"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Trump administration to turn away far more asylum seekers at the border under new guidance
By Tal Kopan, CNN
The Trump administration is implementing a new asylum policy at the border that will result in potentially thousands of asylum seekers being turned away before they can plead their case in court.
The guidance, reviewed by CNN, also applies to refugee applicants — immigrants seeking similar protections in the US who are still abroad.
Under new guidance given Wednesday to the officers who interview asylum seekers at the US’ borders and evaluate refugee applications, claims based on fear of gang and domestic violence will be immediately rejected. In addition, the guidance tells officers they should consider whether an immigrant crossed the border illegally and weigh that against their claim, potentially rejecting even legitimate fears of persecution if the immigrant crossed illegally.
The move is likely to draw swift condemnation from immigration advocates and legal challenges. Advocates say international law is clear that asylum claims are valid even when a migrant enters a country illegally. They also argue that rejecting these traumatized immigrants puts their lives at risk immediately upon their return home.
The changes being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security come on the heels of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision last month that gang and domestic violence victims no longer qualify for asylum. Asylum protects migrants already in the US who fear persecution in their home country.
Remember, folks, most of the intended “victims” of this policy are:
unrepresented
detained
traumitized
speaking through an interpreter (perhaps telephonic)
totally clueless as to what a “particular social group,” the “three criteria,” nexus,” or Matter of A-B- mean, and
Matter of A-B has never been tested or approved by any “real (Article III) court.”
Shoot first, ask questions later. This is America in the 21st Century. This is how we treat our fellow human beings —- most of them refugees seeking our help and protection under the law. This is what we are as human beings under Trump & Sessions. Someday, our descendants will look back on us and say “how could you!”
PORT ISABEL DETENTION CENTER, Texas — Sitting before an immigration judge in this south Texas detention center Thursday, a Central American mother separated from her son pleaded for asylum.
“Your honor, I’m just asking for one opportunity to be here,” said the woman wearing a blue prison uniform and a red plastic rosary around her neck. “You don’t know how much pain it has caused us to be separated from our children. We’re kind of losing it.”
Judge Robert Powell’s face was stern. During the last five years, he has denied 79% of asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“What you’re describing is not persecution,” he said.
“I’m asking for an opportunity,” the woman replied in Spanish through an interpreter.
“I’m not here to give you an opportunity.” He ordered her deported.
Immigrant family separations on the border were supposed to end after President Trump issued an order June 20. A federal judge in California ordered all children be reunited with their parents in a month, and those age 5 and under within 15 days. On Thursday, the administration said up to 3,000 children have been separated — hundreds more than initially reported — and DNA testing has begun to reunite families.
Port Isabel has been designated the “primary family reunification and removal center,” but lawyers here said they have yet to see detained parents reunited.
To qualify for asylum in the U.S., immigrants must prove they fear persecution at home because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them. Most of the Central American parents detained here after “zero tolerance” fled gang and domestic violence. But that’s no longer grounds for seeking asylum, according to a guidance last month from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, so judges are following that guidance.
Because immigration courts are administrative, not criminal, immigrants are not entitled to public defenders. And so, each day, they attempt to represent themselves in hearings that sometimes last only a few minutes.
The courtrooms are empty. That’s because, like others nationwide, the court is inside a fortified Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Access is restricted, and may be denied. The Times had to request to attend court hearings — which are public — 24 hours in advance. After access to the facility was approved last week, admission was denied to the courtrooms when guards said the proceedings were closed, without explanation.
Detainees have little access to the outside world, including their children. It costs them 90 cents a minute to place a phone call. When they do, they can be nearly inaudible. They receive mail, but when reporters wrote to them last week, the letters were confiscated and guards questioned why they had been contacted, according to a lawyer. Lawyers also said some separated parents have been pressured into agreeing to deportation in order to reunite with their children.
UNICEF officials toured Port Isabel Thursday. A dozen pro bono lawyers visited immigrants. But they were spread thin. None represented parents at the credible fear reviews, where judges considered whether to uphold an asylum officer’s finding that they be deported.
Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi, a former Homeland Security lawyer appointed to the bench two years ago, questioned several parents’ appeals.
“You have children?” he asked a Honduran mother.
Yes, Elinda Aguilar said, she had three.
“Two of them were with me when we got separated by immigration, the other is in Honduras,” said Aguilar, 44.
“How many times have you been to the U.S.?” the judge asked.
Aguilar said this was her first time. The judge reviewed what Aguilar had told an asylum officer: That she had fled an ex-husband who beat, raped and threatened her. “He told you he would kill you if you went with another man?” the judge said.
Yes, Aguilar replied.
The judge noted that Aguilar had reported the crimes to police, who charged her husband, although he never showed up in court. Then he announced his decision: deportation.
Aguilar looked confused. “Did the asylum officer talk to you and explain my case?” she said.
The judge said he was acting according to the law.
Although she was fleeing an abusive husband, he said, “your courts intervened and they put him through the legal process. That’s also how things work in this country.”
Aguilar knit her hands. She wasn’t leaving yet.
“I would like to know what’s going to happen to my children, the ones who came with me,” she asked the judge.
“The Department of Homeland Security will deal with that. Talk to your deportation officer,” he said. Guards led her away as she looked shocked, and brought in the next parent.
Down the hall, Judge Powell heard appeals from separated parents appearing by video feed from Pearsall Detention Center to the west. Though he denied most asylum cases, there are exceptions. Recently, after an asylum officer denied a claim by a Central American woman who said police raped and threatened to kill her, Powell reversed that decision. She can now pursue her asylum claim, though she still hasn’t been released or reunited with her kids.
Obvious question: What, in fact, is a “judge” who isn’t there to give individuals fair hearings and treat them with respect, dignity, and humanity “there for?” What good is a judge who won’t protect individual rights from Government abuses? That’s the whole reason for our “Bill of Rights!”
Jeff Sessions regularly makes bogus, racist inspired claims about “fraud” in our asylum system. But, the REAL fraud in our asylum system is holding ourselves out as a nation of laws and Constitutional government instead of the Banana Republic we have become under Trump. And, maybe if this is what America is today, Trump is right: we don’t need any judges. Just jailers and executioners.
S.E.R.L. v. Att’y Gen., No. 17-2031, 3rd Cir., July 3, 2018
HOLDING: Latinas fleeing persecution in the Northern Triangle can expect no protection under U.S. asylum laws in the Third Circuit.
PANEL: Circuit Judges Kent Jordan, Cheryl Ann Krause; Senior Circuit Judge Ira Morton Greenburg
OPINION BY: Judge Kent Jordan
KEY QUOTES:
S.E.R.L., a native of Honduras, seeks review of the denial of her application for asylum and statutory withholding of removal based on membership in a proposed particular social group that she characterizes as “immediate family members of Honduran women unable to leave a domestic relationship[.]”2 (Opening Br. at 21.) She fears persecution by two men, Jose Angel and Juan Orellana. Jose Angel abducted, raped, and continues to stalk one of S.E.R.L.’s daughters, K.Y.R.L. That daughter has already been granted asylum in the United States. Juan Orellana is S.E.R.L.’s stepfather and has repeatedly abused S.E.R.L.’s mother. S.E.R.L. fears that if she is removed to Honduras, both men will persecute her, Jose Angel because of her relationship to her daughter, and Juan Orellana because of her relationship to her mother.S.E.R.L. and two of her children fled here from Honduras in 2014. Within a month of their unlawful arrival, the Department of Homeland Security initiated removal proceedings pursuant to INA § 212(a)(6)(A)(i). S.E.R.L. conceded removability, and timely applied for asylum and statutory withholding of removal.4 In support of her claims for relief, she alleged past persecution and a fear of future persecution based on the relationships just noted.
. . . .
S.E.R.L. contends that the BIA’s change innomenclature from “social visibility” to “social distinction” is the only change the BIA has made to its test for assessing a“particular social group,” and, she says, that is a “distinction without a difference.” (Reply Br. at 5.) According to S.E.R.L., our decision in Valdiviezo-Galdamez forecloses application of the “particularity” and “social distinction”requirements. She also argues that the BIA plainly acknowledges that it has not changed course, nor has itprovided a “principled” explanation for why it continues to impose criteria we rejected in Valdiviezo-Galdamez. (Opening Br. at 31.)
In addition, those who have filed amicus briefs in this case point out that the BIA’s decisions in M-E-V-G- andW-G-R- could be read as inconsistent with certain other BIA decisions and contrary to the canon of ejusdem generis. Amici note, for example, that in W-G-R-, the BIA concludedthat “‘former members of the Mara 18 gang in El Salvadorwho have renounced their gang membership’ does not constitute a particular social group” in part because “the group could include persons of any age, sex, or background.”26 I. & N. Dec. at 221. Yet, even though the groups varied significantly across age, sex, and background, the BIA has also held that “Filipinos of Chinese [a]ncestry” constituted a “particular social group,” In re V-T-S-, 21 I. & N. Dec. 792, 798 (BIA 1997), and that “former member[s] of the national police” in El Salvador, Fuentes, 19 I. & N. Dec. at 662, likewise could be cognizable.15 And although the BIA expressly justified its new requirements as “[c]onsistent with the interpretive canon ‘ejusdem generis,’” M-E-V-G-, 26 I. & N. Dec. at 234, amici highlight that some of the enumerated grounds for persecution, including “political opinion,” and “religion,” 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A), may themselves be thought of as amorphous, diffuse, or subjective and therefore as insufficient bases for PSGs under M-E-V-G-’s requirements.
Those critiques raise legitimate concerns. The BIA has chosen to maintain a three-part test for determining the existence of a particular social group, and it has discussed how the revised particularity and social distinction requirements are not a departure from but a ratification of requirements articulated in its prior decisions. M-E-V-G-, 26 I. & N. Dec. at 234. And the arguable inconsistencies in its precedent highlight the risk that those requirements could be applied arbitrarily and interpreted to impose an unreasonably high evidentiary burden, especially for pro se petitioners, at the threshold. At the same time, however, we recognize thatM-E-V-G- is a relatively recent decision and clarity and consistency can be expected to emerge with the accretion of case law. That process is aided by M-E-V-G- itself, which addressed the specific concerns we raised in Valdiviezo- Galdamez, and explained why the particularity and social distinction requirements are different from one another and necessary. We now consider each of those requirements, beginning with social distinction, to explain why, notwithstanding our concerns, we conclude that the requirements are reasonable and warrant Chevron deference.
. . . .
Although S.E.R.L. also relies heavily on Matter of A-R-C-G-, 26 I. & N. Dec. 388 (BIA 2014), where the BIAhad held that “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” constituted a particular socialgroup, the Attorney General recently issued a decision overruling A-R-C-G-. See Matter of A-B-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018).
. . . .
At the same time, we are mindful of the role that courts can and must play to ensure that agencies comply withtheir “obligation to render consistent opinions,” Chisholm v. Def. Logistics Agency, 656 F.2d 42, 47 (3d Cir. 1981), including, as relevant here, review of BIA decisions for inconsistent application of M-E-V-G’s requirements to similarly situated petitioners, routine rejection of proposed PSGs without reasoned explanation, and the imposition of insurmountable evidentiary burdens that would render illusory the opportunity to establish a PSG. However, just as we will carefully examine cases on petition for review to guard against such dangers, we anticipate that the BIA will scrutinize the IJ decisions that come before it with those considerations in mind and with an eye towards providing clear guidance and a coherent body of law in this area.
