Seattle Times – immigrationcourtside.com

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: ICE Contractor Operates “Gulag Within A Gulag” Near Seattle

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/secret-prison-within-a-prison-report-details-solitary-confinement-practices-at-northwest-detention-center-in-tacoma/

Joseph O’ Sullivan reports for the Seattle Times:

OLYMPIA — The Northwest detention center in Tacoma holds people in solitary confinement on average more than any other dedicated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, according to a new watchdog report.

The report by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights also contends that the center — in violation of ICE’s own policies — imposes solitary confinement on inmates with mental-health issues, or who are exercising their First Amendment rights by going on hunger strikes.

The report is based on federal government records and documents by the company that operates the prison, GEO Group, which were obtained by the Center for Human Rights after years of litigation.

The privately run detention center holds as many as 1,575 immigrants accused by the government of living illegally in the U.S. and facing deportation proceedings.

In an interview, Angelina Godoy, director for UW’s Center for Human Rights, said the report “speaks to this existence of a secret prison within a prison.”

“There’s essentially no effective oversight of the practice” of solitary confinement, Godoy added. “And from the data that we were able to gather, there’s really disturbing conclusions about just flagrant violation of international human-rights norms.”

. . . .

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Read the full article at the link.

The Biden-Harris Administration must eliminate the “New American Gulag” (NAG”). The money could be “repurposed” for grants to encourage legal representation of migrants and to train more and better Accredited Representatives (non-attorneys) to represent individuals in immigration proceedings.

Contrary to the bogus narratives spread by DHS and White Nationalist restrictionists, reputable research and studies show that individuals with legal representation appear for hearings at an extraordinarily high level. Thus, punitive private “faux civil” detention in the NAG should, in a rational, properly operating system, be unnecessary.

In those relatively few cases where detention is necessary because the DHS demonstrates a danger to the community or high risk of failure to appear, the Government should provide it in humane, professionally run, closely monitored, and accountable non-punitive facilities.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-30-20

PERSPECTIVE: OUR FAILED IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT POLICIES LOOK JUST AS DUMB, SHORT-SIGHTED, & CRUEL FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BORDER!

https://apple.news/

Looking at deportation from south of the border, I saw our own flawed attitudes about migration more clearly

February 25, 2019

While reporting on deported Mexicans in that country’s capital, I saw the human cost of our failure to develop a thoughtful immigration policy.

By

By Tyrone Beason

Times staff reporter

MEXICO CITY — For the thousands of Mexicans who’ve been deported from the United States and who’ve chosen to rebuild their lives in this massive capital city, America represents “el otro lado,” Spanish for “the other side.”

On our side of the U.S./Mexico border, from Florida to Washington state, these repatriated Mexicans left behind jobs, loved ones and community ties.

On our side, they experienced the chaos and coldness of America’s immigration and deportation system, one that has shown little interest in broken families and the loss of economic viability, or the relative unsafety and cultural hostility toward migrants of all kinds that deported people face after returning to their native country.

Earlier this month, two of my Times colleagues and I traveled here, to the other side of America’s border crisis, to learn about life after deportation. The stories we heard, the hardships we came to understand and the grass roots efforts we learned about will all be presented soon in a special package in The Times.

But before I write about that, I wanted to write about the strange context in which we did our reporting.

There we were covering the real-life experience of being kicked out of the United States, during the same week that our president declared a state of emergency to prevent an imaginary army of Mexican and Central American migrants from barging in.

The way President Donald Trump describes it, we are at war with craven invaders who don’t want to play by America’s immigration rules.

From the vantage point of Mexico City, though, it seemed as if America had plunged deeper into a war with itself, in part because it can’t come up with sensible rules for a nation that has been built and sustained by immigrants and migrant workers — both free and captive.

People who live and work in the United States without legal documents do represent a special category of migrant, and they certainly know the risks.

