“Safe Third Country” – Page 9 – immigrationcourtside.com

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO WATCH” — CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE: U.S. ASYLUM OFFICERS REFUSE TO CARRY OUT ILLEGAL & IMMORAL ANTI-ASYLUM PROGRAM! — “You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

https://apple.news/ABLpJrjGFTROOJbP0K3fAGg

Molly O’Toole reports in the LA Times:

Asylum officers rebel against Trump policies they say are immoral and illegal

In collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at a much-criticized Trump administration policy to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers implementing it.

It only took Doug Stephens two days to decide: He wasn’t going to implement President Trump’s latest policy to restrict immigration, known as Remain in Mexico. The asylum officer wouldn’t interview any more asylum seekers only to send them back to danger in Mexico.

As a federal employee, refusing to implement the government policy probably meant that he’d be fired, and an end to his career as a public servant. He’d only been assigned five of the interviews so far. But it was five too many — to the trained attorney, the policy officially termed “Migrant Protection Protocols” was not only unethical, it was against the law.

When Stephens told his supervisor in San Francisco his decision, he said he was stunned.

“I told him, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not doing these interviews,’” Stephens said, speaking publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview. “I think they’re illegal. They’re definitely immoral. And I’m not doing them.’”

Stephens is believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to conduct interviews under the program, according to Michael Knowles, a spokesman for the National CIS Council, the union that represents some 13,000 asylum officers and other employees of Citizenship and Immigration Services worldwide.

But he isn’t alone. Across the country, asylum officers are calling in sick, requesting transfers, retiring earlier than planned and quitting, all to resist this and other Trump administration immigration policies that they view as illegal, according to Stephens, as well as other asylum officers and officials.

In a collaboration with the radio program “This American Life,” the Los Angeles Times takes an exclusive, front-line look at one of the Trump administration’s most successful policies to restrict asylum — the Migrant Protection Protocols — from the perspective of the asylum officers forced to implement it.

The asylum officers’ primary job is to make sure that the U.S. government is not returning people to harm in their home countries, a foundational principle in both U.S. and international law. But under MPP, instead of allowing asylum seekers who come to the southern border to wait in the U.S. for their immigration hearings, U.S. officials are forcing them to wait in Mexico.

Since the Trump administration announced the policy in December, U.S. officials have pushed roughly 60,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico, to wait in areas that the U.S. State Department considers some of the most dangerous in the world.

While U.S. officials downplay the danger in Mexico, kidnappings, rape and other violence against asylum seekers under the program are widespread and well documented, according to other officials, advocates, lawyers and academic researchers.

Homeland Security officials concede that the program is designed to discourage asylum claims. The president is running for reelection on renewed promises to limit immigration. Under the policy, only 11 asylum seekers have been granted some kind of relief, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database.

The half-dozen asylum officers interviewed by The Times say that in almost every interview they’ve conducted under the policy, the asylum seeker expressed a fear of returning to Mexico — many said they’d been harmed there already. But under the new standards, the officers say they had to return them anyway.

“What’s my moral culpability in that?” said an asylum officer who’s conducted nearly 100 interviews. She requested anonymity because she feared retaliation. “My signature’s on that paperwork. And that’s something now that I live with.”

The asylum officers rebelling against Trump’s immigration policies say they run counter to the laws passed by Congress, as well as their oath to the Constitution and extensive training, which includes how to detect fraud or any potential national security concerns.

Under U.S. law, migrants have the right to request asylum. Some 80% of asylum seekers pass the first step in the lengthy process, an interview with an asylum officer that’s known as a credible-fear screening. Congress set a low standard for the officers to use at this initial stage, to minimize the risk of sending someone back to harm, or even death. But ultimately, only about 15% of applicants win asylum before an immigration judge.

Trump and his top officials use this difference between the percentage of asylum seekers who pass the first step versus the percentage who ultimately win asylum to claim that asylum itself is a “hoax” or “big fat con job.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, has publicly criticized the officers, saying they approve too many requests and oppose Trump’s initiatives for partisan reasons. On Wednesday, Cuccinelli was named acting deputy Homeland Security secretary.

Cuccinelli’s spokesperson stopped responding to requests for an interview. But The Times asked Cuccinelli during an October media breakfast about concerns from officers.

“So long as we’re in the position of putting in place what we believe to be legal policies that haven’t been found to be otherwise,” Cuccinelli said, “we fully expect them to implement those faithfully and sincerely and vigorously.”

Citizenship and Immigration Services also declined requests for data on staffing for the Homeland Security agency, and the asylum section specifically, to try to quantify what officers and officials called an “exodus” primarily because of the policy.

In another sign of widespread discomfort among the asylum officers, the union representing them has filed “friend of the court” briefs in lawsuits against the administration, arguing that its immigration policies — including MPP — are illegal.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the ongoing litigation against the policy. The panel’s ruling on whether the policy is legal is pending.

When Stephens refused to do the interviews, his supervisors started disciplinary proceedings, issuing him formal warnings, he described at the time. He decided to quit, but not before he sent out a legal memo he’d drafted arguing why the policy violates the law, which he sent to his entire San Francisco office, supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator. He later got his own legal representation, at Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit.

He says he’s still trying to draw attention to the program, encouraging others to speak out against it.

“You’re literally sending people back to be raped and killed,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

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

So, what happened to the integrity of 9th Circuit Appellate Judges and Congress? Why are they OK with blatant violations of our laws, our Constitution, and human rights that actually kill people? You could call it “accessory to murder.”

Folks like Doug Stephens, Molly O’Toole, and many other courageous, dedicated members of the “New Due Process Army” are making a public record. While the cowardly abusers might be “getting away with murder” in “real time,” they will eventually be held accountable by history for their illegal, immoral, and unconscionable actions. And, that includes not only the “perpetrators” in the Trump Administration, but also their many disgraceful enablers in the judiciary and Congress.

Many innocent people might die or be sent to oblivion. But, their bloodstains won’t be washed away, even by time.

PWS

11-16-19

“CONSTITUTIONAL CASTRATION”– CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: HOW THE FECKLESS GOP CONGRESS IS SCREWING THE MOST VULNERABLE AMONG US BY LETTING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TRASH THE IMMIGRATION LAWS AND END-RUN THE CONSTITUTION WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL PARTICIPATION! – “The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-bulldozed-over-congress-on-immigration-will-lawmakers-ever-act/2019/11/14/67401466-0722-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

Catherine writes @ WashPost:

By

Catherine Rampell

Columnist

November 14, 2019 at 7:09 p.m. EST

Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.

The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.

To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.

Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.

Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.

Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.

Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.

Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. This would have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.

Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.

But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.

Take asylum law.

“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.

But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.

Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.

This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”

“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.

A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.

The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?

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

Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?

It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.

Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!

PWS

11-15-19

SENATE REPORTS “OUTS” WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME’S VILE ATTACK ON ASYLUM SYSTEM, WHILE HOUSE FINALLY SCHEDULES LONG-OVERDUE OVERSIGHT OF “LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” PROGRAM!

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/11/14/politics/merkley-asylum-report/

Priscilla Alvarez Reports for CNN:

(CNN)The Trump administration’s immigration policies have taken a toll on some of the officers tasked with carrying them out, according to a scathing report by Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley.

The 81-page report released Thursday compiles whistleblower accounts and media reports to provide an overview of the administration’s crackdown on migrants seeking asylum in the United States and attempts to curb migration to the southern border.

In one email, dated August 12, 2019, and obtained by Merkley’s office, an asylum officer denounced one of the administration’s policies as “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States.” The email was first reported by The Washington Post.

<img alt=”Trump administration proposes rule that would deny work permits to some asylum seekers” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190813111158-ken-cuccinelli-presser-uscis-081219-large-169.jpg”>

Trump administration proposes rule that would deny work permits to some asylum seekers

The officer was referring to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols program, which requires some migrants to stay in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. The program is being challenged in court, but has been allowed to proceed for the time being.

It’s not the first time asylum officers have expressed frustration over the program, which advocates argue puts migrants, many of whom are from Central America, in harm’s way.

In June, the union representing US asylum officers asked a federal court to end the policy, saying the directives are “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”

Merkley’s report, titled “Shattered Refuge,” emphasizes the frustrations held by some officials in the administration who are responsible for carrying out its policies and raises alarm over departmental actions that it alleges exacerbated the crisis at the southern border.

The report included details about:

Six pregnant women in Customs and Border Protection custody were sent back to Mexico in May to await their immigration proceedings despite being several months pregnant, according to whistleblowers. The report cites a letter the American Civil Liberties Union directed to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general in September elevating concerns about the placement of pregnant women in the Migrant Protection Protocols program.

The former head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum division, John L. Lafferty, was pushed out by then-acting Director Ken Cuccinelli. Whistleblowers perceived this to be “the result of acting as a committed, civil servant who played it by the book,” according to the report.

In April, US Citizenship and Immigration Services moved to raise the standard for credible-fear screenings, the first step in the asylum process. A lawsuit was filed in June challenging the change.

The Trump administration assigned CBP agents to conduct credible fear interviews in what appeared to be an attempt to curb the number of asylum applicants, the report states. (More than 50 Border Patrol agents are conducting credible fear screenings, according to USCIS. As of October 2019, Border Patrol agents have completed around 2,000 credible fear determinations.)

The report states that limiting entry at CBP ports of entry, a practice known as “metering,” has led to long wait lines and put migrants at heightened risk.

“America should be a land of hope and refuge — the place President Reagan called a shining city on a hill. We’ve seen the betrayal of that vision by the Trump administration’s intentional infliction of trauma on children and families as a warning to others to stay away,” Merkley said in a statement. “Their draconian actions were so contrary to American values and law that at least one whistleblower felt they could not morally or legally carry out their orders.”

The Trump administration has argued that the nation’s immigration system has incentivized people to journey to the southern border. President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department and DHS in April to propose regulations to staunch the flow of migrants, many of whom claim to be seeking asylum in the United States.

Within the last week, USCIS, an immigration agency within DHS, has rolled out proposed changes that would deny work permits to asylum seekers who cross the border illegally and apply a charge to asylum applications, among other things. Immigrant advocates and lawyers have pushed back on the proposed regulations, arguing that the rules penalize a swath of migrants who are seeking refuge in the United States.

Merkley’s report acknowledges the proposed changes to the asylum system and also resurfaces documents that found the controversial policy that led to the separation of thousands of families at the US-Mexico border was intended to deter migrants from coming to the border. It also reflects on the overcrowding at CBP facilities over the summer.

Here’s the information on the House Oversight hearings of “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico,” dishonestly referred to by DHS as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”):

EXAMINING THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF DHS’ ‘REMAIN IN MEXICO’ POLICY

DATE: Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Add to my Calendar

TIME: 10:00 AM

LOCATION: 310 Cannon House Office Building

SUBCOMMITTEE: Border Security, Facilitation, & Operations (116th Congress)

ISSUE: Border Security & Immigration

Video

Check back for live video of this hearing.

