"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
“At Some Point the Country Is Going to Have to Wake Up”: James Clyburn on the Floyd Killing and The Role of Race In The Coming Election
Chris SmithMay 29, 2020
Clyburn, who helped hand Biden his presumptive nomination, talks about Biden’s “you ain’t black” and V.P. possibilities, and why this moment is defined by “raw politics and meanness.”
by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images.
James Clyburn grew up in a segregated South Carolina. He is now the longest-serving member of the state’s congressional delegation and the highest-ranking black Democrat in the House. In February, Clyburn basically saved Joe Biden’s presidential bid, endorsing Biden three days before South Carolina’s pivotal primary and helping deliver the decisive black vote. On Thursday evening, just after landing in his home state for a weekend visit, the 79-year-old Clyburn talked about holding on to his optimism in the wake of yet another brutal killing of a black man by police.
Vanity Fair: What was your reaction when you saw the video of a Minneapolis cop kneeling on the neck of George Floyd?
James Clyburn: I don’t know that I would describe my emotion as anger. I guess I should be angry. Maybe at my age, and as many of these kinds of things as I’ve experienced, you get to the point where you say, but for the video, I would not have seen it; other people would not have seen it; and the official word would be all anyone knew. I do feel, though, that at some point the country is going to have to wake up to this reality.
What do you tell black Americans, particularly young black male Americans, who say the country is long past the point when it should have awakened, and that the reality is just racism and hatred?
Going back to the student movement and the civil rights movement, I’ve really questioned many times whether or not what we were doing made any real sense. Whether there was any possibility of success. But along with people like John Lewis, who I met in October 1960, he’s held on to his faith in the country, and I’ve held on to mine. I went to jail several times. I ran for office three times before I got elected. You don’t give up. You aren’t going to win by giving up.
by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
The four Minneapolis police officers have been fired. Should they be tried for murder?
They certainly should stand trial. The hand of one is the hand of all, so four people need to be on trial.
In a conference call with House leaders two days after Floyd’s death, you talked about it being a symptom of larger problems that plague minority communities, and that it showed the need for systemic change. What did you mean?
I have been saying for a long time now that so much in this country needs to be restructured. Health care, education, the judicial system. Every time these issues are raised, folks on the Republican side find a way to parse the words and turn it to their agenda, and they get accommodated by too many people in the media. When we first started discussing the CARES Act, I said to my caucus, in a Zoom call, that this was a tremendous opportunity for us to restructure things in our vision. My vision comes from the pledge of allegiance: liberty and justice for all. That remains a vision—but we’re not doing much to make that vision a reality. Mitch McConnell goes on the floor of the Senate and calls me out, as if there’s something nasty about my vision. He never asked me what my vision was. I’ve got it on billboards all over Charleston: “Making America’s Greatness Accessible and Affordable for All.” What’s wrong with that? And that’s been weaponized by the other side as something untoward. It’s ideology, it’s raw politics, and meanness. That’s why we can’t fix these things.
Do you think the Floyd killing will end Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s chances of being picked as Joe Biden’s running mate?
It certainly won’t help. But it’s not just this. Her history with similar situations when she was a prosecutor came up time and again during the campaign. I suspect this incident plays into that.
You said you cringed when Biden told a radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”
I compare Joe Biden to the alternative, not the Almighty. One of the things I learned early in this business is that one of the worst things you can do in politics is to make a joke out of any serious matter. He would have been better off not doing that.
Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who happens to be black, said that Biden’s remark showed him to be “condescending and arrogant.”
I’ve known Joe Biden for a long, long time. I don’t perceive anything about him to be arrogant. Tim Scott supports [Donald] Trump, and I don’t. If he can reconcile his blackness with Trump, that’s fine. I can’t reconcile mine with Trump. I’ll never ever accept the president of the United States looking into a camera and calling a black woman a dog. I will never get over that. Nothing else he says will matter to me. And he said that not about one of his opponents—that was about one of his staffers! Who supported him! I have three daughters, and I know how I’d feel about any man calling one of them a dog.
With his attacks on former president Barack Obama, among other things, it’s clear that Trump is going to play the race card in his reelection campaign. Do you worry about the tensions becoming dangerous, or is it better to have the issue out in the open?
I think we’re in much better shape for it to be out in the open than for it to be hidden under a bushel. That’s what happened in 2016. The whole thing about African American males responding to Trump saying, “What do you have to lose?” I know from my visits to barber shops that it resonated. But if you fool me once, that’s on you. If you fool me twice, that’s on me. If black men allow themselves to be fooled twice, it’s on them. Four years later, if it ain’t clear what they have to lose, if they can’t count up their losses with Trump, ask them to ask me.
You have said that it isn’t “a must” for Biden to pick a black woman as the vice presidential nominee. Why not?
I remember Sarah Palin. She was fine until it turned out the vetting hadn’t been thoroughly done. I remember Geraldine Ferraro. She was fine. It was her husband that got exposed during the campaign. So if I say it’s a must and something turns up in the vetting, what does that make me? I’m never going to say it’s a must for him to choose a black woman. It would be a plus.
Are you confident that black turnout will be high enough to win no matter whom Biden chooses?
I don’t know about that. Black voters are incentivized already. You can always stimulate the vote. There are picks that could energize the vote.
If Biden said, “Jim, I’ll choose whomever you want,” what would say?
I’m not gonna tell you! But I would tell him.
There’s a tremendous amount of outrage right now about the George Floyd and the Ahmaud Arbery killings. But unfortunately, we’ve seen this cycle many times before, where attention fades after a few weeks.
I think something’s going to be different about this. After the Minneapolis killing, I saw the Minnesota attorney general on TV. For the first time in the state’s history, that attorney general is African American. Also Muslim. That, to me, helps set this whole issue on a different plane. Minneapolis had issues with the former mayor and the police. This mayor says he’s calling for these men to be indicted. To me, that’s progress in something all of us need to work on. You can’t take these things in silos. I’m a history guy. I’ve been studying this country’s history pretty much all my life. It’s pretty sordid in some areas. But that history ought to inform us. Everybody’s not going to learn the lessons. The ones who learn, you hope they change the world.
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Our country can’t get to the better future we need with horrible, unqualified, bigoted leaders like Trump, Pence, Mitch, et al.
One of the most unhelpful of our failed institutions: A Supreme Court that has abandoned the courageous heritage of Brown v. Board of Education and instead encouraged, embraced, aided, and abetted the “Dred Scottification of the other” by a corrupt, bigoted, racist, overtly White Nationalist Executive and his equally corrupt cronies and toadies.
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
That’s because the pretense was nonsense from the start. Trump’s regulatory agenda was never about helping the economy; it was always about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. White House officials have weaponized the “administrative state” they claim to hate and have repeatedly tried to strangle disfavored groups with regulations and red tape.
Not just Twitter, either.
Arbitrary delays in processing visa applications, for example, have been used to punish immigrants and the companies that employ them. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has rejected visa applications because applicants lack a middle name. It has also waited to mail approved visas until (oops!) after the visas had already expired.
The additional costs and uncertainty these processing changes create for workers and their employers are a feature, not a bug.
Elsewhere, both federal and state officials have ratcheted up bureaucratic hurdles for the poor, as Georgetown University professors Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan have documented.
Right now, for example, states can decide a poor family is automatically eligible for food assistance if the family is enrolled in other means-tested safety-net programs. The Trump administration is trying to block states from doing this, and require more paperwork to prove eligibility. By the administration’s own calculations, this would cause 1 million children to lose their automatic eligibility for free school lunches.
The administration, of course, argues that its regulatory decisions are determined not by Trump’s political whims but by meticulous analysis of what’s best for the economy.Helpfully, a method exists to check their work: the cost-benefits analysis that agencies must produce ahead of major rule changes.
These records show, however, that the administration has repeatedly struggled to prove that its regulatory actions actually increase economic and social welfare.
To get the numbers to work out in its favor, the administration has had to cook the books.
. . . .
The only upside to this slapdash math is that it makes the administration’s most damaging and punitive regulatory changes less likely to hold up in court. Already, the Trump administration has lost more than 90 percent of the legal challenges to its regulatory policies, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. By comparison, previous administrations lost only about 30 percent of the time.
“A lot of these losses have been because of the poor quality of the analysis — who’s harmed, who’s helped, by how much,” said Richard Revesz, a law professor who directs the institute.
The only thing that may save us from the administration’s regulatory vindictiveness is its incompetence.
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Read the rest of Catherine’s article at the link.
As usual, Catherine’s analysis is “spot on.” My problem is this.
If the same private litigant and his or her lawyers kept presenting Federal Courts with false, misleading, or just plain faked evidence and statistics, the private lawyers likely would be facing discipline or disbarment for failure to provide “candor to a tribunal.” The client would be facing large penalties and likely contempt for continuing to institute or cause frivolous litigation.
Yet, except for occasional “harsh but toothless” language in judicial opinions or a couple of minor fines, Trump, his sycophantic toadies, and his battery of unethical Government lawyers get off scot-free for abusing the Article III Judiciary and our legal and judicial processes. Meanwhile, the private litigants are forced to file the same challenges over and over again in different jurisdictions across the country. In the area of immigration, asylum, and human rights, most of the lawyers are donating their time pro bono, while the unethical Government attorneys and their corrupt clients are on the taxpayer’s dime.
The occasional Equal Access to Justice Act award against the Government seldom comes close to compensating private lawyers for their actual lost time and lost opportunities. Nor does it deter the Trump regime, because it comes out of “you of the taxpayers’” pocket.
A Federal Judge demands accurate statistics from DHS after private litigants show the last batch was bogus; the DHS merely submits another set of bogus or misleading data, forcing the private litigants to once again have to demonstrate their unreliability. Government officials and their attorneys claim, contrary to fact, that there is no “child separation” policy, but suffer no consequences other than to be told to stop violating the Constitution. Instead of doing that, they “repackage” unconstitutional child separation as a bogus “parental choice.” So, now the private litigants, who have already won once, have to show that the latest iteration of a clearly illegal and contemptuous policy is what it is: unlawful.
