May 2019 – Page 3 – immigrationcourtside.com

SPECIAL: “ROUNDTABLE OF FORMER IMMIGRATION JUDGES” BLASTS EOIR DIRECTOR McHENRY FOR SPREADING LIES & MISREPRESENTATIONS, POLITICAL PANDERING, UNDERMINING JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE, AND GROSS DERELICTION OF DUTY TO PROTECT DUE PROCESS! — “The time for you to renew the agency mission is long overdue. Your job is to insulate the agency from political influences from the Department of Justice and beyond. Nothing short of judicial independence, neutrality, and fairness is acceptable for courts that make life and death determinations such as those which arise in immigration claims.” Today’s EOIR Is A Massive Fraud That Must Be Replaced With Real Courts Committed To Providing Justice To All!

https://www.naij-usa.org/news/setting-the-record-straight

Judge Jeffrey S. Chase, Leader of the Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges

James McHenry, Director
Executive Office for Immigration Review 5107 Leesburg Pike, 26th Floor
Falls Church, VA 22041
Re: EOIR “Myth vs. Fact” memo Mr. McHenry:
As former Immigration Judges and BIA Board Members, we write to state our offense at EOIR’s recently issued memo purporting to present imagined “myths” and wildly inaccurate and mis- leading information labeled as “fact.” The issuance of such a document can only be viewed as political pandering, at the expense of public faith in the immigration courts you oversee.
Even if anything contained in the memo is actually correct, it is simply not EOIR’s place to be issuing such a document. EOIR’s function is to protect the independence and integrity of the hundreds of judges who sit in its Immigration Courts, on the BIA, and within OCAHO.
American courts do not issue propaganda implying that those whose cases it rules on for the most part have invalid claims; that the participation of lawyers in its hearings provides no real value and has no impact on outcome; that the government’s own program to assist litigants in obtaining legal representation is a waste of taxpayer money; or that those unable to surmount the government-created obstacles to filing asylum applications are somehow guilty of deceit. Such statements indicate a bias which is absolutely unacceptable and, frankly, shocking.
We all had the honor of serving as judges within EOIR. Many of us remember when EOIR’s stated vision was “through teamwork and innovation, [to] be the world’s best administrative tri- bunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.” We remember a time when EOIR’s lead- ership took that mission seriously, and strove to achieve it.
The time for you to renew the agency mission is long overdue. Your job is to insulate the agency from political influences from the Department of Justice and beyond. Nothing short of judicial independence, neutrality, and fairness is acceptable for courts that make life and death determinations such as those which arise in immigration claims.
May 13, 2019

Hon. Steven Abrams, Immigration Judge, New York, Varick St., and Queens Wackenhut Detention Center, 1997-2013
Hon. Sarah M. Burr, Assistant Chief Immigration Judge and Immigration Judge, New York, 1994-2012
Hon. Esmerelda Cabrera, Immigration Judge, New York, Newark, and Elizabeth, NJ, 1994-2005 Hon. Teofilo Chapa, Immigration Judge, Miami, 1995-2018
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase, Immigration Judge, New York, 1995-2007
Hon. George T. Chew, Immigration Judge, New York, 1995-2017
Hon. Bruce J. Einhorn, Immigration Judge, Los Angeles, 1990-2007 Hon. Cecelia M. Espenoza, Board Member, BIA, 2000-2003
Hon. Noel Ferris, Immigration Judge, New York, 1994-2013
Hon. John F. Gossart, Jr., Immigration Judge, Baltimore, 1982-2013 Hon. Miriam Hayward, Immigration Judge, San Francisco, 1997-2018 Hon. Rebecca Jamil, Immigration Judge, San Francisco, 2016-2018 Hon. William P. Joyce, Immigration Judge, Boston, 1996-2002
Hon. Carol King, Immigration Judge, San Francisco, 1995-2017
Hon. Elizabeth A. Lamb, Immigration Judge, New York, 1995-2018
Hon. Donn L. Livingston, Immigration Judge, New York and Denver, 1995-2018 Hon. Margaret McManus, Immigration Judge, New York, 1991 – 2018
Hon. Charles Pazar, Immigration Judge, Memphis, 1998-2017
Hon. Laura Ramirez, Immigration Judge, 1997-2018
Hon. John W. Richardson, Immigration Judge, Phoenix, 1990-2018
Hon. Lory D. Rosenberg, Board Member, BIA, 1995 – 2002.
Hon. Susan G. Roy, Immigration Judge, Newark, 2008-2010.

Paul W. Schmidt, Chairman and Board Member, BIA, 1995 – 2003; Immigration Judge, Arlington, 2003-2016.
Hon. Denise Slavin, Immigration Judge, Miami, Krome, and Baltimore, 1995-2019 Hon. Ilyce Shugall, Immigration Judge, San Francisco, 2017-2019
Hon. Andrea Hawkins Sloan, Immigration Judge, Portland, 2010 – 2017
Hon. Polly A. Webber, Immigration Judge, San Francisco, 1995-2017

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Right on! EOIR, which has become an spreader of lies and false marratives, and which has abandoned its due process focused mission, needs to be eliminated. More will be coming on the disgusting “Lie Sheet” put out by EOIR last week. EOIR “Management,” which has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt its inability to competently administer the Immigration Court system, is also a morass of intellectual dishonesty and political toadyism. What a waste of taxpayer money and public trust!

PWS

05-12-19

THESE ARE THE DECENT FOLKS THAT TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST NATION WANT YOU TO FEAR — “I constantly lived in fear and all I could do was pray to God to keep my kids safe. I think that that photo of me and my kids being gassed helped people see that we are humans too and we deserve to be treated with basic dignity. All of us are the same in the eyes of God.”

https://apple.news/AnODNXB12S1u3477b18BmjQ

Gina Martinez reports for Time:

She Was Tear-Gassed at the Border. But for This Migrant Mother, the Hardest Part Is the Children She Left Behind

Gina Martinez

In November 2018, the image of Maria Lidia Meza Castro desperately holding on to her twin daughters at the U.S.-Mexico border as a tear gas canister unleashed smoke behind them sparked national anger.

“Honestly, in that moment, I just thought, ‘I’m going to die with my kids right here and now,’” Castro tells TIME.

Six months later, Castro is living in a three-bedroom house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with the five children she brought with her on the 2,000-mile journey from Honduras. And as millions of Americans prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday, she says she would do it all again. But, her thoughts are constantly on the four children she left behind.

“Trust me, in Honduras you really suffer. Thank God at the very least I’m not suffering, but my kids over there are, and that’s tough,” she says.

Castro says she left Honduras in October 2018 and reached Tijuana a month later. It was there that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers fired tear gas canisters at migrants rushing toward the U.S. border. Following the incident, Castro spent weeks in Tijuana camps until she and a group of fellow migrants were escorted to the Otay Mesa port of entry with the assistance of the nonprofit group Families Belong Together and two Democratic members of Congress. They also helped her apply for asylum. After making it through the border, she and her children were detained for five days before being released to live in the Washington area, close to where Castro has family.

THE BRIEF

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Photographer Federica Valabrega first met Castro and the five children she brought with her last November in Mexicali, Mexico, as they were making their way to Tijuana, days before the photograph of her being tear-gassed made headlines.

Valabrega lost contact with Castro after she entered the U.S. When she finally tracked her down, Valabrega spent three weeks with the Castro family, living with them and documenting their daily lives as they adjust to the United States.

“Ultimately, I felt compelled to follow up with Maria because I wanted to know how she was doing and because her determination to do anything in her power to raise her children in a better place as a single mother inspired me,” Valabrega says.

Castro and five of her kids share their new home with a fellow Honduran migrant mother and her two children. For now, the future is uncertain –– Castro’s attorney says there is a huge backlog and no set court date, leaving Castro and her children in limbo.

She is forced to wear an ankle bracelet, which some asylum seekers are issued to ensure they do not flee before their court date, and is not legally allowed to work. She spends her days tending to the children she was able to bring and worrying about the ones back in Honduras.

Castro crossed the border with her 4-year-old son James, 5-year-old twin girls Cheyli and Sayra, 13-year-old daughter Jeimy and 15-year-old son Victor. But she longs to be reunited with her 20-year-old son, Jayro, who was already in the U.S. but was deported in early February; her 18-year-old twins boys, Fernando and Yoni; and her 16-year-old son Jesus, who is paraplegic and cannot walk or travel. She fears they will fall prey to the violence she fought so hard to escape.