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

Make no mistake about it, the bogus MPP never had anything whatsoever to do,with “protecting” migrants! No, it was designed specifically to harm (kill on some occasions), punish, and “deter” asylum applicants from exercising their rights under U.S. and international law.

PWS

11-14-19

JUDICIAL HERO? — HARLINGEN U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE DANIEL GILBERT REPORTEDLY QUITS BENCH DURING HEARING IN PROTEST OF ABUSIVE “MIGRANT PROTECTION PROTOCOLS” (More Accurately Known As “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico”) — Courage Of Non-Tenured Administrative Judge Contrasts Sharply With Dereliction Of Duty By Life-Tenured 9th Circuit Jurists!

As reported by tireless defender of immigration rights and civil rights R. Andrew Free, Esquire, on Twitter:

R. Andrew Free

@ImmCivilRights

Follow

Follow @ImmCivilRights

More

Immigration Judge Daniel Gilbert apparently stood up & walked out of court today. He reportedly quit in protest after nearly twomonths of seeing the human carnage that the regime has unleashed through its #MigrantPersecutionProtocols described below

Hero.

Here’s more:

Adolfo Flores

Verified account

@aflores

Follow

Follow @aflores

More

Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the immigration judges union, didn’t offer details on what led Judge Gilbert to take another job at DHS but said he “Has accepted a position with DHS and due to conflicts issues…he can no longer preside over a docket.” https://twitter.com/immcivilrights/status/1195026305449746432 …

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

Sadly, I’d have too wonder how long Judge Gilbert will last at USCIS in the age of the “Wolfman” and “Cooch Cooch.”

PWS

11-14-19

BENEATH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S LIES: LET’S SEE WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IN EL SALVADOR: “We don’t hear that what’s happening at the border is a symptom of the real crisis in El Salvador and other countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America.”

Meghan E. Lopez
Head of Mission
International Rescue Committee
El Salvador

Yesterday my colleague Frank Mc Manus updated you on the escalating crisis in Yemen. Today, I wanted to share what’s happening in El Salvador — and why your help is needed now.

The threat to women and girls is real. It is frightening. And it must not go unnoticed any longer.

Our teams at the IRC supports women and girls around the world, including in El Salvador. Donate now to help us provide women and girls and entire families in need with lifesaving support.

In the States, we often don’t hear much about El Salvador aside from it being the country of origin for many asylum seekers at the border. We don’t hear that what’s happening at the border is a symptom of the real crisis in El Salvador and other countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America.

El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent and deadly places, similar to those of active war zones. The high level of violence is largely due to organized crime and rampant gang activity — and it’s what drives people to flee for their lives. Here are some startling facts:

In 2018, one woman was murdered every 20 hours.

There were more than 9.2 homicides per day.

Approximately 10 people each day disappear.

My teams on the ground are seeing that it’s teenage girls who are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence from state, civilian and criminal entities. They are also being forced into becoming “gang girlfriends,” which is essentially sex slavery so they can protect their families.

We are helping women and girls and their families in El Salvador in many ways. We run an online platform called CuentaNos.org which has become a lifeline. It provides information for people during moments of crisis or while on the move in El Salvador, and soon in Honduras and Guatemala as well. We provide emergency cash assistance to help people find shelter and safety when they most need it and a crisis referral service to help people connect directly with the support they need, all the while working to improve those services that our partners provide.

The IRC provides support in many places facing emergencies around the world. You can help women and girls in the places where we work, including in El Salvador, by making a lifesaving gift today.

Thank you so much for giving your attention to this often forgotten crisis.

My very best,

Meghan Lopez
Head of Mission
IRC El Salvador

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

So why are we not only returning vulnerable women, children, and families to El Salvador, but, outrageously, also trying to send asylum applicants from other countries there, even though the Administration knows full well:

It isn’t “safe,” by any definition;
It’s a hellhole where gangs, narcos, and corrupt government officials aligned with them are in control of much of the country;
It doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system; and
It can’t protect and support its own population, let alone tens of thousands of refugees from other countries that the U.S. intends to “outsource” there.

These outrageous shams are some of the “proud legacy” that folks like “Big Mac With Lies” leave behind. And the new DHS honchos, Wolf and “Cooch Cooch,” have promised to be even more cruel, racist, and scofflaw.

Remember the truth and the facts the next time you hear a dishonest Trump official falsely claim that the only reason folks are fleeing for their lives is to take advantage of “loopholes” in US. law.

PWS

11-13-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — U.S. ASYLUM OFFICER EXPOSES TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INTENTIONAL RACIST VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, ENABLED BY A COMPLICIT 9th CIRCUIT! — “The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/12/scathing-manifesto-an-asylum-officer-blasts-trumps-cruelty-migrants/

Greg Sargent writes in the WashPost:

November 12, 2019 at 3:47 p.m. EST

President Trump’s requirement that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while they await hearings in the United States is creating a new humanitarian crisis. Yet it isn’t generating nearly the outrage and media scrutiny that his horrific family separations did.

But now a deeply dismayed asylum officer has authored a remarkable manifesto that was obtained by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), as part of an investigation Merkley is conducting of Trump’s asylum policies.

The manifesto indicts the “Remain in Mexico” program from the inside in sweeping and scalding terms, describing it as illegal under U.S. law, a violation of the United States’ international human rights obligations and arbitrarily implemented to deliberately punish people for seeking asylum here.

The policy is “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States,” the asylum officer writes in the manifesto.

The asylum officer recently left their job, and in the missive, the officer says he or she could not continue to implement it “after careful consideration and moral contemplation.”

The officer’s condemnations of the policy are among the key revelations in a forthcoming assessment of Trump’s asylum policies by Merkley’s office.

Those policies include everything from ongoing efforts to send asylum seekers back to Honduras, which is “one of the most violent and unstable nations in the world,” to a new proposal to charge asylum applicants a $50 fee.

Merkley’s report, portions of which I’ve seen, will conclude that the administration has undertaken “systemic efforts” to “effectively rewrite U.S. asylum laws, rules and procedures,” with the overarching goal of “gutting the asylum system” but “without congressional approval or involvement.”

Merkley’s report will also conclude that Trump’s policies have “intentionally inflicted trauma” on asylum seeking families.

The Remain in Mexico policy — which is also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — requires migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico pending hearings in the United States, with the ostensible goal of preventing them from disappearing into the interior during that waiting period. About 50,000 migrants have been relocated there.

Numerous critics have said it’s deeply cruel to knowingly force migrants to wait in places where they’ll be subjected to serious risk, and journalistic exposés and studies alike have documented that the MPPs do does just that.

The officer, who has repeatedly been in touch with Merkley’s office as part of its investigation, will remain anonymous.

But the officer’s lawyer — Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project — confirmed to me the authenticity of the manifesto and confirmed that it accurately depicts the person’s circumstances.

“In addition to this whistleblower, we are representing several other Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers who have raised serious concerns about immigration-related abuses,” Gold said. “That Congress is taking these issues seriously is essential to promoting accountability and protecting ethical civil servants committed to upholding their oaths of office.”

Tensions have been rising between asylum officers and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the asylum system. And the union for asylum officers has already issued a legal brief condemning MPP amid litigation over the program.

But this asylum officer’s personal indictment of the policy goes much further.

For one thing, he or she accuses the administration of implementing the policy in an “arbitrary” manner:

The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.

For another, he or she alleges that internal processes are breaking down. Under MPP, if asylum seekers in U.S. territory declare in their initial interview a fear of being returned to Mexico, they’re supposed to get a second screening, conducted by a trained asylum officer who is supposed to determine whether that fear is credible.

But the asylum officer charges that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment — is mismanaging the system in a way that’s deliberately designed to be punitive and to make it harder for applicants to succeed:

The implementation is calculated to prevent individuals from receiving any type of protection or immigration benefits in the future. As such, it is a punitive measure intended to punish individuals who attempt to request protection in the United States. There is no clearly established policy and system for notifying applicants of changes to hearing dates and times, or for the applicants to provide change of addresses to the courts and Border Patrol. Without a highly functional notice system, the administration has ensured that a high number of applicants will miss their court dates.

And the asylum officer blasts the program as “ad hoc” and rigged against applicants:

The current process places on the applicants the highest burden of proof in civil proceedings in the lowest quality hearing available. This is a legal standard not previously implemented by the Asylum Office and reserved for an Immigration Judge in a full hearing. However, we are conducting the interviews telephonically, often with poor telephone connections, while at the same time denying applicants any time to rest, gather evidence, present witnesses, and, most egregious of all, denying them access to legal representation.

In a statement sent my way, Merkley vowed more revelations to come.

“This whistleblower reveals that in multiple ways, the Trump administration has asked them and other American asylum officers to take actions they believe break their oath of office and violate the law,” Merkley told me. “In the coming days, I will be releasing a report that details the full scope of this administration’s efforts to gut our legal asylum system.”

What this will confirm again is that for Trump, the goal is to make it as hard as possible for people to apply for asylum who actually would likely qualify for it — further eroding our commitment to the principle that desperate people have the right to appeal for refuge here and get a fair hearing without fear of being returned to face catastrophe.

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

So, why are those supposedly sworn to uphold the law, given the privilege of life-tenure, participating in overtly transparent human rights, legal, and constitutional violations?

Why do “ordinary civil servants” have more legal understanding and courage than the “robed ones in the ivory tower?”

Why are Federal Judges permitting a corrupt, biased, and racist Administration to cut off access to courts and punish individuals for exercising their legal rights under our laws?

Why is it OK to use the legal system as a “deterrent” to those seeking legal refuge under our laws?

Assuming that our republic survives, the question for the future is what can we do to insure appointment of Federal Judges, at all levels, with integrity who possess the courage to stand up for the most vulnerable among us in the face of unconstitutional racism and White Nationalism.

PWS

11-13-19

9TH CIRCUIT’S CONTINUING SHAME: “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program Was Ruled “Illegal From The Git Go” By Courageous U.S. District Judge – Then, 9th Intervened To “Open The Killing Fields” – Empowered By Appellate Judicial Complicity, DHS Agents Now Simply Commit Fraud On Asylum Applicants & Their Lawyers By Returning Them To Mexico With Fake Hearing Dates!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1e0901c7-ba27-4d78-a71a-823c2481d392

Gustavo Solis reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:

By Gustavo Solis

Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to accept only migrants with future court dates scheduled.

Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.

However, records obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.

Those documents, unofficially known as tear sheets, are given to every migrant in the Migrant Protection Protocols program who is sent back to Mexico. The document tells the migrants where and when to appear at the border so that they can be transported to immigration court. What is different about the tear sheets that migrants with closed cases receive is that the future court date is not legitimate, according to multiple immigration lawyers whose clients have received these documents.

This has happened both to migrants who have been granted asylum and those who had their cases terminated — meaning a judge closed the case without making a formal decision, usually on procedural grounds. Additionally, at least one migrant was physically assaulted after being sent back to Mexico this way, according to her lawyer.

Bashir Ghazialam, a San Diego immigration lawyer who represents six people who received these fake future court dates, said he was shocked by the developments.