But as I sat and listened to returnees in Mexico City — who had migrated to the United States with their families when they were minors, or who started their own families while on American soil in the years before being deported — the trauma of deportation and the complexity of the rebuilding process seemed more real.

We are good at sending people “back where they came from” for the crime of being here without papers and sometimes for committing other offenses that result in being considered unfit for legal residency. What we are not so good at is considering the possible injustice of forcing people back into countries that may not be equipped to reintegrate them, that may not even want to welcome them home, and that for all intents and purposes may not feel like “home” anymore.

Mexico City — a teetering metropolis that sits at an elevation of 7,300 feet and that’s more than 20 million people strong — is a hard place to navigate even for those who were born here and never left. It’s especially challenging for those who left years ago in search of a better life in America and now find themselves back here and needing to start over, in a city dealing with issues like poverty and corruption.

We met repatriated Mexicans who spoke like homies from around the way, who shook my hand with the soul-brother salute, who talked about the United States as if they had been born wrapped in red, white and blue, who are proudly making it work in the land of their ancestors while also displaying the spirit of their adoptive motherland up north.

In deportation cases, the decision can seem pretty cut-and-dry: Should they stay or should they go?

On the ground in the beautiful cacophony that is Mexico City, the overcrowded and smoggy incubator of dreams big and small, everything was a blur and there were nothing but gray areas.

It’s so easy in our society to portray immigrants who carry proper documentation as “good” and those who don’t have those documents as “bad,” but when our government behaves as if it doesn’t care about the aftereffects of the decision to expel someone from our soil — which seems to be the case right now — it is our character that’s in question.

Trump’s wall is not the only story. And immigration isn’t our only crisis.

We have a responsibility to be careful about who we let into this country, to be sure. But we also have to find a way to more humanely manage the detention, departure and reintegration of those we send away — to see them as human beings even when they have violated the integrity of our borders.

We can act as if the fate of undocumented migrants isn’t our problem, that they shouldn’t have come here under those circumstances in the first place.

But if we deal with the original sin of entering the United States illegally in such a clinical way, we will be committing the equal sin of heartlessness when humanity is due.

Justice is never truly blind.

Because of that, as we think about deportation, we should view this tough journey with our eyes wide open.

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

Callous treatment of those who might once have thought of our country as “home” is never a good idea. Not fully considering the human and political consequences of our own actions is the height of arrogance. It says to the world “who cares about others and what they think — we can do as we please because we’re the biggest and richest bullies on the block.”

Under Trump, the U.S. is faltering on most foreign policy fronts, unnecessarily alienating our potential friends and allies and “sucking up” to the worst and most dangerous strongmen in the world while getting little of verifiable value in return (notably, one of the worst among them, Putin, helped install Trump in his current position).

No country remains “on the top of the heap” forever. And, as our power and influence begin to wane under Trump’s erratic and incompetent hand, we might someday soon find that we need all the friends we can get, even outside our border, to maintain and regain our position and prestige in the world. Just ask the Brits about the perils of “going it alone” — or letting national policies be driven by irrational and self-defeating nativist sentiment.

PWS

02-26-19

PROFESSOR PHIL SCHRAG IN THE SEATTLE TIMES: FAMILY SEPARATION IS JUST PRELIMINARY TORTURE IN SESSIONS’S GULAG – THE NEXT STEP: DEPORTATION OF BROWN-SKINNED REFUGEE FAMILIES TO DEATH ZONES — “And so they will be deported back to the situations of rape, beating and slashing they fled.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-fate-worse-than-separation-awaits-central-american-families/

Professor Phil Schrag writes in theSeattle Times:

Under two court orders, the government is now reuniting migrant children with their mothers. Although the California court that ordered the reunification may permit continued detention of the families until their asylum claims can be decided, something worse than separation or detention awaits those mothers who are deported: rape and death.

Many of the mothers and children who previously could have won asylum will now be sent back to Central America, where they face horrific violence at the hands of the brutal gangs from which they fled.

