"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
🏴☠️🤡KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: Experienced Immigration Judges Flee America’s Star Chambers At Record Numbers As Trump Regime’s Malicious Incompetence Triples Backlog With Twice The Number Of Judges On Bench, According To Latest TRAC Report!
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
More Immigration Judges Leaving the Bench
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The latest judge-by-judge data from the Immigration Courts indicate that more judges are resigning and retiring. Turnover is the highest since records began in FY 1997 over two decades ago. These results are based on detailed records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) which administers the Courts.
During FY 2019 a record number of 35 judges left the bench. This is up from the previous record set in FY 2017 when 20 judges left the bench, and 27 judges left in FY 2018.
With elevated hiring plus the record number of judges leaving the bench more cases are being heard by judges with quite limited experience as immigration judges.
Currently one of every three (32%) judges have only held their position since FY 2019. Half (48%) of the judges serving today were appointed in the last two and a half years. And nearly two-thirds (64%) were appointed since FY 2017.
While the Court is losing many of its most experienced judges, the backlog of cases continues to balloon. It is now almost three times the level when President Trump assumed office.
Update on Disappearing Immigration Court Records
Records continue to disappear in the latest data release for updated court records through the end of June 2020. The report provides the latest statement from EOIR Chief Management Officer Kate Sheehey about this matter.
To read the full report on Immigration Judges leaving the bench as well as the Sheehey statement, go to:
TRAC’s free web query tools which track Immigration Court proceedings have also been updated through June 2020. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools and their latest update go to:
TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
Look folks, I’m not disputing that Susan B. Long and David Burnham of TRAC are smart people. I’m even willing to speculate that they are smarter than most of the folks still in so-called public service (that largely isn’t any more) in all three branches of our failing Government.
But, are they really that much smarter than Supreme Court Justices, Article III Federal Judges, and Legislators who have let this grotesquely unconstitutional, dysfunctional, and deadly Star Chamber masquerading as a “court system” right here on American soil unfold and continue its daily abuses right under their complicit noses? Or, do we have too many individuals in public office lacking both the human decency and moral courage to stand up against institutionalized racism, unnecessarily cruelty, corruption, and pure stupidity, all of which very clearly are prohibited by both the due process and equal protection clauses of our Constitution, not to mention the 13th and 15th Amendments. It’s not rocket science!
Enough with the Congressional and Court-enabled “Dred Scottification” of the other! That’s how we ended up with things like the “Chinese Exclusion Act” and “Jim Crow” and why we have an institutionalized racism problem now.
Instead of standing up for equal justice for all under the Constitution, the Supremes and Congress often have willingly been part of the problem — using the law knowingly and intentionally to undermine constitutionally required equal justice for all and an end to racism. And, we can see those same attitudes today, specifically in the Supremes’ ridiculously wrong, intellectually dishonest, and cowardly decisions “greenlighting” various parts of White Nationalist Stephen Miller’s bogus program of dehumanizing asylum seekers and immigrants of color. This is not acceptable performance from Justices of our highest Court!
We need better, more courageous, and more intellectually honest public officers in all three branches who are willing to stand up for individual rights, human lives, and the common good over bogus right wing legal doctrines and inhumanity cloaked in legal gobbledygook. It won’t happen overnight. But, a better America starts with throwing a totally corrupt, cruel, and maliciously incompetent President and his GOP enablers out of every public office at every level of government this November.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Now that we are deep into protests over racism, inequality and police brutality — protests that I’ve come to see as a revisiting of Freedom Summer — it is clear that Donald Trump sees the activation of white nationalism and anti-otherness as his path to re-election. We are engaged in yet another national conversation about race and racism, privilege and oppression.
But, as is usually the case, the language we used to describe the moment is lacking. We — the public and the media, including this newspaper, including, in the past, this very column — often use, consciously or not, language that shields anti-Black white supremacy, rather than to expose it and hold it accountable.
We use all manner of euphemisms and terms of art to keep from directly addressing the racial reality in America. This may be some holdover from a bygone time, but it is now time for it to come to an end.
Take for instance the term “race relations.” Polling organizations like Gallup and the Pew Research Center often ask respondents how they feel about the state of race relations in the country.
I have never fully understood what this meant. It suggests a relationship that swings from harmony to disharmony. But that is not the way race is structured or animated in this country. From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof.
Protests, and even violence, have erupted when white people felt their hold on those things was threatened or when Black people — or Indigenous people, or Hispanics — rebelled against those things being denied.
So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
White Supremacy is at the core of Donald Trump and today’s GOP. It is willfully enabled by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Supreme Court Justices who refuse to acknowledge the obvious anti-Hispanic and anti-people of color motivations behind unconstitutional and inhuman immigration and asylum restrictions designed by notoriously outspoken neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller.
Likewise, the intellectually corrupt Supremes’ majority fails to prevent the GOP’s racist strategy of suppressing voting rights of African Americans and Latinos. The unconstitutionality of these schemes to deny the vote and dilute the political power of people of color has been crystal clear under our Constitution since the enactment of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.
You don’t need a Harvard law degree to figure this out. Just honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity — things that I once took for granted among Supreme Court Justices, but now see are sorely missing on today’s Court where extreme rightist ideology identified with white supremacy has replaced judicial qualifications as selection criteria when the GOP was in charge.
Ending white supremacy in America will require ousting Trump and the GOP and ending the GOP’s power to put more unqualified judges who are opposed to racial and social justice in America on the Federal Bench.
This November, vote like your life and our nation’s future depend it it. Because they do!
WASHINGTON, DC — The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) condemns the Trump administration’s recent ramp-up of efforts to turn the immigration court system into an enforcement tool rather than an independent arbiter for justice. The immigration courts are formally known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and are overseen by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
AILA President Jennifer Minear, noted, “AILA has long advocated for an independent immigration court, one that ensures judges serve as neutral arbiters of justice. This administration has instead subjected the courts to political influence and exploited the inherent structural flaws of the DOJ-controlled immigration courts, which also prosecutes immigration cases at the federal level. The nail in the coffin of judicial neutrality is the fact that the administration has put the courts in the control of a new Chief Immigration Judge who has no judicial experience but served as ICE’s chief immigration prosecutor. No less concerning is DOJ’s recent choice for Chief Appellate Immigration Judge – an individual who also prosecuted immigration cases and advised the Trump White House on immigration policy. This administration continues to weaponize the immigration courts for the sole purpose of accelerating deportations rather than dispensing neutral justice. Congress must investigate these politically motivated appointments and pass legislation to create an independent, Article I immigration court.”
Among the recent actions taken by this administration to bias the immigration courts:
As a friend and former colleague said recently “I would have thought that the one thing everyone could get behind, regardless of political philosophy, would be a neutral court system.” Sadly, not so in today’s crumbling America.
There are three groups blocking the way:
The Trump Administration, where due process only applies to Trump and his corrupt cronies;
GOP legislators whose acquittal of Trump against the overwhelming weight of the evidence shows exactly what due process means to them;
Five GOP-appointed Justices on the Supremes who don’t believe that due process applies to all persons in the US, notwithstanding the “plain language” of Article 5 of our Constitution — particularly if those persons have the misfortune to be asylum seekers of color.
