicial process and Guatemala’s nascent rule of law.

No longer. Trump’s America has gone AWOL.

“Cicig has mounted a system of terror where it persecutes those who think differently,” Morales declared grotesquely to the United Nations General Assembly last September. Earlier that month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had tweeted, “We greatly appreciate Guatemala’s efforts in counternarcotics and security.” That was it.

The State Department, through its deputy spokesman but not Pompeo himself, has declared that the United States is “deeply concerned” by Morales’s recent efforts to pass a bill that would grant amnesty to, and free, those convicted of gross human rights violations during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. But this mild protest was dismissed in Guatemala City as the murmurings of a third-tier bureaucrat — in effect, tacit authorization. The government operates on the basis that it has a green light from the White House.

Many in the State Department are troubled. One officer told me: “It’s a strange and disturbing thing. The arguments we make to political appointees are not heard. We have a State Department that basically stood by while Jimmy Morales dismantled the mechanisms put in place to confront impunity.”

Luis Arreaga, the United States ambassador in Guatemala, is a career diplomat who has tried to stand up for American principles. For this he has been dismissed in local media as an Obama holdover, called the “worst ambassador in the world” and accused of being both on George Soros’s payroll (of course) and an agent of Cuba or Venezuela.

All this is consistent with an elaborate Guatemalan lobbying operation in Washington that has sought to portray Cicig as a bunch of Soros-backed liberal lefties. Several Republicans, including Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, have proved receptive.

In January, Crawford tweeted in support of the expulsion of Cicig, saying Guatemalans were “entitled to their own sovereignty.” In March, Lee tweeted: “Free and fair elections of a nation’s representatives, chosen by and for the people, is the foundation of republican government. Our friends in Guatemala should be able to exercise this right, free from foreign influence by the U.S. State Department.”

This amounted to a thinly veiled attack on Arreaga, whom Guatemalan media have attempted to portray as backing the presidential candidacy of Thelma Aldana, a tough former attorney general behind several anti-corruption cases. She now faces an arrest warrant for alleged embezzlement as Morales maneuvers desperately to block her candidacy. She has taken refuge in El Salvador.

In line with the nationalist playbook at work in Hungary and Poland, Morales has also gone after the independent judiciary relentlessly. Judges are regularly branded as “terrorists.”

I went to see Gloria Porras, one of the five justices on the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s last bastion of the rule of law. She is a woman of great poise and dignity, under constant attack.

“Every time we uphold a case of corruption,” she told me, we make it possible for “public money to be spent on the basic problems we have.” The government says that public money is not sufficient for medicine, education and roads. “I believe it is sufficient but not used in the right way,” she said.

Porras and other colleagues have been threatened with removal from the court. This month there was a bomb threat that forced the court’s evacuation. She looked at me with defiant pride.

“They assault my dignity,” she said, “because I have zero tolerance for narcotics trafficking and I am independent in my positions. The traffic of drugs to the United States is, as musicians say, in crescendo. The traffic is tied to corruption. Whatever the risks, whatever the attacks, I will do my work. It is a question of legality. It is also a question of honor.”

“Every time I make the right decision,” she continued, “I contribute to the creation of hope that my country can change.”

Every anti-corruption decision by an independent justice, in other words, fosters a Guatemala where Pablo and his family do not have to leave in desperation, because they might just have a future.

Before I left Rigoberto Pablo’s village, I spoke to his daughter, Gabriela. School had been canceled. She was bored and frustrated. “I want to go to America, I want to study there with my brother,” she said. “And I want to see Papa.”

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Gabriela Pablo doing homework in the courtyard of her family’s home. CreditDaniele Volpe for The New York Times

No wall will stop the flow of migrants. No raging about rapists or threats to separate families will stop it. No racism against brown people or fear of demographic change in 21st-century America will stop it. A broken American immigration system certainly won’t stop it. Not as long as Central Americans are desperate.

Trump doesn’t believe in multilateral diplomacy. If he were serious, he would involve Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico in diplomacy on practical steps. He would explore fair and efficient in-country asylum processing. He would stop talking about a wall and slashing foreign aid and start talking about Central American development, a possible Marshall Plan for the region. Mexican migration has declined as Mexican standards of living have risen. There’s a lesson there, if Trump were interested.

He would pursue ways to make the Guatemalan-Mexican border something more than a joke, to combat corruption and narcotics trafficking, to fight impunity and establish the rule of law in Central America, to give Guatemalans some belief in their government, to empower the likes of Gloria Porras, to restore American values, to protect human rights and to match migrants with jobs. And he would declare, “We cannot tolerate the death on our watch of ONE MORE child!”

The unique energy of America’s churn is indivisible from the renewal new immigrants bring.

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Pablo in New Mexico.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times

At the same time, if generosity breeds lawlessness, it defeats itself. Somewhere between those truths lie possible compromises on immigration that Republicans and Democrats could agree on — if Trump had not reduced politics to partisan war.

My journey to the border and on to Guatemala left me with a familiar feeling: Trump’s America is betraying itself. What brought Rigoberto Pablo and his child here is an old and honorable idea of the United States: “I came to this country to make money and to improve my life,” he told me when we spoke this month. His ankle bracelet had been removed a few weeks before, and in August he will appear in court to apply for asylum. He is a decent, honest man with a decent, honest family. He deserves better than Jimmy Morales’s lawlessness and Donald Trump’s posturing.