A Federal Judge orders they DHS to make individualized release determinations for detainees held in overcrowded substandard conditions that violate the Government’s own health guidance. Instead of doing that, the DHS merely moves them to another, slightly less crowded facility with equally bad conditions and falsely claims they have “fixed” the problem. Again, the private litigants have to gather new evidence that the move has not materially reduced the health risks to the clients. And so on.
Essentially, the Trump regime and their lawyers are playing a big game of “hide the ball;” every time the private advocates show the Federal Judge where the ball actually is hidden, the Government simply moves it again. And, unfortunately, most Federal Judges give the regime and its ethics-challenged lawyers unlimited “plays” at the expense of the other side. Even when relief is ordered, it just solves the “problem of the moment” rather than halting the pattern of ethical abuses, contemptuous attitudes, and unlawful conduct by the regime and its complicit lawyers.
In effect, the regime has “weaponized” the Federal Courts and the Article III Judiciary in a way not dissimilar from how Sessions and Barr have “weaponized” the Immigration Courts. Turning the Article III Courts into a feckless “runaround” where the individuals and their lawyers “lose even when they win” makes the process punitive and serves as a deterrent to those seeking to challenge the regime’s overtly lawless agenda.
The November election is the chance to throw a scofflaw regime out of office. But, the deep-seated institutional and integrity problems of an Article III Judiciary, beginning with the dangerously complicit and spineless in the face of tyranny “Roberts Court,” that has allowed itself to be “weaponized” and used by the army of authoritarian scofflaws to punish those seeking to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law won’t be solved so quickly. The Article III Judiciary requires an institutional re-examination and a philosophical and ethical overhaul so that it serves the Constitution, due process of law, and equal justice for all, rather than protecting the interests of an insular right-wing minority that seeks nothing less than the disintegration of our nation and our cherished democratic institutions.
A.G. Sessions To Citizens Who Suffered Police Brutality: Go Pound Sand! — Busting Criminals, Deporting Migrants, Policing Tech Employers Takes Precedence Over Civil Rights Protections For African Americans — Baltimore Police Reformers Forced To “Stand Alone” After DOJ Pulls The Rug Out From Underneath Them!
Lynh Bui and Peter Hermann report in the Washington Post:
“BALTIMORE — After the federal government released a searing 163-page report in August condemning police practices in Baltimore, the police commissioner and mayor stood with Justice Department leaders to promise sweeping reform.
Change was necessary, they all said, not only to prevent riots like those that flared after the fatal injury of Freddie Gray in police custody, but also to repair the long-standing, deep rift between the city’s crime-weary residents and its police.
Nine months later, Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner again appeared before television cameras committing to overhaul the department.
But this time they stood by themselves.
“I’m asking the citizens of Baltimore to have faith that we will continue this work,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (D) said Tuesday. “It’s hard to deny that these kinds of reforms don’t need to take place in the city of Baltimore.”
On January 12, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Justice Dept. reached a deal for sweeping reforms to the Baltimore Police Dept. after a federal review found officers routinely violated residents’ civil rights. (Reuters)
The pledge to move ahead came hours after the Justice Department had asked a federal judge Monday night to postpone the department’s tentative police reform agreement with the city — part of a wider review of pacts nationwide ordered by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The Baltimore consent agreement was announced days before President Trump took office and awaits a federal judge’s approval.
The request for a delay, which a judge has yet to rule on, left some Baltimore leaders and residents worried that momentum will wane and leave the city stuck in a familiar loop of unfulfilled promises.
Interim city solicitor David Ralph would not comment Tuesday on whether the city would file a response to the requested delay.
“It seemed clear that Justice was going ahead with these reforms, and now all of a sudden they don’t want to do it,” said Rebecca Nagle, co-director of the No Boundaries Coalition, a resident-led advocacy group.
The coalition helped organize residents to relay their experiences with city police to the Justice Department team that produced the August report, which concluded that the police department engaged in unconstitutional policing that discriminated against black residents in poor communities through illegal searches, arrests and stops for minor offenses.
“Residents invested two years doing this, and not going forward will destroy the trust that has built up,” Nagle said.
In Sessions’s two-page memo ordering the review of open and pending consent decrees, he said the department wants to guarantee the pacts are in line with Trump administration goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.
“The Federal government alone cannot successfully address rising crime rates, secure public safety, protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public, or implement best practices in policing,” the memo stated. “These are, first and foremost, tasks for state, local and tribal law enforcement.”
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Now, I might only be a retired Immigration Judge, not a civil rights expert. But, even I can tell that if “state and local law enforcement” could solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.
In fact, until former Attorney General Lynch and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division intervened, state and local authorities had done their best to cover up the problems and avoid solving them. (And, I’m by no means a fan of Lynch. She was appropriately very interested in vindicating the civil rights of African Americans. But, she wasn’t interested in the human rights of mostly Hispanic women and children fleeing Central America. She aided and abetted a system of detention of such asylum applicants under deplorable conditions and hustling their cases through the U.S. Immigration Courts, in too many cases without full due process or even an opportunity for a fair hearing.)
No, what Sessions really means is that he has no interest whatsoever in helping the African American community vindicate their civil rights if it means clamping down on police abuses. After all, look at the “bang up” job that Session’s home state, Alabama, did on protecting its African American citizens from police abuses for most of the 20th Century. Who could ask for more? Or, perhaps we should get a “second opinion” from Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) who had his head split open by one of Sessions’s “police heroes,” an Alabama State Trooper.
That’s what often happens when the Feds rely on states and localities to vindicate citizen’s constitutional rights against the state’s own abuses. Classic “fox guarding the chicken coop.” Sort of like having Jeff Sessions protecting the rights of minorities and migrants. Yeah, the Birmingham Bridge incident was in 1965. But, Sessions and his gang have every intention of turning the clock back to those “glory days” of state’s rights.
Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was “silenced” on the Senate floor for “disparaging” a colleague, Senator Sessions, by putting the truth about his tone-deaf record on civil and human rights “in the record.” But, silenced or not, Warren spoke truth about Session’s unsuitability to serve as Attorney General. Sadly, African Americans, Hispanics, members of the LGBT community, and migrants are likely to find out first hand that “he’s still the same ol’ Jeff.”
PWS
04-04-17
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The George Floyd tragedy became largely inevitable the day a GOP-controlled Senate approved the stunningly unqualified 21st Century Jim Crow Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions to be Attorney General. The results have been disastrous for America and particularly cruel and tragic for people of color.
Also, as a nation, we need to come to grips with the failure of our Supreme Court. The Supremes’ GOP majority has enabled, encouraged, and embraced the Trump regime’s “Dred Scottification” of “the other.”
They have disgracefully and improperly failed to set a legal and moral tone condemning racist abuses, kids in cages, gross mistreatment of legal asylum seekers, and blatantly biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Courts” that parody and mock justice every day. The Supremes have enabled GOP schemes to erode minority voting and political power and have shown a willingness bordering on enthusiasm to accept bogus security-related “pretexts” for racism, religious intolerance, and abuse of authority by Trump and his cronies!
Unwarranted favoritism toward unethical Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco is also a glaring, inexcusable problem. America’s future depends on a more diverse, courageous, humane, and “connected with reality” Supreme Court; a Court that rejects bogus right-wing legal nonsense; a Court that solves problems, upholds individual legal rights, insists on “equal justice for all,” and holds the Executive fully accountable for intentional abuses of authority.
This November, vote like you life and the survival of our democratic republic depend on it! Because they do!
DOJ memo offered to buy out immigration board members
The buyouts were only offered to Board of Immigration Appeals members hired before Trump took office
The Justice Department memo came from the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, a Justice Department agency. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
The Justice Department offered buyouts to pre-Trump administration career members on its influential immigration appeals board as part of an ongoing effort to restructure the immigration court system with new hires who may be likely to render decisions restricting asylum.
An internal memo viewed by CQ Roll Call shows that James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, offered financial incentives to longtime members of the Board of Immigration Appeals to encourage them to retire or resign. The buyouts and “voluntary separation incentive payments” were offered to “individuals whose positions will help us strategically restructure EOIR in order to accommodate skills, technology, and labor markets,” according to the April 17 memo.
EOIR is the Justice Department agency that oversees the Board of Immigration Appeals, a 23-member body that reviews appealed decisions by immigration judges and sets precedent.
According to two knowledgeable sources at EOIR who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, the memo was sent to the nine board members appointed under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, before Trump took office. No one accepted the buyout offers, according to both sources.
CQ Roll Call reached out for comment on the memo to McHenry, EOIR and the Justice Department and received a statement Wednesday saying that “the Department does not comment on personnel matters.”
“Any insinuation that politicized hiring has become ramped up is inconsistent with the facts,” the statement said.
The memo sheds light on an ongoing debate over BIA hiring. Immigration judges, lawyers and former EOIR employees say the Trump administration has used the board to help meet its goal of reducing immigration, while government officials say they have simply streamlined a lengthy hiring process that was always subject to political judgments.
In October, CQ Roll Call reported on documents showing the Justice Department had tweaked the hiring process to fill six new vacancies on the board with immigration judges with high asylum denial rates and a track record of complaints. Additional memos that CQ Roll Call wrote about earlier this month shed further light on these rule changes that enabled fast-tracking of those and more recent hires.
The three most recent hires to the board include an immigration judge who denied 96 percent of the asylum requests before him and had a history of formal complaints about “bias and prejudice.” The vacancies were created after a flurry of career board members left the BIA.
“EOIR does not select board members based on prohibited criteria such as race or politics, and it does not discriminate against applicants based on any prohibited characteristics,” the Justice Department said in its statement. “All board members are selected through an open, competitive, merit-based process that begins with a public advertisement on the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) federal employment website.”
Recent changes to EOIR hiring procedures “have made the selection process of board members more formalized and neutral,” the department said.
While buyouts are typically offered to soften the blow of workforce reductions, the two sources at EOIR said the agency’s offers were made so that the BIA could be reconfigured entirely, with the positions of “board members” replaced by those of “appellate immigration judges.” The differences go beyond title, extending to pay ranges and leave policy. Appellate immigration judges also hear cases at both the trial and appellate levels, creating potential conflicts of interests.
