"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.
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Even death won’t deter desperate humans from seeking refuge. But, it’s certainly diminishing us as a nation! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
At Mexico’s insistence, the Biden administration has agreed to measures designed to help and protect migrants seeking asylum north of the border, but forced by a recent court edict to wait south of the border as their claims are processed.
Once, it may have been difficult to imagine that Mexico had coaxed Washington to adopt humanitarian and other improvements to benefit asylum seekers. For decades, the United States was a beacon of hope for migrants seeking such protections, including those fleeing abuse and violence in Mexico and points farther south.
The Trump administration turned that equation on its head, devising a policy in 2019 known colloquially as “Remain in Mexico” and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols. It forced asylum seekers awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims into squalid tent camps south of the border. Fewer than 2 percent of those claims were successful — and President Donald Trump seized on the pandemic to shut down the asylum process altogether, using an obscure public health rule called Title 42.
The painful irony of the Migrant Protection Protocols is that they protected no one. Thousands of migrants forced into tent camps south of the border became targets of rapists, violent gangs and kidnappers demanding ransom.
Mr. Biden ended the MPP upon entering office, though he also retained Title 42 to expel many migrants, especially men traveling alone, without an asylum hearing. But a federal judge ordered the program reinstated, and the Supreme Court let the judge’s order stand for now. Even as the administration presses ahead with a legal fight to terminate the policy, officials were compelled to negotiate its renewal with Mexico.
It’s nice to think that the agreed-upon humanitarian, medical and legal protections will make a real difference to migrants who are returned to Mexico under MPP, which started this month. Some steps may help. They will be offered covid-19 vaccines, and the administration has committed to a six-month limit on adjudicating their asylum claims, which under the previous administration often languished for years.
Migrants who would be particularly vulnerable if returned to Mexico, including minors and those at risk of persecution, will be exempted from the program. And asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico will be moved away from two spots across the border from the Texas cities of Laredo and Brownsville, which have been especially dangerous for migrants in the past.
Still, it seems like wishful thinking to believe that a written agreement will erase the squalor and peril that previously awaited asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico. Legal counsel, previously in egregiously short supply, may be even scarcer now; some legal assistance organizations say they won’t cooperate with MPP. And many, if not most, migrants — especially single men apprehended on their own — will continue to be shunted across the border, with no hope of asylum whatsoever under Title 42, just as they have been for the past 20 months.
MPP was a disgrace to the United States; now it is being resurrected. The disgrace will be compounded if the current administration, in coordination with Mexico, fails to ensure muscular protections that ensure that asylum seekers are safe, treated with dignity and receive fair hearings.
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Be assured that innocent folks are dying and will continue to die in Mexico as a result of poorly-qualified right-wing U.S. Judges, feckless politicians, and an Administration that can’t get its act together and “find its spine” on human rights, immigration, and racial justice issues!Failure to recognize the reality of forced migration, create a safe orderly asylum and refugee processing system (as required by law), and rationally expand the categories for legal immigration, will continue to kill, maim, and harm. See,e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/09/tractor-trailer-full-migrants-crashes-southern-mexico-killing-least-49/
Also, if we want other countries to help in a constructive way, and to regain our position as a leader among democracies, “leading by example” would be most helpful!
December 6 , 2021
The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges is a group of 51 former Immigration Judges and Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals who are committed to the principles of due process, fairness, and transparency in our Immigration Court system.
There has been no greater affront to due process, fairness, and transparency than the MPP, or “Remain in Mexico” policy. Instituted under the Trump Administration, it appears to have been motivated by nothing other than cruelty.
Tragically, to comply with a most misguided court order, the Biden Administration, which promised us better, is today not only resuming the program with most of its cruelty intact, but expanding its scope to now apply to nationals of all Western Hemisphere countries.
In 1997, the BIA issued a precedent decision, Matter of S-M-J-, that remains binding on Immigration Judges and ICE prosecutors. In that decision, the BIA recognized our government’s “obligation to uphold international refugee law, including the United States’ obligation to extend refuge where such refuge is warranted. That is, immigration enforcement obligations do not consist only of initiating and conducting prompt proceedings that lead to removals at any cost. Rather, as has been said, the government wins when justice is done.”1
One of the cases cited by the BIA was Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas Co. v. FERC,2 a decision which concluded: “We find it astonishing that an attorney for a federal administrative agency could so unblushingly deny that a government lawyer has obligations that might sometimes trump the desire to pound an opponent into submission.”
The MPP policy constitutes the pounding into submission of those who, if found to qualify for asylum, we are obliged by international law to admit, protect, and afford numerous fundamental rights. The “pounding” in this instance is literal, with reports of those lawfully pursuing their right to seek asylum in the U.S. being subject to kidnappings, extortion, sexual abuse, and other
1 Matter of S-M-J-, 21 I&N Dec. 722, 728 (BIA 1997). 2 962 F.2d 45, 48 (D.C. Cir. 1992).
threats and physical attacks.3 This is the antithesis of fairness, in which the parties are not afforded equal access to justice.
Concerning due process, a statement issued by the union representing USCIS Asylum Officers, whose members interview asylum applicants subjected to the program, noted that MPP denies those impacted of meaningful access to counsel, and further impedes their ability to gather evidence and access necessary resources to prepare their cases.4 As former judges who regularly decided asylum claims, we can vouch for the importance of representation and access to evidence, including the opinions of country condition experts, in successfully obtaining asylum. Yet according to a report issued during the Trump Administration, only four percent of those forced to remain in Mexico under MPP were able to obtain representation.5 As of course, DHS attorneys are not similarly impeded, the policy thus fails to afford the parties a level playing field.
As to transparency, one former Immigration Judge from our group who attempted to observe MPP hearings under the prior administration was prevented from doing so despite having the consent of the asylum seeker to be present. A letter from our group to the EOIR Director and the Chief Immigration Judge expressing our concern went unanswered.
Like many others who understand the importance that a fair and independent court system plays in a free and democratic society, we had hoped to have seen the last of this cruel policy. And like so many others, we are beyond disappointed to learn that we were wrong. On this day in which MPP is being restarted, we join so many others both within and outside of government in demanding better.
We urge the Biden Administration to end its unwarranted expansion of MPP; to instead do everything in its power to permanently end the program; and to insure that in the interim, any court-ordered restart of MPP first accord with our international treaty obligations towards refugees, and with the requirements of due process and fairness on which our legal system is premised.
Contact Jeffrey S. Chase, jeffchase99@gmail.com
3 See the compilation of of publicly reported cases of violent attacks on those returned to Mexico under MPP by Human Rights First, available at https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/ PubliclyReportedMPPAttacks2.19.2021.pdf.
4 American Federation of Government Employees, National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, “Union Representing USCIS Asylum Officers Condemns Re-Implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols” (Dec. 2, 2021).
5 Syracuse University, TRAC Immigration, “Contrasting Experiences: MPP vs. Non-MPP Immigration Court Cases,” available at https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/587/.
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Thanks to “Sir Jeffrey” Chase for leading this effort. It’s an honor and a privilege to serve with you and our other colleagues on the Round Table!
They raped women, burned homes and killed dozens of people, including children, chopping up their bodies with machetes and throwing their remains to pigs.The gruesome massacre three years ago, considered the worst in Haiti in decades, was more than the work of rival gangs fighting over territory. It was organized by senior Haitian officials, who provided weapons and vehicles to gang members to punish people in a poor area protesting government corruption, the U.S. Treasury Department announced last year.
Since then, Haiti’s gang members have grown so strong that they rule swaths of the country. The most notorious of them, a former police officer named Jimmy Cherizier, known as Barbecue, fashions himself as a political leader, holding news conferences, leading marches and, this week, even parading around as a replacement for the prime minister in the violent capital.
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Read the rest of this gruesome, yet telling, report at the link.
Over 21 years on the Immigration Bench as both a trial and appellate judge, I adjudicated thousands of asylum claims. The circumstances described on this article undoubtedly would give rise to many potentially valid asylum and withholding claims, based on actual or implied political opinion and/or family or gender-based “particular social groups” and Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) grants based on torture with government acquiescence or actual connivance!
So, how do Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and Garland, who to my knowledge have never represented an asylum applicant or adjudicated an individual asylum case among them, “get away” with simply suspending the rule of law, under false pretenses, for those entitled to seek asylum?
Stephen Miller must be on “Cloud Nine” as Biden & Co. carry out his White Nationalist plans to eradicate asylum, particularly when it protects women and people of color! This is even as Miller and his neo-Nazi cohorts (a/k/a “America First Legal”) are gearing up to sue the Biden Administration to block every measure that might aid immigrants, particularly those of color.