**************************************
3RDCIRCUIT’S JULY 4 MESSAGE TO ABUSED LATINAS: YOUR LIVES DON’T MATTER! – S.E.R.L v. Att’y Gen., JULY 3, 2018 – How “Go Along To Get Along” Judging Costs Innocent Lives!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
U.S. Immigration Judge (Ret.)
Judge Kent Jordan, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, and Senior Judge Ira Morton Greenburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit got together in Philly, ”our nation’s birthplace,” on July 3, 2018 to deliver an early July 4 message for courageous Latinas fleeing the Northern Triangle: Your lives don’t matter; we’re OK with femicide, rape, torture, and abuse of you and your children as long as it’s out of sight, out of mind in some foreigncountry where we don’t have to listen to your screams or come across your mutilated bodies!
These judges’ names and faces are worth remembering, since they went to such great lengths to avoid taking or acknowledging any legal or moral responsibility for their own actions. Obviously, they don’t want anyone to put names and faces with consequences.
While you wouldn’t recognize it from their 43 pages of intentionally legalistic, opaque, de-humanized, gobbledygook, there is actually a simple straightforward human tragedy behind their obfuscation and task shirking. Since they won’t tell it, I will.
“Ms. S.E.R.L”. (I’ll call her “Susana”) is a native and citizen of Honduras. Honduras is a patriarchal “failed state” with a corrupt and incompetent government that does little or nothing to control gang violence and violence against women, even encouraging it or participating in the abuses in many cases. By 2015, femicides in Honduras had far surpassed “epidemic levels.” For example, in 2013, one Honduran woman was murdered every fourteen hours!
Jose Angel abducted, raped, and continued to stalk Susana’s daughter “Karla.” Susana’s stepfather, Juan Orellana repeatedly abused Susana’s mother without any interference from the government. Juan also threatened Susana personally. Having witnessed what these men did to her closest relatives, her daughter and her mother, Susana reasonably believed that she would be next. Karla was granted asylum in the U.S. Susana fled to the United States with two other daughters and applied for asylum.
Since Karla was granted asylum in the U.S., Susana expected the same humane treatment, particularly since our Supreme Court once said that asylum laws should be generously applied to those with as little as a 10% chance of being persecuted. After all, Honduran women are a distinct, well-recognized class subject to essentially uncontrolled specifically gender-based violence in a patriarchal society. Additionally, the family members closest to Susana had already suffered severe harm in Honduras at the hands of two specific men. And, her daughter Karla was being allowed to stay.
The Immigration Judge supposedly believed Susana. However, he came up with some creative ways, pioneered by the BIA, to deny her protection. First, he found that she had no reason to fear harm because she hadn’t actually been harmed or killed by either Jose or Juan, despite the threats to her from Juan who obviously was capable of inflicting severe harm. Second, he found she didn’t fit within any “particular social group,” whatever that might mean on a particular day. The went on to make the amazing finding that being a Honduran woman would have nothing to do with the harm anyway.
Perhaps, the judge believed that Honduran men suffered the same high rate of femicide as did women. Or, maybe he believed that guys like Jose and Juan and Honduran society in general wouldn’t recognize that Susana was a Honduran woman closely related to two previously abused Honduran women. The judge observed that refugee laws weren’t meant to protect women like Susana from “generalized violence,” even though Susana’s claim wasn’t based on generalized violence but rather specific violence directed at her.
The judge basically told Susana to buck up and accept her fate. The judge appeared to have no idea what actually happens to women like Susana in Honduras. Susana appealed to the BIA which had very recently found that a virtually identical situation qualified a woman for asylum. But, the other woman wasn’t Susana, and the BIA found some reasons why it was OK to send Susana back to where she might reasonably expect be killed, raped, or abused by Jose and/or Juan.
Susana appealed to a “real court”, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Unlike the Immigration Judge and the BIA, judges on the Third Circuit don’t work for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Jeff hates foreign nationals, women, and particularly brown-skinned foreign women fleeing from persecution in Central America. He thinks that they are all coming here for economic reasons and should just go stand in a line to immigrate. But, Jeff knows that the line doesn’t really exist, and that they will likely be killed or disabled shortly after return anyway. What Jeff really wants is an America where only nasty old White guys like him hold all the power and non-White folks stay away.
Judge Kent Jordan, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, and Senior Judge Ira Morton Greenburg decided Susana’s case. They recognized that the BIA had rewritten asylum law so that fewer individuals would be protected and more rejected. They also recognized that Jeff Sessions had further rewritten the laws so that women like Susana would have no chance of protection. They also knew that there were lots of good arguments against what the BIA and Jeff were doing and in favor of protecting Susana.
But the judges found another Supreme Court case saying that they really didn’t have to decide legal questions if Jeff Sessions and his subordinates had done it for them. They thought that it made sense to rewrite protection law so that very few people, particularly women of color, would be protected. According to their thinking, the asylum law is intended to reject, not protect. They also thought that because these were relatively new interpretations, Jeff and the BIA should have a chance to kill or harm as many Latinas as possible before they as judges might think about whether it was a good idea. Of course, by then, it would be too late for Susana and others like her. And, these judges don’t really have any intent or will to hold Sessions accountable anyway.
So, Judge Jordan, Judge Krause, and Judge Greenburg told Susana that she should be separated from her daughter Karla and go back to Honduras with her other daughters to die, be raped, be beaten, or whatever. They knew that she would receive no help from the Government. But, they just didn’t care. Because Susana and her daughters were not their daughters or granddaughters and they wouldn’t have to hear her screams or look at their dead bodies. But, history has recorded what they did. Let the slaughter of innocents commence.
Better, more courageous judges might have said the obvious: that “women in Honduras” are a particularized, distinct, immutable/fundamental protected group; that Susana is a member of that group; and that any reasonable person in her position would have an objectively reasonable fear of persecution if returned to Honduras.
They also could have castigated the BIA and Jeff Sessions for intentionally manipulating asylum law so as not to grant protection to some of the most vulnerable and needy refugees among us. But, this “Gang of Three’ who decided Susana’s case would have been happy pushing the St. Louisand its cargo of Jewish refugees from Germany back out to sea again. Any of the judges who looked at Susan’s case could have had spoken out for saving her life and the lives of her daughters. None did!
After abdicating their judicial functions to hold the Executive accountable, this “Gang of Three” dishonestly expresses concerns about consistency and not creating “insurmountable evidentiary burdens.” Get serious!
Everyone knows Jeff Sessions is ordering Immigration Judges to crank out more removal orders with little or no Due Process. He has publicly stated his disdain for asylum seekers and women asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle. He has made it clear that he intends to “deconstruct:” the entire U.S. protection system until the only “consistency” will be that nobody gets asylum. And with cases like his decision in Matter of A-B-and spineless “go along to get along” precedents like this from the Article III courts, Sessions is implementing his real plan – insuring that nobody who comes to the border and seeks asylum passes “credible fear” and even gets to an Immigration Judge hearing.
Judges like these can shirk their responsibilities and hide behind mountains of hollow words and legal platitudes. But, they won’t escape the judgement of history for their lack of courage, backbone, integrity, and their unwillingness to stand up for human rights and human decency in the face of tyranny.
Happy July 4, 2018 from Judge Kent Jordan, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, and Senior Judge Ira Morton Greenburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit! They can celebrate. But, for Susana, her family, and other vulnerable refugee like her, there will be no celebration. Indeed, they might not even live to see another July 4! That should make us all ashamed as a nation!
Perhaps Trump’s “no due process” approach is the best solution if persecution claims can be considered outside of the United States.
Letting them apply here isn’t working well.
As of April 2017, the average wait for a hearing was 670 days, and the immigration court backlog has increased since then. It was 714,067 cases in May 2018.
It isn’t possible to enforce the immigration laws if deportable aliens can’t be put in removal proceedings, and the judges are being pressed to spend less time on cases, which puts due process in jeopardy.
We need a politically acceptable way to reduce the number of asylum applicants to a manageable level.
******************************************
Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article!
I agree with Nolan’s observation that pushing Immigration Judges to schedule more cases and spend less time on them puts due process in jeopardy. I also can see that Sessions intends to reduce asylum grant rates to about 0% by totally distorting the system until it is impossible for virtually anyone actually needing protection to get it.
As I have stated before, the problem isn’t the asylum law. The problem is the way Trump and Sessions have distorted and perverted asylum law and the Constitutional right to Due Process.
Asylum law is designed to protect individuals fleeing from persecution. We haven’t even begun to test the limits of our ability to give refuge. Indeed, at the time of the world’s greatest need, and our own prosperity, we have disgracefully turned our backs on accepting anything approaching a fair share of the world’s desperate refugees. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a nation! Refugees of all types bring great things to our nation and help us prosper. But, even if they didn’t, that wouldn’t lessen our moral and humanitarian obligations to accept our fair and more generous share of the world’s refugees.
And never forget that the backlog and the waiting times have little or nothing to do with fault on the part of asylum applicants.Many of them have also been unfairly screwed by the mess that Congress, the DOJ, DHS, and politicos have made of the Immigration Court system.
The backlog is almost entirely the result of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” which has been kicked into high gear under Sessions, exceptionally poor choices in docket management and bad prosecutorial decisions by DHS, and years of neglect and understaffing by Congress, as well as stunningly incompetent management of the Immigration Courts by the DOJ under the last three Administrations.
Here’s the truth that Trump and the restrictionists don’t want to deal with:
SOLVING THE SOUTHERN BORDER: It’s Not Our Asylum Laws That Need Changing — It’s The Actions Of Our Leaders Who Administer Them That Must Change!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
U.S. Immigration Judge (Ret.)
Contrary to what White Nationalist liars like Trump & Sessions say, our U.S. asylum laws are not the problem. The politicos who misinterpret and misapply the law and then mal-administer the asylum adjudication system are the problem.
The current asylum laws are more than flexible enough to deal efficiently, effectively, and humanely with today’s bogus, self-created “Southern Border Crisis.” It’s actually nothing more than the normal ebb and flow, largely of refugees, from the Northern Triangle.
That has more do with conditions in those countries and seasonal factors than it does with U.S. asylum law. Forced migration is an unfortunate fact of life. Always has been, and probably always will be. That is, unless and until leaders of developed nations devote more time and resources to addressing the causation factors, not just flailing ineffectively and too often inhumanely with the inevitable results.
And the reasonable solutions are readily available under today’s U.S. legal system:
Instead of sending more law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges to the Southern Border, send more CBP Inspectors and USCIS Asylum Officers to insure that those seeking asylum are processed promptly, courteously, respectfully, and fairly.
Take those who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol to the nearest port of entry instead of sending them to criminal court (unless, of course, they are repeat offenders or real criminals).
Release those asylum seekers who pass “credible fear” on low bonds or “alternatives to detention” (primarily ankle bracelet monitoring) which have been phenomenally successful in achieving high rates of appearance at Immigration Court hearings. They are also much more humane and cheaper than long-term immigration detention.
Work with the pro bono legal community and NGOs to insure that each asylum applicant gets a competent lawyer. Legal representation also has a demonstrated correlation to near-universal rates of appearance at Immigration Court hearings. Lawyers also insure that cases will be well-presented and fairly heard, indispensable ingredients to the efficient delivery of Due Process.
Insure that address information is complete and accurate at the time of release from custody. Also, insure that asylum applicants fully understand how the process works and their reporting obligations to the Immigration Courts and to DHS, as well as their obligation to stay in touch with their attorneys.
Allow U.S. Immigration Judges in each Immigration Court to work with ICE Counsel, NGOs, and the local legal community to develop scheduling patterns that insure applications for asylum can be filed at the “First Master” and that cases are completed on the first scheduled “Individual Merits Hearing” date.