That risk is now very great because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently changed policy that had allowed immigration judges to grant asylum to victims of domestic violence.

In 2016, I volunteered as a lawyer at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas. Every mother I met had fled to the United States to escape brutal domestic violence, threats of rape or death from gangs. Nearly all were found by asylum officers to have “credible fear of persecution,” enabling them to claim asylum in hearings before federal immigration judges.

Immigration advocates who work on the cases of mothers in the family detention centers in Texas estimate that more than 85 percent of them are at risk of serious bodily harm or death at the hands of violent men in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Federal statistics for family cases are unavailable, but until recently, many of the families fleeing from those countries eventually did win asylum from immigration judges. In the clinic that I codirect at Georgetown Law, and at other law-school clinics, students have won asylum for several of them. We also know from data collected by the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings that hundreds of other Central American families have obtained protection in immigration courts around the country. It had become well established that victims of domestic violence could win asylum. In some cases, asylum was also granted to families fleeing threats of violence in countries where the police are unable to prevent such violence.

But the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the Attorney General unilaterally to tell immigration judges how to interpret the law. Attorney General Sessions recently overruled the appellate case that supported asylum for domestic-violence victims.

Reversing that woman’s asylum grant, he wrote that her ex-husband “attacked her because of his pre-existing relationship with the victim” rather than because she was a member of a “group” of women who were violently attacked by husbands or gang members.

Our attorney general’s view of the law, apparently, is that domestic violence is a purely private affair, unrelated to social norms or patterns in countries in which such violence is endemic. By characterizing domestic violence as “private criminal activity,” even when the police can’t prevent or stop it, he also apparently intends to bar the victims from winning asylum.

Immigration judges don’t enjoy deporting genuine victims of violence. Perhaps some will find creative ways to grant relief to these families, rather than becoming cogs in the giant femicide machines of northern Central America. But many will feel bound to follow Sessions’ official guidance.

If the women fleeing for their lives have to prove that those who want to rape and kill them bear animus toward all women similarly situated, and not just their actual victims, they will be hard pressed to win asylum. And so they will be deported back to the situations of rape, beating and slashing they fled.

The public should not be distracted by the government’s reunification of families. The families now being released may stay together for a few months. But they remain in terrible peril because of the Trump administration’s lack of empathy and humanitarian concern for the parents and children who quite reasonably fear for their lives.

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

Phil is a good friend, and a practicing scholar who has actually been to the border. He knows that these most vulnerable individuals qualify as refugees under a correct application of legal standards and that they merit and deserve protection as human beings. He can also see how the system has been “gamed” by Sessions and how USCIS and EOIR are both complicit.

What’s being done by Sessions and his White Nationalist cabal is both illegal and immoral. Our shame as a nation will be enduring for 1) giving such a totally unqualified, corrupt, and evil individual a chance to take control of American immigration policy; and 2) not acting more quickly to stop him from implementing his racist agenda.

Meanwhile, his victims are likely to pay the price with their lives.

PWS

08-06-18

SEATTLE TIMES: THE CRUELTY OF TRUMP’S “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT FINALLY SINKS IN – EVEN IN “TRUMP COUNTRY!”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/fear-regrets-as-pacific-county-residents-go-missing-amid-immigration-crackdown-police-chief-neighbors-kind-of-in-shock-after-immigration-arrests-in-pacific-county-immigration-crack/

Nina Shapiro reports for the Seattle Times:

“LONG BEACH, Pacific County — Named after a character in a cowboy book, Police Chief Flint Wright describes himself as pretty conservative.

A portrait of Ronald Reagan hangs in his office, along with photos of John Wayne, and his father and grandfather on horses — capturing the rural lifestyle of Pacific County, which curves around Willapa Bay in the state’s southwest corner.