The end result is “Dred Scottification” — that is, dehumanization or “de-personification” of “the other.” The GOP has made it a centerpiece of their failed attempt to govern, from voter suppression, to looting the Treasury for the benefit of the rich and powerful, to immunity for law enforcement officers who kill minorities, to greenlighting cruel, inhuman,and counterproductive treatment of lawful asylum seekers and immigrants. Not surprisingly, this essentially “Whites Only” view of social justice is ripping our nation apart on many levels.
I find it highly ironic that at the same time we are rightfully removing statutes of Chief Justice Roger Taney, a racist who authored the infamous Dred Scott Decision, Chief Justice Roberts and four of his colleagues continue to “Dred Scottify” asylum seekers and other immigrants, primarily those of color, by denying them the due process, fundamental fairness, fair and impartial judges, and, perhaps most of all, racist-free policies that our Constitution demands!
Compare the “due process” afforded Trump by the GOP Senate and the pardon of a convicted civil and human rights abuser like “Racist Sheriff Joe” with the ugly and dishonest parody of due process afforded Sister Norma’s lawful asylum seekers whose “crime” was seeking fair treatment, justice, and an acknowledgement of their humanity from a nation that has turned it’s back on those values.
What Sister Norma’s article did not mention is that those who survive in Mexico long enough to get to “court” have their asylum claims denied at a rate of about 99% by an unfair system intentionally skewed and biased against them. Most experts believe that many, probably a majority, of those being denied actually merit protection under a fair and impartial application of our laws.
But, as pointed out by AILA, that’s not why Billy the Bigot has appointed prosecutors as top “judges” and notorious asylum deniers as “appellate judges.” He intends to perpetuate a highly unfair “deportation railroad” designed by infamous White Nationalist racist Stephen Miller. In other words, our justice system is being weaponized in support of an overtly racist agenda formulated by a racist regime that has made racism the centerpiece of its pitch for remaining in office. Incredible! Yet true!
The Supremes have life tenure. But, the other two branches of our failing Government don’t. And, a better Executive and a better Legislature that believe in our Constitution and equal justice for all is a necessary start on a better Federal Judiciary — one where commitment to due process, fundamental fairness, and equal justice for all is a threshold requirement for future judicial appointments.Time to throw the “non-believers” and their enablers out of office.
This November, vote like your life and our country’s existence depend on it! Because they do!
This is the first time in the pollster’s decades of tracking the country’s thoughts on immigration that more people would favor more immigration compared to those who want to see less.
Of those surveyed, 34 percent said that they want to see the U.S.’s level of immigration increase, while 28 percent said they want to see it decreased. Thirty-six percent said that the country’s immigration rate should remain the same.
Conducted May 28-June 4, the survey was completed before the Trump administration stopped the issuing of any new H-1B and other visas through the end of the year. It also came before the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s rollback of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act was illegal.
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Read Marty’s full article at the link.
Interestingly, I’ve been saying on Courtside that Dems should make robust, sensible, humane, practical, immigration, refugee, and human rights policies that recognize the reality of human migration, pay attention to market forces, boost the economy, and promote Constitutional due process, equal justice, and human dignity for all in America a centerpiece of the Biden campaign.
Social justice isn’t just “aspirational” — it’s a Constitutional and a human right!
We need leaders who not only “talk the talk, but walk the walk.”
This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!
Just eight miles from the White House, the Trump administration has quietly opened a new front in its war against immigrants. Inside a 26-story office tower next to a Target in Falls Church, Virginia, the Board of Immigration Appeals has broken with any pretense of impartiality and appears to be working in lockstep with the administration to close the door on immigrants’ ability to remain in the country.
Created in 1940, when the immigration system was moved from the Department of Labor to the Justice Department, BIA serves as the appellate court within the immigration system, where both ICE prosecutors and noncitizen respondents can appeal decisions by individual immigration court judges around the country. It not only decides the fate of the migrants whose cases it reviews; if it chooses to publish a decision, it sets precedent for immigration courts across the country.
Under previous administrations, the BIA was ostensibly impartial and bipartisan, though mainly out of a long-standing tradition of promoting judicial objectivity. Since the entire immigration court system is contained in the Department of Justice—within an administrative agency known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)—immigration judges, including those serving as board members on the BIA, are employees of the DOJ, and, by extension, are part of the executive branch. Unlike their counterparts in the federal judiciary, immigration judges are not independent.
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Since 2018, the Trump administration has exploited its powers over the BIA by expanding the board from 17 to 23 members to accommodate additional anti-immigrant hardliners. Justice Department memos obtained by the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) show that EOIR pushed shorter hiring timelines, which were used to bring on judges with more restrictionist records.
Now the court is stacked with members who have consistently ruled against immigrants, such as one judge who threatened to unleash a dog on a two-year-old boy during a hearing. Numbers obtained by a law firm through a Freedom of Information Request show that the six BIA judges appointed by Attorney General William Barr all had granted asylum in less than 10 percent of cases in fiscal year 2019. (One never granted asylum, despite hearing 40 cases.) An EOIR spokesperson told The Nation in an e-mail that“EOIR does not choose Board members based on prohibited criteria such as race or politics” and that “Board members are selected through an open, competitive, merit-based process.”
The most notable example of the administration’s preference for ultraconservative judges came in late May, when Barr appointed David H. Wetmore as BIA chairman. Wetmore, a former immigration adviser to the White House Domestic Policy Council, was around for some of the Trump administration’s most egregious policies, including the travel ban and family separation policy.
Although only two decisions have been issued since Wetmore was appointed chair, he seems set to pick up where his predecessor, former Acting Chair Garry G. Malphrus, left off. Malphrus, a George W. Bush holdover, became the face of the court’s lurch to curtail immigrants’ legal protections since Trump took office. He had the hawkish bona fides that made him an ideal chairman under the Trump DOJ: From 1997 to 2001, he served as chief counsel to one-time segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he was made associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council after his roleas a Brooks Brothers rioter during the 2000 Bush v. Gore recount in Florida—during which GOP operatives staged a protest that disrupted a recount and may have handed Bush the presidency.
Malphrus was made acting chair in 2019, and authored 24 of the 78 BIA precedential decisions issued under the current administration. Almost all of these precedential decisions have made it more difficult for immigrants to win their cases. The board made it harder for victims of terrorism to win asylum and raised the bar of evidence needed for several types of protections.
“It’s not a court anymore, it’s an enforcement mechanism,” said Paul Wickham Schmidt, who was himself chair of the BIA between 1995 and 2001 and now writes a popular immigration blog called Immigration Courtside. “They’re taking predetermined policy and just disguising it as judicial opinions, when the results have all been predetermined and it has nothing to do or little to do with the merits of the cases.”
Consider this: In a case decided in January, the BIA was considering whether an immigration judge had erred in refusing to postpone a removal decision for a person awaiting a decision on a U visa application—a visa type reserved for victims of certain crimes or those cooperating with authorities investigating a crime—to be resolved. (ICE had recently changed their policies to make it easier to deport people in this situation.) The BIA sided with the judge, acknowledging that the crime victim was “eligible for a U visa” but was not entitled to wait to receive it, in part due to his “lack of diligence in pursuing” one. The decision signals that immigrants eligible for crime victim visas, and who are willing to cooperate with law enforcement, can still be ordered deported.