“This is fraud,” he said. “I don’t call everything fraud. This is the first time I’ve used the words, ‘U.S. government’ and ‘fraud’ in the same sentence. No one should be OK with this.”

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests to comment about why they had engaged in the practice.

Ghazialam first noticed this in September, when three of his clients were sent back to Mexico after their cases were terminated on Sept. 17. After the judge made his decision, the family spent 10 days in Customs and Border Protection custody.

On Sept. 27, the family was given a document that read, in part, “At your last court appearance, an immigration judge ordered you to return to court for another hearing.” That piece of paper told them to return to court on Nov. 28.

However, the immigration judge ordered no further hearing. Ghazialam’s clients do not have a hearing scheduled on that or any other day.

To confirm Ghazialam’s claims, a reporter called a Department of Justice hotline that people with immigration court cases use to check their status and dates of future hearings. That hotline confirmed that the family’s case had been terminated on Sept. 17 and that “the system does not contain any information regarding a future hearing date on your case.”

“That date is completely made up and the Mexican authorities are not trained enough to know this is a fake court date,” Ghazialam said.

After being returned to Mexico, the mother was stabbed in the forearm while protecting her children from an attempted kidnapping. She still has stitches from the wound, Ghazialam said.

The mother presented herself at the border shortly after the stabbing. She told Customs and Border Protection agents that she was afraid to stay in Mexico. The agents gave her a fear of return interview and tried to send her back to Mexico.

But this time, Mexican immigration officials refused to let her and her children back into Mexico because they did not have a court date, Ghazialam said. She is currently with relatives in New York, waiting to figure out the future of her legal status in the United States while wearing an ankle monitor.

In most of these cases, immigration attorneys aren’t aware that their clients were sent back to Mexico until it’s too late.

In one case, a Cuban asylum seeker was returned to Mexico after an immigration judge in Brownsville, Texas, granted her asylum.

The woman’s lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, remembers hugging her client after the decision and arranging a place to meet after authorities released her later that day following processing.

Goodwin expected the process to take 45 minutes, so she went to a nearby Whataburger and ordered a chocolate milkshake. About 40 minutes later, she got a phone call from her client.

“She was hysterical and crying,” Goodwin said. “I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and she says, ‘I’m in Mexico.’ ”

Goodwin called U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities to try to find out what happened. She spent five hours at the border until 9 p.m. and then went home to draft a lawsuit. It wasn’t until she threatened to sue CBP that her client was paroled into the United States.

“It was total chaos for 24 hours to try to figure it out,” Goodwin said. “It shouldn’t be like that, especially when CBP is blatantly lying. They are creating documents that have false information.”

The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said it was worried about the practice.

“The idea that even though these vulnerable individuals are able to obtain an asylum grant from an immigration judge and CBP is sending them back to harm’s way in Mexico is really disturbing, especially under the guise that there’s a future hearing date,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the organization.

Mexico’s National Institute of Migration did not immediately respond to questions about this practice.

Although Ghazialam and Goodwin were able to eventually get their clients back into the United States, some people are still in Mexico.

That’s what happened to a Guatemalan woman and her two children after a judge terminated their case on Oct. 18. The same day the judge closed their case, a U.S. immigration official gave her a piece of paper with the false hearing date of Jan. 16.

“But this appointment does not exist,” said the woman’s New York City attorney, Rebecca Press. “If you check with the immigration court system, there is no January hearing date and the case has already been terminated.”

It’s unclear how widespread this practice is. Lawyers in San Diego; Laredo, Texas; and Brownsville confirmed they have seen it firsthand.

However, only about 1% of asylum seekers in the Migrant Protection Protocols program have lawyers. Therefore it’s difficult to track what happens to the overwhelming majority of the people in the program.

Lawyers said asylum seekers without legal representation who have been sent back in this manner probably have no way of advocating for themselves. It took Goodwin hours of calls to high-level officials in both U.S. and Mexican immigration agencies plus the threat of a lawsuit to get her client back into the United States.

“If you don’t have someone who’s willing to sit around and spend five hours on the phone and stay up all night drafting litigation to force their hand, you’re going to be stuck,” she said.

As news of these false hearing dates spread among the immigration attorney community, some lawyers are taking proactive steps to protect their clients from being returned to Mexico after their court cases are closed.

Siobhan Waldron, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote a letter to Mexican immigration officials explaining that her client had no future hearing date and outlined a step-by-step process Mexican officials could take to verify that her client’s case had been closed by using the Department of Justice hotline.

The letter worked at first.

When CBP officers tried to return Waldron’s client to Mexico on Nov. 1 with a false January hearing date, her client showed the note to Mexican officials, who refused to take her in. However, the next day, CBP officers sent Waldron’s client back to Mexico with another false court date and this time did not allow her to show Mexican officials her lawyer’s letter that she kept in a special folder, Waldron said.

“They didn’t let her take it out,” Waldron said. “They said, ‘You can’t present anything from that folder.’ ”

The lawyer plans to file “any complaint you can imagine” to CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and other regulatory agencies because “these agents need to be held accountable.”

Her client is still in Mexico, too afraid to walk outside because she has already been kidnapped and assaulted, Waldron said.

Solis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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As my friend Laura Lynch points out, the individuals affected by this judicially-enabled outrage are not just “asylum applicants” – they include those who have been GRANTED ASYLUM as well as those whose removal proceedings were terminated because a U.S. Immigration Judge found that DHS ILLEGALLY SUBJECTED THEM to the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program.”

The 9^th Circuit’s horrible and incompetent handling of Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan will live in infamy as a monumental judicial abdication of duty that has actually harmed or killed innocent asylum seekers while inspiring DHS to new heights of illegal behavior and contempt for our entire legal system.

Why have a “Judicial Branch” that won’t stand up for individual legal rights in the face of Executive tyranny, overreach, and downright fraud? What are these robed folks doing to earn their lifetime paychecks? And, given the quality and philosophy of many of Trump”s judicial appointments, rammed through a corrupt GOP Senate by “Moscow Mitch,” these are questions the majority of Americans might be asking for decades to come!

PWS

11-08-19

HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/doj-changed-hiring-promote-restrictive-immigration-judges?fbclid=IwAR2VfI3AKcttNoXlc_MX0sa-6X94bsOWF4btxb7tWDBz7Es4bvqB63oZA-0

Tanvi Misra reports for Roll Call:

DOJ changed hiring to promote restrictive immigration judges

New practice permanently placed judges on powerful appellate board, documents show

Posted Oct 29, 2019 2:51 PM

Tanvi Misra

@Tanvim

More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border DHS advances plan to get DNA samples from immigrant detainees White House plans to cut refugee admittance to all-time low

Error! Filename not specified.

James McHenry, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, testifies before a Senate panel in 2018. Memos from McHenry detail changes in hiring practices for six restrictive judges placed permanently on the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Department of Justice has quietly changed hiring procedures to permanently place immigration judges repeatedly accused of bias to a powerful appellate board, adding to growing worries about the politicization of the immigration court system.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests describe how an already opaque hiring procedure was tweaked for the six newest hires to the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals. All six board members, added in August, were immigration judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates. Some also had the highest number of decisions in 2017 that the same appellate body sent back to them for reconsideration. All six members were immediately appointed to the board without a yearslong probationary period.

[More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border]

“They’re high-level deniers who’ve done some pretty outrageous things [in the courtroom] that would make you believe they’re anti-immigrant,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and past senior legal adviser at the board. “It’s a terrifying prospect … They have power over thousands of lives.”

Among the hiring documents are four recommendation memos to the Attorney General’s office from James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system.

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The memos, dated July 18, recommend immigration judges William A. Cassidy, V. Stuart Couch, Earle B. Wilson, and Keith E. Hunsucker to positions on the appellate board. McHenry’s memos note new hiring procedures had been established on March 8, to vet “multiple candidates” expressing interest in the open board positions.

A footnote in the memos states that applicants who are immigration judges would be hired through a special procedure: Instead of going through the typical two-year probationary period, they would be appointed to the board on a permanent basis, immediately. This was because a position on the appellate board “requires the same or similar skills” as that of an immigration judge, according to the memo.

Appellate board members, traditionally hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, are tasked with reviewing judicial decisions appealed by the government or plaintiff. Their decisions, made as part of a three-member panel, can set binding precedents that adjudicators and immigration judges rely on for future cases related to asylum, stays of deportation, protections for unaccompanied minors and other areas.

McHenry, appointed in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concludes his recommendation memos by noting that the judge’s “current federal service was vetted and no negative information that would preclude his appointment” was reported. He does not mention any past or pending grievances, although public complaints have been filed against at least three of the judges.

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These documents, obtained through FOIA via Muckrock, a nonprofit, collaborative that pushes for government transparency, and shared with CQ Roll Call, reflect “the secrecy with which these rules are changing,” said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. “It’s very hard to remove or discipline a judge that’s permanent than when it’s probationary, so this has long term implications.”

‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have left’: Migrant laments ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Volume 90%

The Department of Justice declined to answer a series of questions asked by CQ Roll Call regarding the new hiring practices, why exemptions were made in the case of these immigration judges and whether complaints against any of the judges were considered.

“Board members, like immigration judges, are selected through an open, competitive, and merit-based process involving an initial review by the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent, multiple levels of review by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ official wrote via email. “This process includes review by several career officials. The elevation of trial judges to appellate bodies is common in almost every judicial system, and EOIR is no different.”

Homestead: On the front lines of the migrant children debate

Volume 90%

Opaque hiring process

When the department posted the six board vacancies in March, the openings reflected the first time that board members would be allowed to serve from immigration courts throughout the country. Previously, the entire appellate board worked out of its suburban Virginia headquarters.

In addition, the job posts suggested that new hires would be acting in a dual capacity: They may be asked to adjudicate cases at the trial court level and then also review the court decisions appealed to the board. Previously, board members stuck to reviewing appeals cases, a process that could take more than a year.

Ultimately, all six hires were immigration judges, although past board candidates have come from government service, private sector, academia and nonprofits.

“This was stunning,” MaryBeth Keller, chief immigration judge until she stepped down this summer, said in a recent interview with The Asylumist, a blog about asylum issues. “I can’t imagine that the pool of applicants was such that only [immigration judges] would be hired, including two from the same city.”

Keller said immigration judges are “generally eminently qualified to be board members, but to bring in all six from the immigration court? I’d like to think that the pool of applicants was more diverse than that.”

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who headed the board under President Bill Clinton, said the panel always had arbitrary hiring procedures that changed with each administration and suffered from “quality control” issues. But the Trump administration has “pushed the envelope the furthest,” he said.

“This administration has weaponized the process,” he told CQ Roll Call. “They have taken a system that has some notable weaknesses in it and exploited those weaknesses for their own ends.”

The reputation and track record of the newest immigration judges has also raised eyebrows.

According to an analysis of EOIR data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, each of these newest six judges had an asylum denial rate over 80 percent, with Couch, Cassidy, and Wilson at 92, 96, and 98 percent, respectively. Nationally, the denial rate for asylum cases is around 57 percent. Previous to their work as immigration judges, all six had worked on behalf of government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the military.

