March 2018 – Page 7 – immigrationcourtside.com

THE GUARDIAN: USCIS TURNS ITS BACK ON THE REAL AMERICA – “TRULY A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS!” – “The recent barrage of exclusionary immigration policy proposals are attempts to sow the seeds of fear, anxiety, and distrust. Rather than pursue policies that set immigrants apart, we should seek to integrate immigrants and highlight the assets they bring to communities across our nation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/02/america-nation-immigrants-uscis-deleted?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Professors Linda R. Tropp and Dina G. Okamoto write in The Guardian:

“For more than a century, the identity of the United States has been grounded in the notion that we are a “nation of immigrants.” Immigrants have made innumerable contributions to our economy, infrastructure, and culture – building our railroads and bridges, bringing innovation and new ideas, and settling in communities that thrive throughout our country today. But now, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a federal agency charged with immigrant affairs, has turned its back on this rich legacy.

As of last week, the mission statement of the USCIS has changed. No longer does its mission speak to “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” that promotes “an awareness and understanding of citizenship” along with “ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.” Now, the new version focuses on “adjudicating requests for immigrant benefits” while “protecting Americans” and “securing the homeland”.

Why do changes to the USCIS’s mission statement matter? It may seem like just a few words, but this new language is happening within the context of other alarming changes to our national immigration policies and practices.

Refugee admissions have been curbed to a historic low, and people with “temporary protected status” who fled their homelands due to natural disasters or civil wars are being sent back.

Several crucial programs are at risk of being terminated, including programs that allow 50,000 people from countries underrepresented in current immigration streams to come to the US, pathways for those who arrived in the US as children without legal documents to remain in the US to work and attend school, and the family-based system of immigration – a cornerstone of US immigration policy – which allows US citizens to reunite with family members by sponsoring their migration to the US.

All of these changes have been presented under the guise of protecting against threats to our national security. But these policies stand in stark contrast to the will of the American people. Despite increased attention on anti-immigrant sentiments, Americans across the country largely embrace immigrants of all faiths and cultures and want our government to do the same.

Most Americans believe the numbers of immigrants coming to the United States should be kept at its present level or increased. And 60% percent of Americans oppose building a wall on our border with Mexico. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now supportgranting legal status to immigrants originally brought to the US without papers as children, driven by the same moral imperative that has guided family reunification efforts over the last 50 years.

These levels of endorsement in national polls are bolstered by the actions of US citizens from many walks of life who have taken to the streets in protest, boldly stating that “immigrants are welcome here”.

Indeed, across the country, people and communities have been sending the clear message that immigrants are not only welcomed, but valued. Hundreds of local governments have advocated for their cities and towns to be recognized as “welcoming cities” for immigrants.

Spanning from the industrial rust-belt of the midwest to our nation’s borders, civic leaders have gone to great lengths to welcome immigrants, because they open up new businesses, populate local schools, revitalize housing markets, and infuse new life into local communities. And while the majority of immigrants in the US are here legally, nearly 500 US cities have chosen to become “sanctuary cities” to protect immigrants without legal status from deportation, even at the risk of losing federal funding.

These actions by everyday Americans uphold our nation’s values and reflect the best of who we are as a country, while our federal immigration policies are seeking to close doors and build walls. One of the best ways to honor our values as a nation is not to close opportunities to immigrants, but to successfully integrate them into the fabric of our society. As researchers who have been studying immigration and race relations for 20 years, our research shows that one of the best ways to integrate immigrants into the fabric of society is to interact with and welcome them.

Such encouraging effects of contact between US citizens and immigrants are not limited to big cities or liberal-leaning areas. Recent immigrants have established themselves both in diverse urban areas and new destinations across the United States.

According to recent poll data, more than 75% of US adults report that there are immigrants living in their community, with about a quarter (27%) reporting many recent immigrants in the community where they live. Our surveys of US citizens, including both white and black Americans, show that the more they encounter and interact with immigrants, the more inclined they are to welcome them into their communities.

This significance of welcoming does not simply serve to express our national values or concern about immigrants and their wellbeing. Welcoming immigrants is also important for creating a shared sense of identity and community within our nation. Parallel surveys we have conducted with immigrants show that the more they feel welcome by Americans, the more they come to identify as American themselves and to seek to become US citizens – factors that can fuel greater civic participation and contributions to our society.

The recent barrage of exclusionary immigration policy proposals are attempts to sow the seeds of fear, anxiety, and distrust. Rather than pursue policies that set immigrants apart, we should seek to integrate immigrants and highlight the assets they bring to communities across our nation.

Linda R Tropp is a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dina G Okamoto is the director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University. They are both visiting scholars at the Russell Sage Foundation.”

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

Trump and the GOP restrictionists are trying to “whitewash” American history by denying and downplaying the achievements of immigrants, particularly those of color, without which American could never have survived and prospered. Don’t let them get away with their disingenuous and anti-historical efforts. Don’t let this (unjustifiably) disgruntled minority of (largely White, badly misinformed) Americans hijack our country and its future.

PWS

LIAR-IN-CHIEF GETS FOUR (4) PINOCCHIOS FOR TOTALLY BOGUS CLAIMS ABOUT THE “VISA LOTTERY!”🤥🤥🤥🤥

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/02/26/president-trumps-consistent-misrepresentation-of-how-the-diversity-visa-lottery-works/?utm_term=.ef79ebd959db

Glenn Kessler for the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker:

“Think of the lottery. You have a country, they put names in. You think they’re giving us their good people? Not too many of you people are going to be in a lottery. So we pick out people, then they turn out to be horrendous and we don’t understand why. They’re not giving us their best people, folks. They’re not giving us — I mean, use your heads. They’re giving us — it’s a lottery. I don’t want people coming into this country with a lottery. I want people coming into this country based on merit, based on merit.”
— President Trump, in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 23, 2018

“We need something to do with chain migration and something to do with visa lottery. I mean we actually have lottery systems where you go to countries and they do lotteries for who comes into the United States. Now, you know they are not going to have their best people in the lottery, because they’re not going to put their best people in a lottery. They don’t want to have their good people to leave. . . . We want people based on merit. Not based on the fact they are thrown into a bin and many of those people are not the people you want in the country, believe me.”
— Trump, remarks during an interview with Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, Feb. 24

We have repeatedly covered the president’s inaccurate description of the diversity visa lottery system as part of speech roundups and in our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims. At last count, he has made at least 16 inaccurate claims about the diversity visa lottery, though we are still trying to catch up with all of his remarks in February.

We often toss obviously false claims in the database, deeming them not worthy of a fact check, only to find ourselves months later writing a full fact check because the president continues to make his claim, unabashed by the number of times he has been declared wrong. One of our colleagues, rereading the president’s speech to CPAC, noted: “His absolute refusal to understand what the visa lottery is remains amazing.”

Then we saw Trump’s interview with Pirro. Oh my. So here’s the full story, written in the hope the president will read it and perhaps learn something.

The Facts

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, as the program is officially called, originally was designed to help the Irish.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was aimed at reuniting families, so applicants who had immediate family living in the United States — children, spouses, siblings, parents — were given priority. This, however, had some unforeseen consequences. Immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries had come to the United States more recently, and they often had immediate family overseas who were prioritized under the new program. Many Europeans, by contrast, had been in the country for decades, so they had fewer close relatives remaining overseas.

The change in immigration policy hit the Irish particularly hard.

Unlike other European countries, Ireland faced political instability and an economic crisis in the second half of the 20th century. Before 1965, it had been relatively simple for the Irish to immigrate. By the 1980s, as a result, tens of thousands of Irish immigrants came to the United States as tourists or students and overstayed their visas.

In 1990, lawmakers, led by then-Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), pressed for passage of a bill that proposed making a set number of visas available each year to “diversity immigrants” from “low-admission” countries. Despite being couched as a “diversity” action, it was openly pitched as a way to aid the Irish. President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990 as part of a broader immigration package.

Today, under the visa lottery system, a computer program managed by a State Department office in Williamsburg, Ky., randomly selects up to 50,000 immigrant visas a year — from nearly 15 million who applied in 2017 — from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Thus people from about 20 countries such as Brazil, Canada, China, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, the United Kingdom (except North Ireland) and Vietnam are out of luck because more than 50,000 people from these countries had been admitted during the last five years. The visas are apportioned among six geographic regions, with a maximum of 7 percent available to persons born in any single country.

So, essentially, the odds of being selected are under 1 percent — and what that gets you initially is an invitation to apply for a green card. (In 2017, the State Department notified nearly 116,000 that they could apply, but the program ends once 50,000 are accepted. Each person selected gets a number on the list, so people in the bottom half have increasingly less chance of winning a visa.)

Individuals who apply must have at least a high school diploma (or its equivalent) or two years’ work experience of a type specified by the State Department to be eligible for the program. The selected applicants undergo a background check, interview and medical tests before entering the country, and some applicants undergo an additional in-depth review if they are considered a possible security risk — after which, selected applicants can be deemed ineligible for a visa.

Now let’s look back at Trump’s recent remarks and see what he apparently fails to understand:

“You have a country, they put names in.” Nope, no country submits the names of people for the diversity visa lottery; people who apply are self-selected.

“We actually have lottery systems where you go to countries and they do lotteries for who comes into the United States.” Wrong again. The foreign countries do not run their own lottery systems. The United States randomly selects from the millions of people who apply. As noted, a State Department office located in Kentucky, with a workforce of 400 people, manages the process. The Kentucky office receives and processes lottery entries, selects winners, processes winners’ visa applications, and schedules applicant interviews at missions abroad.

“They’re not going to put their best people in a lottery. They don’t want to have their good people to leave.”Again, the selection of applicants is not done by other countries. Moreover, the odds of success are so low that even if another country decided who could apply, there would be a less than 1 percent chance of success in getting rid of such people.