He’s delighted with Biden’s abuse of asylum seekers of color! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com
NGOs don’t share the Biden Administration’s vision of what a “safe” Haiti looks like. Neither do kidnapped American missionaries! PHOTO: Marcelo Casal, Jr., Creative Commons License
Angering and alienating your potential allies and supporters to aid the far-right program of your enemies who are determined to do whatever it takes to undermine, discredit, and destroy your Presidency! Obviously, I’m no political expert. But, sure sounds like an incredibly stupid, “designed to fail” strategy to me!
The treatment of Haitian refugees at the U.S. border last month — some chased by horseback agents, others huddled by the thousands under a bridge — is tragic. For reasons that are less obvious, it is also ironic. Although Americans’ centuries-long debt to the Haitian people is untaught in our schools and unacknowledged in our public discourse, the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people created the United States we know today.
Even the capsule version of Haiti’s successful fight to end slavery and for independence at the turn of the 19th century is riveting. C.L.R. James, the late Trinidadian political leader and historian of the Caribbean, wrote six decades ago:
“In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in [Hispaniola], the slaves revolted. The struggle lasted for 12 years. The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. The defeat of Bonaparte’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti which has lasted to this day.”
It’s one of the most remarkable stories of liberation that we have as a species: the largest revolt of enslaved people in human history, and the only one known to have produced a free state. But even this sweeping account understated the extraordinary role that Haiti’s rebellious enslaved played in world history.
Their success in freeing themselves in the face of the stoutest European hostility imaginable ironically made Haiti the first nation to fulfill the most fundamental values of the Enlightenment: freedom from bondage and racial equality for all. These principles were enshrined in Haiti’s first constitution, in 1804, decades before they were embraced by the United States.
And that was just the beginning.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
How have we repaid the debt? By illegally deporting Haitian asylum seekers to the “kidnapping center of the world” and then disingenuously claiming that it is a “safe” country for returns!
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Four days after the August earthquake that devastated the south of Haiti, Walkens Alexandre, a physician, was traveling to treat victims at a hospital when a motorcycle blocked his white Ford Ranger. Two men hopped off, pulled guns, commandeered his truck and hauled him to the outskirts of the capital.
He was held for three days while the kidnappers negotiated by phone with his family. He’d be set free for 30 times his monthly salary. Loved ones pleaded with relatives and friends to contribute to the ransom.
“Now I’m traumatized, fearful of people, and reminded of this every time someone slams a door, or I hear a motorcycle,” said Alexandre, 43. “We don’t feel safe in Haiti. There is always panic, always fear.”
The most troubled nation in the hemisphere is now being held hostage by a surge in kidnappings.
With victims spanning all social classes and ransoms ranging from as little as $100 to six figures, Haiti now holds the tragic title of highest per capita kidnapping rate on Earth. Recorded kidnappings so far this year have spiked sixfold over the same period last year, as criminals nab doctors on their way to work, preachers delivering sermons, entire busloads of people in transit — even police on patrol. So great is the surge that this year, Port-au-Prince is posting more kidnappings in absolute terms than vastly larger Bogotá, Mexico City and São Paulo combined, according to the consulting firm Control Risks.
[Haitian migrants thought Biden would welcome them. Now deported to Haiti, they have one mission: Leave again.]
Locals and foreigners alike are living in fear. The heads of several foreign companies told The Washington Post that the kidnapping wave led them to reassign staffers to remote work in other Caribbean countries, Europe or the United States. Other firms are leaving Haiti altogether.
“Every time you leave your door in Port-au-Prince, it’s like a game of Russian roulette,” said one European executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security. “You don’t know if you’ll be kidnapped that day.”
Maarten Boute, chairman of cellular phone provider Digicel Haiti, said his firm has resorted to moving staff only in armored cars with drivers trained for kidnapping scenarios. Because of the escalating risk, he said, he abandoned his Port-au-Prince home this year to move into a fortified hotel compound.
“Most people who can afford it and have visas have sent their family away, or moved outside the country,” he said. “We are using armed security, armored cars and have patrols that [scout] roads. But we still avoid certain areas, or moving around, as much as we can.”
Saddled with endemic poverty and violence, Haiti is no stranger to kidnapping waves. The country suffered a brutal surge from 2005 until the 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people but had the effect of moderating kidnappings. Numbers have climbed steadily in recent years as violent gangs, unchecked by the government, have seized control over key portions of the country.
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Read the rest of the report at the link!
This is a “safe country” for removal? “Rounding them up and moving them out” without meaningful inquiry into individual circumstances is “American justice?” Come on, man!
Mayorkas and Garland have obviously spent far too much time at the “Miller Lite Happy Hour” 🤮☠️ and far too little time restoring the rule of law for vulnerable asylum seekers who deserve our protection!👎🏽
“Miller Lite” on Tap @ DOJ & DHS! Maybe Mayorkas & Garland have had “one too many!”
Heidi Altman Director of Policy National Immigrant Justice Center PHOTO: fcnl.org
Haiti has been in turmoil for many years and the recent assassination of the Haitian president, political and economic insecurity, devastating storms, and an earthquake have further destabilized the nation.
Yet, Haitians seeking protection in the United States face treacherous journeys, racial abuse, violence from border patrol agents, detention, and deportation and expulsion back to the life-threatening situation they fled in Haiti.
All people—including Haitian migrants and asylum seekers—need freedom, shelter, dignity, and compassionate welcomes.
In the past couple of weeks, the Biden administration has expelled more than 4,600 people to Haiti. And they continue to deport and expel even more people.
The Biden administration has the authority to grant humanitarian parole and stop the deportations to Haiti. We at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) are teaming up with other organizations to urge them to do just that.
Thousands of Haitian migrants removed from a makeshift camp near Texas have been sent back to Haiti. Now we’re getting our first up-close look at what they are facing upon their arrival. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff reports for TODAY from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Sept. 30, 2021
Eleanor Acer Senior Director for Refugee Protection, Human Rights First
Human Rights First debunks myth that seekers present a COVID health threat:
ASYLUM DOES NOT THREATEN PUBLIC HEALTH
The last week saw more of the Biden administration’s despicable deportation of Haitians and use Title 42 to deny their right to seek asylum. The administration perpetuates the false claim that their use of Title 42 is not an immigration policy, but a public health one, despite the vehement disagreement of public health experts.
Courtesy Washington Times
Migrants, many from Haiti, wade across the Rio Grande
river to leave Del Rio, Texas to avoid possible deportation.
Human Rights First also responded to the administration’s plans to use Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention facility.
“Sending people who are seeking protection to a place that is notorious for being treated as a rights-free zone is the last thing that the Biden administration should do,” Eleanor Acer, Senior Director of Refugee Protection at Human Rights First told NPR. “It is nothing more than a blatant attempt to evade oversight, due process, human rights protections and the refugee laws of the United States.”
Maria Sacchetti Immigration Reporter, Washington Post
Even in rolling out otherwise more reasonable enforcement priorities for ICE, Mayorkas insisted on making the bogus claim that recent border arrivals present a “national security threat,” as reported by the WashPost’s Maria Sacchetti:
Mayorkas said in his memo Thursday that migrants who cross the border illegally, particularly those who arrived unlawfully over the past year or so, remain a “threat to border security” and a priority for removal. But the ACLU has argued in its lawsuit that migrants have a legal right to seek asylum.
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“Courtside’s” rating of Mayorkas’s claims: 🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥
Who would have thought that more than eight months into the Biden Administration, we’d still be arguing about basics like “migrants have a legal right to seek asylum in the US?” See, INA section 208.
The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday defended the Biden administration’s decision to send thousands of Haitians to a home country they fled because of natural disasters and political turmoil.
White House criticizes border agents who rounded up migrants on horseback
Mayorkas told NBC’s Meet the Press the removals were justified because of the coronavirus pandemic, a point disputed by advocates and public health experts.
“The Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention, or CDC] has a Title 42 authority that we exercise to protect the migrants themselves, to protect the local communities, our personnel and the American public,” Mayorkas said.
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“The pandemic is not behind us. Title 42 is a public health policy, not an immigration policy.”
Since Donald Trump’s administration implemented Title 42 in March 2020, advocates and dozens of public health experts have called for its end.
Under Title 42, people who attempt to cross the border are returned to Mexico or deported to their home countries without an opportunity to test asylum claims.
In January, Joe Biden stopped the rule from applying to children. Despite that, at least 22 babies and children were deported to Haiti in February.