“It mirrors a lot of the concerns at the trial level,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). She said several new hires at the trial level have been Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys.

“Every day across the country, people’s lives hang in the balance waiting for immigration judges to decide their fate,” she said. “Asylum grant rates for immigration court cases vary widely depending on the judge, suggesting that outcomes may turn on which judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”

Immigration experts note that denial rates depend on a variety of factors, including the number and types of cases that appear on a judge’s docket. Perhaps a better measure of an immigration judge’s decision-making may be the rate that rulings get returned by the appeals board.

For 2017, the last full year for which data is available, Couch and Wilson had the third and fourth highest number of board-remanded cases — at 50 and 47 respectively, according to federal documents obtained by Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer. The total number of cases on their dockets that year were 176 and 416, respectively.

Some of the behavior by the newer judges also have earned them a reputation. In 2018, AILA obtained 11 complaints against Cassidy that alleged prejudice against immigrant respondents. In a public letter the Southern Poverty Law Center sent last year to McHenry, the group complained that Cassidy bullied migrants in his court. He also asked questions that “exceeded his judicial authority,” Center lawyers wrote.

Another letter, sent in 2017 by SPLC lawyers and an Emory University law professor whose students observed Cassidy’s court proceedings, noted the judge “analogized an immigrant to ‘a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood’ and asked the attorney if he would let that person in.”

SPLC also has documented issues with Wilson, noting how he “routinely leaned back in his chair, placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes” during one hearing. “He held this position for more than 20 minutes as a woman seeking asylum described the murders of her parents and siblings.”

Couch’s behavior and his cases have made news. According to Mother Jones, he once lost his temper with a 2-year-old Guatemalan child, threatening to unleash a dog on the boy if he didn’t stop making noise. But he is perhaps better known as the judge who denied asylum to “Ms. A.B.,” a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor, even after the appellate board asked him to reconsider. Sessions, the attorney general at the time, ultimately intervened and made the final precedent-setting ruling in the case.

Couch has a pattern of denying asylum to women who have fled domestic violence, “despite clear instructions to the contrary” from the appellate board, according to Johnson, the immigration lawyer who said Couch “has been prejudging all claims that have a history of domestic violence, and quite literally copying and pasting language he used to deny other domestic violence victims asylum.”

Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte-based immigration lawyer and second vice president at AILA, went to law school with Couch and called him “complex.” While he was reluctant to characterize the judge as “anti-immigrant,” he acknowledged “concerning” stories about the Couch’s court demeanor.

“In our conversations, he’s held the view that asylum is not the right vehicle for some individuals to immigrate to the U.S. — it’s one I disagree with,” McKinney said. “But I feel quite certain that that’s exactly why he was hired.”

Politicizing court system

Increasingly, political appointees are “micromanaging” the dockets of immigration judges, said Ashley Tabaddor, head of the union National Association of Immigration Judges. Appointees also are making moves that jeopardize their judicial independence, she said. Among them: requiring judges to meet a quota of 700 completed cases per year; referring cases even if they are still in the midst of adjudication to political leadership, including the Attorney General, for the final decision; and seeking to decertify the immigration judges’ union.

These are “symptoms of a bigger problem,” said Tabaddor. “If you have a court that’s situated in the law enforcement agency … that is the fundamental flaw that needs to be corrected.”

In March, the American Bar Association echoed calls by congressional Democrats to investigate DOJ hiring practices in a report that warned the department’s “current approach will elevate speed over substance, exacerbate the lack of diversity on the bench, and eliminate safeguards that could lead to a resurgence of politicized hiring.”

“Moreover, until the allegations of politically motivated hiring can be resolved, doubt will remain about the perceived and perhaps actual fairness of immigration proceedings,” the organization wrote. “The most direct route to resolving these reasonable and important concerns would be for DOJ to publicize its hiring criteria, and for the inspector general to conduct an investigation into recent hiring practices.”

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One of the most disgusting developments, that the media sometimes misses, is that having skewed and biased the system specifically against Central American asylum seekers, particularly women and children, the Administration uses their “cooked” and “bogus” statistics to make a totally disingenuous case that the high denial rates show the system is being abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers. That, along with the “fiction of the asylum no show” been one of “Big Mac’s” most egregious and oft repeated lies! There certainly is systemic abuse taking place here — but it is by the Trump Administration, not asylum seekers and their courageous lawyers.

This system is a national disgrace operating under the auspices of a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts whose life-tenured judges are failing in their collective duty to put an end to this blatantly unconstitutional system: one that also violates statutory provisions intended to give migrants access to counsel, an opportunity to fully present and document their cases to an unbiased decision maker, and a fair opportunity to seek asylum regardless of status or manner of entry. Basically, judges at all levels who are complicit in this mockery of justice are “robed killers.”

Just a few years ago, asylum seekers were winning the majority of individual rulings on asylum in Immigration Court. Others were getting lesser forms of protection, so that more than 60 percent of asylum applicants who got final decisions in Immigration Court were receiving much-needed, life-saving protection. That’s exactly what one would expect given the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in 1987 about the generous standards applicable to asylum seekers in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca.

Today, conditions have not improved materially in most “refugee sending countries.” Indeed, this Administration’s bogus designation of the Northern Triangle “failed states” as “Safe Third Countries” is absurd and shows their outright contempt for the system and their steadfast belief that the Federal Judiciary will “tank” on their responsibility to hold this Executive accountable.

As a result of this reprehensible conduct, the favorable trend in asylum adjudication has been sharply reversed. Now, approximately two-thirds of asylum cases are being denied, many based on specious “adverse credibility” findings, illegal “nexus” findings that intentionally violate the doctrine of “mixed motives”enshrined in the statute, absurdly unethical and illegal rewriting of asylum precedents by Sessions and Barr, intentional denial of the statutory right to counsel, and overt coercion through misuse of DHS detention authority to improperly “punish” and “deter” legal asylum seekers.

Right under the noses of complicit Article III Judges and Congress, the Trump Administration has “weaponized” the Immigration “Courts” and made them an intentionally hostile environment for asylum seekers and their, often pro bono or low bono, lawyers. How is this acceptable in 21^st Century America?

That’s why it’s important for members of the “New Due Process Army” to remember my “5 Cs Formula” – Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make these folks with “no skin the game” feel the pain and be morally accountable for those human lives they are destroying by inaction in the face of Executive illegality and tyranny from their “ivory tower perches.”

We’re in a war for the survival of our democracy and the future of humanity. There is only one “right side” in this battle. History will remember who stood tall and who went small when individual rights, particularly the rights to Due Process and fair treatment for the most vulnerable among us, were under attack by the lawless forces of White Nationalism and their enablers!

PWS

10-31-19

HOW TRUMP, COMPLICIT COURTS, FECKLESS CONGRESS, AND DHS ARE KILLING MORE CHILDREN AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER WHILE HELPING HUMAN SMUGGLERS STRIKE IT RICH – “Malicious Incompetence” Fueled By Judicial Dereliction Of Duty & Congressional Malpractice Is A Boon to The Bad Guys! – “Most of all, he sees no end to the ways he can make profits off the border crackdown. He makes a joke out of it.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-19/a-smuggler-describes-how-children-die-and-he-gets-rich-on-border

Nacha Cattan reports for Bloomberg News:

Children Die at Record Speed on U.S. Border While Coyotes Get Rich

Deaths of women and children trying to cross into U.S. set record in first nine months of the year, UN research project finds

By

Nacha Cattan

October 19, 2019, 8:00 AM EDT

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Roberto the coyote can see a stretch of border fence from his ranch in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, about a mile south of El Paso. Smuggling drugs and people to “el otro lado,” the other side, has been his life’s work.

There’s always a way, he says, no matter how hard U.S. President Donald Trump tries to stop the flow. But this year’s crackdown has made it a tougher proposition. A deadlier one, too—especially for women and children, who are increasingly dying in the attempt.

Not much surprises Roberto, who asks not to be identified by his surname because he engages in illegal activity. Sitting on a creaky metal chair, shaded by quince trees and speaking above the din from a gaggle of fighting roosters, the 65-year-old grabs a twig and scratches lines in the sand to show how he stays a step ahead of U.S. and Mexican security forces.

Here’s a gap in the fence that migrants can dash through—onto land owned by American ranchers in his pay. There’s a spot U.S. patrols often pass, so he’s hiring more people to keep watch and cover any footprints with leaf-blowers.

Coyote Roberto, on Aug. 28.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Roberto says he was taken aback in July this year, when he was approached for the first time by parents with young children. For coyotes, as the people-smugglers are known in Mexico, that wasn’t the typical customer profile. Roberto asked around among his peers. “They were also receiving a lot of families,” he says. “Many, many families are crossing over.”

That helps explain one of the grimmer statistics to emerge from all the turmoil on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Even more than usual, the 2,000-mile frontier has turned into a kind of tectonic fault line this year. Poverty and violence—and the pull of the world’s richest economy—are driving people north. At the border, they’re met by a new regime of tightened security and laws, imposed by Trump in tandem with his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO.

Some give up and go home; some wait and hope—and some try evermore dangerous ways to get through.

Nineteen children died during attempted crossings in the first nine months of 2019, by drowning, dehydration or illness, according to the UN’s “Missing Migrants” research project. That’s up from four reported through September 2018 and by far the most since the project began gathering data in 2014, when two died that entire year. Women are dying in greater numbers, too—44 in the year through September, versus 14 last year.

A 9 month-old baby sleeps inside El Buen Pastor migrant shelter, on Aug. 29. The baby had been in and out of hospitals due to respiratory illnesses during his shelter stay.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Many of those families are fleeing crime epidemics in Central America, as well as economic shocks. Prices of coffee—a key export—in the region plunged this year to the lowest in more than a decade, crushing farmers.

Making matters worse, climate change will produce more frequent crop failures for those growers that will, in turn, drive more migration, said Eleanor Paynter, a fellow at Ohio State University. “Asylum law does not currently recognize climate refugees,” she said, “but in the coming years we will see more and more.”

The demand side is equally fluid. When the Great Recession hit in 2007, a slumping U.S. economy led to a sharp drop in arrivals from Mexico and Central America. Today, the reverse is true: Record-low unemployment in the U.S. is attracting huge numbers from Central America.

Recession Factor

The U.S. economy’s slump a decade ago coincided with a sharp drop in migrant arrivals from Central America

Source: Estimates by Stephanie Leutert, director of Mexico Security Institute at University of Texas, based on model created for Lawfare blog

But none of those factors fully explains why so many families are now willing to take such great risks. To understand that, it’s necessary to go back to the birth of the “Remain in Mexico” policy in January, when new U.S. rules made it much harder to seek asylum on arrival—and its escalation in June, when Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican goods, and AMLO agreed to deploy 26,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The crackdown was aimed at Central Americans—mostly from such poor, violent countries as El Salvador and Honduras—who’d been entering the U.S. through Mexico in growing numbers. Many would cross the border, turn themselves in and apply for asylum, then wait in the U.S. for a court hearing. That route was especially favored by migrants with young children, who were likely to be released from detention faster.