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“It’s hard because things are looking so bad in Honduras,” she says. “Over there they are killing people, they’re forcing young men to sell drugs and commit other crimes. My son feels terrible because he’s so far from me but also because I’m not able to help him financially because I still haven’t been able to get a job.”

Castro’s inability to have a job forces her to rely on a local church for food and other essentials while she awaits a court date that is likely still months away.

“I wish I could work. I want to fight for them and support them financially, but it’s not possible yet,” she says.

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Now, as Castro and her youngest children settle into life in the United States, she says her focus is solely on obtaining asylum so she can begin working and providing for all nine of her kids.

“I’m just happy for the opportunity to be here. Now that I’m here, I at least have some hope to give my kids a good life,” she says. “I like it here because there is not as much danger; here you can be in peace. It’s just so different from life in Honduras, where you can’t even be outside after a certain time without putting your life in danger.”

She says her children are getting more accustomed to life in the Washington suburbs with each passing day. They are beginning to learn English and enjoy playing in the park.

As Castro looks back on the difficult journey from Honduras, she says she would do it all over again if it meant ending up where she is now.

“It was very much worth the suffering we had to go through to end up here,” she says. “I constantly lived in fear and all I could do was pray to God to keep my kids safe. I think that that photo of me and my kids being gassed helped people see that we are humans too and we deserve to be treated with basic dignity. All of us are the same in the eyes of God.”

She adds: “My message to mothers everywhere, especially moms who are going through what I am, is just that God gave us a chance to change our lives and with patience and hope we can fight for our families and give them a better life.”

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Go to the complete article from Time at the link for some great photography from Federica Valabrega.

Whether or not Maria Lidia Meza Castro and her family qualify to stay in the U.S., they and others like them deserve to be treated humanely, respectfully, and to have their claims fully and fairly considered. That’s not happening now, particularly at EOIR which has intentionally tried to skew the law against applicants from Central America and fails over and over to either apply the asylum law correctly or to correctly and honestly assess the conditions in the Northern Triangle. Not to mention that EOIR management has turned the Immigration Courts into an intentionally hostile environment for the mostly pro bono attorneys trying to help asylum applicants. And, Trump would like to truncate the process even further. Totally disgraceful!

Even if Castro doesn’t ultimately qualify for relief under the immigration laws, she and her family would be in danger in Honduras and could make contributions to the United States. Therefore, a smart, humane, and brave country would carefully consider granting broader protections than asylum law might allow. Instead, the Trump Administration tries to contort and limit what should be generous, life-saving relief available under our asylum laws.

PWS

05-12-19

COLBERT I. KING @ WASHPOST: The Ugly Endurance Of Racism In America: “I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-america-would-age-out-of-racism-what-was-i-thinking/2019/05/10/32e89c8a-7274-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html

King writes:

There was a time when I believed, almost as an article of faith, that with the passage of time, America would age out of racism. What in the world was I thinking?

But that is what I told myself in the fall of 1954 — five months after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision — when I learned that students attending then-all-white Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Technical high schools, and several white junior high schools in the District, had staged walkouts to protest the assignment of black kids to their schools. I was enrolled at then-all-black Dunbar High School at the time.

I really believed that racial integration was a step toward the goal of full equality and that, as the months wore on, those who walked out would shed their fear and anger. Instead, they and their families devoted the time remaining before the black students arrived to finding a means to flee the city.

Still I dreamed.

When, in 1956, students and adults shouted racial epithets and threw rotten eggs and rocks at a young black woman named Autherine Lucy who tried to enter the University of Alabama to obtain a degree in library science, I consoled myself with the thought that the hurlers of eggs and epithets would age out of the picture. Even when the University of Alabama expelled Lucy, under the guise of ensuring her personal safety, I thought those elders would one day be off the scene.

The same thought was in my head in the fall of 1957, when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called the National Guard to surround Central High School in Little Rock to prevent nine African American students from attending the all-white school, declaring “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter.

One day, oh one fine day, I believed, it’s gonna be over because one day, folks such as Orval Faubus are gonna be dead and gone.

But they were still around years later when, in the summer of 1964, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were in Mississippi helping to register voters. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

Through it all, I clung firmly to the belief that because those white men and women hellbent on making life miserable for people unlike themselves were getting up in age, they would soon die out and be replaced by a younger, more broad-minded, racially tolerant generation of white Americans. Unlike many of their elders, these young people would be unencumbered by ingrained racist ideas, I said to myself.

What a fool was I. Bigotry doesn’t age out.

Evidence of that smacks us in the face.

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21 .

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19 .

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46 .

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo. They were driven by the same racial animus that caused students to walk out of Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Tech high schools 65 years ago.

Bigotry is a disease of the mind — a poisonous infection unbounded by age, time or space. It is transmissible, capable of being passed down from elders to child, from community to community, from racial and religious kin to racial and religious kin.

The newly appointed archbishop of Washington, Wilton Daniel Gregory, has called racism “a grave moral disease whose recurrence, aggressiveness and persistence should frighten every one of us.”

What’s striking about today’s disease, Gregory wrote in a December 2016 article carried by the Catholic News Service, is that it “may seem to have been brought under control”; that it was on the wane.

Presciently, Gregory wrote, “We have returned to a moment in our nation’s history when racist feelings and sentiments have been condoned as acceptable to express publicly and publish openly.”

The response he called for would reflect the sentiment of my youth: to “disavow any vestige of racism and hatred of other people because of race, religion, legal status or gender.”

Eradicating and inoculating us from this disease is our hope and never-ending challenge — for each of us. For certain, hate won’t outgrow itself.

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

I have noticed before the similarity between the faces and expressions of the overwhelmingly white, mindlessly cheering crowds, behind Trump at his rallies as he rattles off his “normal litany” of lies, insults, and racist provocations and the absurd, yet ugly and dangerous, faces of white racists in the 1950’s and 1960’s South —- captured in black and white photos as they bullied and taunted African Americans at lunch counters or African American kids attempting to attend school. Really, I also wanted to believe that those days were gone, and the white folks pictured were either gone or would be embarrassed and humiliated by the cowardice, ignorance, and inhumanity of their past actions.

King is right: “hate won’t outgrow itself.” And Trump and his followers are are nurturing, growing, and harvesting that hate on a daily basis. The majority of us who don’t believe in Trump’s vile messages and unacceptable methods must take our country back before hate and bigotry consume it!

PWS

056-11-19

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

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

Roger Cohen writes in the NY Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No longer. Trump’s America has gone AWOL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image

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

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

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

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

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

Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

05-11-19

GREAT NEWS FOR DUE PROCESS! — With A Boost From Roundtable Of Former Immigration Judges Member Judge John Gossart, CASA, & CAIR Coalition, Fairfax Co. Virginia Enacts Universal Representation!

Judge (Ret.) John F. Gossart, Jr.

Claudia Cubas, Litigation Director, CAIR Coalition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, May 10, 2019
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Diana Castaneda, dcastaneda@wearecasa.org, 240-515-5561
Fairfax County Now First Virginia Jurisdiction to Fund Legal Representation
for Immigrants in Need
Fairfax, VA – CASA and CAIR Coalition are pleased to announce that the Fairfax County Board of
Supervisors voted to fund a $200k “Universal Representation” pilot program, which will provide legal
representation to immigrants living in Fairfax County who are facing deportation proceedings and in need
of counsel—including DACA recipients and TPS holders.
“With the passage of Universal Representation, CASA and our community are proud that Fairfax County
has taken a step forward in terms of equity by ensuring that immigrants are treated with dignity by
providing legal representation. We will continue advancing immigrant rights as one community,” said
Luis Aguilar CASA Virginia Director.
“As our communities continue to weather the capricious changes in immigration law and the threat of deportation hangs over so many of our neighbors, Fairfax County has taken a simple yet effective stance: provide Fairfax families with counsel when detained and facing deportation,” said Kelly White CAIR Program Director – Detained Adult Program.
The decision of Fairfax County is invaluable for the more than 175 Fairfax families facing immigration proceedings each year.
immigrant and mixed-status families from the threat of deportation. ###

Universal Representation protects due process by allowing immigrants to access their rights under U.S.
law.
“My husband and I work full-time to be able to give our family a place to live. We have two children
with DACA. If one of us is detained by ICE I know for sure we won’t have the resources to afford a
lawyer. This program will allow us to have legal representation,” said Carmen Rios Fairfax Co. Resident.
CASA especially appreciates and recognizes Supervisors Jeff McKay and John Foust’s exceptional
leadership in helping to protect immigrant and mixed-status families.