He doesn’t talk about it much, but he voted for Donald Trump, helping Pacific County go with the Republican presidential candidate for the first time in decades. Among other things, he liked Trump’s promise to secure the borders. Economic migrants are not a problem in his mind — he’s seen how hard they work — but he wondered, “who’s coming with them?” Terrorists, he feared.

Then came the July arrest of Mario Rodriguez by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“I was kind of in shock, to be blunt with you,” Wright said.

Rodriguez, whose visa had expired, had lived in the area for more than a dozen years. He had worked in bilingual education and periodically tipped police to trouble spots.

Mario Rodriguez, detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his visa expired, has lived in the area for more than a dozen years and worked in bilingual education. He is now out on bond as his case goes through immigration court. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

“He was real pro-law enforcement,” the police chief said. “Shoot, anybody would like to have him as a neighbor.”

Trump, on the campaign, had talked about kicking out Mexican “drug dealers, criminals, rapists.” And that’s the kind of immigration crackdown a lot of people here were expecting.

“Yeah, we don’t want that element,” Wright said. But Rodriguez? The police chief couldn’t believe sending him back to Mexico would do anybody any good.

That kind of shock is reverberating throughout the county as Trump’s toughened immigration policy hits home. ICE has arrested at least 28 people in the county this year, according to numbers provided to the Sheriff’s Office.

While that’s just a small share of the roughly 3,100 ICE arrests overseen by its regional office in Seattle — which covers Washington, Oregon and Alaska — it represents a pronounced upward trajectory. Last year, ICE reported eight Pacific County arrests to the sheriff and for a long stretch of years before that, zero.

In a county of small, close-knit communities — Long Beach, population 1,400, is one of the largest — it’s noticed when someone goes missing. The number is magnified by those who have moved, gone into hiding or followed family after a deportation. People have lost neighbors, schools have lost students and businesses have lost employees.

. . . .

Shellfish farmers face many uncertainties, Sheldon explained.

The weather is a big one, periodically disrupting work on the water.

ICE is the new big storm, blowing in periodically to take essential workers.

Boats, working in the seafood industry, travel on Willapa Bay. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

“One minute they’re here. Another minute they’re not,” Sheldon said. “It’s not like there’s any warning.”

She and other employers say they get required paperwork for every worker — though documents might be fake — and don’t know who is illegally here.

“It’s been a huge impact,” said Kathleen Nisbet-Moncy, vice president of the Willapa-Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association, of ICE’s arrests. Many of the area’s two dozen companies are small businesses. Losing key employees is a big deal. One, she said, lost a worker of 25 years.

And the industry already faced a labor shortage.

Workers need to have an understanding of tides; they carry tide tables like Bibles, arranging their days accordingly. Some operate boats. Others shuck oysters or process fish, not easy when done quickly.

Paid by volume, they sometimes work seven day weeks, or days that take in both early-morning and late-night tides cycles.

“Don’t you want people to work?” Sheldon asked. “Why don’t we say you can’t sell cigarettes to illegal immigrants?”

She was joking. But things didn’t make sense to her.

It was hurting her business. So many people have been arrested or moved that she can no longer fill empty positions. She has had scale back orders and turn away customers.

“Tell him I say hi”

In Long Beach Culbertson Park, as after-school football practice got started, 10-year-old Danner Walters broke into tears.

He was on the sidelines talking about his friend Joel. A week before, Joel left for Mexico with his mom and siblings to rejoin his dad, who had been deported months before.

“We’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” Danner said.

. . . .”

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

Read the complete, much lengthier, article, at the link.

Too bad folks don’t think through all of the implications before they pull the lever for immoral and irrational candidates like Trump and the GOP restrictionists. Truth is what the restrictionists don’t want you to hear or think about: the vast majority of the allegedly 11 million undocumented individuals here are law-abiding, productive members of the American community, doing jobs that help, rather than hurt, American workers, doing them exceptionally well, and raising or being part of part of “mixed families” with citizens, immigrants, and undocumented individuals all mixed together.

