"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
In the 18 months since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Republican officials have had ample opportunity to prove they’re not merely antiabortion but also pro-child. They keep failing.
GOP politicians across the country have found new and creative ways to deny resources to struggling parents and children. Take, for instance, the summer lunch program.
Under a new federal program, children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches can also receive food assistance during the summer. The policy, created as part of the bipartisan budget deal in 2022, gives eligible families $40 per month per child, or $120 total over the summer. It often works essentially as a top-up for food stamps, since these families must buy more groceries when their children lose access to nutritious school meals when classes go out of session. (It’s similar to a temporary program offered during the pandemic, though it’s much less generous.)
The federal government pays the entire cost of the benefits associated with this new food program and half the administrative costs. The program isn’t automatic, though; states had to opt in by Jan. 1.
Republican governors across 15 states chose not to, as my Post colleague Annie Gowen reported. Up to 10 million kids will be denied access to this grocery aid as a result.
Why have these governors rejected food assistance, even amid soaring grocery prices and pledges to help families strained by inflation?
Some states, such as Texas and Vermont, cited operational or budgetary difficulties with getting a new system running in time for this summer. These obstacles could presumably be surmounted in future years. In other states, GOP politicians expressed outright disdain for the program.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, for instance, said of the new program, “I don’t believe in welfare.” A spokeswoman for Florida’s Department of Children and Families cited vague unspecified fears about “federal strings attached.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds suggested there was no point in giving this grocery assistance to food-insecure children “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
Reynolds is apparently unaware that obesity is linked to a lack of reliable access to nutritious food and that children in food-insecure homes face a higher risk of developmental problems. This suggests withholding this nutritional assistance hurts not only the state’s children today but also its workforce tomorrow.
This is hardly the only time GOP politicians have worked to swipe food from the mouths of hungry children — and their moms.
. . . .
Indeed, if a version of a child tax credit expansion ultimately materializes — and it might in the next few days — that will happen only because Democratic lawmakers explicitly held those corporate tax breaks hostage in exchange for aid to poor kids.
Republicans keep assuring the American public that they really, truly care about helping women forced into bearing children even when they’re not financially or emotionally ready to do so. They claim they want to protect youngsters and invest in their financial future.
Time for the GOP to put its money where its mouth is.
Yup, it’s a great settlement! But, only for those in the CDCA or who don’t understand how totally screwed up, unfair, directionless, visionless, and out of control Garland’s “Clown Courts” 🤡 are!
So, Garland agrees that “his judges” will comply with the Constitution, but ONLY in the CDCA. In the other 95% of Immigration Courts nationwide, they evidently are free to choose to act in a “normal” arbitrary and capricious unconstitutional manner. Nice!
Of course, by initially setting no bond or more than $10K in any case, DHS can unilaterally invoke the “regulatory clamper” (8 CFR 1003.19(i)(2)) to defeat any release on bond pending appeal. Since the BIA routinely holds bond appeals until the detained merits cases are complete, then dismisses them as “moot,” the Administration retains lots of tools to act unconstitutionally.
Another nice touch!
Does anyone truly understand how completely screwed up and unconstitutional Garland’s “star chambers courts” are?
This is what “justice” looks like in 21st Century America, in a Dem Administration no less? Gimmie a break?
A better BIA might have imposed Constitutional due process requiring consideration of ability to pay nationwide, thus preempting the need for more Article III Court litigation and inconsistent decisions affecting the fundamental human right of liberty!
A “better BIA” might have properly limited the DHS’s unconstitutional authority to use the “clamper” to block release on bond, rather than reducing Immigration Judges to a “clerical” role. See, e.g.,Matter of Joseph (“Joseph I”), 22 I&N Dec. 660, 674 (BIA 1999) (Moscato, Board Member dissenting, joined by Schmidt, Chair, and Heilman, Villageliu, Guendelsberger, Rosenberg, Jones, Board Members).
A better AG might have eliminated the unconstitutional “clamper” that gives ICE counsel unfair leverage in bond cases.
“God loves the greedy and selfish, for they shall inherit the earth, the sun, the planets, and the entire universe.”
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WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING!
“The lion’s share of poor people are elderly, children or disabled persons; another chunk are caregivers. And while caregiving isn’t compensated as market labor, parents looking after children and people caring for elderly or sick family members are hardly shiftless layabouts. Being both a mother and a writer, I am well aware that the less compensated of my two jobs is the more demanding one.
But what about that small number of people who could work but, for whatever reason, don’t? Shouldn’t they have to? Well, before deciding whether it’s morally right for them to receive income without working, consider a far larger group that takes in far more money without toil: the idle rich. They soak up plenty of unearned money from the economy, in the form of rent, dividends and capital income. Salaries and wages — that is, money paid for work — only make up about 15 percent of the income of Americans making $10 million per year or more; the rest is capital income from simply owning assets.
And yet rarely do politicians inveigh against the laziness of the well-off. In fact, the government shells out huge sums of money to the rich every year through tax breaks and subsidies.
. . . .
In other words, the well-to-do already do what workfare advocates seem so nervous about: rake in money they haven’t earned through market labor and thrive off the government’s largesse. Perhaps that itself is unfair — so why duplicate it on the other end of the economy? Put simply, it seems ludicrous at best and sadistic at most to start one’s fairness policing from the bottom up. If we mean to transform our economy into one in which people earn precisely what they work for and no more, and receive nothing from the government lest their work ethic wither, it would be best to start from the top down, where nobody runs any risk of starvation or homelessness if they lose their benefits.