Under the new policy, they were sent back to Mexico by the tens of thousands and required to wait in dangerous border towns for a court date. They might wait in shelters for months for their number to be called, with only 10 or 20 families being interviewed each day. Word was getting back that applications weren’t being approved, anyway.

A white cross marks the death of a person near the border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

That pushed thousands of families into making a tough decision. Juan Fierro, who runs the El Buen Pastor shelter for migrants in Ciudad Juarez, reckons that about 10% of the Central Americans who’ve stayed with him ended up going back home. In Tijuana, a border town hundreds of miles west, Jose Maria Garcia Lara—who also runs a shelter—says some 30% of families instead headed for the mountains outside the city on their way to the U.S. “They’re trying to cross,” he says, “in order to disappear.”

The family that approached Roberto in Ciudad Juarez wanted to take a less physically dangerous route: across the bridge into El Paso.

Roberto has infrastructure in place for both options. He says his people can run a pole across the Rio Grande when the river’s too high, and they have cameras on the bridge to spot when a guard’s back is turned. He has a sliding price scale, charging $7,500 for children and an extra $1,000 for Central Americans—fresh proof of studies that have shown smugglers’ prices rise with tighter border controls. “They pay a bundle to get their kids across,” he says. “Why don’t they just open a small grocery with that money?”

Typically, migrants don’t come from the very poorest communities in their home countries, where people struggle to cover such coyote costs, or from the middle class. Rather, they represent a range from $5,000 to $10,000 per capita in 2009 dollars, according to Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington. This happens to be the level that the economies of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have reached.

A mother and her 5-month-old baby has lived in a migrant shelter since July, waiting for their November court date, on Aug. 29.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez

For the family going across the bridge into El Paso, Roberto wanted to send the parents and children separately, to attract less attention. Ideally, the kids would be asleep, making the guards less likely to stop the car and ask questions. But that raised another problem. He resolved it by arranging for a woman on his team to visit the family and spend three days playing with the children. That way, they’d be used to her and wouldn’t cry out if they woke up while she was taking them across.

Roberto says the family made it safely into the U.S. with their false IDs, a claim that couldn’t be confirmed. He earned about $35,000 from the family, and soon after had another three children with their parents seek passage. “They want to cross, no matter what,” he says. “I don’t know where the idea comes from that you can stop this.”

But people are being stopped and turned back, and the number of migrants caught crossing the U.S. border has plunged from its peak in May. That has allowed Trump to portray the new policy as a success. (Mexican officials tend to agree, though the Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Yet it’s not that simple. Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, said the flow northward initially surged because Trump threatened to close the border, setting off a wave of migrant caravans and smuggling activity. Arrests rose 90% through September from a year earlier, but they’re now at the same levels they were before the surge.

Enrique Garcia was one of those arrested. A 36-year-old from Suchitepequez in Guatemala, he was struggling to feed his three children on the $150 a month he earned as a janitor. So he pawned a $17,000 plot of land to a coyote in exchange for passage to the U.S. for him and his son.

They slipped into Mexico in August on a boarded-up cattle truck, with eight other adults and children, and drove the length of the country, to Juarez. The coyotes dropped them by car at the nearby crossing point called Palomas, where they literally ran for it.

After 45 minutes in the summer heat, Garcia was getting worried about his son, who was falling behind and calling out for water. But they made it past the Mexican National Guard and gave themselves up to a U.S. border patrol, pleading to be allowed to stay. Instead, they were sent back to Mexico and given a January court date.

Children play outside a migrant shelter while a women hand washes clothing in a sink.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Garcia, who recounted the story from a bunk bed in a Juarez shelter, said he was devastated. He couldn’t figure out what to do for five months in Mexico, with no prospect of work. His coyotes had managed to reestablish contact with the group, and most of them—with children in tow—had decided to try again. This time, they wouldn’t be relying on the asylum process. They’d try to make it past the border patrols and vanish into the U.S.

But Garcia decided he’d already put his son’s life at risk once, and wouldn’t do it again. He scrounged $250 to take the boy home to Guatemala. Then, he said, he’d head back up to the border alone. He wouldn’t need to pay the coyotes again. They’d given him a special offer when he signed away his land rights—two crossing attempts for the price of one.

Researchers say there’s a more effective deterrent to such schemes: opening more lawful channels. Clemens, at the Center for Global Development, noted that illegal immigration from Mexico dropped in recent years after U.S. authorities increased the supply of H-2 visas for temporary work, almost all of them going to Mexicans—a trend that’s continued under Trump.

The current debate in Washington assumes that “hardcore enforcement and security assistance in Central America will be enough, without any kind of expansion of lawful channels,” Clemens said. “That flies in the face of the lessons of history.”

The Legal Route

Illegal crossings by Mexicans have plunged. They’re now much more likely to enter the U.S. with temporary H-2 work visas

Source: Calculations by Cato Institute’s David Bier based on DHS, State Dept data

A hard-security-only approach deters some migrants, while channeling others into riskier routes where they’re more likely to die. That’s what happened after Europe’s crackdown on migration from across the Mediterranean, according to Paynter at Ohio State, who’s studied data from the UN’s “Missing Migrants” project. In 2019, “even though the total number of attempted crossings is lower, the rate of death is three times what it was,” she said.

A child plays outside a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juarez.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

As for Roberto, he expresses sadness at the children who’ve died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. He claims he would’ve tried to help them, even if they couldn’t pay.

Most of all, he sees no end to the ways he can make profits off the border crackdown. He makes a joke out of it.

“I’m hearing Trump wants to throw crocodiles in the river,” he says. “Guess what will happen? We’ll eat them.” And then: “Their skin is expensive. We’ll start a whole new business. It’ll bring in money, because we’ll make boots, belts and wallets. We’ll look real handsome.”

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

The “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy” is as evil and immoral as it is stupid and incompetent.

But, that shouldn’t lessen the responsibility of complicit Article III Appellate Judges (including the Supremes) and a sleazy and immoral GOP Senate who are failing to stand up for our Constitution, the rule of law, and human rights. They should not be allowed to escape accountability for their gross derelictions of duty which are killing kids with regularity and unconscionably abusing vulnerable asylum seekers on a daily basis.

America can’t afford to be governed by idiots abetted by the spineless. Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight to save our country, our Constitution, and humanity from evil, incompetence, and disgusting complicity.

PWS

10-31-19

IN SUDDEN REVERSAL, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WILL NOW EXTEND TPS FOR SALVADORANS — Likely A “Payoff” For Corrupt “Safe Third Country” Agreement With El Salvador!

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-28/trump-administration-extends-tps-for-salvadorans-allowing-thousands-to-stay-in-u-s

Molly O’Toole & Tracy Wilkinson report for the LA Times:

The Trump administration on Monday extended Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Salvadorans in the United States, granting them reprieve from removal to El Salvador.

Administration officials had insisted for weeks that the continuance of TPS was not on the table in exchange for the resumption of aid to the small Central American country, or the signing of a recent agreement on asylum seekers. An estimated 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have TPS, making them the largest single group under the program. Many live in Los Angeles.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a millionaire millennial who has had warm words for President Trump and his officials, touted the move in a Twitter announcement on Monday morning as a victory for his newly elected administration.

“They said it was impossible,” Bukele said. “That the Salvadoran government couldn’t do anything. … But we knew that our allies would not abandon us.”

A U.S. District Court in Northern California last October blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating TPS for El Salvador and a handful of other countries. Administration officials have sought to dismantle the program as part of their wider efforts to reduce immigration. TPS offers recipients protection from removal and the right to work legally in the U.S.

The announcement also puts the U.S. in the difficult position of extending a program intended for people fleeing natural disasters or civil unrest, while at the same time effectively designating El Salvador a safe country for asylum seekers. The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Officials have offered little detail of the U.S. asylum agreement with El Salvador, which has yet to take effect. The deal was among several extensively negotiated with so-called Northern Triangle countries by outgoing acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who is due to step down this week.

Central America’s Northern Triangle is an impoverished and violence-ridden region that accounts for the majority of migrants now fleeing to the United States.

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In addition to helping the 200,000 mostly productive long-term Salvadoran TPS residents of the U.S. who lack formal immigration status, the extension benefits both countries. The TPS Salvadorans and their families have been living in fear and uncertainty ever since the Trump Administration announced an intent to terminate Salvadoran TPS (which, naturally, irrationally contravened the advice of its own professional staff and almost all outside experts and appeared to be against the wishes fo the Salvadoran Government).

El Salvador avoids the potential problem of having to resettle several hundred thousand individuals whose homes, family ties, and futures are in the U.S. They also will be able to continue to benefit from the “remissions” that many of these individuals send to family in El Salvador, a significant factor in the Salvadoran economy.

At the same time, the “deal” costs Trump nothing, except for probably some “pushback” from his most ardent White Nationalist supporters.

First, the Administration already was enjoined from terminating the Salvadoran TPS program. Second, with a 1.3 million case largely self-created backlog in the Immigration Courts, the Administration wouldn’t have been able to remove most of the 200,000 individuals at any time in the near future. Third, TPS renewals will likely generate a profit for USCIS for the fees charged for extending work authorizations.

Fourth, and rather ironically, the Salvadorans, along with most of the other 10-11 million so-called undocumented residents of the U.S., are among the “drivers” of U.S. economic prosperity, which is about the only thing propping Trump up these days. Despite the Trump Administration’s string of shamelessly false narratives about the “damage” caused by undocumented workers, their mass removal would undoubtedly “tank” the U.S. economy, at least in the short run.

Of course the “losers” in this are the refugees who continue to pour out of El Salvador and the other essentially “failed states” of the Northern Triangle. They face not only truncation of their legal right to apply for asylum in the United States, but also potential death or mayhem upon forced return or deportation to El Salvador as the result of the bogus “Safe Third Agreement” and equally bogus new requirements that asylum seekers apply in the first country they reach. (El Salvador doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system and is anything but “safe.”)

Perhaps we’ll eventually find out that El Salvador also had to agree to investigate the Biden family as a price for the extension.

PWS

10-29-19

KIRSTJEN NIELSEN’S “REINVENTION” AS A “POWERFUL WOMAN” SHOWS THAT CRUELTY, INHUMANITY, & INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY AREN’T “JUST FOR MEN ONLY” – Ambitious, Amoral “Girl” Shows How To Penetrate The “Good Ol’ Boys’ Network” @ DHS, Destroy Lots Of Innocent Lives, Get On TV!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-the-point-of-a-most-powerful-women-summit-if-kirstjen-nielsen-is-one-of-them/2019/10/23/e3c5d80a-f5a6-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html

Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:

Oct. 23, 2019 at 4:58 p.m. EDT

Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit is the kind of event where you can’t walk 20 steps without being handed the business card of another Powerful Woman, who you know paid $13,500 to be there, because that is the membership fee you would have paid, too, if you were an attendee at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit.Hillary Clinton was supposed to be a featured speaker at the conference in Washington this week, but then she backed out, partly because former homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen, enforcer of the Trump administration’s loathsome child separation policy, was also speaking. Incidentally, so was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii Democrat whom Clinton had just called a “favorite of Russians” in the 2020 race, prompting Gabbard to accuse Clinton of being “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”

Anyway, I decided to go.