More than 30 public health experts wrote to Mayorkas and the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, earlier this month, saying Title 42 was “scientifically baseless and politically motivated”.
This coalition has repeatedly said the policy violates the right to seek asylum and ignores how basic public health measures can reduce the spread of Covid-19.
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“Title 42 runs counter to the government’s own commitment to address Covid-19 globally,” the coalition said. “The absence of effective Covid-19 mitigation services at the border and the expulsion of people to situations in which they may be exposed to Covid-19 and unable to practice prevention are contrary to the US government commitment to address Covid-19 globally.”
On Sunday, Mayorkas told CNN about 4,000 Haitians who arrived in the past two weeks have been expelled, 13,000 others had been allowed to enter the US to pursue their immigration cases in court and 8,000 had voluntarily chosen to return to Mexico.
NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd questioned Mayorkas about why thousands were being sent to Haiti even though they had traveled to the US from South America.
“These are Haitian nationals,” Mayorkas said. “Some of them don’t have documents from the countries from which they just left. So they are subject to removal.”
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Of course, Haiti clearly is not a safe place to return migrants:
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US
Haitian deportees arriving from Texas say they were ‘rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals’
Joe Parkin Daniels in Port-au-Prince
Published:
05:00 Sunday, 26 September 2021
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About this content
When Evens Delva waded across the Rio Grande with his wife and two daughters, he had dreams of starting a new life in Florida. But less than a week later, he and his family stepped on to the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, the sweltering and chaotic capital of Haiti, with nothing except traumatic memories and a feeling of bubbling anger.
Delva, along with nearly 2,000 other Haitians, was deported from southern Texas this week to Haiti, despite having lived in Chile for the past six years and having few remaining connections to his home country. His younger daughter, who is four, does not hold Haitian citizenship, having been born in Chile, and speaks more Spanish than Haitian Creole.
“I don’t know what we’ll do, we don’t have anywhere to stay or anyone to call,” the 40-year-old said, moments after getting off the plane in the blistering midday Caribbean heat. “All I know is that this is the last place I want to be.”
Evens Delva and his wife at Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti on Friday after being deported from Texas. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian
It is not hard to understand why. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is mired in overlapping crises. Gasoline shortages and blackouts are a daily reality, while warring gangs routinely kidnap for ransom and wage battle on the streets.
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The grim situation only worsened when the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his home on 7 July, triggering a political power struggle and further instability and street violence. On 14 August, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s poor southern peninsula, killing more than 2,200 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
US envoy to Haiti resigns over ‘inhumane’ decision to deport migrants
The Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitians under such circumstances drew opprobrium around the world, and prompted the US envoy to Haiti to resign in protest. Haiti is “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life”, he wrote in his resignation letter. “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”
Last week, the world was shocked by images of police officers on horseback charging at desperate Haitian migrants near a camp of 12,000, set up under the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. Delva was on his way to buy food and water for his family when the cavalry charge sent him and dozens of his compatriots running in a frenzy.
“We were rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals,” he said, having spent the six-hour flight from San Antonio with his hands and legs tied.
“They treated us like animals,” added Maria, his wife.. “We’ll never forget how that felt.”
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David K.Shipler American Author PHOTO: Twitter
David Shipler does a great job of exposing the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Mayorkas and other Biden Administration immigration officials.
America’s Callous Border
By David K. Shipler
Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”
Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.
We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.
When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?
Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.
Instead, a new torment is found: Haitians with enough grit to leave their country a decade or so ago and build lives on the margins in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere are taken from their first steps onto U.S. soil and summarily—summarily, without due process—deported. And where to? To Haiti, a failed state where many have long since lost family or work or even places of shelter. To Haiti, which has collapsed into such violence and disarray that the State Department warns Americans on its website: “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19.”
What is wrong with the air in the White House? Is there not enough oxygen? What accounts for the impaired thinking that seems to transcend administrations, from Republican to Democratic. Where is the regard for human dignity? Why is it so often absent in the calculations that create policy?
Donald Trump wore callousness on his sleeve and was proud of it. His base hooted its applause at his vilification of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. By contrast, Joe Biden wears a badge of empathy. His mantra is compassion. “Horrible” and “outrageous” were the words he found to describe the photographed attacks on Haitians from horseback. He halted the use of horses and vowed that agents responsible “will pay.” He also said, “It’s simply not who we are.”
But it is who we are. The images have been compared to old photos of white overseers on horseback commanding enslaved Blacks in the fields. The Border Patrol in cowboy hats have been compared to Texas Rangers “who were celebrated for their excellent ‘tracking skills’ that were put to use to hunt and capture enslaved people,” said historian Monica Martinez of the University of Texas.
These are compelling analogies with painful resonance. They are also flawed as parallels, for the Black migrants at the border are not slaves. They are clamoring to be here, crossing illegally, seeing the border as a threshold. They were not brought here in chains against their will. Some are being removed in chains against their will.
Nevertheless, in a sense they are enslaved by their blackness. If white Canadians tried this up north, does anybody truly believe that they would be treated as the Black Haitians are? Animating America’s conscience should not require reaching back to the sin of slavery. The present ought to be enough.
Our borders always put our split personality on display: We are cruel and welcoming, hateful and helpful, defined by doors closed at times to entire ethnic groups and then opened to invigorate the nation with willing hands and vital contributions.
In fact, if the country is not sufficiently moved by simple morality, then it might consider self-interest. The U.S. population growth rate has been falling steadily since 2008, dropping to a mere 0.58 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many regions lack skilled workers, as homeowners and small business owners and even hospitals can testify from trying to hire carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, and nurses. We should have winced when one Haitian deportee was quoted as describing himself as a welder and carpenter.
Using abuse to manipulate determined people did not work under Trump—a lesson that Biden and his advisers might have learned. Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the border, his aides reasoning that families heading north would get the message and—what?–abandon their fortitude and survival instincts, turn around, and head back to life-threatening misery?
So, too Biden officials are reportedly figuring that tossing Haitian expatriates into Haiti’s maelstrom will dissuade others from coming. In other words, don’t be humane, and folks will give up. But they won’t give up. They will still roll the dice, because there’s always a chance, especially since some are being allowed to stay, at least for a while, pending proper examination of their asylum claims as the law requires. When your ship has sunk, you don’t stop clinging to a piece of flotsam just because some shipmates have slipped off into the sea.
What the Biden White House needs is somebody in an influential position who has made this journey, who has shepherded family and children through jungles and ganglands to reach this supposedly promised land. That official might bring to the Oval Office a glimmer of understanding and respect for the force of personality and perseverance that drive a person toward our callous border.
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Something about the DHS Secretary job seem to require checking honesty, common sense, historical perspective, and humanity at the door, not to mention the true “rule of law.”
DEL RIO, Tex. — Thousands of Haitian migrants who have crossed the Rio Grande in recent days are sleeping outdoors under a border bridge in South Texas, creating a humanitarian emergency and a logistical challenge U.S. agents describe as unprecedented.
Authorities in Del Rio say more than 10,000 migrants have arrived at the impromptu camp, and they are expecting more in the coming days. The sudden influx has presented the Biden administration with a new border emergency at a time when illegal crossings have reached a 20-year high and Department of Homeland Security officials are straining to accommodate and resettle more than 60,000 Afghan evacuees.
The migrants arriving to Del Rio appear to be part of a larger wave of Haitians heading northward, many of whom arrived in Brazil and other South American nations after the 2010 earthquake. They are on the move again, embarking on a grueling, dangerous journey to the United States with smuggling organizations managing the trip, according to border authorities and refugee groups.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
The arrival of asylum seekers at the Southern Border is predictable. Contrary to GOP right wing nativist BS, asylum seekers don’t present a significant national security threat to the U.S.
On the other hand, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and his GOP right wing crazies are a clear and present existential danger to our heath and security as a nation. Don’t let Abbott and his neo-fascist gang shrift the focus away from their lawless, stupid, and immoral behavior — with glaring racial overtones!
The current disorder is the direct result of Mayorkas and Garland not taking the obvious steps to re-establish credible fear screening at ports of entry and the lack of progressive leaders and judges at EOIR who could cut through the self-created backlog and establish and enforce fair precedents and procedures that would enable timely, yet fair and efficient, processing of asylum cases in Immigration Court for those who pass credible fear.
Instead, Garland has gone with inane, backlog-building, aimless-docket-reshuffling encouraging “gimmicks” like “Dedicated Dockets,” and ill-advised proposals to increase use of “expedited removal” and limit the rights of asylum seekers to de novo hearings, without instituting the major EOIR reforms necessary to make such a system credible.