“Many board members have viewed themselves as appellate immigration judges for years, and EOIR first proposed such a designation in 2000,” according to the Justice Department statement. “Elevating trial-level judges to appellate-level courts is common in every judicial system in the United States.”
The American Immigration Lawyers Association and other critics said the buyout offer is the latest example in a series of moves that have undermined the neutrality of the immigration court system. They point out that BIA is already housed under a law enforcement agency, the Justice Department, whose leadership may have a stake in the outcome of the court process.
“The administration is trying to further politicize the immigration court system by packing the appellate bench and is seeking to make room for more handpicked judges with this buyout,” Benjamin Johnson, AILA’s executive director, told CQ Roll Call.
“These latest actions reveal the severe impact of our nation’s immigration system being housed under the Attorney General and only underscore the real need to create an independent immigration court,” he said.
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The refusal of the “holdovers” to take the “buyout” just forced the DOJ politicos to use a different “strategy:” creating additional “appellate judgeships” and “packing” them with appointees with established records of hostility to asylum seekers and the due process rights of respondents.
This presents an interesting historical comparison with an earlier GOP Administration’s program for promoting an anti-immigrant agenda at the BIA. Under Bush II, Ashcroft arbitrarily “cut” the size of the BIA to get rid of the vocal minority of judges who dared to speak up (usually in dissent) for the rights of asylum seekers and other migrants to due process, fundamental fairness, and humane treatment. I was one of those judges “exiled” from the BIA during the “Ashcroft Purge of ‘03.”
Fortunately, I got a “soft landing” just down the hill from the “EOIR Tower” at the Arlington Immigration Court where I remained on the bench and (mostly) “below the radar screen” for the following 13 years. And, yes, I was offered a “buyout” in the form of “early retirement,” which would have been a rather bad financial deal for me at the time.So, I rejected it, and eventually got a much better “deal.”
The DOJ’s claim that the current farce is a “merit selection system” is beyond preposterous. But, as long as Congress and the Article IIIs won’t stand up to Trump’s blatant abuses of due process, the “de-professionalization” of the career Civil Service, and the dehumanization of the “other” before the law (“Dred Scottificfation”), the charade will continue.
Of course the problem isn’t, as EOIR would lead you to believe, that some “trial judges” are elevated to the appellate bench. It’s which “trial judges” are being “rewarded” for their records of hostility to asylum seekers, respondents, and their attorneys.
Also, in what has become essentially a “closed system” of Immigration Judges, staffed almost exclusively by government attorneys overwhelmingly with prosecutorial backgrounds, the “elevation” of existing trial judges, basically tilts the system heavily in favor of DHS and against respondents. Indeed, some fine Immigration Judges with broader experience including private practice, who would have made superior Appellate Immigration Judges in a true merit-based system, were instead forced off the bench by the demeaning, biased, restrictionist policies implemented at EOIR.
Also, having served as both a trial and appellate judge, I know that the “skill sets” are related, but by no means identical. Not all good trial judges make good appellate judges and vice versa. While it’s certainly to be expected that some trial judges will be elevated to the appellate bench, that should not be the sole source of appellate judges.
Appellate judging requires scholarship, collegiality, creativity, writing, and a broad perspective that many talented private advocates, academics, and NGO lawyers possess in abundance. The same holds true of the Article III Appellate Bench. From the Supremes on down, it’s basically in various degrees of failure to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution against the attacks by the Trump regime.
It’s a case of far too many former District Court Judges, former prosecutors, and right-wing “think tankers,” and far too few individuals who have litigation, legal, and life experience gained from representing those who actually come before the courts. The Supremes in particular are badly in need of folks with a broader, more practical, more humane perspective on the law.
The institutional failure of today’s Supremes in the face of concerted Executive tyranny threatens to collapse our entire justice system and take our democratic republic down with it. The whole Article III judicial selection system needs careful reexamination and reforms lest it fall into the same type of institutional dysfunction and disrepute as today’s Immigration “Courts” (which aren’t “courts” at all in any normal sense of the word).
Of course, Trump, Barr, and the rest of their anti-democracy gang would love to make the captive, biased, Executive-controlled Immigration “Courts” the “model” for the Article III Judiciary. And, John Roberts and the rest of the “JR Five” seem all too eager to accommodate them. The perception already is out here that Roberts & Co. “work for” Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco in somewhat the same way as Immigration “Judges” work for Billy Barr. Until Roberts and his gang show the courage to stand up to Trump and enforce the legal, constitutional, and human rights of “the other” in our society, that perception will only deepen.
As generations of African-Americans discovered following the end of Reconstruction, Constitutional and legal rights are meaningless in the face of biased and cowardly legislators, judges, and other public officials who simply look the other way, join the abuses, or “go along to get along” with treating “the other” unfairly under the law.
Due Process Forever, Captive & Complicit Courts, Never!
Washington, DC – According to the Roll Call story published May 27, 2020, Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) Director McHenry sent the remaining members of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) a buy-out memo offering them financial compensation in exchange for early retirement or resignation. This memo was sent on April 17, 2020, during the global public health crisis, and highlights the continuing push by this administration to manipulate the functions of the BIA, the appeals court located within EOIR.
AILA Executive Director Benjamin Johnson stated, “This administration has taken numerous steps to alter the composition and role of the BIA, all in an effort to gain more control over the immigration courts and influence court decisions. In recent months, it came to light that the EOIR Director was attempting to pack the immigration bench with more appointees who have among the lowest asylum grant rates in the country. Now, he is attempting to winnow existing members from the BIA and replace them with a roster of Appellate Immigration Judges, despite congressional and stakeholder concerns about politicization of the BIA. Last year, these new appellate judge positions were created out of thin air. They appear to have nearly identical job functions as the BIA members but the Appellate Immigration Judges can adjudicate both trial and appellate level cases at the same time and can be reassigned away from the BIA at the whim of the EOIR Director.”
“This effort shows a complete disregard, or at the very least a failure to appreciate how our judicial system is supposed to work to provide a fair day in court. In 2003, Attorney General Ashcroft purged several members of the BIA, a political move that was severely criticized and ultimately undermined the credibility of our court system. These recent efforts by this administration make it even clearer that our nation urgently needs an immigration court system that is independent, fair and impartial.”
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The American Immigration Lawyers Association is the national association of immigration lawyers established to promote justice, advocate for fair and reasonable immigration law and policy, advance the quality of immigration and nationality law and practice, and enhance the professional development of its members.
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The BIA is a travesty, to be sure. But, an even bigger travesty is the continued “deference” given to a biased, unqualified, non-expert tribunal and its political handlers by the Article III Courts! Under Marbury v. Madison, it’s the job of the Article III Courts to say what the law is. To “defer” to the BIA, a body that currently functions not like a independent, expert tribunal, but has become a “shill” for DHS Enforcement and an adjunct of White Nationalist White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, is a disgraceful case of judicial task avoidance and dereliction of duty.
If nothing else, the ongoing disaster at the BIA points to an “inconvenient truth” in America’s justice system: We need better, more informed (particularly in the areas of immigrants’ rights and human rights), more courageous judges at all levels of the Federal Judiciary if we are to survive as a democratic republic where the rule of law and equal justice under law have meaning!
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he is planning to introduce legislation on Wednesday that would expand legal immigrants’ access to health care subsidy programs and allow unauthorized immigrants to buy health plans from federal insurance marketplaces.
The bill, known as the HEAL for Immigrant Women and Families Act, would permit legal immigrants to enroll in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), provided that they meet the programs’ income requirements. Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the bill in the House in October 2019, but it would be the first time that the Senate would consider the legislation.
The bill isn’t likely to advance in a Republican-controlled Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already rejected relief for unauthorized immigrants. But it’s the latest effort by Democrats to rectify inequalities in access to health care laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic.
Only a fraction of immigrants is eligible for Medicaid and CHIP: naturalized citizens, green card holders who have lived in the US for at least five years, immigrants who come to the US on humanitarian grounds (such as receiving asylum), members of the military and their families, and, in certain states, children and pregnant women with lawful immigration status. But many other categories of immigrants — including temporary visa holders and young immigrants who have been allowed to live and work in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — would become eligible under Booker’s bill.
“Covid-19 has shined a punishing light on the unjust health care inequities that exist for communities of color broadly, and immigrant communities in particular,” Booker told Vox. “While we should always be working to expand access to health care for everyone, the dire current situation highlights the urgency of addressing these gaps in health care coverage. Health care is a right, and it shouldn’t depend on immigration status. We’re never going to be able to slow and stop the spread of the virus be if we continue to deny entire communities access to testing, treatment, or care.”
The bill also contains provisions expanding health care options for unauthorized immigrants, who are often uninsured and have so far been largely left out of Congress’s coronavirus relief efforts. Booker’s bill would allow them to buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, from which they’re currently barred. It would also allow unauthorized immigrants to become eligible for health care subsidies if they have purchased such an insurance plan and meet other criteria, including minimum income requirements.
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Read the rest of Nicole’s always outstanding and accessible analysis at the above link.
Good luck with getting this through the Senate with Moscow Mitch and the GOP in charge! Not going to happen. And, Booker knows it!
Few groups in America have been as screwed over as migrants, regardless of status, in this pandemic. They perform some of the most difficult and essential jobs that have kept us going through this crisis. But, when it comes to safety, stimulus, health care, unemployment and pretty much anything else they are left out in the cold by the GOP nativists.
Get back to work:no PPE, social distancing, hazard pay, testing, unemployment benefits, home computers, or health care for you! This isn’t the “GOP playing Soup Nazi” – it’s the real deal, the 21st Century version of completely expendable workers and intentional “dehumanization” of the “other.” Already, xenophobic GOP nativists are whining about the very modest economic emergency money that the State of California has provided to their migrant residents, many “essential workers,” regardless of status.