If there is a consensus that these cases merit “priority treatment,” then the ICE prosecutor should agree to remove a “lower priority case” from the current 720,000 case backlog by exercising “prosecutorial discretion.” This will end “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and insure that the prioritization of new cases does not add to the already insurmountable backlog.
Establish a robust “in-country refugee processing program” in the Northern Triangle; fund international efforts to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle; and work cooperatively with the UNHCR and other countries in the Americas to establish and fund protection programs that distribute refugees fleeing the Northern Triangle among a number of countries. That will help reduce the flow of refugees at the source, rather than at our Southern Border. And, more important, it will do so through legal humanitarian actions, not by encouraging law enforcement officials in other countries (like Mexico) to abuse refugees and deny them humane treatment (so that we don’t have to).
My proposed system would require no legislative fixes; comply with the U.S Constitution, our statutory laws, and international laws; be consistent with existing court orders and resolve some pending legal challenges; and could be carried out with less additional personnel and expenditure of taxpayer funds than the Administration’s current “cruel, inhuman, and guaranteed to fail” “deterrence only” policy.
ADDITIONAL BENEFIT: We could also all sleep better at night, while reducing the “National Stress Level.” (And, for those interested in such things, it also would be more consistent with Matthew 25:44, the rest of Christ’s teachings, and Christian social justice theology).
As Eric Levitz says in New York Magazine, the folks arriving at our border are the ones in crisis, not us! “And those families aren’t bringing crime and lawlessness to our country — if anything, we brought such conditions to theirs.”
That warrants a much more measured, empathetic, humane, respectful, and both legally and morally justifiable approach than we have seen from our Government to date.The mechanisms for achieving that are already in our law. We just need leaders with the wisdom and moral courage to use them.
PWS
06-23-18
I also take note of how EOIR under Sessions has disingenuously manipulated the asylum adjudication numbers to support a false narrative that most asylum claims are meritless.
The only “real ” number is a comparison of asylum grants to denials, not grants to the total number of cases involving asylum applications including the substantial number that were never decided on the merits. The fact that a case is disposed of in some other manner does not mean that the asylum application was meritless; it just means that the case was disposed of in another way.
Here are the “real” numbers from EOIR’s own Statistics Yearbook, before they were dishonestly manipulated under Sessions’s instructions to support his false claims about asylum seekers:
Asylum Grant Rate
Grants
Denials
Grant Rate
FY 12
10,575
8,444
56%
FY 13
9,767
8,777
53%
FY 14
8,672
9,191
49%
FY 15
8,184
8,816
48%
FY 16
8,726
11,643
43%
In 2016, the “real” grant rate was 38%. Even under Sessions in the partial FY 2018, the merits grant rate is 35%. That’s by no means negligible — one in three! And, remember folks, this is with asylum law that was already badly skewed against applicants, particularly those from the Northern Triangle with potentially bona fide claims. (But, admittedly, before Sessions recent rewriting of asylum law to improperly deny asylum and essentially impose death sentences or torture on vulnerable women fleeing from the Northern Triangle.)
And, in my experience, the vast majority of denied asylum seekers had legitimate fears of harm upon return that should have entitled them to some protection; they just didn’t fit our unrealistically and intentionally restrictive interpretations. By no means does denial of an asylum claim mean that the claim was frivolous!
The real question we should be asking is that with the refugee situation in the world getting worse and with continually deteriorating conditions in the Northern Triangle, how do asylum merits grant rates drop from 56% and 53% as recently as FY 2011 & 2012 to 35% in 2018? What those numbers really suggests is large-scale problematic behavior and improper influence within the DOJ and the Immigration Judges who are denying far, far too many of these claims. Some of that includes use of coercive detention in out-of-the-way locations and depriving individuals of a fair opportunity to be represented by counsel, as well as a number of BIA decisions (even before Sessions’s Matter of A-B- atrocity) specifically designed to promote unfairness and more asylum denials.
There is no “southern border crisis,” other than the unnecessary humanitarian crisis that Trump and Sessions created by abusing children. Nor is there a problem with our asylum laws except for the intentional failure of our Government to apply them in a legal, fair, and Constitutional manner. But, there is a White Nationalist, racism problem clearly manifesting itself in our immoral and scofflaw national leadership.
Everyone committed to fairness, Due Process, and maintaining America as a country of humane values should fiercely resist, in every way possible, suggestions by Trump, Sessions, and some in the GOP to further abuse Due Process and eliminate the already limited rights of the most vulnerable among us!
We need to say focused on the real threats to our national security and continued existence as a democratic republic: Trump, Sessions, and their cohorts and enablers!
‘National Socialist,’ circa 1935; photograph by August Sander from his People of the Twentieth Century. A new collection of his portraits, August Sander: Persecuted/Persecutors, will be published by Steidl this fall.
Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.
In such a time, we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. The problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.
But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.
Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. Dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch, it provides a jarring contrast with Sebastian Haffner’s devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler, which gives a moment-by-moment, you-are-there feeling to Hitler’s rise. (The manuscript was discovered by Haffner’s son after the author’s death and published in 2000 in Germany, where it became an immediate sensation.)* A much broader perspective comes from Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives, an effort to reconstruct the experience of Germans across the entire twentieth century. What distinguishes the three books is their sense of intimacy. They do not focus on historic figures making transformative decisions. They explore how ordinary people attempted to navigate their lives under terrible conditions.
Haffner’s real name was Raimund Pretzel. (He used a pseudonym so as not to endanger his family while in exile in England.) He was a journalist, not a historian or political theorist, but he interrupts his riveting narrative to tackle a broad question: “What is history, and where does it take place?” He objects that most works of history give “the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be ‘at the helm of the ship of state’ and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.” In his view, that’s wrong. What matters are “we anonymous others” who are not just “pawns in the chess game,” because the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” Haffner insists on the importance of investigating “some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences,” involving “the private lives, emotions and thoughts of individual Germans.”
Mayer had the same aim. An American journalist of German descent, he tried to meet with Hitler in 1935. He failed, but he did travel widely in Nazi Germany. Stunned to discover a mass movement rather than a tyranny of a diabolical few, he concluded that his real interest was not in Hitler but in people like himself, to whom “something had happened that had not (or at least not yet) happened to me and my fellow-countrymen.” In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.
In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew.
In the late 1930s—the period that most interested Mayer—his subjects were working as a janitor, a soldier, a cabinetmaker, an office manager, a baker, a bill collector, an inspector, a high school teacher, and a police officer. One had been a high school student. All were male. None of them occupied positions of leadership or influence. All of them referred to themselves as “wir kleine Leute, we little people.” They lived in Marburg, a university town on the river Lahn, not far from Frankfurt.
Mayer talked with them over the course of a year, under informal conditions—coffee, meals, and long, relaxed evenings. He became friends with each (and throughout he refers to them as such). As he put it, with evident surprise, “I liked them. I couldn’t help it.” They could be ironic, funny, and self-deprecating. Most of them enjoyed a joke that originated in Nazi Germany: “What is an Aryan? An Aryan is a man who is tall like Hitler, blond like Goebbels, and lithe like Göring.” They also could be wise. Speaking of the views of ordinary people under Hitler, one of them asked:
Opposition? How would anybody know? How would anybody know what somebody else opposes or doesn’t oppose? That a man says he opposes or doesn’t oppose depends upon the circumstances, where, and when, and to whom, and just how he says it. And then you must still guess why he says what he says.
When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt “that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,” and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”
Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.
Mayer suggests that even when tyrannical governments do horrific things, outsiders tend to exaggerate their effects on the actual experiences of most citizens, who focus on their own lives and “the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.” Nazism made things better for the people Mayer interviewed, not (as many think) because it restored some lost national pride but because it improved daily life. Germans had jobs and better housing. They were able to vacation in Norway or Spain through the “Strength Through Joy” program. Fewer people were hungry or cold, and the sick were more likely to receive treatment. The blessings of the New Order, as it was called, seemed to be enjoyed by “everybody.”
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
As a historical footnote, I crossed paths with Cass Sunstein at the DOJ during the Carter Administration in 1980-81, when he was an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel and I was the Acting General Counsel/Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy INS.” About all I remember is that: 1) he was brilliant, 2) he wrote really well; 3) everyone had him pegged as among “the most likely to succeed;” and 4) we both had lots, lots more hair then.
I agree with pretty much everything Sunstein says. Except for one major point. I don’t think “it can happen here.” It is happening here!
Cass says “Thus far, President Trump has been more bark than bite.” Really! With all due respect, that seems like a view directly from the “Ivory Tower.”
Ask U.S. citizens children whose parents have been deported for no rational reason without any consideration of what will happen to those left behind; ask those children intentionally abused and probably damaged for life by the likes of Jeff Sessions; ask communities that have been terrorized by the Homan-led “ICE Gestapo” that strikes terror, performs few if any “real” law enforcement functions these days, while insuring that whole segments of the population are “easy marks” for crime and abuse; ask women and children refugees from Central American who are essentially being railroaded back to the “death camps” from which they fled by the noxious White Nationalist racists Trump, Miller, & Sessions, with the assistance of morally vapid sycophants like Nielsen and Kelly, without even the semblance of due process; ask Dreamers who are slurred by the always disingenuous Sessions while being held as hostages by Trump, and hung out to dry by the GOP Congress; ask the kids and families being held in the “New American Gulag” established by Sessions — combined with his intentional distortion of asylum law, they are basically being held in concentration camps waiting to be shipped off to death camps in the Northern Triangle! And we haven’t even gotten to Sessions’s absolutely outrageous, lawless, unconstitutional, and totally immoral plan to rewrite asylum law so that nobody who needs protection actually gets it! Or how about not taking any Syrian refugees, even though they are dying in refugee camps awaiting resettlement every day. Just because the actual deaths, rapes, torture, US-caused human trafficking, and other unspeakable abuses take place outside our national boundaries doesn’t mean that we aren’t just as responsible for them as the fat & happy Burghers of the Third Reich!
I wrote about Sunstein’s timely, yet totally disturbing, article in my response to a comment from my good friend, colleague, and fellow member of the “Gang of Retired Immigration Judges,” Judge Gus Villageliu in response to one of his “right on” comments today. Here’s what I said:
There is a great article by Professor Cass Sunstein about the parallels between Nazism and Trumpism. The key: Germans who supported Hitler were fat, happy, and satisfied with their lives under Nazism and were willfully indifferent to the torture and suffering of their fellow human beings. They happily accepted the Nazi propaganda that Jews were either traitors or had voluntarily left the country after being fairly compensated for their property. Even after the war, some ordinary Germans looked back on the 1933-39 era of Nazi rule as the best time of their lives.
Another key observation by Sunstein: resistance is never futile and every individual act of resistance, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem at the time, is important. The little acts and persistence add up over time.
In my view, they also establish an important record for historians and future generations. I want my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren to know where I stood in the era of Trump, Sessions, Miller & the rest of the White Nationalist neo-Nazis and their utterly disgusting perversion of Western Judeo-Christian values!
Due Process, tolerance, courage, standing up for the less fortunate, and recognizing the human rights and dignity of every person are eternal values that are always worth fighting for!
Join the New Due Process Army. Resist the White Nationalist Regime every step of the way. Force “go along to get along” courts (like the Supremes) to face up to the horrible immorality of their appeasement of the cruel, inhuman, and illegal actions of the Trump Administration. Write the historical record that even the Trumpsters and their followers won’t be able to escape so that we might never, ever again have a Neo-Nazi revival like the Trump Administration!