Held at the posh Mandarin Oriental hotel, Fortune’s conference is the kind of event where the seminars have titles like, “Co-Opetition: From Competition to Cooperation,” and where the hallways are lined with pressed-juice stands, and pop-up Dior counters providing mini-makeovers, and many, many advertisements for M.M. LaFleur, which is a clothing brand you never need know exists unless you reach a certain age and income level, at which point its logo will stalk you on Facebook. “M.M. LaFleur Live with Purpose. Dress with Ease.”

Wandering around on Monday and Tuesday (using a press pass, not my life savings), I caught sessions featuring congresswomen Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Old Navy CEO Sonia Syngal and feminist icon Anita Hill. The COO of Rothy’s shoes was there, talking about how to build a viral brand, and so were dozen of audience members wearing Rothy’s shoes — evidence that the COO knows of what she speaks — and I am not going to lie, I was wearing Rothy’s, too.

The summit is one of those why-the-hell-not events, is what I’m saying. As in, Icertainly wouldn’t pay for it, but if you want to, go ahead. It’s no weirder than many manly conferences with booths showcasing the latest golf club technology. It’s Goop, but with its feet rooted more on the ground.

Except then, abruptly, it wasn’t. Because Anita Hill finished her Q&A, and the audience members ate our fancy “Networking Lunch,” and then suddenly it was Kirstjen Nielsen on the brightly lit ballroom stage, determinedly dodging every question posed to her by “PBS NewsHour’s” Amna Nawaz.

“I don’t regret enforcing the law because I took an oath to do that,” she said, after Nawaz repeatedly pressed her on whether she regretted signing the memo that greenlighted removing children from their parents at the Mexican border.

Nielsen insisted that she “spoke truth to power from the very beginning” of her tenure, and resigned when it became clear that “saying no” wasn’t enough. But then when Nawaz pointed out that Nielsen had just accepted another position with the administration, on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, Nielsen defended the move: “Are you telling every CEO in here that they should never advise the government?” she asked incredulously.

Nielsen’s interview was over within 15 minutes, and then an event moderator appeared onstage and solemnly addressed the audience: “I know that was intense, and I just want to acknowledge that.”

And then I left the auditorium to get a mango-citrus juice and a perfume spritz and think about Powerful Women.

There’s no doubt that Nielsen is powerful; even before joining Homeland Security, she’d been one of the highest-ranking women in the White House. There’s no doubt that she’s a woman; in public appearances she plays up a traditionally womanly appearance with makeup and high heels.

Those were the basic qualifications for an invitation — but should they have been the only ones? When we talk about “Powerful Women,” should we applaud a woman who used her considerable power to make life difficult for the most powerless among us?

Fortune had titled Nielsen’s session “Hard Questions,” and the questions were appropriately pointed: Nobody tossed her softballs about how she balances work and home life, or how she shoehorns in “me” time. Nobody could have grilled Nielsen harder than Nawaz did, or tried to.

But her presence was so incongruous to the rest of the event — an innocuous, if privileged brand of go-get-’em corporate feminism — that it called into question why we were in that hotel at all.

What, in 2019, is the purpose and organizing principle of an event like the Most Powerful Women Summit? Is it like the Hall of Presidents at Disney World — a non-editorializing showcase of every boldfaced woman Fortune could rustle up to prove that many women are powerful?

Are we saying that Powerful Women are just like powerful men — some good and some bad? Which is true, of course, but then why do we need a separate event for them?

Are we just saying that women like green juice and Rothy’s?

Kirstjen Nielsen deserved to be questioned, hard, for her role in an immensely controversial administration policy. And maybe she accepted this particular engagement, her first since leaving the White House, because she thought she could expect a welcoming audience. One who would embrace her as one of their own because being a lady is rough, am I right? Toward the end of her interview, Nielsen wanly said she thought she was going to be asked more about cybersecurity.

But still, there was something off about it. Here she was, making her reputation-washing debut in a ballroom event celebrating aspirational women, smiling grittily as she informed us that, no, we’d all misremembered the whole past three years.

And most of us had paid $13,500 to be there.

Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.

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

Perhaps cruelty, nastiness, dishonesty, illegality, and inhumanity know no gender bounds. Certainly, Nielsen proved to be every bit as bad and every bit the sycophant as her male counterparts, Kelly & “Big Mac with Lies.” The relatives of the dead and those who have suffered unnecessarily and continue to suffer because of her lack of integrity are out there to reflect on the true nature and consequences of her “power” and “legacy.”

One of Nielsen’s most notable “achievements,” in addition to child separation and “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico,” was assisting Sessions & Barr in stripping battered, abused, and tortured women of their ability to gain protection under our asylum laws. Indeed, Nielsen went one better: she was a key player in Trump’s scheme to make women, children, and everybody else fleeing the Northern Triangle of Central America ineligible to apply for asylum at all, thus reversing decades of U.S. commitment to human rights and fundamental fairness. Wow, that’s like “Superwoman” stuff!

Monica Hesse is a well-known author and talented storyteller in addition to being a great journalist. I hope that one of her future projects will be to tell the stories of those whose lives were turned into living hell just because they had the audacity to seek protection under our laws in an attempt to save or better their lives and those of their families. Survival, asserting rights, evincing humanity, expecting kindness, fairness, and compassion: what greater “crimes” could there be in Trump’s America?

Sure, Nielsen might not have quite gotten down to the moral depravity of neo-Nazis like Miller and “Cooch Cooch,” the “custom designers” of Trump’s cowardly attacks on migrants, refugees, and human dignity. That’s a low bar to get under. But, that makes her neither a good person nor an appropriate role model for women (or men) seeking to possess power and engage in true leadership.

It’s incredible to me that with all the brave, courageous, talented, and powerful women involved in leadership positions in the field of immigration and human rights – legislators, journalists, jurists, lawyers, artists, professors, ministers, social workers, NGO executives and managers, teachers, medical professionals, etc., — Nielsen was the best “role model” they could find!

Next year, the folks over at Fortune Maggie should give me a ring. I could give them the names of dozens of brilliant, talented, committed women who are “leading by example” – putting themselves and their values “on the line” every day to save lives and tend to the most vulnerable among us. And, of course, in doing so they actually are saving all of us. Because, to paraphrase MLK, Jr., harm to the most vulnerable among is harm to all of us.

I also have lots of suggestions as to where Fortune could donate the proceeds of the “Most Powerful Women Summit” to actually promote the responsible use of power for women and men: to actually make the world a better place, not just to “jack up” resumes or collect impressive, but largely meaningless, titles and accolades.

DUE PROCESS FOREVER, CORRUPT FORMER PUBLIC OFFICIALS NEVER!

PWS

10-24-19

“BIG MAC” SAYS EL SALVADOR IS A “SAFE” COUNTRY – HE LIES! — Mounting “Disappearances” & Government Acquiescence Show Why “Big Mac,” Pompeo, Pence, Trump & Other Corrupt Architects Of Unlawful Policies Designed To Kill Asylum Seekers (For “Deterrence”) Should Be Charged With “Crimes Against Humanity!” – “The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/disappeared-in-el-salvador-amid-a-cold-war-nightmares-return-a-tale-of-one-body-and-three-grieving-families/2019/10/19/d806d19a-e09d-11e9-be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html

Anna-Catherine Brigida
Freelance Reporter

Mary Beth Sheridan and

report for the WashPost:

By

Mary Beth Sheridan and

Anna-Catherine Brigida

Oct. 19, 2019 at 2:58 p.m. EDT

LAS ANIMAS, El Salvador — For Daisy Flores, Day 135 began like so many others. She soaked corn in a bucket on the dirt floor for tortillas. She washed the kids’ clothes in a blue plastic bin. And she thought, again, about that afternoon in May when her 18-year-old son Edwin rode off on his brother’s motorcycle.He still hasn’t come home.

Twenty miles away, in a working-class neighborhood in San Salvador, Karen was plodding through Day 297. She coped by writing notes to her absent husband and taping them to the bedroom wall.

“I send you a little kiss,” she’d scrawled to the man who had disappeared last year while delivering electricity bills. And: “I can’t take it anymore.”

Not far from her, a third family endured another Monday without their loved one. The middle-aged man had gone missing on his way home from his plumbing job. Was it already Day 192? They’d searched everywhere. Nothing.

AD

Three decades after a brutal civil war characterized by never-explained, never-resolved disappearances, Salvadorans are again vanishing.

The phenomenon is resurrecting one of the most chilling elements of Cold War Latin America. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people disappeared as right-wing governments — many supported by the United States — fought to extinguish leftist insurgencies.

These days, countries such as Mexico, Brazil and El Salvador are battered by criminal wars. The governments aren’t fighting Marxist guerrillas, but gangs and drug cartels instead.

In Mexico, more than 3,000 clandestine gravesites have been unearthed as families search for the 40,000 missing. In El Salvador, few of the burial sites have been found.

Which is why, when the government discovered one outside the capital last month, TV reporters rushed to the scene — and dozens of families began to wonder if their mystery would finally end.

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“I know he’s here,” said the mother of a 14-year-old.

“I am always hoping,” Karen said.

“They haven’t told me anything,” Flores said.

But for one family, things were about to change.

Mexican government says more than 3,000 hidden graves found in the search for the disappeared

A soldier guards a farm in El Limon, where investigators found a clandestine grave with human remains. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

No one knows exactly how many people in El Salvador have gone missing. National police say at least 2,457 people were reported disappeared in 2018, the most in a dozen years. The attorney general’s office puts the figure at 3,437 — more than the total of homicides. Both numbers are widely seen as undercounts.

For Flores, her son’s disappearance was a new version of an old nightmare. Her two uncles were among the at least 8,000 people who vanished during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

That was another era — of death squads, the Reagan Doctrine against communism, guerrillas wielding red banners and AK-47s. El Salvador today is a democracy, with free elections and onetime Marxists in congress.

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So why are disappearances back?

One reason is they make it easier for killers to avoid investigation. That goes both for gang members killing their rivals and for cops secretly executing suspects.

“If there is no body, there’s no evidence,” said Marvin Reyes, who spent 20 years in the national police.

But the disappearances also reflect a political strategy. That became evident when El Salvador’s top two gangs reached a government-backed truce in 2012. The homicide rate — among the highest in the hemisphere — plunged. But disappearances rose.

“If violence needed to be carried out [by gangs], it needed to be invisible, to avoid attention from state authorities,” said Angélica Durán Martínez, who studies Latin American violence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Analysts suspect the gangs and the government hide corpses to keep the homicide rate down.