With almost 100,000 members across the states of Maryland, Virginia, and South Central Pennsylvania, CASA is the largest member-based Latino and immigrant organization in the mid-Atlantic region. CASA organizes with and litigates on behalf of low-wage immigrants. Visit us at www.wearecasa.org and follow us on Twitter at @CASAforall

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

Never has representation been more critical. With EOIR joining the Trump Administration’s all out assault on migrants and Due Process, no individual should face these biased and politicized “courts” without legal representation committed to fight for justice to the “real” courts and to expose and document the parody of justice in today’s Immigration “Courts” under the unethical political leadership of EOIR.

Many thanks to Roundtable Member Judge John Gossart for passing this along.

Join the New Due Process Army. Fight the EOIR travesty!

PWS

05-12-19

TAL @ SF CHRON: The New American Gulag Is Overflowing With Children

Immigrant children in US custody soaring back toward record levels

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigrant-children-in-US-custody-soaring-back-13834123.php

WASHINGTON — The number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody is reaching breaking-point levels again, months after the Trump administration had reduced the total in shelters in response to anger over policies that kept children there.

The recent increase is largely due to a surge in the number of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border rather than an administration policy. Overall crossings this year have skyrocketed to decade-high levels.

As of Thursday, the number of undocumented immigrant children in U.S. custody had increased to more than 13,000, according to figures obtained by The Chronicle. The number is a near-record high, and puts the shelter network that the Department of Health and Human Services runs to keep such children in custody near maximum capacity.

Trump administration officials have asked Congress for nearly $3 billion more to increase shelter capacity. Without it, they say, Health and Human Services could run out of money for the system by June.

While the shelter network has come under increased attention in the aftermath of President Trump’s separation of families at the border last summer in order to prosecute the parents, the vast majority of children in the system come to the U.S. by themselves.

The 13,000 figure has been exceeded only once before. Last fall, the total surpassed 14,000 children in custody for the first time in history, topping out close to 15,000.

That was due mainly to an administration policy under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement rigorously screened adults who were applying to take the children out of custody. The change slowed the process and often deterred such sponsors, usually family members, from coming forward. ICE also arrested some for being undocumented immigrants.

The practice so infuriated members of Congress that in a government funding bill in February, they barred ICE from using the information it collected as part of the screenings to arrest immigrants.

The Trump administration instituted a policy in December to try to release undocumented children from its custody more quickly, rescinding its requirement to fingerprint every adult in the home where the child would be living. Only the adult sponsoring the child is fingerprinted now.

By January, that had brought the number of children in custody below 11,000, according to Health and Human Services, with thousands of beds available.

More here : https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Immigrant-children-in-US-custody-soaring-back-13834123.php

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

Always great to get Tal’s timely and highly readable reporting!

What’s the solution? Well, it’s not the Trump Administration’s “preferred solution” of allowing the Border Patrol to mindlessly rocket vulnerable kids back to the Northern Triangle to be killed, tortured, exploited, abused, or forced to join gangs. It’s actually part of a worldwide trend that has seen more and more of the total refugee population comprised of children. So, this phenomenon shouldn’t have come as a surprise to a competent Administration focused on dealing with refugee situations humanely under the laws.

A rational solution would be to work closely and cooperatively with NGOs with expertise in child refugees (like, for example, Kids In Need Of Defense (“KIND”) or the Safe Passage Project), pro bono lawyers, and communities to figure out what is in the best interests of these children.

Then, pursue the right options: Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (”SIJS”) for some; expedited grants of asylum through the Asylum Office under the Wilberforce Act for others; TPS for others, recognizing the reality that there is an “ongoing state of armed conflict” in the Northern Triangle; an exercise of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) for others; and humane and organized repatriation for others, where that is actually in the child’s best interests.

There are plenty of tools available under existing laws to deal with this issue. We just have an Administration that refuses to use them and prefers to create a “crisis” to justify “throwing children under the bus.” Mistreating children is cowardly and bodes ill for the future of any country that permits it to happen. What goes around comes around!

PWS

05-10-19

COURTSIDE HISTORY: BEYOND TRUMP’S MYTHICAL “WHITE NATIONALIST NATION” LET’S SEE WHO BESIDES ENSLAVED AFRICAN AMERICAN FORCED MIGRANTS DID THE WORK THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT — The Essential Role Of Despised Chinese Immigrants! — “Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. . . .Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=258d1f6b-0c42-4c29-925d-a144ec4f47b1

Professor Gordon Chang of Stanford University writes in the LA Times:

Immigrants got the job done

History finally has its eyes on Chinese laborers who built transcontinental railroad’s western leg

By Gordon H. Chang

The nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed 150 years ago today at Promontory Summit in Utah, connected the vast United States and brought America into the modern age. Chinese immigrants contributed mightily to this feat, but the historical accounts that first transcontinental followed often marginalized their role.

Between 1863 and 1869, as many as 20,000 Chinese workers helped build the treacherous western portion of the railroad, a winding ribbon of track known as the Central Pacific that began in Sacramento.

At first, the Central Pacific Railroad’s directors wanted a whites-only workforce. Leland Stanford, the railroad’s president, had advocated for keeping Asians out of the state in his 1862 inaugural address as governor of California. When not enough white men signed up, the railroad began hiring Chinese men for the backbreaking labor. No women worked on the line.

Company leaders were skeptical of the new recruits’ ability to do the work, but the Chinese laborers proved themselves more than capable — and the railroad barons came to consider them superior to the other workers.

My colleagues and I initiated an international research project — based, appropriately, at Stanford University — to investigate the enormous contribution Chinese workers made to the transcontinental project. It proved to be a formidable task, not least because no written record produced by what were called “railroad Chinese” is known to exist. Without letters, diaries and other primary sources that are historians’ stock in trade, we amassed a sizable collection of evidence that included archaeological findings, ship manifests, payroll records, photographs and observers’ accounts.

The material allowed us to recover a sense of the lived experiences of the thousands of Chinese migrants Leland Stanford came to greatly admire. He told President Andrew Johnson that the Chinese were indispensable to building the railroad: They were “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.” In a stockholder report, Stanford described construction as a “herculean task” and said it had been accomplished thanks to the Chinese, who made up 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad’s labor force.

These workers showed their mettle, and sealed their legacy, on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Many observers at the time had assumed that Stanford and the railroad were daft for thinking they could link California with the East because an immense mountain range separated the state from Nevada and beyond. The Sierra Nevada is a rugged, formidable range, its inhospitableness encapsulated by the gruesome tragedy of the Donner party in 1847 and 1848. Trapped by winter storms in the mountains, they resorted to cannibalism.

To get to the High Sierra, Chinese workers cut through dense forests, filled deep ravines, constructed long trestles and built enormous retaining walls — some of which remain intact today. All work was done by hand using carts, shovels and picks but no machinery.

The greatest challenge was to push the line through the Sierra summit. Solid granite peaks soared to 14,000 feet in elevation. The railroad bed snaked through passes at more than 7,000 feet. The men who came from humid south China labored through two of the worst winters on record, surviving in caverns dug beneath the snow.

They blasted out 15 tunnels, the longest nearly 1,700 feet. To speed up the carving of the tunnels, the Chinese laborers worked from several directions. After opening portals along the rock face on either side of the mountain, they dug an 80-foot shaft down to the estimated midway point. From there, they carved out toward the portals, doubling the rate of progress by tunneling from both sides. It still took two years to accomplish the task.

The Chinese workers were paid 30% to 50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work. In June 1867, they protested. Three-thousand workers along the railroad route went on strike, demanding wage parity, better working conditions and shorter hours. At the time it was the largest worker action in American history. The railroad refused to negotiate but eventually raised the Chinese workers’ pay, though not to parity.

After the Sierra, the Chinese workers faced the blistering heat of the Nevada and Utah deserts, yet they drove ahead at an astonishing rate.

As they approached the meeting point with the Union Pacific, thousands of them laid down a phenomenal 10 miles of track in less than 24 hours, a record that has never been equaled. A Civil War officer who witnessed the drama declared that the Chinese were “just like an army marching over the ground and leaving the track behind.”

Progress came at great cost: Many Chinese laborers died along the Central Pacific route. The company kept no records of deaths. But soon after the line was completed, Chinese civic organizations retrieved an estimated 1,200 bodies along the route and sent them home to China for burial.

The transcontinental railroad’s completion allowed travelers to journey across the country in a week — a trip that had previously taken more than a month. Politicians pointed to the achievement as they declared the United States the leading nation of the world.

The transcontinental railroad has been viewed in a similarly nationalistic way ever since. Chinese workers were often left out of the official story because their alienage and suffering did not fit well with celebration. And attitudes toward them soon soured, with anti-Chinese riots sweeping the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here.