Indeed, far from being losers, there is evidence that many of those who immigrate through the program are better educated than the minimum criteria would suggest. A study by the Migration Policy Institute, using Census Bureau data for 19 countries with high rates of diversity visas, found that among recent immigrants ages 25 and older, “50 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher (compared to 32 percent of the overall U.S. population in 2016), 16 percent reported some college education, and 12 percent had less than a high school diploma.”

Asked for an explanation of the president’s comments, a White House official did not address the substance of the question but pointed to two reports.

In 2004, the State Department’s deputy inspector general warned that the visa lottery “contains significant threats to national security as hostile intelligence officers, criminals, and terrorists attempt to use it to enter the United States as permanent residents.” This refers to congressional testimony by Anne W. Patterson, who recommended that applications not be accepted from countries listed by State as sponsoring terrorism; that recommendation was not acted on. In the same testimony, Patterson lauded the Kentucky office managing the program and its efforts to root out fraud.

Also in 2004, the House Judiciary Committee noted that “there are few restrictions on the countries from which applicants may come. . . . Second, under the program, successful applicants are chosen at random. . . . Because diversity visa winners do not necessarily have such ties, the program could offer an opportunity for individuals or groups who want to harm the United States, its institutions, and its people to place terrorists in the United States.”

The official added that “the point is that they are not admitted on the basis of skill or merit. The educational requirements are virtually nonexistent — a high school education or two years of work experience that requires two years of training. That’s not admitting someone with any regard for skill or merit or their ability to contribute.”

A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office did point to substantial fraud risks within the program and proposed using data to mitigate these risks. However, the State Department at the time disagreed with the report’s findings, saying it already had managed those risks. The same report noted that there could be ‘‘difficulty in verifying identities,” which could have “security-based implications because State’s security checks rely heavily on name-based databases,” something a 2011 report from the House Judiciary Committee suggests could be a national security weakness.

The Fact Checker obviously takes no position on the diversity visa program. In addition to possible national-security issues, fraud continues to be a problem, such as some visa winners selling part of their visa to someone who pretends to be their spouse for the purposes of immigrating to the United States.

The Pinocchio Test

The president clearly dislikes the diversity visa program. Perhaps it has outlived its original purpose. But that’s no excuse for him to consistently misrepresent how it works.

Contrary to his repeated claims, countries do not select the applicants and do not run the lottery. Instead, nearly 15 million people from countries with low immigration to the United States apply annually for the slim chance to win an invitation to apply for a green card.

A State Department office in Kentucky manages the lottery. It’s located in a pleasant part of the state, near Daniel Boone National Forest, in the heart of Trump country. Perhaps the president should visit it one day and find out how the program really operates.

Four Pinocchios

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

In this shameless Administration, led by a congenital liar, truth, particularly about immigration issues, has ceased to have meaning. That’s why those of us who know and believe in truth must work overtime to set the record straight and, eventually, to remove these abusers of power, elected by a minority of American voters, from public office.

PWS

03-04-18

PROFESSOR DANIEL PENA — Supremes Anti-Latino Decision In Jennings v. Rodriguez Threatens The Due Process Rights of All Americans — When The Thugs Come for YOU, Who Will Stand Up For YOUR Rights If YOU Stand By While Others’ Rights Are Trashed?

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/supreme-court-s-latest-immigration-ruling-formalizes-terror-against-latinos-ncna851966

Pena writes:

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Jennings v. Rodriguez on Tuesday is a bizarre and dark new development in the American experiment. Not only because it’s a breakdown of the court’s ability to properly interpret the constitution (as they formally institutionalize a de facto second class of citizens), but because it’s a dereliction of the court’s duty as a part of a system of checks and balances designed to protect the constitutional rights of people in this country, regardless of country of origin, from a tyrannical government that would subvert our founding document for political or racist ends.

This ruling only formalizes what many of us in the Latinx community have known for generations: that the perpetuation of systems and laws that instill fear in immigrants (detained or not) is a form of state-sponsored terror. Now the court is complicit and part of that terror. And as pathways to legal status for immigrants come under attack by the current administration, this kind of terror is increasingly designed to incarcerate people for no other reason than for their inability to access pathways toward legal status — which is how this ruling will likely be used by this current administration.

The court ruled in Jennings v. Rodriguez that all immigrants, even those with protected legal status or asylum seekers, do not have a right to periodic bond hearing after detention, which makes it possible for them to be detained indefinitely. The defendant, Alejandro Rodriguez, who was brought to the United States from Mexico as an infant and became a permanent legal resident, was detained for three years for joy riding and possession of a controlled substance; the ACLU was fighting for his right to a hearing.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. David Maung / Bloomberg Via Getty Images

It comes a day after another Supreme Court decision not to rule on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which in effect leaves that program safe for at least another year. But while the ruling on DACA might give the impression of an impartial system of courts, the latter development undermines that illusion by giving this discriminatory Trump administration its seal of approval in the name of the law.

All three branches are now in sync with their consensus to terrorize detained immigrants, documented and undocumented alike. And the explicit message of this ruling against Rodriguez is that, no matter your legal status, the constitution does not work for you if you’re an immigrant. You can be extracted from the American fabric for seemingly arbitrary reasons, by virtue of that now-institutionalized second class status.

What we’ve seen is the majority of this court, our last branch of un-bought government, actively buying out of the idea of America as a melting pot, as a nation of immigrants who deserve certain unalienable rights, not unlike life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents serve an employment audit notice at a 7-Eleven convenience store on January 10, 2018, in Los Angeles. Chris Carlson / AP

This should be a wake-up call to anyone who thought (maybe still thinks) that they have nothing to fear because they are documented, or that they have nothing to fear because they’re not Latinx, or that they have nothing to fear because they are another type of immigrant, or they have nothing to fear because they’ve done nothing wrong. The ruling makes it possible to target, criminalize and then indefinitely detain someone for no other offense than being systematically denied a pathway toward legal status in the first place — or even if they did.”

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

Read Pena’s full article at the link.

I’ve pointed out before that it’s still not clear on what side of history this version of the Supremes stand. So far, as a group, they have shown little backbone or desire to stand up to the Trump Administrations’s all-out assaults on the Constitution, the “rule of law,” and human rights. That could be a big mistake, since the Trumpsters, to a man (not many women in the “land of misogyny”) have shown total disrespect and disdain for judges at all levels, particularly Federal Judges.

Latinos must get to the polls in larger numbers and “un-elect” at all levels a GOP that has largely gone over to a White Nationalist, anti-Latino racist agenda. Votes are power! That’s why the GOP cherishes voter suppression and gerrymandering so much.

PWS

03-04-18

HON. JEFFREY CHASE WITH MORE ANALYSIS OF THE CASTRO-TUM AMICUS BRIEFS!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/3/4/14-former-ijs-and-bia-members-file-amicus-brief-with-ag

Mar 4 14 Former IJs and BIA Members File Amicus Brief with AG

On February 16, the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP filed an amicus curiae (i.e. “friend of the court”) brief on behalf of 14 former immigration judges and BIA board members with Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuant to his request in Matter of Castro-Tum. In that decision, the Attorney General certified to himself an unpublished decision, in which he requested amicus briefs on the following: (1) whether IJs and the BIA have the authority administratively close cases, and if so, whether the BIA’s precedent decisions “articulate the appropriate standard for administrative closure” (2) If it is determined that IJs lack such authority, should the AG delegate it, or conversely, if the IJs have such authority, should the AG withdraw it; (3) can the purpose of administrative closure be satisfied through other docket management devices; and (4) if the AG determines that IJs and the BIA lack such authority, what should be done with the cases already closed.

As immigration judges and the BIA have exercised their authority to administratively close cases for decades, the AG suddenly raising these questions on his own would seem to signal his intent to do away with this important docket-management tool. As background, the respondent in Castro-Tum is an unrepresented, unaccompanied minor. When he did not appear for a scheduled removal hearing after the immigration court mailed a notice to what it was told was the minor’s address, the DHS attorney requested the immigration judge to order the child removed from the U.S. However, the IJ had questions concerning the reliability of the mailing address that the government provided to the immigration court, and declined to enter the removal order, administratively closing the proceedings instead. The DHS attorney appealed. It should be noted that the appeal did not challenge an immigration judge’s right generally to administratively close cases; the DHS believed that in this particular case, the evidence of record should have required the IJ to enter an order of removal. The BIA agreed with the DHS, and reversed the IJ’s order. It was at that point that the AG inserted himself into the matter by certifying an already-resolved matter to himself and turning it into a challenge to the overall authority to administratively close any case.

Numerous groups filed amicus briefs in this case; they include those that represent unaccompanied children; immigrant rights groups, and academic clinicians. The American Immigration Council (AIC) argued in its brief that AG Sessions’ history of hostility towards noncitizens renders him unfit to decide the issue raised in Castro-Tum. Our group of former IJs and Board members brought a unique perspective to the issue, based on our many years of collective experience managing case dockets and addressing the issues that administrative closure is designed to remedy.

Immigration Judges exist by statute. Therefore, the inherent powers delegated to them (including the power to control their own dockets, and to administratively close cases as a means of exercising such control) come from Congress, and not the Attorney General. As our brief explains, such authority of judges to control their dockets has been recognized by the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. Federal regulations issued by the Department of Justice grant immigration judges the power to “exercise their independent judgment and discretion,” including the ability to “take any action consistent with their authorities under the Act and regulations that is appropriate and necessary for the disposition” of the individual cases appearing before them.

Furthermore, the BIA has set out the proper standard for determining whether a case should be administratively closed or required to proceed. In Matter of Avetisyan, the Board laid out the criteria that may properly be considered in determining whether administrative closure is appropriate. In Matter of W-Y-U-, the Board added that the most important consideration is whether the party opposing administrative closure has provided a persuasive reason for the case to proceed and be resolved on the merits. The immigration judge is required set forth his or her reasons for administrative closure in a decision which may be reviewed on appeal to both the BIA and the federal circuit courts.