While federal courts hear public oral arguments and largely deliberate openly, the BIA typically uses a paper review method, which means they receive briefs from opposing parties and hand down a decision some time later with the whole intervening process shrouded in secrecy. “Unlike federal courts, where unpublished decisions are still accessible by the public, and so you can track what judges are saying in decisions that do not make precedent, the [BIA] only sporadically releases those decisions,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
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Read the rest of Filipe’s article at the link.
Filipe’s final point in the article is one we should all keep in mind:
For hundreds of thousands of immigrants, it doesn’t matter if the anti-immigrant paper pushers in this obscure administrative body are tossed out and all of the policy is slowly reversed by another administration; for most, one shot is all they get. Whether a case was winnable before or even after the Trump BIA is irrelevant. The chance to stay in the United States will be lost forever.
The damage to our humanity and our national conscience inflicted by Trump’s White Nationalist regime, wrongfully enabled by complicit Supremes, and aided and abetted by a GOP Senate will not be “cured” by inevitable later “reforms,” be they next year under a better Administration or decades from now, as is happening with other racial justice issues. Undoubtedly, as eventually will be established, the current anti-immigrant and particularly the anti-asylum policies of the Trump regime are deeply rooted in racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. One need only look at the well-documented careers of “hate architects” like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions to see the intentional ignorance and ugliness at work here.
I frankly don’t see how we as a nation ever can come to grips with the racial tensions and demands for equal justice now tearing at our society without recognizing the unconscionable racism and immorality driving our current immigration and refugee policies and the failure and untenability of too many leaders in all three branches who have either helped promote racial injustice or have lacked the moral and intellectual courage consistently to stand up against it. They are the problem, and their departure or disempowerment, no matter how long it takes, will be necessary for us eventually to move forward as one nation.
The Supreme Court Doesn’t See Asylum-Seekers as People — One week after saving DACA, the high court proved that its sympathies for immigrants seeking better lives are limited.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court saved more than 700,000 immigrants from the Trump administration’s nativist buzz saw. The court ensured that these immigrants, who were brought to the United States by their undocumented parents as children, would continue to be protected by an Obama administration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, sparing them from deportation to countries many could not even remember. The court split 5–4, with Chief Justice John Roberts throwing his lot in with the liberals to find that Donald Trump’s rescission of DACA had been unlawful—largely because it had been carelessly effectuated, defended pretextually, but also because hundreds of thousands of young people had altered their lives in reliance on the promise that they would be immune from deportation.
In a key section of the majority opinion, Roberts highlighted the humanity of these young undocumented people, as was the hopes and dreams of their families: “Since 2012, DACA recipients have enrolled in degree programs, embarked on careers, started businesses, purchased homes, and even married and had children, all in reliance” on DACA, Roberts wrote, quoting from briefs in the case. “The consequences of the rescission … would ‘radiate outward’ to DACA recipients’ families, including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children, to the schools where DACA recipients study and teach, and to the employers who have invested time and money in training them.” The chief justice evinced frustration that the Trump administration seemingly took none of those very human interests into account.
One week later, on Thursday morning, the high court proved that its sympathies for immigrants seeking better lives are limited. In a 7–2 ruling, the justices approved the Trump administration’s draconian interpretation of a federal law that limits courts’ ability to review deportation orders. This time around, the court did not note immigrants’ contributions to the nation or acknowledge their humanity in any way. Having last week treated one class of immigrants like actual people, the court on Thursday pivoted back to callous cruelty. All of the chief justice’s kind words about DACA recipients seemingly do not apply to immigrants who—according to the executive branch—do not deserve asylum.
Thursday’s case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, involves an asylum-seeker from Sri Lanka named Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam who faces likely death if he is deported because he is Tamil. Thuraissigiam was apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol while trying to cross at the southern border in 2017. After an asylum officer and immigration judge rejected his claims, Thuraissigiam was slated for “expedited removal.” Federal law bars courts from reviewing that deportation order. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional as applied to Thuraissigiam under the Constitution’s suspension clause, which limits the government’s ability to restrict habeas corpus—the centuries-old right to contest detention before a judge.
At the Trump administration’s request, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit, with Justice Samuel Alito writing a maximalist majority opinion for the five conservatives and Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg proffering a narrower concurrence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a lengthy, vivid dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan that accused the majority of flouting more than a century of precedent and “purg[ing] an entire class of legal challenges to executive detention.” (In his own opinion, Alito dismissed Sotomayor’s criticisms as mere “rhetoric.”)
This outcome strips due process from immigrants seeking asylum, who now have even fewer rights to a fair adjudicatory process under an expedited system that already afforded them minimal protections. It will also embolden the Trump administration to speed up deportations for thousands of people with no judicial oversight. Under this now court-approved system, immigrants fleeing their home country must undergo a “credible fear” interview, at which they must explain to a federal officer why they qualify for asylum. (The Trump administration has allowed Customs and Border Protection agents—not trained asylum officers—to conduct credible fear interviews.) If the officer finds no “credible fear of persecution,” their supervisor reviews the determination, as does an immigration judge (who is not a traditional judge but rather an employee of the executive branch appointed by the attorney general). If these individuals find no credible fear, the immigrant is thrown into “expedited removal”—that is, swiftly deported in a matter of weeks. They may not contest the government’s “credible fear” determination before a federal court. It is this extreme rule that Thuraissigiam challenged as a violation of habeas corpus and due process.
Alito breezily dismissed Thuraissigiam’s individual claims by stripping a broad swath of constitutional rights from unauthorized immigrants. First, he declared that habeas corpus does not protect an immigrant’s ability to fight illegal deportation orders. Sotomayor fiercely contested this claim, citing an “entrenched line of cases” demonstrating that habeas has long protected the right of individuals—including immigrants—to challenge illegal executive actions in court. Second, Alito held that unauthorized immigrants who are already physically present in the United States have not actually “entered the country.” Thus, they have no due process right to challenge the government’s asylum determination. Sotomayor noted that this holding departs from more than a century of precedent by imposing distinctions drawn by modern immigration laws on the ancient guarantee of due process.
Alito not only waved away these galling consequences; he seemed to laugh at them.
The upshot of the decision will mean almost certain death for Thuraissigiam and others like him. Thuraissigiam faced brutal persecution in Sri Lanka, a fact Alito did not seem to understand at oral arguments. Various officials in the executive branch shrugged off that persecution. Thuraissigiam just wants an opportunity to prove to a federal judge that these officials violated the law by denying his asylum claim. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, he cannot. Nor can the many immigrants thrown into expedited removal by the Trump administration, which has used the process as a tool to speed up deportations across the country. Just two days ago, a federal appeals court cleared the way for the government to expand expedited removal beyond immigrants intercepted near the border to those apprehended anywhere in the nation. The administration has shown little interest in carefully considering whom it’s deporting; now many of those decisions will be rubber-stamped by executive officers and left unscrutinized by the federal judiciary.
