Month: June 2020

BILLY THE BIGOT’S STAR CHAMBERS CONTINUE TO SHOW CONSTITUTIONAL ABROGATION, UNEQUAL JUSTICE ALIVE & WELL IN AMERICA — 2d Cir. Remand Latest To Highlight How Billy’s BIA Lacks Professional Competence, Institutionalizes Anti-Asylum Bias  — Tanusantoso v. Barr

Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca2-on-changed-country-conditions-tanusantoso-v-barr

Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:

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Daniel M. Kowalski

24 Jun 2020

CA2 on Changed Country Conditions: Tanusantoso v. Barr

Tanusantoso v. Barr

“Harmanto Tanusantoso and Wiwik Widayati (collectively, Petitioners) petitioned for review after the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) denied their third motion to reopen, in which they alleged a change of country conditions for Christians in Indonesia. Petitioners argue that the BIA abused its discretion in denying their motion to reopen because it (1) failed to address their primary evidence of changed country conditions and (2) incorrectly concluded that their failure to submit a new asylum application with their motion made the motion procedurally deficient under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.2(c)(1). We agree with Petitioners. We find that the BIA’s one-and-a-half-page order failed to account for relevant evidence of changed country conditions and hold that § 1003.2(c)(1) does not require the submission of a new asylum application for motions such as this one. We therefore GRANT the petition for review, VACATE the BIA’s decision, and REMAND for explicit consideration of Petitioners’ changed country conditions evidence.”

[Hats off to WILLIAM W. CASTILLO GUARDADO and Dan R. Smulian, on the brief, Catholic Charities Community Services, New York, NY!]

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

DISCONNECT: Remanding a case for a fair determination by an unconstitutional “court” system designed by Billy the Bigot to reject valid asylum claims.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN: “Remand” the case to a U.S. Magistrate Judge or a court-appointed Special Master with asylum expertise to give the respondent a fair determination on the motion to reopen, and if the case is reopened, to hear the case on the merits. Any appeals should go directly to the Court of Appeals, bypassing the unconstitutional and unqualified BIA.

To keep sending botched cases back to an unconstitutional and unqualified “court” system that is not a “court” at all is a complete waste of time and an abuse of taxpayer resources. It’s also grossly unfair to individuals who have to keep subjecting themselves to the abuses of “Billy the Bigot” and his illegal “designed to deny” Star Chambers! Additionally, it’s ethically questionable, given the overwhelming evidence of unfairness and dysfunction now in the public record. 

Have the Judges of the Second Circuit taken the few minutes necessary to view “The Immigration Courts: Nothing Like You Have Imagined?” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/06/24/channeling-john-lennon-conservative-judiciary-revolts-hand-selected-over-two-decades-by-americas-chief-prosecutors-to-quash-dissent-promote-compliance-with-dojs-poli/

If not, why not? If so, what’s the excuse for futile and inappropriate remands to this unconstitutional and dysfunctional “non-system?” We need Federal Judges at all levels who “get off the treadmill” and start enforcing the Constitutional requirements of due process, fundamental fairness, impartial decision-makers, and equal justice for all.  

Yes, America is suffering from near-total institutional breakdown and failure under the Trump’s kakistocracy and the institutional weaknesses he has exposed and exploited. But, that doesn’t excuse the failure of those who have the power to fix the system pretending like this is “normal.” It isn’t!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-25-20

  

Related posts:

  1. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎🏻ERROR SUPPLY: EOIR’s Anti-Asylum Bias, Failure To Apply Precedents, Earns Yet Another Rebuke From 3d Cir.  — Blanco v. AG
  2. ⚖️🗽🧑🏽‍⚖️COURTS OF APPEALS CONTINUE TO THROW ROTTEN TOMATOES 🍅 @ BIA’S ANTI-ASYLUM BIAS — Basic Analytical, Legal Errors Continue From Weaponized, Non-Expert “Star Chamber” ☠️ Posing As ”Tribunal!” — Judge Garland Must Fix This Inexcusable, Unnecessary, Systemic Failure Now! — Justice For Persons Of Color & Migrants Can’t “Wait For Godot!”
  3. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

🏴‍☠️☠️👎🏻🤮CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: HOW AMERICA IS DISGRACED BY A CORRUPT, RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME THAT HAS LAUNCHED A COWARDLY & ILLEGAL ATTACK DESIGNED TO KILL ASYLUM SEEKERS — Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase, “Taking a Sledgehammer to Asylum”

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Retired Immigration Judges

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2020/6/23/taking-a-sledgehammer-to-asylum

Taking a Sledgehammer to Asylum

The Trump Administration has repeatedly acted to damage our country’s asylum laws.  Its latest move, expressed in 161 pages of proposed regulations, does so with a sledgehammer.  The proposal claims that “as an expression of a nation’s foreign policy, the laws and policies surrounding asylum are an assertion of a government’s right and duty to protect its own resources and citizens, while aiding those in true need of protection from harm.”  Note how “aiding those in true need of protection from harm” comes last.  The proposal supports the preceding statement with a case that not only had nothing to do with asylum, but predated by eight years the enactment of the 1980 Refugee Act, which continues to serve as our country’s law of asylum.

It was necessary to reach back so far because the Refugee Act actually stands for the opposite proposition, placing the protection of those in need above foreign policy considerations.  The Refugee Act replaced our Cold War-influenced refugee preferences with an obligation to provide protection to those from any country fearing persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

The Department of Justice tried to limit the impact of this monumental change at its outset by interpreting the new legal standard as restrictively as possible.  In 1987, the Supreme Court rejected the Department’s interpretation of the term “well-founded fear,” finding that the meaning the Department applied to the term was not the one intended by Congress.  The Court found it clear that the primary purpose of Congress was to bring U.S. law into conformity with the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees.  It therefore looked for guidance to UNHCR and legal scholars, and concluded that the standard passed by Congress allowed for as little as a ten percent chance of persecution in order to merit asylum.

More than three decades later, District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan put a stop to the Department’s attempt to exclude victims of domestic violence and gang violence from asylum protection at the credible fear stage.  In a lengthy, detailed decision whose reasoning the Sixth Circuit recently adopted for full asylum determinations, the court reiterated that Congress, and not the Attorney General, creates our asylum laws, and that Congress intended for those laws to conform to the Protocol’s more expansive view.

It was because of that more expansive view that the Protocol, and its predecessor, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, avoided the type of strict definitions the proposed regulations seek to impose.  One renowned scholar explained the drafters’ intent “to introduce a flexible concept which might be applied to circumstances as they might arise; or in other words, that they capitulated before the inventiveness of humanity to think up new ways of persecuting fellow men.”1  It is this built-in flexibility that the latest proposal takes exception to.

Of course, it is still Congress, and not the executive branch, that enacts our asylum laws.  And should the present proposal become a final rule before this administration is done, it will be the reassertion of that reality by the courts that will save those seeking refuge here.

I plan to address the different sections of the proposals in installments.  I begin with the proposal to redefine “political opinion.”

The last few months have taught us that, under the Trump Administration, everything is political.  Even the decision to wear a mask and self-isolate out of consideration to our neighbors has been cast as an expression of political opinion.  The virus itself was first depicted as a Democratic hoax; once its existence could no longer be denied, it had to be given a nationality and portrayed as part of a foreign plot.  This is a virus we are talking about.

The Administration saw political allies in armed and angry mobs who somehow portrayed temporary rules designed to protect us all by slowing the spread of disease as a denial of their basic human rights.  And then the same administration branded as political enemies those protesting the very real and systemically ingrained deprivation of their basic human rights solely because of the color of their skin.  The irony is not lost in this very same government that politicizes everything now imposing a very narrow, strict view of what can be called political opinion for asylum purposes.

Regulations may define or clarify laws, but may not rewrite them.  And the courts need only defer to the Department’s interpretation where the language of the law itself is ambiguous.  Courts may go to great lengths and employ all tools of construction at their disposal before deeming a statute ambiguous.

Looking to the Refugee Act, the courts will find that  in the 40 years since its passage, the only amendment relating to its definition of political opinion expanded the meaning of that term.  In 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress amended the refugee definition to read that coercive abortion and sterilization procedures constitute persecution on account of the victim’s political opinion.  Neither the wording of the statute nor its application by the BIA require any inquiry into the motives or beliefs of the victim of the coercive family planning policy.  In other words, a woman need not declare in an online manifesto that she will become pregnant as a statement of protest against an oppressive government’s policy.  One at risk of abortion for any pregnancy by law fears persecution on account of her political opinion.

The proposed regulations acknowledge this.  However, they fail to reconcile how the rest of the proposed language on this topic, the first attempt ever to restrict by either statute or regulation what may constitute a political opinion, is consistent with Congress’s adoption of such an expansive view of political opinion to allow even an accidental pregnancy to satisfy the term’s definition.

The Department provides a weak justification for interjecting itself into the matter in the first place, claiming that the evolving state of case law makes it just too difficult for immigration judges to apply the law consistently.  Any pretense of providing clarification vanishes upon attempting to decipher the proposed guidance on the topic.  Under the proposed rule, immigration judges, asylum officers, and the BIA will be precluded from granting asylum based on a political opinion “defined solely by generalized disapproval of, disagreement with, or opposition to criminal, terrorist, gang, guerilla, or other non-state organizations absent expressive behavior in furtherance of a cause against such organizations related to efforts by the state to control such organizations or behavior that is antithetical to or otherwise opposes the ruling legal entity of the state or a legal sub-unit of the state.”  What could be clearer than that?

As its sole example of the confusion that purportedly warrants the administration stepping in, the proposal cites two recent decisions.  The first (which we can assume the administration doesn’t like) is the Second Circuit’s recent decision in Hernandez-Chacon v. Barr, holding that in resisting rape by an MS-13 member, the asylum applicant expressed “her opposition to the male-dominated social norms in El Salvador and her taking a stance against a culture that perpetuates female subordination and the brutal treatment of women.”

The other case referenced was a 15 year old Fourth Circuit decision, Saldarriaga v. Gonzales, which the Department describes as holding that “disapproval of a drug cartel is not a political opinion.”  In its attempt to demonstrate that immigration judges sitting in the jurisdictions of the Second and Fourth Circuits might reach different results, the Department conveniently omits a much more recent Fourth Circuit decision, Alvarez Lagos v. Barr, which found unrefuted evidence that the Barrio 18 gang imputed an anti-gang political opinion to the asylum-seeker’s nonpayment of extortion and flight to the U.S.  Including that decision would have cleared up the purported confusion used to justify the new rules, so the proposal simply ignored it.

But even accepting the Department’s view that different circuits might take different views on this topic, and that somehow, it’s the responsibility of someone like Stephen Miller, as opposed to the Supreme Court, to resolve such conflict, would applying that garbled definition cited above (and no, it does not become clearer with repeated reading) change the outcome of Hernandez-Chacon?  Because in the view of the court, the asylum applicant in that case did not simply express a generalized disapproval of a gang.  Her opposition to systemic injustice perpetuating brutality against women, who are viewed as a subordinate class, is an expression of something much larger, in which the government is implicated.