In fact, none of us live entirely on what we earn. We rely on the infrastructure, knowledge and technology developed by those who have come before us, and those contemporaneous with us. Instead of trying to mince each person’s life’s work into careful calculations of contribution and merit, it seems more sensible to pursue a fairer economy overall: one that directs its excesses not to the already rich, but to those who have the greatest need; one that recognizes in its distributive structure that every person is immeasurably valuable, deserving of life and dignity.”
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Read the rest of Bruenig’s article, which includes statistical support for her position, at the link.
Wow! Valuing human lives, achievements, and contributions as much as capital! What a revolutionary concept for a capitalist society.
“You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.”
We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of America’s wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid Row streets, strides along, stepping over a dead rat without comment and skirting round a body wrapped in a worn orange blanket lying on the sidewalk.
The two men carry on for block after block after block of tatty tents and improvised tarpaulin shelters. Men and women are gathered outside the structures, squatting or sleeping, some in groups, most alone like extras in a low-budget dystopian movie.
We come to an intersection, which is when General Dogon stops and presents his guest with the choice. He points straight ahead to the end of the street, where the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA rise up in a promise of divine riches.
Heaven.
Then he turns to the right, revealing the “black power” tattoo on his neck, and leads our gaze back into Skid Row bang in the center of LA’s downtown. That way lies 50 blocks of concentrated human humiliation. A nightmare in plain view, in the city of dreams.
Alston turns right.
Philip Alston in downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
So begins a two-week journey into the dark side of the American Dream. The spotlight of the UN monitor, an independent arbiter of human rights standards across the globe, has fallen on this occasion on the US, culminating on Friday with the release of his initial report in Washington.
His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty.
Of those, nine million have zero cash income – they do not receive a cent in sustenance.
Alston’s epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of America’s reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.
The Guardian had unprecedented access to the UN envoy, following him as he crossed the country, attending all his main stops and witnessing the extreme poverty he is investigating firsthand.
Think of it as payback time. As the UN special rapporteur himself put it: “Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time I’m in the US.”
David Busch, who is currently homeless on Venice beach, in Los Angeles. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
The tour comes at a critical moment for America and the world. It began on the day that Republicans in the US Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet – owning as much as half of the entire American people.
A few days into the UN visit, Republican leaders took a giant leap further. They announced plans to slash key social programs in what amounts to an assault on the already threadbare welfare state.
“Look up! Look at those banks, the cranes, the luxury condos going up,” exclaimed General Dogon, who used to be homeless on Skid Row and now works as a local activist with Lacan. “Down here, there’s nothing. You see the tents back to back, there’s no place for folks to go.”
California made a suitable starting point for the UN visit. It epitomizes both the vast wealth generated in the tech boom for the 0.001%, and the resulting surge in housing costs that has sent homelessness soaring. Los Angeles, the city with by far the largest population of street dwellers in the country, is grappling with crisis numbers that increased 25% this past year to 55,000.
Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.
She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.
She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.
Given all that, it’s remarkable how positive Finley remains. What does she think of the American Dream, the idea that everyone can make it if they try hard enough? She replies instantly: “I know I’m going to make it.”
A 41-year-old woman living on the sidewalk in Skid Row going to make it?
“Sure I will, so long as I keep the faith.”
What does “making it” mean to her?
“I want to be a writer, a poet, an entrepreneur, a therapist.”
Ressy Finley, who lives in a tent on 6th Street in Downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
Robert Chambers occupies the next patch of sidewalk along from Finley’s. He’s created an area around his tent out of wooden pallets, what passes in Skid Row for a cottage garden.
He has a sign up saying “Homeless Writers Coalition”, the name of a group he runs to give homeless people dignity against what he calls the “animalistic” aspects of their lives. He’s referring not least to the lack of public bathrooms that forces people to relieve themselves on the streets.
LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the west coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.
Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. That’s a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.
“It’s inhuman actually, and eventually in the end you will acquire animalistic psychology,” Chambers said.
He has been living on the streets for almost a year, having violated his parole terms for drug possession and in turn being turfed out of his low-cost apartment. There’s no help for him now, he said, no question of “making it”.
“The safety net? It has too many holes in it for me.”
Of all the people who crossed paths with the UN monitor, Chambers was the most dismissive of the American Dream. “People don’t realize – it’s never getting better, there’s no recovery for people like us. I’m 67, I have a heart condition, I shouldn’t be out here. I might not be too much longer.”
That was a lot of bad karma to absorb on day one, and it rattled even as seasoned a student of hardship as Alston. As UN special rapporteur, he’s reported on dire poverty and its impact on human rights in Saudi Arabia and China among other places. But Skid Row?
“I was feeling pretty depressed,” he told the Guardian later. “The endless drumbeat of horror stories. At a certain point you do wonder what can anyone do about this, let alone me.”
And then he took a flight up to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin district where homeless people congregate, and walked into St Boniface church.
What he saw there was an analgesic for his soul.”
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Read the rest of the story, with many major “poverty stops” across America, at the link.
At some point, all Americans will pay a price for the Trump/GOP plan to loot America for the rich and increase income inequality.