Federal immigration law prohibited Chinese citizens from becoming Americans until 1943.

As a faculty member of the university that bears his name, I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor. But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers. Without them, Leland Stanford would probably be at best a footnote in history — and the West and the United States would not exist as we know it today.

Gordon H. Chang is a professor of history at Stanford University.

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

Sometimes, it takes too long. Often, the “real heroes” die unrecognized (like the more than 1,200 Chinese workers mentioned in this article or the many anonymous enslaved African-Americans whose uncompensated labor and ingenuity “propped up” at least five of our first seven Presdients) long before justice comes. And, frequently, the flawed folks who were wrongly acclaimed “popular heroes” of their day escape judgement within their lifetimes.

But, history has a way of eventually “getting it right.” Trump and his misguided followers eventually will be in for a reckoning.

It won’t be pretty. Once the subpoenas can’t be ignored, the testimony perjured, the innumerable lies, intentional misrepresentations, and squalid distortions presented as “business as normal,” and the full historical record becomes available for study and analysis, free from the political hoopla of the present, it will be much, much worse than we can possibly imagine. The true unpalatable nature of Trump and his enablers will be revealed for some future generations. And, those who stood against them and their racism, greed, dishonesty, and cruelty will be vindicated.

PWS

05-10-19

TRUMP “JOKES” ABOUT SHOOTING MIGRANTS TO THE DELIGHT OF HIS SUPPORTERS!

https://apple.news/ATFIvqS4cSr6ZYm7nQkHnpg

Jack Holmes writes @ Esquire:

Donald Trump Cracked a ‘Joke’ After His Supporter Yelled About Shooting Immigrants at the Border. This Isn’t a Joke.

Not when armed militias are roaming the border and one member mused about doing the same thing. Not when the president has relentlessly dehumanized migrants and advocated for political violence from the podium.

Why are they laughing and clapping? Because they know it’s not a joke.

The President of the United States committed multiple felonies and hired a pet toad as attorney general to try to shove it under the rug. He is now asserting that Congress is not a co-equal branch of government with oversight powers as laid out in the Constitution, and so has no authority to subpoena documents or witnesses he doesn’t like. He and his apparatchiks have decided they can just flout the law-that they are above it. He has relentlessly attacked the free press as an enemy of the state, attempting to undermine any source of information independent from his government. He has called for his political opponents to be investigated and imprisoned. He has repeatedly embraced political violence from the rally podium. He has “joked” about extending his term and, Wednesday night, about serving more than the two he’s limited to by the Constitution.

Sadly, that last part wasn’t the most frightening “joke” of the evening at the Trump rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, last night.

When Trump talked about stopping asylum-seekers and other undocumented immigrants, a person in the crowd yelled, “Shoot them!” and everybody laughed and cheered and clapped. In response, the president laughed that this was all some charming regional quirk of the Florida Panhandle, where you can “get away with” this kind of joke.

Another ABC News reporter, Will Steakin, also backed this account.

This is not a joke. Over and over again, Trump has made comments his aides later dismissed as “jokes,” or gone out of his way to say he would never do something, all with the intent of putting these ideas out there. Perhaps they might take on a life of their own. He once said he “hates these people”-referring to reporters-but “would never kill them.” Why does that need to be said, unless you want to get people thinking about it? At a rally in February, a supporter worked into a frenzy physically attacked a BBC reporter while Trump spoke.

The intent last night was clear: float the idea by suggesting we could never allow border agents to use weapons against migrants, even though other countries do. And then, when a guy in the crowd jumps to the next step, let it slide into the public imagination under the guise of a “joke.” It’s a trial balloon. Will there be pushback? Where will the message land, and how?

After all, there are already people roaming the border who are musing about murdering immigrants. Various “militias” have taken it upon themselves to patrol the border as a vigilante-or paramilitary-force. As reporter Ken Klippenstein found just this week thanks to a police report obtained through FOIA, some of them are quite interested in what the president’s joking about.

They’re already “detaining” large groups of migrants at gunpoint based on no legal authority. That’s also known as “kidnapping.” (The leader of the group, United Constitutional Patriots, was arrested. Now the group want to change its name to escape accountability.) At least one member, it appears, is already musing about lining people they capture up against a wall and shooting them. Perhaps they are looking for some kind of…permission. Or signal. From someone in a position of authority. Who communicates it’s not a big deal-normal, even. We’re all laughing, after all.

Elsewhere in the speech, Trump once again echoed conspiracy theories about an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.

This is the theory that drove the Tree of Life synagogue shooter-who believed Jews were helping to organize the “invasion” of nonwhite people through The Caravan-to kill 11 Jewish worshippers. (After the shooting, Trump said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if someone was funding The Caravan when asked by a reporter, echoing anti-Semitic tropes. In response to a reporter’s further question, he even alluded to George Soros, a Jewish billionaire and frequent target for right-wing conspiracies. He also doubled down on his “invasion” language.) In reality, most people coming to the southern border are seeking asylum based on claims they are fleeing domestic or gang violence in the chaotic Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In another time, we might call them refugees. They travel in “caravans” up through Mexico because the journey is dangerous and there’s safety in numbers.

No matter: they are convenient villains in the president’s dark and venal vision of the American Experiment, where this is a country for and by white people and everybody else ought to be thankful for whatever they get. The demonization of The Other is a tale as old as America, but Donald Trump has returned the nation to dangerous places in 2019, questioning not just the Americanness, but the very humanity, of Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. He does so by attacking these groups’ violent outliers-the drug dealers and coyotes and ISIS-but these are the only examples of these groups he has ever discussed. There has never been one word about the Guatemalan mother who flees here with her child and works for decades cleaning somebody’s house. It’s only ever the murderers and rapists, and if they’re “invading” your country, any response is justified.

His followers get the message. Note that the woman in the clip above-who confirmed someone else in the crowd yelled “shoot ’em”-did not say the supporter and the president were talking about “illegal immigrants.” She said “immigrants.” Because that’s who Trump is always talking about. It’s not about the law. Donald Trump has no regard for the law. It’s about Us and Them. There is no reason to believe this will get anything other than worse while this grotesque and incurable man continues to wield more power than any other human being on Earth. He is a danger to the most marginalized in our society now, but that’s how it always begins. If he can get away with this, who will be next?

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

Read the complete article with some of the “twitter feeds embedded” at the above link.

What kind of country are we becoming?

What kind of folks cheer and encourage “jokes” about shooting the most vulnerable among us? Trump has certainly brought out all the worst in America.

There are no “jokes” in Trump’s world — he’s a sick and cruel coward without values, human empathy, or any sense of humor. As American historian Professor Heather Cox Richardson pointed out recently on Facebook “Trump has a pattern of floating ideas as ‘jokes’ to normalize them.”

At one point in our recent past, a politician who “joked” about shooting unarmed people would have been censured by both parties and forced to resign. Trump has “normalized” the vile and unspeakable and brought out the absolute worst in his supporters and the hollow toadies with whom he surrounds himself. It’s destroying America. The rest of us who still believe in humanity and the values to which our country historically has aspired, without fully achieving, need to stand up to this redux of Germany in 1939 and Birmingham in 1963.

Join the New Due Process Army. Fight to uphold our Constitution against the dangerous onslaught of Trump and his enablers!

PWS

05-10-19

POLITICO: Are Trump’s Immigration Policies Causing More Migrants To “Voluntarily Depart?”

https://apple.news/ANCLqhkMJT5OlWhn2TePBdg

Christie Thompson and Andrew R. Calderon of The Marshall Project report in Politico:

Christie Thompson is a staff writer and Andrew R. Calderon is a data reporter for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the U.S. criminal justice system.

Alejandra Garcia Zamarrón, a mother of three American citizens, had lived in the United States for nearly 20 years when a police officer pulled over the unregistered vehicle she was riding in.

Georgia was her home, the place where she’d lived for years and raised her family. But when she found herself locked in the Irwin County Detention Center, she had few options to stay. She’d been brought to the U.S. as a child, but her protected status as a childhood arrival had expired. And she had given a fake name and date of birth to the police officer who stopped her, a misdemeanor that put her at greater risk of deportation.

Zamarrón, 32, initially vowed to fight her removal from the U.S. as long as she could. But as the months in detention dragged on, she changed her mind and asked for “voluntary departure,” which would allow her to leave the U.S. without a deportation on her record. “My family decided the best bet was for me to leave and fight from the outside,” Zamarrón said in a phone call from the detention center, before she returned to Mexico in November.