But, Booker’s HEAL bill is a significant “ready for prime-time marker” if we get regime change! Health care and immigration are huge issues in the Hispanic community. Biden needs to get out the Hispanic vote and having legislation like this “ready to roll” on “Day 1” will be key in energizing voters to “work through the obstacles” and vote Trump & the GOP Senators out in the key states to finally get some much needed aid out to the American Hispanic community and others, including folks in rural areas of so-called “Red States,” and disproportionately adversely affected African-American communities in need who are excluded from “Trump’s America” (except, of course, when the chips are down and we need workers for thankless jobs or when Trump needs votes). You can also add in Asian Americans who have been working hard for America but face a barrage of racist-inspired incidents. There’s a “community of interest” there that the Dems’ should be able to attract and build upon with “good government” that furthers the common interests.
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American RacismStephen Miller & Count Olaf Evil Twins, Notorious Child AbusersCaitlin Dickerson National Immigration Reporter NY TimesMichael D. Shear White House Reporter NY Times
Caitlin Dickerson and Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:
From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.
The question was, which disease?
Mr. Miller pushed for invoking the president’s broad public health powers in 2019, when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu.
When vast caravans of migrants surged toward the border in 2018, Mr. Miller looked for evidence that they carried illnesses. He asked for updates on American communities that received migrants to see if new disease was spreading there.
In 2018, dozens of migrants became seriously ill in federal custody, and two under the age of 10 died within three weeks of each other. While many viewed the incidents as resulting from negligence on the part of the border authorities, Mr. Miller instead argued that they supported his argument that President Trump should use his public health powers to justify sealing the borders.
On some occasions, Mr. Miller and the president, who also embraced these ideas, were talked down by cabinet secretaries and lawyers who argued that the public health situation at the time did not provide sufficient legal basis for such a proclamation.
That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.
Within days of the confirmation of the first case in the United States, the White House shut American land borders to nonessential travel, closing the door to almost all migrants, including children and teenagers who arrived at the border with no parent or other adult guardian. Other international travel restrictions were introduced, as well as a pause on green card processing at American consular offices, which Mr. Miller told conservative allies in a recent private phone call was only the first step in a broader plan to restrict legal immigration.
But what has been billed by the White House as an urgent response to the coronavirus pandemic was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Mr. Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy, three former officials who were involved in the earlier deliberations said.
One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a “wish list” of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.
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He had come up with the proposals, the official said, by poring through not just existing immigration laws, but the entire federal code to look for provisions that would allow the president to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.
Administration officials have repeatedly said the latest measures are needed to prevent new cases of infection from entering the country.
“This is a public health order that we’re operating under right now,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters earlier this month. “This is not about immigration. What’s transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health.”
The White House declined to comment on the matter, but a senior administration official confirmed details of the past discussions.
The architect of the president’s assault on immigration and one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers inside the White House, Mr. Miller has relentlessly pushed for tough restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, including policies that sought to separate families crossing the southwest border, force migrants seeking asylum to wait in squalid camps in Mexico and deny green cards to poor immigrants.
Mr. Miller argues that reducing immigration will protect jobs for American workers and keep communities safe from criminals. But critics accuse him of targeting nonwhite immigrants, pointing in part to leaked emails from his time before entering the White House in which he cited white nationalist websites and magazines and promoted theories popular with white nationalist groups.
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Read the full article at the link.
As America suffers, immigrants, both legal and “undocumented,” are on the front lines of those “essential workers” risking their lives to keep us healthy, safe, fed, and clothed.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazi Miller remains “on the dole” — publicly funded for putting out a steady stream of discredited and xenophobic actions designed to exploit, dehumanize, and demean many of the most courageous and necessary among us.
Can it get any more vile and disgusting?
Nearly 55 years after the end of WWII, Trump & Miller are reviving many aspects of the racist ideology and actions that we supposedly fought to end forever. Raises the question of who really won the war.
Always the opportunists, Trump and Miller now see the crisis that their “malicious incompetence” helped to aggravate as a chance to target both “Optional Practical Training” (“OPT”) for foreign students and Chinese students, one of the largest groups of those studying in the U.S. You can read about it in this article by Stuart Anderson in Forbes.https://apple.news/ADkCNTe_gTje__BlQ8c-8pg
Stuart Anderson Executive Director National Foundation for American Policy
OPT unquestionably benefits our country as well as the students, many of whom remain and become important parts of our society. The targeting of Chinese students certainly fits with the far right’s Anti-Asian movement that has helped spike a notable increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans during the pandemic. Could the revival of the Chinese Exclusion Act be far beyond on the Trump/Miller Jim Crow agenda?
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
While corporations are going on life support thanks to this huge government bailout, undocumented immigrants and their families, among them US citizens, are being allowed to suffer, to starve, and, without access to health care, perhaps even to die. As things already stood, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for any federally funded public health insurance programs. On top of that, the millions who have tax IDs, so that they can work without formal authorization, are now denied help in the form of unemployment benefits—they are the only US taxpayers excluded from the coronavirus stimulus package.
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It’s also troubling to single out immigrants because of the historic scapegoating of immigrants during other health crises. The historian Alan M. Kraut writes that in the 1830s, Irish immigrants were stigmatized as bearers of cholera, and at the end of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was dubbed the “Jewish disease.” Scapegoating also obscures a longer thread in a bigger pattern, regardless of which party or administration is in power. According to Professor Viladrich, the American government’s denying assistance to this group of working immigrants is the historic norm.
“A lot of this is related to a labor force that is disposable,” she said. “There is no contradiction here; it is very consistent with ACA, with welfare reform, all of that. The systematic exclusion of immigrants is parallel with the systematic exploitation of immigrants.”
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, lobbied hard to ensure that people without work authorization would be excluded from the CARES Act. On the Senate floor, he spoke against child tax credit going to people without social security numbers:
If you want to apply for money from the government through the child tax credit program, then you have to be a legitimate person… It has nothing to do with not liking immigrants. It has to do with saying, taxpayer money shouldn’t go to non-people.
His office later said he was referring to people who fraudulently claimed a child in order to reap the federal benefit. Whatever he meant by “legitimate person” and “non-people,” the effect was the same: in the eyes of the law, undocumented immigrants would be non-people.
Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, used the term “bare life” to describe a life reduced to plain biological facts, the robbing of a person’s political existence by those who have the power to define who is included as a worthy human being and who is excluded. While the labor of undocumented people is gladly accepted, their humanity has been tidily erased by lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
The immigration and legal historian Daniel Kanstroom reminds us that in times of trouble, like wars or national emergencies, immigrants are the first to get thrown overboard. It was in part due to the ban on Chinese immigrants back in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that the demand for Mexican workers increased dramatically. In his 2007 book Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, Kanstroom explained how this ban combined with wartime labor needs in 1917 led to the US government’s systematic recruitment of Mexican workers: “From 1917 through 1921, an estimated 50,000–80,000 Mexican farm workers entered the United States under this program, establishing a legal model and cultural mindset that endured for decades to come.”
Kanstroom cites a line from the 1911 Dillingham Commission, an extensive bipartisan investigation into immigration, that “The Mexican… is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer.” The precedent was set, and what followed was a cycle of recruitment, restriction, and expulsion. More than one million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly removed from the United States during the Depression years. Some of the people deported by the government to Mexico were US citizens, but then as now, because of their undocumented relatives, they were subject to the same brutal treatment.
In 1942, as a wartime labor shortage loomed, the US worked out an agreement with Mexico for short-term, low-wage workers to fill in the gap. The Bracero Program, as it was known, continued until 1964, with some 4.5 million Mexican workers legally entering the country during those years. There were enormous contradictions in the way those workers were treated: ad hoc legalization programs designed to help big farmers took place at some times; then, at others, there were huge deportation drives when the demand for labor fell off—most notoriously, the terrifying round-ups of 1954’s so-called Operation Wetback.
According to the scholar of migration Nicholas De Genova, “It is precisely their distinctive legal vulnerability, their putative ‘illegality’ and official ‘exclusion,’ that inflames the irrepressible desire and demand for undocumented migrants as a highly exploitable workforce—and thus ensures their enthusiastic importation and subordinate incorporation.” It is no mistake that there remain millions of “illegal” workers of Latino ethnicity contributing their labor, taxes, and humanity to this country; it suits America very well in the good times, and always has.
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Read the rest of Maev’s outstanding analysis of our sordid history of abusing essential immigrant workers, from enslaved African Americans, to Chinese laborers, to Latino workers who have been propping up our economy and keeping us alive during the time of pandemic. Their reward: dehumanization, degradation, deportation without due process, and sometimes death.
I speak often at Courtside about how Trump’s self-righteous, immoral, scofflaw White Nationalist cabal — folks like Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Barr, Cuccinelli, Paul — have been engineering a vile “Dred Scottification” program to dehumanize, abuse, and exploit the most vulnerable, yet often most essential, among us.
I have also highlighted how the Trump kakistocracy’s efforts to create an extralegal, unconstitutional “Reincarnation of Jim Crow” too often have been supported and encouraged by some of those highly privileged Supreme Court Justices whose job was supposed to be protecting all of us, and particularly the most vulnerable persons, from invidious Executive abuses: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.
The latest example: In the middle of humanitarian trauma, the “socially distant Justices” managed to find time for a little gratuitous cruelty: denying an application to stay the regime’s irrational, racist, and unlawful “public charge rules” that threaten the lives and safety of immigrants, their U.S. citizen families, and U.S. society as a whole. https://apple.news/ABNL4e_DtRPS4eN5m5gx1ug
Amy Howe writes at Scotusblog:
Under federal immigration law, noncitizens cannot receive a green card if the government believes that they are likely to become reliant on government assistance. The dispute now before the court arose last year, after the Trump administration defined “public charge” to refer to noncitizens who receive various government benefits, such as health care, for more than 12 months over a three-year period. The challengers had argued that the rule is “impeding efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus, preserve scarce hospital capacity and medical supplies, and protect the lives of everyone in the community” because it deters immigrants from seeking testing and treatment for the virus out of fear that it will endanger their ability to obtain a green card. The federal government countered that it has made clear that the use of publicly funded health care related to COVID-19 “will not be considered in making predictions about whether” immigrants are likely to become a public charge.