Removing them is a senseless and cruel waste of time and money. The only reasons for doing it have to do with racial and cultural bias — that’s why guys like Trump, Sessions, Bannon, and Miller have to come up with bogus economic and law enforcement rationales in an attempt to “rationalize” basically irrational policies.

Actually, the number of undocumented individuals in the United States is a boon to our country, our economy, and our culture. It shows that we remain a vibrant nation, and that we should have been admitting hundreds of thousands of additional legal immigrants annually. That’s why GOP proposals to restrict legal immigration are so wrong-headed.

Because we failed to do what we should have, the system basically “self corrected” largely by the operation of free market forces, but with some adverse effects like the use of smugglers, the exploitation of the undocumented, and the colossal amount of money wasted by “dumb” immigration enforcement and detention over many Administrations and Congresses.

But, it’s not too late to get it right by legalizing the productive, law-abiding individuals already here and expanding our legal immigration system to realistic levels that are more consistent with our needs as a nation. That will reduce or eliminate the “job magnet” and cut the business for smugglers without vast expenditures of law enforcement funds.

PWS

11-09-17

TAL KOPAN & JIM ACOSTA ON CNN: Speaker Ryan Says Trump Should Delay DACA Decision While Congress Works On Extension! — Also, Top Seattle Execs Urge Trump To Keep DACA

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/01/politics/paul-ryan-daca-trump-immigration/index.html

Tal & Jim write:

“(CNN)House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday gave a major boost to legislative efforts to preserve protections for young undocumented immigrants — and urged President Donald Trump to not tear up the program.

Trump told reporters Friday he was still mulling the decision.
Responding to a question about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, on his hometown radio station WCLO in Janesville, Wisconsin, Ryan said Congress was working on a legislative fix to preserve the program.
“I actually don’t think he should do that,” Ryan said of Trump’s consideration of terminating the program. “I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.”
'Dreamers' anxious as Trump DACA decision looms
‘Dreamers’ anxious as Trump DACA decision looms
Ryan’s statement offers the most public support by anyone in the Republican congressional leadership for some sort of legislation to protect the “Dreamers” under DACA.
The popular Obama administration program — which gives protections from deportation to undocumented immigrants that were brought to the US as children to work or study — has long been targeted by Republicans as an overreach of executive authority.
Nevertheless, a number of moderate Republicans alongside Democrats support the program and have offered legislation that would make the protections permanent.

. . . .