The number of immigrants who have applied for voluntary departure has soared since the election of Donald Trump, according to new Justice Department data obtained by The Marshall Project. In fiscal year 2018, the number of applications doubled from the previous fiscal year—rising much faster than the 17 percent increase in overall immigration cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The numbers show yet another way the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is having an effect: More people are considering leaving the U.S., rather than being stuck in detention or taking on a lengthy legal battle with little hope of success.

Last year, voluntary departure applications reached a seven-year high of 29,818. In the Atlanta court, which hears cases of Irwin detainees like Zamarrón, the applications multiplied nearly seven times from 2016 to 2018.

The increase in applications for voluntary departure could be seen as a win for the Trump administration, which has made it a goal to get undocumented immigrants out of the country and reduce the backlog of immigration cases. Indeed, the Justice Department has published the growing number of voluntary departures alongside deportations as a sign of a “return to the rule of law” and that Trump’s approach is working. It’s also a sign of how broad immigration enforcement has become, sweeping up the criminals Trump talks about alongside parents like Zamarrón who have little to no criminal history—voluntary departure is only open to immigrants without a serious record. When Mitt Romney once shared his plan to have people “self-deport,” he meant it as an alternative to ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s power. But the recent spike in voluntary departure has come with an increase in both arrests and detention.

An application for voluntary departure has to be approved by an immigration judge. The number of requests granted increased 50 percent in fiscal year 2017, according to data from the Justice Department. Because not every case is resolved during the year it is filed, and judges can grant voluntary departure without a formal application, the annual total of voluntary departures has exceeded the number of applications.

Under immigration law, voluntary departure is considered a kind of privilege. If you are deported, you have to wait years to apply for a visa to reenter the United States, but those who leave voluntarily don’t have the same wait. And you don’t face serious prison time if you are caught without legal status in the U.S.

But voluntary departure is a last resort for many undocumented immigrants because it means leaving their longtime homes and, often, their families without any clear prospect for returning. And those who take the option usually have to pay their own way home. Those flights can cost thousands of dollars because immigration officials require a special kind of ticket that can be changed at any time.

Several factors are probably responsible for the surge in the number of applications for voluntary departure, experts say. ICE has increasingly gone after immigrants who have no criminal backgrounds—those who are more likely to qualify for voluntary departure. Because of the growing backlog of immigration cases, judges and Department of Homeland Security attorneys may feel pressured to resolve cases quickly and offer voluntary departure instead of dragging out multiple appeals.

“I would definitely think that some of it might be related to judges trying to keep up with their production quotas,” said former immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review—the Justice Department office in charge of immigration courts—declined to comment on the increase in applications. “Using metrics to evaluate performance is neither novel nor unique to EOIR,” spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly wrote in an email. “The purpose of implementing these metrics is to encourage efficient and effective case management while preserving immigration judge discretion and due process.”

ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy wrote in an email many apply for voluntary departure so they don’t have to wait to apply to reenter the country. “In addition, voluntary departure generally provides far more time to make necessary arrangements than for those who are ordered removed,” he wrote.

Attorney Marty Rosenbluth, who represents clients in the immigration court at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, said more of his clients from Mexico are considering voluntary departure because of the danger involved in deportation. At Stewart, one of the country’s most remote detention centers, the number of applications last year was 19 times what it had been in 2016.

“It’s largely a safety thing,” Rosenbluth said. In deportations, “ICE just dumps you at the border, and you’re on your own.”

If they’re granted voluntary departure, people are able to fly into Mexico City or closer to home.

Immigrants may also be increasingly aware of voluntary departure as an option and of the slim chances of winning a case from detention. “Detainees talk to each other,” said Trina Realmuto, a directing attorney for the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. “The one guy fighting his case is going to say, ‘I’ve been here a year and nobody wins.’ There are legal factors, and there’s human factors.”

Zamarrón’s request for voluntary departure came as a surprise to her legal team. “She had been saying for months and months, ‘I’m going to fight this,’” said attorney Laura Rivera of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who worked on Zamarrón’s case. “It speaks to the desperation of people in detention that they’d be trying to sign up in droves for this thing that actually causes them to be removed. They’ve got to be thinking that there’s no way out.”

Before she returned to Mexico, Zamarrón said she was driven by the need to have more contact with her family than she was able to have in detention.

“When I come out, I’ll be able to have more communication with them, FaceTime with them,” she said. “I didn’t want to wait. I’m ready to see my baby’s face.”

From Mexico, she recently video-called into her 13-year-old daughter’s baptism. She hopes to apply for a U-Visa as a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault and, at the very least, have her 17-year old son petition to bring her to the United States after he turns 21.

Zamarrón said many of the women with whom she was detained were also considering voluntary departure.

“They’re tired of living in here, of dealing with ICE, dealing with guards, dealing with the injustice. … They give up. They’d rather be deported than fight for their case,” she said. “We’re not criminals. We just don’t have options.”

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“Voluntary departure” (“VD”) is a mixed bag. It undoubtedly can be an effective way for Immigration Judges to manage crowded dockets by eliminating those cases that do not require “full merits” hearings. And, after Sessions got done stripping judges of their most effective docket management tools and reducing them to “enforcement clerks,” it’s one of the few such tools left to the beleaguered and diminished “judges.”

On the other hand, in conjunction with coercive detention and “production quotas,” there is a temptation for judges and DHS Counsel to use “VD” to duress migrants into abandoning plausible cases for asylum or other relief just to get out of what has intentionally become an oppressive and biased system.

Either way, it’s unlikely that the “VD rush” will be a major factor in reducing the ever-increasing backlog of Immigration Court cases. That would require a smarter due process oriented, more pragmatic approach than this Administration is capable of or willing to embrace.

PWS

05-10-19

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

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

Daniel Okrent writes in the NY Times:

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

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

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

Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

Opinion articles about immigration.

Opinion | Janet Murguía

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

May 2, 2019

Opinion | Alan Cross

Alabama Is More Pro-Immigrant Than You Think

April 30, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due Process Forever — White Nationalism Never!

PWS

05-09-19

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS MASSIVE ASSAULT ON HUMAN RIGHTS! — Can Anyone Stop These Scofflaws!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/us-asylum-screeners-to-take-more-confrontational-approach-as-trump-aims-to-turn-more-migrants-away-at-the-border/2019/05/07/3b15e076-70de-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

The Trump administration has sent new guidelines to asylum officers directing them to take a more skeptical and confrontational approach during interviews with migrants seeking refuge in the United States. It is the latest measure aimed at tightening the nation’s legal “loopholes” Homeland Security officials blame for a spike in border crossings.

According to internal documents and staff emails obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, the asylum officers will more aggressively challenge applicants whose claims of persecution contain discrepancies, and they will need to provide detailed justifications before concluding an applicant has a well-founded fear of harm if deported to their home country.

The changes require officers to zero in on any gaps between what migrants say to U.S. border agents after they are taken into custody and testimony they provide during the interview process with a trained asylum officer.

“Officers conducting credible fear interviews should also be addressing any more detailed inconsistencies between the applicant’s testimony during the credible fear interview and other testimony in sworn statement,” John Lafferty, the head of the asylum division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), wrote to staff in an email, outlining the changes.

[Court backlog of more than 850,000 cases undercuts Trump immigration agenda]

‘This is what we’re seeing every day’: Another long night on the U.S.-Mexico border

The new guidelines and directive to asylum officers are among the most significant steps the administration has taken to limit access to the country for foreigners seeking asylum, whose right to apply for humanitarian protection is protected by U.S. law and rooted in post-World War II international treaties granting refuge to those fleeing persecution. The changes appear to signal the administration wants to turn away asylum seekers earlier in the legal process, aiming to cut down on the number of applicants who enter the court system and to deter others from attempting to cross into the United States to seek asylum.

Tighter control over asylum claims would fit into a broader White House effort to control the parameters of legal immigration. White House officials — including senior adviser Jared Kushner — met with Republican members of Congress on Tuesday as they draft a proposal that would base the immigration system largely on an immigrant’s ability to contribute to the economy. The Trump administration already has set lower limits on refugees, is cracking down on visa overstays and has alleged that many asylum seekers crossing the southern border are frauds.

With a record number of Central American families arriving at the border and swamping U.S. courts with asylum claims, Trump has repeatedly scoffed at the protections and has told crowds that dangerous criminals are using it to game the system and stay in the United States.

“The asylum program is a scam,” Trump said last month in a speech. “Some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen, people that look like they should be fighting for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) . . . you look at this guy you say ‘Wow, that’s a tough cookie!”