The Government’s argument doesn’t pass the “straight face” test. The monetary savings from this rule are minuscule; its overriding purpose was to dump on immigrant families and intimidate ethnic, primarily Hispanic, communities. It was the “brainchild” of neo-Nazi Stephen Miller. What greater proof could there be of its White Nationalist purpose? Given the regime’s well-established record of lies and unbridled hostility toward immigrants and communities of color, why would anyone have confidence in the regime’s often hollow or disingenuous “promises?”
Those of us who believe in honoring our immigrant heritage, making our constitutional guarantees reality rather than unfulfilled promises, that human values, empathy, and kindness matter, and that we can and must do better than shallow, often outright evil, folks like Trump, Miller, Cuccinelli, Roberts, Barr, et al. need to retake our Government at the ballot box this November and build a better, fairer, more humane future for America and all persons in our country.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Willie Davis, a Hall of Fame defensive end and a team captain for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, when he helped lead his team to the first two Super Bowl championships, died April 15 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85.
The Packers announced his death, noting that his wife said he had been treated for kidney failure.
Mr. Davis played 10 years for the Packers, joining the team in 1960 and becoming a stalwart defensive performer at left end. He was one of the leading disciples of Lombardi, an intense taskmaster and perfectionist who is considered one of football’s greatest coaches.
“Perfection is not attainable,” Lombardi said, in one of many maxims attributed to him. “But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
Throughout most of the 1960s, the Packers reached a level of excellence that few teams in any sport have equaled, winning five National Football League championships in seven years. In January 1967, the Packers met the Kansas City Chiefs of the rival American Football League in the inaugural Super Bowl, winning 35-10. The next year, in Super Bowl II, the Packers beat the Oakland Raiders, 33-14. The Super Bowl trophy is named for Lombardi.
The 6-foot-3, 245-pound Mr. Davis led Green Bay’s pass rush in both games, and as the team’s defensive captain he was, in effect, Lombardi’s alter ego on the field.
“He told us this was a way of life, a game of survival, a test of manhood,” Mr. Davis told author David Maraniss for his 1999 biography of Lombardi, “When Pride Still Mattered.”
Steady, smart and seemingly indestructible, Mr. Davis did not miss a game during his 12-year NFL career. He never gave up on a play and often chased down runners on the opposite side of the field.
Before his Super Bowl heroics, Mr. Davis forced what Green Bay fans call the “million-dollar fumble” during a game against the Baltimore Colts late in the 1966 season. With the Colts driving for a touchdown in the fourth quarter, Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas dropped back to pass, then tucked the ball under his arm and ran toward the goal line.
Mr. Davis caught him from behind on a muddy field and jarred the ball loose. Linebacker Dave Robinson recovered the fumble, and the Packers held on for a 14-10 victory. They then beat the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL championship game before going on to the first Super Bowl.
“As a pass rusher, he was so quick off the ball,” Robinson said of Mr. Davis in an interview with Packers.com. “He was a good run player, too. He was so strong in the chest, he could hit the tackle and control them. Throw them or drive them.”
Mr. Davis played his first two NFL seasons with the Cleveland Browns, doubling as an offensive tackle and defensive end. Admiring his ability, Lombardi acquired him in a trade before the 1960 season, making him a full-time defensive player.
“In Willie Davis we got a great one,” Lombardi said in 1962.
During the team’s grueling preseason drills, Lombardi was known for loudly criticizing some players and quietly encouraging others, depending on what he thought was the best motivational tool in the moment. One year, after ripping another player, he unexpectedly turned on Mr. Davis, who was never unprepared for practice or a game.
The next morning, Mr. Davis asked Lombardi for an explanation.
“He said, ‘I’ve got to prove nobody’s beyond chewing out,’ ” Mr. Davis recalled to sportswriter W.C. Heinz for the book “Once They Heard the Cheers.” “I said, ‘Yeah, coach, but give me some warning.’”
Mr. Davis was a five-time all-pro and still holds the Packers record for recovered fumbles, with 21. Sacks of opposing quarterbacks were not an official statistic when he played, but historians have credited him with more than 100 during his career. He brought a tenacity to the game that made him, according to NFL Films, one of 100 greatest players in pro football history.
He was the leader of a defensive unit filled with Hall of Fame players, including defensive tackle Henry Jordan, linebackers Robinson and Ray Nitschke and defensive backs Herb Adderley and Willie Wood, who died in February.
Former Packers center Bill Curry called Mr. Davis, in an NFL Films documentary, “the finest combination of leader and player that I ever saw.”
[[Willie Wood, Hall of Fame defensive back for Vince Lombardi’s Packers, dies at 83]]
Beyond the field, Mr. Davis served as a leader for other African American players in the NFL and, as Lombardi instilled, a force for team unity on the Packers. As a white player from Georgia, Curry had not been on an integrated team until he joined the Packers in 1965.
Mr. Davis “didn’t just help me to play in the NFL for 10 years,” Curry said, “he changed my life because I was never able to look at another human being in the same way I had.”
William Delford Davis was born July 24, 1934, in Lisbon, La. He was 8 when his parents separated, and he moved with his mother and two younger siblings to Texarkana, Ark. His mother was a cook at a country club.
Mr. Davis earned a scholarship to the historically black Grambling State University in Louisiana, where his coach was Eddie Robinson, who prepared dozens of players for pro careers and was the first college football coach to win 400 games.
After graduating in 1956, Mr. Davis served two years in the Army before joining the Browns in 1958. While playing in the NFL, he also received a master of business administration degree in 1968 from the University of Chicago. He retired from the Packers at the end of the 1969 season and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1981.
Mr. Davis was a football broadcaster for NBC in the 1970s and turned down several coaching offers. He operated a prosperous beer distributorship in Los Angeles before selling the business in 1989.
He was a key figure in planning the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and was reportedly recruited to run for mayor of the city. He later owned several radio stations and was on the boards of the Packers and several companies and founded a charitable foundation in Lombardi’s name.
His marriages to Ann McCullom and Andrea Erickson ended in divorce; survivors include his wife, the former Carol Dyrek; and two children from his first marriage.
In his business office, Mr. Davis kept pictures of his Packers championship teams and a framed portrait of Lombardi.
“There are days when I wake up and I don’t feel like getting up and crawling into the office,” he told Heinz in the 1970s. “I say to myself that I own the Willie Davis Distributing Company, and today I’m going to exercise my prerogative and not go in. Then I think, ‘What would Lombardi do?’ I get up and out of bed.”
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Willie’s spectacular defense was a treat to watch during the years of Packers’ dominance of the NFL. Seemed like he was always there with the clutch tackle or big fumble recovery when it was most needed. And, like many on Lombardi’s Packers, he went on to success in other fields after retiring from football.
The Trump administration’s novel COVID-19 border ban invokes public health authority to erect a shadow immigration enforcement power in violation of the Refugee Act, legal safeguards for unaccompanied minors, and fundamental procedural rights. Relying on an obscure 1944 provision that provides no authority for immigration removals, the Centers for Disease Control purports to authorize summary Border Patrol expulsions of asylum seekers.
On March 20, the Centers for Disease Control (“CDC”) issued a largely unnoticed but sweeping order authorizing the summary expulsion of noncitizens arriving at the border without valid documents. The Order operates wholly outside the normal immigration removal process and provides no opportunity for hearings or assertion of asylum claims. It deploys a medical quarantine authorization to override the protections of the immigration and refugee laws through the use of an unreviewable Border Patrol health “expulsion” mechanism unrelated to any finding of disease or contagion.
How the COVID-19 Expulsion Policy Works
The CDC Order is based on an emergency Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Interim Final Rule issued simultaneously with the Order under the authority of an obscure provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act. Section 362 of that Act authorizes the Surgeon General to suspend “introduction of persons or goods” into the United States on public health grounds. Based on an unprecedented interpretation of the 1944 Act, the CDC regulation invokes the COVID-19 pandemic to redefine what constitutes “introduction of persons” and “introduction of communicable diseases” into the United States. It establishes a summary immigration expulsion process that ignores the statutory regime governing border arrivals and disregards the protections and procedures mandated by the 1980 Refugee Act and Refugee Convention as well as the special safeguards for unaccompanied minors under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”).
The CDC Order “suspending introduction of certain persons” applies to land travel from two countries, Mexico and Canada, and only to those noncitizens defined as “covered aliens.” That definition is unrelated to infection or disease. It includes only those who arrive by land without valid travel documents and immediately “suspends” their “introduction” for a renewable period of 30 days. In actuality the Order singles out those who seek asylum – and children – to order them removed to the country from which they entered or their home country “as rapidly as possible.” A recently leaked Customs and Border Protection directive makes clear that expulsion is the goal and that no process is provided.
The Order’s stated rationale is the risk alleged from “covered aliens” being crowded in “congregate settings.” The apparent justification for bypassing all legal protections and procedures is the CBP’s assertion that Border Patrol officers are “not operating pursuant to” their authority under the immigration laws.
This shadow immigration expulsion regime is not part of some coherent public health or safety plan to seal our borders or to diminish the risk of COVID-19’s introduction into the U.S. A web of other proclamations and restrictions leave open many avenues for other travelers to enter the United States. The risk of processing in congregate settings is a function of DHS’s own practices and policies; it is also not unique to landborders.
The CDC order is designed to accomplish under the guise of public health a dismantling of legal protections governing border arrivals that the Trump administration has been unable to achieve under the immigration laws. For more than a year, the administration has sought unsuccessfully to undo the asylum system at the southern border claiming that exigencies and limited government resources compel abrogating rights and protections for refugees and other noncitizens. The courts have rebuffed those attempts in critical respects. Now the administration has seized on a public health crisis to impose all it has been seeking – and more.
Unquestionably, the United States faces a pandemic of unknown scope and duration that has led to the greatest social and economic disruption and restrictions on personal movement in our lifetime. The hospital and healthcare system is under siege and threatened with collapse in some areas. Infected persons can be asymptomatic and may not be detected. The addition of contagious individuals can exacerbate spread of the virus, place additional strains on hospitals, pose dangers to healthcare workers and law enforcement officers, and increase the risk of infection for others.