The brief additionally points out the inadequacy of other existing tools. In Avetisyan, the immigration judge granted multiple continuances to allow DHS to adjudicate a visa petition filed on behalf of the respondent. However, the petition could not be adjudicated because USCIS (which adjudicates such petitions) was required to keep returning the file to the ICE prosecutor before it could get to the petition because it was needed for the next immigration court hearing (which was only scheduled to check on the status of the visa petition). The file remained in constant orbit, never remaining with USCIS long enough to allow for adjudication of the petition, which in turn would require another continuance. Furthermore, federal regulation specifically requires that immigration proceedings by administratively closed before USCIS will adjudicate certain waivers of inadmissibility. As noted in the brief, DHS defended such administrative closure requirement when its necessity was questioned by a comment on the proposed regulation.

Our group of amici expresses our sincere gratitude to the outstanding attorneys at Akin Gump who provided their pro bono assistance: partner Steven H. Schulman; Andrew Schwerin, the primary drafter; and Martine Cicconi, Mallory Jones, and Chris Chamberlain, who drafted sections of the brief. We also thank Prof. Deborah Anker of Harvard Law School and the staff and students of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic for its invaluable support and insights. The amici included in our brief were former BIA Chair and Board Member and former Immigration Judge Paul W. Schmidt; former Board Members Cecelia M. Espenoza, Lory D. Rosenberg, Gustavo D. Villageliu, and former Immigration Judges Sarah M. Burr, Bruce J. Einhorn, Noel Ferris, John F. Gossart, Jr., William P. Joyce, Edward Kandler, Carol King, Susan Roy, Polly A. Webber, and myself.

Copyright 2017 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

JEFF CHASE

ICE ENFORCEMENT: CRUELTY WITHOUT BOUNDS – Wisconsin Rapids Family & Community Ripped Apart By Mindless “Gonzo” Immigration Enforcement — While Worthwhile USG Programs Are Being Cut, Your Tax Dollars Being Squandered To Make America Worse!

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/2018/03/02/family-fights-keep-wisconsin-rapids-father-truck-driver-deportation-ice/389513002/

Melissa Siegler reports in the Green Bay Press Gazette:

“WISCONSIN RAPIDS – Katrina Jabbi’s daughters keep asking for their daddy.

Her husband, Buba Jabbi, 41, on Feb. 15 was detained by immigration officials when he voluntarily reported at an annual check-in. He has since then been held in federal detention, and Katrina has been notified by U.S. government officials that on Tuesday he will be deported to The Gambia — a West African country he hasn’t called home for more than 20 years.

“I don’t want my kids to feel like their father abandoned them,” she said. “They’re asking and crying for daddy every single day.”

Katrina Jabbi is a Wisconsin Rapids native. She met Buba on a Greyhound bus in 2009, she said, and fell in love with him for his kind, loving spirit. They got married in 2013 and have two daughters, Nalia, 5, and Aisha, 1. Katrina said she works part-time from home; her husband had been working as a truck driver.

The couple moved back to Wisconsin Rapids in 2016 to be closer to Katrina’s family. They are expecting their third child in October.

Buba Jabbi appears to be part of efforts by the Trump administration to increase strict enforcement of immigration laws. He has not been charged with a crime in Wisconsin and his detention was not the result of an arrest.

According to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, the U.S. is stopping fewer people crossing the border illegally but deporting more who already were in the country without legal documentation. According to the data, ICE removed more that 81,000 illegal immigrants in 2017. Of those, 61,000 occurred after Jan. 20 of last year, which was an increase of 37 percent over the same time period in 2016.

The New Sanctuary Movement of Milwaukee, organized by immigration advocacy group Voces de la Frontera, has also seen an increase in the number of people being detained, according to the movement’s coordinator, Shana Harvey.

RELATED: Wisconsin Rapids father of two to be deported to West Africa

RELATED: UWSP students uncertain about a future without DACA protection

Buba Jabbi came to the United States in 1995 on a temporary travel visa to attend the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, according to Katrina. She said she wasn’t sure about the amount of time his visa allowed him to remain in the country, but that he overstayed the visa. When he tried to change his status, the paperwork he filed was incorrect and he was moved into removal proceedings, where he remained for several years, she said.

“He kind of got stuck in a system,” Katrina Jabbi said. “It was hard for him to move out of that.”

However, Buba Jabbi was considered “undeportable” because his country would not provide travel documents on his behalf, she said. Instead, he was given orders of supervision, requiring him to report to immigration once a year and obtain work authorization, which, according to Katrina Jabbi, he has done for the last 10 years.

Buba was at his annual appointment Feb. 15 in Milwaukee with immigration officials when he was detained and told he would be deported, according to Katrina.

Katrina and Buba Jabbi with their daughters, Nalia, 5, and Aisha, 1. (Photo: Courtesy of Katrina Jabbi)

His attorney filed a stay of removal on Buba’s behalf. According to ICE Public Affairs Officer Nicole Alberico, a stay of removal can be granted for up to one year and is meant to give the deportee time to get their affairs in order.

Alberico declined to speak about the details of Buba Jabbi’s case.

Katrina said she will continue to fight for her husband by filing a 601 Waiver, which argues that the Jabbi family would endure extreme hardship as a result of Buba’s deportation.

Katrina, who first shared her family’s story on a GoFundMe page, said she finds comfort in knowing that Buba will be with his family in The Gambia, including his parents, whom he hasn’t seen since coming to the U.S.

“I really appreciate everyone’s support and kindness,” she said. “It’s humbling to know so many people are supportive of our situation. It is a very complex situation. I appreciate the people that open their minds and try to understand.”

But, the affected U.s. citizens do have the “ultimate remedy.” They can vote Trump and his enablers out of office and demand sane, humane, sensible immigration laws and enforcement that benefits, not hurts, America and our future. “Green Card ” holders can eventually become citizens and vote. If everyone in America who has been affected by the evils of Trumpism goes to the polls, the next two years could be better, and Trump can be removed after four years.

U.S. citizen children who now are helpless victims of Trump’s ICE will eventually grow up and become voters. They should remember who took their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters away from them!

PWS

03-04-18

DAHLIA LITHWICK @ SLATE: The Anti-Due-Process President!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/trump-uses-due-process-to-mean-bonus-protections-for-his-white-guy-buddies-nobody-else.html

Dahlia Lithwick In Slate:

Donald Trump has an interesting history with the notion of “due process,” and his position on the subject seems to have been updated again this week,

this time in reference to gun ownership. As he explained, in an extremely twirly gun control meeting at the White House on Wednesday, due process in dealing with people who might have mental illnesses is, in fact, overrated. Just as Vice President Mike Pence was advocating “gun violence restraining orders” with the caveat that we should “allow due process, so no one’s rights are trampled,” the president broke in to note that actually due process is maybe crap.

“Or, Mike,” he blurted. “Take the firearms first and then go to court. … Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures. I like taking the guns early. Take the guns first, go through due process second.

“They have so many checks and balances that you can be mentally ill and it takes you six months before you can prohibit it,” the president added.

Conservative media acted with horror and alarm. Trump boosters like Sean Hannity pretended it didn’t happen. Then everyone pretended it didn’t happen. Then Trump and the NRA reunited Thursday night to let us know it wasn’t really true. Perhaps for the first time in history, Second Amendment fantasists can now understand where having a loaded gun in the hands of a truly unstable person can lead.

More interesting, though, than the president’s vague and unbankable policy pronouncements is this further evolution in our possible understanding of his understanding of what “due process” might mean.

This is the same Trump who can’t stop talking about executing suspected drug dealers. It’s the same Trump who pardoned convicted former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the same Trump who persistently threatened to jail his political opponents, including Hillary Clinton, if he won the presidency. This is the man who spent a small fortune taking out ads seeking the death penalty for the Central Park Five before they had even been tried and refused to acknowledge when they were exonerated

So, when it comes to “due process,” I don’t think those words mean what he thinks they mean.

What due process rights actually mean is that the state can’t take away someone’s “life, liberty or property” without adequate legal safeguards and protections. That’s what Trump was belittling this week—the silly “checks and balances” that get in the way of confiscating guns without notice or an opportunity to be heard. When the president talks about using the force of the state to seize property or incarcerate someone without any legal recourse, he is attacking a core pillar of legal and constitutional law. The government can’t take your stuff away just because the president feels like it.

Now consider the many times Trump has used the absence of “due process” to justify his own action and inaction. The most famous recent example would be after his former staff secretary, Rob Porter, resigned following accusations by two ex-wives of domestic violence. Trump—who has himself been accused multiple times of sexual assault and abuses—tweeted his sympathy: for men who are accused of harming women.

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation,” he tweeted. “Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

Later Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney suggested that the tweet was likely referencing Steve Wynn, the casino mogul who had to step down as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee when it was reported that he also allegedly sexually harassed female employees over years. While we may never know which of these two alleged predators had so moved the president to remember that due process is an actual thing, it wasn’t hard to miss the fact that for Trump it is something the world—not just the state—owes powerful white men who stand to lose their jobs.

There’s an obvious pattern here. It was only recently that the president defended and endorsed Roy Moore, who was credibly accused by multiple women of committing sexual misconduct against them when they were children and young adults. In that case, Trump wanted due process to protect Moore not from incarceration or unjust loss of property, but from the chance that he might lose a Senate seat. Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered the White House line in defending Moore, doing grotesque backflips to protect a credibly accused child abuser with claims that mere allegations can destroy entire (men’s) lives.

“Like most Americans,” she said at the time, “the president does not believe we can allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life. However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”

There’s also the time that Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was caught on tape assaulting a female reporter. Trump’s answer then: “How do you know those bruises weren’t there before?”

“Due process” to Trump, then, is mostly just something owed by newspapers, complaining women, or voters to his buddies. This definition is what the rest of us might legally define as “blind and unflinching fealty.” But there’s a different lesson to be gleaned from his revelatory gun discussion this week. In an inadvertent gaffe, he used the words due process correctly, meaning taking guns from people without legal protections or procedures in place. He also used checks and balances disparagingly to mean actual constitutional protections against what is considered government overreach.