One asylum officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said the changes are “huge” and would make the screening process more time-consuming by requiring officers to provide detailed written analysis before referring an applicant to the courts.

Jessica Collins, a CIS spokesperson, confirmed that new guidelines — included in a lesson plan Reuters has posted online — were issued to officers, describing them as a “periodic update.”

“As part of this periodic update, we have reiterated to asylum officers long-standing policies that help determine an individual’s credibility during the credible fear interview and have ensured there are consistent processes for both positive and negative credible fear determinations,” Collins said in a written statement.

Central American asylum seekers exit the Chaparral border crossing gate after being sent back to Mexico by the U.S. in Tijuana, Mexico, in January. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

Homeland Security agencies already are struggling to comply with court orders limiting the amount of time families with children can be held in detention, and further processing delays could exacerbate dangerous overcrowding at Border Patrol stations and immigration jails. Some areas along the border have been overwhelmed, at times seeing three times as many migrants as they have beds in detention facilities, leading many to be directly released into the United States after initial questioning.

Migrants taken into custody at the border who state a fear of persecution in their homelands typically receive a cursory interview with an asylum officer, and it is up to that officer to evaluate whether the person’s story is credible enough to be referred to immigration courts for a fuller assessment.

The initial screening is known as a “credible fear” assessment, and it has become a particular focus of frustration for the White House at a time when illegal border crossings have jumped to a 12-year high, exceeding 100,000 per month.

The influx has swamped U.S. agents and filled Border Patrol stations far beyond their capacity, forcing the government to frequently bypass the credible fear screening process and release tens of thousands of Central American families with little more than a notice to appear in court.

Matthew Albence, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told reporters Tuesday that his agency has released 168,000 family members since Dec. 21.

“We’ve released four times as many people as we’re able to arrest on an annual basis,” said Albence, noting that ICE makes approximately 40,000 “at large” arrests of immigration violators in the U.S. interior each year.

Statistics show most migrants who claim persecution pass the initial credible fear screening, but far fewer ultimately receive asylum from a judge. An avalanche of new applicants in recent years has contributed to a backlog of more than 860,000 cases in U.S. immigration courts, and it can take years for an asylum applicant to get a final answer in court.

That lag time that has created a loophole in U.S. immigration enforcement, Homeland Security officials say, especially for applicants who arrive with children. They are typically released from custody and allowed to remain in the country while their cases are adjudicated. The process allows them to spend years living and working in the United States, regardless of whether their claims are ultimately found to be valid.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller has led the push to tighten up the asylum system, and his frustration with the slow pace of change was at the heart of his recent attempt to oust L. Francis Cissna, the head of CIS, according to three administration officials. Cissna kept his job after senior GOP senators came to his defense and urged Trump to keep him.

One senior DHS official said Miller and others in the administration are struggling against an asylum officer corps that doesn’t share its immigration goals and would rather refer an applicant to the courts than risk making the wrong choice in a rushed decision with life-or-death consequences.

The administration’s changes take effect immediately, and asylum officers will be trained in their application in coming weeks, according to the emails and CIS officials.

The overhaul follows a White House directive last week ordering Homeland Security and Justice Department officials to tighten asylum rules by limiting access to work permits for applicants and charging fees for the first time to migrants who arrive on U.S. soil seeking humanitarian protection.

Those changes also direct the Justice Department to complete processing of asylum claims within 180 days.

Lafferty also told staff that 10 U.S. Border Patrol agents had volunteered to join a pilot program that will train them to conduct credible fear screenings. As many as 50 agents will be trained in coming months, he said.

The plan has raised concerns from immigrant advocates who say agents should not be making such consequential decisions about credibility of migrants’ deportation fears and their eligibility for humanitarian refuge.

“Credible fear interviews involve the discussion of sensitive, difficult issues,” Julie Veroff, of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, wrote Monday, calling the plan “highly concerning.”

“Federal law thus requires that credible fear interviews be conducted in a ‘nonadversarial manner,’” Veroff wrote. “Credible fear interviews have always been conducted by professionals who specialize in asylum adjudication, not immigration enforcement.”

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Same old, same old. Seems like Trump has been down this path before with Sessions and Nielsen. It ended in a stinging rebuke from Judge Emmet Sullivan in Grace v. Whitaker.

Why aren’t we at the point of contempt citations and disbarment actions for frivolous litigation being conducted by the Trump Administration?

PWS

05-18-19

FRACTURED 9TH GIVES GO-AHEAD TO “REMAIN IN MEXICO” PROGRAM! — Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan

Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan, 9th Cir., 05-07-19, published

Innovation Law Lab 19-15716

DHS’s request for a stay GRANTED

PANEL: O’SCANNLAIN, W. FLETCHER, and WATFORD, Circuit Judges.

OPINION: Per Curiam with Concurring Opinions by Judges Watford & Fletcher

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

Lots of impenetrable legal gobbledegook. Pretty hard to see how Judges Fletcher and Watford concurred in a decision (which appears to have been “ghosted” by Judge O’Scannlain) they really didn’t agree with. But, hey, it’s only human lives at stake here.

Bottom line: Trump wins, asylum seekers with a credible fear of persecution lose. Big Time!

But, in the end, it’s likely to be America and human values that lose here.

PWS

05-07-19

THE GIBSON REPORT: 05-06-19 — Prepared By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group

TOP UPDATES

Trump Calls For Asylum-Seekers To Pay Fees, Proposing New Restrictions

NPR: In the memo, Trump said he is giving Attorney General William Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan 90 days to propose new regulations to speed up the processing of asylum claims, charge application fees for those seeking asylum, and to bar work authorization for certain applicants. See also Asylum seekers leave everything behind. There’s no way they can pay Trump’s fee.

White House asks Congress for $4.5 billion in emergency spending at border

WaPo: The request includes $3.3 billion for humanitarian assistance and $1.1 billion for border operations, and it represents a dramatic escalation of the administration’s efforts to address the situation at the border.

Trump administration to give Border Patrol agents authority to decide asylum claims on the spot

Wa Examiner: The Department of Homeland Security is racing to implement a plan that would give federal law enforcement on the border the authority to conduct interviews with asylum seekers who fear returning to their home countries, according to two sources with firsthand knowledge of the plan.

Civil servants say they’re being used as pawns in a dangerous asylum program

Vox: Asylum officers have raised concerns with their union. Vox spoke with several of them in their capacity as union members, in meetings facilitated and attended by the head of the union representing immigration officers in US Citizenship and Immigration Services, about how the new procedures have changed their jobs.

Emails show Trump admin had ‘no way to link’ separated migrant children to parents

NBC: On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a “central database,” an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News. See also Homeland Security Used A Private Intelligence Firm To Monitor Family Separation Protests.

Bodies In The Borderlands

Intercept: Scott Warren Worked to Prevent Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert. The Government Wants Him in Prison.

John Kelly joins board of company operating largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children

CBS: Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas. Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.

Kushner’s immigration plan has skeptics lining up on both sides

CNN: For months, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser has been chipping away at a plan to overhaul the country’s immigration system, seizing an issue that’s otherwise belonged at the White House to senior adviser and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller.

ICE Reallocates Resources to Investigate Use of Fraudulent Documents at Southwest Border

ICE announced the reallocating resources to investigate the use of fraudulent documents to “create fake families seeking to exploit U.S. immigration laws.” During April 2019, HSI conducted about 100 family unit interviews and have found evidence of fraud in “more than a quarter of cases.” AILA Doc. No. 19050232

Administration Backs Plan for More Visas for Seasonal Workers

WSJ: The Trump administration is moving ahead to allow an additional 30,000 seasonal workers to return to the U.S. this summer, a higher-than-expected number that reflects internal tensions in the White House’s approach to legal immigration.

Trump Names Mark Morgan, Former Head of Border Patrol, to Lead ICE

WaPo: President Trump on Sunday named a former Obama administration official who has embraced some of Mr. Trump’s hard-line positions on border security as the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of a broad effort to force federal agencies into a more aggressive crackdown on migrants.

Trump says the border crisis is about criminals and gangs. His administration says it is about families and children.

WaPo: The sharp dichotomy between the president’s rhetoric and the tone of his aides reflects how they are waging a battle on separate fronts — one political and the other operational — as the administration struggles to deal with a mounting humanitarian crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Why is Mexican migration slowing while Guatemalan and Honduran migration is surging?

WaPo: Migration from Mexico has dropped 90 percent over the past 20 years; this year, for the first time ever, Guatemala and Honduras are on pace to surpass it as the leading sources of illegal immigration to the United States.