But the COVID-19 ban is an act of medical gerrymandering. It is crafted to override critical legal rights and safeguards in singling out only those arriving at the border without authorization and deeming that class of people a unique and unmitigable public health threat. It tries to justify an end-run around congressionally mandated procedural rights and protections essential for refugees and unaccompanied minors and it does so to achieve an impermissible goal. What’s additionally shocking here: the statutory provision does not actually give the executive branch expulsion authority.
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Read the rest of Lucas’s “mini treatise” at the above link.
The law is clearly against Trump here, as Lucas so eloquently and cogently sets forth. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean much in an era of a feckless GOP-stymied Congress and an authoritarian-coddling righty Supremes’ majority led by Roberts and his four sidekicks.
The Supremes have delivered a strong message to the lower Federal Courts that Trump can do just about anything he wants to migrants. He just has to invoke some transparently bogus “national security” or “emergency” rationale for ignoring the Constitution and statutes.
It’s “Dred Scottification” in full force. Largely the same way the courts buried the rights and humanity of African Americans to enable a century plus of “Jim Crow” following the end of the Civil War. The “law of the land” just became meaningless for certain people and in certain jurisdictions. “Any ol’ justification” — states’ rights, separate but equal, no jurisdiction, etc. — was more than enough to read Africans-American citizens out of their Constitutional and other legal protections.
Don’t kid yourself. That’s exactly what Trump, the GOP, and the Supremes’ majority are up to here.
And, the amazing thing, here in 21st Century America, they are getting alway with it! In plain sight!
This November, Vote Like Your Life Depends On It! Because It Does!
There is complicated news nabout voter suppression tonight out of Wisconsin. It has overridden today’s news of the extraordinary outburst of Trump’s acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, who flew almost 8000 miles to Guam to harangue the sailors from the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
I’ll cover the Modly story later in the week, but for tonight, Wisconsin.
There is a crucial election there tomorrow that landed tonight at the US Supreme Court. The backstory is that in 2010, thanks to REDMAP the Republican Redistricting Majority Project I wrote about on Saturday, the Wisconsin legislature was controlled by Republicans. They worked to guarantee their control, gerrymandering the state so effectively in 2011 that in the 2012 elections, Republicans lost a majority of voters, but took 60% of the seats in the legislature. (They won only 48.6% of the votes, but took 61% of the seats.)
With this power, they promptly passed a strict voter-ID law that reduced black and Latino voting, resulting in 200,000 fewer voters in 2016 than had voted in 2012. (Remember, Wisconsin is a key battleground state, and Trump won it in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes.)
Now, there is a move afoot to purge about 240,000 more voters from the rolls, thanks to the old system called “voter caging.” The state sent letters to registered voters, largely in districts that voted Democratic in 2016, and those who did not respond to the letters have been removed from the voter rolls on the argument that the fact they didn’t respond to the letters must mean they have moved. Initially, the purge was supposed to happen in 2021, after the election, but a conservative group sued to removed them earlier and a conservative state judge, Paul V. Malloy ordered it done. Malloy’s decision has been appealed to the Wisconsin state supreme court, which has deadlocked over the issue by a vote of 3-3.
On tomorrow’s ballot is a contest for a seat on that court. The Republicans desperately want to reelect their candidate, Justice Daniel Kelly, who recused himself from the voter purge vote pending the election. Trump has endorsed Kelly, who will uphold the purge if he is reelected. Before the pandemic, observers thought Kelly’s opponent had a good chance of unseating him because of expected high turnout among Democrats. But now, of course, all bets are off, especially since the Democratic strongholds in the state are in the cities, where the residents are hunkered down.
The election was originally scheduled for tomorrow, but the pandemic has gummed up the works. A stay-at-home order went into effect in the state on March 25, and more than a million voters have requested absentee ballots. But this huge surge means the state is running behind and hasn’t been able to deliver the ballots. Meanwhile, roughly 7000 poll workers, who are volunteers and often elderly, have said they would not come manage the election, so a large number of polls can’t open. The city of Milwaukee, whose 600,000 people normally would have 180 polling places, will have five. Milwaukee tends to vote Democratic.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, tried to get the Republican-dominated legislature to postpone the election or to mail ballots to all voters for a May 26 election deadline, but it refused. Over the weekend, the mayors of Wisconsin’s ten biggest cities urged the state’s top health official, Andrea Palm, to “step up” and use her emergency powers to replace in-person voting with mail-in voting, as Ohio did when faced with a similar problem. On Monday, Evers signed an executive order postponing the election until June 9—something even he was unsure he had the power to do, but he said he felt he had to try to keep people safe– but Republicans challenged the order and the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court blocked it.
Last Thursday, a federal judge permitted absentee ballots to be counted in the election so long as they arrived back to election officials by April 13, but Republicans immediately challenged the decision. Tonight, in a 5-4 decision, the US. Supreme Court refused to permit this extension of time for the state to receive absentee ballots, arguing (apparently without any self-awareness) that the federal judge made a mistake by changing the rules of an election so close to its date. This means that absentee ballots have to be postmarked tomorrow, even if the voter hasn’t gotten one by then.
The court insisted that the issue in the decision was quite narrow, and had nothing to do with the larger question of the right to vote. The four dissenting justices cried foul.
Writing for the four other judges in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that “the court’s order, I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement.” “The majority of this Court declares that this case presents a “narrow, technical question”…. That is wrong. The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic. Under the District Court’s order, they would be able to do so. Even if they receive their absentee ballot in the days immediately following election day, they could return it. With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety, or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance—to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin’s citizens, the integrity of the State’s election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation.”
The New York Times editorial board echoed Ginsburg, warning that what is happening in Wisconsin, where Republicans are trying to use the pandemic to steal an election, could happen nationally in 2020. This is why Democrats tried to get robust election funding in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill to bolster mail-in ballots, and why Trump said: “The things they had in there were crazy, they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have another Republican elected in this country again.”
This crisis in Wisconsin has national implications. The reelection of Kelly will likely mean Wisconsin loses another 240,000 voters, most of them Democrats. This will increase Trump’s chances of winning the state in 2020, and Wisconsin is likely key to a victory in the Electoral College.
This is why I watch the minutia of politics so carefully. It’s hard to imagine that the election of a state judge in Wisconsin matters to our nation of fifty states and 330 million people, but it does. Oh, boy, does it.
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Remember, if more voters turn out, Trump & the GOP lose. The “J.R. Five” will be doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s why it’s critical for Dems to get out the vote and create a “Roberts-proof” majority. Also, winning the Senate is the way to start pushing back on the J.R.Five’s plans to dismantle democracy and with it any semblance of equality in America. Voter suppression is just the beginning.
Lynn S. Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, has riled conservatives by publishing a blistering critique of the Supreme Court’s record under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., focusing on a string of decisions that he argues have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Adelman also criticized President Trump, who he wrote ran as a populist but failed to deliver “policies beneficial to the general public. … While Trump’s temperament is that of an autocrat,” Adelman wrote, “he is disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”
The article by Adelman was all the more unusual because it went after the chief justice directly. Roberts, he said, was “misleading” in his 2005 confirmation hearing testimony when he pledged to be a passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.
Adelman called that metaphor a “masterpiece of disingenuousness,” saying the court under Roberts “has been anything but passive” as its “hard right majority” has actively participated in “undermining American democracy.”
As president, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused federal judges of being political and beholden to the presidents who appointed them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
The article, entitled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy,” is scheduled for publication in an unspecified forthcoming issue of the Harvard Law & Policy Review, which describes itself as the official publication of the liberal American Constitution Society. It was published in full at SSRN this month.
Adelman, appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is a former Democratic state senator in Wisconsin and Legal Aid Society trial lawyer. Perhaps his best-known decision nationally was a 2014 ruling striking down Wisconsin’s voter ID law.
His broad critique of the Roberts court, with particular reference to its decisions on voting rights and campaign finance by corporate interests, is not an uncommon one — coming, that is, from liberal scholars or political leaders, including former president Barack Obama.
But coming from a sitting federal judge in a journal article accompanied by such a blunt attack on Roberts, not to mention Trump, it has attracted uncommon attention.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
So I’m not the only one to note the Chiefie’s “Taneyesque” performance, particularly on issues involving the rights of migrants, refugees, Muslims, and other persons of color. He has joined the regime in “Dred Scottifying” those with brown skins who are entitled to the protection of our Constitution and our laws, which Trump has eliminated without legislation, relying largely on transparently fraudulent “national security rationales.”
But, Roberts hasn’t been much good for African Americans or other minorities either, joining his right winger activist colleagues in disingenuously dismantling key parts of civil rights and voting rights protections and turning an intentionally blind eye to partisan gerrymandering carried out by the GOP to disenfranchise minorities. Election results get skewed and folks actually die as a result of these intentional miscarriages of justice to further a toxic right wing agenda aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions, promoting inequality, and institutionalizing privilege. As Judge Adelman said “the transformation of the Supreme Court from what he described as a defender of ordinary people and ‘subordinated groups’ to an enabler of an ‘anti-democratic’ Republican agenda.” Right on, Judge A!
I also found this comment telling:
Adelman was unapologetic. “I think it’s totally appropriate to criticize the court when there’s a basis for it,” he said. “Judges are encouraged to comment on the law because we have a particular interest, knowledge and familiarity.”
Compare that with the “muzzling” of the Immigration Judiciary by the Executive reported recently on Courtside. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/03/🤡🤡clown-court-report-as-due-process-goes-into-death-spiral-regime-muzzles-immigration-judges/
And, as I constantly point out, the Immigration Courts aren’t “courts” at all. They are blatantly unconstitutional “star chambers” run by the Executive Branch with the complicity of the Article III Judiciary who see their work daily and know full well that they are often “rubber stamping” final orders sending folks into potentially life-threatening exile with only a transparently thin veneer of “due process.” But, according to Roberts and his gang, brown-skinned refugees aren’t entitled to even access this process in a reasonable manner, let alone receive the fair hearings to which they are entitled before being “orbited” to potential death in foreign lands. What if it were his wife and kids? I’ll bet their lives would get more consideration.