The popular Obama administration program — which gives protections from deportation to undocumented immigrants that were brought to the US as children to work or study — has long been targeted by Republicans as an overreach of executive authority.
Nevertheless, a number of moderate Republicans alongside Democrats support the program and have offered legislation that would make the protections permanent.
Ryan, who worked on comprehensive immigration reform before he became part of House leadership, endorsed that approach in the interview.
“President (Barack) Obama does not have the authority to do what he did … we’ve made that very clear,” Ryan said in the radio interview. “Having said all of that, there are people who are in limbo. These are kids who know no other country, who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home. And so I really do believe there that there needs to be a legislative solution.”
Trump’s decision
Asked whether he’s made a decision on DACA, Trump said: “Sometime today, maybe over the weekend.”
“We love the Dreamers,” he said.
The Trump administration has been discussing for weeks what to do about DACA, responding to the deadline on an ultimatum issued by 10 state attorneys general, led by Texas. The threat: Sunset DACA by September 5 or the states will try to end it in court.
Discussions have heated up this week as officials have met to chart a path forward. While a decision had been possible Friday, and one source familiar had believed a decision was pending Friday morning, by midday, sources familiar with the deliberations did not expect a decision before the weekend.
Parts of the Department of Homeland Security, which administers DACA, have been told to prepare for a decision but have not been given any potential details of what a decision may be.
White House discussing whether DACA deadline can be moved
White House discussing whether DACA deadline can be moved
Sources inside and outside the administration said the White House continues to explore buying itself time and is also considering allowing the attorneys general to proceed with their threat.
That course of action could potentially remove pressure from the White House, where the President has promised to act with “heart” on the matter and give Congress time to pass a legislative fix, and one source said it was under consideration.
Any action by the President to sunset DACA would put immediate pressure on Congress to act, something the White House and a senior congressional source recognize would be a challenge with many other pressing priorities at the moment, from Harvey relief to the debt ceiling to government spending. A go-slow approach on DACA is preferred, the congressional source added.
Big congressional boost
Ryan has long been sympathetic to the plight of Dreamers. At a CNN town hall at the beginning of the year, Ryan was asked by a young woman protected under DACA whether he wanted her deported. He said he was working with the Trump administration and seeking a “humane solution.”
“What we have to do is find a way to ensure that you can get right with the law,” the speaker told the young woman.
But until now, leadership has not helped the push by moderate Republicans to advance legislation to do so. Four different options have been introduced in Congress, including two bipartisan solutions led by Sens. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. Another proposal from Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo has entirely Republican support and is expected to be introduced in a similar form in the Senate by North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis.
In addition to Ryan’s endorsement, another conservative boost on Friday came from Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a staunch conservative who has in the past supported immigration reform.
“I’ve urged the President not to rescind DACA, an action that would further complicate a system in serious need of a permanent, legislative solution,” Hatch said in a statement. “Like the President, I’ve long advocated for tougher enforcement of our existing immigration laws. But we also need a workable, permanent solution for individuals who entered our country unlawfully as children through no fault of their own and who have built their lives here. And that solution must come from Congress.”
Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman, a moderate Republican, announced on Thursday he would try to force a vote on one of the bipartisan bills when Congress returns next week through what’s known as a discharge petition, which would require a majority of House members to sign on to work. The speaker’s office had no comment on that effort.”

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Additionally, as reported in the Seattle Times, the CEOs of Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks have added their voices of support for Dreamers:

“The leaders of Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks joined other corporate executives in asking President Donald Trump to keep in place a program that shields from deportation young people who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects about 800,000 “Dreamers,” is said to be a target for repeal as Republican attorneys general threaten to sue to push the Trump administration to carry out the president’s hard-line pledges on immigration.

Supporters of the program, including Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, came to its defense this week, urging the White House to keep DACA intact. Those ranks swelled with hundreds of corporate executives, lawyers and other organizations who made largely economic arguments in a separate open letter.

“Dreamers are vital to the future of our companies and our economy,” the letter said. Signatories include Amazon.com chief executive Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Starbucks boss Kevin Johnson.”

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-amazon-starbucks-leaders-voice-support-for-dreamers/?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=mobile-app&utm_campaign=ios

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Read Tal’s complete article at the link.

A legislative solution seems to be in everyone’s best interests here! Let’s hope it will happen.

PWS

O9-01-17

Six Compelling Stories Of How Refugees ARE America That You Should Read!

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/trump-america-refugees-immigrants-seattle-pacific-northwest/?utm_source=The+Seattle+Times&utm_campaign=893d2c55f3-Morning_Brief_05_19_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5beb38b61e-893d2c55f3-12276787

Daniel Beekman writes in the Seattle Times:

“The United Nations defines a refugee as someone forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence.

He or she has a well-founded fear of being targeted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
A refugee can be an adult or a child.

Julie Wong was 10.

“It couldn’t have been longer than a football field from where we were hiding to that ship, but I remember what I saw along the way,” Wong said of the night she left the Vietnamese city Danang in 1975.

“We had to step over dead bodies. Bicycles. Suitcases. People’s lives strewn all around.”

Wong is 52 and lives with her husband in Sammamish. Their sons play football. She works for a pharmaceutical company as an oncology diagnostic consultant.

She cried when she talked about Danang being shelled and the refugee camp near San Diego where she took English classes.