Grasping at additional straws, the Department also pointed to one sentence in a BIA decision from 1996, Matter of S-P-, stating the need in that case to examine whether the persecutors were motivated at least in part by their belief that the asylum applicant held political views “antithetical to the government.”  This, according to the administration, is proof that only views antithetical to the government can be political opinion.  However, in that case, the asylum seeker had been arrested, detained for six months, interrogated, and tortured by the government, specifically, government soldiers.  So in determining whether such persecution was on account of the applicant’s political opinion, in that particular case, the Board obviously focused on whether those soldiers thought the victims views were anti-government.  The sentence in no way intended to state that under all circumstances must political opinion be one that is directly aimed at the government.  By analogy, the BIA didn’t say that only women can be members of particular social groups because in one gender-based case, it analyzed whether the social group elements were “fundamental to the individual identity of a young woman.”  See Matter of Kasinga, 21 I&N Dec. 357, 366 (BIA 1996).  The point is, the Board used the language necessary to decide the case before it, and for the Department to now pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

Note:

  1.  Atle Grahl-Madsen, The Status of Refugees in International Law 193 (1966).

Copyright 2020 Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

Republished with permission.

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

A nation’s inhumanity to others, allowing unqualified individuals like Stephen Miller to make policy, and moral cowardice will have severe future consequences. 

PWS

06-24-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS: “More than two-thirds of migrants fleeing Central American region had family taken or killed!” — “We’re speaking of human beings, not numbers!”– As Evidence Mounts Of Regime’s “Crimes Against Humanity,” DHS Trump Toady & Unapologetic “Dehumanizer” Mark Morgan Proudly Touts “Success” Of “Extermination As Deterrence” Policies!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

🏴‍☠️☠️NO, IT’S NOT “JUST ENFORCING THE LAW” AS ALBENCE & THE DHS FALSELY CLAIM — THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INTENTIONALLY CRUEL, STUPID, WASTEFUL, IMMORAL, & ENTIRELY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE DEPORTATION POLICIES ARE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — We All Are Demeaned & Reduced As Human Beings By Allowing Trump’s DHS & His DOJ to Get Away With This!

 

Julia Preston
Julia Preston
American Journalist
The Marshall Project

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/22/the-true-costs-of-deportation

 

Julia Preston reports for The Marshall Project:

The True Costs of Deportation
When immigrant parents of American children are expelled, the lives of their loved ones can fall apart. Here are the stories of three families who faced financial ruin, mental health crises—and even death.
By JULIA PRESTON

Before her husband was deported, Seleste Hernandez was paying taxes and credit card bills. She was earning her way and liking it.
But after her husband, Pedro, was forced to return to Mexico, her family lost his income from a job at a commercial greenhouse. Seleste had to quit her nursing aide position, staying home to care for her severely disabled son. Now she is trapped, grieving for a faraway spouse and relying on public assistance just to scrape by.
She went, in her eyes, from paying taxes to depending on taxpayers. “I’m back to feeling worthless,” she says.
This story was published in partnership with The Guardian.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of American families are coping with anguish compounded by steep financial decline after a spouse’s or parent’s deportation, a more enduring form of family separation than President Trump’s policy that took children from parents at the border.
Trump has broadened the targets of deportation to include many immigrants with no serious criminal records. While the benefits to communities from these removals are unclear, the costs—to devastated American families and to the public purse—are coming into focus. The hardships for the families have only deepened with the economic strains of the coronavirus.
A new Marshall Project analysis with the Center for Migration Studies found that just under 6.1 million American citizen children live in households with at least one undocumented family member vulnerable to deportation—and household incomes drop by nearly half after deportation.
About 331,900 American children have a parent who has legal protection under DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that shields immigrants who came here as children. After the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Trump’s cancellation of the DACA program was unlawful, those families still have protection from deportation. But the court’s decision allows the president to try to cancel the program again. The debate cast light on the larger population of 10.7 million undocumented immigrants who have made lives in the country, raising pressure on Congress to open a path to permanent legal status for all of them.
We examined the impact of the wrenching losses after deportation and the potential costs to American taxpayers of expelling immigrants who are parents or spouses of citizens.
After an immigrant breadwinner is gone, many families that once were self-sufficient must rely on social welfare programs to survive. With the trauma of a banished parent, some children fail in schools or require expensive medical and mental health care. As family savings are depleted, American children struggle financially to stay in school or attend college.
Three families in northeastern Ohio, a region where Trump’s deportations have taken a heavy toll, show the high price of these expulsions.

. . . .

****************
Read the rest of Julia’s article at the link.

This isn’t the first time in American history that invidious racially-motivated enforcement of bad laws has been used to dehumanize or abuse “the other” while hiding behind transparently fake law enforcement pretexts. Poll taxes anyone?

A straightforward reading of our Constitution says that removing parents of U.S. citizens and breadwinners of American families without compelling reasons for doing so (lacking in these cases) is unreasonable and therefore a violation of Due Process. It’s time to stop doing the immoral and unconstitutional! And it’s past time to insure that public officials like Albence who promote and defend these assaults on humanity are removed from power.

The current institutions of Government have initiated, carried out, or failed to stop these illegal actions. Disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, considering that the nation, by minority vote, enabled a scofflaw White Nationalist regime in 2016.

But, voters still have the political power to oust the abusers of humanity and purveyors of racially-motivated lies and false narratives, and to insist on long-overdue changes to the system to make due process (reasonability), fundamental fairness, and equality under the law a reality for the first time in U.S. history, rather than continuing to be the Constitution’s intentionally unfulfilled promises.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-24-20

Related posts:

  1. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  2. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  4. MUST SEE TV:  “IMMIGRATION NATION” PREMIERES TODAY ON NETFLIX:  Time Magazine Says “Netflix’s Searing Docuseries Immigration Nation Is The Most Important TV Show You’ll See In 2020!” 

CHANNELING JOHN LENNON? – Conservative Judiciary Revolts! – Hand-Selected Over Two-Decades By America’s Chief Prosecutors to Quash Dissent & Promote Compliance With DOJ’s Politicized “Priorities,” Immigration Judges Chafe Under Interference, Humiliation, Lack of Concern for Health & Safety by Their Political Boss “Billy the Bigot” Barr!

 

REVOLUTION

By The Beatles

 

[Intro]
Aah!

[Verse 1]
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

[Chorus]
Don’t you know it’s gonna be
Alright
Alright
Alright

[Verse 2]
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait

[Chorus]
Don’t you know it’s gonna be
Alright
Alright
Alright

[Instrumental Break]

[Verse 3]
You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

[Chorus]
Don’t you know it’s gonna be
Alright
Alright
Alright

[Outro]
Alright, alright
Alright, alright
Alright, alright
Alright, alright!

 

Music and lyrics from Genius.com:

https://genius.com/

 

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

https://prospect.org/justice/revolt-of-the-immigration-judges/

From American Prospect:

The Revolt of the Judges

The Trump administration has ordered immigration court judges to reject more applicants and speed up trials—and it wants to bust the judges’ union.

BY STEPHEN FRANKLIN

 

JUNE 23, 2020

 

 

First you see scenes from classic movies of wizened judges, brave lawyers, and contemplative juries, but then the video lays out its grim theme: This is not what happens in America’s immigration courts.

These courts are subject to political influences, a narrator explains. They are driven by political messages, and bound by rules based on the “whims” of whoever is in power in Washington, D.C., she says. They don’t provide the blind justice that Americans expect. What they provide is assembly-line justice.

Who is making these claims? A hard-line political or fringe legal group? Hardly. The video is from the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ), the union that represents the nation’s 460-plus immigration judges—reasonably well-paid lawyers, many of whom come from government and law enforcement backgrounds.

Nor is the video the first such salvo from the judges’ group, which has lobbied Congress and spoken out frequently about what’s gone exceptionally wrong with the immigration courts under the Trump administration. Such criticisms, the judges say, are the reason that the government sought last August to decertify their union, the only such effort taken by the Trump administration against a federal workers’ labor organization.

“They are trying to silence the judges by silencing their union,” says Paul Shearon, head of the 90,000-member Professional and Technical Engineers union, to which the NAIJ has been affiliated for the past 30 years. He worries that busting a federal union may be the “next step” in the Trump administration’s actions meant to weaken all federal unions.

Shearon is confident, however, that the union will win its fight against decertification when the local level of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) issues its ruling. He is “not so optimistic,” though, that it will prevail at the higher level of the FLRA, where two of three boardmembers are Trump appointees and “clearly political players.” Though the government has sought to speed up a ruling, the judges do not know when a decision is likely—but they expect one before the November election.

The judges’ complaints are many.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article and view the video “The Immigration Courts: Nothing Like You Have Imagined.”

Should be required viewing for every Justice, Federal Judge, U.S. Legislator, and law student.

You don’t need a law degree to know that something purporting to be a “court” where a notoriously corrupt and dishonest political prosecutor is directing “his judges” to deny asylum and speed up the assembly line is unconstitutional under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, every day, life-tenured Court of Appeals Judges rubber stamp the results, often effectively death sentences, of this Star Chamber without questioning the obvious defects. Why?

America’s need for judicial reform and establishing scholarship, courage, integrity, fairness, commitment to due process and human rights, practical problem solving, and humanity as the hallmarks of judicial service runs much deeper than the Immigration “Courts.” If we want to achieve “equal justice for all” as required by our Constitution, but not being uniformly delivered by our judiciary, we need better judges at all levels of our Federal Judiciary.

That starts with throwing out Trump and the GOP Senate that has stuffed our Article III Judiciary with unqualified right-wing ideologues, intentionally tone-deaf to the legal and human rights of refugees, immigrants, people of color, women, the poor, working people, and a host of others whose humanity they decline to recognize. But, that is by no means the end of the changes necessary!

Due Process Forever. Complicit Courts, Never!

PWS

06-24-20

 

Related posts:

  1. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  2. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!

DC CIR. GREENLIGHTS TRUMP’S EXPANSION OF EXPEDITED REMOVAL – U.S. Ethnic Communities, Should Expect Targeting, Widespread Abuses

 

https://apple.news/AhkK30GXCT2aSpqRxx7gQkw

 

From The Hill:

Appeals court says Trump administration can move forward with expanding fast-track deportations
By Harper Neidig – 06/23/20 11:03 AM EDT

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration move forward with expanding a procedure for quickly deporting undocumented immigrants despite a lawsuit against the program.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new rule that significantly expands the number of undocumented immigrants who can be deported without being able to make their case to a judge or accessing an attorney.

In the 2-1 ruling, the majority wrote that a group of nonprofits had legal standing to bring the lawsuit but that immigration law granting broad authority to DHS makes their case unlikely to succeed.