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It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country

Karen looks through the window of her bedroom. Her husband went missing in San Salvador last November. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Trump administration reaches deal to send asylum seekers to El Salvador in an effort to deter migrants from entering the United States

For victims’ families, the uncertainty is cruel: There’s no resolution, no body to bury, no hope of closure. “We have so much stress,” said Karen, a 39-year-old mother of three.

She and her kids try to keep their minds on work and school, but their bodies betray them: Karen’s insomnia, her son’s overeating, her daughter’s wildly oscillating periods.

She believes her husband was abducted because he refused to hide a gang’s weapons in the family’s home. She is so frightened of retaliation that she spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.

Daisy Flores, 47, also suspects her son was hauled away by gang members.

Edwin was perhaps the most affectionate of her seven kids. The kind of boy who would sneak up behind her at the stove and grab her in a bear hug. Who wasn’t embarrassed to accompany his mama to the market.

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She doesn’t think he was a gang member. But: “I can’t tell you what kind of friends he had.” Everyone knew that MS-13 dominated their hamlet, a woodsy patch of small, concrete homes surrounded by fields where campesinos grew corn and raised cows and chickens. Nearby villages were ruled by the rival gang Barrio 18 .

Edwin’s absence is a constant torment. One of his brothers was so terrified that he considered migrating to the United States, like tens of thousands of Salvadorans in recent years.

Whenever Daisy thought of her missing son, she’d lose her appetite.

“I can’t live like this, learning nothing,” she said.

But in recent months, there was a new reason for hope.

Nayib Bukele, the charismatic young mayor of San Salvador, was elected president in February on promises of change.

“They say the president, now, he’s helping people,” Daisy said. “And that if you go to the attorney general, he’s helping to find the disappeared.”

A crusading attorney general promises answers

El Salvador Attorney General Raúl Melara and investigators arrive at the clandestine gravesite, under heavy guard, in Barrio 18 territory. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

U.S. officials said aid to El Salvador helped slow migration. Now Trump is canceling it.

Attorney General Raúl Melara hopped out of an SUV and strode toward the yellow police tape.

“Is it up here?” he asked.

At 47, Melara was part of El Salvador’s tiny business elite, with a doctorate in law and years of leading the National Association of Private Enterprise. He had swept-back dark hair and wire-framed glasses and favored starched white shirts. But on this afternoon, he had donned jeans, a gray polo shirt and a windbreaker to visit the village outside San Salvador known as El Limon — notorious territory of Barrio 18.

Melara scrambled up a nearly vertical dirt path alongside a dying cornfield, trampling vines and brushing through shoulder-high grass. A quarter-mile up lay a clearing, with mounds of freshly dug dirt and a body.

It had been a man in jeans and work boots.

More bodies would probably be dug up in the coming weeks, Melara told journalists. The new government, he said, was committed to finding the disappeared and punishing the culprits.

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“This is a phenomenon that, in past years, was hidden. They didn’t want it to be visible,” he told the TV cameras. “But we’re all seeing it.”

In just a few months, Melara had made some aggressive moves. He’d formed a team of prosecutors to focus on the disappeared. He’d promoted tougher penalties for those involved in the crime. He was working with the police to produce more accurate numbers.

Reform and revival: Gang members find Christianity in El Salvador prisons

Some were skeptical. It wasn’t until 2017 — a quarter-century after the civil war’s end — that the government finally created a commission to search for the disappeared from that conflict. And locating the more recent victims could be politically unpalatable in a country obsessed with the murder rate.

“Finding and identifying these bodies will inevitably imply a rise in the homicide index,” said Celia Medrano of the human-rights group Cristosal .

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Arnau Baulenas, legal coordinator of the Human Rights Institute at the José Simeón Cañas University of Central America, said Melara’s initiatives were positive but insufficient.

“The attorney general has a very small team,” he noted. There are so few forensic criminologists that one of them — Israel Ticas — has become a celebrity for helping mothers find the remains of their children.

Melara knows he lacks money, equipment and expertise. It sometimes seems the only thing that’s not in short supply is fear.

“In Mexico, the families of the victims are visible,” he told The Washington Post. “They’ve generated social pressure.”

El Salvador is different. Indeed, at El Limon, as the investigators shoveled dirt, a mother in blue flip-flops approached. Her son vanished a year ago, at age 14.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, weeping, in a TV interview. “Even if he’s not alive, and it’s just to bury him.”

But she begged the cameraman not to identify her. He filmed her feet.

There was no sign of her son. On Day 2 of the dig, though, investigators discovered a tantalizing clue near the body.

It was a wallet. Inside was an ID card.

During Pompeo’s visit, El Salvador’s new president says migrant problem ‘starts with us’

The site where investigators found the remains of a man. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)This pick belongs to Israel Ticas, El Salvador’s most prominent forensic criminologist. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)As does this shovel. Ticas uses both implements to dig up clandestine graves. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

A discovery brings new hope, and fear

The call came that day. It had been six months since the middle-aged plumbing worker vanished. Now his family was being summoned to the Justice Ministry.

Maybe, at last, they’d have an answer. But they couldn’t even grieve in peace. They begged reporters not to release his identity.

“We don’t want to make a lot of noise,” said one of the man’s relatives. “The neighborhood is really dangerous.”

Another relative was more blunt: “Saying the wrong thing could get you killed.”

The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.

“There’s silence — exactly like during the armed conflict,” said Eduardo García, who heads Pro-Búsqueda, a group searching for war victims.

Ten days after the discovery at El Limon, investigators still were trying to match the corpse with the DNA submitted by the plumbing worker’s relatives.

The families waited.

For Karen, the news had generated a brief flicker of possibility. Then authorities told her the corpse wasn’t her husband. “I am not going to stop calling the attorney general’s office,” she said. Maybe they’d discover some sign of him, somewhere.

Daisy hasn’t given up, either. In her son’s bedroom, she unlatched a suitcase stuffed with neatly folded shirts and slacks.

“Here are his clothes,” she said. “I’m keeping them here so they don’t get all dusty.”

She has vivid dreams of her son. In one, he was trapped in a room. “I couldn’t get him out,” she said. One day she heard her 3-year-old grandson shouting outside the house. “Edwin is coming,” he yelled, pointing at the dirt path. No one was there.

By Day 145, Daisy was thinking of paying another visit to the attorney general’s office.

“God willing, they’ll have some news soon.”

Daisy Flores touches a favorite shirt of her son, Edwin, at her home. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Fred Ramos in San Salvador and Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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Through their lies about conditions in the Northern Triangle and extralegal programs directed against legitimate asylum seekers, folks like “Big Mac with Lies,” “Cooch Cooch,” Pompeo, Miller, and Trump are literally “getting away with murder.” Why?

It’s critically important not to let guys like “Big Mac” attempt to “rehabilitate” their images in the private sector by touting their “management experience” and claiming the “Nazi defense” of “just carrying out my duties” or the totally disingenuous “just carrying out the law.” No other Administration, GOP or Democrat, has even hinted that the dangerous and corrupt countries of the Northern Triangle without functioning asylum systems would be considered “Safe Third Countries” or that our overseas refugee program would essentially be ended at the time of the world’s greatest need (even as we are complicit in genocide and creating more refugees in Syria).

In this respect, it is heartening to see the “pushback” against the disingenuous attempt of former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to “repackage” herself as a “leading female executive.” No, she was a Trump sycophant and a major human rights violator who is lucky not to be in jail. And, the same goes for many of the other current and former “Senior Executives” at DHS.

PWS

10-20-19

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: As Life Threatening Due Process & Statutory Violations Predictably Mount Under The Ninth Circuit’s “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program, Congressional Dems Demand IG Investigation Of “Tent Courts,” A/K/A Kangaroo Courts!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20920000/house-democrats-investigation-tent-courts-border-port

House Democrats are calling for investigations into two temporary immigration courts that opened along the southern border last month where migrants who have been waiting in Mexico are fighting to obtain asylum in the US, according to a letter sent Thursday.

The courts — located in tent complexes near US Customs and Border Protection ports in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas — were built to hear cases from migrants who have been sent back to Mexico under President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Unveiled in January, the policy has affected over 50,000 migrants found to have credible asylum claims, including those who present themselves at ports of entry on the southern border and those who are apprehended while trying to cross the border without authorization.

The tent courts, which opened in early September with no advance notice to the public, have the capacity to hold as many as 420 hearings per day in Laredo and 720 in Brownsville conducted exclusively by video. Immigrants and their attorneys video conference with judges and DHS attorneys appearing virtually, streamed from brick-and-mortar immigration courts hundreds of miles away.

Democratic leaders, led by Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro, raised concerns Thursday that the tent facilities have led to violations of migrants’ due process rights by restricting their access to attorneys and relying on teleconferencing. They also expressed alarm that asylum seekers processed in the facilities are being returned to Mexico even though they are in danger there and that the public has largely been barred from entering the tent facilities, shrouding their operations in secrecy.

“Given the lack of access to counsel and the limitations of

, we are concerned these tent courts do not provide full and fair consideration of their asylum claims, as required by law,” the lawmakers wrote, urging the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice’s inspectors general to investigate. “The opening and operations of these secretive tent courts are extremely problematic.”

Few have been allowed to enter the courts

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan had assured that members of the public and the press would be permitted to access to the facilities so long as they do not “disrupt proceedings or individuals’ privacy.”

In practice, however, that’s not how they have operated, and as House Democrats pointed out Thursday, preventing the public from viewing immigration court proceedings violates federal regulations.

“We are concerned that the administration has intentionally built these tent court at Customs and Border Protection ports of entry to justify limited public access to these facilities, and that this lack of transparency may allow DHS to hid abuse and due process violations that may occur in the tents,” their letter said.

Laura Lynch and Leidy Perez-Davis, attorneys with the American Immigration Lawyers Association who visited the port courts shortly after they opened in September, said they and other lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center, Amnesty International, and the Women’s Refugee Commission were barred from observing proceedings in the courts absent a document showing that they were representing one of the migrants on site.

The few attorneys that had such agreements were allowed to enter the facility a little more than an hour before their clients’ hearings to help them prepare — insufficient time given that, for many, it is their first opportunity to meet in person, Perez-Davis said.

In the first few days that the courts were open, the only people allowed in the hearing rooms were immigrants and their attorneys — but critically, not their translators, Lynch said. There were few attorneys representing asylum seekers in proceedings at the port courts, and even fewer spoke fluent Spanish and could have conversations with their clients.

Officials have since allowed translators into the hearing rooms, Lynch said, but neither DHS nor the DOJ have issued any formal clarification of their policy.

Attorneys are also not allowed to attend “non-refoulement interviews” at the tent facilities, in which an asylum officer determines, usually over the phone, whether a migrant should be sent back to Mexico or qualifies for an exemption allowing them to go to a detention facility in the US.

Limiting access to the port courts also inhibits legal aid groups’ ability to conduct presentations for migrants informing them of their rights in immigration proceedings, as they typically do in immigration courts.