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Desperate people do desperate things! Duh! That’s what one of my colleagues told me my first week on the bench in Arlington. Too bad that Trump and the incompetents who work for him don’t take the time to understand the basics of human migration and conduct themselves lives like human beings and responsible public officials.

America deserves someone better than Donald Trump and his cowardly sycophantic GOP. Both Guatemala and the U.S appear to be “governed” by kakistocracies!

We diminish ourselves as a nation with each day that Trump is in office. But, that won’t stop human migration. It’s going top take folks much smarter, more humane, and more competent that Trump and his toadies to successfully address today’s immigraton issues.

PWS

05-11-19

COURTSIDE HISTORY: Trump’s American White Nationalist Antecedents Were The Racist Pols & Pseudo-Scientists Of A Century Ago! — The Lies & Ugliness Of The Past Are Being Repeated — Only This Time It’s People Of Color Rather Than Italians, Irish, Slavs, Catholics, & Jews Who Are Targeted For “Dehumanization” (Although It Would Be Wrong To Underestimate Trump’s Responsibility For The Revival Of Anti-Semitism)!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/sunday/anti-immigrant-hatred-1920s.html

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.

Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

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Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.

What was different about the new, putatively scientific campaign was that even whiteness was no ticket to entry.

Writing about Slavic immigrants, the sociologist Edward A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin — later the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union — declared, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man.” The president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”

The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.” A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, his city’s leading supporter of progressive causes, explained to friends why he became the single largest financial backer of the anti-immigrant campaign: His concern, he wrote, was that without a restriction law, Europe would be “drained of Jews — to its benefit no doubt but not to ours.”

The “biological” justifications for this nativism were first developed in Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, in laboratories financed by the widow of the railroad baron E.H. Harriman. (One of her goals, Mary Harriman said, was preventing “the decay of the American race.”) The laboratory’s head, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding. One of the first steps, he believed, was to impose new controls on open immigration.

At first, Davenport wished to bar the immigration only of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

First published in 1916 and reissued in a series of revisions over the next eight years — all of them brought into print by Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — “The Passing of the Great Race” savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern and southern Europe while exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe. With the presumed authority of scholarship, he summarized the essential argument of racial eugenics.

“Whether we like to admit it or not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.” And, he concluded, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

Grant was not an actual scientist. But Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-famous paleontologist and his closest friend, definitely was. Osborn, who once expressed his opposition to the extension of the Westchester Parkway near his country estate because it would bring thousands of “East Side Jews” to the area, presided over the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, and made that institution the beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement. “I am convinced,” said Osborn, that the “spiritual, physical, moral and intellectual structure” of individuals is “based on racial characteristics.” It wasn’t a matter of ethnic bias, he said — it was “cold-blooded” science.

Other scholars rallied to the cause. Robert M. Yerkes — his name immortalized today at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta — conducted a severely flawed series of tests of American servicemen purporting to establish the intellectual inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans. Charles W. Gould, a lawyer in New York, sponsored “A Study of American Intelligence,” by Carl C. Brigham, a young Princeton psychologist (and later the inventor of the SAT). Brigham’s conclusion: “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”

At the same time, Perkins and his colleagues at Charles Scribner’s Sons published a raft of books promoting racialized eugenics. Scribner publicists wrote in one promotion piece: “The inrush of lower races is threatening the very blood of our country.” Perkins’s authors were echoed in the country’s leading magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. “Race character is as fixed a fact as race color,” the Post declared. “Thirty years ago,” the magazine insisted in another article, “science had not perhaps sufficiently advanced to make us fully aware” of the danger of open immigration. Now it had.

Read more

Opinion articles about immigration.

Opinion | Janet Murguía

The American Family Makes This Country Great, and It’s in Danger

May 2, 2019

Opinion | Alan Cross

Alabama Is More Pro-Immigrant Than You Think

April 30, 2019

When the 1924 Immigration Act reached the floor of Congress, passage was assured. Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, declared that “the fundamental reason” for immigration restriction was “biological.” During the floor debate, one congressman said the law was provoked by “the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” Given the arguments presented by so many of the nation’s leading scientific figures, who could disagree?

The resulting law established quotas by nation; they cut like a scythe. In the last year before their introduction, more than 220,000 Italians entered the United States. The quota slashed that number to less than 4,000. Reductions nearly as harsh were imposed on other eastern and southern European groups, while tens of thousands of slots reserved for Britons, Scandinavians and other “Nordics” went unfilled.

The 1924 quotas remained in force for more than 40 years — while the economic devastation of a worldwide depression hit southern Europe especially hard; while a 1939 measure that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States died in Congress, and the savagery of the Holocaust began; while the Nazis and their allies starved 350,000 Greeks and slaughtered 200,000 Serbs; and while displaced-persons camps stretched across the ruins of postwar Europe.

In 1920, Charles Davenport had asked Madison Grant, “Can we build a wall high enough around this country” to keep out the unwanted? They could, and they did.

Daniel Okrent is the author of “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.”

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

The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.

Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.

At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.

Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?

How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

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The New York Times

By The Editors

Video by Leah Varjacques and Taige Jensen

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Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison

Wake up, before it’s too late! Join the New Due Process Army and fight against this Administration’s vile White Nationalist Plan to destroy our country!

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