Alito not only waved away these galling consequences; he seemed to laugh at them. Not for a moment does he appear to believe that asylum-seekers may be genuinely in fear for their lives. Among the many bon mots dropped by Alito in his opinion, he wrote: “While [Thuraissigiam] does not claim an entitlement to release, the Government is happy to release him—provided the release occurs in the cabin of a plane bound for Sri Lanka.” Given that Thuraissigiam claims he will likely be tortured to death if he is sent back to Sri Lanka, it’s not clear that line means what he thinks it does. Throughout the opinion Alito refers to Thuraissigiam as either “alien” or “respondent” and appears simply incapable of imagining that his claims are truthful.
It’s easy to miss the massive erosion of asylum-seekers’ rights in the victory last week around the triumph of DACA. But in some ways, it’s the most American outcome in the world to view DACA beneficiaries as more human because they have gone to school here and birthed children here, while scoffing at asylum-seekers, who, as part of a lengthy tradition under both constitutional and international law, simply ask the U.S. government to save their lives. Roberts, who seemed so attuned to the hardships of DACA recipients, joined Alito’s merciless opinion in full; in fact, the chief justice assigned the opinion to Alito, who has become the court’s staunchestcrusaderagainst immigrants’ rights.
The court’s split shows that a majority of justices think immigrants like Thuraissigiam are not the productive young people of the DACA case, with financial and familial ties to all that makes America great, but rather faceless masses cynically manipulating America’s generous asylum policy and overwhelming its immigration system. They believe these people do not deserve an iota of sympathy, let alone due process. That is already how many border agents viewed these immigrants: not as humans with rights, but as fraudulent parasites. The Supreme Court has now transformed that vision into law—and, in the process, allowed the executive to send more persecuted people to their deaths without even a meaningful day in court.
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Imposing death sentences without fair hearings, or indeed any real hearings at all, is bad stuff. And, Justices who justify this behavior should not be on the bench at all.
Sadly, that applies just as much to the two so-called “liberal icons” who voted with Alito and four other sneering colleagues who seemed to actually glory in being able to dehumanize another soul with the audacity to fight for his life. Frankly, this stuff is right out of the Third Reich. Read a few of the German Judiciary’s opinions of the time and see how quickly, easily, naturally, and often happily Reich jurists “justified the unjustifiable and the unthinkable.” I have no doubt that Sam Alito and some of his colleagues would have fit right in. How has American Justice gotten to this incredible “low point.”
I don’t know exactly what we can do about life-tenured judges who are unqualified for their jobs. Life tenure is there for a reason — to insure judicial independence overall, even in particular instances like this where it clearly does no such thing. And, with 200+ largely unqualified Trump appointees now on the Federal Bench, essentially “young deadwood,” the problem will get worse before it gets better.
The first step is to replace Trump and oust the GOP from the Senate. Then, methodically appoint only judges committed to equal justice for all, willing to stand up against abuses of justice by both the Executive and the Congress, and whose life experiences and legal work show an unswerving commitment to human rights and the rights of migrants to be treated as persons (fellow humans) under law.
It’s a national disgrace that with immigration and human rights the major issues clogging today’s Federal Courts, few, if any, Federal Judges have any experience representing asylum seekers in the Star Chambers known as “Immigration Courts” nor have they personally experienced the type of dehumanization, racism, torture, grotesque abuses, and unnecessary cruelty that they so unnecessarily, uncourageously, and glibly inflict on migrants and asylum seekers who indeed are the most vulnerable among us. If immigration and human rights are the pivotal issues of American justice, then we need to get Justices and judges on the bench who understand what they are doing and the dire human consequences of their actions (or inactions).
The situation of today’s asylum seekers of color is not much different from that of others Americans of color whose legal and Constitutional rights were denied, and whose humanity was intentionally degraded, by a corrupt judiciary and a legal system that intentionally failed to make Constitutonal equal justice for all a reality rather than a cruel fiction .
A nation that doesn’t demand better judges will never rise above its own mistakes and failures. And a Federal Judiciary that so obviously and intentionally lacks diversity and humanity can never properly serve the national interest.
Ditch the clueless, largely white, male “dudocracy” with their Ivy League degrees and not much else to offer. Appoint judges schooled in real life, who know what the law means in human terms and will use it to solve, rather than aggravate, inflame, or avoid, human problems! There are tons of such lawyers out there. We all know them. We need them to move from the “bullpen” to the Federal Benches, before it’s too late for everyone in America!
Folks, what we have here is “judicially-approved murder without trial.” It could also be called “extrajudicial killing.” Ugly, but brutally true! “The upshot of the decision will mean almost certain death for Thuraissigiam and others like him.” We should understand what’s happening, even if seven disingenuous and unqualified members of our highest court claim not to know or care what they are doing and refuse to acknowledge the real life consequences of their deep, dark, and disturbing intellectual corruption and their studied lack of human compassion, empathy, and decency.
Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out! It’s a Start On A Better Court, For America & For Humanity!
‘I Will Not Stand Silent.’ 10 Asian Americans Reflect on Racism During the Pandemic and the Need for Equality
SANGSUK SYLVIA KANG
ANNA PURNA KAMBHAMPATY
Diseases and outbreaks have long been used to rationalize xenophobia: HIV was blamed on Haitian Americans, the 1918 influenza pandemic on German Americans, the swine flu in 2009 on Mexican Americans. The racist belief that Asians carry disease goes back centuries. In the 1800s, out of fear that Chinese workers were taking jobs that could be held by white workers, white labor unions argued for an immigration ban by claiming that “Chinese” disease strains were more harmful than those carried by white people.
Today, as the U.S. struggles to combat a global pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 120,000 Americans and put millions out of work, President Donald Trump, who has referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and more recently the “kung flu,” has helped normalize anti-Asian xenophobia, stoking public hysteria and racist attacks. And now, as in the past, it’s not just Chinese Americans receiving the hatred. Racist aggressors don’t distinguish between different ethnic subgroups—anyone who is Asian or perceived to be Asian at all can be a victim. Even wearing a face mask, an act associated with Asians before it was recommended in the U.S., could be enough to provoke an attack.
Since mid-March, STOP AAPI HATE, an incident-reporting center founded by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, has received more than 1,800 reports of pandemic-fueled harassment or violence in 45 states and Washington, D.C. “It’s not just the incidents themselves, but the inner turmoil they cause,” says Haruka Sakaguchi, a Brooklyn-based photographer who immigrated to the U.S. from Japan when she was 3 months old.
Since May, Sakaguchi has been photographing individuals in New York City who have faced this type of racist aggression. The resulting portraits, which were taken over FaceTime, have been lain atop the sites, also photographed by Sakaguchi, where the individuals were harassed or assaulted. “We are often highly, highly encouraged not to speak about these issues and try to look at the larger picture. Especially as immigrants and the children of immigrants, as long as we are able to build a livelihood of any kind, that’s considered a good existence,” says Sakaguchi, who hopes her images inspire people to at least acknowledge their experiences.
Amid the current Black Lives Matter protests, Asian Americans have been grappling with the -anti-Blackness in their own communities, how the racism they experience fits into the larger landscape and how they can be better allies for everyone.
“Cross-racial solidarity has long been woven into the fabric of resistance movements in the U.S.,” says Sakaguchi, referencing Frederick Douglass’ 1869 speech advocating for Chinese immigration and noting that the civil rights movement helped all people of color. “The current protests have further confirmed my role and responsibility here in the U.S.: not to be a ‘model minority’ aspiring to be white-adjacent on a social spectrum carefully engineered to serve the white and privileged, but to be an active member of a distinct community that emerged from the tireless resistance of people of color who came before us.”