Looking for clarity on the law and latest policies affecting children and families separated at the border? Professor Andrew Schoenholtz and Michelle Brané (L’94) of the Women’s Refugee Commission will discuss the status of reunifying families, what’s driving migration and where the administration’s zero-tolerance policy goes from here. Watch the conversation live on Georgetown Law’s Facebook page 10:00 AM today!
Andy & Michelle are long-time friends and two of the “best ever.” Andy (co-author of Refugee Roulette) is my colleague at Georgetown Law these days, and Michelle worked at the BIA as an Honors Program Attorneys during my tenure as BIA Chair.
Start your day with a breath of fresh air and some much-needed truth about refugees, migrants, the law, and how we are treating the most vulnerable among us.
BALTIMORE, Md. ― Aracely Martinez Yanez, 33, knows she’s one of the lucky ones. A deep scar that carves a line through her scalp, from crown to cheek, is proof of that fortune.
She got lucky when her abusive partner shot her point-blank in the head, and she survived.
She got lucky when she escaped her tiny village in Honduras. Local villagers blamed her for her partner’s death; he killed himself and their two young sons after he shot her.
She got lucky when she wasn’t harmed as she made the treacherous 2,000-mile journey to America.
And she got luckiest of all when she was granted asylum after she got here.
If she were to make her journey to America now, she would likely be turned away. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that immigration judges generally cannot consider domestic violence as grounds for asylum. Sessions overturned a precedent set during the Obama administration that allowed certain victims to seek asylum here if they were unable to get help in their home countries.
Domestic abuse of the kind experienced by Martinez Yanez is endemic in Central America. In Honduras, few services for victims exist, and perpetrators are almost never held criminally responsible. One woman is killed every 16 hours there, according to Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights.
For many victims, the United States is their best shot at staying alive.
While the exact numbers are not available, immigration lawyers have estimated that the Trump administration’s decision could invalidate tens of thousands of pending asylum claims from women fleeing domestic violence. Advocates warn it will be used to turn women away at the border, even if they have credible asylum claims.
“This administration is trying to close the door to refugees,” said Archi Pyati, chief of policy at Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that works with immigrant women and girls who have survived gender-based violence. They represented Martinez Yanez in her asylum case. Travel bans, increased detention and family separation are all being used as tools to deter individuals from coming here, Pyati said.
Still, that will not stop women from coming. Because there are thousands of women just like Martinez Yanez, and their stories are just as harrowing.
CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST
Aracely Martinez Yanez is pictured with her three daughters: Alyson, 4, Emely, 11 and Gabriela, 7. She holds her only photograph of her murdered sons: Daniel, 4, and Juancito, 6.
A Violent Start
Martinez Yanez grew up in a tiny village in Honduras with her parents and seven siblings. Her family made a living by selling homemade horchata, a sweet drink made from milky rice, and jugo de marañon, cashew juice. They also sold fresh tortillas out of their house. Her childhood was simple and happy.
But after she turned 15, a man in her village named Sorto became obsessed with her. At her cousin’s wedding, he tried to dance with her. She pushed him off: He was 15 years her senior, and gave her the creeps. A few days later, Martinez Yanez said, he waited outside her house with a gun and kidnapped her. He took her to a mountain and raped her repeatedly.
“I wanted to die,” she told HuffPost through an interpreter at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday. “I felt dirty. He said that I was his woman, and that I would not belong to anyone else.” As she told her story, she rubbed her legs up and down, physically uncomfortable as she recalled the terrible things that had happened to her.
Over the next six years, she said, Sorto went on to rape and beat her whenever he pleased. In the eyes of the village, she was his woman, just like he said. She got pregnant immediately, giving birth to her first son, Juancito, at 16, and her second son, Daniel, at 18. Sorto would come and go from the village, as he had a wife and children in El Salvador. But when he wasn’t there, she said she was watched by his family.
As for help, there were no police in her village, she said. She had seen what happened to other women who traveled to the closest city to report abuse: It made things worse. The police did nothing, and the abuser would inevitably find out.
“I felt like I was worthless, like I had no value,” she said.
A few years after her sons were born, she became friends with a local barber who cut her children’s hair. He was sweet and respectful, nothing like Sorto, she said. They began a secret relationship. Sorto had been gone from the village for a few years, and Martinez Yanez hoped she was free of him. Then she got pregnant. Scared that Sorto would find out, she fled to San Pedro Sula, a city in the north of the country. She didn’t tell anyone where she had gone.
But Sorto found her anyway. He called her on the phone and told her if she did not come back to the village within the next 24 hours, he would kill her family, she said. Martinez Yanez got on the next bus back.
A few days after she returned, she said, Sorto told her that he was taking her and their two boys to the river. He brought a hunting rifle with him. The family walked through the mountainside. Martinez Yanez recalled handing her children some sticks to play with, and crouching on the ground with them. Then she felt the rifle pressing into her head. The rest is a blank.
Sorto shot her in the back of the head, and killed her two sons, before shooting himself. Juancito was 6, Daniel was 4. Somehow, Martinez Yanez, five months pregnant, survived. She was hospitalized for months and had to relearn to walk and talk. She is still deaf in one ear, and has numbness down one side of her body.
When she returned home to the village, she said, people threw rocks at her and called her names. Someone fired a gun into her house. Someone else tried to run her over with a bicycle. The community blamed her for the killings because she had tried to leave Sorto, she explained. His family wanted to avenge his death.
“The whole village was against me,” she said. “Children, adults. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.”
A few months later she gave birth to a girl, Emely, but she was overwhelmed with stress. On top of grieving the death of her two sons, learning to live with a traumatic brain injury, and caring for her newborn, she was constantly worried about being killed by people in her village.
It was too much. She eventually fled to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, but Sorto’s family found her there too, she said. In a last-ditch effort to save Martinez Yanez’s life, her family paid over $7,000, an enormous sum for the family, to a coyote, a person who helps smuggle people across the border to the U.S. Emely, who was now 2, had to stay behind. They couldn’t afford to send her, too.
Martinez Yanez made the heartbreaking decision to go alone.
The Journey To Freedom
She left in the middle of the night, traveling with a group of four or five people. They were transported in a van for part of the trip, and then in taxis.
There was very little to eat or drink, she said, and she barely slept. Her stomach was upset and she suffered from debilitating headaches. In Mexico, she almost turned back.
“I missed my parents and my daughter so much,” she said. “But the threats and the conditions that I knew were waiting for me in my village gave me the motivation to continue to the U.S. to be safe.”
It took them two weeks to get to the U.S. border. Then they waited two days before attempting to cross, she said. She was terrified that she would be caught by immigration officials and sent back. She crossed the border illegally in February 2009, and went to her uncle’s house in Houston, Texas, before traveling on to Annapolis, Maryland, where her brother lived.
Women like Aracely are saving their own lives.Kristen Strain, a lawyer who worked on Martinez Yanez’s asylum case.
Martinez Yanez didn’t know that she could apply for asylum as a domestic violence victim until a few years later, when she sought medical care for her head injury in Maryland. There, she was referred to Tahirih Justice Center.
Kristen Strain, an attorney who worked on her case, wrote the legal brief arguing that Martinez Yanez should be granted asylum.
Generally, applicants must show that the persecution they have suffered is on account of one of five grounds: race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Strain successfully argued that being a female victim of severe gender-based violence in Honduras counted as a particular social group for purposes of obtaining asylum.
“There simply aren’t laws in place that protect women like Aracely,” she said. “They have no recourse. It is accepted in their communities that women can be treated like men’s property.”
She said it took over a year to gather all the evidence for Martinez Yanez’s claim, which included a neurological evaluation, medical documents, news stories from Honduran papers about the shooting, dozens of interviews, and statements from friends and family in Honduras to corroborate her story.
“It is not as if it’s easy,” Strain said. “In addition to having to physically get here, which is harrowing and dangerous, women have to navigate a complex legal system that is difficult to understand, especially when they don’t speak the language. It’s hard for them to even know what their rights are, let alone find an attorney who can advocate for them.”
“Women like Aracely are saving their own lives,” she went on.
Martinez Yanez was granted asylum in 2013. Her daughter, Emely, was allowed to join her in 2014. While they talked on the phone regularly, the mother and daughter had not seen each other for five years.
CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST
Martinez Yanez watches her daughters play outside the family’s Baltimore apartment.
A New Life
In her Baltimore home, more than 3,000 miles from the tiny village in Honduras where she was raised, Martinez Yanez likes to be surrounded by photos. They remind her of those she had to leave behind.
There’s one of her sister graduating college. Another of her parents beaming happily.
And then, hanging in the entrance to the kitchen, is a photograph of her with her two deceased sons. It is the only picture she owns of them. She brought it with her when she fled Honduras. When she spoke to HuffPost about her sons, she cried. She still doesn’t understand why they were killed.
Since she’s been in the U.S., Martinez Yanez has expanded her family. Emely, who is 11, now has two sisters: Gabriela, 7, and Alyson, 4.
“I’m very fortunate to be able to have my daughters with me,” she said. “I can’t ask for anything better to happen. I am so happy with my life.”
Martinez Yanez still struggles with the repercussions of being shot in the head. She is forgetful and can get confused easily. She said she has to put every appointment she has in her phone with an alarm, otherwise she’ll miss it.
She said she was grateful that she was granted asylum, and heartbroken for other women who may not have the same opportunity she did.
“I just feel so sad that other women in my situation, or even in worse situations than mine will not be allowed in the country anymore,” she said. “Here, I don’t have to hide or run away from anyone.”
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In my years at the Arlington Immigration Court, I had many well-documented, deserving cases like this. In those days, the ICE Office of Chief Counsel in Arlington followed the so-called “Martin Brief” in which DHS urged the BIA to recognize domestic violence as a proper basis for asylum under certain circumstances long before the BIA actually got around to deciding A-R-C-G-. Because the applicants were almost never held in detention, they were able to get top–flight pro bono representation from NGOs, Law School Clinics, Human Rights First, and “Big Law” Firms serving pro bono.
The cases were so well documented that they often could be “pre-tried” between counsel before the individual hearing date. The parties then often jointly asked me to set an earlier “short block hearing” (one hour or less) where the evidence could be introduced, discussed, and abbreviated testimony taken. At the end of those hearings, the parties jointly moved me for a grant of asylum.
So, without the interference of the DOJ politicos, here was an actual working system that helped get deserving cases granted and off the docket, conserved judicial resources, saved time, saved lives, and complied completely with Due Process. In other words, a smashing Immigration Court and U.S. system of justice “success story” by any rational measure!
That has all been disgracefully dismantled by Sessions. Now, following his perversion of the law in Matter of A-B-, He’s encouraging DHS and Immigration Judges to deny such cases without even hearing the testimony (even though every one of these individuals easily should qualify for the lesser relief of protection under the Convention Against Torture). That’s almost certain to result in appeals, prolonged litigation in the Courts of Appeals, and ultimately return of most cases to the Immigration Courts for full hearings and fair consideration.
At some point, not only is A-R-C-G- likely to be reinstated, but it is likely to be expanded to what is really the fundamental basis for these claims — gender as a qualifying “Particular Social Group.” It’s undeniably immutable/fundamental, particularized, socially distinct and clearly the basis for much of the persecution in today’s world!
In the meantime, however, those who don’t have the luxury of great pro bono representation, lack an attentive Circuit Court of Appeals, or who can’t get through the “credible fear interview” as it has now been “rigged for denial” by Sessions will likely be unlawfully returned to their home countries to suffer abuse, torture, and a lifetime of torment or death, along with those cute little kids in the pictures we’re seeing.