When Donald Trump misuses legal language to manipulate law and misrepresent truth, it’s easy to see how the rule of law means nothing to him. Funnily, when he uses legal language precisely and correctly to assert that he wants to use state authority to impair the rights of gun owners, he’s actually revealing a much more potent and frightening disdain for the rule of law and the Constitution. And honestly, no more due process is necessary to understand that.

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

Generally, this Administration has taken the position that rights only apply to them and their buddies. A confederation of scofflaws!

PWS

03-04-17

WHEN EVERYTHING & EVERYBODY IS A PRIORITY, THERE ARE NO PRIORITIES — WHAT “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IS REALLY ABOUT!

At CNN, the “Amazing Tal” has it all for you:

Happy Friday!
Hope you’re battening down the hatches during this Nor’easter.
You may have already seen, but wanted to send you my latest story this morning, a deep dive into immigration arrests.
Have a great weekend and stay safe!
Tal

http://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/politics/ice-immigration-deportations/index.html

How Trump changed the rules to arrest more non-criminal immigrants
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A businessman and father from Ohio. An Arizona mother. The Indiana husband of a Trump supporter. They were unassuming members of their community, parents of US citizens and undocumented. And they were deported by the Trump administration.
It’s left many wondering why the US government is arresting and deporting a number of individuals who have often lived in the country for decades, checked in regularly with immigration officials and posed no danger to their community. Many have family members who are American citizens, including school-aged children.
President Donald Trump famously said in a presidential debate that his focus is getting the “bad hombres” and the “bad, bad people” out first to secure the border, but one of his first actions after taking office was an executive order that effectively granted immigration agents the authority to arrest and detain any undocumented immigrant they wanted.
Where the Obama administration focused deportation efforts almost exclusively on criminals and national security threats, as well as immigrants who recently arrived illegally, the Trump administration has also targeted immigrants with what are called final orders of removal — an order from a judge that a person can be deported and has no more appeals left.
In Trump’s first year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 109,000 criminals and 46,000 people without criminal records — a 171% increase in the number of non-criminal individuals arrested over 2016.
The Trump administration regularly says its focus is criminals and safety threats, but has also repeatedly made clear that no one in the country illegally will be exempted from enforcement.
“We target criminal aliens, but we’re not going to exempt an entire class of (non)citizens,” Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton told reporters Wednesday.
“All of those in violation of immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States,” ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez added in a statement.
Critics say including people with decades-old final orders of removal as priorities is more about boosting numbers by targeting easily catchable individuals than about public safety threats.
“A final order of removal is absolutely not indicative of a person’s threat to public safety,” said former Obama administration ICE chief and DHS counsel John Sandweg. “You cannot equate convicted criminals with final orders of removal.”
Sandweg said that people with final orders, especially those who are checking in regularly with ICE, are easy to locate and can be immediately deported without much legal recourse. Identifying and locating criminals and gang members takes more investigative work.
There are more than 90,000 people on so-called orders of supervision who check in regularly with ICE officials, according to the agency. And there are more than 1 million who have removal proceedings pending or who have been ordered to leave the country but have not.
As a result of the change in ICE policy, headlines about heart-wrenching cases of deportation separating children from parents or caregivers have been a regular occurrence.
The story of Amer Adi, an Ohio businessman who lived in the US nearly 40 years, and has a wife and four daughters who are all American citizens, drew national media coverage last month. Through a complicated dispute about his first marriage, Adi lost his status and was ordered deported in 2009, but ICE never opted to remove him from the country. His congressman even introduced a bill to protect Adi, saying he was a “pillar” of the community, but last fall, ICE told Adi to prepare to be deported.
At a check-in on January 15, he was taken into custody and not allowed to see his family before being put on a plane back to his home country of Jordan on January 30.
“We shouldn’t spend one penny on low-hanging fruit,” said Sarah Saldana, the most recent director of ICE before Trump’s inauguration. “What we should be spending money is on getting people who are truly a threat to public safety.”

‘ICE fugitives’
The Trump administration has subtly blurred the distinction between criminals and those with final orders of removal, which is a civil, not criminal charge.
ICE has combined “ICE fugitives” — people who have been ordered to leave the country but haven’t yet — with convicted criminals who have pending criminal charges and reinstated final orders of removal, allowing the agency to say 92% of those arrested under Trump had criminal convictions or one of the other factors — when the number with criminal records is closer to 70%.
With an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, ICE has typically had resources to arrest and deport only roughly 150,000-250,000 individuals per year — requiring the agency to make choices about who to prioritize to proactively seek out for arrest.
ICE says its mission is carrying out the law and that it “must” deport these individuals.
“The immigration laws of the United States allow an alien to pursue relief from removal; however, once they have exhausted all due process and appeals, they remain subject to a final order of removal from an immigration judge and that order must be carried out,” said Rodriguez. “Failing to carry out final orders of removal would be inconsistent with the entire federal framework of immigration enforcement established by Congress, and undermine the integrity of the US immigration system.”
Administration officials also argue the publicizing of these cases sends a message to would-be border crossers that undocumented immigrants are never safe in the US, even when sympathetic.
“If we don’t fix these loopholes, we’re going to entice others to make that dangerous journey,” ICE Director Tom Homan told the President at a roundtable earlier last month. “So it’s just not about law enforcement, it’s about saving lives.”

Limited resources
But Saldana and other former immigration officials question the prudence of going after that population indiscriminately, saying it diverts resources from more serious security concerns.
If 20 officers are assigned to identify targets with final orders, “those are 20 officers who won’t be out focused on finding gang members or criminals,” said Bo Cooper, a career official who served as general counsel of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
“When there are a finite amount of resources, choices you make come at the expense of other choices,” Cooper said. “It really is a significant policy choice.”
Sandweg said the Obama administration in 2014 changed its priorities to move away from those with old removal orders in order to give itself more resources to pick up targets from jails, which can be hours away from ICE offices, when they get word that a criminal could be detained on immigration charges.
Sandweg and Cooper noted that other law enforcement agencies also prioritize — the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn’t bother with low-level marijuana possession, but focuses on cartels, Sandweg said — and it’s a part of agency culture.
“Setting enforcement priorities is not micromanagement, that’s what every law enforcement agency does,” agreed Cooper.
As for whether ICE was handcuffed during the Obama era, Saldana said that even in Trump’s executive order, there is room for discretion.
“That’s silly,” Saldana said. “Can you imagine having 11, 12 million in the system? The cost would be extraordinary, so you have to make priorities and work that way. … You can’t sweep everybody into one category. Not everyone is a contributor to society, and not everyone is a criminal.”

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

Homan’s shtick about “saving lives” is as preposterous as it is insulting! The “dangers” of seeking to come to the US actually are well known by those making the journey. Whether they are educated or not, they are smart, brave, resourceful people — the kinds of folks we actually could use more of in America.

What Homan and others (including some of the jurists at all levels hearing these cases and getting the results wrong) fail to recognize is that the dangers of remaining in failed states controlled by gangs and corrupt politicos is much greater than the dangers of the journey and the chance of being returned. That being the case, folks have been coming and will continue to come, no matter how nasty and arbitrary we are and no matter how much we mock our Constitution, our own laws on asylum and protection, and the international standards to which we claim adherence.

Too many of those being returned were denied relief under arcane legal standards even when the judges hearing the cases acknowledged that they had established a likelihood of persecution or death upon return. But, they failed to show a “nexus to a protected ground” or “government acquiescence” as those terms are often intentionally restrictively defined by the BIA and some courts.

I know that I had such cases, and I can’t say as anyone ever understood why I was sending them back to possible severe harm or death. Homan and others like him don’t actually have to pronounce such judgments on other human beings face to face as do U.S. Immigration Judges. Neither do the Appellate Immigration Judges sitting in the “BIA Tower” in Falls Church, VA for that matter!

But, the DHS always has discretion as to whether to execute such an order. How on earth does sending productive members of our society and others who have committed no crimes back to be killed, extorted, raped, or forced to join gangs “save lives.” What total hypocrisy!

Indeed, the only “message” we’re actually sending to such folks is that they might as well join the gangs because their lives don’t matter to us. There will be a reckoning for such attitudes for Homan and others some day, even if its only that the judgement of history and the shame of future generations for their lack of empathy, intellectual honesty, common sense, and humanity!

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won‘t stop human migration!

PWS

03-03-18

BIA EXPOSEE: DID THE BIA SUPPRESS EVIDENCE IN MATTER OF J-C-H-F- THAT WOULD HAVE DIRECTLY UNDERMINED THEIR ANTI-IMMIGRANT RULING? — HON. JEFFREY CHASE THINKS SO, & HE HAS THE EVIDENCE TO BACK UP HIS CHARGE!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/3/2/matter-of-j-c-h-f-an-interesting-omission

Mar 2 Matter of J-C-H-F-: An Interesting Omission

In its decisions involving claims for protection under Article III of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the BIA defines “government acquiescence” to include “willful blindness” by government officials.

In its recent decision in Matter of J-C-H-F-, the BIA addressed the criteria an immigration judge should use in assessing the reliability of a statement taken from a newly-arrived non-citizens at either an airport or the border. The BIA largely adopted the criteria set out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in its 2004 decision in Ramsameachire v. Ashcroft.

Ramsameachire set out four reasonable factors for consideration: (1) whether the record of the interview is verbatim or merely summarizes or paraphrases the respondent’s statements; (2) whether the questions asked were designed to elicit the details of the claim, and whether the interviewer asked follow-up questions to aid the respondent in developing the claim; whether the respondent appears to have been reluctant to reveal information because of prior interrogation or other coercive experiences in his or her home country; and (4) whether the responses to the questions suggest that the respondent did not understand the questions in either English or through the interpreter’s translation.