Justin Tsui
“I didn’t think that if he shoved me into the tracks I’d have the physical energy to crawl back up,” says Tsui, a registered nurse pursuing a doctorate of nursing practice in psychiatric mental health at Columbia University. Tsui was transferring trains on his way home after picking up N95 masks when he was approached by a man on the platform.
The man asked, “You’re Chinese, right?” Tsui responded that he was Chinese American, and the man told Tsui he should go back to his country, citing the 2003 SARS outbreak as another example of “all these sicknesses” spread by “chinks.” The man kept coming closer and closer to Tsui, who was forced to step toward the edge of the platform.
“Leave him alone. Can’t you see he’s a nurse? That he’s wearing scrubs?” said a bystander, who Tsui says appeared to be Latino. After the bystander threatened to record the incident and call the police, the aggressor said that he should “go back to [his] country too.”
When the train finally arrived, the aggressor sat right across from Tsui and glared at him the entire ride, mouthing, “I’m watching you.” Throughout the ride, Tsui debated whether he should get off the train to escape but feared the man would follow him without anyone else to bear witness to what might happen.
Tsui says the current antiracism movements are important, but the U.S. has a long way to go to achieve true equality. “One thing’s for sure, it’s definitely not an overnight thing—I am skeptical that people can be suddenly woke after reading a few books off the recommended book lists,” he says.“Let’s be honest, before George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, there were many more. Black people have been calling out in pain and calling for help for a very long time.”
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Read the other nine profiles and see Haruka Sakaguchi’s great photography at the link.
Racism, hate, cruelty, ignorance, dehumanization, inequality, and incompetence are the planks of Trump’s re-election “platform.”
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
The Supreme Court just issued a ruling with sweeping, immediate implications for the immigration enforcement system, potentially allowing the Trump administration to move forward in deporting tens of thousands of immigrants living in the US with little oversight.
The case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, concerns immigration officials’ authority to quickly deport migrants who don’t express fear of returning to their home countries, which would make them eligible for asylum. The process, first enacted in 1996 and known as “expedited removal,” takes weeks, rather than the typical years it can take to resolve a full deportation case, and does not involve a hearing before an immigration judge or offer immigrants the right to a lawyer.
In a 7-2 decision, the justices found Thursday that newly arrived immigrants don’t have the right to challenge their expedited removal in federal court, which advocates claim is a necessary check on immigration officials to ensure that migrants with credible asylum claims aren’t erroneously turned away and have access to a full and fair hearing.
Until recently, only a small number of immigrants who had recently arrived in the US could be subjected to expedited removal. But President Donald Trump has sought to vastly expand US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s power to use expedited removal as a means of deporting any immigrant who has lived in the US for up to two years, potentially affecting an estimated 20,000 people.
Thursday’s decision therefore allows Trump to significantly scale up his immigration enforcement apparatus while going largely unchecked.
“Trump has made it very clear that ICE has the authority to use this process throughout the entire country,” Kari Hong, a professor at Boston College Law School, said. “They could start stopping anyone at anytime on any suspicion that they have committed an immigration violation and deport them. I don’t think it’s unreasonable [to predict] that ICE agents will target dark-skinned individuals.”
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Read the rest of Nicole’s clear and understandable analysis at the link.
Writing ability, intellectual honesty, commitment to Due Process, belief in equal justice for all, opposition to institutional racism, and fidelity to human values, as well as “real life” understanding of what it means to have your life and human dignity ground to mush in Trump’s illegal “deportation machine” obviously are in short supply among today’s Supremes. Disgraceful!
So, according to these seven cloistered dudes, somebody on trial for her or his life, the highest possible stakes in any proceeding in America, civil or criminal, can have her or his fate determined by Trump employees who serve as policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. No access to a “fair and impartial decision-maker” as required by the Constitution. No checks for errors, abuses, or mistakes that could result in a vulnerable individual being sent to face persecution, torture, and/or death in a land they fled because their life was in danger. This notwithstanding that Federal Courts find egregious errors in application of basic legal concepts from Trump’s immigration adjudicators almost every day! This is “due process” because Congress said it was! What complete deadly nonsense and sophistry! Really, how do the purveyors and enablers of such atrocious, disingenuous, and illegal attacks on humanity sleep at night.
Let’s be clear. There is no legitimate purpose in a supposedly independent, life-tenured judiciary without the courage to hold both the Executive and the Congress accountable for equal justice under law as required by our Constitution. If they are going to act like Border Patrol Agents in robes, send them down to the border and let them be part of the killing fields. Got innocent blood on your hands, might as well have it on your robes too!
The formula is very simple: Better Executive + Better Legislators + Better Judges = Equal Justice For All. The exceptionally poor performance of the Supremes in insuring racial justice in America, indeed their intentional undermining of it in voting rights, civil rights, immigration, and other areas, is a major contributor to the continuing institutional racism that is on the verge of ripping our nation apart. The Supreme’s latest abrogation of the Constitution stokes racial injustice in America and endangers our nation’s security and future.
How many Hispanic American citizens will be illegally “expeditiously removed” to Mexico by DHS Enforcement before the nation wakes up!We need better judges! Judges who will stop intentionally ignoring the clear constitutional requirements for Due Process, Equal Justice, and ending institutionalized racism in America. Judges who will not feign ignorance of the grotesque human suffering they wrongfully enable. Judges who will stand up for the rule of law against an overtly racist Executive. Judges who will stop enabling, participating in, and encouraging further “crimes against humanity!”
Also, every Federal Judge should have 1) demonstrated legal and practical knowledge of human rights law and what really happens to individuals in our immigration “justice” system; and 2) a course in writing cogent English and applying simple logic from Nicole.
This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it. Because they do!
Due Process Forever! Supremes that don’t believe in equal justice under law, never!
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform in concert at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida on July 15, 2008. (UPI Photo/Michael Bush) (Newscom TagID: upiphotos868523) [Photo via Newscom]Alaa Elassar Writer CNN Digital
(CNN)The family of the late Tom Petty has filed a cease and desist notice to the Trump campaign after one of the musician’s songs was played at the President’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down” was played on Saturday evening at the rally, which drew a smaller-than-expected crowd of supporters.
“Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind,” the family said in a tweet Saturday.
“Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together,” according to the tweet.
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Read the complete article at the link.
Good for them!
As my former Georgetown Law Refugee Law & Policy students will remember, I used the lyrics of “Refugee” from “Professor Tom” & The Heartbreakers as a “teaching vehicle” about what it’s really like to be a refugee (something of which Trump and his cult of mindless supporters seem entirely unaware).
Perhaps a better choice from Tom’s collection, and one more indicative of the true state of our nation and Trump’s recent poll performance would have been Tom’s“Free Fallin’.”
She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too
It’s a long day living in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy ’cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart
And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
All the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura boulevard
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts
And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
I want to glide down over Mulholland
I want to write her name in the sky
Gonna free fall out into nothin’
Gonna leave this world for a while
And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
Donald Trump told thousands of supporters on Saturday that he had asked US officials to slow down testing for Covid-19 because case numbers in the country were rising so rapidly.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the US president used racist language, referring to Covid-19 as “kung flu”, and described testing for the virus as a “double-edged sword” because it led to the identification of more cases.