So far, the results have been predictably chaotic and ineffective. By dragging their feet on elimination of the Title 42 farce initiated by Trump & Miller, Garland and Mayorkas now find themselves “between a rock and a hard place” because of District Judge Sullivan’s recent order finding the misuse of Title 42 to “orbit” asylum seekers to doom without any process was likely illegal.
A restored, fair, legal asylum system inevitably would result in the legal admission of more asylees. Again, contrary to the GOP blather, that is something 1) our law requires, and 2) our country needs. Running a viable refugee program for the Americas outside U.S. borders is also something that should already have been in operation and could reduce the necessity for irregular entries.
Restoration of the rule of law and morality at the border would also take the regulation of immigration out of the hands of smugglers and cartels and restore it to the Government. But, that requires both an understanding of the dynamics of human migration and the courage to do the right thing in making the system work — not as a “false deterrent” but as a fair, generous, efficient, and equitable system, led by and composed of progressive human rights experts.
In the wake of the DOJ’s decision to appeal Judge Sullivan’s order and reports that the Biden Administration will begin illegal deportations of Haitians back to danger zones in Haiti without any due process, 71 human rights organizations wrote a letter blasting the Administration’s actions.
September 17, 2021
Hon. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. President of the United States 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500
Hon. Alejandro N. Mayorkas
Secretary of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2707 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20528
Hon. Merrick Garland
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20530
Dear President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas, and Attorney General Garland:
In the wake of multiple federal court decisions holding that your administration’s policies are likely unlawful, we, the 71 undersigned organizations, are appalled that you have chosen to file a notice of appeal in the Huisha-Huisha litigation, resisting an order to process the protection claims of families with children who seek asylum. This decision serves as a particularly disturbing step in what is emerging to be a clear pattern of failure to uphold the refugee laws enacted by Congress. We write to urge you to immediately change course before you further tarnish this administration’s record and inflict even more harm on families, children and adults seeking our country’s protection. We call on the administration to immediately end its embrace, defense, and advancement of illegal and cruel Trump administration policies that harm families and people seeking protection and bolster xenophobic rhetoric by treating people seeking protection as threats. Instead, we urge your administration to restore access to U.S. asylum at ports of entry and also to immediately stop blocking and expelling asylum seekers and migrants to life-threatening dangers.
On September 16, a federal district court held that the government likely does not have authority under U.S. law to implement the Title 42 policy, which subjects people to “real threats of violence and persecution” by returning them to danger in Mexico or the countries they fled, and enjoined the use of the policy against families. Rather than respect human rights and restore asylum in compliance with this ruling, the administration has already filed a notice of appeal in this case. Earlier this month, another federal district court held that the government’s policy of turning back people seeking protection at ports of entry is likely unlawful under the Immigration
and Nationality Act. Your administration must reverse course and accept these court rulings, immediately take steps to restart asylum processing, and permanently end these policies, which were designed to deter and punish people seeking safety in the United States and betray our values and legal obligations towards refugees.
Rather than abiding by campaign promises to uphold the legal right to seek asylum and treat migrants humanely, your administration has embraced and escalated the unlawful Title 42 policy created by the Trump administration to use public health as a pretext to evade U.S. refugee laws. In August 2021, your administration issued a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order extending the policy and relying on much of the same dangerous and false rhetoric that the Trump administration relied on in its CDC orders.
The human toll of the Title 42 policy during your first eight months in office is enormous. Since January 2021, there have been at least 6,356 public and media reports of violent attacks— including rape, kidnapping, trafficking, and assault—against people blocked from requesting asylum protection at the U.S.-Mexico border and/or expelled to Mexico. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other international bodies have repeatedly condemned the use of Title 42 to return refugees to danger in violation of international law and urged the United States to restore access to asylum. Leading public health experts have warned the administration time and time again that the policy has no scientific basis as a public health measure and urged the use of rational science-based measures to process asylum seekers and migrants to safety. In its ruling enjoining the use of Title 42, the district court also emphasized that the government’s public health arguments were specious.
This month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expelled dozens of Haitian families and adults to danger in Haiti under Title 42, despite ongoing turmoil following the assassination of the country’s president in July and a major earthquake in August, and flew more than 6,000 Guatemalan migrants and asylum seekers directly to the danger they had fled in Guatemala without an opportunity to apply for U.S. asylum. Since August, DHS has also expelled asylum seekers and migrants directly to southern Mexico, where Mexican immigration authorities forced them to cross the border into remote areas of Guatemala. These expulsions to southern Mexico sparked public condemnation from UNHCR, which warned that this practice “increases the risk of chain refoulement—pushbacks by successive countries— of vulnerable people in danger, in contravention of international law and the humanitarian principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention.”
We further call on your administration to take all necessary legal steps to end the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), most importantly by immediately making a public commitment to issue a new policy memo that provides a fuller explanation for the decision to terminate MPP and that resolves any perceived Administrative Procedure Act (APA) issues identified by the district court in its ruling requiring the government to restart this shameful program. The APA
2
was the singular concern cited by the Supreme Court in its decision upholding the district court’s preliminary injunction, and the administration’s failure to date to commit to issuing a new policy memo raises serious concerns over whether you intend to use the legal challenge as cover to backtrack on your commitment to fulfill your campaign promise to end MPP.
During the two years that MPP was in effect, there were over 1,500 publicly reported cases of violent attacks against people returned to Mexico, including asylum seekers who were brutally murdered. In addition to subjecting individuals to life-threatening dangers under MPP, the program violated the due process rights of asylum seekers and migrants by stranding them in Mexico without access to legal counsel, forcing them to risk their lives to attend their court hearings—there have been numerous reports of asylum seekers in MPP being kidnapped while attempting to reach immigration court—and requiring many to prepare their cases while facing unrelenting fear and insecurity. It is clear that there is no way to make MPP lawful, humane, safe, or rights-respecting. The administration should take all lawful and necessary steps to preserve the MPP wind down and continue processing individuals previously subjected to MPP into the United States while taking immediate steps to address the District Court’s concerns to terminate the policy once and for all.
Policies that turn back, block, expel, and force asylum seekers and migrants to wait in danger are unlawful, as now confirmed by multiple federal courts, and we entreat your administration to immediately stop inflicting violence on people seeking safety in our country by permanently ending these policies and restoring asylum in compliance with U.S. and international refugee laws.
Sincerely,
ADL (Anti-Defamation League) African Communities Together Aldea – The People’s Justice Center Alliance San Diego
America’s Voice
American Friends Service Committee
American Immigration Lawyers Association
Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP)
Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture
Border Angels
Border Kindness
Border Organizing Project
Bridges Faith Initiative
Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition
CARECEN SF – Central American Resource Center of Northern California
3
Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) Center for Victims of Torture
Church World Service
Detention Watch Network
Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
First Focus on Children
Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project Grassroots Leadership
Haitian Bridge Alliance
HIAS
Hope Border Institute
Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative Human Rights First
Human Rights Initiative of North Texas
Immigrant Defenders Law Center
Immigration Equality
International Mayan League
International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) International Rescue Committee
Japanese American Citizens League
Jesuit Refugee Service/USA
Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice of Western MA Justice Action Center
Justice in Motion
Karen Organization of San Diego
Kino Border Initiative
Latin America Working Group (LAWG)
Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG)
National Immigrant Justice Center
National Immigration Law Center
National Immigration Project (NIPNLG)
National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice
Oasis Legal Services
Oxfam America
Physicians for Human Rights
Project Blueprint
Refugees International
4
Safe Harbors Network
San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium
South Bay Peope Power
Student Clinic for Immigrant Justice
Tahirih Justice Center
The Advocates for Human Rights
Transgender Law Center
Unified U.S. Deported Veterans resource Center
Unitarian Universalist Refugee & Immigrant Services & Education VECINA
Vera Institute of Justice
Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)
Witness at the Border
Women’s Refugee Commission
Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights
5
Obviously, the Biden Administration has little regard for the human rights advocates who helped put them in office. Only time will tell whether disrespecting, antagonizing, and making enemies and adversaries out of a highly talented and motivated group of progressives, who successfully fended off some of the most grotesque human rights violations by the Trump kakistocracy, and who have demonstrated the capacity to consistently “out-litigate” the floundering DOJ, will prove to be a successful strategy!