“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote in the majority decision.

Millett, an Obama appointee, and Judge Harry Edwards, a Carter appointee, were in the panel’s majority. Judge Neomi Rao, appointed by President Trump, dissented, arguing the lawsuit should have been thrown out altogether.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link.

As due process dies across America, expect the abuses by DHS Enforcement to increase. Any individual who can’t prove legal status on the spot or foreign national who can’t show two years U.S. residence could be detained and deported by ICE and CBP without consulting a lawyer or seeing a judge.

It’s actually a 1996 law that prior Administrations chose to limit to recent illegal entrants near the border. Now, individuals who don’t carry documents proving status or sufficient length of residence could be summarily removed anywhere in the U.S.

How long will it be before the first Mexican American is illegally harassed or removed?

How many Americans of color trust DHS to “do the right thing?”

 

We’ll see.

 

PWS

 

06-23-20

 

Related posts:

  1. 🤡WELCOME TO CLOWN COURT: Where The Lives Of Millions Of Humans & The Future Of America Are Treated Like A Cruel Joke, As Complicit Article III Courts Watch This Grotesque Unconstitutional Spectacle & Parody Of Justice Unfold On Their Watch!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

WACKO-IN-CHIEF’S FINAL DESTRUCTION OF LEGAL IMMIGRATION SYSTEM BARS WORK VISAS FOR THOSE NEEDED FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY — Xenophobic Move So Dumb & Counterproductive That Even Trump Tool L. Graham Forced to Feebly Dissent!

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/503985-graham-trump-visa-order-will-have-a-chilling-effect-on-our-economic-recovery

Rebecca Klar reports for The Hill:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday that the order President Trump signed earlier in the day suspending,  with some exceptions for health care and other “essential workers,” certain temporary work visas through the end of the year will have a “chilling effect” on the nation’s economic recovery amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“This decision, in my view, will have a chilling effect on our economic recovery at a time we should be doing all we can to restore the economy,” Graham said in a series of tweets.

. . . .

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

Read Rebecca’s full article at the above link.

Of course, if Graham, Mitch, and their GOP buddies in the Senate and House really wanted to rein in Trump they could. Just get together with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and pass by veto-proof margins legislation countermanding or amending Trump’s order.

But, that would require action, not just babbling. 

In the meantime, Trump has succeeded in totally destroying the U.S. legal immigration and refugee system that has taken decades to build.  And, the institutions that could and should have stopped him failed.

PWS

06-23-22

Related posts:

  1. MLK DAY 2018 — DR. KING’S DREAM OF AN AMERICA CELEBRATING EQUALITY & RACIAL HARMONY IS UNDER VICIOUS ATTACK BY TRUMP, PENCE, SESSIONS, AND A HOST OF OTHERS IN TODAY’S WHITE NATIONALIST ENABLING GOP — Who Is Going To Fight To Reclaim The Dream, & Who Is Going To “Go Along To Get Along” With The 21st Century Version Of Jim Crow?
  2. 😰👹👺🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮“DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN” — Nicole Narea @ Vox With A Glimpse Of Trump’s Second Term: American Apocalypse — Dark, Ugly, Hateful, Violent, Dishonest, Exclusionary, Stupid, Racist, Diminished, Yet Very White & Privileged — Are People Of Color & Their Allies Really Going To Stand By & Watch While Their Past & Our Future As A Strong, Creative, Tolerant, Diverse, Humane Nation Is Written Out Of History By A Racist GOP & Its Totally Wacko Yet Dangerously Evil Cult Leader?
  3. GEORGE PACKER @ THE ATLANTIC: With Failed Institutions & Lousy Leaders, Including a President Leading the Charge to the Bottom, America Faces An Uncertain Future — “A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.” — Joe Biden & The Dems Could Be The Last, Best Hope For American Democracy & Real Progress Toward “Equal Justice For All!”
  4. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!

THE GIBSON REPORT — 06-22-20 – Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group – WORLD REFUGEE DAY WAS JUNE 20 – AMERICA’S TRUMP REGIME CELEBRATED BY ADVANCING A DISINGENUOUS RACIST ATTACK ON WORK AUTHORIZATION FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS – Just A Few Days After 8 Justices of Supremes Claimed Cluelessness About Trump’s Racist Immigration Agenda! (See, Item #2 Under “Top News”)

 

Elizabeth Gibson
Elizabeth Gibson
Attorney, NY Legal Assistance Group
Publisher of “The Gibson Report”

COVID-19
Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify the latest policies on the relevant government websites and with colleagues on listservs as best you can.

New
• Opening dates for some non-detained courts: The Honolulu Immigration Court resumed hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, June 15, 2020. The Boston, Buffalo, Dallas, Hartford, Las Vegas, Memphis, and New Orleans Immigration Courts will resume hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, June 29, 2020. Hearings in non-detained cases at all other immigration courts are postponed through, and including, Thursday, July 2, 2020. All immigration courts will be closed Friday, July 3, 2020, in observance of Independence Day. The Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Saipan, and San Diego Immigration Courts will resume hearings in non-detained cases on Monday, July 6, 2020.
• USCIS Reopening
o Newark Asylum Office Remains Closed due to unresolved facility issues unrelated to COVID-19
o New York City and Brooklyn field offices are listed as closed to public, emergency services only

Closures
• EOIR Operational Status & Standing Orders
• EOIR Case Status
• EOIR Updates via Twitter
• ICE Updates (Including ERO and Detention)
• USCIS Updates
• Consular Updates
• NY Courts Updates

Guidance:
• IJ Email Filings
• BIA Email Filings
• EOIR Standing Orders
• EOIR Electronic Signature Guidance
• EOIR Update Regarding EOIR Practices Related to the COVID-19 Outbreak
• USCIS’s Signature Policy Update
• USCIS Announces Flexibility for Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Deny

TOP NEWS

Trump suggests another attempt at rolling back DACA
Roll Call: The president in a series of tweets said the administration “will be submitting enhanced papers shortly in order to properly fulfil the Supreme Court’s ruling & request of yesterday.” See also DACA ‘unlawful’ despite Supreme Court ruling, acting Homeland Security chief says.

The Trump Administration Will Soon Deny Work Permits For Asylum-Seekers Who Enter The US Without Authorization
BuzzFeed: The policy, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News in August, will make asylum-seekers who do not cross into the country at a port of entry ineligible for a work permit in most cases. It will also delay the time it takes for those who apply for asylum — either while already in the US or after crossing the border and referred to immigration court — to become qualified to get a work permit, from 150 days to 365 days. Asylum-seekers who do not file for protections within one year of arriving in the US will also be denied a permit.

Businesses Brace for Possible Limits on Foreign Worker Visas
NYT: Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. See also Chasing Down the Rumors: Possible Extension and Expansion of Presidential Proclamation Suspending Entry of Certain Immigrants into the United States (Updated 6/19/20).

Representation at Bond Hearings Rising but Outcomes Have Not Improved
TRAC: Despite the rising rate of representation, bond grant rates have not improved. During FY 2015 and FY 2016, immigration judges granted bond at 56 percent of these hearings. This fell to 50 percent during FY 2018. Since FY 2018 grant rates have fallen to 48 percent where they have remained for the last three years.

Immigration attorneys face courtroom challenges amid pandemic
Roll Call: Even when courts remain open, to limit personal contact, most procedures are being conducted by video or phone, lending themselves to technical problems that have made it difficult, if not nearly impossible, for lawyers to effectively consult with clients.

Under Threat & Left Out: NYC’s Immigrants And The Coronavirus Crisis
CUF: Immigrant New Yorkers are enduring unprecedented economic pain from the pandemic—and yet they have been almost completely shut out of government programs created for those in need, CUF research and interviews with two dozen nonprofit leaders reveals.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

Supreme Court Upholds DACA, Says DHS’s Decision to Rescind Was Arbitrary and Capricious
On June 18, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that DHS’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, also known as DACA, was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. (DHS v. Regents of the University of California) AILA Doc. No. 20061801

CA2 Remands CAT Claim of Petitioner Who Fled El Salvador After Threats from MS-13 Gang
The court held that the IJ erred as a matter of law in penalizing the petitioner for her prompt flight from El Salvador after members of the MS-13 gang threatened her, and thus remanded her Convention Against Torture (CAT) claim to the BIA. (Martinez De Artiga v. Barr, 6/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061702

Naturalization Applicants File Lawsuit Seeking to Compel USCIS to Conduct Immediate Administrative Naturalizations
The plaintiffs, who have been unable to complete the naturalization process due to the COVID-19 pandemic, filed a class action lawsuit seeking to compel USCIS to conduct immediate administrative naturalizations pursuant to INA §337(c). (Campbell Davis, et al. v. USCIS, et al., 6/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061602

BIA Issues Decision on K-1 Visas and INA §204(c)(2)
The BIA ruled that an individual who has conspired to enter into marriage for the purpose of evading immigration laws by seeking to secure a K-1 fiancé(e) nonimmigrant visa is subject to the bar under INA §204(c)(2). Matter of R.I. Ortega, 28 I&N Dec. 9 (BIA 2020) AILA Doc. No. 20061909

BIA Reverses Finding That Misdemeanor Conviction Was a Particularly Serious Crime
Unpublished BIA decision reverses finding that conviction for third degree assault under N.Y.P.L. 120.00(01) was a particularly serious crime because offense was a misdemeanor unaccompanied by any unusual circumstances. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of G-G-G-, 2/27/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061608

BIA Upholds Termination of Proceedings Based on Regulatory Violation
Unpublished BIA decision upholds termination of proceedings based on DHS’s violation of 8 C.F.R. 287.3(d), which requires ICE to decide within 48 hours of arrest whether to grant bond and issue an NTA. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Pablo-Nicolas, 2/25/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061607

BIA Holds Florida Aggravated Battery Does Not Require Use of Force
Unpublished BIA decision holds that aggravated battery under Fla. Stat. 784.045(b) does not require the use of force because it encompasses simple battery against a pregnant victim. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Campbell, 2/19/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061606

CA1 Finds Salvadoran Petitioner Was Denied Her Statutory Right to Counsel
The court concluded that the IJ had denied the Salvadoran petitioner her statutory right to be represented by the counsel of her choice, and found that the assistance of a lawyer likely would have affected the outcome of her removal proceedings. (Hernandez Lara v. Barr, 6/15/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061905

CA4 Reverses District Court with Instructions to Dismiss Plaintiffs’ Complaints in Travel Ban Case
In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii, the court reversed the district court’s order of May 2, 2019, denying the government’s motion to dismiss, and remanded with instructions to dismiss the plaintiffs’ complaints with prejudice. (IRAP v. Trump, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 17031332

CA5 Upholds BIA’s Denial of Asylum to Petitioner from Trinidad and Tobago Who Alleged Membership in Three PSGs
The court held that petitioner had failed to demonstrate a legal or constitutional error in BIA’s denial of his application for asylum based on membership in three alleged particular social groups (PSGs), including children unable to leave a family relationship. (Alexis v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061704