Both the Second Circuit in Ramsameachire and the BIA in J-C-H-F- applied these criteria to the statement in question in their respective cases; both found the statement reliable, which led to an adverse credibility finding due to discrepancies between the statement and later testimony. But there is a big difference between the two cases. Ramsameachire was decided one year before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is part of the U.S. government, published the first of its two reports (in 2005 and 2016) assessing the expedited removal system in which Bureau of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers encounter arriving asylum seekers. USCIRF conducted field research over several years before issuing each report. As I wrote in an earlier blog post summarizing these reports, USCIRF’s first recommendation to EOIR was to “retrain immigration judges that the interview record created by CBP is not a verbatim transcript of the interview and does not document the individual’s entire asylum claim in detail, and should be weighed accordingly.”

As I already noted in my prior post, USCIRF described its findings of the airport interview process as “alarming.” It found that the reports were neither verbatim nor reliable; that they sometimes contained answers to questions that were never asked, that they indicate that information was conveyed when in fact it was not. USCIRF found that although the statements indicated that they were read back, they usually were not, and that a CBP officer explained that the respondent’s initials on each page merely indicated that he or she received a copy of each page, and not that the page was read back to the respondent and approved as to accuracy.

The Second Circuit in Ramsameachire would have no way of knowing any of this, and therefore reasonably considered the statement to be a verbatim transcript which had been read back to the respondent, whose initials on each page were deemed to indicate approval of the accuracy of its contents. But the BIA in 2018 could claim no such ignorance. USCIRF had specifically discussed its reports at a plenary session of the 2016 Immigration Judge Legal Training Conference in Washington D.C., where the report’s co-author told the audience that the statements were not verbatim transcripts in spite of their appearance to the contrary. As moderator of the panel, I pointed out the importance of this report in adjudicating asylum claims. The person in charge of BIA legal training at the time was present for the panel, and in fact, had the same panelists from USCIRF reprise its presentation two months later at the BIA for its Board Members and staff attorneys. I personally informed both the chair and vice-chair of the BIA of the report and its findings, and recommended that they order a hard copy of the report. The report was even posted on EOIR’s Virtual Law Library, which at the time was a component of the BIA, under the supervision of the vice-chair (along with training and publication). I can say this with authority, because I was the Senior Legal Advisor at the BIA in charge of the library, and I reported directly to the BIA vice-chair.

In spite of all of the above, J-C-H-F- simply treats the statement as if it is a verbatim transcript, and noted that the pages of the statement were initialed by the respondent; in summary, the Board panel acted as if the two USCIRF reports did not exist. Very interestingly, sometime in 2017, the USCIRF report was removed from the EOIR Virtual Law Library. Based on my experience overseeing the library, I can’t imagine any way this could have happened unless it was at the request of the BIA vice-chair. But why would he have required the report’s removal?

If any reader has information as to when J-C-H-F- was first considered for possible precedent status by the BIA, please let me know via the contact link below.

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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

I can largely corroborate what Jeffrey is saying. I, of course, have been gone from “The Tower” for 15 years.

But I know 1) that BIA judges and staff were present during the USCIRF sessions at the Annual Immigration Judges Conference (in fact, I believe it was “required training” on religious asylum claims), 2) as an Immigration Judge I had access to the Annual Reports of the USCIRF and used them in my adjudications; 3) I was well aware, and believe that any competent EOIR judge would also have been aware, that airport statements and statements taken by the Border Patrol were a) not verbatim, and b) often unreliable for a host of reasons as pointed out by the USCIRF.

I am certainly as conscious as anyone of the precarious positions of BIA Appellate Immigration Judges as administrative judges working for the Attorney General. I’m also very well aware of the human desire for self-preservation, job preservation, and institutional survival, all of which are put in jeopardy these days by siding with immigrants against the DHS in the “Age of Trump & Sessions,” where “the only good migrant is a deported migrant.”

But, the job of a BIA Appellate Immigration Judge, or indeed any Immigration Judge, is not about any of these things. It’s about “guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”

That means insuring that migrants’ rights, including of course, their precious right to Due Process under our Constitution, are fully protected. Further, an EOIR judge must insure that the generous standards for asylum set forth by the Supreme Court in Cardoza-Fonseca and by the BIA itself in Matter of Mogharrabi are fully realized, not just “rote cited.”

If standing up for migrants’ rights turns out to be job threatening or institutionally threatening, then so be it. Lives are at stake here, not just senior level US Government careers, as important as I realize those can be!

Unfortunately, I think today’s BIA has become more or less of a “shill” for the enforcement heavy views of Jeff Sessions, DHS, the Office of Immigration Litigation, and the Trump Administration in general.

What good is “required training” in adjudicating asylum requests based on religion if the BIA and Immigration Judges merely ignore what is presented? It isn’t like DHS or CBP had some “counterpresentation” that showed why their statements were reliable.

Indeed, I had very few DHS Assistant Chief Counsel seriously contest the potential reliability issues with statements taken at the border. And never in my 13 years on the bench did the DHS offer to bring in a Border Patrol Agent to testify as to the reliability or the process by which these statements are taken.

I can’t imagine any other court giving border statements the weight accorded by the BIA once the problems set forth in the USCIRF Report were placed in the record. And, I’m not aware that the DHS has ever set forth any rebuttal to the USCIRF report or made any serious attempt to remedy these glaring defects.

We need an independent Article I United States Immigration Court that guarantees Due Process and gives migrants a “fair shake.” Part of that must be an Appellate Division that functions like a true appellate court and holds the Government and the DHS fully accountable for complying with the law.

PWS

03-03-18

MAX BOOT @ WASHPOST: A KLEPTOCRACY OF GRIFTERS – THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION — “[T]here have been more crooked regimes — but only in banana republics. The corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration is unprecedented in U.S. history.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administrations-no-good-very-bad-wednesday/2018/03/01/7dc60fd2-1d69-11e8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html

Max Boot reports from The Swamp for the Washington Post:

“One of the great non-mysteries of the Trump administration is why Cabinet members think they can behave like aristocrats at the court of the Sun King. The Department of Housing and Urban Development spent $31,000 for a dining set for Secretary Ben Carson’s office while programs for the poor were being slashed. The Environmental Protection Agency has been paying for Administrator Scott Pruitt to fly first class and be protected by a squadron of bodyguards so he doesn’t have to mix with the great unwashed in economy class. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $122,334 for Secretary David Shulkin and his wife to take what looks like a pleasure trip to Europe last summer; Shulkin’s chief of staff is accused of doctoring emails and lying about what happened. The Department of Health and Human Services paid more than $400,000 for then-Secretary Tom Price to charter private aircraft — a scandal that forced his resignation.

Why would Cabinet members act any differently when they are serving in the least ethical administration in our history? The “our” is important, because there have been more crooked regimes — but only in banana republics. The corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration is unprecedented in U.S. history. The only points of comparison are the Gilded Age scandals of the Grant administration, Teapot Dome under the Harding administration, and Watergate and the bribe-taking of Vice President Spiro Agnew during the Nixon administration. But this administration is already in an unethical league of its own. The misconduct revealed during just one day this week — Wednesday — was worse than what presidents normally experience during an entire term.

The day began with a typically deranged tweet from President Trump: “Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. . . . Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!” Translation: Trump is exercised that the Justice Department is following its normal procedures. Sessions fired back: “As long as I am the Attorney General, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor.” Translation: The president is asking him to act without “integrity and honor.”

This is part of a long pattern of the president pressuring the “beleaguered” Sessions — a.k.a. “Mr. Magoo” — to misuse his authority to shut down the special counsel investigation of Trump and to launch investigations of Trump’s political foes. Because Sessions won’t do that, Trump has tried to force him from office. The president does not recognize that he is doing anything improper. He thinks the attorney general should be his private lawyer. The poor man has no idea of what the “rule of law” even means, as he showed at a White House meeting Wednesday on gun control, during which he said: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This from a supposed supporter of the Second Amendment.

But wait. Wednesday’s disgraceful news was only beginning. Later in the day the New York Times reported that Jared Kushner’s family company had received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from companies whose executives met with him in his capacity as a senior White House aide. The previous day, The Post had reported that officials in the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico had discussed how they could manipulate the president’s son-in-law “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.” Oh, and don’t forget that during the transition in 2016, while Kushner was trying to refinance a family-owned office building, he met with a Russian bankerclose to the Kremlin and with executives of a Chinese insurance company that has since been taken over by the Chinese government.

President Trump’s nepotism has compromised U.S. standing in the world, says Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. (The Washington Post)

Little wonder that the previous week Kushner lost his top-secret security clearance. The wonder is that a senior aide with such dodgy business dealings was allowed access for a full year to the government’s most sensitive secrets — and that he still works in the White House. This is the kind of nepotism that plagues dictatorships and is a defining characteristic of Trump’s kleptocratic rule.

Of course, we are still only scratching the surface of administration scandals. This is a president, after all, whose communications director quit on Wednesday after admitting to lying (but insists her resignation was unrelated); whose senior staff included an alleged wife-beater; whose former national security adviser and deputy campaign manager have pleaded guilty to felonies; whose onetime campaign chairman faces 27 criminal charges, including conspiracy against the United States; whose attorney paid off a porn star; and whose son mixed family and government business on a trip to India. Given the ethical direction set by this president, it’s a wonder that his Cabinet officers aren’t stealing spoons from their official dining rooms. Come to think of it, maybe someone should look into that.”

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

The total ugliness, dishonesty, corruption, and lack of accountability of the Trumpsters is hard to contemplate. Everybody mentioned in this article probably belongs in jail. Other than that, though, they’re a great bunch of guys. Check those pockets and briefcases for the spoons! Draining The Swamp indeed!

PWS

03-02-18

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND: It Didn’t Take This GOP Controlled Congress Long To Forget About Saving The “Dreamers!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/with-no-more-deadline-congress-has-stopped-talking-about-immigration/2018/03/01/12d66ad6-1c9d-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html

Paul Kane reports for the Washington Post:

“Take away a deadline, and Congress will simply lose its focus on any issue — even the heated debate around immigration.