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Those who don’t die in the river, the desert, or at the hands of traffickers while trying to seek asylum in an arrogant America that disdains human rights and moral values face arbitrary and illegal removal to potential torture, rape, and death in the countries they fled! Why is the Biden Administration, like the Trump kakistocracy, afraid to make fair and honest determinations of qualifications for asylum? EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Finally, Defendants argue that “[a]ny time [the government]
is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by
representatives of its people, it suffers a form of irreparable
injury.” Defs.’ Opp’n, ECF No. 76 at 38 (quoting Maryland v.
King, 133 S. Ct. 1, 3 (2012)). But, as explained above, the
Title 42 Process is likely unlawful, and “[t]here is generally
no public interest in the perpetuation of an unlawful agency
action.” Newby, 838 F.3d at 12.
*********************************“
“There is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of an unlawful agency action.” Yup! Couldn’t have said it better myself!
Who knows if this will stand. Both the DC Circuit and the Supremes have too often been willing to allow continued Government abuse of the rights of “mere migrants,” mostly of color, because they can’t really see them as fellow human beings, entitled to due process, justice, and human dignity!
But, at least for this moment in time, it’s a victory for due process, humanity, and judicial integrity.
Norma Pimentel, a sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, is executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
Dear Mr. President:
I write today to appeal to your sense of morality, human dignity and as a fellow Catholic. While the Supreme Court has blocked your efforts to rescind the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, while litigation against it proceeds through the court system, I urge you to act. These legal complications, and our backlogged immigration courts system, cannot become an excuse to strand thousands of people in dire conditions, especially when other options are available.
I know from firsthand experience just how desperate the situation is. MPP was implemented in my community in early 2019. Its effect was to force thousands of people into a makeshift “tent city” along the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river as they awaited rulings on whether they would be granted asylum.
I would visit the camp almost every single day. It was a blessing that hundreds of compassionate Americans crossed the border between Brownsville, Tex., and Matamoros, Mexico, several times a day to bring tents, food, clothing, and to tend to these families’ medical needs and legal issues. While supported by the good nature and assistance that staff and others provided, I often worried about how the women, men and children at the camp could survive in such conditions. How could they stand the scorching heat of our region’s hot sun or the occasional torrential downpours that turned their encampment into a mud pit?
The lack of care for humanity and the sounds of human misery accompanied me daily as I moved through the camp. I know that reports of these conditions have reached your ears, too: I met your wife, Jill Biden, here in 2019 as she donned rubber boots to wade through the mud and see for herself the misery in which asylum seekers, including many women and children, lived for as long as two years.
So, I rejoiced when you declared an end to this immoral policy on your first days in office, and despaired when the Supreme Court required your administration to implement it once again.
I pray for the Supreme Court justices as I do for all leaders. But in my heart, I know that surely, we can do better than return to the conditions and suffering I witnessed in 2019.
. . . . .
I invite you to come and see for yourself, as your wife did in 2019, what is happening on the border. There are many layers to the immigration realities behind the strident political rhetoric that dominates and obscures the issue today. But we must find ways to counter what Pope Francis calls a “globalization of indifference.”
Mr. President, please demonstrate to the world that the words of Jesus — whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me — are the foundation of not only our faith, but of the moral structure of our country.
******************
Read the rest of Sister Norma’s letter at the above link.
She’s right: “We cannot allow a lack of creativity and fortitude to become an excuse to abandon the principle of compassion.” But, sadly, that’s exactly what the Biden Administration is doing by listening to the wrong advice from those wedded to the failed, illegal, and cruel concept of misusing the law and perverting process as a “deterrent.”
The experts, “practical scholars,” NGOs, intellectual leaders, and courageous progressive judicial talent who can solve this problem, folks like Sister Norma, Karen Musalo, Marielena Hincappie, Kevin Johnson, Michelle Mendez, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Lenni Benson, Michele Pistone, Geoffrey Hoffman, Jason “The Asylumist” Dzubow, and Judge Ilyce Shugall, are all “on the outside looking in.” Moreover, rather than working with them to fix the asylum system at the border and bring essential progressive reforms to our dysfunctional Immigration Courts, the Administration has actively alienated and disrespected their views in favor of recycling “guaranteed to fail, Miller-Lite” deterrence only policies of the past.
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Beyond bad GOP judges, corrupt and evil GOP State AGs, “Miller Lite” bureaucratic retreads, and feckless and timid Biden policy wonks, this is the harsh reality of our continuing, failed, “border deterrence” policies and our abrogation of asylum laws and human morality. EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
The solutions are out there! Too bad the Administration has become “part of the problem,” rather than having the guts and creativity to solve the problem while saving lives! No courage, no convictions, no solutions! It’s a formula for disaster☠️ and death!⚰️
As Sister Norma says, using the words of Jesus, in her powerful conclusion: “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me — are the foundation of not only our faith, but of the moral structure of our country.” Right now, He couldn’t be very pleased with the conduct of the GOP nativists, the Supremes, righty Federal Judges, horrible GOP AGs, and the feckless bureaucrats and timid policy officials of the Biden Administration!
REYNOSA, Mexico — When Joe Biden was running for president, he promised to close a squalid border tent camp in Mexico where thousands of migrants had been left to await the outcome of their immigration cases by the Trump administration.
Last spring, Biden emptied the camp, allowing most of the migrants to claim asylum and enter the U.S. even as his administration continued enforcing a Trump pandemic policy that effectively barred most other asylum seekers.
Soon after the Matamoros camp was bulldozed last March, a new camp formed about 55 miles west across from the border bridge to the more dangerous, Gulf crime cartel stronghold of Reynosa. Now that camp and another in Tijuana are home to thousands of asylum seekers, many with spouses and children in the U.S. They’re expected to grow after federal courts reinstated Trump’s so-called Remain in Mexico program last week, making it even harder for asylum seekers to enter the U.S. legally.
“We all thought this would get better when Biden got the presidency,” said Brendon Tucker, who works at the camp clinic run by the U.S.-based nonprofit Global Response Management, which also ran a clinic at the Matamoros camp.
Instead, he said, Biden’s pandemic ban on asylum claims, “is creating worse conditions in Mexico.”
About 2,000 migrants were living at the camp in Reynosa, Mexico, last week.(Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times)
A White House spokesman declined to comment about the migrant camps, referring questions to the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security said in a statement that, “This administration will continue to work closely with its interagency, foreign, and international organization partners to comply in good faith with the district court’s order [on Remain in Mexico] while continuing our work to build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that upholds our laws and values.”
In Reynosa, where about 2,000 migrants were living last week, conditions are in many ways worse than they were in Matamoros, Tucker said. There’s less potable water, fewer bathrooms, showers and other sanitation that U.S.-based nonprofits spent months installing in Matamoros. Mexican soldiers circle in trucks with guns mounted on top. Migrants face not only cartel extortion and kidnapping, but also COVID-19 outbreaks and pressure to leave from Mexican authorities. Fewer U.S. volunteers, including immigration lawyers, are willing to cross the border to help due to security concerns. Few at the camp understand their rights and U.S. pandemic restrictions, although they say they asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about them before they were expelled.
“They didn’t tell us anything, they just left us here,” said Salvadoran migrant Emerita Alfaro Palacios, 34, who’s been living at the camp with her 17-year-old daughter Pamela since June, hoping to join her brother in Houston.
Migrants call the camp Plaza Las Americas, the name of the park it occupies. The first to arrive last spring holed up inside the central gazebo. Those who followed pitched tents outside, their warren of droopy tarps and clotheslines expanding daily. Gone were the mariachis who used to congregate in the park, in the shade of a dilapidated casino that still draws throngs on weekends. Last week, only the gazebo’s spindly roof was visible, like the center of an enormous, patched circus tent. Taxis and vendors still circled, selling fruit popsicles, tacos, pupusas and other dishes catering to hungry migrants, mostly Central Americans. Many said they came to the border hoping Biden would allow them to claim asylum. Some had seen reports about how he helped those at the camp in Matamoros.
Many Reynosa residents and officials consider the camp an eyesore.
Standing on the roof of a nearby building overlooking the camp last week, maintenance worker Hector Hernandez Garrido, 33, said it was the responsibility of the U.S. to accept the asylum seekers. He said he feared the camp was contaminated by COVID-19 and other diseases.
Two weeks ago, Reynosa authorities removed cook stoves from the camp kitchen, citing safety risks. They pressured U.S. volunteers to stop cordoning off a section of the camp for migrants who had tested positive for COVID-19, and have threatened to cut the camp’s electricity and water supply.
“They want us out,” said Gina Maricela, a Honduran single mother and nurse at the GRM clinic.