Perez-Davis said that she observed one hearing from San Antonio — where some of the remote immigration judges handling cases in the ports courts are based — in which a young migrant woman was confused about what “asylum” means. That kind of knowledge would have previously been provided in presentations by legal aid groups.

Videoconferencing doesn’t facilitate a fair proceeding

The use of video conferencing in immigration court proceedings has long been a subject of controversy. In theory, teleconferencing would seem to make proceedings more efficient and increase access to justice, allowing attorneys and judges to partake even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

But in practice, advocates argue that teleconferencing has inhibited full and fair proceedings, with some even filing a lawsuit in New York federal court in January claiming that it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights.

Immigrants who appear in court via teleconference are more likely to be unrepresented and be deported, a 2015 Northwestern Law Review study found. Reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Executive Office of Immigration Review have also raised concerns about how technical difficulties, remote translation services, and the inability to read nonverbal communication over teleconference may adversely affect outcomes for immigrants.

Yet despite such research, the immigration courts have increasingly used video as a stand-in for in-person interaction.

In the port courts in Laredo and Brownsville, video substitutes for that kind of interaction entirely — but it has not been without hiccups so far.

Lynch, Perez-Davis, and Yael Schacher, a senior US advocate at Refugees International, said they all observed connectivity issues. For migrants who must recount some of the most traumatic experiences of their lives to support their asylum claims, video conferencing makes their task harder, Perez-Davis said.

“I have been asking myself what happens if you’re in the middle of the worst story you’ve ever had to tell, and the video cuts out?” she said.

These courts are sending immigrants back to danger in Mexico

Migrants are required to travel in the dark and show up for processing before their hearings at the port courts early as 4:30 in the morning.

That puts them at increased risk, with recent reports of violence and kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo, which is directly across the border from Laredo, and Matamoros, which is adjacent to Brownsville. The State Department has consequently issued a level four “Do Not Travel”warning in both Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

Lynch and Perez-Davis said that attorneys are also increasingly afraid of crossing the border into Mexico in light of those safety concerns. Where they used to cross over the border to deliver presentations informing migrants of their rights and the US legal process in Mexican shelters, that is no longer happening to the same degree.

“It has chilled any sort of ability to provide legal representation,” Perez-Davis said.

DHS purports to exempt “vulnerable populations” from the Remain in Mexico policy and allow them to remain in the US, but in practice, few migrants have been able to obtain such exemptions in non-refoulement interviews.

The advocacy group Human Rights First issued a report earlier this month documenting dozens of cases in which inherently vulnerable immigrants — including those with serious health issues and pregnant women — and immigrants who were already victims of kidnapping, rape and assault in Mexico were sent back under MPP after their interviews.

With attorneys barred from advocating for migrants in these interviews, migrants will likely continue to be sent back to Mexico even if they should qualify for an exemption under DHS’s own guidelines.

“These interviews are a basic human rights protection to ensure that no one is returned to a country where they would face inhumane treatment, persecution or other harm,” Democrats wrote Thursday. “We are concerned that DHS is returning asylum seekers to harm in Mexico.”

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

This situation persists as a direct and predictable consequence of the Ninth Circuit’s atrocious decision staying the District Court’s properly issued injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan!

As I told the US District Court, District of Rhode Island, 2019 District Conference on “Independence & the Courts” today:

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make the guys in the ivory tower “own” the deaths, human rights abuses, unrelenting human misery, and mockeries of justice that their intransigence and failure to carry out their oaths to faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. is causing to the most needy and vulnerable among us — that is, to those who have the audacity to assert their legal rights under our laws.

What good are “independent” courts who won’t stand up for our individual rights under the Constitution? “Independence” does not entitle judges to use their privileged positions to be complicit or complacent in the face of great tyranny and the human misery and irreparable harm it causes!

And, thanks to Nicole for “keeping on” this horrifying chronicle of calculated and premeditated human rights abuses by an Executive Branch “gone rogue,” and the disastrous real life human consequences of ivory tower appellate judges failing to perform their Constitutional duties. They will not escape the judgment of history for their unwillingness to stand up to the abuses of a White Nationalist regime carrying out a predetermined agenda totally unrelated to governing in the public interest or complying with the rule of law.

Also, many thanks too Laura and Leidy for having the courage and dedication to put themselves “on the line” to let us know exactly what’s happening as a result of the massive failure of all three branches of our Government.

Join the New Due Process Army and take the fight to preserve our American values and our Constitution to all three branches of Government until they do their duties and stop the illegal and unconstitutional abuses of asylum seekers!

PWS

10-18-19

HUMANITY REVILED: THE HUMAN COSTS OF TRUMP’S INTENTIONALLY CRUEL & INHUMAN POLICIES CARRIED OUT BY DHS – Mica Rosenberg @ Reuters & Friends With Three Timely Reports!

I wanted to share our latest exclusive reporting that found some 16,000 children, nearly 500 of them infants under 1 year old, have been sent back to Mexico under the “Migrant Protection Protocols” to wait out their U.S. court hearings in often precarious living conditions. The government would not share a demographic breakdown of who was being sent back under the program so we sought the answers ourselves:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-babies-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-migrant-policy-sends-thousands-of-babies-and-toddlers-back-to-mexico-idUSKBN1WQ1H1

Separately, we just completed a multimedia project that took months of work and lots of cross-border collaboration to follow the diverging fates of several migrants who travelled with the caravans last year:

https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-IMMIGRATION-PROFILE/0100B2FK1NP/index.html

I am also following the developments in the U.S. refugee resettlement program:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-refugees/all-i-can-do-is-pray-a-family-in-limbo-as-us-slows-refugee-admissions-idUSKBN1WI0XV

Please read and share and stay in touch with more story ideas!

All the best,

Mica

………………………………………………….

Mica Rosenberg

Reuters News

National Immigration Reporter

www.reuters.com

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

Thanks Mica & team for the great in-depth reporting highlighting the human costs of the Trump Administration’s scofflaw policies.

It’s also what “Big Mac With Lies” actually stood for and went along with during his tenure at DHS. Things to remember when, somewhere down the line, Big Mac inevitably tries to “reinvent himself” as “the voice of reason” or an “internal resistor” to Trump’s grotesque anti-human rights campaign and his “political weaponization” of DHS.

DHS actually has a duty to insure that refugee laws are fairly and generously applied, as intended, to protect those fleeing persecution and torture. Not only did Big Mac fail to carry out that responsibility, but he actively undermined, mocked, and further endangered those needing protection under our laws. And, it was all part of a blatantly racist, White Nationalist, restrictionist Trump agenda that Big Mac fully understood and willfully advanced. He presided over a highly corrupt, unprofessional, politicized, weaponization of DHS. By this time, the damage appears to be irreparable.

PWS

10-13-19

“BIG MAC WITH LIES” OUT AT DHS — Implementing White Nationalist Agenda & Parroting Anti-Immigrant False Narratives Failed To Win Him Favor With Trump, Miller, & Other Neo-Nazi Extremists Running Administration’s All-Out Attack On Due Process & Human Rights!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

immigrationcourtside.com

Oct. 11, 2019. Acting Homeland Secretary Kevin McAleenan’s resignation was announced by Trump this evening. It contained the minimal “faint praise” for his efforts and the standard disingenuous bureaucratic BS about wanting to spend more time with the family and pursuing interests in the private sector. At least Big Mac has a family left, unlike those asylum seekers who died seeking legal protection, illegally separated children, abused asylum applicants living on streets in Mexico, and mindlessly deported long-time residents who suffered under his corrupt, yet inept, leadership at DHS.

Some news reports claim it was Big Mac’s decision. But, that seems unlikely, since he never was on the “Trump/Miller A Team.” It’s more likely that Big Mac actually was forced out by the White Nationalist Cabal lead by neo-Nazi Miller.

While cruel, corrupt, and complicit, Big Mac didn’t appear sufficiently ideologically committed to Miller’s racist restrictionist hate agenda. He certainly willingly abused human rights, but he didn’t do it with the obscene glee and delight in unnecessary human suffering consistently exhibited by Trump, Miller, and “Cooch Cooch.”

The DHS Secretary position has been a parade of horrors for the American Constitution, the Rule of Law, human rights, and human decency. McAleenan, like his predecessors General John Kelly and Kristjen Nielsen, came to the job with an undeserved reputation for professionalism and bipartisanship. In practice, he followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by performing like a typical political hack and Trump sycophant.

Illegal child separations, deaths in substandard detention conditions, misappropriation of funding for the Wall, totally absurd and dishonest “Safe Third Country” agreements with some of the most dangerous and “asylum free” countries in the world, abuse of legal asylum seekers under the “Let ‘em Die In Mexico” program, disrespect for and hindrance of attorney representation, bogus claims about failures to appear, expansion of the “New American Gulag,” illegal regulations aimed at indefinite detention of families and children, trashing the U.S. Refugee Program, illegal attempts to impose discriminatory “public change” requirements, illegal use of unreliable information to apprehend individuals, false imprisonment of U.S. citizens, mindless deportation of long-term residents who were actually benefitting America, tremendous backlogs of applications for legal stratus, overloading the Immigration Courts with improvidently commenced cases, schemes to discourage legal immigrants, insults to Federal Judges, lack of candor in dealing with Congress, and disrespect for Congressional Representatives are just some of the abominations that took place on Big Mac’s watch.

Indeed, in the past month lower Federal Courts have slammed as illegal at least five of the racist gimmicks that Big Mac and the DHS have tried to foist on the migrant community at the urging of Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” and the other White Nationalists. Some of Big Mac’s most egregious actions came in connection with the “in your face” regulations that DHS & DOJ presented to Judge Dolly Gee in the Flores litigation. Those regulations proposed unlimited abuses to be inflicted on detained children in unregulated facilities during indefinite detention, which was just the opposite of what Judge Gee had ordered. The DOJ’s unethical arguments in support of Big Mac’s indefensible position left Judge Gee incredulous.

Undoubtedly, he will be replaced by someone with a more overt ideology of racism and hate. Neo-Nazis like Ken “Cooch Cooch” Cuccinelli, now illegally serving as head of USCIS, or some of the DHS underlings who have been competing for Miller’s attention with public statements of cruelty, anti-immigrant sentiment, and disrespect for the law are strong possibilities. Trump has a penchant for finding and selecting the worst that humanity has to offer to serve him.

Indeed, it’s quite likely that Trump’s next choice will be so spectacularly unqualified and unpalatable, even to some in the GOP (see, “Cooch Cooch”), that “Moscow Mitch” might balk at pushing the nomination through. But, since Trump prefers to flaunt the Constitution and to operate with “acting toadies” anyway, that probably won’t make any difference.

The Trump Administration is a kakistocracy. So, expect the worst, but be prepared for something far more grotesque and absurd. In the meantime, Big Mac should be remembered for the laws he broke, his attacks on human rights and human decency, his intellectual dishonesty, his immorality, his cowardice in the face of tyranny, the cruel and unnecessary pain he inflicted on legal asylum seekers invoking our laws, and the many lives that he needlessly ruined in service to the worst and most unqualified President in U.S. history.

PWS

10-11-19

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