CA6 Upholds Denial of Asylum to Salvadoran Who Was Found to Be a UAC at Time of Entry
The court held that the IJ had properly exercised jurisdiction over the case of the petitioner, who had entered the United States when he was 18 years old and had been found by an immigration official to be an unaccompanied child (UAC) at the time of his entry. (Garcia v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061811

CA9 Holds Petitioner’s Conviction for Being Under the Influence of Amphetamines in California Rendered Him Removable
The court held that a conviction for being under the influence of a controlled substance in violation of California Health and Safety Code §11550(a) is divisible with respect to controlled substance and thus the modified categorical approach applied and was satisfied. (Tejeda v. Barr, 6/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061913

CA9 Rejects Petitioner’s Equal Protection Challenge to Former Derivative-Citizenship Statute
The court dismissed the petition for review, rejecting the petitioner’s argument that the second clause of INA §321(a)(3) discriminates by gender and legitimacy and thus violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. (Roy v. Barr, 6/4/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061912

CA11 Upholds Denial of Motion to Remand Based on Ineffective Assistance Where Petitioner Did Not Substantially Comply with Lozada
The court held that petitioner had failed to meet the three Lozada requirements for presenting an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, finding that his attorney lacked actual notice of allegations that his assistance had been ineffective. (Point Du Jour v. Att’y Gen., 6/4/20) AILA Doc. No. 20061914

AILA and Partners Send Letter to EOIR on Premature Decision to Resume the Non-Detained Docket
AILA, the Council, CLINIC, HRF, NIJC, and NIPNLG sent a letter to EOIR recommending that the overwhelming majority of non-detained hearings be postponed for the duration of the national public health emergency. Additional recommendations include a moratorium on the issuance of in absentia orders. AILA Doc. No. 20061500

DHS Extends Flexibility in Requirements Related to Form I-9 Compliance
DHS announced that it has extended the flexibilities in rules related to Form I-9 compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic by an additional 30 days. The accommodations, which now expire on July 19, 2020, include discretion to defer physical presence requirements and extension for NOIs served in 3/20. AILA Doc. No. 20032033

DHS Acting Secretary Announces Extension of Border Restrictions
DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf announced that DHS will continue to limit non-essential travel at U.S. land ports of entry with Canada and Mexico due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that DHS’s Canadian and Mexican counterparts agree with the need for this extension. AILA Doc. No. 20042031

DHS Announces Imposition of Visa Sanctions on Burundi
DHS announced that it has imposed visa sanctions on Burundi “due to lack of cooperation in accepting its citizens and nationals ordered removed” from the U.S. As of 6/12/20, the Bujumbura U.S. embassy has discontinued issuance of all NIVs, with exceptions, for Burundian citizens and nationals. AILA Doc. No. 20061903

RESOURCES

• Post-Supreme Court Decision DACA Guidance
• ILRC: Understanding the 2020 Supreme Court Decision on DACA
• ILRC: All Those Rules About Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude (June 2020)
• Practice Alert: Impact of the Supreme Court Decision Blocking DACA Rescission
• Practice Alert: Submitting Initial Evidence and Documentation with Form I-485
• Practice Alert: COVID-19 and the Public Charge Rule
• Practice Alert: Presidential Proclamations Suspending Entry Due to 2019 Novel Coronavirus
• Think Immigration: Fight Back Against Chevron Deference in Asylum and Withholding Cases
• DHS Releases Fact Sheet on Measures on the Border to Limit the Further Spread of Coronavirus
• Bite-Sized Ethics: Dual Representation and Secrets Between Clients
• OIG: CBP Struggled to Provide Adequate Detention Conditions During 2019 Migrant Surge
• COVID-19 IN ICE CUSTODY Biweekly Analysis & Update
• Practice Advisory: Criminal Consequences Updates from the BIA and the Ninth Circuit

EVENTS

Note: Check with organizers regarding cancellations/changes
• 6/22/20 The Supreme Court Ruling on DACA: What the Decision Means and What’s Next
• 6/24/20 I-730 Petition Training
• 6/24/20 Thought Getting an EAD Was Straightforward? Think Again!
• 6/26/20 Our Asylum System at Grave Risk: What You Can Do
• 6/29/20 Climate Change and Migration: Converging issues, diverging funding
• 7/7/20 Winning Withholding of Removal and Convention Against Torture Cases
• 7/15/20 Understanding Motions to Reopen Based on Changed Country Conditions
• 7/16/20-7/30/20 Webinar Series: Navigating Refugee and Asylee Issues in Turbulent Times
• 7/20/20 2020 AILA Virtual Annual Conference on Immigration Law
• 7/22/20 Tax Issues in Immigration Cases
• 7/23/20 Defending Immigration Removal Proceedings 2020
• 7/30/20 How to File a Successful Travel Ban Waiver
• 8/5/20 Unraveling Aggravated Felonies and Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude
• 8/18/20 Strategies for I-601 Waivers in Adjustment of Status Cases
• 8/26/20 Immigration Legal Services in Rural America
• 8/27/20 Crafting a Winning Particular Social Group for an Asylum Case
• 9/14/20 Working with Domestic Violence Immigrant Survivors: The Intersection of Basic Family Law, Immigration, Benefits, and Housing Issues in California 2020
• 9/22/20 Defenses to Denaturalization
• 9/23/20-10/7/20 3-Part Webinar Series: Integrating Technology to Improve Your Immigration Legal Services
• 10/1/20 Representing Children in Immigration Matters 2020: Effective Advocacy and Best Practices

ImmProf

Monday, June 22, 2020
• Immigration Article of the Day: Banished and Overcriminalized: Critical Race Perspectives of Illegal Entry and Drug Courier Prosecutions by Walter Goncalves
Sunday, June 21, 2020
• Will President Trump Make the Supreme Court’s DACA Decision a 2020 Presidential Campaign Issue?
• Immigration Article of the Day: Discriminatory Cooperative Federalism by Ava Ayers
Saturday, June 20, 2020
• “DREAMers” versus the Labels Used in Government Documents and Judicial Opinions in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California by Professor Maritza Reyes
• The Equal Protection Claim in the DACA Cases
• World Refugee Day – June 20, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
• DACA Victory at Supreme Court Is Precarious at Best
• Immigration Article of the Day: Injustice and the Disappearance of Discretionary Detention Under Trump by Robert Koulish
• DACA, College and University Students, and the Future of U.S. Immigration Law
• Guest Post: Minyao Wang, The Supreme Court Decides DACA Rescission Case on Administrative Law Grounds, Avoids Deciding Lawfulness of DACA
Thursday, June 18, 2020
• Responses to Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California
• Breaking News: DACA Lives Another Day: Supreme Court Vacates Rescission of DACA
• Some more good news: DACA recipients and noncitizens win two lawsuits that provide financial assistance
• Proposed rule bars colleges from granting covid-relief funds to DACA recipients [Updated 6/17/20]
• Immigration Article of the Day: Law Enforcement in the American Security State by Wadie Said
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
• From the Bookshelves:Mary Jordan, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump
• Immigration Article of the Day: Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair
• UVA to Enroll Students Regardless of Immigration Status
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
• From The Bookshelves: Dominicana by Angie Cruz
• Immigration and Economic Recovery Symposium
Monday, June 15, 2020
• White House attributing covid-19 increase to travel from Mexico
• Lessons learned in the journey from Prop. 187 to DACA to the Supreme Court
• Supreme Court Denies Cert in United States v. California, State Sanctuary Law Case
• Supreme Court Grants Review in Immigration Detention Case
• DACA Decision Today?
• “Trump is quietly gutting the asylum system amid the pandemic President Trump’s election-year push to foreground immigration is officially in full swing.”

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

Just so we understand the work authorization fraud perpetrated by Trump, currently individuals who seek asylum at ports of entry are “rocketed” to the exceptionally dangerous countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (none of which have a fair or functional asylum system) without any hearing, meaningful inquiry, or a chance to apply for asylum in the U.S. So, no work authorization for them.

Those who recognize the futility of trying to use our now-fraudulent legal system to seek protection might therefore cross the border and turn themselves in to DHS or, if they get to the interior, turn themselves in to USCIS to apply for asylum. They also will be denied work authorization under the latest Trump scheme.

So you, or some Federal Judge actually interested in upholding the law, might ask: “Who gets employment authorization under Trump’s shell game?” The answer: “Pretty much nobody.”

So, you might then ask, isn’t this government fraud, or at least grotesque dishonesty? Of course, but but “it’s only refugees not real humans.” For the most part, courts have allowed Trump, Miller, and company to run roughshod over the legal rights and humanity of migrants, with particular emphasis on looking the other way while refugees, women, and children are abused. So, it’s OK. Until Trump strips you of your humanity without recourse.

As if to punctuate the Constitutional malpractice and moral vapidity of everyone on the Supremes save Justice Sonia Sotomayor, on Saturday Trump headed off to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the worst White-led race massacres in U.S. history, one day after the Juneteenth Celebration of African American liberation in America. Given the timing and the mood in the nation, it appeared to be a rather thinly disguised attempt by Trump to provoke some type of racial confrontation that he thought would benefit him politically.

Failing that, and faced with a smaller-than-expected audience of cultists, Trump turned the evening into a celebration of lies, hate, insults, and racism – denying the reality and justice of the cause of equal justice under law, using an offensive racist slur against Asians, and “joking” about 120,000 dead Americans and his totally incompetent response to COVID-19, to name just a few of his very public and intentional transgressions against our nation and human decency.

America can’t go any further with Trump and the GOP in charge and promoting an agenda of racism, hate, division, and inequality. But, it’s also worth asking how far we can get with eight Justices who are willfully blind to Trump’s obvious racism, his and his lawyers’ lack of honesty and ethics, and the toxic agenda of prolonging and deepening institutional racism in America that he and his supporters so ardently back and, to be frank, only exists because the Supremes and other government institutions have assisted it for more than a century.

Over more than two centuries, America has failed over and over again to deal honestly, ethically, courageously, and realistically with racism. At some point, the failures will become fatal for our republic. A house divided against itself and with rot in its structural integrity cannot stand for much longer.

Those in charge might claim cluelessness; but you should have your eyes open to the pernicious effects of malicious incompetence and systemic racism.

Some day, the full ugly truth of the Trump regime, its unbridled racism, its total dishonesty, its selfishness, its cowardice, its “crimes against humanity,” and our disgraceful national complicity will come out. It always does. Then, those in charge who were derelict their duties and looked the other way in the face of tyranny and needless human suffering will claim “just doing my job” or “how could I have known?” Don’t let them and/or their apologists get away with the “Nuremberg Defense!”  We know; they know! It’s time to end the willful blindness and deal with the truth!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Institutions, Never!