It’s not clear where the migrants would go. Last month, Reynosa officials also launched a legal battle to demolish the city’s primary nonprofit migrant shelter, already home to hundreds, arguing it lies in a floodplain. Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, who has been crossing the border daily to help migrants at the Reynosa camp through her nonprofit Sidewalk School, said they rented a 20-room hotel for those who are COVID-positive to quarantine. They may build a new camp, she said, but that would take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s exactly like Matamoros, but with less support,” Rangel-Samponaro said. “Cut what you like, that’s not going to stop the encampment.”
As in Matamoros and other border cities in the surrounding Tamaulipas state, it’s not city officials or even migrants who ultimately control the plaza — it’s the cartel. Migrants who enter or leave the city without paying a smuggler risk getting kidnapped and held for ransom. So do those who leave the camp, even for a few hours to shop or look for work.
Honduran migrant Lesly Pineda, a factory worker, said she and her 11-year-old son Joan were kidnapped with eight other migrants in July and released only after she paid a $2,000 ransom. A single mother, Pineda, 33, then took her son to the border and sent him across the Rio Grande with a smuggler. He remained at a federal shelter in Texas last week, she said. She had left her two oldest children, ages 15 and 14, with her mother in Honduras.
. . . .
**********************
“Floaters — How The World’s Richest Country Responds To Asylum Seekers” — Will U.S. policy makers ever get beyond this jaundiced view of the “proper place” for asylum seekers in modern society? So far, despite Biden’s and Harris’s campaign rhetoric, the “reality on the ground” (or “in the river,” as the case might be) has remained disturbingly unchanged! EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT – The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Mart??nez Ram??rez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez’ wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Read Molly’s full report at the link.
The Trump kakistocracy considered the legal asylum system to be a “loophole” in their White Nationalist agenda. So, they just overtly violated the law. Thanks to an indulgent “Dred Scott” Supremes’ majority, they largely got away with it!
The Biden Administration considers complying with asylum laws, due process, and the rule of law, essentially a “political option” that they are working on (slowly, and incompetently).
In the meantime, they simply continue the Trump Administration’s illegal policies. Because, hey, it’s not real humans whose rights, lives, and humanity are being stomped upon here. Just “foreign nationals” and mostly “people of color” at that. Let ‘em continue to twist in the wind, while the Administration gets its act together. That’s particularly convenient if it’s happeningsouth of the border where, except for a few courageous folks like Molly and some NGOs and religious workers, the human trauma is largely “out of sight out of mind.”
If all else fails, we can always blame Trump. Like Trump, Biden has largely ceded control of southern border policies and migration from Latin America to cartels, smugglers, and traffickers. When the legal system fails, the underground and the black market take over.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that restoring the legal asylum system and actually, for perhaps the first time,administering it fairly, lawfully, generously, and with competent expert Asylum Officers and Immigration Judges (“new blood” required) would result in a substantial number of border arrivals being granted legal asylum or other forms of protection.
We’d actually be able to screen individuals, know who we have admitted, where they are going, have them in possession of legal work authorization, in a position to pay taxes, and in many cases have them on a path to eventual full integration into our society. And, by all legitimate accounts, after four years of Trump’s legal immigration disaster and a falling birth rate, we certainly can use more legal immigration.
Instead of looking at asylum seekers as a self-defined “problem,” why not look at saving them and integrating their skills and undoubted courage, energy, and perseverance into our society in a constructive manner as an “opportunity?” Because, that’s exactly what it is!
Human migration will continue, as it always has been, to be a major force in the 21st Century. “Smart money” is on the countries that best learn how to adapt and take advantage of its realities and embrace its opportunities as the “winners of the future.”
Given a fair, functional, generous system, many asylum seekers would be motivated to apply in an orderly fashion at ports of entry, or even abroad (if we actually had a robust functioning refugee program for Latin America, which we don’t). With an honest system that treats them fairly, listens carefully, and provides reasoned understandable decisions, even those who don’t qualify would be more likely to accept the result and consider constructive alternatives.
If the U.S. stepped up, fulfilled our legal obligations, and set a good example, other countries in a position to accept refugees and asylum seekers might also be motivated to improve their performance.
But, what we’re doing right now to those we falsely promised to treat fairly won’t be swept under the carpet forever. Historians are likely to highlight the cowardly abrogation of our legal duties to refugees and asylum seekers, by Administrations of both parties, as alow point in the American story.
A robed GOP Justice, carrying a copy of Dred Scott and the tool of right-wing extremism, heads for secret meeting to take action against brown-skinned refugees! Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons LicenseDahlia Lithwick Supreme Court Reporter Slate Wikimedia Commons — Public DomainMark Joseph Stern Reporter, Slate
On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court issued one of the most radical orders in recent memory—and it did it in three sentences, unsigned. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative justices attacked the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy (a principle it had vehemently preserved throughout the Trump presidency) by compelling the Biden administration to revive Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required all asylum-seekers who arrive at the Southern border—including many fleeing violence in Central America—to wait for their U.S. immigration hearings in Mexico. This 2019 policy, the product of extensive negotiations between the Trump administration and the Mexican government, has been suspended for about 17 months. On Aug. 13, however, a single federal judge issued a nationwide injunction ordering the government to reinstate the long-dormant program immediately. Late Tuesday, the Supreme Court blessed this unprecedented hostile takeover of the executive’s immigration policies without bothering to explain how or why.
The implications of Tuesday’s decision are profoundly disturbing. . . .
Perhaps the most perverse aspect of the litigation over “Remain in Mexico”—also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP—is that the policy itself is illegal. The Immigration and Nationality Act does allow the government to return a narrow class of migrants to “contiguous territory” while they await hearings. But, as a federal appeals court explained in 2020, the law does not allow the government to send the vast majority of asylum-seekers back to Mexico to await hearings. Doing so violates the United States’ treaty obligations as implemented in the INA, which bar the government from sending refugees back to countries where they fear persecution.
. . . .
As we have suggested in the recent past, the problem with late-night emergency orders written as haikus on Post-it notes stuck to the front doors of the Supreme Court isn’t just that the parties must scramble, without guidance, to discern what it is the court wants them to do. In this case, perhaps tens of thousands of desperate asylum-seekers and their families have absolutely no clue as to what the law is now and why. We have no idea what even constitutes an emergency, or which parties have standing, or what the legal reasoning might be.
Not very long ago, the high court used its shadow docket to spank what it deemed runaway district court judges arrogating power to set immigration policy in violation of Trump’s orders. Now, the same shadow docket is being used to hand federal immigration powers to runaway district court judges, with no rule or principle set forth beyond the fact that Biden should just lose, because they say so.
*****************
Under Roberts, the Supremes are looking more and more like the deadly EOIR Star Chambers/Clown Courts!☠️⚰️🤡 Shamefully, the “Roberts Six” have “revived” the “essence” of perhaps the worst Supremes’ decision in U.S. history, Dred Scott, and gotten away with applying it to people of color in the 21st Century!
They have elevated utter BS and fabricated “injuries” manufactured in bad faith by vile right wing GOP State AGs over the human rights, lives, and human dignity of refugees seeking asylum! In particular, they have targeted bown-skinned women, children, and families legally seeking refuge! This is progress? Seems like the definition of “judicial cowardice” to me!
Meanwhile Garland inexcusably has failed to reform his Immigration Courts by replacing unqualified Immigration Judges and BIA Appellate Judges selected by his predecessors under highly questionable procedures with well-qualified progressive judges who are experts in due process and human rights.
Building a progressive Immigration Judiciary at EOIR is absolutely necessary to developing the legal skills to hold the anti-American far right at bay and eventually creating a better Article III Judiciary that will actually stand up for due process and equal justice for all persons in America. Something the “Roberts 6” have scandalously and spinelessly failed to do!🤮👎🏽
“This Dude loves the ‘Miller Lite’ approach to asylum by Garland and Mayorkas, as well as Harris’s latest tone-deaf ‘victim shaming.’” Keeps him (as well as human smugglers) in business! Reaper Image: Hernan Fednan, Creative Commons License
SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador — Rejected by her family, Zashy Zuley del Cid Velásquez fled her coastal village in 2014, the first of a series of forced displacements across El Salvador. She had hoped that in the larger city of San Miguel she could live as a transgender woman without discrimination and violence, but there she was threatened by a gang.
She moved away from San Miguel, then back again in a series of forced moves until the 27-year-old was shot to death April 25, sending shock waves through the close-knit LGBTQ community in San Miguel, the largest city in eastern El Salvador.