At Tuesday morning’s House Republican briefing, just one of the five GOP leaders made a reference to the issue, and it was a passing one — a proposal meant mostly to placate conservatives, not a real solution that could get signed into law.

Across the Capitol, a few hours later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and four senior Republicans did their weekly briefing. Topics ranged from gun background checks to the Winter Olympics. There was no immigration talk at all.

The four Senate Democrats who followed McConnell also made no mention of the looming Monday deadline to resolve the fate of 800,000 undocumented immigrants who have been shielded from the threat of deportation under an expiring executive order.

It’s understandable that most of the attention has shifted toward the fallout of the Valentine’s Day massacre of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, with the media intensely focused on gun laws and school violence.

Capitol Police remove a banner as members of the Catholic community and supporters of DACA recipients are arrested during a protest on Capitol Hill this week. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

All but one of the 17 questions fielded by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), at their separate press briefings, related in some way to the Parkland, Fla., shootings. The lone outlier focused on the memorial service for the Rev. Billy Graham.

This was supposed to be the week when Congress would force itself to resolve the dispute over the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order, which President Trump announced in September he would revoke on March 5, giving Congress a six-month window to resolve the issue.

It was, in some ways, a masterful idea by the Trump West Wing, living up to his tough talk on immigration during the presidential campaign in 2016 but also foisting the issue into the laps of lawmakers.

But now, amid legislative and judicial gridlock, lawmakers and the media have moved on to other topics. First, the Senate failed two weeks ago to approve any compromise. Then, the Supreme Court declared it would not wade into the legal challenges to the DACA program until it plays out in lower federal court rulings — a legal process with no obvious end date in sight.

“We would be well advised to continue our work on it, but it seems to me that a lot of the air is out of the balloon here in the Capitol, and people don’t sense its urgency,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the Republican whip who had been leading bipartisan talks.

Cornyn’s lead negotiating partner, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the Democratic whip, has declared helping the “dreamers,” as the undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children are known, an urgent, moral mandate. But even he understands why the issue has fallen off the radar.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) flanked by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), left, and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.), speaks with reporters this week about school safety measures in response to the Parkland, Fla., massacre that left 17 dead. The Republicans made no mention of immigration reform. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

“Along comes this tragedy, in the high school in Parkland, Florida, and the response of the young people and the national response of the subject, it blows away all other conversations about DACA and the Dream Act, North Korean nuclear threats,” Durbin said.

He and Cornyn have not held any serious immigration talks in weeks, he said — and he added that the same is true for a separate bipartisan group of centrist senators. And none are on tap.

“We talk but at this point we don’t have a plan,” he said.

Just like that, in the span of a few days — Senate gridlock, a madman’s bullets killing children and a judicial ruling — and the issue that consumed Washington for most of December, January and February is no longer worth a mention at a leadership news conference.

That’s not to say the issue has subsided from the political debate. Activists are trying to keep the pressure on Trump and Congress, with a rally planned for Sunday in Washington to draw attention to Monday’s DACA deadline that is set to pass without much fanfare.

In southwestern Pennsylvania, Republicans are furiously trying to stave off an embarrassing loss in a special election to fill a vacant House seat. The district tilted toward Trump by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016, a year in which Democrats did not even field a candidate against the longtime Republican incumbent, Tim Murphy, who resigned amid a scandal late last year.

Now, to halt the momentum for Democrat Conor Lamb, a GOP super PAC called the Congressional Leadership Fund has unleashed a new adthat ties Lamb to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her hometown San Francisco’s status as a “sanctuary city” for people in the country illegally.

“Conor Lamb wants to help Nancy Pelosi give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants,” the narrator says. “Sanctuary cities and amnesty for illegals. Conor Lamb is a Pelosi liberal.”

Lamb, 33, a former assistant U.S. attorney, does support a path to citizenship for DACA recipients, but he has stated that he will not vote for Pelosi as speaker. That position was highlighted in a new ad he is running that calls for new leadership in both parties.

Clearly, Republicans believe the issue still has resonance with their conservative base voters, especially if it is mixed in with images of Pelosi. And Lamb seems to be aware of the threat.

But Republicans could face their own political dilemma if the federal courts rule that DACA was illegal, which would effectively reinstate Trump’s order and revoke protections from those 800,000 people. Deportations could begin quickly.

“I don’t believe that Senator McConnell and the Republicans want to see too many people deported out of Nevada and Arizona in the weeks and months ahead,” Durbin said.

He named two southwestern states with large dreamer populations where Republicans are trying to defend two Senate seats that could flip control of the Senate in the November midterm elections.

Republicans are well aware of the potential for a court ruling at any time.

“I’ve been working in and around courts long enough to know things can turn on a dime,” said Cornyn, who served as Texas attorney general, and on the state Supreme Court, before winning his Senate seat 15 years ago.

That said, Cornyn remains less than optimistic about congressional action until that court order arrives and forces action. Stating the obvious, he said: “We don’t do things around here unless there is a deadline.”

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

Given the ugliness surrounding the farcical “debate” about Dreamers in the Senate and pressure exerted by the White Nationalists/Bakuninists in the House, perhaps it’s just as well that Dreamers are “forgotten” for now.

My prediction: It will take “regime change” — however long that might take — to solve the “Dreamers’ dilemma” on a long-term basis. In the meantime, I think that their status and fate will be tied up in the courts for a long, long time — wasteful, but an unfortunate fact of life when we have “Gonzo Government” elected by a minority of voters.

PWS

03-02-18

LAUREN MARKHAM IN THE NEW REPUBLIC: Why “Trumpism” Ultimately Will Fail – Those Ignorant of Human History & Unwilling To Learn From It Will Just Keep Repeating The Same Expensive Mistakes – “One tragic lesson of the extra-continentales is that no set of governments, however callous, can solve the migration crisis by closing its doors to refugees seeking shelter. . . . The doors will not hold, and neither will the fences. You can build a wall, but it will not work. Desperate people find a way.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/146919/this-route-doesnt-exist-map

“How efforts to block refugees and asylum-seekers from Europe have only made the global migration crisis more complex and harrowing

By LAUREN MARKHAM

February 26, 2018

By 7 p.m., the sun had set and groups of young men had begun to gather inside a small, nameless restaurant on a narrow street in Tapachula, Mexico. Anywhere else in the city, a hub of transit and commerce about ten miles north of the Guatemalan border, there would be no mistaking that you were in Latin America: The open colonial plaza, with its splaying palms and marimba players, men with megaphones announcing Jesus, and women hawking woven trinkets and small bags of cut fruit suggested as much. But inside the restaurant, the atmosphere was markedly different. The patrons hailed not from Mexico or points due south but from other far-flung and unexpected corners of the globe—India, Pakistan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Congo. Men, and all of the diners were men, gathered around tables, eating not Mexican or Central American fare but steaming plates of beef curry, yellow lentils, and blistered rounds of chapati. The restaurant’s proprietor, a stern, stocky Bangladeshi man in his thirties named Sadek, circulated among the diners. He stopped at one table of South Asian men and spoke to them in Hindi about how much they owed him for the items he’d collected on their tab. The waitress, patiently taking orders and maneuvering among the crowds of men, was the only Spanish speaker in the room.

Outside, dozens of other such men, travelers from around the world, mingled on the avenue. They reclined against the walls of restaurants and smoked cigarettes on the street-side balconies of cheap hotels. They’d all recently crossed into the country from Guatemala, and most had, until recently, been held in Tapachula’s migrant detention center, Siglo XXI. Just released, they had congregated in this packed migrants’ quarter as they prepared to continue their journeys out of Mexico and into the United States. They had traveled a great distance already: a transatlantic journey by airplane or ship to Brazil; by car, bus, or on foot to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia; through Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua; on to Honduras, Guatemala, and into Mexico. Again and again, I heard their itinerary repeated in an almost metronomic cadence, each country a link in a daunting, dangerous chain. They’d crossed oceans and continents; slogged through jungles and city slums; braved detention centers and robberies; and they were now, after many months, or even longer, tantalizingly close to their final goal of the United States and refugee status.

Police in Tapachula, a Mexican city used as a waypoint for migrants known as *extra-continentales*, patrol past a Cameroonian traveler (in a striped shirt).

They are the extreme outliers of a global migration crisis of enormous scale. Today, more than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes—a higher number than ever recorded, as people flee war, political upheaval, extreme poverty, natural disasters, and the impacts of climate change. Since 2014, nearly 2 million migrants have crossed into Europe by sea, typically landing in Italy or Greece. They hail from dozens of countries, but most are from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria—countries struggling with war, political repression, climate change, and endemic poverty.

Their passage to supposed safety, which takes them across Libya and the Sinai, as well as the Mediterranean, has become increasingly perilous. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 150,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2017. More than 3,000 are believed to have drowned. Stories of detention in Libya, as well as physical and sexual abuse, are commonplace among those who manage to make it to Europe. A recent CNN report depicted a Libyan slave auction, where people were being sold for as little as $400. Even the lucky ones who wash up on Europe’s shores may end up stuck for years in transit camps and detention centers in the south of the continent, in some cases only in the end to be deported. In 2013, in an effort to curb migration and ease the burden of migrants within its borders, the European Union began ramping up deportations. In 2016, nearly 500,000 people were deported from Europe.

Globally, more than 65 million people have currently been forced from their homes—a higher number than ever recorded.

While the global drivers of migration have not subsided—devastation in Syria and Afghanistan, political repression in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—200,000 fewer migrants attempted to cross into Europe in 2017 than the year before. In response to the migrant crisis, European countries have sent strong messages that newcomers are no longer welcome; they’ve built fences to stop refugees from crossing their borders and elected far-right politicians with staunchly anti-immigrant messages. Meanwhile, most asylum cases are stalled in overburdened court systems, with slim prospects for any near-term resolution, which leaves many migrants stuck in the wicked limbo of a squalid, under-resourced refugee camp or austere detention facility. Today, European authorities have stiffened their resistance not only to new arrivals, but to the hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers who arrived years before and remain in an eerie liminal zone: forbidden to live or work freely in Europe and unwilling, or often unable, to go home.