The White Nationalist, neo-Nazi regime of Trump, Sessions, and their enablers will be one of the most horrible and disgusting periods in our history. History will neither forget nor treat kindly those who failed to stand up to the racists and child abusers running and ruining our Government, and destroying many innocent lives in the process.
An attorney recently reported the following: at a Master Calendar hearing, an immigration judge advised that if on the Individual Hearing date, both the court and the ICE attorney do not believe the respondent is prima facie eligible for asylum based on the written submissions, the judge will deny asylum summarily without hearing testimony. The judge stated that other immigration judges around the country were already entering such summary judgments, in light of recent decisions of the Attorney General.
I have been telling reporters lately that no one decision or policy of the AG, the EOIR Director, or the BIA should be viewed in isolation. Rather, all are pieces in a puzzle. Back in March, in a very unusual decision, Jeff Sessions certified to himself a four-year-old BIA precedent decision while it was administratively closed (and therefore off-calendar) at the immigration judge level, and then vacated the decision for the most convoluted of reasons. What jumped out at me was the fact that the decision, Matter of E-F-H-L-, had held that all asylum applicants had the right to a full hearing on their application without first having to establish prima facie eligibility for such relief. It was pretty clear that Sessions wanted this requirement eliminated.
Let’s look at the timeline of recent developments. On January 4 of this year, Sessions certified to himself the case of Matter of Castro-Tum, in which he asked whether immigration judges and the BIA should continue to have the right to administratively close cases, a useful and common docket management tool. On January 19, the BIA published its decision in Matter of W-Y-C- & H-O-B-, in which it required asylum applicants to clearly delineate their claimed particular social group before the immigration judge (an extremely complicated task beyond the ability of most unrepresented applicants), and stated that the BIA will not consider reformulations of the social group on appeal. The decision was written by Board Member Garry Malphrus, a hard-line Republican who was a participant in the “Brooks Brother Riot” that disrupted the Florida ballot recount following the 2000 Presidential election.
On March 5, Sessions vacated Matter of E-F-H-L-. Two days later, on March 7, Sessions certified to himself an immigration judge’s decision in Matter of A-B-, engaging in procedural irregularity in taking the case from the BIA before it could rule on the matter, and then completely transforming the issues presented in the case, suddenly challenging whether anyone fearing private criminal actors could qualify for asylum.
On March 22, Sessions certified to himself Matter of L-A-B-R-et al., to determine under what circumstances immigration judges may grant continuances to respondents in removal proceedings. Although this decision is still pending, immigration judges are already having to defend their decisions to grant continuances to their supervisors at the instigation of the EOIR Director’s Office, which is tracking all IJ continuances.
On March 30, EOIR issued a memo stating that immigration judges would be subjected to performance metrics, or quotas, requiring them to complete 700 cases per year, 95 percent at the first scheduled individual hearing, and further requiring that no more than 15 percent of their decisions be remanded. On May 17, Sessions decided Castro-Tum in the negative, stripping judges of the ability to manage their own dockets by administratively closing worthy cases.
On May 31, Castro-Tum’s case was on the Master Calendar of Immigration Judge Steven Morley. Instead of ordering Castro-Tum deported in absentia that day, the judge continued the proceedings to allow an interested attorney to brief him on the issue of whether Castro-Tum received proper notice of the hearing. Soon thereafter, the case was removed from Judge Morley’s docket and reassigned to a management-level immigration judge who is far less likely to exercise such judicial independence.
On June 11, Sessions decided Matter of A-B-, vacating the BIA’s 2014 decision recognizing the ability of victims of domestic violence to qualify for asylum as members of a particular social group. In that decision, Sessions included headnote 4: “If an asylum application is fatally flawed in one respect, an immigration judge or the Board need not examine the remaining elements of the asylum claim.” The case was intentionally issued on the first day of the Immigration Judges training conference, at which the need to complete more cases in less time was a repeatedly emphasized.
So in summary, within the past few months, the immigration judges have been warned that their livelihood will depend on their completing large numbers of cases, without the ability to grant continuances or administratively close cases. They have had the need to hold a full asylum hearing stripped away, while at the same time, having pointed out to them several ways to quickly dispose of an asylum claim that until weeks ago, would have been clearly grantable under settled case law.
So where does all this leave the individual judges? There has been much discussion lately of EOIR’s improper politicized hirings of immigration judges. I feel that the above developments have created something of a Rorschach test for determining an immigration judge’s ideology.
The judges that conclude from the above the best practice is to summarily deny asylum without testimony are exactly the type of judges the present administration wants on the bench. They can find a “fatal flaw” in the claim – either in the formulation (or lack thereof) of the particular social group, or in the lack of preliminary documentation as to the persecutor’s motive, the government’s inability to protect, or the unreasonableness of internal relocation, and simply deny the right to a hearing. It should be noted that these issues are often resolved by the detailed testimony offered at a full merits hearing, which is the purpose of holding such hearings in the first place.
On the other hand, more thoughtful, liberal judges will find that in light of the above developments, they must afford more time for asylum claims based on domestic violence, gang threats, or other claims involving non-governmental actors. They will conference these cases, and hear detailed testimony from the respondent, country experts, and other witnesses on the particular points raised by Sessions in Matter of A-B-. They may consider alternative theories of these cases based on political opinion or religion. They are likely to take the time to craft thoughtful, detailed decisions. And in doing so, they will find it extremely difficult to meet the completion quotas set out by the agency with Sessions’ blessing. They may also have their decisions remanded by the conservative BIA, whose leadership is particularly fearful of angering its superiors in light of the 2003 purge of liberal BIA members by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. The removal of Castro-Tum’s case from the docket of Judge Morley is clearly a warning that the agency does not wish for judges to behave as independent and impartial adjudicators, but rather to act in lockstep with the agency’s enforcement agenda.
There is another very significant issue: most asylum claims also apply for protection under Article III of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Unlike asylum, “CAT” relief is mandatory, and as it does not require a nexus to a protected ground, it is unaffected by the AG’s holding in A-B-. So won’t those judges pondering summary dismissal still have to hold full hearings on CAT protection? It would seem that a refusal to hold a full CAT hearing would result in a remand, if not from the BIA, than at the circuit court level.
Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
Four Easy, Low Budget, Steps To A Better, Fairer, & More Efficient U.S. Immigration Court System:
Remove Jeff Sessions and all other politicos from control.
Restore Immigration Judges’ authority to “administratively close” cases when necessary to get them off the docket so that relief can be pursued outside the Immigration Court system.
Give Immigration Judges authority to set and control their own dockets, working with Court Administrators and attorneys from both sides (rather than having DHS enforcement policies essentially “drive the docket” as is now the case) to:
Schedule cases in a manner that insures fair and reasonable access to pro bono counsel for everyone prior to the first Master Calendar;
Schedule cases so that pleadings can be taken and applications filed at the first Master Calendar (or the first Master Calendar after representation is obtained);
Schedule Individual Hearings in a manner that will maximize the chances of “completion at the first Individual Hearing” while minimizing “resets” of Individual Hearing cases.
Establish a Merit Selection hiring system for Immigration Judges overseen by the U.S. Circuit Court in the jurisdiction where that Immigration Judge would sit, or in the case of the BIA Appellate Immigration Judges, by the U.S. Supreme Court.
No, it wouldn’t overnight eliminate the backlog (which has grown up over many years of horrible mismanagement by the DOJ under Administrations of both parties). But, it certainly would give the Immigration Courts a much better chance of reducing the backlog in a fair manner over time.Just that, as opposed to the Trump Administration’s “maximize unfairness, minimize Due Process, maximize backlogs, shift blame, waste money and resources”policies would be a huge improvement at no additional costs over what it now takes to run a system “designed, built, and operated to fail.”
Elise Foley & Jennifer Bendery report for HuffPost:
The way the Trump administration talks about it, you’d think there are only two ways to respond to families crossing into the U.S. illegally: either separate kids from their parents while the adults are tried as criminals or put entire families into indefinite detention.
But there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.
The Family Case Management Program, which President Donald Trump ended several months after taking office, was meant to keep track of immigrant parents and kids in removal proceedings without having to keep them locked up. It was relatively small ― about 950 families in five locations. But it was hugely successful: More than 99 percent of families in the program showed up for their court dates, and 97 percent participated in required check-ins with their case managers, according to a report from Geo Care, the private prison company that operated the program. And it reportedly cost the government just $36 per family each day, versus $319 per bed per day in a family detention center.
Now, as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress seek to expand the government’s ability to lock up immigrant families long term, Democrats and immigrant rights advocates are asking why they don’t bring back the alternative program in an expanded version.
“In both bills the plan is to incarcerate families,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. “To put mothers in cages with toddlers, as if that’s the only alternative, which clearly it is not. Unless your intention is to be punitive and harsh and punish people before seeking asylum.”
The FCMP was meant for people deemed too vulnerable for detention, such as pregnant or nursing women or families with special needs children. It required families to be briefed on their responsibilities in the immigration court process, which can be complicated, and to check in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their case manager. Case managers referred families to services — such as lawyers and children’s school enrollment — and, if they received a deportation order in court, helped them prepare to return to their native country.
It was a success story for alternatives to detention, according to experts who served on an advisory committee for the program.
“The message is if you do this kind of frequent and fairly intensive case management, you can get almost 100 percent compliance,” said Randy Capps, the director of research for U.S. programs at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “You don’t have to detain people.”
ICE abruptly shut down the program last June with little explanation for advisory committee members, some of them said. They were simply told at a meeting that it would be their last.
Agency spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez said in a statement that ICE discontinued the program after determining that other alternatives to detention “proved to be a much better use of limited resources” with similar rates of compliance. She added that “removals of individuals on [alternatives to detention] occur at a much higher rate” than the FCMP.
“There are no plans to reinstate the FCMP at this time,” she said.
That method for assessing the program doesn’t make sense, said another former member of the FCMP advisory committee, Michelle Brané, the director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. The FCMP wasn’t in effect long enough for many of the participants to complete their removal proceedings, she said. She added that the program’s purpose was to ensure immigrants went to their removal hearings and that whether those hearings resulted in relief or deportation was irrelevant.
“The program’s efficacy shouldn’t be assessed by removals because if people are getting legal help and qualify [for relief], then that’s not a removal, but it is full compliance,” she said. “That means their system works.”
Another ICE spokesman, Matthew Bourke, said in an email that removals were “a relevant way to determine the program’s effectiveness” because a key reason ICE created the program “was to promote participant compliance with immigration obligations which included final orders of removal.”
He said that immigrants monitored under other alternatives to detention comply with court hearings more than 99 percent of the time and with check-ins almost 98 percent of the time.
But it’s unclear whether expanding alternatives to detention is part of Trump’s plan to address the issue of families arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s certainly not one he has boosted. His executive order this week, which he said would stop routine family separations for unauthorized immigrant families, presented only detention as an option.
Immigrant rights advocates are pushing for policymakers to remember that detention isn’t the only option.
“ICE has a whole range of alternatives to detention,” said Ashley Feasley, a former advisory committee member and the director of policy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration and refugee services. “These are existing programs that could be implemented now in lieu of building large-scale family-child detention facilities.”
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Elise & Jennifer’s article ties in nicely with my essay yesterday “SOLVING THE SOUTHERN BORDER: It’s Not Our Asylum Laws That Need Changing — It’s The Actions Of Our Leaders Who Administer Them That Must Change.”
As long as we treat refugees as a law enforcement issue and a political football that can be solved by “bogus deterrence,” rather than as a humanitarian crisis that requires empathy and a thoughtful effort to address the causes by working with the international community, our policies will continue to fail miserably, do more harm than good, and diminish us as a nation and as human beings.