The US had now tested 25 million people, far more than other countries, Trump said, adding: “When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”
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A White House official later told Reuters that Trump was joking.
Don’t call it a comeback: Trump’s Tulsa rally was just another sad farce | Richard Wolffe
Across the US, more than 119,654 people are confirmed to have been killed by Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. It remains the country worst hit by coronavirus, followed by Brazil, which now has more than a million cases, and Russia, which has 576,162 infections.
Trump said the “radical fake news” media had not given him credit for doing what he called “a phenomenal job” of responding to the outbreak.
The campaign rally in Tulsa went ahead despite warnings from health officials that it risked fuelling a spike in coronavirus cases. The crowd was smaller than expected, with many empty sections in the 19,000-seat arena, but few attendees wore masks.
Globally, 8,753,853 coronavirus cases have now been recorded and 463,281 fatalities confirmed, according to Johns Hopkins University.
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Read the rest of Rebecca’s global report at the link.
This from a dude who 1) has no sense of humor; and 2) lacks any trace of human decency.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.
The first question I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates during our recent conversation on The Ezra Klein Show was broad: What does he see right now, as he looks out at the country?
“I can’t believe I’m gonna say this,” he replied, “but I see hope. I see progress right now.”
Coates is the author of the National Book Award winner Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, among others. We discussed how this moment differs from 1968, the tension between “law” and “order,” the contested legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Donald Trump’s view of the presidency, police abolition, why we need to renegotiate the idea of “the public,” how the consensus on criminal justice has shifted, what Joe Biden represents, the proper role of the state, and much more.
But there’s one particular thread of this conversation that I haven’t been able to put down: There is now, as there always is amid protests, a loud call for the protesters to follow the principles of nonviolence. And that call, as Coates says, comes from people who neither practice nor heed nonviolence in their own lives. But what if we turned that conversation around? What would it mean to build the state around principles of nonviolence, rather than reserving that exacting standard for those harmed by the state?
An edited transcript from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.
Ezra Klein
What do you see right now, as you look out at the country?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment.
I had an interesting call on Saturday with my dad, who was born in 1946, grew up dirt poor in Philadelphia, lived in a truck, went off to Vietnam, came back, joined the Panther Party, and was in Baltimore for the 1968 riots. Would’ve been about 22 at that time.
I asked him if he could compare what he saw in 1968 to what he was seeing now. And what he said to me was there was no comparison — that this is much more sophisticated. And I say, well, what do you mean? He said it would have been like if somebody from the turn of the 20th century could see the March on Washington.
The idea that black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods would resonate with white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London — that was unfathomable to him in ‘68, when it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.
I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black, that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is. I think that’s different.
Ezra Klein
Do you think there is more multiethnic solidarity today than there was then?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I do. Within my lifetime, I don’t think there’s been a more effective movement than Black Lives Matter. They brought out the kind of ridiculousness that black folks deal with on a daily basis in the policing in their communities.
George Floyd is not new. The ability to broadcast it the way it was broadcasted is new. But black folks have known things like that were going on in their communities, in their families, for a very long time. You have a generation of people who are out in the streets right now, many of whom only have the vaguest memory of George Bush. They remember George Bush the way I remember Carter. The first real president who they actually grappled with was a black dude. That’s a different type of consciousness.
Ezra Klein
I was watching the speech Trump gave before tear-gassing the protesters in the park in DC. What so chilled me about that speech was how much he clearly wanted this — like this was the presidency as he had always imagined it, directing men with guns and shields to put down protesters so he could walk through a park unafraid and seem tough.
He’s always seemed so disinterested and annoyed by the actual work of being president, even during coronavirus. But this is the thing that he seems energized and excited by. And that’s been the scary part of it to me — that you have somebody in that role who is eager for escalation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
It is pretty clear that the war-making part of being head of state was the part that most appeals to Donald Trump.
What does this mean for the election? It may be true that Donald Trump will win. Maybe this will lead to some sort of white backlash that ultimately helps him. I can’t really call that. But what I will say is this is a massive denial of legitimacy. Donald Trump may win the election in November, but he will be a ruler and not a president.
I think that those things need to be distinguished. When you’re calling out the military to repress protests that are in cities across the country, not just in ghettos and in hoods, all you have is force at that point. Most likely if he wins, he’ll be someone who won with a minority of the vote two times, which will be a first in American history. And violence will be the tool by which he rules. I think it’s a very different situation to be in.
Ezra Klein
I’m glad you brought in that word legitimacy. I wrote a piece the other day called “America at the breaking point,” and one of the things that I was imagining as I wrote that was a legitimacy crisis. The stakes have been going higher and higher this year: coronavirus, the entire country locked in houses, upset, angry, scared. Then you add on a series of basically televised lynchings.
And then you think: This is an election year. In some ways, I’m more afraid of the situation you just described. If Donald Trump is reelected in a way that does not feel legitimate to people — if he loses by more votes than he did in 2016, or there’s a contested-vote situation — this could turn out badly. Legitimacy crises are scary things. And I don’t think we’re really well equipped for one right now.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I agree. But when I look back historically, the alternative to me is 1968.
I think, amongst a large swath to a majority of black people in this country, the police are illegitimate. They’re not seen as a force that necessarily causes violent crime to decline. Oftentimes you see black people resorting to the police because they have no other option, but they’re not seen with the level of trust that maybe Americans in other communities bestow upon the police. They know you could be a victim to lethal force because you used a $20 bill that may or may not have been counterfeit, because you were asleep at night in your home and somebody got a warrant to kick down your door without knocking.
I would argue that [feeling] has been nationalized. I don’t know that everybody in America feels that way, but I think large swaths of Americans now feel that Trump is the police. And they feel about Trump the way we feel about cops: This is somebody that rules basically by power. I would prefer that situation to 1968, where we’re alone in our neighborhoods and we know something about the world and we know what the police do, but other folks can’t really see it — and if they can, they’re unsympathetic. I would prefer now.
The long history of black folks in this country is conflict and struggle, between ourselves and the state and other interests within the society so that we can live free. And this is the first time that I think a lot of us have felt that the battle was legitimately joined, not just by white people but other people of color. When I hear that brother in Minneapolis talk about how his store was burned down and him saying, “Let it burn.” That’s a very different world. It’s a very, very different situation. It’s not a great one. It’s not the one we want. But it’s not ‘68.
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Read the rest of the interview at the link.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading Coates’s novel about slavery and freedom, The Water Dancer, which I highly recommend.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️I also found the just-released streaming movie Just Mercy instructive. It’s based on the true story of unjustly convicted Alabama death-row inmate Walter McMillan and his courageous young just-out-of-Harvard African-American attorney Bryan Stevenson, played by Michael B. Jordan. In the movie, as in real life, justice was achieved in the end.
But, was it really?
Why should justice in America a be so dependent on both the “right lawyer” and the particular location and judges before whom you are tried? Why should it be so difficult, time consuming, painful, and uncertain to obtain? Why weren’t the crooked sheriff and the other perpetrators of deadly fraud held accountable? Why was such a tone-deaf judge on the bench in the first place? Why was a corrupt system not interested in real justice for the murder victim? Why do we still have the death penalty — clearly “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Constitution by any rational definition?