Because of the high risks of crossing and the low odds of being permitted to stay, more and more would-be asylum-seekers are now forgoing Europe, choosing instead to chance the journey through the Americas that brings them to Sadek’s restaurant in Tapachula. Each year, thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make their way to South America and then move northward, bound for the United States—and their numbers have been increasing steadily. It’s impossible to know how many migrants from outside the Americas begin the journey and do not make it to the United States, or how many make it to the country and slip through undetected. But the number of “irregular migrants”—they’re called extra-continentales in Tapachula—apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has tripled since 2010.

They remain a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans crossing into the United States. But it is a hastening trickle that may well become a flood. “These ‘extra-continental’ migrants will probably increase,” said Roeland De Wilde, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migrationin Costa Rica, “given the increased difficulties in entering Europe, relative ease of entry in some South American countries, and smugglers’ increased organization across continents.”

A migrant from Bangladesh, Sadek (in a red shirt) is part restaurateur, part migratory middleman. He can help a traveler with a good meal—or a good travel agent or immigration attorney.

One tragic lesson of the extra-continentales is that no set of governments, however callous, can solve the migration crisis by closing its doors to refugees seeking shelter. All Europe has done is redirect the flow of vulnerable humanity, fostering the development of a global superhighway to move people over this great distance. The doors will not hold, and neither will the fences. You can build a wall, but it will not work. Desperate people find a way.

“Cette route,” a French-speaking man from Cameroon told me, one sweltering afternoon in Tapachula on the breezeless balcony of a hotel frequented by irregular migrants, “n’existe pas sur le map.” This route doesn’t exist on the map.”

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

Read Lauren’s much longer complete article at the above link. It’s one of the most incisive treatments of the worldwide migration phenomenon that I have seen recently. I highly recommend it.

Thanks to dedicated “Courtsider” Roxanne Lea Fantl of Richmond, VA for sending this item my way!

Shortly after I arrived at the Arlington Immigration Court, one of my wonderful colleagues told me “Paul, desperate people do desperate things. Don’t take it personally, and don’t blame them. We just do our jobs, as best we can under the circumstances.” Good advice, to be sure!

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration!

PWS

03-02-18

THE LEVIN REPORT: “A wise person once said, of working in the White House: ‘It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns . . . I am in a constant state of shock and horror.’” 🤡🤡🤡🤡

Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:

“A wise person once said, of working in the White House: “It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns . . . I am in a constant state of shock and horror.” Whether or not that description can be attributed to Gary Cohn or is simply “representative” of his views, we may never know, but it’s obviously a good summation of what life is like inside the capsizing Carnival cruise ship that is the West Wing, particularly over the last 24 hours.

To recap, on Wednesday night, The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump was expected to announce major tariffs on aluminum and steel on Thursday, a development that apparently caught administration officials completely off guard. Though Trump has been itching to start a trade war since he announced his candidacy for president, virtually all of his advisers, outside the truly batshit insane ones, strongly advised against such punitive measures, as they could ultimately hurt many U.S. allies and provoke retaliation by U.S. trading partners, among other terrible consequences. During a June meeting with his Cabinet to discuss the issue, a whopping 22 people were said to be against Trump’s wishes, to the three who weren’t: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, then-senior adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump himself. Unhappy that more people weren’t on his side, Trump reportedly screamed, “I want tariffs. And I want someone to bring me some tariffs!”

With Bannon’s departure, there was a thought that sheer numbers, if not sanity, would prevail. In addition to Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have all strenuously argued against the tariffs, warning that they could hurt the global economy, damage key relationships, and threaten national security. That was obviously wishful thinking, though, given that 1) when Trump gets an idea in his head, no matter how dumb it is, he doesn’t let it go, and 2) the president has recently been taking the advice of Peter Navarro, a hard-line trade adviser who makes Bannon look like a “globalist cuck.” (For reference, Navarro wrote a book called Death by China, has encouraged Trump to go after freaking Canada, and thinks the North American Free Trade Agreement is responsible for an increase in spousal abuse, divorce, and infertility.) Considering Navarro’s growing influence in the White House, in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have come as a shock that this afternoon, this happened:

President Trump said on Thursday that he will impose stiff and sweeping tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum as he moved to fulfill a key campaign promise to get tough on foreign competitors. Mr. Trump said he would formally sign the trade measures next week and promised they would be in effect “for a long period of time.” The trade measures would impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. It is unclear whether those would apply to all imports or be targeted toward specific countries, like China, which have been flooding the United States with cheap metals.

The announcement capped a frenetic and chaotic morning inside the White House as Mr. Trump summoned more than a dozen executives from the steel and aluminum industry to the White House, raising expectations that he would announce his long-promised tariffs. However, the legal review of the trade measure was not yet complete and, as of Thursday morning, White House advisers were still discussing various scenarios for tariff levels and which countries could be included, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

It’s hard to overstate how bad of an idea this is. In addition to going against the advice of nearly all of his advisers and most people on Capitol Hill, essentially flipping off the World Trade Organization, and likely alienating important allies, the “JOBS JOBS JOBS” president is putting countless “JOBS” at risk in sectors like the automotive industry that obviously rely on aluminum and steel to manufacture their products. (According Axios’s Jonathan Swan, a report put out by Wilbur “wake me when the meeting is over” Ross that recommended imposing tariffs enraged Cohn because it didn’t factor in such collateral damage. Cohn and other staffers were also reportedly irked by the fact that the report suggested Trump’s fantasy of a manufacturing Renaissance could come true, when everyone knows it’s never gonna happen.)

To give you an idea of how unpopular today’s announcement was, even the Brothers Koch have come out against it, calling the tariffs, via their Americans for Prosperity mouthpiece, “a misguided approach that will hurt American businesses and families by increasing costs and undermining the tax relief just delivered by Congress and President Trump.” Larry Kudlow, whose name as been floated as a possible replacement for Cohn, and who is a huge fan of Trump’s, slammed the move, too, saying “All that will happen with steel tariffs is you will raise prices for all import users and that includes businesses and of course consumers. You will wind up hurting millions of people to help 140,000 people in the steel industry.” But don’t take their word for it. Here’s how Trump’s favorite metric responded:

(For those of you who are not visual learners, what we’re saying is: the Dow plunged 550 points on the news, closing the day down more than 400 points. For a stock-market obsessed president, that’s gotta hurt.)

Scott Pruitt, risking his life, will fly coach

Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruittcame under fire for routinely flying first or business class when coach would have sufficed. His excuse? That “we live in a very toxic environment politically, particularly around issues of the environment,” and one time someone went up to him in the airport and uttered completely factual statements to his face. From there on out, his security detail decided that flying at the back of the plane was too much of a risk, and that Pruitt’s safety could only be ensured in the part of the aircraft where the booze is on the house. Today, however, this hugely brave American announced that those days are over.

During an interview with CBS News, Pruitt said that he has told his security detail “to accommodate those security threats in alternate ways . . . up to and including, flying coach going forward.”

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

Get “The Levin Report” full version here https://tinyletter.com/besslevin/archive

Perhaps showing why we have the Trump “Clownocracy” in the first place, some Dems actually enthusiastically endorsed Trump’s idiotic move. As the late great Casey Stengel might have said, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Guys, we need steel and aluminum, and we import one heck of a lot more than we make. Even an “economic dummy” like me knows that. So, a trade war that hurts American consumers and manufacturers who use steel and aluminum is going to be a big loser for us. Countries like ours that are, and almost certainly always will be, net importers rather than exporters can’t afford trade wars (particularly with our, perhaps soon to be former, “friends” like Canada & the EU)!

Finally, a “too bizarre not to be true rumor” sweeping the “world of inside the Beltway punditry” is that “Don the Con Man” will fire “Mr. Magoo” (a/k/a “Gonzo Apolyptco,” a/k/a “Jeff Sessions”) and temporarily replace him with the ethically challenged Scott “First Class” Pruitt for long enough to completely dismantle the Justice Department and our system of justice just as he did with our environment and the EPA. Talk about the “GOP Wrecking Crew” and the not-so-smart minority of folks who voted them into power. Vladi must be laughing his tail off!

PWS

03-02-18

SATIRE FROM ANDY BOROWITZ @ THE NEW YORKER: “Jeff Sessions Urges Melania to Work Harder on Campaign to Stop Cyberbullying”

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/jeff-sessions-urges-melania-to-work-harder-on-campaign-to-stop-cyberbullying?mbid=nl_Borowitz%20030118&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13031039&spUserID=MjQ1NjUyMTUwNjY5S0&spJobID=1360078000&spReportId=MTM2MDA3ODAwMAS2

“Jeff Sessions Urges Melania to Work Harder on Campaign to Stop Cyberbullying

By Andy Borowitz

Photograph by Remo Casilli / Camera Press / Redux

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that the problem “is far worse than I imagined,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday urged First Lady Melania Trump to intensify her campaign against cyberbullying.

Speaking to reporters from his office at the Justice Department, Sessions said that, whatever Mrs. Trump had done to eliminate the scourge of cyberbullying, “It clearly has not been enough.”

“From my perspective, cyberbullying is very much a growing problem,” he said. “And with every passing day it gets worse and worse.”

Sessions said that, while he understands that Mrs. Trump has many other responsibilities as First Lady, “anything you can do to get cyberbullying to stop will be very much personally appreciated by me.”

“Please help,” he said, his voice quavering.

In an official statement released later in the day, the First Lady said that she had “kind of forgotten” about her campaign to stop cyberbullying but that she would “get right on it.”

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

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, AND ALSO MORE FACTUAL ACCURACY THAN ANY REPORT PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF “AGENT DEVON!”

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

“Mister Magoo” nothing! He’s not a “bumbler” when it comes to implementing Trump’s White Nationalist immigration policies and bashing Latinos and other minorities.