She doesn’t usually talk about those things. Most people never ask, and she doesn’t feel the need to tell. She leads a busy life as a proud American.

But when Wong sees Syrian refugees on the news, running for their lives, she’s reminded of her own story.”

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

Read about Wong and five other Americans from refugee backgrounds at the link’

PWS

05-19-17

Former Obama DOJ Civil Rights Officials Blast Sessions On Local Policing! — Seattle Finds Sessions Dead Wrong, Fed’s Intervention & Consent Decrees Make Dramatic Improvements, Save Citizens & Police From Unnecessary Violence!

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/opinion/dont-let-jeff-sessions-undermine-police-reform.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20170406&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=9&nlid=79213886&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0&referer=

Op-Ed in the NY Times:

By VANITA GUPTA and COREY STOUGHTON
APRIL 5, 2017
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently ordered a review of federal agreements with a number of local law enforcement agencies aimed at reforming troubled departments. As a first step, the Justice Department on Monday asked a judge to delay a consent decree that would overhaul Baltimore’s police force.

On its face, Mr. Sessions’s order simply asks whether the consent decrees promote public safety, support officers, respect local control and are warranted. But underlying the order is the Trump administration’s belief that efforts to align police practices with the Constitution have compromised public safety and thrown police officers under the bus.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Countless police chiefs and mayors are vocal about wanting federal reform or have emerged from the consent decree process remarking that their departments were the better for it. Mr. Sessions claims to want to revert to local control, but he should listen to local officials like Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, who called the Justice Department’s request to delay the reform agreement “a punch in the gut” and noted that “a consent decree will make the Baltimore police department better both with the crime fight and our community relationships.”

No matter what review Mr. Sessions conducts, he cannot unilaterally undo these reform agreements. That’s because the district courts that oversee them will ultimately decide their fate. In addition, the reforms are negotiated with local elected officials and law enforcement leaders, with extensive input from grass-roots organizations, police unions, officers and civilians. Mr. Sessions can try to undermine them, but many of the reforms are durable.

That’s good, because communities around the country need this work to continue. In cities like Ferguson, Mo., Chicago and Baltimore, federal reform addresses unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, and excessive and retaliatory force. These problems erode trust between police departments and the communities they serve, trust that is essential to effective policing as well as officer and public safety.
Rebuilding these ties is also necessary for preventing and solving crime. Few in law enforcement would disagree with this. When we worked on police reform at the Justice Department, we heard over and over again from officers and community members during our investigations in Baltimore and Chicago that relationships had broken down so badly, witnesses sometimes refused to share vital information and victims declined police assistance.

Mr. Sessions’s suggestion that the Justice Department’s policing agreements interfere with proactive policing is likewise baseless. There is no question that lawful stops, arrests and, at times, the use of force are all necessary tools for ensuring public safety. But Baltimore’s misguided zero-tolerance policing strategy, for example, severely damaged police-community relations, especially in black neighborhoods. Even the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police acknowledged that officers felt “pressure to achieve numbers for perception’s sake.”

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And, Seattle’s recent experience shows that Federal intervention and consent decrees improve policing and saves lives, as shown by this report in the Seattle Times:

“Five years after the U.S. Justice Department found Seattle police officers too often resorted to excessive force, the federal monitor overseeing court-ordered reforms issued a glowing report Thursday concluding the department has carried out a dramatic turnaround.

Crediting Mayor Ed Murray, Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole and, most of all, the Seattle Police Department’s men and women, the monitor, Merrick Bobb, found overall use of force is down and, when officers do use it, it is largely handled in a reasonable way consistent with department policies.
As a result, Bobb found the department to be in substantial compliance — formally known as initial compliance — with core provisions of a 2012 consent decree that required the city to adopt new policies and training to address excessive force.
“The significance and importance of this finding cannot be understated, as this report makes clear,” Bobb wrote in the 102-page assessment. “It represents a singular and foundational milestone on SPD’s road to full and effective compliance — and represents Seattle crystallizing into a model of policing for the 21st century.”