We need better political and moral leadership from our nation’s leaders. That’s unlikely to happen with the current morally twisted, functionally incompetent, and tone-deaf White Nationalist Kakistocracy.
There is now a broad, bipartisan consensus that ripping infants from their mothers — and then putting both in (separate) cages — is not a morally acceptable way of treating families who cross our southern border. After weeks of deliberation, our nation has concluded that Central American migrants do not deserve to have their children psychologically tortured by agents of the state.
But what they do deserve remains in dispute.
The White House contends that migrants have a right to be caged with their family members (except for those who have already been separated from their children, who aren’t necessarily entitled to ever see their kids again). But the judiciary says that child migrants have a right not to be caged, at all. And progressives seem to believe that these huddled masses are entitled to something more — though few have specified precisely what or why.
In defending its “zero tolerance” policy — which is to say, a policy of jailing asylum-seekers for the misdemeanor offense of crossing the U.S. border between official points of entry — the White House has implored its critics to consider the bigger picture: Such “illegal aliens” have already undermined the rule of law in our country, and brought drugs, violent crime, and MS-13 to our streets. Locking up their families might look cruel when viewed in isolation; but when understood in the broader context of a migrant crisis that threatens the safety and sovereignty of the American people, the policy is more than justified.
In reality, however, this narrative inverts the truth: Context does not excuse the cruelty of our government’s “zero tolerance” policy, it indicts that policy even further. The United States is not suffering a crisis that justifies radical measures; the Central American families gathered at our border are. And those families aren’t bringing crime and lawlessness to our country — if anything, we brought such conditions to theirs.
After all, it was the CIA that overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954, and thereby subjected its people to decades of dictatorship and civil war. It was the streets and prisons of California that gave birth to MS-13, and American immigration authorities that deported that gang back to El Salvador. And it is America’s taste for narcotics that sustains the drug trade in Honduras — and our war on drugs that ensures such trade is conducted by immensely profitable and violent cartels.
There is no easy answer to the Central American migrant crisis. But any remotely moral policy response will need to proceed from the recognition that we are not the victims of this crisis — and asylum-seekers are not its creators.
Central American families are not a threat to the United States.
It is very hard to make a reasoned case for why our nation’s current levels of undocumented immigration — or, of low-skilled immigration more broadly — represent major threats to the safety and material well-being of the American people.
We have long known that native-born Americans commit violent crimes at far higher rates than either legal or undocumented immigrants. And newer research into immigration and criminality has proven even more devastating to the nativists’ case: States with higher concentrations of undocumented immigrants tend to have lower rates of violent crime — and this correlation persists even when controlling for a given state’s median age, level of urbanization, and rate of unemployment or incarceration.
Meanwhile, the American economy is in great need of young, unskilled workers. On the Labor Department’s list of the 15 occupations that will experience the fastest growth over the next six years, eight require no advanced education. Further, with the baby-boomers retiring — and birth rates plummeting — the future of American economic growth, and the survival of Social Security, depends on an infusion of foreign workers. It is true that there is some basis for believing that mass, low-skill immigration depresses the wages of native-born high-school dropouts (although that claim is contentious). But there is no basis for believing that restricting immigration will do more to boost such workers’ take-home pay than encouraging unionization through labor-law reform, or expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Thus, given the positive material benefits of mass low-skill immigration, it is hard to see how more of it would constitute an economic crisis, even if we stipulate that it puts downward pressure on the wages of some native-born workers.
By contrast, the crisis facing the migrants themselves is wrenching and undeniable.
Asylum-seekers are fleeing violence and disorder, not exporting it.
To seek asylum in the United States, Central American families must travel many hundreds of miles through the desert, along a route teeming with rapists, thieves, and homicidal gangs. The hazards inherent to this journey aren’t unknown to most who take it — such migrants simply find the hazards of remaining in place more intolerable.
And that calculation isn’t hard to understand. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras endure some of the highest rates of violent crime — and levels of official corruption — of any nations in the world. As recently as 2015, El Salvador was the single-most violent country (that wasn’t at war) on planet Earth, with a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000. And the vast majority of those homicides went unpunished — according to a 2017 report from the Georgetown Security Studies Review, roughly 90 percent of murders throughout the Northern Triangle go unprosecuted. This lawlessness is both a cause and effect of widespread public distrust in state police forces, which are largely non-professionalized, frequently penetrated by criminal gangs, and historically associated with atrocities carried out in times of political unrest and civil war.
Public trust in the region’s other governing institutions is similarly, justifiably, low. Due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficacy, nations in the Northern Triangle collect less in tax revenues than most other Latin American countries (relative to the size of each nation’s gross domestic product). This fact, combined with high levels of spending on (grossly underperforming) security forces leaves the region’s governments with little funding for social services and public investment. And corruption eats into what meager funding is allocated to such purposes — in Honduras, the ruling National Party has been accused of embezzling social security funds; Guatemala’s former president and nine of his ex-ministers were arrested in February for graft connected to a public transit project.
While the region’s governments have struggled to collect taxes, its drug cartels have proven quite effective at collecting tribute. In 2015, the Honduran newspaper La Prensa revealed that citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were collectively making more than $651 million in extortion payments to criminal organizations annually. Those who fail to pay up are routinely murdered; many of the migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. claim (quite credibly) to be fleeing such homicidal extortion rackets.
So, these migrants are fleeing a genuine crisis. But that does not necessarily mean that our country has any special obligation to address their plight. The U.S. government is not forcing the Northern Triangle’s political and economic elites to engage in graft, or avoid taxes. It does not pay the region’s police to let murders go unsolved, or (directly) sell weapons to the region’s cartels. In fact, Congress has spent more than $3 billion on security aid for Central America over the past decade.
And yet, the United States still bears profound responsibility for the region’s troubles; because the Northern Triangle’s failures of governance — and wrenching security challenges — are inextricably-linked to our nation’s policy choices and consumption habits.
On the former point: The CIA subjected Guatemala to decades of authoritarian rule and civil war, for the sake of aiding a fruit company that its director was invested in.
In 1945, a revolutionary movement built a representative democracy in Guatemala. Nine years later, the United States tore it down. Officially, the Eisenhower administration orchestrated the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz’s government to save the Guatemalan people from Communist tyranny. In reality, it did so to deny them popular sovereignty.
Árbenz had been democratically elected, and enjoyed widespread public support. He had legalized the Communist Party, but was no card-carrying member. His crime was not the suppression of dissent or the suspension of constitutional rule — but rather, an attempt to address his nation’s wrenching inequality by redistributing the United Fruit Company’s (UFC) unused land to impoverished peasants.
This was not an act of pure expropriation — the UFC had robbed the Guatemalan government of tax revenue, by vastly understating the value of its holdings. By seizing the company’s unused lands, Árbenz secured a measure of compensation for his state; and, more importantly, provided 100,000 Guatemalan families with land, and access to credit. Agricultural production increased, poverty fell. Árbenz’s constituents were pleased.
But the United Fruit Company was not. And both Secretary of State John Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles had close ties to the UFC. So, our government took out Árbenz, and replaced him with a reactionary, former military officer — who promptly assumed dictatorial powers. Nearly four decades of civil war between authoritarian governments and left-wing guerrillas ensued — throughout which the United States provided support to the former. By the time the fighting ended in 1996, 200,000 people were dead.
It is impossible to know what life in Guatemala would be like today absent the CIA’s intervention. One can imagine Árbenz’s democracy thriving through the second half of the 20th century, and serving as a model for its neighbors in the Northern Triangle. One can also imagine less rosy counterfactuals. What we know for certain is that the United States deliberately undermined the national sovereignty of Guatemala and inadvertently triggered decades of civil war. And we know that said civil war left in its wake large groups of demobilized men with experience in killing, and access to (often, U.S.-made) military-grade weapons — and that many of those men ended up forming violent, criminal organizations that plague the Northern Triangle today.
And American drug users and policymakers sustain those criminal organizations.
Demand for narcotics is overwhelmingly concentrated in prosperous, developed countries; which means, in the Western Hemisphere, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States. And the U.S. government’s Draconian (and profoundly ineffective) approach to reducing that demand has only inflated the profits that Central American criminal organizations can reap by satisfying our illicit appetites. As German Lopez reported for Vox in 2014:
These drugs cost pennies by the dose to produce, but their value is increased through the supply chain to reflect the risk of losing a harvest to drug-busting government officials or rival criminal organizations.
The inflated cost creates a huge financial incentive for criminal organizations to get into the business of drugs, no matter the risks. They might lose some of their product along the way, but any product that makes it through is immensely profitable.
Criminal groups would likely take up other activities — human trafficking, kidnapping, gun smuggling, extortion — if the drug market didn’t exist. But experts argue drugs are uniquely profitable and empower criminal organizations in a way no other market can.
One could argue that the downside risks of legalizing hard drugs justify the harms inherent to their prohibition. The fact that the United States refuses to remove marijuana from the black market — and thus, deny cartels a major profit source — is harder to justify. But either way, it remains the case that the costs of our nation’s consumption — and prohibition — of drugs fall heaviest on our neighbors to the south. In fact, some have even argued that America’s drug habit is responsible for nearly all of the violence in the Northern Triangle — among them, White House chief of staff John Kelly.
“There are some in officialdom who argue that not 100 percent of the violence [in Central America] today is due to the drug flow to the U.S.,” Kelly wrote in 2014, when he was serving as Southcom commander. “I agree, but I would say that perhaps 80 percent of it is.”
MS-13 was born in the U.S.A.
Donald Trump has accused Central American governments of “sending” their most violent and criminal residents to the United States — including the homicidal gangsters of MS-13. In truth, of course, the vast majority of migrants from Central America are self-selected and nonviolent.
But Trump’s mistake is almost understandable: After all, the U.S. government actually has sent some of its most violent and criminal residents to Central America: MS-13 was formed on the streets of Los Angeles, hardened in American prisons, and then deported back to the Northern Triangle.
True, the gang’s original members were (mostly unauthorized) Salvadoran immigrants who’d fled their nation’s civil war. But those immigrants arrived in California as troubled teenagers, not sadistic killers. Dara Lind offers a concise sketch of the competing theories for how some of them became the latter:
[The Salvadoran teens] faced hostility from other ethnic groups for being new, and from other young people for being long-haired mosher types, so they banded together and called themselves the Stoners — later Mara Salvatrucha, and eventually, once the gang had metastasized under the network of Southern California Latino gangs known as Sureños, MS-13.
When and why the “Stoners” became a hardened violent gang is up for debate. Avalos attributes it to repeated confrontations with other LA gangs, while journalist Ioan Grillo thinks it has more to do with the arrival of newer Salvadoran immigrants who were “hardened by the horrors” of civil war. Salvadoran journalists Carlos Martinez and Jose Luis Sanz, meanwhile, say that the gang’s story paralleled that of a lot of young men during the “tough on crime” era: They were minor delinquents stuffed into jails and prisons, where they had the time, opportunity, and incentive to become hardened criminals.
Whichever version of this story one accepts, our nation’s institutions remain implicated in the formation of MS-13. Salvadoran immigrants did not introduce the culture of street gangs to Los Angeles; L.A. introduced it to them. And, given the rates of recidivism in our criminal justice system, it is reasonable to assume that the failure of American prisons to rehabilitate these teenage immigrants (once they turned to violent crime) was not solely due to their inadequacies.
Regardless, the U.S. government bears unambiguous responsibility for MS-13’s evolution into an international menace. Despite the fact that El Salvador was ill-equipped to handle a massive influx of gang members, the U.S. deported roughly 20,000 convicts (including many MS-13 members) to that country between 2000 and 2004 — without telling the Salvadoran government which of the deportees being returned to them had criminal histories, and which did not.