“Zashy was desperate; her family didn’t want her … and the gangsters had threatened her,” said Venus Nolasco, director of the San Miguel LGBTQ collective Pearls of the East. “She knew they were going to kill her. She wanted to flee the country, go to the United States, but they killed her with a shot through her lung.”
One day after Del Cid’s slaying, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris identified anti-LGBTQ violence in Central America as one of the root causes of migration in the region during a virtual meeting with the president of neighboring Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei. She is visiting Guatemala and Mexico this week.
Transgender migrants were present in the Central American caravans that attempted to reach the United States border in recent years, fleeing harassment, gang extortion, violence and police indifference to crimes against them. Even in those large migrant movements, they say they faced harassment.
Things had been rough during Del Cid’s first stint in San Miguel. She had been living in a neighborhood where, as in many parts of the country, the MS-13 gang was the ultimate local authority. Gang members began to harass her, then brutally beat her, breaking her arm in 2015, Nolasco said.
“They warned her to leave, but she didn’t listen,” Nolasco said.
Del Cid moved in with Nolasco in the same neighborhood. One day, the gang grabbed Del Cid again.
“They took her, they wanted to kill her,” Nolasco said. “I begged them not to kill her, to let her go and she would leave the neighborhood.”
Del Cid moved back to her hometown, but her family rejected her again. She tried to please them, but she couldn’t, Nolasco said. Del Cid joined a church, got a girlfriend and had a baby girl, but could not maintain that life, she said.
She returned to San Miguel, where initially things seemed to go better. In 2020, Del Cid received humanitarian and housing support from COMCAVIS TRANS, a national LGBTQ rights organization, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Del Cid rented a home and opened a beauty salon there. She hired another woman to help her and was participating in an entrepreneurship program. She was preparing a business proposal to move the salon into its own space.
But Del Cid was shot in the back walking alone at night down the street. Passersby tried to help her and took her to a hospital, where she died. So far, police have made no arrests, and Nolasco believes that like other hate crimes in the country, “it will be forgotten; they’re not interested in what happens to us.”
Laura Almirall, UNHCR representative in El Salvador, said Del Cid’s killing frightened her community and saddened everyone who knew her.
“She was excited about her new plans and her new life. And unfortunately and tragically, everything came to an end,” she said.
Nolasco said that in San Miguel, some 70 miles east of the capital, the transgender community endures constant harassment from intolerant residents and gangs. They have rocks thrown at them, are beaten and are victims of extortion. If they go to police to make a report, they are insulted and demeaned. “Don’t come here to claim rights, because there are no rights for you,” police tell them, Nolasco said.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Despite some legal nonsense from EOIR and sometimes from uninformed Circuit Judges who have never represented asylum seekers and know little of actual conditions in the Northern Triangle, neither El Salvador nor the other Northern Triangle governments are “willing and able” to protect most individuals suffering gender-based and other forms of persecution.Decisions claiming otherwise are, in most cases, legally wrong and disingenuous to boot.
The U.S. asylum system needs expert Asylum Officers at DHS and progressive expert Immigration Judges at EOIR. Babbling (misleadingly) about “sealed borders” won’t take the place of telling Garland and Mayorkas to stop screwing around, bring in progressive experts, and fix the U.S. asylum system before more die! V.P. Harris could have taken the first necessary step toward “fixing the Southern Border” without even leaving DC.
How are we going to promote the rule of law in other nations when we ourselves are unwilling to exhibit honesty and follow the law with respect to the most vulnerable in the world seeking legal refuge at our borders?
With the U.S. “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement March 16, immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border has emerged as one of the toughest challenges facing the Biden Administration. Last week, President Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of “stemming” the flow of migrants, Biden was questioned about the immigration situation at his first official press conference, immigrant detention centers began to fill up once again, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle made trips to the border to publicize the issue and propose solutions.
Biden’s attempts to address immigration may be new, but the issue is one that has dogged his predecessors for decades. Since the 1970s, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to address undocumented immigration by constructing ever more draconian policies of border control, deportation and detention—border theater that grabs headlines and sometimes leads to short-term change, but never actually solves the problem.
There’s a reason why the U.S. government has failed for so many years to “control” the border: none of these policies have addressed the real reasons for migration itself. In migration studies, these are known as “push” and “pull” factors, the causes that drive migrants from one country to another.
Today, the countries sending the most migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border–especially the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador–are experiencing a combination of push factors that include poverty and inequality, political instability, and violence. And while the current situation may be unique, it is also deeply rooted in history.
Many countries in Central America have struggled with poverty since the time of independence from Spain in the early 19th century. While they are beautiful countries that are rich in culture and history, that colonial past has meant they have historically been home to large, landless, poor, rural populations, including many indigenous people of Mayan descent. In the years after Spanish control, they were typically ruled by small oligarchies that disproportionately held wealth, land and power, and their economies were primary export-dependent, which brought great riches to landowners but also exacerbated and perpetuated inequality and the poverty of the majority. Those dynamics have carried forward to today. More recently, climate change–in particular, drought and massivestorms–has forced the vulnerable rural poor out of the countryside.
. . . .
And while many Central Americans could indeed qualify for asylum based on their experiences of persecution, the previous administration made every effort to limit their ability to obtain it. Now the Biden Administration must decide whether to restore the asylum framework, which has become the only possible path to legal migration (as well as safety and security) for Central Americans and other migrants who—due to these combined push and pull factors—are desperate to come to the United States.
Given the complicated and deep-rooted reasons behind migration, lawmakers cannot control or “solve” the ongoing crisis at the border by simply pouring money and resources into ever more militaristic border theater. It’s no wonder that decades of such policies have done little to change the underlying dynamics.
Instead, if Americans are serious about changing the situation at the border, we need to address the push and pull factors behind Central American migration. We need to acknowledge the reality of the U.S. economy (in particular, that it demands immigrant labor to work low-wage jobs) and work to construct new legal frameworks that reflect that reality. We need to target financial and logistical support to encourage Central American countries to address the poverty and inequality that fuel migration, rather than cutting foreign aid, as the Trump Administration did. We need to do all we can to end the pervasive gang violence that pushes so many migrants out of their homelands. And of course, we must continue to evaluate our own historical and contemporary role in creating the longstanding problems that are pushing Central Americans to migrate.
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Read the rest of Julia’s article at the link. One key truth: many more Central American migrants would qualify for asylum and be legally admitted to our society under a fair application of our asylum laws directed and supervised by real expert judges who scrupulously enforce due process and best practices on a now biased, unfair, and dysfunctional system!
“Stemming the tide” might be neither realistic nor possible at this time. But, controlling it, managing it humanely and legally, and regularizing it, while lessening the “push” factors should be achievable.
It would, however, require bold actions:
Recognizing the primacy of humanitarian protection laws and insisting on due process in implementing them;
Putting experts in humanitarian situations, due process advocates, diplomats, labor economists, and demographers in leadership positions; and
Embracing much larger levels of legal immigration, particularly from Latin America.
Vice President Kamala D. Harris Vice President of the United States (Official Senate Photo)
Unfortunately for Vice President Harris and the rest of us who want humane, realistic immigration policies, there are reasons for our half-century of overall failure on the border.
Bloated government bureaucracies, powerful corporate interests, nativist politicians, and even foreign leaders are heavily invested in expensive and guaranteed to fail “uber enforcement” gimmicks. Failure basically creates a never-ending demand for more: more enforcement agents, “civil prisons,” jailers, deporters, cars, trucks, guns, boats, ammo, walls, fences, technology, courts, judges, prosecutors, lobbyists, “baby jails,” processing centers, foreign aid that goes largely into the pockets of corrupt leaders and their cronies, and a never-ending supply of underground, low-wage, politically neutered workers.
Additionally, we now have an entire political party with an agenda of overt institutionalized racism, dehumanization of the other, and fear-mongering White Nationalist myths driving its bogus populist narrative.
None of these “architects and enablers of border failure and institutionalized racism” are going “quietly into the night.” They will fight tooth and nail to defend their sinecures, profitable empires, and politically useful White Nationalist myths.
The politician who finally breaks the deadly cycle of failure and human misery at our border, while harnessing and realizing the positive power of human migration, will become a hero for future historians and undoubtedly merit a chapter in a new edition of Profiles in Courage.
Sadly, such recognition and adulation is likely to come long after she is gone from the scene. Long term vision and moral courage are not necessarily rewarded with short-term political popularity. Just ask the few Republicans who voted in accordance with the overwhelming, basically uncontested, evidence of Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors!”
That’s why it’s a tough challenge even for someone of Vice President Harris’s undoubted intelligence and abilities. It’s up to those of us who believe in a better America to keep her from getting sidetracked and co-opted by the vested interests of failure and White Nationalist myth-makers and purveyors.