I also appreciate Judge Adelman’s “spotlighting” the disingenuous testimony of Roberts and other right wingers under oath before the Senate when they “feigned impartiality” to disguise their anti-democracy agenda (without, of course, losing the support of the rightest Republicans who were “licking their chops” at finally getting their long-awaited “judicial wrecking crew” in place).
As one of my esteemed Round Table colleagues said recently:“In the words of Balzac, ‘to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.’”
Unhappily, thanks to Roberts and other complicit Article IIIs, we’re there. Which is exactly how Trump and his supporters want it!
In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.
— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)
How soon we forget!
So much for the bogus ”passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.”
When critics reach for analogies to describe Donald Trump — or look for examples of democratic deterioration — they tend to look abroad. They point to Russia under Vladimir Putin, Hungary under Viktor Orban, or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump, in this view, is a type — an authoritarian strongman. But it’s a foreign type, and his corrupt administration is seen as alien to the American experience.
This is a little too generous to the United States. It’s not just that we have had moments of authoritarian government — as well as presidents, like John Adams or Woodrow Wilson, with autocratic impulses — but that an entire region of the country was once governed by an actual authoritarian regime. That regime was Jim Crow, a system defined by a one-party rule and violent repression of racial minorities.
The reason this matters is straightforward. Look beyond America’s borders for possible authoritarian futures and you might miss important points of continuity with our own past. Which is to say that if authoritarian government is in our future, there’s no reason to think it won’t look like something we’ve already built, versus something we’ve imported.
Americans don’t usually think of Jim Crow as a kind of authoritarianism, or of the Jim Crow South as a collection of authoritarian states. To the extent that there is one, the general view is that the Jim Crow South was a democracy, albeit racist and exclusionary. People voted in elections, politicians exchanged power and institutions like the press had a prominent place in public life.
There’s a strong case to be made that this is wrong. “To earn the moniker,” argues the political scientist Robert Mickey in “Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972,” “democracies must feature free and fair elections, the safeguarding of rights necessary to sustain such elections — such as freedoms of assembly, association, and speech — and a state apparatus sufficiently responsive to election winners and autonomous from social and economic forces that these elections are meaningful.”
By that standard, the Jim Crow South was not democratic. But does that make it authoritarian? A look at the creation of Jim Crow can help us answer the question.
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Jim Crow did not emerge immediately after the Compromise of 1877 — in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in return for the presidency — and the end of Reconstruction. It arose, instead, as a response to a unique set of political and economic conditions in the 1890s.
By the start of the decade, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued in his influential 1955 book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” opposition to “extreme racism” had relaxed to the point of permissiveness. External restraining forces — “Northern liberal opinion in the press, the courts, and the government” — were more concerned with reconciling the nation than securing Southern democracy. And within the South, conservative political and business elites had abandoned restraint in the face of a radical challenge from an agrarian mass movement.
Mickey notes how the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party “clashed with state and national Democratic parties on major economic issues, including debt relief for farmers and the regulation of business.” What’s more, “A Colored Farmers’ Alliance grew rapidly as well, and held out the possibility of biracial coalition-building.” This possibility became a reality in states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, where Populists joined with a majority-black southern Republican Party to support common lists of candidates in “fusion” agreements against an explicitly elitist and white supremacist Democratic Party. Populists and Republicans won their greatest victories in that era in North Carolina, where they captured the state legislature and governor’s mansion, as well as local and county offices.
Democrats, among them large landowners and “New South” industrialists, responded with violence. Democratic paramilitary organizations — called “Red Shirts” — attacked Populist and Republican voters, suppressing the vote throughout the state. In Republican-controlled Wilmington, N.C., writes Mickey, “Democratic notables launched a wave of violence and killings of Republicans and their supporters, black and white, to take back the state’s largest city; hundreds fled for good.”
This basic pattern repeated itself throughout the South for the next decade. Working through the Democratic Party, conservative elites “repressed Populists, seized control of the state apparatus, and effectively ended credible partisan competition.” They rewrote state constitutions to end the vote for blacks as well as substantially restrict it for most whites. They gerrymandered states to secure the political power of large landowners, converted local elective offices into appointed positions controlled at the state level, “and further insulated state judiciaries from popular input.” This could have been stopped, but the North was tired of sectional conflict, and the courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the Democrats.
The southern Democratic Party didn’t just control all offices and effectively staff the state bureaucracy. It was gatekeeper to all political participation. An aspiring politician could not run for office, much less win and participate in government, without having it behind him. “What is the state?” asked one prominent lawyer during Louisiana’s 1898 Jim Crow constitutional convention, aptly capturing the dynamic at work, “It is the Democratic Party.” Statehood was conflated with party, writes Mickey, “and party disloyalty with state treason.”
Southern conservatives beat back Populism and biracial democracy to build a one-party state and ensure cheap labor, low taxes, white supremacy and a starkly unequal distribution of wealth. It took two decades of disruption — the Great Depression, the Great Migration and the Second World War — to even make change possible, and then another decade of fierce struggle to bring democracy back to the South.
It’s not that we can’t learn from the experiences of other countries, but that our past offers an especially powerful point of comparison. Many of the same elements are in play, from the potent influence of a reactionary business elite to a major political party convinced of its singular legitimacy. A party that has already weakened our democracy to protect its power, and which shows every sign of going further should the need arise. A party that stands beside a lawless president, shielding him from accountability while he makes the government an extension of his personal will.
I’m not saying a new Jim Crow is on the near horizon (or the far one, for that matter). But if we look at the actions of the political party and president now in power, if we think of how they would behave with even more control over the levers of the state, then we might be on a path that ends in something that is familiar from our past — authoritarian government with a democratic facade.
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“[T]he courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the [Jim Crow] Democrats.”
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In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.
— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)
How soon we forget!
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Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants. There is nothing “fair and balanced” about the court’s double standard that favors the government over everyone else. And, as Sotomayor implies, this flagrant bias creates the disturbing impression that the Trump administration has a majority of the court in its pocket.
Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants. There is nothing “fair and balanced” about the court’s double standard that favors the government over everyone else. And, as Sotomayor implies, this flagrant bias creates the disturbing impression that the Trump administration has a majority of the court in its pocket.
Read the full article at the above link.
Here’s a link to Justice Sotomayor’s full dissent in Wolf v. Cook County:
Here’s a “key quote” from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:
These facts—all of which undermine the Government’s assertion of irreparable harm—show two things, one about the Government’s conduct and one about this Court’s own. First, the Government has come to treat “th[e] exceptional mechanism” of stay relief “as a new normal.” Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting from grant of stay) (slip op., at 5). Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming lim- ited Court resources in each. And with each successive ap- plication, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, its behavior relating to the public-charge
6 WOLF v. COOK COUNTY SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
rule in particular shows how much its own definition of ir- reparable harm has shifted. Having first sought a stay in the New York cases based, in large part, on the purported harm created by a nationwide injunction, it now disclaims that rationale and insists that the harm is its temporary inability to enforce its goals in one State.
Second, this Court is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process. That is because the Court—in this case, the New York cases, and many others—has been all too quick to grant the Government’s “reflexiv[e]” requests. Ibid. But make no mistake: Such a shift in the Court’s own behavior comes at a cost.
Stay applications force the Court to consider important statutory and constitutional questions that have not been ventilated fully in the lower courts, on abbreviated timeta- bles and without oral argument. They upend the normal appellate process, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won a stay. (Here, the Government touts that in granting a stay in the New York cases, this Court “necessarily concluded that if the court of appeals were to uphold the preliminary injunctio[n], the Court likely would grant a petition for a writ of certiorari” and that “there was a fair prospect the Court would rule in favor of the govern- ment.” Application 3.) They demand extensive time and resources when the Court’s intervention may well be unnec- essary—particularly when, as here, a court of appeals is poised to decide the issue for itself.
Perhaps most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This Court often permits executions—where the risk of ir- reparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.” Mur- phy v. Collier, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (second statement of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 4); see also id., at ___ (ALITO, J., joined by THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., dissenting from grant of stay) (slip op., at 6) (“When courts do not have ad- equate time to consider a claim, the decisionmaking process may be compromised”); cf. Dunn v. Ray, 586 U. S. ___ (2019) (overturning the grant of a stay of execution). Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances— where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision making process that this Court must strive to protect.
I respectfully dissent.
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Of course, the regime’s use of manufactured and clearly bogus “national emergencies” or fake appeals to “national security” is a perversion of both fact and law, as well as a mocking of Constitutional separation of powers. This obscenely transparent legal ruse essentially was invited by the Roberts and his GOP brethren. Roberts somewhat disingenuously claims to be a “student of history.” But, whether he takes responsibility for it or not, he has basically invited Trump & Miller to start a new “Reichstag Fire” almost every week with migrants, asylum seekers, Latinos, and the less affluent as the “designated usual suspects.”
Powerful as her dissent is, Justice Sotomayor actually understates the case against her GOP colleagues. Every racist, White Nationalist, nativist, and/or authoritarian movement in American history has been enabled, advanced, and protected by morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest jurists who have intentionally provided “legal cover” for those official misdeeds. How about “states rights,”“separate but equal,”“plenary power,” and a host of other now discredited legal doctrines used to justify everything from slavery to denying voting, and other Constitutional rights including life itself to African Americans? They were all used to “cover” for actions that might more properly have been considered “crimes against humanity.”
Who knows what legal blather Roberts and his four fellow rightist toadies will come up with to further promote the destruction of humanity and the disintegration of American democracy at the hands of Trump, Miller, Barr, Putin, and the rest of the gang?
But, courageous “outings” like those by Justice Sotomayor will help insure that history will be able to trace the bloody path of needless deaths, ruined lives, wasted human potential, official hate mongering, and unspeakable human misery they are unleashing directly to their doors and hold them accountable in a way that our current system has disgracefully failed to do.