PWS

06-22-20

Related posts:

  1. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  2. CHARLES M. BLOW @ NYT: TIME TO START CALLING IT WHAT IT IS:  “It is time for us to simply call a thing a thing: White supremacy is the biggest racial problem this country faces, and has faced. It is almost always the cause of unrest around race. It has been used to slaughter and destroy, to oppress and imprison. It manifests in every segment of American life.”
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻 “PERP NATION” — DHS’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” IS A DEATH TRAP FOR MIGRANTS SEEKING JUSTICE — So Why Haven’t Congress & The Federal Courts Required DHS To Comply With The Constitution? — Because We Have The Wrong Folks In Congress & The Federal Courts!
  4. 🇺🇸🗽⚖️MORE GOOD NEWS FOR AMERICA AS TRUMP KAKISTOCRACY☠️🦹🏿‍♂️⚰️ FINALLY COMES TO AN END: Biden Will Move Immediately For Sane, Humane, Practical Immigration Policies — Wants To Put Trump’s Cruel, Racist, Stupid Abuses Of Humanity, Common Sense, Rule Of Law, & America’s Immigrant Heritage In The Rear-View Mirror! — Promises Reversal Of DHS’s Role As White Nationalist “Political Police Force”🏴‍☠️☠️ That Beat Up On the Most Vulnerable While Ignoring Real Security Threat Posed By Trump-Inspired Righty Domestic Terrorists!

SPECTACLE @ JUSTICE: POPE BILLY CONVENES  ☠️“CADAVER SYNOD”☠️— Looks to “Exhume” Decade-Old “Dead” Case for Punishment in EOIR Star Chamber!

TOLES ON BARR
Tom Toles on Billy Barr
Cadaver Trial
Jean-Paul Laurens
Pope Formosus & Stephen VI
1870

Pope Formosus died on April 4, 896. But, if he thought his worldly sins had passed on with him, he had not counted on the tenacity of his successor Pope Stephen VI. In 897, “PS-6” had his predecessor’s body dug up and the corpse brought before the Papal Court to answer charges of perjury, violating canon law, and illegally serving as a bishop.

The corpse was dressed and propped up on a throne. Apparently recognizing Formosus’s financial distress and limited mental capacity, PS-6 appointed a church deacon to be the dead Pope’s “mouthpiece.” There are no records, however, of the deacon’s actually consulting with his “client” on a defense strategy. PS-6 vigorously prosecuted the case.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the corpse was found guilty after trial. Formosus was stripped of his vestments, had three fingers cut off his right hand, and was unceremoniously thrown into the Tiber River weighted down with the 9th Century equivalent of “concrete overshoes.”

In a rather ironic twist of fate, the corpse eventually resurfaced and washed ashore. Finally finding the love and devotion that had eluded him in life, as a washed up corpse, Formosus started to perform miracles and became an object of veneration by the people. They turned on PS-6, who was eventually imprisoned and strangled. Perhaps the moral here is “don’t mess with the dead.”

Now, the direct successor to PS-6, Pope Billy the Bigot Barr, has reached back into the reign of King George II of Bush to exhume the corpus of A-M-R-C-, finally laid to rest in the Year of Our Lord 2006, the sixth year of the reign of Bush II. He intends to seek “justice” before the Star Chamber of the EOIR, his private judge, jury, and executioner.

But, watch out Billy, as PS-6 found, even beating up on dead corpses and other vulnerables can be dangerous! Cowardly arrogance and gross abuses of justice, divine or human, can come back to bite even the high and mighty.

The potential for post-mortem perjury prosecutions should be of grave concern to Trump, Billy, Gonzo, “Big Mac” With Lies, Nielsen, Kelly, and a host of other Trump officials. The possibility of post-mortem disbarment for outgoing Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco and his band of truth and decency challenged DOJ lawyers should also haunt their futures, along with the ghosts of the broken bodies, cries of abused children, and souls of those only “crime” was to seek justice in America that they have unjustly maligned, prosecuted, and persecuted  in the name of Trump’s White Nationalism.

Meanwhile, the Jesters of the Papal Court 🤡🤹‍♂️, also known as Article III Judges, continue to watch the spectacle of American justice dying before their eyes while they daily fail to take the strong, courageous, action to end Billy’s Star Chambers! 

An outstanding lecture on “The Cadaver Trial” (and other Great Trials of World History) by Professor Douglas O. Linder of the U. Of Missouri-KC School Law is available on The Great Courses. You can watch the trailer and sign up for a free trial subscription (if not already a member) here.  https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-great-trials-of-world-history-and-the-lessons-they-teach-us “The Cadaver Trial” is among the three Medieval Trails covered in “Lecture #3” and inspired this piece.

The latest on the Strange Saga of A-M-R-C- and the adventures of Pope Billy the Bigot can be found at LexisNexis Immigration Community courtesy of Papal Historian Dan Kowalski.  https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/eoir-posts-case-underlying-matter-of-a-m-r-c-

PWS

06-21-20

Related posts:

  1. 🇺🇸😎⚖️🗽👍🏼LAW YOU CAN USE:  Michelle Mendez and CLINIC Publish A New Practice Advisory on Opening & Closing Statements in Immigration Court
  2. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, “PERPS” ON THE LOOSE! — DOJ Internal Report Shows How “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton Conspired To Separate Migrant Kids In Violation Of 5th Amendment — When Will These Criminals Be Charged & Prosecuted Under 18 USC 242? — NY Times Reports!
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  4. ☠️👎DEATH PANEL: Billy The Bigot’s BIA Spends 34-Pages Stomping Every Aspect Of Claim By Victim Of Trump’s MPP — Matter of M-D-C-V-

TOM PETTY’S FAMILY BLASTS USE OF LATE ROCKER’S SONG “I WON’T BACK DOWN” AT TRUMP’S TULSA HATE RALLY, DEMANDS “CEASE & DESIST” —  “Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together.” 

Tom Petty
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform in concert at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida on July 15, 2008. (UPI Photo/Michael Bush) (Newscom TagID: upiphotos868523) [Photo via Newscom]
Alaa ElassarWriter CNN
Alaa Elassar
Writer
CNN Digital

Alaa Elassar writes at CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/21/politics/tom-petty-trump-cease-and-desist-trnd/index.html

(CNN)The family of the late Tom Petty has filed a cease and desist notice to the Trump campaign after one of the musician’s songs was played at the President’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down” was played on Saturday evening at the rally, which drew a smaller-than-expected crowd of supporters.

“Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind,” the family said in a tweet Saturday.

“Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together,” according to the tweet.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

Good for them!

As my former Georgetown Law Refugee Law & Policy students will remember, I used the lyrics of “Refugee” from “Professor Tom” & The Heartbreakers as a “teaching vehicle” about what it’s really like to be a refugee (something of which Trump and his cult of mindless supporters seem entirely unaware). 

Perhaps a better choice from Tom’s collection, and one more indicative of the true state of our nation and Trump’s recent poll performance would have been Tom’s “Free Fallin’.”

Free Fallin’

by Tom Petty

She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too

It’s a long day living in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy ’cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart

And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’

All the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura boulevard
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts

And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m

I want to glide down over Mulholland
I want to write her name in the sky
Gonna free fall out into nothin’
Gonna leave this world for a while

And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’

Check out the video and get more from Tom here:  

https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/tom-petty/free-fallin

PWS

06-21-20

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IMBECILE ON THE LOOSE — 120,000 Americans Are Dead From COVID-19, & Many More Will Continue To Die As Infections Spike & The Gov. Response Falters — Trump Thinks It’s An Opportunity For A Racist Joke! — Asian Americans & Those Who Lost Loved Ones (Or Both) Might Not “Get” His “Humor” 

Kiddie Gulag
Trump’s Legacy
Kiddie Gulag
Rebeccas Ratcliffe
Rebecca Ratcliffe
SE Asia Reporter
The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/21/global-report-trump-says-he-ordered-coronavirus-testing-to-slow-down?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Rebecca Ratcliffe reports for The Guardian:

Donald Trump told thousands of supporters on Saturday that he had asked US officials to slow down testing for Covid-19 because case numbers in the country were rising so rapidly.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the US president used racist language, referring to Covid-19 as “kung flu”, and described testing for the virus as a “double-edged sword” because it led to the identification of more cases.

The US had now tested 25 million people, far more than other countries, Trump said, adding: “When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”

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A White House official later told Reuters that Trump was joking.

Don’t call it a comeback: Trump’s Tulsa rally was just another sad farce | Richard Wolffe

Across the US, more than 119,654 people are confirmed to have been killed by Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. It remains the country worst hit by coronavirus, followed by Brazil, which now has more than a million cases, and Russia, which has 576,162 infections.

Trump said the “radical fake news” media had not given him credit for doing what he called “a phenomenal job” of responding to the outbreak.

The campaign rally in Tulsa went ahead despite warnings from health officials that it risked fuelling a spike in coronavirus cases. The crowd was smaller than expected, with many empty sections in the 19,000-seat arena, but few attendees wore masks.

Globally, 8,753,853 coronavirus cases have now been recorded and 463,281 fatalities confirmed, according to Johns Hopkins University.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Rebecca’s global report at the link.

This from a dude who 1) has no sense of humor; and 2) lacks any trace of human decency.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-21-20

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LIGHT IN A TIME OF DARKNESS: Humanity & Law in America Probably Had Their Two Best Moments  (LGBTQ Rights & DACA) in Three Years Of Trump’s Darkness — Chief Justice John Roberts Made It Happen — How His  Decision to Stand Up For Dreamers & The Rule of Law Against Trump’s Inhumanity, Cruelty, & Lawlessness is Already Making A Difference in The Lives of American Young People Across Our Broken Nation!

John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts
Theresa Vargas
Theresa Vargas
Reporter
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/behind-defund-the-police-and-abolish-ice-is-a-shared-hope-that-more-dads-make-it-home/2020/06/20/a8c0969a-b28a-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html

Theresa Vargas reports for WashPost:

By Theresa Vargas

June 20 at 10:30 AM ET

Angel Romero was about 8 years old when his bus rides home from school changed.

His family was living in Prince William County in Virginia at the time, and the elementary school student didn’t understand much about the agreement the county had entered into with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He knew only that some of his classmates had arrived home after school and found their parents gone.

“I started worrying if I would have parents when I came home,” he recalls.

On those bus rides home, he would sit with his anxiety until his bus came to his stop.

Some days, he would see his mom and dad standing there, and feel immediate relief that they hadn’t been deported. Other days, his mother would wait alone, because his father had to work at his construction job, and the boy would carry his fears with him until his dad walked in the door.

“It would be really scary not knowing if he was at work — or somewhere else,” the now 21-year-old tells me when we talk on a recent morning. “There is still that subconscious fear that has stuck with me. It’s never gone away.”