Terrorism, immigration efforts hampered by Homeland Security vacancies

WaPo: Just 47 percent of key department slots are filled with confirmed appointees, according to the Political Appointee Tracker published by The Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service. Only Interior is worse, at 41 percent, among Cabinet-level agencies.

Push for driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants intensifies at Capitol

Buffalo News: Twelve states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, permit undocumented immigrants to get licenses. They do so, however, in vastly different ways, from two-tiered systems in some cases to making it be only used for driving and not, for instance, as identification to get into federal buildings.

We Got U.S. Border Officials to Testify Under Oath. Here’s What We Found Out.

ACLU: The information we uncovered through our lawsuit shows that CBP and ICE are asserting near-unfettered authority to search and seize travelers’ devices at the border, for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

No More Filing Window at OPLA-NYC

DHS: Please be advised that the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor New York City (OPLA-NYC) will permanently close the reception window at 26 Federal Plaza effective Monday, June 3, 2019. Starting on that date, OPLA-NYC will no longer accept in-person filings at 26 Federal Plaza. OPLA-NYC will continue to receive documents 24/7 through ICE eService (visit: eserviceregistration.ice.gov)… Although OPLA-NYC will continue to accept service of filings by mail, we will only provide proof of service via ICE eService.

Natz Interview Locations

USCIS: Starting June 1, 2019, Brooklyn and Staten Island residents will be interviewed (only natz cases) at the USCIS Field Office in Newark. Newark Office will be working on Saturdays as well. This is the way USCIS deals with the current backlog.

On Heels of Barr Immigration Decision, Booker, Jayapal, Smith to Re-Introduce Bill to Counter Attorney General’s Efforts

Booker: The bill would directly combat Attorney General Barr’s efforts to indefinitely detain immigrants by, 1) mandating that all detained immigrants have access to a bond hearing before an immigration judge, and 2) shifting the burden to the government to prove that asylum seekers and other immigrants should be detained because they pose a risk to the community or a flight risk.

Unpublished Decision: Theft of Services not a CIMT (attached)

BDS: affirming Judge Farber’s grant of our motion to terminate because our LPR client’s recent petit larceny conviction is on direct appeal (following a successful late-filed notice of appeal) and his theft of services conviction is not a CIMT.

BIA Remands, Finding that a Subsequent Notice of Hearing Can “Perfect” a Deficient NTA

The BIA held that if a NTA does not specify time/place of initial removal hearing, the subsequent service of a notice with that information “perfects” the deficient NTA and triggers the stop-time rule. Matter of Mendoza-Hernandez and Matter of Capula-Cortes, 27 I&N Dec. 520 (BIA 2019) AILA Doc. No. 19050230

BIA Terminates Proceedings After Finding Grand Larceny Conviction Not an Aggravated Felony

Unpublished BIA decision terminated removal proceedings after finding respondent’s conviction of grand larceny in the second degree under NY law was not an aggravated felony and thus she was not removable under INA §237(a)(2)(A)(iii). Courtesy of Michael Goldman. (Matter of Reyes, 4/24/19) AILA Doc. No. 19050302

BIA Holds Ohio Statute Not a Firearms Offense

Unpublished BIA decision holds that the improper handling of a firearm in a motor vehicle under Ohio Rev. Code 2923.16(E)(1) is not a firearms offense because state has prosecuted under similar statutes for possessing antique firearms. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Edwards, 6/20/18) AILA Doc. No. 19050395

BIA Holds California Vehicle Manslaughter Not a CIMT

Unpublished BIA decision holds that vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence under Calif. Penal Code 192(c)(1) is not a CIMT because it does not require a sufficiently culpable mental state. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Pourmand, 6/18/18) AILA Doc. No. 19050295

BIA Grants Interlocutory Appeal Challenging Denial of Change of Venue

Unpublished BIA decision grants interlocutory appeal of denial of motion to change venue to immigration court close to his attorney where respondent had conceded removability and submitted application for cancellation of removal. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Linares Flores, 6/15/18) AILA Doc. No. 19050195

BIA Holds Virginia Hit-and-Run Statute Not a CIMT

Unpublished BIA decision holds that Va. Code Ann. 46.2-894 is not a CIMT because it does not require drivers to leave the scene of the accident or realize that the accident resulted in injury or property damage. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Sifuentes-Reyna, 6/15/18) AILA Doc. No. 19050196

CA1 Finds Petitioner Failed to Satisfy Prejudice Requirement for Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Claim

The court upheld the BIA’s denial of petitioner’s motion to reopen his 2012 removal order, finding that the petitioner failed to show sufficient prejudice resulting from the alleged ineffective assistance of counsel upon which he based his motion to reopen. (Franco-Ardon v. Barr, 4/26/19) AILA Doc. No. 19042900

CA5 Finds BIA’s Retroactive Application of Matter of Diaz-Lizarraga Violates Due Process

The court found that the BIA erred in applying the definition of crimes involving moral turpitude (CIMTs) announced in 2016 in Matter of Diaz-Lizarraga to the petitioner’s 2007 conviction for attempted theft. (Monteon-Camargo v. Barr, 3/14/19, amended 4/26/19) AILA Doc. No. 19031974

CA9 Upholds BIA’s Decision Not to Certify Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Claim for Review Under 8 CFR §1003.1(c)

The court held that the BIA’s decision not to certify a claim is committed to agency discretion and, in this case, was not subject to judicial review. (Idrees v. Barr, 12/13/18, amended 4/30/19) AILA Doc. No. 19011471

EDVA Finds Plausible Claims that ORR Family Reunification Policies Violate Constitutional, Statutory, and Administrative Laws

The judge granted two classes to be certified in this case challenging Office of Refugee Resettlement policies that the class has argued makes it too difficult for children to get out of detention and back with their families or in a home with a sponsor. (J.E.C.M. v. Lloyd, 4/26/19) AILA Doc. No. 18121803

DOJ Notice and Request for Comments on Proposed Revisions to Forms EOIR-42A and EOIR-42B

DOJ notice and request for comments on proposed revisions to Form EOIR-42A and Form EOIR-42B. Comments are due 5/28/19. (84 FR 17891, 4/26/19) AILA Doc. No. 19042936

USCIS Updates Officer Training on Credible Fear of Persecution and Torture Determinations

USCIS updated its Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations (RAIO) Directorate Officer Training course on credible fear of persecution and torture determinations, to explain how to determine whether an individual subject to expedited removal or an arriving stowaway has a credible fear. AILA Doc. No. 19050602

RESOURCES

Practice Advisory: “One Day to Protect New Yorkers” Legislation

Why Is Your Case Taking So Long? USCIS Processing Delays Have Now Hit Crisis Levels

Practice Pointer: T Visa Adjustment of Status and the Public Charge Ground of Inadmissibility

ABA Sends Letter to Attorney General Urging Reconsideration of Matter of M-S-

CBP Releases Officer’s Reference Tool Documents

MAVNI Litigation Update and Discussion (4/25/19)

Think Immigration: USCIS Acknowledges That Its Own Policies Compound Case Processing Delays

Maya Interpreters

Callous and Calculated: Longer Work Authorization Bar Endangers Lives of Asylum Seekers and Their Families

Family Separation FOIA Results

The Role of Contact and Values in Public Attitudes Toward Unauthorized Immigrants

EVENTS

5/6/19 NYCBA: The Courtroom: Performance and Conversation

5/7/19 Best Practices for Interacting with the National Visa Center

5/8/19Ethics For Public Interest Lawyers In These Demanding Times

5/13/19ACS New York: “Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital” with Eric Manheimer

5/15/19Federal Court Litigation Section Call (5/15/19)

5/21/19Admissibility, Revocation, and Public Health: “Risky” Business

5/21/19 The Pseudoscience of Xenophobia: Eugenics and Immigration in America

5/30/19Understanding Denaturalization and its Impact on Your Clients

6/2/19 Introduction to Immigration Law Practice: A Course for New Practitioners

6/17/192019 AILA/GMS Annual Global Immigration Forum

8/4/19 Legal, Cultural, & Historical Approach to Understanding the Complex and Controversial Issue Dominating Our National Dialogue

ImmProf

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Giannis Antetokounmpo: Immigrant of the Day (Reprise)

Evidence that Trump Administration Lied About Ability to Reunite Families, leading to Baby Jails

From the Bookshelves: Earned Citizenship by Michael J. Sullivan

Scott Warren Worked to Prevent Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert. The Government Wants Him in Prison.