Our debt to Central American migrants cannot be paid simply by reuniting them with their traumatized children.
Donald Trump does not deny that the migrants at our southern border hail from nations wracked by violence and instability (the brutality of Central American gangs is one of our president’s favorite topics of conversation). But Trump sees the Northern Triangle’s troubles as cause for turning away its refugees, not taking them in: In his understanding (or at least, in the one he projects to the public), Honduras is not violent and poor for complicated reasons of history, politics, and economics; it is violent and poor because Honduran people live there. Therefore, these migrants are not looking to escape their nations’ pathologies, but to export them; they’re not huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but virus-bearing insects yearning to “infest.”
These sentiments reek of racism. But like so many other prejudices that the powerful harbor against the powerless, they also betray a will to evade responsibility.
If the pathologies of impoverished black communities can be attributed to the cultural (and/or biological) flaws of black people, then the American government owes them little. If we acknowledge that their troubles are inextricable from centuries of discriminatory policy, by contrast, our collective obligation to improve their well-being becomes immense. And the same is true of migrant families. If we can call these people “animals,” then we need not ask what caused the barbarities they’re fleeing. But rejecting Trump’s racism requires us to ask that question — and answering it honestly requires grappling with our collective responsibility for the traumas that migrant children suffered before they ever crossed our border.
What we owe them can be debated (accepting a much greater number of them into our country, and increasing aid to their region would seem like two possibilities). But there is no doubt that we owe them much more than this.
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ESSAY:
SOLVING THE SOUTHERN BORDER: It’s Not Our Asylum Laws That Need Changing — It’s The Actions Of Our Leaders Who Administer Them That Must Change!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
U.S. Immigration Judge (Ret.)
Contrary to what White Nationalist liars like Trump & Sessions say, our U.S. asylum laws are not the problem. The politicos who misinterpret and misapply the law and then mal-administer the asylum adjudication system are the problem.
The current asylum laws are more than flexible enough to deal efficiently, effectively, and humanely with today’s bogus, self-created “Southern Border Crisis.” It’s actually nothing more than the normal ebb and flow, largely of refugees, from the Northern Triangle.
That has more do with conditions in those countries and seasonal factors than it does with U.S. asylum law. Forced migration is an unfortunate fact of life. Always has been, and probably always will be. That is, unless and until leaders of developed nations devote more time and resources to addressing the causation factors, not just flailing ineffectively and too often inhumanely with the inevitable results.
And the reasonable solutions are readily available under today’s U.S. legal system:
Instead of sending more law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges to the Southern Border, send more CBP Inspectors and USCIS Asylum Officers to insure that those seeking asylum are processed promptly, courteously, respectfully, and fairly.
Take those who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol to the nearest port of entry instead of sending them to criminal court (unless, of course, they are repeat offenders or real criminals).
Release those asylum seekers who pass “credible fear” on low bonds or “alternatives to detention” (primarily ankle bracelet monitoring) which have been phenomenally successful in achieving high rates of appearance at Immigration Court hearings. They are also much more humane and cheaper than long-term immigration detention.
Work with the pro bono legal community and NGOs to insure that each asylum applicant gets a competent lawyer. Legal representation also has a demonstrated correlation to near-universal rates of appearance at Immigration Court hearings. Lawyers also insure that cases will be well-presented and fairly heard, indispensable ingredients to the efficient delivery of Due Process.
Insure that address information is complete and accurate at the time of release from custody. Also, insure that asylum applicants fully understand how the process works and their reporting obligations to the Immigration Courts and to DHS, as well as their obligation to stay in touch with their attorneys.
Allow U.S. Immigration Judges in each Immigration Court to work with ICE Counsel, NGOs, and the local legal community to develop scheduling patterns that insure applications for asylum can be filed at the “First Master” and that cases are completed on the first scheduled “Individual Merits Hearing” date.
If there is a consensus that these cases merit “priority treatment,” then the ICE prosecutor should agree to remove a “lower priority case” from the current 720,000 case backlog by exercising “prosecutorial discretion.” This will end “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and insure that the prioritization of new cases does not add to the already insurmountable backlog.
Establish a robust “in-country refugee processing program” in the Northern Triangle; fund international efforts to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle; and work cooperatively with the UNHCR and other countries in the Americas to establish and fund protection programs that distribute refugees fleeing the Northern Triangle among a number of countries. That will help reduce the flow of refugees at the source, rather than at our Southern Border. And, more important, it will do so through legal humanitarian actions, not by encouraging law enforcement officials in other countries (like Mexico) to abuse refugees and deny them humane treatment (so that we don’t have to).
My proposed system would require no legislative fixes; comply with the U.S Constitution, our statutory laws, and international laws; be consistent with existing court orders and resolve some pending legal challenges; and could be carried out with less additional personnel and expenditure of taxpayer funds than the Administration’s current “cruel, inhuman, and guaranteed to fail” “deterrence only” policy.
ADDITIONAL BENEFIT: We could also all sleep better at night, while reducing the “National Stress Level.” (And, for those interested in such things, it also would be more consistent with Matthew 25:44, the rest of Christ’s teachings, and Christian social justice theology).
As Eric Levitz says in New York Magazine, the folks arriving at our border are the ones in crisis, not us! “And those families aren’t bringing crime and lawlessness to our country — if anything, we brought such conditions to theirs.”
That warrants a much more measured, empathetic, humane, respectful, and both legally and morally justifiable approach than we have seen from our Government to date.The mechanisms for achieving that are already in our law. We just need leaders with the wisdom and moral courage to use them.
I’ll be on for a 5 minute or so segment with Scott Simon that airs locally on WAMU starting at 8:00 AM Saturday. I believe “my segment” will begin around 8:20 AM. It will be posted to the internet by noon on Saturday.
MATTER OF FACT WITH SOLEDAD O’BRIEN
I have about a 10 minute segment with Soledad that will air in the DC area on WTTG, Ch. 5, at 1:00 AM on Monday (CORRECTED). It will also be posted online later.
“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq., it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of this Administration to rigorously enforce our immigration laws. Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time. When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment under section 1325(a) of title 8, United States Code. This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise. It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.
Sec. 2. Definitions. For purposes of this order, the following definitions apply: (a) “Alien family” means
(i) any person not a citizen or national of the United States who has not been admitted into, or is not authorized to enter or remain in, the United States, who entered this country with an alien child or alien children at or between designated ports of entry and who was detained; and
(ii) that person’s alien child or alien children.
(b) “Alien child” means any person not a citizen or national of the United States who
(i) has not been admitted into, or is not authorized to enter or remain in, the United States;
(ii) is under the age of 18; and
(iii) has a legal parent-child relationship to an alien who entered the United States with the alien child at or between designated ports of entry and who was detained.
Sec. 3. Temporary Detention Policy for Families Entering this Country Illegally. (a) The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary), shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.
(b) The Secretary shall not, however, detain an alien family together when there is a concern that detention of an alien child with the child’s alien parent would pose a risk to the child’s welfare.
(c) The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available measures to provide to the Secretary, upon request, any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families, and shall construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.
(d) Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.
(e) The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the
Central District of California to modify the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions, CV 85-4544 (“Flores settlement”), in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.
Sec. 4. Prioritization of Immigration Proceedings Involving Alien Families. The Attorney General shall, to the extent practicable, prioritize the adjudication of cases involving detained families.
Sec. 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented in a manner consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
DONALD J. TRUMP”
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Section 1 maintains the abusive policy of prosecuting every misdemeanor illegal entry case (“zero-tolerance,” a/k/a “zero common sense,” a/k/a “zero humanity”). Most of those duressed into pleading guilty in assembly line Federal criminal courts are sentenced to “time served,” thus illustrating the absurd wastefulness of this policy and how it detracts from real law enforcement. Trump also throws in a gratuitous and totally disingenuous jab at Congress and the courts for causing the problem that he & Sessions actually created.
Section 3(a) directs the detention of families throughout criminal proceedings and until the end of Immigration Court proceedings (which often takes many months or even years), an abominable, costly, inhumane, unnecessary, and unsustainable policy originally developed during the Obama Administration. The Government lacks adequate family detention facilities, which are supposed to be non-secure facilities licensed by a child welfare agency. Additionally, asylum applicants in Removal Proceedings generally have a right to bond. In most cases, there would be no legitimate reason to deny bond. Contrary to the Administration’s bogus suggestions and intentionally misleading statistics, studies show that those who are represented by counsel and understand the asylum process show up for their hearings more than 90% of the time. I found it was close to 100%. This suggests that a “saner” policy would be to help individuals find lawyers and then release them.
Section 3(c) makes the Secretary of Defense, an official without any qualifications whatsoever, responsible for providing family jails on military bases. It shouldn’t take the courts too long to find these facilities unsuitable for family immigration detention.
Section 3(e) recognizes that this order is largely illegal in that it contravenes the order of the U.S. District Court in Flores v. Sessions which was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. Flores orders the release of juveniles from immigration detention within 20 days unless they present a significant public safety risk or are likely to abscond. Where juveniles don’t meet the release criteria, they must be held in the least restrictive setting appropriate to age and special needs. While Trump orders the Attorney General to seek a modification of Flores, there is no legal rationale for that action. In fact, the abusive “fake emergency” situation that Trump & Sessions have created, shows exactly why Flores is needed, now more than ever. It also makes a compelling case for Congress to enact Flores protections into law, thereby making them permanent and avoiding future abuses by the Executive.
Section 4 basically orders the Attorney General to engage in more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) in the U.S. Immigration Courts by prioritizing cases of recently arrived families, many of whom have not had a chance to obtain lawyers and document applications, at the expense of cases that are already on the docket and ready for final hearings. That’s why the Immigration Court backlog is 720,000 cases and continuing to grow. It also shows why the Immigration Courts are a facade of Due Process, totally mismanaged by politicos, and must be removed from the DOJ and become a truly independent court system that establishes court priorities and procedures without Executive interference.
The order is silent on whether it applies to those families who have already been separated and how those families might be reunited.
In summary, this “Temporary Executive Order” is not a credible attempt to solve the problem of family separation. Rather, it is another “designed to fail” charade intended to provoke litigation so that the predictable mess can be blamed on the courts, Congress, the asylum applicants and their families (“blaming the victims”), and their courageous lawyers. In other words, anyone except Trump and his cronies who are responsible for the problem.
It’s a prime example of what life in a Kakistocracy is and will continue to be until there is “regime change.”
What would a “real solution” to this issue look like. Well, I’ve said it before:
The real choices are 1) a dangerous 4,000 mile journey to a place where you might be able to save your life and that of your loved ones; or 2) the much more dangerous option of remaining in a place where you will likely be beaten, raped, extorted, tortured, impressed against your will, or killed by gangs, who are not just “street criminals” (as falsely portrayed by Sessions and other restrictionists) but who exercise quasi-governmental authority with the knowing acquiescence of the recognized governments.
Realistically, folks are going to opt for #1. We could recognize them as refugees; screen them abroad to weed out gang members and criminals and to take the danger out of the 4,000 mile journey; work with the UNHCR and other countries to distribute the flow; open more paths to legal immigration for those who want to leave but might not fit easily within the refugee definition; and encourage those who still arrive at our borders without documents seeking protection to go to a port of entry where they will be treated respectfully, humanely, and be given a prompt but full opportunity to present their cases for protection with access to counsel in a system that satisfies all the requirements of Constitutional Due Process, with the additional understanding that if they lose they will have to return to their home country.