It’s also worth remembering that one of the greatest advocates of putting African Americans in Alabama to death was none other than White Nationalist prosecutor Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. Sessions then went on to a further career involving child abuse, squandering of taxpayer funds on “gonzo” prosecutions of legal asylum seekers, and unfairly sentencing Hispanic refugee women to torture, and even death. Yet, Sessions walks free. He even has the audacity to run for public office again based on his perverted, racist views of “justice” in America.
Whether or not he, or the equally repulsive and bigoted other GOP candidate, former football coach Tommy Tuberville, get elected will be a true test of how far we have come as a nation, and in particular, how far Alabama has come in atoning for past wrongs. Anybody who cares about equal justice for all should send at least a few bucks to the re-election campaign of wholly decent, competent, U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) to help him fight the GOP “forces of darkness, racism, and inequality,” arrayed against him.
I really hope Coates is right. But, based on the “reality of the moment” we still have a long way to go.True social justice would involve accountability for individuals like Trump, Miller, Sessions, and Barr who have been actors and proponents of injustice toward “the other” in our society. When folks like unapologetic White Nationalist provocateur Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) are no longer placed in public office, then, and only then, will social justice and equal justice for all have been achieved.
And, I personally doubt our capacity as a nation for true due process and equal justice under law as long as the “JR Five” rule the Supremes. So far, there haven’t been many racial injustices or “Dred Scottifications” of the other that they have had the courage and integrity to condemn! Better judges, with more humanity and empathy, are a requirement for a truly just nation.
That pandering, maliciously incompetent, willfully ignorant, bigot Donald Trump, with his vile, intentionally racially divisive message of fear still polls at 42% shows just how far we have to go to achieve due process and equal justice for all in America. “Equal Justice For All” isn’t just a “snappy slogan;” it requires leaders who really believe in it!
Right now, save for Nancy Pelosi, we conspicuously lack such leaders in all three Branches of our National Government. Better results will require change at the top. It will also require a significant minority of voters to stop enabling the intolerant, incompetent, and divisive to rule.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once wrote:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The quote isn’t just an “abstract concept;” it has “real life” meaning. It’s from King’sLetter From Birmingham Jail, where he was unjustly imprisoned in 1963 for participation in peaceful protests against racial injustice.
“Social Justice” isn’t just an idealistic concept. It’s an absolute necessity for a well-functioning, just, and fully productive society!
Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.
The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.
In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.
The commission’s report, written by the executive director, David Ginsburg, an establishment liberal lawyer of New Deal vintage, appeared at the end of February 1968. It became an instant million-copy best seller. Its language is bracing by the standards of any era: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for far-reaching policy reforms in housing, employment, education, and policing, to stop the country from becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
It was too much for Johnson, who resented not being credited for his efforts to achieve civil rights and eradicate poverty, and whose presidency had just been engulfed by the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. He shelved the report. A few weeks later, on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The next night, Johnson—who had just announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection—spoke to a country whose cities were burning from coast to coast. “It is the fiber and the fabric of the republic that’s being tested,” he said. “If we are to have the America that we mean to have, all men of all races, all regions, all religions must stand their ground to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time, and in all times to come. Last evening, after receiving the terrible news of Dr. King’s death, my heart went out to his family and to his people, especially to the young Americans who I know must sometimes wonder if they are to be denied a fullness of life because of the color of their skin.” To an aide, he was more blunt in assessing the uprising: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
King’s murder and the riots it sparked propelled Congress to pass, by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, the decade’s last major piece of civil-rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enforced fair standards in housing. Johnson signed it on April 11. It was too late. The very best reports, laws, and presidential speeches couldn’t contain the anger in the streets. That year, 1968, was when reform was overwhelmed by radicalization on the left and reaction on the right. We still live in the aftermath. The language and ideas of the Kerner Report have haunted the years since—a reminder of a missed chance.
The difference between 1968 and 2020 is the difference between a society that failed to solve its biggest problem and a society that no longer has the means to try. A year before his death, King, still insisting on nonviolent resistance, called riots “the language of the unheard.” The phrase implies that someone could be made to hear, and possibly answer. What’s happening today doesn’t feel the same. The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.
After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.
If 2020 were at all like 1968, the president would go on national television and speak as the leader of all Americans to try to calm a rattled country in a tumultuous time. But the Trump administration hasn’t answered the unrest like an embattled democracy trying to reestablish legitimacy. Its reflex is that of an autocracy—a display of strength that actually reveals weakness, emptiness. Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman trying to show that he was still master of the country amid reports that he’d taken refuge in a bunker: the phalanx of armored guards surrounding him as he strutted out of the presidential palace; the tear gas and beatings that cleared his path of demonstrators and journalists; the presence of his daughter, who had come up with the idea, and his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square.
William Barr has reacted to the killing of George Floyd like the head of a secret-police force rather than the attorney general of a democratic republic. His first act was not to order a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, but—as he’s done before—to rush out ahead of the facts and try to control public opinion, by announcing that the violence following Floyd’s death was the work of left-wing agitators. Streets of the nation’s capital are now blocked by security forces from Barr’s Department of Justice—many from the Federal Bureau of Prisons—wearing uniforms that make them impossible to identify, like paramilitary troops with unknown commanders.
The protests have to be understood in the context of this institutional void. They resemble the spontaneous mass cry of a people suffering under dictatorship more than the organized projection of public opinion aimed at an accountable government. They signify that democratic politics has stopped working. They are both utopian and desperate.
Some public figures—politicians, policy experts, civic leaders—have come forward with proposals for changing the mindset and tactics of the police. Terrence Floyd, the brother of the murdered man, urged protesters to educate themselves and vote. But the overwhelming message of the protests is simply “end racism,” which would be a large step toward ending evil itself. The protesters are demanding an absolute, as if they’ve stopped expecting the state to produce anything that falls a little short. For white protesters—who are joining demonstrations on behalf of black freedom and equality in large numbers for the first time since Selma, Alabama, 55 years ago—this demand means ending an evil that lies within themselves. It would be another sign of a hollow democracy if the main energy in the afterglow of the protests goes into small-group sessions on white privilege rather than a hard push for police reform.
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This is where we are. Trust is missing everywhere—between black Americans and police, between experts and ordinary people, between the government and the governed, between citizens of different identities and beliefs. There’s an election coming in five months. It won’t end racism or the pandemic, or repair our social bonds, or restore our democracy to health. But it could give us a chance to try, if we get that far.
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Read the rest of Packer’s article at the above link.
Well said! The only thing missing is specific reference to the toxic failure of the U.S. Supreme Court.
We once had a Court with the legal experience, ethics, vision, and moral courage to lead America forward toward a more just and equal society. That’s been totally dissipated by years of GOP erosion of the Court’s legal expertise, practical problem-solving ability, humanity, courage, vision of a better future for all in America, and integrity.
The “journey downward and march backward” from Brown v. Board of Education to legal travesties like Trump v. Hawaii and Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (to name just two glaring examples of the Court’s disgraceful and illegal “Dred Scottification” of the other in our society) is certainly one of the most outrageous, disturbing, and disgusting tales in post-Plessy v. Ferguson American jurisprudence.