In the past week, Romero has been able to celebrate on a personal level two nationally recognized victories: Prince William County’s decision to not renew its 287(g) agreement with ICE and a Supreme Court ruling that blocks President Trump’s attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offers protections to immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

[[Large Virginia county ends immigration enforcement agreement]]

Romero, who is a DACA recipient, stood in front of the Supreme Court on the day that decision was made. At one point, he took a knee and raised a fist in the air. A line of people, who, like him, had worked with the immigrant advocacy group CASA toward that moment, did the same.

It’s a posture that has been seen over and over again in recent weeks as streets across the country have filled with people protesting police brutality and other racial inequities. The push to “Defund the Police,” which has grown from those protests, may seem a distant fight from the effort to “Abolish ICE,” which immigrant rights groups have demanded, but many of the activists who are on the front lines right now, pushing for change, see the two as connected. They see them as two cries in the same battle.

What “Defund the Police” and “Abolish ICE” share is an acknowledgment that bad law enforcement practices, no matter what the badge looks like, unjustly separate families. They leave children not knowing whether their dads (or moms) will make it home, not because of what they did that day, but because of who they are.

Both also directly affect black immigrants.

In rallies that took place before the Prince William County decision, brown hands held white signs declaring “Black Lives Matter.” And in the hours after the Supreme Court decision, black activists called for an end to how the country enforces immigration. The system, which has seen in-custody deaths of adults and children, criminalizes people for entering the country while not providing clear paths to citizenship.

“These movements should be very linked, and I believe they are getting more and more linked as we are fighting together,” says Luis Aguilar, the Virginia state director for CASA. He is a DACA recipient and has spent years working toward seeing Prince William County end its agreement with ICE.

He is also Afro-Mexican. His dad comes from a region of Mexico where runaway slaves settled.

“When I see things like what happened to George Floyd, it goes beyond the personal,” the 33-year-old says of the police-custody killing that has sparked weeks of protests. “It goes to a space where you start thinking about why these things are happening, and you realize that currently society isn’t in a place where it truly respects each person as a human being.”

Aguilar was 15 and living in Falls Church when his father was deported.

“I would not want any other child to experience the results of a broken immigration system,” he says. “I think we owe it to society to fix the system.”

The decision by Prince William lawmakers not to renew its agreement with ICE when it expires at the end of the month received a blip of attention compared with the Supreme Court decision. But it is a significant development for the Washington region. That program changed the county. It created a hostile atmosphere, and not just for undocumented immigrants. It forced Latino families to leave the county and some to avoid calling the police, even when they needed help.

I know this not only from studies that have been conducted over the years, but also from personal observation.

When I came to The Washington Post, it wasn’t as a columnist. I was hired to cover the Prince William County Police Department. I had been in that job less than a year when county lawmakers approved 287(g), which gave law enforcement officials some of the same powers as immigration enforcement agents. They did that despite hearing concerns from the police department that it would erode community trust, prevent immigrants from reporting crimes and require a whole lot of money.

When Corey Stewart was running for a Senate seat, I wrote about what I saw and experienced after the crackdown happened — including how a man yelled at me, “Go back to your country!” — to show the intangible ways in which it failed the community. (And for those who want to point to it as a solution to crime, Prince William Police Chief Barry M. Barnard was recently quoted as saying, “I’m not seeing any hard data where the 287 program has been shown to be the direct cause of any measurable crime reduction.”)

Instead, it left people feeling scared and targeted — and it did that to residents who weren’t even out of elementary school yet.

Angel Romero says for him, “that moment just changed everything.”

“It changed my personality,” he says. “I used to be a really talkative kid, and I had like a switch, where I became very closed off and introverted.”

. . . .

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

Sophie Bolich
Sophie Bolich
Reporter
Madison.com (WI)

https://madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/an-amazing-feeling-of-relief-immigrant-community-cheers-daca-ruling/article_3d3a943b-ef1c-5228-aa44-af5bba8b347f.html?utm_source=BadgerBeat&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=News%20Alerts

Sophie Bolich reports for the Madison.com:

When Sharet Garcia heard the U.S. Supreme Court decided to uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all she could do was cry.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” she said.

As a DACA recipient and founder of the online networking space UndocuProfessionals, Garcia said that the decision came as a shock. “We’re very excited, of course, and very happy…but at the same time, we know there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she said.

In the year since its creation, UndocuProfessionals has garnered a nationwide following. In the past months, it has become a gathering space for DACA recipients — also called DREAMers — to find support through the uncertainty of the approaching decision.

Garcia said she stayed awake into the early hours Thursday morning answering messages from other DREAMers who were anxiously awaiting the results.

“I was there trying to support them in the best way I can,” she said.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, which came after months of anticipation, ruled that the Trump administration improperly ended the DACA program in 2017. The announcement left DREAMers and their loved ones with “an amazing feeling of relief,” said Centro Hispano director Karen Menendez Coller.

It was the second defeat this week for the Trump administration, coming just days after the court ruled in favor of anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQIA+ employees under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“The emotional impact is huge,” Menendez Coller said. “I can’t even describe the burden that this has lifted from so many people in the community.”

Anticipating the court’s decision against the backdrop of the pandemic, she added, was “an incredible load to carry,” noting the financial impact as well as the daily emotional turmoil that DREAMers face.

“You kind of have to put [the worry] at the back of your mind and ignore it,” said a Madison-area DACA recipient, who asked to remain anonymous. At the same time, she said, the thought was always lurking. “At any moment, had the outcome been negative, your whole world is going to change.”

She added that while many people weren’t hopeful about the decision, she was.

“There’s a lot more opportunities that people have had now for eight years,” she said, noting that, since the program’s 2012 inception, DREAMers have started small businesses, graduated college and worked for big companies.

“I think that that’s a big reason why I was like, maybe they’ll think twice about it. And thankfully they did.”

Though she counts the decision as a win, Menendez Collar said that the path to equity is “a long road.” Centro Hispano plans to continue mobilizing and raising funds to assist DREAMers and the undocumented community. They plan to collaborate with the Immigration Office of Affairs and increase the Immigrant Assistance Fund, which is housed at the Madison Community Foundation and helps DREAMers access legal help and cover fees associated with filing DACA applications.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Theresa’s and Sophie’s articles at the respective links above.

Imagine how many lives could be saved and changed for the better and how great America could become as a nation if Chief Justice Roberts and all other Federal Judges could find it within themselves to stand up for the legal, human, and Constitutional rights of refugees, asylum applicants, and migrants in every case challenging the Administration’s systemic, lawless, and invidiously motivated attacks on our legal system and the lives and humanity of the most vulnerable among us?

And, special thanks to Theresa and Sophie for reporting that puts humanity back in the law where it belongs. Without mercy, humanity, fairness, and decency, there can be neither law nor true justice.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-21-20

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JULIA PRESTON @ THE MARSHALL PROJECT: Despite Court Order, Trump Likely To Shaft Some Applicants For DACA Protection

Julia Preston
Julia Preston
American Journalist
The Marshall Project

 https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/19/immigrant-teens-left-out-when-trump-ended-daca-are-in-limbo-after-supreme-court-ruling

Immigrant Teens Left Out When Trump Ended DACA Are In Limbo After Supreme Court Ruling.

The justices ruled the

president illegally suspended

the Dreamers program. But

it’s unclear if Trump will let

more eligible applicants in.

FILED 3:05 p.m. 06.19.2020

pastedGraphic.png

Maria García finished high school in Tempe, Arizona, this May. BRENDA SUGEY GARCÍA MUÑOZ

By JULIA PRESTON

Young immigrants across the country were elated after the Supreme Court’s favorable ruling Thursday for DACA, the program that temporarily shields about 650,000 undocumented people from deportation. But Maria Garcia is not cheering—at least not yet.

Garcia, who is 17 and just finished high school in Tempe, Arizona, has everything needed to be eligible for DACA. She was 4 years old when her Mexican parents sent her across the border with a smuggler—“some random lady,” as she remembers it. She has never been in legal trouble and graduated with a 4.0 grade point average. She is two years older than the program’s lower age limit of 15.

Yet Garcia has not been able to apply for DACA. After President Trump’s decision to cancel the program in 2017, and the court fights that followed, immigrants who already had two-year permits under DACA have been allowed to renew them. But no new applications were accepted.

She is in a cohort of foreign-born teenagers, part of a group sometimes called Dreamers, who turned 15 after the program was terminated on Sept. 5, 2017. They are coming of age without legal papers, facing fears, frustrations and roadblocks that immigrants just a few years older have avoided with DACA. There are about 66,000 of them, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research center, and they could be eligible to apply for DACA after the Supreme Court decision.

But it is not clear that Trump will let them in.

Lawyers are debating the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court found that the Trump administration acted unlawfully in ending the program, failing to follow procedural rules or to take into account the hardships for immigrants who had built their lives around it. The court sent the matter back to the Department of Homeland Security “so that it may consider the problem anew,” and sent three cases back to lower courts for further action.

Trump, who once called DACA holders “incredible kids,” immediately threatened to cancel the program again.

pastedGraphic_1.png

Donald J. Trump

✔

@realDonaldTrump

As President of the United States, I am asking for a legal solution on DACA, not a political one, consistent with the rule of law. The Supreme Court is not willing to give us one, so now we have to start this process all over again.

141K

1:20 PM – Jun 18, 2020

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65K people are talking about this

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, said the ruling “usurps the clear authority of the executive branch to end unlawful programs.” But administration officials issued no guidance on how they planned to proceed.

Some legal scholars argued that the administration is required to restore the program with no delay and begin taking new applications. “The effect of the ruling is we go back to life as it was before September 2017,” said Marisol Orihuela, a professor at Yale Law School.

Others predicted the administration would not accept new applications unless, after further court battles, a judge orders them to re-open the program completely. If Trump moves to end DACA again, bureaucratic procedures and court fights would likely leave the current configuration in place past the election in November.

The legal fog was bewildering to young people who could be receiving DACA’s protections but are still left out.

“What happened is one step,” Garcia said guardedly of the Supreme Court’s ruling, by phone from her home in Phoenix, “but we still have a way to go.”

pastedGraphic_2.png

Reyna Montoya, who lives in Gilbert, Arizona, knows her own DACA permit is preserved for now, but she worries about undocumented students. MATT YORK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Obama administration created DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in 2012, and the program doesn’t grant a formal immigration status. For undocumented immigrants who came here as children, it offers temporary protection from deportation and a two-year, renewable work permit with a Social Security number. But the program removed obstacles many young people faced because of their lack of legal status, opening door after door.

“Within a year, they were already taking giant steps,” said Roberto Gonzales, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied the program since it started. “They found new jobs. They increased their earnings. They acquired driver’s licenses. They began to build credit through opening bank accounts and obtaining credit cards.”

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For Garcia, however, Trump’s cancellation of DACA just when she was old enough to apply was a painful blow.

Aside from her schoolwork, she started running track for her Tempe high school. By senior year she was the school’s top runner, she said. But as she applied to colleges and scholarships, she received only impersonal form letters of rejection because she didn’t have a Social Security number.