Moreover, use of force has dropped even as officer injuries have not gone up and crime, by most measures, has not increased, Bobb and his monitoring team write in the report.

O’Toole shared the results in a departmentwide email Monday afternoon, saying, “In short, the Monitor’s assessment confirms the data that SPD reported on earlier this year: of the hundreds of thousands of unique incidents to which SPD officers respond every year, only a small fraction of one percent result in any use of force.”

The report, which has been in the works for some time, comes days after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Justice Department officials to conduct a review of reform agreements with more than a dozen police agencies nationwide to determine whether they, among other things, undermine officer safety and crime fighting.

While the order could undercut newer agreements reached under the civil-rights emphasis during the Obama administration, officials have said it is unlikely to affect Seattle’s pact because it is under the firm control of a federal judge.

The judge, James Robart, has shown an unwavering commitment to Seattle’s consent decree, even declaring “black lives matter” during a court hearing, and earlier this year halted the Trump administration’s first travel ban.
In a statement Tuesday, Murray said, “Our progress under the Consent Decree cannot be undone by empty bureaucratic threats. Our police department is well into the process of reform and will continue this work. We are too far along for President Trump to pull us away from justice.”

Read the complete article here: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/in-major-step-federal-monitor-finds-seattle-police-use-of-force-reforms-are-working/?utm_source=The+Seattle+Times&utm_campaign=fe0fd2fdf6-Alert_Dramatic_turnaround_in_Seattle_PD’s_use_of_f&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5beb38b61e-fe0fd2fdf6-122767877

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Must be hard for current and former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys, who have spent years painstakingly investigating, drafting, and negotiating agreements to promote effective, constitutional policing to see their work being trashed by a guy who has spent most of his career trying to limit civil and human rights. Been there myself, in a somewhat different context, and it’s very disheartening and maddening.

While I don’t have much optimism that career attorneys in the DOJ will be able to stand up to Sessions and keep their jobs, it is encouraging that many of the jurisdictions, police departments, and Federal Judges involved in the consent decree process intend to keep the ball rolling despite Session’s attempts to undermine their efforts.

And, certainly advocates, like Gupta and Stoughton in their new “private sector” positions, intend to keep the pressure on even if it means doing battle with the Trumped-up Sessions version of the DOJ. Forget civil rights, gotta keep a close eye on what those H-1B workers and their employers are up to.

PWS

04-06-17

Seattle Sues Over DOJ’s “Sanctuary City” Threat — Preemptive Action Claims Harm From Uncertainty!

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-sues-trump-administration-over-sanctuary-cities/?utm_source=The+Seattle+Times&utm_campaign=c846202ede-Morning_Brief_03_30_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5beb38b61e-c846202ede-122767877

Daniel Beekman writes in the Seattle Times:

“Seattle is suing President Donald Trump over his executive order cracking down on so-called “sanctuary cities” for how they handle people living in the United States illegally.

The city is doing nothing wrong by limiting its own involvement in immigration enforcement, while Trump is overreaching by trying to make cities do the work of the federal government, Mayor Ed Murray and City Attorney Pete Holmes said Wednesday.
The goal of the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, is to have the executive order declared unconstitutional, Murray said at a news conference, accusing the Trump administration of waging “a war on cities.”

“Our lawsuit is staying true to our values,” the mayor said. “We value civil rights, we value the courts and we value the Constitution.”

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I suspect that this is just the first of many suits we will see about this issue. I doubt that anything Trump has done so far will create jobs for working class Americans (sadly). But, he has been, and is likely to continue to be, a boon for lawyers and reporters.

He’s even keeping me pretty busy in retirement. I can’t even “blog” all of the interesting articles and cases I read in one day. Have to be “selective.”

PWS

03/30/17

Due Process Forever!

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