The Court’s abject failure to move forward and make voting rights and equal justice for all a reality is in no small measure linked to the death of George Floyd and other Americans of color and the nationwide protests of injustice. Failure of judicial integrity, vision, and leadership — in other words failures of both legal and moral justice —imperils our nation and many of its inhabitants.
America already faces long-term threats to our justice system and those it supposedly serves from the irresponsible and poorly-qualified life-tenured judicial appointments of Trump and the Mitch-led GOP. To them, things like “equal justice for all,” “voting rights,” “due process for all,” “women’s rights,” and “human rights” are just cruel hoaxes — things to be privately mocked, publicly “lip-serviced,” then buried forever beneath an avalanche of disingenuous and opaque legal gobbledygook intended to hide their true anti-democratic, White Nationalist enabling intent. The appointment of any more Justices along the lines of the “J.R. Five” likely would be the final “nail in the coffin” for our democratic republic! 🏴☠️👎🏻🥵
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
This op-ed argues that the terms we use to discuss immigration rely on a lot of anti-immigrant assumptions.
The United States has a long history of hostility toward immigrants, from barring “undesirables” (a shifting category that has targeted the nonwhite, the disabled, and women) to turning away desperate asylum seekers who went on to gruesome deaths. Even after these cruel laws have been rolled back (and some haven’t), they’ve fundamentally shaped the way we as a nation think of immigration. A lot of the modern policy we consider “common sense” was directly molded by this history. It means that often the terms of the immigration debate rely on a lot of anti-immigrant assumptions. Even the best-intentioned progressives can fall into these traps, which is why examining how we talk about these issues is so important.
THE NOTION THAT THERE ARE “GOOD” AND “BAD” IMMIGRANTS
One common talking point holds that we should welcome the “good” immigrants while getting rid of the “bad” or “criminal” ones. This framing obscures the realities of the U.S. justice system, which disproportionately arrests, convicts, and incarcerates people of color. Black immigrants make up just 7.2% of the noncitizen population, yet they make up over 20% of people facing deportation on criminal grounds. The “good” vs. “bad” framework also obscures how laws are an expression of class power: Financial crimes committed by wealthy individuals and corporations often go unpunished, while everyday people are often punished for their poverty. And even people convicted of crimes shouldn’t lose their humanity, especially in a system that is incentivized to incarcerate.
Anti-immigration advocates often invoke misleading language and statistics suggesting that immigrants commit more crime, while ignoring a vast legal framework set out to criminalize immigrants for minor infractions. Many studies have found that undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, but our very definition of what constitutes a crime has grown dramatically over the past few decades. A set of 1996 laws expanded deportable offenses by reclassifying more minor crimes as “aggravated felonies” in the context of immigration. As a result, immigrants can be considered felons for acts like drug possession or failing to appear in court.
DISTINGUISHING “REAL” REFUGEES FROM ECONOMIC MIGRANTS
Another dangerous misconception is the differentiation between “real” refugees (people whose search for safety we consider valid) and “economic migrants,” who are perceived as “gaming the system” to obtain a higher standard of living in America. This is a fundamentally false dichotomy: People, and the systems we live in, are far too complex to fit in these binaries. Who gets to be considered a “real” refugee is significantly informed by America’s ideological attitudes; for decades, the system was based more on Cold War politics than any real concern for the safety of asylum seekers. Those fleeing political or religious persecution are seen as legitimate, while those fleeing violent crime or a lack of economic opportunity — causes that also have political roots — are, too often, not. It’s a pattern that continues today: People coming to the U.S. from countries where America has vested geopolitical interests have historically had a harder time gaining asylum than those from countries the U.S. ideologically opposes, even if they have strong claims of persecution.
This hierarchy has stark consequences. As the bar becomes ever higher for who is a “true” refugee, many who flee certain death are turned away. Meanwhile, those who flee “less serious” violence, like poverty and starvation, often have no avenue for help. Their experiences expose the glaring gaps in our asylum policy. Why should certain types of violence be taken more seriously than others? Who is to say that the fear of gang violence is worse than that of not being able to feed your children?
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Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
Whether you accept Uhlmann’s conclusions or not, her point that immigrants’ advocates often accept the terms and framework set forth by nativists and restrictionists is basically valid. One false concept that appears to govern much of the debate is that immigration is fundamentally “negative” and therefore 1) must be limited to those who can provide immediate economic benefits to us (leaving aside the range of human interests of the immigrants themselves), and 2) that any increases in “desirable” immigration must be offset by cuts, restrictions, and/or removals of “undesirables.”
In many ways, this explains the sad failure of the Obama Administration to adopt more humane and effective immigration policies. They apparently never could get over the idea that they had to “prove their toughness” by deporting record numbers of folks and inflicting some gratuitous cruelty on migrants, particularly helpless asylum seekers, to “establish their creds” and get the GOP to the table to discuss serious immigration reform. No chance!
With restrictionists, even record levels of removals and historically low levels of border apprehensions are “never enough.” That’s because they are coming from a place of ideological nativism which is neither fact nor reality driven. It’s driven by inherent biases and nativist myths.
Overall, immigration is both a human reality — one that actually predated the establishment of “nation-states” — and a plus for both the immigrants and the receiving countries.
That being said, I personally think that immigration should be robust, legal, humane, and orderly. But, I doubt that “immigration without limits” is politically realistic, particularly in today’s climate.
Generally, global “market forces” affect immigration much more than nativists are willing to admit. When the legal system is too far out of line with the realities of “supply and demand” the excess is simply forced into the “extralegal market.”
That’s why we have approximately 11 million so-called “undocumented immigrants” residing in the U.S. today. Most are law abiding, gainfully employed, and have helped fuel our recent economic success. Many have formed the backbone of the unheralded “essential workforce” that has gotten us through the pandemic to this point. Many pay taxes now and all could be brought into the tax system by wiser government policies.
That’s why the mass removals touted by Trump and his White Nationalists are both impractical and counterproductive, as well as being incredibly cruel, inhumane, and cost ineffective.
There is a theory out there that although Trump’s uber-enforcement policies might be doomed to long-term failure, he is “succeeding” in another, much more damaging, way. By attacking the safety net, government, education, science, the environment, worker safety, and the rule of law while spreading racism, xenophobia, divisiveness, and maximizing income inequality, Trump has finally succeeded in making the U.S. a less desirable place for “immigrants with choices” to live.
As Bill Gelfeld wrote recently in International Policy Digest:
This pandemic has laid bare national weaknesses, and these weaknesses will have not gone unnoticed by potential and future migrants. Where they have a choice, and many skilled and even unskilled migrants do indeed have a choice, they will increasingly opt for those locales that have figured out universal health care, pandemic and crisis response, and unified national action, and these are the nations that now stand to gain from this migratory boon. https://apple.news/AiY6v3tN0SU6ES08RMUe29g
In the “post-pandemic world economy,” as our birthrate continues to go down and we need immigrants to fuel continued economic growth, the U.S. might well find itself losing the international competition for immigrants, particularly those we most want to attract.
The latter is likely if we give in to the restrictionist demand that we cut legal immigration. That simply forces more immigrants into the “extralegal market.” “Immigrants with choices” are more likely to choose destinations where they can live legally, integrate into society, and fully utilize their skills over a destination that forces them to live underground.
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!