“I basically didn’t know where I was going in my life,” she said. “I wanted to give up.”

At the last minute she discovered a scholarship program called TheDream.US, which provides financial aid for college even if students are undocumented. She was approved and plans to attend Arizona State University in the fall, hoping to study aerospace engineering.

As protesters are marching against police brutality and demanding reforms, Garcia said she is even more aware of her fears of government authorities anytime she goes out into the street. To get to school she sometimes has to drive, and with no license because of her immigration status, her anxiety spikes when she sees a police car.

Garcia said she doesn’t fear “being shot and actually dying” in a police encounter. “But we do have that fear of being deported.”

Reyna Montoya, a DACA holder who is 29, created Aliento, an organization in Phoenix that provides support for immigrant youth. More than 500 teenagers who have been shut out of DACA have come to the group for legal and financial help, and solace.

“I feel I can finally catch my breath,” Montoya said on Thursday, knowing her own DACA permit is preserved for now. But she remains surrounded by students “like my past undocumented high school self, who was so sad and depressed about my future.”

One is Milagros Heredia, 18, whose mother carried her across the border to Arizona when she was nine months old. Her mother, Rosa Alcantar, is 36 and has a DACA permit.

pastedGraphic_3.png

Milagros Heredia and her mother, Rosa Alcantar, in 2019. COURTESY OF MILAGROS HEREDIA

Heredia’s childhood was spent in hospitals and chemotherapy after doctors found a large tumor in her brain. Her worry then was the mortification of losing her hair. “Appearances were everything in third grade,” she said.

Doctors determined the tumor was growing but benign. In high school Heredia became an honors student and a leader of a Latinx student organization. Having won a scholarship from TheDream.US, she plans to enroll at Grand Canyon University in August.

She was relieved Thursday to learn that her mother’s DACA permit remains in place. But Heredia still can’t work or drive legally. She has to be careful looking for part-time jobs to help her family.

“You’re never sure who’s with you and who’s against you,” she said.

She’s been watching the police protests in Phoenix. “In the back of my head I always know the police could stop me,” she said, and because of her undocumented status, “I potentially could lose everything.”

Julia Preston covered immigration for The New York Times for 10 years, until 2016. She was a member of The Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico. She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.

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

Always an honor to feature Julia, a “First Ballot Hall of Famer” among journalists, on Courtside. Few in America have done more to show the human side and human effects of immigration law and their inextricable ties to the continuing battle for social justice for all.

One of many great things about retirement is having a chance to get to know the “real persons behind the mastheads and bylines” among immigration and justice reporters. They are right up there with pro bono immigration lawyers and human rights activists among those who embody the very best and most courageous our nation has to offer.

Notwithstanding the Chief Justice’s fantastic claim, incredibly joined by seven of his intellectual-honesty-and-basic-Con-Law-challenged colleagues, that there was no showing of racial animus in the DACA repeal, that is, of course, untrue, as almost any honest observer recognizes. 

Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor had the courage, integrity, and decency to acknowledge the overt bigotry and racism that motivates every Trump immigration policy. It’s almost like the other eight Justices don’t know who Stephen Miller is and what he stands for. Or, they never heard Trump spew out his racist dog whistles at his rallies or on Twitter. Or, they have never compared the faces of those behind Trump at his rallies with pictures of White hate at the Museum of African American History or the pictures from Hitler rallies at the Holocaust Museum. Or, they weren’t able to comprehend Dana Milbank’s recent exposition of Trump’s racism in Trump’s own words. But, of course, they do know all these things. Full well! There’s ignorance. Then there is willful ignorance by those who know better!

Every aspect of the Trump regime’s vicious attack on the legal rights and humanity of migrants has been motivated by an ugly combination of racism, bigotry, White Nationalism, and wanton cruelty. You need to look no further than Trump’s contemptuous, belligerent, and ignorant reaction to the ruling to see that nothing except racism and using Dreamers as “hostages” for race-driven immigration “reforms” was ever behind the attack on DACA. 

For Justices, who are law school grads and members of the bar, to take seriously the regime’s patently bogus claim of prosecutorial illegality (actually rationality) on the part of the Obama Administration from an Administration that has actively chosen not to enforce a myriad of duly enacted environmental, civil rights, voting rights, healthcare, ethics, consumer safety as well as immigration benefits laws while declining to prosecute serious crimes and devoting prosecutorial time to punishing border crossers is, of course, beyond preposterous. The bad faith and dishonesty dripping from Justice Thomas’s absurdist dissent in DHS v. Regents shows why the Court as an institution has become disreputable during the Trump Administration. 

As pointed out by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, https://apple.news/Akv4yN8i5Qv-Rz6r79m_O7Q, Roberts essentially begged Trump to take the time and effort to create some, minimal non-racist, totally bogus but facially rational “pretext” for the termination, so that he and other righty judges would have some “cover” for future votes to uphold or enable invidiously racist policies directed against the Latino and Black communities, as they had dutifully done in the past. He also implicitly suggested that Trump keep his big mouth shut, lock Stephen Miller in the White House basement, and let the Noel Franciscos, Billy Barrs, Cooch Cooches, and other members of Trump’s ethics-and-morality-free “legal team” finish the hatchet job on the Dreamers. Additionally, he hinted that Trump would do well to “bury” this issue till after the election.

I don’t see this regime as giving any quarter to Dreamers. Since their malicious incompetence has bankrupted once-flush USCIS, which they are now, outrageously, “holding for ransom” that the House Dems should refuse, I doubt that Trump will bother to comply with any part of the ruling unless specifically ordered to do so under penalty of contempt in an individual case. Maybe not even then. After all, since his corrupt acquittal by the Senate he has openly advertised that he now is above any law. He’s too busy spreading disease, dismantling the justice system, and trying his hardest along with Billy Barr to provoke racial strife throughout the nation. Why bother with the mere “mechanics” of government of which he knows nothing and cares even less.

Roberts has asked little of an Administration that he has basically allowed to operate outside the law and human morality, for the most part. His “ask” in this case is exceedingly modest. In an earlier case where Trump failed to deliver, Roberts only wanted him not to use perjured testimony of a Cabinet Member as a cover for a racially motivated attack on the census. It’s a mark of the deep contempt in which Trump holds Roberts, judges, the Constitution, the rule of law, and humanity that he has chosen to “spit in the Chief Justice’s face,” not to mention the faces of the many young Dreamers who are our path to a better future as a nation. 

That would be a nation where the likes of Trump, his GOP toadies, and their enablers are banished from power and public office by the voters, forever. And, a nation that eventually achieves a Supreme Court with Justices who uniformly believe in Constitutionally-required “equal justice for all” and enforce it, rather than just looking for ways to skirt and avoid it while disingenuously hiding their misdeeds behind obvious (sometimes even actively solicited) pretexts and obtuse right-wing “philosophies.” The latter are essentially thin intellectual cover for attacks on humanity and looking the other way when the powerful abuse the vulnerable.

We’re a long way from where we need to be as a nation. But, if we don’t get started on the path this November, the “grand American experiment” will come crashing down in a heap. I doubt that this “Clown Show” can continue, even with Supreme complicity as an ally.

PWS

06-20-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎🏻THE TRUMP REGIME & A CORRUPT SOLICITOR GENERAL HAVE CONDUCTED A WAR OF ATTRITION AGAINST AMERICAN LAWYERS ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE BATTLE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY — John Roberts & His GOP Buddies On The Supremes Have Aided, Abetted, & Encouraged It! — Constant Improper & Ethically Questionable Interference With Thoughtful, Legally Correct Lower Court Rulings Holding The Regime Accountable Have Demoralized The Profession’s Best & Bravest! — The Answer Is Better Judges For A Better America!
  4. 🤮NO PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TOWARD MEN (WOMEN, OR ESPECIALLY CHILDREN) FROM REGIME OF “BAD SANTAS” 🦹🏿‍♂️🎅🏻— Illegally Separated Families Continue To Suffer Irreparable Trauma, 😰 Volunteer Groups 😇🗽⚖️ Left To Pick Up Pieces — A Reminder That Defeated Regime Has Mocked, Disparaged, & Trashed Christ’s Values & Assaulted Humanity Over Four Christmases!🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️👎🏻

🏴‍☠️☠️KAKISTOCRACY W/ CRUELTY: TRUMP PROMISES RENEWED RACIST ASSAULT ON DREAMERS — Apparently Inspired By Supremes’ Clearly Erroneous Finding That Original Racist Assault Wasn’t Racist At All!  — Worst Prez in U.S. History Shows Once Again That There’s No End To His Creepy Racist Cruelty, Stupidity, & Willingness to Waste Taxpayers’ Money!

Astrid Galvin
Astrid Galvan
AP Journalist
Deb Riechmann
Deb Riechmann
AP Journalist

https://apple.news/A8axfX18tSJerFjEt643BbA

Astrid Galvin and Deb Riechmann report for AP:

Undeterred by this week’s Supreme Court ruling, President Donald Trump said Friday he will renew his effort to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Trump denounced the high court’s ruling that the administration improperly ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017. Splitting with Trump and judicial conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in the 5-4 vote Thursday.

Through executive action, Trump could still take away the ability for 650,000 young immigrants to live and work legally in the United States. But with no legislative answer in Congress in sight, uncertainty continues for many immigrants who know of no other home except America.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump said, “The Supreme Court asked us to resubmit on DACA, nothing was lost or won. They “punted”, much like in a football game (where hopefully they would stand for our great American Flag). We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly.”

Ken Cuccinelli, acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Friday that the administration was starting over. “We’re going to move as quickly as we can to put options in front of the president,” but those are executive branch options, he told “Fox & Friends.”

“That still leaves open the appropriate solution which the Supreme Court mentioned and that is that Congress step up to the plate,” he said.

Cuccinelli said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., made some positive comments in that direction on Thursday so the administration thinks it’s possible for a constructive conversation with Congress. But experts say there isn’t enough time to knock down the 8-year-old program before the November election and doubt the government would try because DACA is popular with voters.

Trump’s tweet on Friday was less confrontational than the one on Thursday when he slammed the high court ruling. “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.” He apparently was referring to DACA and an earlier ruling this week where the court said it’s illegal to fire people because they are gay or transgender.

Activists are vowing to keep fighting for a long-term solution for young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States when they were children. They not only face a White House that’s prioritized immigration restrictions but a divided Congress that is not expected to pass legislation giving them a path to citizenship anytime soon.

The court decision still elicited surprise, joy and some apprehension from immigrants and advocates who know it’s only a temporary solution.

“This is a huge victory for us,” Diana Rodriguez, a 22-year-old DACA recipient, said through tears.

Rodriguez, who works with the New York Immigration Coalition, said she hasn’t been to Mexico since she was brought to the U.S. at age 2. The ruling means young immigrantscan keep working, providing for their families and making “a difference in this country,” she said.

But the work isn’t over, Rodriguez said: “We can’t stop right now, we have to continue fighting.”

