"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
INSIDE THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG:” LIES, LIES, EVERYTHING IS LIES – WHY DO WE PUT UP WITH A PRESIDENT & AN ADMINISTRATION WHO CONSISTENTLY LIE & MISREPRESENT? — They Must Think We’re A Nation of Dummies & Cowards – And, That This Kakistocracy Is Even In Office Shows They Might Well Be Right About That!
Abigail Tracy @ Vanity Fair reports on the latest batch of vile untruths flowing from the top of our vile White Nationalist regime as they try to defend their indefensible policy of official child abuse:
Facing mounting outrage in the media over its new “zero-tolerance” policy at the border, the Trump administration is deliberately misleading Americans about the thousands of migrant children it has forcibly separated from their families. The objective, according to people close to Donald Trump, is twofold: “deterrence,” as Chief of Staff John Kelly explained last month, and political extortion. “The thinking in the building is to force people to the table,” a White House official toldThe Washington Post last week. A second official confirmed that the president is hoping to use the detained children as leverage to force Democrats to cut a deal on immigration: “If they aren’t going to cooperate, we are going to look to utilize the laws as hard as we can.”
The images emerging from these detention centers, where traumatized young children are kept in chain-link pens, have drawn comparisons to some of the worst episodes in American history, including the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Instead of ending the controversial policy, however, President Trump has promoted a contradictory and confusing message about family separation. At times, he has blamed Democrats for what he has described as their “law” (it is not a law); at others, he has suggested that family separation is indeed his policy, but that Democrats have forced him to take action by not agreeing to new immigration-reform legislation. In a series of tweets Monday morning, he wrote that it is “the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder [sic] Security and Crime” and called on Congress to “change the laws.” He also indicated that the policy is driven by racial or cultural concerns, describing migrant children as Trojan horses for “the worst criminals on earth” and declaring that the U.S. should not repeat Europe’s “big mistake” of “allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture.”
Over the weekend and into Monday, a number of Trump officials made similar obfuscations about the policy. In every instance, however, the implication was clear: the problem could go away if Democrats will just play ball. “This is up to the Democrats. They could fix this right now. If you close those loopholes, we could do this humanely,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said during an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, before accusing Democrats of bolstering drug cartels and the “child-smuggling industry.” Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway similarly put the onus on Congress to address the crisis at the border during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. After asserting that “nobody likes this policy,” Conway said, “If the Democrats are serious, and if a lot of Republicans are serious, they’ll come together. They won’t just talk about just this week, just the Dreamers, or just the wall, or just catch and release. It’s all of the above,” she said. Even First Lady Melania Trump appeared to lay responsibility for her husband’s policy at Congress’s feet, issuing a rare policy statement saying that she “hates to see children separated from their families,” but “hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, meanwhile, seems unsure whether her agency’s policy exists. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” she tweeted on Sunday, blaming Democrats, journalists, and advocacy groups of “irresponsible and unproductive” reporting on the border. On Monday, however, Nielsen appeared to reverse herself, defending the separation of migrant families as necessary when prosecuting migrants who cross the border illegally. “There are some who would like us to look the other way,” the Homeland Security secretary said at a speech before the National Sheriffs’ Association in New Orleans. “Past administrations may have done so, but we will not. We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family. We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who addressed the group after Nielsen, said while he doesn’t enjoy separating children from their parents, the situation could be fixed if only Democrats would accede to building Trump’s border wall and passing new laws to crack down on illegal immigration.
The mixed messaging has become a problem for Republicans seeking to defend the Trump policy, but unsure whether they are supposed to be blaming Democrats, defending “law and order,” or pretending the policy doesn’t exist. “The policy is incredibly complicated and it is one we need to do a better job of communicating,” White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc ShorttoldThe Wall Street Journal. “We’ve not talked about the history of how we got to this point.”
The history of the policy, however, does not support the administration’s narrative. It is true that at the height of the 2014 migrant crisis, when there was a surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border, the Obama administration placed a large number of families in detention centers. But these families—many of them fleeing violence in Central America—were allowed to remain together while their claims were being processed. Under Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, however, all adults caught crossing the border are criminally prosecuted, with no exceptions. As a result, thousands of children have been taken away from their parents and treated as if they had tried to cross the border alone. In some cases, undocumented adults are being deported without their children, who remain detained in federal immigration facilities with no way to contact their parents. Immigration experts worry that some families may be permanently separated.
“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said last month when announcing the new policy. “If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.” White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a staunch advocate of the policy, told The New York Times last week, “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
Still, the cruel reality of family separation has become difficult for Trump’s allies to defend. On Sunday, Breitbart News criticized the Associated Press for describing the metal enclosures used to intern children as “cages,” suggesting that they were merely “chain-link partitions.” Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy argued the same point Monday morning.
This appears to be a losing battle for the White House. In a rare op-ed in The Washington Post, former First Lady Laura Bush derided separating families as “cruel” and “immoral.” Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of the late Billy Graham and a frequent defender of Trump, similarly slammed the policy as “disgraceful.” And while Republicans on Capitol Hill have remained largely silent on the issue, G.O.P. Senators Jeff Flake and Susan Collins sent a letter to Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azardemanding more information on whether the Trump administration was separating families seeking asylum at ports of entry, in addition to those crossing the border illegally.
Administration officials have seized on the distinction between the treatment of asylum claimants caught crossing the border versus those presenting themselves at sanctioned ports of entry to depict the former category as criminals. D.H.S. spokesperson Tyler Houlton recently said, “There is no policy to separate those seeking asylum at a port of entry.” But according to multiple reports, undocumented immigrants who appear at these ports are often turned away or detained. “Contrary to what D.H.S. has indicated as proper procedure, we are currently seeing cases where immigrant families seeking asylum are separated after lawfully presenting themselves at a U.S. port of entry,” Senator Flake said in a statement accompanying his letter. In some cases, it appears that immigrants’ claims are simply rejected—a result, perhaps, of the Trump administration’s institutional skepticism toward asylum claims. Sessions has previously criticized the asylum process, asserting in a speech last October that “dirty immigration lawyers” provide applicants with “the magic words needed to trigger the credible fear process.” On Monday, Nielsen declared, “Our system for asylum is broken.”
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No, asylum law isn’t broken — except that it has been applied far too narrowly, begrudgingly, and often in the absence of common sense, humanity, principles, and due process leading to unnecessary inconsistencies and backlogs in a system that has not been allowed to fully function in a way that fulfills its humanitarian purposes. Instead of designing the asylum system to efficiently screen out the minority of applicants who don’t really qualify as refugees, and grant some type of protection to the majority, the system is now engaged in manipulating and intentionally misconstruing the law and falsifying or distorting facts to disqualify or deny legitimate refugees fleeing for their lives. The idea being pushed by our White Nationalist regime is to create and support a false narrative that the majority of refugees arriving here and applying for asylum aren’t “really refugees.” But, they are.
What is broken is the group of corrupt, dishonest, ignorant, and incompetent political hacks who are administering and intentionally destroying our asylum and refugee systems today. Removing this regime and their enablers from office at the ballot box will a long difficult process. But, until it is accomplished, we will not regain our humanity as a nation and we certainly will not be able to put any fair, workable, legal system of immigration controls that serves our real national interests in place.
Our democratic institutions are dissolving right before our eyes. But, the responsibility for that is clearly and solely upon our Executive and Legislative Branches which are all controlled by the Trump GOP.Don’t let them get away with unloading their responsibility on the rest of us who are resisting tyranny and trying to do the right thing (something that never, ever, occurs to anyone associated with Trump).