Alternatively, we could double down on our current failed policies of detention, deterrence, and lawless and immoral Governmental behavior; send the message that folks shouldn’t bother using our legal system because it’s a fraud that has intentionally been fixed against them; encourage the use of smugglers who will charge ever higher fees for developing new and more dangerous means of entry; and send the message that if folks really want to survive, they should pay a smuggler to get them into the interior of our country where they have at least a fighting chance of blending in, hiding out from immigration enforcement, behaving themselves, and working hard until they are caught and removed, die, conditions improve and they leave voluntarily for their country of origin, or we finally give them some type of legal recognition.
My first alternative could likely be established and operated for a fraction of what we are now spending on failed immigration enforcement, useless and unnecessarily cruel detention, unnecessary criminal prosecutions, and a broken Immigration Court system.
Plus, at a time of low birth rate and low unemployment, it would give us a significant economic boost by bringing a highly motivated, hard-working, family oriented, and appreciative workforce into our society. It might also inspire other stable democratic nations to join us in an effort to save lives (which also happens to fit in well with religious values), resettle individuals, and, over time, address the horrible situation in the Northern Triangle that is creating this flow.
Alternative two, which is basically a variation on what we already are doing, will guarantee a continuing “black market flow”of migrants, some of whom will be apprehended and removed at significant financial and societal costs, while most will continue to live in an underground society, subject to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and law enforcement, underutilizing their skills, and not being given the opportunity to integrate fully into our society.
Don’t hold your breath! But, eventually the New Due Process Army will win the war and enough elections to finally bring sanity, humanity, and reality to the U.S. immigration system.
You can call it a “policy” (Jeff Sessions) or you can call it a not-policy (Kirstjen Nielsen) or you can call it a “law” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders). You can say that yes it’s a policy but nobody likes it (Kellyanne Conway) or you can say it’s a “zero-tolerance” enforcement of a Democratic law (Donald Trump) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of an amalgam of various congressional laws (Nielsen) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of the Department of Justice’s own preferences with respect to enforcing prior laws (Sessions).
You can say the purpose of the Justice Department’s family separation policy is deterrence (Stephen Miller, John Kelly) or you can claim that asking if the purpose of the policy is deterrence is “offensive” (Nielsen). You can claim in your legal pleadings that the family separation policy is wholly “discretionary” and thus unreviewable by any court, meaning that only the president can change it (Justice Department in Ms. L v. ICE). Or you can claim that only Congress can “fix loopholes” (Nielsen) or you can say that Congress as a whole can’t fix anything because congressional Democrats are entirely to blame (Trump, Mike Huckabee).
You can blame all this newfound “loophole” action on a consent decree from 1997 in a case called Flores (Sessions, Paul Ryan, Chuck Grassley) or on a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that interpreted Flores (Nielsen) or on a 2008 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (Nielsen). Better yet, you can fault some magical mashup of “the law” that forces you to defend every statute to its most absurd extreme (Sanders). By this logic, you can also claim that Korematsu—the case authorizing the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II—is still on the books and thus needs to be enforced because it’s also “the law,” but that would be insane. Oh, but wait. Trump proxies made that very claim during the campaign (Carl Higbie).
You can pretend that by turning every adult who crosses the border into a presumptive criminal your hands are tied, so you need to jail children to avoid jailing children (Nielsen). You can insist that the vast majority of children who cross the border are being smuggled in by gang members (Nielsen) or that all asylum-seekers are per se criminals (which they are not) or that lawful asylum-seekers should just come back at a better time (Nielsen). You can claim you never intended your policy (if it is in fact a policy) to have any impact on asylum-seekers at all (Nielsen) but of course it would turn out you were lying and this has been the plan all along (John Lafferty, Department of Homeland Security asylum division chief).
You can pretend that your hands are tied so you need to jail children to avoid jailingchildren.
You can say the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sessions). You can say again, incredibly, that the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sanders). But that would be pathetic (Stephen Colbert).
You can blame the press for the photographs they take (Nielsen) and for the photographs they don’t take (Nielsen). You can suggest that the children in cages are not real children (not linking to Ann Coulter) or that the cages are not in fact cages (Steve Doocy) even though government officials admit that they are cages. You can claim that the detention facilities are “summer camps” or “boarding schools” (Laura Ingraham). You can take umbrage that the good people of DHS and CBP and ICE are being maligned (Nielsen).
You can say that separating children from their parents is a strategic move to force an agreement on Trump’s wall, which would make the children purely instrumental (Trump). Or you could say that this is a way to protect children by deterring their parents, which would also make the children purely instrumental (Kelly). Or you can instead say you are protecting the children from all the harm that happens to children transported over borders by doing untold permanent damage to them as they scream in trauma (Nielsen). Because the best way to deter child abuse is through child abuse.
You can fight to the death about comparisons to Nazis or you can celebrate a candidate (Corey Stewart) who is a hero to Nazis or you can merely show a staggering lack of comprehension about what Nazis actually did (Sessions).
You can fact check and fact check and fact check these claims and it won’t matter that they are false. And the fact that nobody in this administration even bothers to coordinate their cover stories at this point reflects just how pointless it is to fact check them anyhow. It’s an interactive game of choose your own logic, law, facts, and victims, but every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages, sleeping under foil blankets as strangers change their diapers. The trick is twisting and dodging and weaving until you get to that final page.
It is very sad (Melania Trump). Something should be done (Ted Cruz). If only there were some mechanism to stop torturing children. If only there were some way to stop litigating why we’re doing it and who is doing it and just stop doing it.
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump on Tuesday delivered a stream-of-consciousness-style speech on immigration as furor over his administration’s separation of families at the border reaches a fever pitch.
But his speech at a small business event in Washington contained several factual inaccuracies.
White House says family separations at the border are a ‘binary choice,’ but stats say otherwise
Here is what Trump said, and what the reality is.
False claim: Family separations are Democrats’ fault
Trump said the family separations at the border are “a result of Democrat-supported loopholes in our federal laws” that he said could be easily changed.
“These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don’t want,” Trump said.
The reality: Trump’s administration made a decision to prosecute 100% of adults caught crossing the border illegally even if they came with children, and thus are separating parents from their kids at the border with no clear plan to reunite them after the parents return from jail and court proceedings.
The administration has long wanted to roll back a law unanimously passed under President George W. Bush and a court settlement dating back decades but most recently affirmed under the Obama administration — citing those two provisions as “loopholes.” Both were designed to protect immigrant children from dangers like human trafficking and to provide minimum standards for their care, including turning them over to the Department of Health and Human Services for resettlement within three days of arrest, as opposed to being held in lengthy detention, and dictating that children with their families also cannot be held in detention or jail-like conditions longer than three weeks.
The administration has complained the laws make it harder to immediately deport or reject immigrants at the border, and that they are not able to detain families indefinitely.
False claim: Thousands of judges
Trump said his administration was hiring “thousands and thousands” of immigration judges, that the US already has “thousands” of immigration judges and that other countries don’t have immigration judges.
Trump to huddle with Republicans during crucial week on immigration
In reality, there the Justice Department’s immigration courts division has 335 judges nationwide, with more than 100 more judges budgeted for, according to a DOJ spokesman.
Because of a massive backlog in the immigration courts, it can take years for those cases to work their way to completion, and many immigrants are allowed to work and live in the US in the meantime, putting down roots. The funding for immigration courts and judges has increased only modestly over the years as funding and resources for enforcement have increased dramatically. A proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to address the family separation issue would double the number of judges to 750.
Trump’s comments Tuesday echoed remarks he made last month. In a May Fox News interview, he claimed the United States was “essentially the only country that has judges” to handle immigration cases. But that is incorrect.
A number of other countries have immigration court systems or a part of the judiciary reserved for immigration and asylum cases, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and Canada.
False claim: Virtually all immigrants disappear
Trump also claimed falsely that when immigrants are let into the country to have their cases heard by a court, they virtually all go into hiding.
“And by the way, when we release the people, they never come back to the judge, anyway. They’re gone,” Trump said. “Do you know if a person comes in and puts one foot on our ground, it’s essentially, ‘Welcome to America, welcome to our country.’ You never get them out because they take their name, they bring the name down, they file it, then they let the person go. … Like 3% come back.”
In reality, the number of immigrants who don’t show up to court proceedings is far lower. And many of the immigrants released from detention are given monitoring devices such as ankle bracelets to ensure they return.
Republicans craft bill to keep detained families together
According to the annual Justice Department yearbook of immigration statistics from fiscal year 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, 25% of immigration court cases were decided “in absentia” — meaning the immigrant wasn’t present in court. In that year, there were 137,875 cases. The number of cases decided “in absentia” between fiscal year 2012 and fiscal year 2016 was between 11% and 28%.
When White House legislative chief Marc Short made a similarly inaccurate claim on Monday, the White House pointed to a statistic about the high percentage of deportation orders for undocumented children that were delivered in absentia, but amid total case completions for minors, the number of in absentia orders has ranged from 40% to 50% in recent years.
Advocates for immigrants attribute some of the missed hearings to often not receiving a court notice mailed to an old address or not having an attorney who can adequately explain the process to the child. Studies have shown that with legal advice and guidance, immigrants are far more likely to show up for hearings and have their claims ultimately be successful.
False claim: Countries are sending bad eggs to the US
Trump said that countries deserve to be punished for illegal immigration, and that they “send” bad eggs to the US.
“They send these people up, and they’re not sending their finest,” Trump said.
He continued: ‘When countries abuse us by sending people up — not their best — we’re not going to give any more aid to those countries.”
In fact, there is no evidence that countries “send” anyone in particular to the US — rather analyses of recent immigration flows have shown that in recent years, a much higher number of Central Americans have come to the US fleeing rampant gang violence and instability in especially the countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Experts who study the countries agree that cutting aid would only further destabilize the region, likely making illegal immigration worse, not better.
Though gang members do cross the border illegally alongside those fleeing violence, the administration has never been able to provide numbers showing that those are a large percentage of the cases. Only a handful of such prosecutions occur a year, while more than 300,000 people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally last fiscal year. Nearly 120,000 defensive asylum applications were filed last year, according to government data, meaning those individuals believed they were fleeing violent situations back home.
False Claim: Mexico isn’t helping the US
Mexico, Trump said, “does nothing for us.”
As for Mexico’s contribution, experts say the country’s crackdown on immigrants within its borders has been a major help to the US in recent years. According to statistics from the US and Mexican governments compiled by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and shared with CNN, over the past three years, Mexico has deported tens of thousands more migrants back to the primary countries in Central America that drive immigration north. Each of the last three years, Mexican removals exceeded US removals to those countries.
Mexico is also apprehending tens of thousands of Central Americans before they reach the US. According to the data, Mexico intercepted 173,000 Central Americans in fiscal year 2015, 151,000 in fiscal year 2016 and just under 100,000 in fiscal year 2017.
In the past two years, Mexico has lagged behind the US in apprehensions, but Migration Policy Institute President Andrew Selee, an expert on Mexican policy, said that could be due to a number of factors including smugglers successfully changing their routes to avoid detection or relations with Trump.
CNN’s Catherine Shoichet and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
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Join the New Due Process Army today!
Free the children.
Require Due Process and real justice for refugees.
Hold the lying child abusers in the kakistocracy accountable for their indefensible actions.
Remove the abusers and their enablers from office and political power.
Welcome more immigrants and refugees.
End racism masquerading as “government policy” or the “rule of law.”
Time for the decent, tolerant, majority to take back our country from the forces of darkness, evil, and dishonesty.