Trump was right about at least one thing: There are indeed “GOP Justices” on the Supremes wholly owned by him and his party. They consistently put GOP rightist ideology and and authoritarianism above the Constitution, human rights, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and simple human decency. Other than that, they’re a “great bunch of guys!”
Limiting immigration over the next four decades would do little to stop the racial diversification of the United States — but it could push the country into a population decline, according to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau.
For the first time in a decade, the federal agency gamed out how varying degrees of immigration could impact the U.S. population in terms of growth, age and racial diversity and its labor force.
Its conclusions, experts said, underscore the important role immigrants play in keeping the U.S. population trending upward.
“We desperately need immigration to keep our country growing and prosperous,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the Census numbers this week. “The reason we have a good growth rate in comparison to other developed countries in the world is because we’ve had robust immigration for the last 30 to 40 years.”
The Census compared population estimates based on immigration levels from 2011 to 2015 and ran several “what if” scenarios to see how changing the flow of immigrants could impact the population as a whole.
Analysts compared the status quo with a “high immigration” scenario in which immigration would increase by about 50 percent; a “low immigration” scenario in which immigration would decline by about 50 percent; and a “zero immigration” scenario that demonstrates what would happen if immigration ground to a complete stop.
Immigration fluctuations between now and 2060 could make the difference of as many as 127 million people in the U.S. population, the Census found.
If immigration declines by 50 percent, the United States would still add about 53 million people over the next four decades, the report says.
But if immigration is stopped altogether, the population would stall out in 2035, after which it would slide into a decline. By 2060, under a zero-immigration scenario, the Census found the population could reach a low of 320 million people with a large and rapidly aging senior population.
The population of American seniors — aged 65 and older — is expected to surpass the population of children under the age of 18 in every scenario, though higher immigration patterns would delay the inevitable: In the zero-immigration plot, seniors outpace children by the year 2029; in the high-immigration pattern, seniors don’t overtake children until 2045.
Immigration has, of course, been shaped by the policies and rhetoric of President Trump, whose rise to power in 2016 and subsequent immigration policies are not accounted for in the Census report.
Last month, the president added six countries to his administration’s travel ban list, which already prohibited nearly all citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea from immigrating to the United States.
The new ban, which takes effect on Feb. 22, would bar immigrants from Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country — as well as Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan. It would also prevent people from Tanzania and Sudan from applying for the visa lottery, which issues up to 50,000 visas annually to countries with historically low migration to the United States.
Most of the people affected by the policy hail from predominantly black and Muslim nations, a fact that has prompted Democrats and other critics to call the ban an exercise in racism and xenophobia.
But according to census data, eliminating all forms of immigration altogether would not prevent the United States from becoming increasingly nonwhite.
“The fastest-growing racial group in this country is people who identify as multiracial,” Frey said.
Without any new immigrants coming to the United States, the non-Hispanic white population would still fall by about 17 percent over the next four decades, the Census reports. That means that by 2060, white people would make up just barely more than half of the country — 51 percent, with that number expected to decline further in the future.
In all other scenarios, the United States is projected to become majority-minority well before then: by 2041, if immigration increases; by 2045, if immigration remains constant; and by 2049, if immigration is cut in half.
Among young people below age 30, the change is more rapid, and is expected to tip the scales in this decade.
“You could stop immigration tomorrow, and this country would still become more racially diverse,” Frey said.
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It would make more sense if we had a thoughtful, honest Government that worked to achieve the full potential of inevitable immigration rather than fighting a costly, rancorous, counterproductive, and ultimately fruitless “war” against that which made America great in the first place.
The latest regime “scam on America:” sending “elite Border Patrol Tactical Squads” (who obviously lack any real, meaningful law enforcement assignment) to “sanctuary cities” to round up more undocumented individuals to aimlessly throw into a failing and mismanaged “court” system that’s already backed up for years. There has to be a more intelligent and efficient way to prioritize and conduct immigration enforcement.
“We can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are in the process of doing that on many fronts), but it won’t stop human migration.”
Joel Rubin and Brittany Mejia report for the LA Times:
A federal judge in Los Angeles upends the way ICE may use local police to detain people it suspects of being in the country illegally.
A federal judge in Los Angeles this week issued his final judgment in a long-running immigration case, upending the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses local police to detain people it suspects of being in the country illegally.
The judgment filed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte formalized a ruling he made in September that included a permanent injunction barring ICE from using error-prone databases when issuing so-called detainers, which are requests made to police agencies to keep people who have been arrested in custody for up two days beyond the time they would otherwise be held.
The earlier ruling also blocked ICE from issuing such requests to state and local law enforcement in states where there isn’t an explicit statute authorizing police to arrest someone or keep them in custody on an immigration detainer.
The ruling, which applied to ICE activity in all but a few states, appeared to have enormous implications for how the government targets people for deportation. However, attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights groups that brought the case disagreed over whether the injunction went into effect immediately, and ICE gave no indication it had changed its practices.
Last fall, an ICE spokesman said the agency was “reviewing the ruling and considering our legal options.”
This week’s judgment erased any ambiguity.
Under the judgment, ICE has three months to “adopt and implement any policies, practices, trainings, and systems changes necessary to ensure consistent and effective compliance” with the judgment, Birotte wrote. The judge ordered government lawyers to provide him with evidence it had implemented new policies.
“This judgment ensures that ICE has to comply with the court’s findings that the program it’s had for decades is grounded in unconstitutional practices that have to end,” said Jennie Pasquarella, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped argue the case.
The class-action lawsuit alleged that the databases that agents consult to issue detainers are so badly flawed by incomplete and inaccurate information that ICE officers should not be allowed to rely on them as the sole basis for keeping someone in custody.
In September, the judge agreed with that assessment, finding that the databases often contained “incomplete data, significant errors, or were not designed to provide information that would be used to determine a person’s removability.”
These errors, according to that decision, have led to arrests of U.S. citizens as well as noncitizens in the country lawfully. From May 2015 to February 2016, of the 12,797 detainers issued in that period, 771 were lifted, according to ICE data. Of those 771, 42 were lifted because the person was a U.S. citizen.
In the years since the lawsuit was filed, ICE has amended its policies, saying the changes made the process for issuing detainers more rigorous.
Previously, for example, agents would check individual databases in search of evidence of someone being in the country illegally. But three years ago, the agency launched a new system, in which 10 databases are automatically queried. A supervisor is required to sign off on decisions to issue detainers.
Birotte said in his judgement this week that conducting interviews with people suspected of being in the country illegally and checking the hard copy files the government keeps on immigrants is the most reliable source of information for issuing detainers.
The judge’s decision affects any detainer requests issued by an ICE officer in the federal court system’s Central District of California. That designation is significant because it includes the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, a facility in Orange County from which ICE agents send out detainer requests to authorities in 43 states, Guam and Washington, D.C.
Dozens of deportation officers and contract analysts work in shifts around the clock every day at the center. In 2018, the center issued 45,253 detainers and alerted agents at field offices to more than 28,000 additional people released from law enforcement custody before ICE could detain them.
If ICE tries to move its detainer operation to another facility, Birotte said, it must alert him in advance and the injunction would follow it to the new location.
All existing detainers issued by the enforcement center were also nullified by the judge’s ruling. Pasquarella said it was unknown how many people that affects, but said it is in “the thousands.”
Finally, Birotte gave ICE a month to alert the thousands of local and state police departments to which it sent detainer requests of his judgment and “its impact on detainers issued by ICE.” He ordered ICE to post its notice prominently on its website and said the agency “shall specifically inform these agencies that a detainer does not provide the legal authority for a state or local law enforcement officer to make a civil immigration arrest.”
The detainer process begins when police arrest and fingerprint a person. The prints are sent electronically to the FBI and checked against the prints of millions of immigrants in Homeland Security databases. If there is a match — such as someone who applied for a visa or was apprehended by Border Patrol — it triggers a review process, which often culminates with an agent at the center deciding whether to issue a detainer.
Approximately 70% of the arrests ICE makes occur after the agency is notified about someone being released from local jails or state prisons. In fiscal year 2019, ICE had lodged more than 160,000 detainers with local law enforcement agencies, according to the agency.
An ICE spokeswoman declined to comment on the judgment and would not say whether ICE had yet changed its practice of issuing detainer requests. Instead, she referred reporters to a statement released Thursday by the White House.
“A single, unelected, district judge in the Central District of California issued a legally groundless and sweeping injunction that — if not immediately lifted — will guarantee the release of innumerable criminal illegal aliens into our communities putting citizens at dire risk,” the statement said. “This ruling undermines the pillars of immigration enforcement and blocks traditional and vital law enforcement cooperation that has occurred for decades.”
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Judge Andre Birotte found that the ICE detainer program is riddled with legal errors. Not too surprising. In addition to using DHS’s inherently unreliable databases, immigration “detainers” are issued by immigration agents, not neutral and detached magistrates as they should be, which makes them constitutionally suspect and has led to rulings across the country that they should not be honored.
If I were the ACLU, however, I wouldn’t “do the victory dance” yet. Led by the complicit “J.R. Five,” the Supremes often have shown themselves to be willing, sometimes enthusiastic, enablers of the regime’s White Nationalist campaign to dehumanize and “Dred Scottify” immigrants under our laws.
As the ACLU accurately has stated: “The fundamental constitutional protections of due process and equal protection embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to every person, regardless of immigration status.”
Unfortunately, the “J.R. Five” has ignored the rule of law and our Constitution when it comes to protecting the rights of immigrants. They have managed to “tune out” their own immigration heritages, their own good fortune and privileged positions, and turn a deaf ear to humanity and its unnecessary suffering. Instead they have allied themselves with Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other White Nationalists in subjecting immigrants and other people of color to the “New Era of Jim Crow.”
Someday, if America survives as a democracy, we will get “regime change.” But, the problems of a life-tenured judiciary infected with too many at its highest levels who are unwilling to stand up for human rights and/or who are driven by a twisted far-right ideology incorporating many of the worst aspects of white supremacy and its abuses of power over history will not necessarily disappear overnight.