Leon Krauze in the WashPost tells us what’s really happening at the border. WARNING: It has little to do with the myths and false narratives being peddled by the GOP, the Administration, and the media.
The current emergency at the border has found the U. S. media at its most solipsistic. Coverage seems more focused on whether the emergency should be called “a crisis” (it should) and what the political fallout for the Biden administration will be. With few exceptions — like the remarkable work of MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff or Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez — many news outlets seem utterly uninterested in the stories of the migrants themselves.
This is wrong because it fails to provide one crucial piece of the puzzle: the very concrete context of human suffering.
. . . .
This by no means excuses the stories of anguish and confinement that have emerged over the last few weeks from within the facilities set up by the Biden administration to deal with the number of young migrants crossing the border, nor does it absolve the president himself from delivering on his promise of a humane immigration system, diametrically opposed to Trump’s cruel policies, designed in collaboration with unapologetic racist xenophobes like Stephen Miller.
The Biden administration can and should do better. But the current debate cannot ignore the very concrete despair facing thousands of immigrant families who, under the direct threat of violence or abuse, chose to push their young children to the United States, in search of safety.
If the alternative was famine, gang violence, kidnapping, rape or sexual slavery, wouldn’t you bet it all on the journey north? If more people understood this, the political debate and the coverage surrounding the crisis would be much more empathetic and we would get closer at delivering concrete, humane solutions.
Now, let’s hear more “simple truth” from Suzanne Gamboa over at NBC News:
Suzanne Gamboa, Political Editor, NBCLatino, NBC NewsDate: October 21, 2013 Place: Washington, DC Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS Creative Commons License
America’s immigration impasse — an endless loop across different administrations — is largely self-inflicted, because Congress has repeatedly failed to acknowledge one simple thing: Immigration happens.
Accordingly, immigration laws must be continually adjusted, reformed and revised, experts say.
“People will always want to come to the U.S., and the U.S. will always need people,” said former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was a top immigration adviser to President George W. Bush.
Until there is a system that allows enough legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs, there will be illegal immigration, Gutierrez said.
“That’s just part of how our economy is set up. It’s part of demographics,” Gutierrez said. “Our birthrate is not high enough to be able to fill the needs of our economy.”
The coronavirus pandemic reinforced the importance of immigrant labor to the American economy, including labor by the undocumented.
All of those people and many other immigrants, including young immigrants — often called “Dreamers” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — will play a key role in helping the economy recover from its pandemic bust.
But immigration requires periodic calibration, and the economics and the changing patterns are lost in the politics.
“People are going to move — as they are all around the world — where they think they can find places to better feed their children. That’s the bottom line, and that’s the history of migration to the United States,” said Luis Fraga, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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Everyone should read the rest of the stories at the above link.
Degrading Ourselves As A Nation Won’t Stop Human Migration
By Judge (Ret) Paul Wickham Schmidt
“Courtside” Exclusive
March 26, 2021
Notwithstanding the endlessly disingenuous and self-centered alarmist rhetoric coming from all directions on the border mess, often mindlessly regurgitated by the press (not just Fox News), the real “crisis” involves the human lives at stake and the unnecessary human misery we are causing by failing to establish, professionally staff, and fairly and competently operate the legal refugee and particularly asylum systems required by law. This “due process crisis” actually has devastating and debilitating practical effects, starting with the dysfunctional immigration, refugee, and asylum system and the beyond dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Heck, we don’t even pretend to comply with Constitutionally-required due process of law for asylum seekers who present themselves to us seeking life-saving refuge. Most of those who show up at legally-established border ports are told that the border is “closed” and that there is no way for them to apply. OK, so they attempt to cross between ports and immediately present themselves to the Border Patrol. But, they also are told there is no way to apply and are orbited back to some of the most dangerous countries in the world without any process whatsoever, let alone due process of law. Who are we kidding with all our dishonest pontificating about “the rule of law?”
It’s a strange way to implement the statutory command that any foreign national “irrespective of . . . status, may apply for asylum,” along with a constitutional guarantee that “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Gee, you don’t even need one of those fancy Ivy League law degrees to understand that language. You just have to be able to read, comprehend, and act.
What you do have to do to get where we are today is to view asylum seekers and other migrants (predominantly people of color) as less than human — “non-persons” in a constitutional sense. It’s what some of us call “Dred Scottification of the other” and it has accelerated over the past four years — not just in immigration.
The whole idea of a “court system” being run by the Executive who also is the chief of enforcement is beyond constitutionally preposterous. It’s a “negative tribute” to the Supremes and other Article III life-tenured judges who have grown so distant from their own humanity and immigration stories as to become willfully blind to the ongoing farce that constitutes “justice” and “due process of law” for asylum seekers and other immigrants in the U.S.
Today’s nearly non-existent “asylum system” is a deadly and illegal “catch 22,” with the Supremes sitting in their marble palace refusing to do the primary task that justifies their continued existence: enforce the Constitution against Government misbehavior and in favor of the “little guys” and the “vulnerable.” No thanks, not up to the job!
The real tragedy is that there are plenty of folks out here with the knowledge, integrity, courage, and ability to establish a legal system that would actually comply with out laws, our Constitution, and further offer the hope of constructively addressing some problems before refugees arrive at our borders. But, they remain “benched,” even by the Biden Team. So the “good guys”are going to keep attacking the corrupt and broken system in court and at the polls for as long as it takes to get some course correction — years, decades, centuries — ask most African Americans how long it takes to achieve the true justice that America promises to all, but historically has only delivered to some.
In the long run, a fair system would undoubtedly accept many more legal refugees and asylum seekers. That’s what happens in refugee situations — it’s the core of what we call “forced migration” — when you sign on to international conventions intended to prevent the “next holocaust,” and you fairly and humanely apply the rules meant to protect refugees and those who face torture. And, as they have in the past, the overwhelming number of refugees and asylees, like the overwhelming majority of immigrants (essentially all of us, except Native Americans) will adapt, fit in, and contribute to the health, wealth, and future of our nation. They will change, but so will we — ultimately for the better!
Sure, America wouldn’t be as white, “Christian” (to the extent that adherence to a nominal Christian denomination, rather than actually performing Christ’s extremely difficult, self-sacrificing, risky, compassionate mission, defines Christianity), and nominally heterosexual as it was when White Nationalist myths and whitewashed history ruled the roost. But, it would be a better nation — one that actually has a chance of prospering, realizing the full potential of all its residents, and leading the world in the 21st century. A nation that could devote more human, natural, and monetary resources to building and exporting greatness, rather than to an endless stream of cruel, inhuman, stupid, and wasteful enforcement and deterrence gimmicks.
Bottom line, folks are going to come to America, as they have throughout history. Some will stay, some won’t. But, come they will, unless and until those like Trump and the GOP create such a mess that our own people start fleeing to foreign shores. Immigration, regardless of status, is a sign of strength. Xenophobia a sign of fatal weakness.
Our real choice isn’t whether we want to “close” borders, bar refugees, and abuse children as the Cottons, Cruzes, Millers, and Hawleys advocate. It’s whether we create a robust, orderly, rational legal system to screen, regulate, and distribute the inevitable flow or whether, as we have for the past decades, we force millions to reside and work underground — part of an “extralegal” or “black market” system that pols of both parties and those who profit from that underground system have created.
Sprawling mismanaged enforcement bureaucracies, dysfunctional “courts,” armies of publicly-paid lawyers defending the indefensible, for-profit civil prisons, big agriculture, hospitality giants, loads of upwardly mobile professionals who need child care to pursue careers, communities that live off of marketing ethnic culture, meat packing conglomerates, architects and construction firms who are “building America,” even news media fixated on hyping the problem rather than fixing it (see, e.g., yesterday’s Biden press conference), the list of those who profit from a talented, hard working, reliable, loyal, yet politically and socially disenfranchised, workforce is endless.
Even the GOP’s “Cotton-Cruz crowd” benefits from having an imaginary enemy to rant and rail and gin up hate against — safe in the knowledge that the tanking of our economy, upheaval of society, and possible threat to their privilege that would result from realizing their disingenuous call to boot the entire undocumented population will never happen. Their kids and grandkids can continue to reap the privilege that comes from exploiting an essential, yet politically neutered, workforce. It’s really more about institutionalizing racism to maintain economic and political power over the eventual non-white majority that drives their bogus and ugly narratives.
We can degrade ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever! It’s a vision based on a written promise, not a “pipe dream!”