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, appeared satisfied to let the court’s decision stand as the law of the land for now.

While Republicans protested that now, if ever, was the time for Congress to clarify the immigration system, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear that Democrats were done with their legislation before the summer break and had little interest in meeting GOP demands to fund Trump’s long-promised border wall as part of any comprehensive immigration overhaul.

“There isn’t anybody in the immigration community that wants us to trade a wall for immigration,” she said.

Pelosi was reminded that Trump has said he wants immigration reform. “We’ll see,” she said, noting how few days remain on the legislative calendar. “I don’t know what the president meant — maybe he doesn’t either.”

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden said that if elected, he would send lawmakers proposed legislation on his first day in office to make DACA protections permanent.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Right now, Mark Joseph Stern’s prediction @ Slate that the Supremes’ failure to call out the Trump Administrations’s unconstitutional racial bias will come back to haunt America is looking pretty accurate. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/john-roberts-daca-racist-policies-equal-protection.html

There will be no racial reconciliation, equality, and equilibrium in the U.S., nor will our nation reach its full potential, until Trump and the GOP are permanently expelled from power the power they have so grotesquely and dishonestly abused.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-19-20

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. WASHPOST:  TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DACA RECIPIENTS SERVE ON THE FRONT LINES OF OUR PANDEMIC RESPONSE — Trump & His Supremes Add Insult To Injury! — America’s New “Dred Scottifyers”
  4. JULIA PRESTON @ THE MARSHALL PROJECT: Despite Court Order, Trump Likely To Shaft Some Applicants For DACA Protection

VOX IMMIGRATION REPORTER NICOLE NAREA CONTINUES  TO WIN PRAISE FOR HER ANALYSIS — ImmigrationProf Blog Highlights Nicole’s “Trenchant Criticism” of Regime’s Outrageous Proposal to Repeal Asylum Protections by Regulation!

Nicole Narea
Nicole Narea
Immigration Reporter
Vox.com

 

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2020/06/trump-is-quietly-gutting-the-asylum-system-amid-the-pandemic-president-trumps-election-year-push-to-.html

Dean Kevin Johnson writes on ImmigrationProf Blog:

Nicole Narea on Vox has a trenchant criticism of the asylum rules proposed by the Trump administration last week.  Here is the the criticism in a nutshell:

“The Trump administration has proposed a regulation that would deliver its biggest blow to the US asylum system yet, vastly expanding immigration officials’ authority to turn away migrants. If enacted, it would all but close America’s doors to asylum seekers — a signature policy for a president desperately trying to rally his base in an election year.

The regulation, which was announced Wednesday, would allow immigration officials to discard asylum seekers’ applications as “frivolous” without so much as a hearing, and make it impossible for victims of gang-related and gender-based violence to obtain protection in the US. It would also refuse asylum to anyone coming from a country other than Canada or Mexico, or who does not arrive on a direct flight to the US, as well as anyone who has failed to pay taxes, among other provisions.

President Donald Trump has been working to dismantle the asylum system for years, but this latest regulation is part of an election-year push to curtail immigration. In recent months and under the pretext of responding to the coronavirus pandemic, his administration has closed the US-Mexico border, begun rapidly returning asylum seekers arriving on the southern border to Mexico, and issued a temporary ban on the issuance of new green cards — policies that are now being challenged in court.”

The 30 day public comment period starts on June 15.

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

Nicole cuts through the BS and exposes 160+ pages of the regime’s legal gobbledygook, evil intent, and White Nationalist racism for exactly what it is. No surprise for those of us who have been avid readers of Nicole’s outstanding reporting, first at Law360 and now at Vox News. 

Keep on the story, Nicole! Don’t let the White Nationalist kakistocracy continue to hide their vile and unconstitutional program directed against asylum seekers of color behind a barrage of opaque legalese! 

Following the Supreme’s lifeline to Dreamers, some commentators are heralding the triumph of the “rule of law” over Trump. That’s total wishful thinking. It’s great that the Court got a couple of cases right this week. Lives saved are lives saved. That’s actually what they are supposed to do all the time.

Meanwhile, the existence of Remain in Mexico, misuse of COVID-19 to return asylum seekers to potential death, baby jails, kids in cages, family separation, the New American Gulag, Star Chambers in the DOJ that call themselves “courts,” and the elimination of the legal immigration system without legislation show just how ineffectual the Article III Courts have been overall in enforcing due process, equal justice, and human rights in the face of Executive tyranny and grotesque misfeasance. 

The folks who launched these fantastically illegal and disingenuous proposals to eliminate asylum, harm, and kill vulnerable individuals deserving protection largely based on White Nationalist racial animus obviously have deep disrespect not only for the rule of law but for humanity as a whole. That they they can get away with it and continue to openly promote their false and illegal agenda shows how little the Article III Courts actually have done to stem the unconstitutional tide of irrational, race-based actions by a thoroughly corrupt Administration over the past three years.

Ask folks rotting in Mexico, orbited to torture without hearings, separated from their family members, suffering in squalor and disease in the Gulag for no crime, or watching their chance to immigrate legally go down the drain how that “rule of law” is working out for them. Until the Article III Courts as an institution confront the real problems here: Trump’s dishonesty, White Nationalism, xenophobia, and institutional racism, all of which violate the Constitution, the “rule of law” will only be a reality for some. America deserves better from our Article III judges. I can only hope that some day we will get it.

PWS

06-19-20

 

Related posts:

  1. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. 👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!
  4. PURE BS 💩 — TRUMP’S “BIG LIE” ABOUT MIGRANT APPEARANCES FOR HEARINGS BOGUS AS $3 BILL 🤮👎🏻— Replacing DHS/EOIR With Rational, Qualified, Fact-Based Governance & Real Judiciary Could Bring Appearance Rate Close To 100%!  — Two Items From ImmigrationProf Blog!

1ST CIR. — EOIR’S SCOFFLAW “HASTE MAKES WASTE” DENIALS OF COUNSEL UNDER BARR WILL BUILD BACKLOG  — Hernandez-Lara v. Barr

Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

Dan Kowalski reports for Lexis Nexis Immigration Community:

CA1 on Right to Counsel: Hernandez Lara v. Barr

Hernandez Lara v. Barr

“Hernandez petitions for review on multiple grounds, but we need decide only one. Concluding that the IJ denied Hernandez her statutory right to be represented by the counsel of her choice, we grant the petition, vacate the BIA’s decision, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this decision.”

[Hats way off to Sang Yeob Kim and Eloa J. Celedon, with whom Harvey Kaplan, Gilles Bissonnette, Henry Klementowicz, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, and Celedon Law were on brief, for petitioner; Deirdre M. Giblin, Iris Gomez, and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute on brief for Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, American Immigration Lawyers Association New England Chapter, Boston College Law School Immigration Clinic, Boston University Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston, Catholic Social Services of Fall River, Central West Justice Center, DeNovo Center for Justice and Healing, Greater Boston Legal Services, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts, MetroWest Legal Services, The Northeast Justice Center, Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Immigration Law Clinic, amici curiae!]

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

Read the full decision and you will see how under Barr’s White Nationalist “leadership,” the EOIR ignores not only constitutionally required due process, the statutory right to counsel, but also prior BIA precedent to screw (largely Latino) asylum seekers. The First Circuit recognizes the correct standards. But, I’ll wager they aren’t being applied in most of the unrepresented cases now being railroaded through the Immigration Courts. Nobody in charge is doing anything to stop the systemic, invidiously racially motivated unfairness.

We’re still a long way from enforcing the Constitution and eliminating unconstitutional racism, including specifically the Government’s vile attacks on Latino and other asylum applicants. 

While thankfully Chief Justice Roberts saved lives and futures today, he and seven of his colleagues also ignored the facts to endorse the Trump regime’s institutional racism targeting Latinos with various assaults on immigration laws, due process, and human decency. His protestations to the contrary as he and his colleagues brushed off the obvious Equal Protection violations that would have been proved fail the “straight face test.”  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/john-roberts-daca-racist-policies-equal-protection.html.

Indeed, that Roberts found that the Administration acted without rational explanations as required by the APA in and of itself basically shows that there were “other motivations” for the actions. I’m not sure the “prime movers” behind the “Screw Dreamers” policy even know what the APA is. Sessions’s “legal analysis” that was nothing of the sort — as observed by some lower courts — could have been written by a sixth grader.

Sadly, only Justice Sonia Sotomayor had the intellectual honesty and courage to speak truth on the continuing racism of Trump and the GOP and how it is being enabled by her colleagues on the Supremes.

Whatever progress members of the the public might think they are making on achieving racial justice isn’t reflected in the continuing insultingly intellectually dishonest actions of many of those who lead and control our Government. They obviously believe that with a few cosmetic (at best) changes this moment will pass, as have other efforts to make the Constitution a reality for all in America.

Then they can resume the same abuses and disingenuous claims that institutional racism no longer exists in a system where it is deeply and intentionally ingrained. But, the folks who are victimized by it might continue to differ with this bogus view. Since, as we have recently learned, they are often the ones who have and continue to prop up our society, that’s going to be a long-term problem for future generations.

We’ll never get to equality without regime change. Nor will be get to a better Federal Judiciary who will make the Constitutional guarantee of elimination of racial injustice a priority and a reality without an Executive, a Senate, and more judges who really believe in it. Until then, those who believe in racial justice will have to continue the battle in the trenches. Denial of the reality of racism in America won’t change it, no matter what the majority of the Supremes might claim to think.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-18-20 

Related posts:

  1. ⚖️🗽🧑🏽‍⚖️COURTS OF APPEALS CONTINUE TO THROW ROTTEN TOMATOES 🍅 @ BIA’S ANTI-ASYLUM BIAS — Basic Analytical, Legal Errors Continue From Weaponized, Non-Expert “Star Chamber” ☠️ Posing As ”Tribunal!” — Judge Garland Must Fix This Inexcusable, Unnecessary, Systemic Failure Now! — Justice For Persons Of Color & Migrants Can’t “Wait For Godot!”
  2. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻AMERICAN INJUSTICE: A COURT SUPREMELY WRONG FOR OUR TIME: Justices Who Oppose Equal Justice For All, View Refugees & Asylum Seekers As Subhuman, Are Incapable Of Consistent Moral Leadership, & Willingly Participate In & Hollowly Attempt To Justify The Bullying Of “The Other” Are Fueling America’s Race To The Bottom Under Trump! — “They believe these people do not deserve an iota of sympathy, let alone due process. That is already how many border agents viewed these immigrants: not as humans with rights, but as fraudulent parasites. The Supreme Court has now transformed that vision into law—and, in the process, allowed the executive to send more persecuted people to their deaths without even a meaningful day in court.”
  3. 🇺🇸😎⚖️🗽👍🏼LAW YOU CAN USE:  Michelle Mendez and CLINIC Publish A New Practice Advisory on Opening & Closing Statements in Immigration Court
  4. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!