The Trump Administration and the War on Immigration Diversity by Rose Cuison Villazor and Kevin R. Johnson

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Former White House Chief of Staff joins board of company that operates immigration detention shelters

From the Bookshelves: Contested Migration Control in Europe by Eule, T., Borrelli, L.M., Lindberg, A., Wyss, A.

Immigration Article of the Day: Crimmigration — Structural Tools of Settler Colonialism by Carrie Rosenbaum

Friday, May 3, 2019

Immigration is beautiful: 200 Years of Immigration as Tree Rings

New Depo Evidence About Border Searches of Phones, Laptops

Immigration Article of the Day: An Empirical Study of Political Control Over Immigration Adjudication by Catherine Y. Kim and Amy Semet

From the Bookshelves: Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability by Jay Timothy Dolmage

Kushner Rumored to Be Finalizing Immigration Proposal for the President

Thursday, May 2, 2019

From the Bookshelves: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

Immigration Article of the Day: Improper Commandeering by Josh Blackman

Halima Aden: From Refugee to “Sports Illustrated” Burkini Sensation

Asylum seekers leave everything behind. There’s no way they can pay Trump’s fee.

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

At Trump golf course, undocumented employees said they were sometimes told to work extra hours without pay

Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Trump Wants To Speed Up Asylum Cases And Start Charging An Application Fee

How labels affect the perception of migrants in the United States

Mexican Migration Dramatically Decreasing

Is the political science in the Census political or science?

Monday, April 29, 2019

Living with fear

Healthcare4all

How Nativism became the norm in the Dominican Republic

“Take a Small Step”: A Lesson for Law Students

Immigrants Rising Fellowship Applications

Supreme Court oral argument discounts empirical studies predicting census undercount

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Elizabeth’s second and third items show how the Trump Administration is compromising the fairness of the credible fear and asylum systems within DHS by skewing the law and procedures against asylum seekers. This is despite both the intent behind the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees that asylum seekers be “given the benefit of the doubt” and the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca holding that the term “well founded fear” must be given a generous interpretation so that even those whose chances of persecution are as low as 10% could qualify for asylum.

PWS

05-07-19

PROFESSOR FITZ BRUNDAGE @ WASHPOST: Can We Regain Our Humanitarian Values In The Age Of Trump? — “We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/03/can-united-states-retain-its-humanity-even-crisis

Brundage writes in WashPost:

By Fitz Brundage

Fitz Brundage is the William B. Umstead professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and the author of “Civilizing Torture,” which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.

May 3

Does it violate human rights to hold children in fenced enclosures in grim facilities that are bone-chillingly cold for weeks on end? Is separating children from their parents a form of cruel and unusual punishment? When does a crisis justify the kind of treatment normally seen as inhumane?

The furious debate over migrant detention along the nation’s southwest border with Mexico has put these questions front and center in American politics. But they’re not new. The treatment of people on the margins of American life — criminals, immigrants, civilians in overseas war zones — has always proven a challenge to our democratic ideals.

Yet beginning in the 1920s, activists waged a half-century-long struggle to persuade the Supreme Court to stop abusive practices by authorities. After World War II, the United States also committed itself to the promotion of international human rights. These two signal developments have been seriously eroded, first by the excesses of the war on terrorism and now by the Trump administration’s targeting of the unwelcome and powerless, whether they are undocumented immigrants in the United States or asylum seekers. We have returned to a pattern of willful ignorance, one that allows us to avoid grappling with deeply immoral policies.

Threats to our safety, perceived or real, have long justified the kind of “tougher policies” that President Trump has demanded for the southern border. He may not be well versed in history, but the president is joining a long line of elected officials who found that rights and basic norms are easily jettisoned when they collide with demands for greater security. Across our history, from the Indian wars to the war on terrorism, officials were quick to call for “tougher policies” and slow to fill in the details. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered military commanders in the Philippines to adopt “the most stern measures” to punish Filipino guerrillas; in a subsequent campaign the Marines followed orders and left a trail of devastation and death across the island of Samar. But such methods were justified as a “military necessity.”

Roosevelt rationalized the brutal treatment of alleged guerrillas by citing the need to stanch the threat to security. This kind of evasive language has repeatedly prevented us from coming to terms with acts of cruelty carried out in the name of national security. We’re seeing that pattern again.

What precisely did Trump officials mean when they announced “a tougher direction” for immigration? They certainly imply more than just the proposals for new fees and regulations reducing the numbers of asylum seekers. Are the American people ready to confront the reality of harsh security measures? Or will we retreat into euphemisms such as a “hardened” border and “zero tolerance” for migrants that covers up the reality of what is actually happening on the border?

As early as 2014, immigrants-rights advocates appealed to the Department of Homeland Security to investigate more than 100 instances of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents abusing child immigrants. A quarter of the children reported physical abuse, including sexual assault, the use of stress positions and beatings. Many more suffered verbal abuse, including death threats. Since then, goaded by Trump, CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have applied even more extreme measures, including harsh confinement and prolonged separation of families.

We are deciding day by day whether to extend the basic protections of law and civilization to the people arriving on our border. For much of the nation’s history, the prohibition on cruelty and torture in American law rested on the premise that the fundamental decency of Americans, especially empathy for fellow citizens, would make such violations unthinkable.

But our capacity to empathize begins to fray at the margins, and we grow less certain about who, exactly, deserves protection. Those deemed undeserving, unwelcome or powerless — Native Americans, the enslaved, prison inmates and criminal suspects — have commonly suffered forms of violence and abuse that violated our national principles. Some people are inside the protection of the law, and some are cast out from it.

We’re seeing a replay of that ugly history unfold along our southern border. If the Trump administration codifies its get-tough rhetoric into harsher policies, we will see far more allegations of human rights abuses against the men and women charged with securing our border. And we probably will rationalize it by claiming that those responsible are just a few bad apples rather than reckoning with the ways cruelty has been embedded in the policy itself. Like the euphemistic language of security, this choice allows us to avoid uncomfortable questions about our moral values.

In fact, we’ve already seen this pattern. Accusations of cruelty and torture by ICE and CBP agents have been circulating for years, and they follow this well-worn pattern. Official denials are followed by investigations that almost always find limited violations by “a few bad apples,” not the kind of systemic abuse that would call our broader policies into question.

This pattern has long historical roots: When investigations of police brutality in Washington during the 1930s revealed widespread use of abusive interrogation methods, the police superintendent, whose predecessors had dismissed similar allegations for decades, only grudgingly conceded that a few officers may have gone too far in their resolve to protect the public.

By seeing violations of human rights as rare exceptions, unfortunate lapses that don’t challenge our fundamental sense of decency, Americans can avoid any real reckoning with the policies we’ve approved — which often violate our purported values. Very few of the officers and soldiers responsible for the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and none of the architects of the George W. Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” policies have faced legal consequences. Even Jon Burge, a notorious ringleader of lawless police in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s, was convicted of perjury for lying to police investigators rather than torturing countless suspects.

Focusing on bad apples has long allowed us to excuse morally bankrupt policies. We need to realize that human rights abuses on the southern border aren’t spurred by immoral actors in ICE or CBP, but rather because of a political leadership that can’t or won’t come up with humane immigration policies.

Congress needs to do its job and exercise scrupulous oversight of Trump’s immigration policies. But the real solution to our border crisis is to demand that all elected officials, from local sheriffs to senators, responsibly address immigration and human rights. Trump declared that he wants immigration to be a key campaign issue in 2020. His opponents should accept that challenge. We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.

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Join the New Due Process Army today and fight for human rights, the rule of law, accountability for Government scofflaws, and a return to basic human decency! Fight for a better future for ALL Americans!

PWS

05-07-19

LEADERSHIP CRISIS: Poor Quality Of Today’s World Leaders Threatens All Of Our Human Rights, Says Former U.N. Human Rights Chief — “[W]orld leaders are weak, shortsighted and mediocre, and no longer willing or able to defend human rights.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/opinion/united-nations-human-rights.html

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein in the NY Times:

In the video Op-Ed above, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, argues that world leaders are weak, shortsighted and mediocre, and no longer willing or able to defend human rights. Abuses used to be called out and stopped, and human rights offenders had something to fear. Today, they are met with silence instead.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein (@raad_zeid) served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018. Previously he spent 18 years as a diplomat helping to establish the International Criminal Court and serving on the Security Council. He is now the Distinguished Global Leader in Residence at the Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania.

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Watch the video at the above link.

Actually, “weak, shortsighted, and mediocre” is an exceedingly generous description of Trump’s toxic, openly racist, incompetent, and aggressively xenophobic leadership that has seen the U.S. become a major human rights scofflaw.

PWS

05-06-19

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