Nope! He’ll always be “Gonzo Apocalypto” to me! Captures the full crazy, wild-eyed, disingenuous, ignorant, malicious meanness of the man!

PWS

03-01-18

AMERICA THE UGLY: WHY ARE WE ALLOWING OUR GOVERNMENT TO ABUSE THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF FAMILIES & CHILDREN? — “This policy is tantamount to state-sponsored traumatization.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/immigrant-children-deportation-parents.html

DORA GALACATOS, ALAN SHAPIRO and BRETT STARK in the NY Times:

“The Department of Homeland Security may soon formalize the abhorrent practice of detaining the children of asylum-seekers separately from their parents. Immigrant families apprehended at the southwest border already endure a deeply flawed system in which they can be detained indefinitely. In this immigration system, detainees too often lack adequate access to counsel. But to unnecessarily tear apart families who cross the border to start a better life is immoral.

Sadly, such separations are already happening. The Florence Project in Arizona documented 155 such cases by October and other immigrant advocacy organizations report that children are being taken away from their parents. If the secretary orders this practice to be made standard procedure, thousands of families could face unnecessary separation.

The Trump administration’s goal is to strong-arm families into accepting deportation to get their children back. Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, admitted this when she told the Senate on Jan. 16 that separating families may “discourage parents” from seeking refuge in America.

But the increasing informal use of family separation has not proved to be a deterrent. Last year, the number of family apprehensions at the southwestern border skyrocketed from 1,118 families in April to 8,120 in December.

Parents will continue to flee violence to protect their children and themselves. It is reprehensible to punish them for that basic human impulse. It is also despicable that the government would use children as bargaining chips. This policy is tantamount to state-sponsored traumatization.

Those of us who have seen the sites where families are detained and work directly with children and families who have gone through the system know what’s at stake.

The children we work with call the Border Patrol processing stations for migrants stopped at the border “iceboxes” (hieleras) and “dog kennels” (perreras). “I was wet from crossing the river and it was so cold I thought I would die,” one child said.

Another told us: “The lights were kept on day and night. I became disoriented and didn’t know how long I had been there.” A third said: “I was separated from my older sister. She is the closest person in my life. I couldn’t stop crying until I saw her again a few days later.”

In our work we have heard countless stories about detention. But the shock of bearing witness to them is hard to put into words. In McAllen, Tex., you enter a nondescript warehouse, the color of the dry barren landscape that surrounds it. It could be storage for just about anything, but is in actuality a cavernous, cold space holding hundreds upon hundreds of mostly women and children.

Chain-link fencing divides the harshly illuminated space into pens, one for boys, a second for girls and a third for their mothers and infant siblings. The pens are unusually quiet except for the crinkling of silver Mylar blankets. This is where family separation begins, as does the nightmare for parents and children.

The parents whose sons and daughters have been taken from them are given two options: either agree to return home with their children — or endure having those children sent on to shelters run by the Health and Human Services Department while they themselves languish in detention centers scattered around the country.

This country’s medical and mental health organizations have rightly recognized the trauma of this practice. The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned immigrant family separation, and family detention overall, as “harsh and counterproductive.” The American Medical Association has denounced family separation as causing “unnecessary distress, depression and anxiety.”

Studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the irreparable harm to children caused by separation from their parents. A parent or caregiver’s role is to mitigate stress. Family separation robs children of that buffer and can create toxic stress, which can damage brain development and lead to chronic conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and heart disease. For that reason, more than 200 child welfare, juvenile justice and child development organizations signed a letterdemanding that the Trump administration abandon this ill-conceived policy.

Family separation is also unjustifiable legally, as “family unity” is central to our immigration laws and our longstanding policy of reuniting citizens and permanent residents with their relatives.

More fundamentally, family separation is anathema to basic decency and human rights. For our government to essentially hold immigrant children as hostages in exchange for the “ransom” of their parents’ deportation is simply despicable.

It is every parent’s nightmare to have a child snatched away. To adopt this as standard procedure to facilitate deportations is inhumane and does nothing to make Americans safer. This country, and Secretary Nielsen, must reject family separation.

9TH STOMPS BIA’S “ABSURD” INTERPRETATION OF THE CHILD STATUS PROTECTION ACT (“CSPA”) IN Matter of Zamora-Molina, 25 I. & N. Dec. 606 (BIA 2011) – TOVAR V. SESSIONS – Congress Intended The CSPA To Help Immigrant Kids – But, You’d Never Know It From The Anti-Immigrant Interpretations Of DHS & The BIA!

9th-Tovar-CSPA-Absurd

Tovar v. Sessions, 9th Cir., 02-14-18, Published

PANEL: Dorothy W. Nelson and Stephen Reinhardt, Circuit Judges, and George Caram Steeh,* District Judge.

* The Honorable George Caram Steeh III, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, sitting by designation.

OPINION BY: Judge Stephen Reinhardt

SUMMARY (BY COURT STAFF):

“Immigration

The panel granted and remanded Margarito Rodriguez Tovar’s petition for review of a Board of Immigration Appeals decision rejecting his application for adjustment of status.

Relying on the BIA’s published opinion in Matter of Zamora-Molina, 25 I. & N. Dec. 606 (BIA 2011), the immigration judge and BIA rejected Rodriguez Tovar’s application for adjustment of status. The agency held that, because Rodriguez Tovar was over 21 years old in biological age on the date of his father’s naturalization, his F2A visa petition (for a minor child of a lawful permanent resident) immediately converted to an F1 visa petition (for an adult child of a U.S. citizen), and not to an immediate relative petition. The agency came to this conclusion even though Rodriguez Tovar was classified by statute as under 21 years old for purposes of his F2A petition, pursuant to the age calculation formula set forth by the Child Status Protection Act. The BIA concluded that Rodriguez Tovar was not eligible for adjustment of status because no visa was immediately available and that Rodriguez Tovar would be subject to removal forthwith.

The panel observed that if Rodriguez Tovar’s father had remained an LPR instead of becoming a citizen, Rodriguez Tovar would have been eligible for a visa in the F2A category

** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

RODRIGUEZ TOVAR V. SESSIONS 3

in 2007, at which point his age under the statute would have been 20. Similarly, had he been afforded his statutory age when his father became a citizen, he would have been eligible for a visa immediately. The panel also noted that the government’s position would lead to the absurd result that Rodriguez Tovar would have to wait in line for a visa abroad and not become eligible for an F1 visa until more than twenty years after he would have been eligible for an F2A visa but for his father’s naturalization.

Concluding that Congress had clear intent on the question at issue, the panel did not defer to the BIA’s opinion in Matter of Zamora-Molina. Reading the statue as a whole, the panel concluded that Congress intended “age of the alien on the date of the parent’s naturalization,” 8 U.S.C. § 1151(f)(2), to refer to statutory age—that is, age calculated according to 8 U.S.C. § 1153(h)(1). Under that statute, Rodriguez Tovar’s age was only 19 on the date of his father’s naturalization. Accordingly, the panel concluded that Rodriguez Tovar’s visa application must be treated as one for an immediate relative of a U.S. citizen, for which visas are always immediately available.”

KEY QUOTE:

“[I]nterpretations of a statute which would produce absurd results are to be avoided if alternative interpretations consistent with the legislative purpose are available.” Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors, Inc., 458 U.S. 564, 575 (1982). Accordingly, we conclude “that Congress had a clear intent on the question at issue,” The Wilderness Soc’y, 353 F.3d at 1059: children of LPRs may take advantage of the age- calculation formula in 8 U.S.C. § 1153(h)(1) for purposes of converting to immediate relative status under § 1151(f)(2) when their parents naturalize.

22 RODRIGUEZ TOVAR V. SESSIONS

In other words, “age” in 8 U.S.C. § 1151(f)(2) refers unambiguously to age as calculated under 8 U.S.C. § 1153(h)(1). We reject the BIA’s contrary holding in Matter of Zamora-Molina, 25 I. & N. Dec. 606, as well as the district court’s parallel reasoning in Alcaraz v. Tillerson, No. 2:17- cv-457-ODW (C.D. Cal. July 26, 2017). The petition for review is granted and the case is remanded to the BIA with instructions to find that Rodriguez Tovar has an immediately available visa as the immediate relative of a U.S. citizen and to conduct further proceedings regarding the other requirements for adjustment of status.”

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

As I have pointed out before, the BIA generally chooses the interpretation of law that is most favorable to DHS and least favorable to the individual. Rather than the BIA acting to protect individual rights under the Due Process clause of our Constitution, today’s BIA basically engages in a “tag team match” with the DHS to defeat individual interests, even those as compelling as the rights of immigrant families and children!

Meanwhile, as these glaring problems with pro-DHS bias and poor quality work from a supposedly “expert tribunal” fester, Sessions actively pushes to have Immigration Judges at all levels “pedal faster” so that more mistakes are made and more individuals are deported in violation of our laws. Remember, very few of the individuals wronged by poor work by Immigration Judges or the BIA can afford to go to the Courts of Appeals for vindication! The problems that my colleague Hon. Jeffrey Chase and I, along with others, have been highlighting are literally just the “tip of the iceberg” of the monumental legal quality and fairness issues working against individual migrants in today’s out of control, failing, U.S. Immigration Courts.

Another thing to consider: take a look at the complexity of this decision, charts and all. How would an unrepresented individual, particularly a child, fairly be able to represent him or herself in Immigration Court and before the BIA. The obvious answer: They wouldn’t!

How will these glaring Due Process, fairness, and quality control problems be solved by Sessions’s anti-Due Process “round ’em up and move ’em out” policies? Answer: They won’t!

We need an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. Harm to our most vulnerable is harm to all of us!

PWS

03-01-18

Related posts:

The Facts

The Pinocchio Test

Four Pinocchios

Related posts:

Related posts:

Mar 4 14 Former IJs and BIA Members File Amicus Brief with AG

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won‘t stop human migration!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

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, AND ALSO MORE FACTUAL ACCURACY THAN ANY REPORT PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF “AGENT DEVON!”

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: