"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
The evil of separating children from their parents
Just because Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that every illegal immigrant crossing the border would be prosecuted (resulting in parents being separated from their children), that doesn’t mean it’s morally defensible.
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Yup! Captures the essence of the man.
PWS
05-30-18
reports for the Washington Post:
President Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border is renewing a political uproar over immigration, an issue that has challenged Trump throughout his presidency and threatens to grow more heated as he imposes more restrictions to stem the flow of illegal immigration.
In one of several misleading tweets during the holiday weekend, Trump pushed Democrats to change a “horrible law” that the president said mandated separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis.
In April, more than 50,000 migrants were apprehended or otherwise deemed “inadmissible,” and administration officials have made clear that children will be separated from parents who enter the country illegally and are detained. The surge in illegal border crossings is expected to continue as the economy improves and warmer weather arrives.
“I keep imagining somebody taking my kids from me. My kids are 2 and 4 years old, and that’s the age of some of the children that have been separated from their parents at the border,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), who is helping to organize a Thursday rally in San Antonio to highlight the issue. “When a lot of people hear the story, they get a similar reaction. They can’t imagine why this would be a standard government practice.”
Trump’s deflection offers a familiar playbook, critics of the administration’s policies say. In their view, Trump’s most recent comments are strategically similar to tactics he used when he ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and then insisted on hard-line measures in a bill to permanently protect “dreamers.”
“He used DACA kids as a bargaining chip, and it didn’t work,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “So now he’s using vulnerable Central American families for his nativist agenda. It’s shameless.”
. . . .
“The law does not require this inhumane and immoral action – DHS could stop it today. We do not need a law. This is a punt. They literally just ran this bad-faith play with DACA,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted Sunday. “They are going to use the suffering of children as political leverage for the wall, and we must refuse to participate, because if this kind of hostage taking is ever successful it will never stop.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
No, protections for refugees and children aren’t “loopholes!” They are important protections for those who have a right to seek a fair determination of their applications for refuge in the United States under our laws!
The statement that families can be “deported together” is simply more proof that Trump, Nielsen, and Sessions have already prejudged these cases. Although many are in fact denied, many more would be granted, possibly a majority, if individuals were given fair access to counsel, as the law contemplates, and the Government were actually required to correctly apply asylum and protection laws. Instead, for years the government has been getting away with politically influenced, unduly restrictive legal constructions and also coercing individuals with detention, entering bogus “in absentia orders” against them, or otherwise hustling them through the system without Due Process. Most of these tactics are directed specifically against those seeking protection from the Northern Triangle of Central America — one of the most dangerous regions in the world.
Join the New Due Process Army and stand up against the dishonest scofflaw public officials administering Trump’s sick immigration policies.
PWS
05-28-18
Seung Min Kim reports for the Washington Post:
. . . .
The issue is compounded, Rosenstein said, by the fact that these migrant children must eventually be released from detention, and many never show up for their immigration proceedings before a judge. Rosenstein, quoting statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, said less than 4 percent of unaccompanied minors are ultimately removed from the United States.
“We’re letting people in who are creating problems. We’re letting people in who are gang members. We’re also letting people in who are vulnerable,” Rosenstein said. Because many of the migrant children lack families or a similar support system, they become “vulnerable to [gang] recruitment,” the deputy attorney general said,
Thomas Homan, the departing deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said about 300 arrests related to the MS-13 gang were made on Long Island last year. Of those arrested, more than 40 percent entered the United States as unaccompanied minors, he said.
=“So it is a problem,” Homan said. “There is a connection.”
Other federal statistics paint a somewhat different tale. From October 2011 until June of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials arrested about 5,000 individuals with confirmed or suspected gang ties, according to congressional testimony from the agency’s acting chief, Carla Provost, in June.
Of the 5,000 figure, 159 were unaccompanied minors, Provost testified, and 56 were suspected or confirmed to have ties with MS-13. In that overall time frame, CBP apprehended about 250,000 unaccompanied minors, according to Provost.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
The Trump claims are, as usual, totally bogus. The percentage of gang members who come in as “unaccompanied minors” is infinitesimally small. The vast majority of these kids are gang victims entitled to asylum or relief under the Convention Against Torture if the law were fairly applied (which it isn’t).
Contrary to the suggestion by Rosenstein, when given access to legal representation, approximately 95% of the unaccompanied children show up for their hearings. And the “vulnerability” mentioned by Rosenstein is largely the result of the Trump Administration’s “reign of terror” against migrant communities which has made nearly all migrant children, along with other community members, “easy pickings” for gangs, with no realistic recourse to law enforcement. There are actually strategies for combatting gangs. But the Trumpsters have no interest in them.
Indeed, gangs have recognized that folks like Trump, Sessions, Homan, Neilsen, and now Rosenstein are their best recruiters and enablers. How dumb can we be as a country to put these biased, spineless, and clueless dudes in charge of “law enforcement.”
Interesting that in an obvious attempt to kiss up to Trump, Sessions, & Co and save his job, Rosenstein pathetically has decided that being a sycophant and sucking up to the bosses is his best defense. Particularly when it’s at the expense of kids and other vulnerable migrants seeking protection. Pretty disgusting! And, I doubt that it will eventually save him from Trump. Just tank his reputation and his future like others who have been “slimed for life” by their association with Trump.
Join the New Due Process Army and stand up for kids against the “child abuse” being practiced by the Trump Administration and its corrupt and incompetent officials.
PWS
05-24-18
Irwin Redlener writes in the Washington Post:
. . . .
It is hard to imagine a more stressful situation for a young child than to be forcibly taken from his or her parents and detained with strangers. Sometimes this unfortunate outcome is necessary when children are the victims of parental violence or severe neglect. But in the case of current U.S. policy as articulated by the attorney general, the “abuser” is the federal government.
Forced separation of children and their parents is “child abuse by government.” And in this case, knowing what we now know about the consequences of severe stress in children, it is no stretch to assert that these new federal policies are not just cruel but also can have lifelong consequences for their child victims.
If Melania Trump meant what she said about children, she might want to organize a heart-to-heart meeting with the attorney general — and with her husband. Maybe the first lady could advocate for policies that reflect the spirit of her new agenda and a commitment to protect vulnerable families seeking safety and opportunity in the United States.
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Read the complete, very disturbing, article at the link. What kind of country with what kind of values puts a child abuser in charge of its legal system? Under Trump & Sessions, America has gone from a defender to an abuser of human rights. Sessions is a refutation of human decency every day that he is allowed to remain in the office for which he was so spectacularly unqualified in the first place.
Senator Liz Warren was right. Remember McConnell and the other smug Republicans who put this horrible individual in place to damage our youth and our reputation as a nation of laws, decency, and human compassion.
PWS
05-12-18
OpinionJeff Sessions’s breathtaking policy of malice toward migrants
A child traveling with migrants from Central America waits to enter the U.S. border and customs facility on April 29. (Jorge Duenes/Reuters)
ATTORNEY GENERAL Jeff Sessions is indifferent about whether undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families or whether they are fleeing domestic abuse, drug cartels, extortion rackets or political violence. It’s all the same to Mr. Sessions, who said Monday that all those who come into the country illegally would be prosecuted — and separated from their children in the bargain. Thus has the top law enforcement official in the United States enshrined callousness as administration policy.
Will babies be separated from nursing mothers? Will toddlers be housed in institutions far from parents? How many children will be traumatized by being carted away from their parents for weeks or months — or longer? The attorney general doesn’t say or, apparently, care.
Mr. Sessions’s policy of separating parents and children is intentionally and unapologetically punitive. There was no talk from him of developing additional detention centers that could accommodate families while parents await prosecution for the misdemeanor of illegal entry. There was no public recognition of the United States’ historical role as a beacon for refugees, nor its obligation in law and international treaty to accept migrants seeking asylum from danger in their native countries. There were no estimates of how many children will be removed from their parents, for how long, and with what long-term damage to their emotional and psychological welfare.
Instead, the attorney general offered indifference. Proclaiming a new policy of “zero tolerance,” he rebranded the United States as a crueler place than the countries from which people are fleeing. And never mind that, in many cases, parents are seeking refuge in this country in order to escape violence and persecution — and to protect their children.
The impetus for the new stance, of course, is President Trump, who has made clear that his crusade against all immigrants, with or without documents, knows no limits. Having washed his hands of the “dreamers,” mainly teenagers and 20-somethings raised and educated in this country after being brought here by their parents, Mr. Trump need not travel a great moral distance to upend the lives of brand-new migrant families by removing children from their parents.
The administration’s stated justification is a surge in migrants in recent months. The number of apprehensions of those coming into the country without papers, especially from Central America, has spiked from a year ago. However, the overall flow of migrants over the southwest border is near a four-decade low.
In other words, Mr. Sessions’s talk of a “massive influx” of undocumented immigrants is a falsehood. Against his incendiary vow that the administration will not allow the United States to be “invaded” and “stampeded ” is the plain truth that the southwest border is more secure, and less frequently breached, than at any time since the Nixon administration.
Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions propose a breathtaking innovation: wrenching every small child away, as a matter of policy, from his or her family. They have now matched their demagoguery on immigration with malice.
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YUP! In a highly competitive race, Gonzo Apocalypto gets my vote for “Worst Government Official in America!” Willful ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, cruelty, racism, maliciousness, dishonesty, fake religion, and lawlessness all put together in one toxic package.
PWS
05-11-18
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-dhs-doj-immigration-families_us_5af0bd5ee4b0ab5c3d68ae96
Roque Planas & Elise Foley report for HuffPost:
In a sweeping enforcement change, Donald Trump’s administration will increasingly prosecute members of immigrant families who cross the border illegally, even if that means splitting children from their parents and regardless of whether they’re seeking safety in the U.S., Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday.
It’s already happening. On April 27, Border Patrol officers picked up a 30-year-old Salvadoran woman, Morena Mendoza Romaldo, with one of her children after she crossed into the U.S. near San Diego. She fled El Salvador because of sexual violence, according to court filings. She clearly told Border Patrol that she was afraid to return there; an arrest narrative filed in court has “credible fear claim” written on it.
Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. But previously the Justice Department rarely targeted family units — as the Border Patrol describes parents who cross with their children — for prosecution. Instead, authorities typically routed migrant families to immigration courts, and they were often released from detention after three weeks because of a court order limiting how long undocumented children may remain locked up. People with credible fear of being returned to their native countries were likewise often sent to immigration court instead of being criminally prosecuted.
But now, with the Trump administration looking for ways to crack down on policies its officials deride as “catch and release,” the response has gotten harsher.
Mendoza’s case was one of 11 immigration prosecutions filed against alleged members of a caravan of asylum-seeking Central Americans. At least two others were also separated from their children after facing prosecution for illegal entry.
Sessions and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s acting Director Thomas Homan said during a press conference in San Diego that the Department of Homeland Security would refer for prosecution all cases of people crossing illegally, as part of a zero-tolerance policy — regardless of whether they’re fleeing persecution or traveling with children.
“People are not going to caravan or otherwise stampede our border,” Sessions insisted. He later said, “We don’t want to separate families, but we don’t want families to come to the border illegally.”
It will be up to individual U.S. attorneys to decide how many of the migrants will face criminal charges. In the past, limits on the number of government attorneys or courtroom capacity led authorities to instead route most people caught at the border through the traditional deportation process without convicting them of a crime first. Last week Sessions announced that the Justice Department hired 35 more assistant U.S. attorneys to help prosecute immigration crimes in the five federal districts that touch the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigration prosecutions have taken up roughly half the federal criminal docket since 2008, after policy changes pioneered by George W. Bush, institutionalized under Barack Obama and now enthusiastically embraced by Trump.
The zero-tolerance policy won’t apply to those who seek asylum at ports of entry, which is not illegal, although the Trump administration has publicly urged migrants to stay in Mexico instead. At least two of the 11 alleged caravan members facing prosecution for illegal entry — Olga Esmeralda George and Marbel Yaneth Ramirez-Raudales — said they tried to initiate asylum claims at a nearby port of entry but were turned away, according to court filings.
Sessions’ plans are already facing opposition from the San Diego Federal Public Defenders’ Office. Illegal entry prosecutions are often open and shut cases. But attorney Eric Fish has asked the court to dismiss three of the 11 alleged caravan members’ cases, arguing that his clients, including Mendoza, were targeted for political reasons that amount to unconstitutional discrimination.
If other countries treated people seeking refugee protection in this way, the United States would be appalled.Eleanor Acer, refugee protection program director, Human Rights First
In court filings littered with Trump’s tweets excoriating the caravan, Fish contended that Border Patrol agents arrested the three defendants at the same time as a group of Indian nationals. But the Indians were never prosecuted.
“The government cannot choose its defendants based on their alleged country of citizenship, but that’s exactly what it did here,” he wrote in a court filing. “The Court should not stand for such invidious discrimination, and should dismiss the complaint.”
Fish is also disputing the $10,000 bonds set by the court, arguing that his clients present no flight risk and could be instead monitored by GPS and released on their own recognizance.
The cases highlight how much energy Sessions is devoting to some of the pettiest crimes possible. Until he announced his zero-tolerance policy, illegal-entry prosecutions were all but unheard of in San Diego. And in the three contested cases, the government offered to free the defendants on time served if they pleaded guilty.
At least two of the defendants said they intend to seek asylum, which generally exempts people from criminal prosecution for illegally crossing the border. One of them, Yaneth, attempted to turn herself in at a legal port of entry but was turned away, according to court filings. Under U.S. law and international treaty obligations, Customs and Border Protection is required to let in migrants who say they fear persecution in their country of origin. But CBP faces a lawsuit in the Southern District of California alleging that the agency often flouts those rules.
Organizers with the caravan disputed that the migrants facing prosecution were affiliated with their group, though they said it’s possible that some had joined the caravan and later left it. At its peak, the number of migrants traveling with the caravan topped 1,000, but its numbers dwindled to fewer than 300 as some decided to remain in Mexico, were counseled that their asylum claims would be hard to press in U.S. courts or were repelled by the open hostility of top Trump administration officials.
“It’s pretty obvious that they don’t know who is part of the caravan or not,” said Alex Mensing — an organizer with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, which coordinated the caravan — noting that one of the defendants, Eric Alberto López Robles, is a Mexican national and that the caravan did not work with any Mexican adults. “It just doesn’t add up.”
Those crossing with the caravan were instructed to go through a legal port of entry to make their claims and were advised against crossing illegally, according to Nicole Ramos, the director of Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit group that is offering legal services to the caravan’s members. Ramos, who once worked as a federal public defender, said that in legal workshops, she warned about the threat of prosecution.
“After people were given transit visas, perhaps some of them went in other directions, but they were not integrated into the caravan,” she said. “The goal of the caravan was to get to Tijuana and present themselves legally. And as part of the legal orientation we gave, we specifically advised people about criminal prosecutions.”
Prosecuting people who are seeking asylum could violate international law, according to human rights advocates. Border Patrol was warned about this at least once, when the DHS Office of the Inspector General issued a report in 2015 saying the agency risked violating U.S. treaties by referring people for prosecution even though they expressed fear of persecution in their native country.
Immigrant rights advocates have been hearing for months from parents who were separated from their children and in some cases aren’t sure how to get in touch with them. The practice “is simply barbaric,” said Eleanor Acer, who leads the refugee protection program at Human Rights First.
“If other countries treated people seeking refugee protection in this way,” she said, “the United States would be appalled.”
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Similar “strategies” have been tried and failed in the past under Administrations of both parties. But, doubling down on failed strategies, particularly when they disproportionately harm and punish a group consisting largely of Hispanics, is a Sessions specialty.
I will be interested to see how independent Article III Judges react to having their courtrooms clogged and judicial time focused on minor misdemeanors (rather than serious crimes) as part of the Administration’s enforcement apparatus
PWS
05-08-18.
https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/5/6/7r3izq486dxxtzlrsythpmr2kg35j3
Briefs Filed in Matter of A-B-
Briefs of the parties and amici have now been filed with the Attorney General in Matter of A-B-. Once again, a group of former immigration judges and BIA members, which this time numbered 16 (including myself) filed an amicus brief (which can be viewed here: http://www.aila.org/infonet/amicus-brief-matter-of-a-b- ).* The respondent’s brief was submitted by the outstanding legal team of Ben Winograd of IRAC; Karen Musalo, Blaine Bookey, and Eunice Lee of CGRS, and Charlotte attorney Andres Lopez. DHS’s brief was submitted by Michael P. Davis of ICE, whose reasoned positions are to be commended.
The issue in the case below involved the actions of immigration judge V. Stuart Couch in failing to abide by the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reversed Couch’s denial of asylum in a particularly strong claim involving a victim of severe domestic violence. The BIA reversed the judge’s decision, and remanded with instructions to grant asylum following the required updated security clearance by DHS. However, Couch took some nine months to schedule the case for a hearing. When at that hearing, DHS stated that the clearances had been completed, Judge Couch did not issue a new decision (as he was directed to do by the BIA). Instead, he stated that he was recertifying the case to the BIA, something that he lacked the authority to do without first issuing a new decision.
The case sat for another seven months, during which time it is not clear whether the record actually made its way back to the BIA. But before the Board could rule on the propriety of Judge Couch’s actions, the case was somehow plucked from wherever it had been by AG Jeff Sessions, who on his own transformed the case into a vehicle to answer a question that no one but himself seems to understand, namely, whether being the victim of private criminal activity constitutes a cognizable particular social group for asylum purposes. (There is an interesting question of how Sessions even knew that this case existed.)
In response, the Department of Homeland Security appealed to reason. It requested the AG to hold off until the BIA ruled on the propriety of Couch’s attempted recertification. DHS also requested Sessions to provide further clarification of his question, and noted that “this question has already been answered, at least in part, by the Board and its prior precedent.” Sessions denied both requests, adding that he is not bound by BIA precedent, nor is he required to allow briefing on an issue before him on certification. It seems as if Sessions might be saying that as he’s bestowing the privilege of allowing briefs, he doesn’t further need to let everyone know what it is they are being asked to brief.
Depending on how Sessions is choosing to interpret the question, his decision might impact not only domestic violence claims, but any asylum claim based on a particular social group involving private criminal activity (which could include claims based on sexual orientation or sexual identity; as well as victims of female genital cutting, human trafficking, gang violence, blood feuds and honor killings). Or then again, maybe not. Because if Sessions is asking whether a particular social group delineated as “victims of private criminal activity” is cognizable, his answer wouldn’t impact the outcome of this case, as the respondent never claimed to be a member of such group. Nor would it matter to the outcome if Sessions is asking whether a group which includes the element of victimization by a criminal acting in a private capacity is cognizable, as no element of victimization is included in the respondent’s delineated group of “El Salvadoran women who are unable to leave their domestic relationships where they have children in common.” Nowhere in the wording of such group is there a mention of being the victim of private criminal activity, nor is the respondent claiming that she was targeted for abuse because of her being a victim of private criminal activity.
But could Sessions be questioning whether any particular social group merits asylum where its members fear persecutors who are not government officials? If that’s his question, a decision in the negative would run counter to not only more than a half century of BIA precedent, but also to decisions of all eleven Federal circuit courts, and to international law, all of which universally agree that for asylum purposes, persecution may be by private actors that the government is unable or unwilling to control.
Does Sessions himself understand the question he is asking? Let’s just assume that since this case involves a credible victim of severe domestic violence, and that her particular social group was found by the BIA to be substantially similar to the one it recognized as cognizable in its 2014 precedent decision in Matter of A-R-C-G-, that Sessions is considering invalidating that decision.
The purpose of courts and tribunals is to resolve disputes between the parties. The issue that Sessions now wishes to address has been settled, and is not being contested by either party. The Department of Homeland Security itself made this point to Sessions. Had this case been allowed to run its course and result in a grant of asylum, it is far from clear that such result would have been contested or appealed by DHS. In its brief to Sessions, DHS states more than once that it “generally supports the legal framework set out by the Board in Matter of A-R-C-G-.” DHS continued that the group in that case of “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” was not defined by the respondent’s being subject to domestic violence. DHS specifically stated that like the BIA, it “understands ‘unable to leave a relationship’ to signify an inability to do so based on a potential range of ‘religious, cultural, or legal constraints…’” DHS continued that neither the PSG in A-R-C-G- nor the group offered by A-B- herself violate the principle that such group “must exist independently of the persecution suffered and/or feared.”
In refusing DHS’s request for clarification, Sessions claimed that “several Federal Article III courts have recently questioned whether victims of private violence may qualify for asylum” based on their membership in a particular social group. However, in responding to such statement in its subsequent brief, DHS noted that “none of the circuit court decision cited by the Immigration Judge questioned the underlying validity of A-R-C-G-.” In response to Sessions’ statement that he is not bound by the BIA’s precedent decisions, DHS recognized this, but “avers that the Attorney General should not directly or indirectly abrogate A-R-C-G-,” but should “rather…emphasize the importance of case and society-specific analysis.”
There is thus agreement between the parties of the validity of the Board’s holding in A-R-C-G-. In revisiting the issue, Sessions is not attempting to resolve a dispute, as no such dispute exists.
To me, the most shocking aspect of Sessions’ action is its timing. Case law concerning human rights (including the law of asylum) and civil rights does not develop in a vacuum. Much as courts have extended civil rights protections based on race, gender, and sexual orientation throughout the history of this country, the idea of what constitutes persecution and which of its victims are deserving of protection evolves along with the views of society. Sessions is choosing, unprompted, to challenge whether victims of domestic violence are deserving of asylum just as our society has undertaken a powerful, long-overdue, and much needed correction in the form of the #metoo movement. Many hundreds of thousands of us (“us” of course referring to people regardless of gender, as women’s rights are human rights) have filled the streets of cities all over America (and the world) the past two Januarys in a powerful, emotional rebuke to sexual assault and all forms of sexism. Powerful men who for years had engaged in all forms of sexual abuse and harassment are for the first time experiencing the consequences of their actions. And it is at this particular time that Sessions seeks to revoke protection to women who are domestic violence victims?
Briefs are good, but more is needed. The wonderful Tahirih Justice Center collected 60,000 signatures on a petition which it delivered to Sessions in March calling on him to uphold asylum protection for survivors of domestic violence: https://www.tahirih.org/news/tahirih-delivers-petition-on-asylum-for-domestic-violence-survivors-to-the-attorney-general/. More organizations need to follow Tahirih’s example. In addition to the briefs submitted, there needs to be a true public outcry addressed to Sessions on this issue. Asylum protection for victims of domestic violence is not just an immigration issue or a women’s issue. It is a human right, on which all of us should make ourselves heard.
*Heartfelt thanks to the law firm of Gibson Dunn (Megan Kiernan, Ronald Kirk, Chelsea Glover, Lalitha Madduri, and Amer Ahmed) for drafting the brief, and to former BIA member Lory D. Rosenberg for organizing and coordinating the effort.
Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=73fad225-44bc-4757-97fa-b9369552de1e
WASHINGTON — Central Americans who travel north to plead for entry at the U.S. border are taking their chances on an immigration system that is deeply divided on whether they can qualify for asylum if they are fleeing domestic violence or street crime, rather than persecution from the government.
The law in this area remains unclear, and the outcome of an asylum claim depends to a remarkable degree on the immigration judge who decides it.
And sitting atop the immigration court system is Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a longtime advocate of much stricter limits on immigration who has recently taken an interest in reviewing asylum cases.
Lawyers say they are troubled by a legal system in which decisions turn so much on the views of individual judges.
Among the 34 immigration judges in Los Angeles, two granted fewer than 3% of the hundreds of asylum claims that came before them in the last five years, while another judge granted 71% of them. The disparity is even greater in San Francisco, where the judge’s rate of granting asylum claims ranged from 3% to 91%.
Overall, asylum seekers would do much better in San Francisco, where 32% were denied between 2012 and 2017, compared with a 68% denial rate in Los Angeles during the same period, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
This is not news to immigration lawyers. A decade ago, several law professors published a study called “Refugee Roulette” that revealed how asylum cases depend heavily on the views of individual judges. “The level of variation was shocking. And it hasn’t changed,” said Georgetown University professor Philip Schrag.
Judge Ashley Tabaddor from Los Angeles, president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, discounts the statistics. “They’re not reliable,” she said, since judges may have very different caseloads. Some judges hear claims from people who have been detained for crimes, while others hear mostly claims from juveniles, she said.
“We are human. Different people can have different views about the same set of facts,” she said.
Several Los Angeles lawyers who have won or lost asylum cases in recent months said the identity of the judges played an important role. “It’s astounding how much variation there is from judge to judge. The system is in need of repair. It’s an embarrassment,” said Joseph D. Lee, a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson.
He represented an El Salvador mother who fled north with her three children after gang members shot and killed her husband’s brother in front of her family and then threatened to do the same to her relatives.
“The Central American cases can be difficult to win. Some judges are pretty hostile to gang-related claims,” he said. His client’s claim was denied, and he plans to appeal. “Your chance of winning an asylum claim shouldn’t turn on the luck of the draw on which judge you get. But that is exactly how it works,” he said.
It may soon become much harder to win such claims. Under an unusual feature of the law, the attorney general, as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, also oversees the immigration courts. He can overrule their decisions and announce new rules that are binding on them.
In March, Sessions announced he would review the question of whether women fleeing domestic violence or other “private criminal activity” can rely on this to win asylum.
Last fall, Sessions spoke to a meeting of immigration judges and complained America’s “generous asylum” system has become “overloaded with fake claims.… The credible fear process was intended to be a lifeline for persons facing serious persecution. But it has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States.”
In the last week, the American Bar Assn., faith-based groups and a coalition of immigration law professors have submitted “friend of the court” briefs to Sessions urging him not to reverse years of precedent involving women fleeing abuse and terror.
But veteran immigration judges are not optimistic. Sessions “just wants more people to be removed,” said Paul W. Schmidt, a retired immigration judge from Virginia and an outspoken critic of the attorney general. “He will make it a lot harder for Central Americans to get asylum.”
The dispute begins with the words of the asylum law. In the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress adopted the United Nations standard and said people may seek asylum if they are “unable or unwilling to return” to their home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Under the law, asylum seekers are treated differently than, for example, refugees from a war-torn nation or immigrants seeking work.
Four of those terms in the asylum law are clear enough: race, religion, nationality and political opinion. But lawyers and judges have struggled to decide what counts as “membership in a particular social group.”
Courts have agreed that gays and lesbians can count as a social group, since they have suffered persecution in many societies. Some judges have also said women and girls fleeing sexual abuse and violence can seek asylum because their society views women as the property of men — and with no hope for protection from their government.
But the question becomes harder when considering the gang violence that has spread through some Central American countries. For example, people who testified against violent gangs or resisted them in other ways have sought asylum on the grounds they are members of a particularly endangered social group.
“These cases are challenging,” said Nareeneh Sohbatian, a Los Angeles lawyer at Winston & Strawn who supervises asylum claims. “We talk a lot about this. If they are targeted because of a gang, it can be difficult to show it was caused by their membership in a particular social group.”
Jenna Gilbert, managing attorney for Human Rights First in Los Angeles, said it is clear the asylum law does not protect people fleeing “generalized violence.” A claim “needs to be tied to the one of the protected categories,” she said. “The cases are very fact-dependent.”
But the odds of winning asylum are not good for Central Americans. In the last five years, China had the largest number of asylum seekers in the U.S. immigration courts, and only 20% of their claims were denied. Ethiopians did even better, with only 17% denied. By contrast, the highest denial rates arose from claims brought by natives of Jamaica (91%), the Philippines (90%), Mexico (88%), El Salvador (79%), Honduras (78%) and Guatemala (75%).
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who works at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter enforcement, said it is not surprising that Sessions will reconsider rulings on asylum in cases of domestic violence. “Right now, the law is very unclear. The phrase ‘particular social group’ is vague. A lot of these claims are compelling, but that doesn’t mean it is ‘persecution’ under the law. If a gang wants to recruit me, that’s not persecution.”
Last month, Sessions criticized a caravan of Central American asylum seekers approaching the border as a “deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system. There is no right to demand entry without justification. Smugglers and traffickers and those who lie or commit fraud will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
People who present an asylum claim at the border must only show they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they were to return home. Most asylum seekers are allowed to stay and make their claim.
Sessions said he would send more prosecutors and judges to the border area to resolve these claims quickly, rather than let them linger for many months or years.
Meanwhile, lawyers are also rushing to represent the asylum seekers. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration has waged a yearlong campaign to undermine asylum seekers and demonize those who only wish to live in safety with the families,” said Gilbert of Human Rights First. “We’re proud to assist these individuals who are fleeing unspeakable horror as they try to rebuild their lives.”
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It’s really not that complex.
Eventually, long after I’m gone, I’m sure the “truth will out.” However, that will be little help to those currently being railroaded through the travesty that passes for justice in today’s U.S. Immigration Courts or those who have been denied justice in the past.
PWS
05-06-18
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/05/politics/donald-trump-border-wall-close-country-remark/index.html
Elizabeth Landers reports for CNN:
(CNN)President Donald Trump seemed to float a new idea about border control during a tax reform roundtable in Ohio.
The President was in the midst of criticizing Democrats during a riff about border security when he slipped in the idea that people might “have to think about closing up the country.”“They don’t want the wall, but we’re going to get the wall, even if we have to think about closing up the country for a while,” Trump said. “We’re going to get the wall. We have no choice. We have absolutely no choice. And we’re going to get tremendous security in our country.”Trump then mentioned the notion a second time, saying, “And we may have to close up our country to get this straight, because we either have a country or we don’t. And you can’t allow people to pour into our country the way they’re doing.”It was not immediately clear what Trump meant by the remarks. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington said Saturday in an interview with CNN’s Ana Cabrera that Trump “is absolutely out of his mind to think that is any kind of a reasonable solution for our economy or compassionate or in line with our values.”“This President has done everything he can every time he’s in trouble to turn around and try to turn it against immigrants, and it really deeply saddens me,” Jayapal said.. . .
http://www.cnn.com/2018/05/03/politics/immigration-border-crossings-stabilize/index.html
Border crossings steady in April after March spike
By: Tal Kopan, CN
Illegal border crossings stabilized in April after jumping substantially in March, a sign that a surge at the southern border may not be imminent, according to newly released statistics from the Trump administration.
In April, there were 38,234 apprehensions at the southern border and 12,690 people deemed “inadmissible,” or who came to a port of entry without papers that authorized them to enter the US, virtually unchanged from the month before. The number of family units and children in both categories also held roughly steady from the previous month.
The news comes as the administration has claimed a “crisis” on the southern border, a narrative largely driven by the jump in March and the comparison to the numbers last spring, when crossings were at abnormally low levels.
Administration officials have also been decrying a so-called caravan of migrants — an annual pilgrimage of mostly women and children who say they are fleeing violence and abuse in their home countries — that has arrived at the border with Mexico. More than half of the roughly 150 migrants in that group have been processed by Customs and Border Protection for their claims of asylum. Those who meet the legal threshold will be allowed to pursue their claims in court cases that could take months or years. Those that don’t will be turned away from the US.
In the midst of the caravan’s trek and the release of the March statistics, President Donald Trump has ordered the National Guard to deploy troops to the border, with roughly 1,000 having been sent so far, and with the Justice Department announcing it will send more immigration judges and prosecutors to border districts, as well.
April’s figures indicate that although there was a sharp spike in March, border crossings remain in line with historic seasonal trends. Numbers are still consistent with Obama administration years — slightly below fiscal years 2013 and 2014 but slightly above 2015 and 2016.
The crossings in April of this year were more than triple April 2017, but that comparison is distorted, as crossings last April were at levels unseen in modern history, before they started to pick up and stabilize more in line with recent years.
Crossings have been trending downward for decades and are at historic lows, prompting Homeland Security to declare last fall that the border is the most secure it has ever been.
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Lies and false narratives are a key part of the White Nationalist agenda. Kind of like the modern version of the infamous “Reichstag Fire” that Hitler used to rally nationalist sentiment and seize power. Nice folks!
PWS
05-04-18
The immigrant ‘caravan’ is a test. Trump wants us to fail.
The “caravan” of asylum-seeking migrants that has finally arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border is a test of American character and purpose — a test President Trump wants us to fail.
I put caravan in quotation marks because the group that reached Tijuana hardly qualifies for the term. Just a few dozen would-be entrants presented themselves at the Port of San Ysidro on Sunday — only to be told that U.S. immigration officials were too busy to attend to them. Another several hundred were reported to be in the general area, waiting their turn to attempt to cross the border.
Trump has spoken of these people as if they were some kind of rampaging horde. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has accused them of “a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system.” The truth is that this sort of thing happens every year: Would-be migrants seek safety in numbers as they make the long and perilous trek north through Mexico.
Sessions probably understands this context; Trump probably doesn’t. But I believe both are sincere in their desire to stanch the flow of Latino immigration — not, I strongly suspect, because of drugs or crime, but because they loathe the demographic and cultural change that is taking place.
While he and his administration were being appropriately roasted at the White House Correspondents’ Associationdinner on Saturday evening, Trump was at a rally in Michigan saying that our immigration laws are “corrupt . . . so corrupt” and that the motives of those who defend our nation’s traditional role as a haven for asylum seekers are political. “The Democrats actually feel, and they are probably right, that all of these people that are pouring across are going to vote for Democrats, they’re not going to vote for Republicans.”
They’re not going to vote for anybody, of course, since they’re not citizens. Truth doesn’t matter to Trump. But you knew that.
What seems to really drive the president crazy is that the United States remains a haven for those fleeing persecution. Trump laid out his complaint Saturday: “If a person puts their foot over the line, we have to take them into our country, we have to register them. We then have to ask them a couple of questions. Lawyers are telling them what to say. How unsafe they are. And once they say that, we have to let them go, to come back to court in like a year. Only one problem: They don’t come back, okay. That’s the end. Welcome to the United States.”
You will have noticed that missing from Trump’s rant is any sense of morality or mission.
There is a reason the law makes provision for those seeking asylum. In 1939, Congress rejected a bill that would have admitted 20,000 German Jewish children. Later that year, authorities refused to allow the St. Louis, a ship carrying about 900 German Jews, to dock in Miami; the Coast Guard sent out patrol boats to warn the ship away. The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, and 254 of its passengers later perished during the Holocaust.
That shameful history led to changes in immigration policy that prohibit rejecting claims of asylum out of hand. The bar is high, but many of the Central American asylum seekers probably clear it.
In El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the major threat comes from rampant gang violence. Boys are often offered a stark choice: Join a gang or be killed. Girls are threatened with rape. It is easy to say this is a problem local elected officials and police ought to solve, but government institutions are weak, and corruption is widespread. What choice does a family under imminent threat have but to flee? What would you do?
It is of course true that not every Central American who asks for asylum truly merits it. That’s why each case is examined and evaluated, with all the time needed to reach a proper determination — which is how the migrants now at the border must be handled, despite what Trump and Sessions might prefer.
To close our eyes and hearts to legitimate claims of persecution would be to repeat the shameful and tragic mistakes of the World War II era. If the subjects of Trump’s demagoguery were summarily denied entry, as he apparently would like, most would be forced to go home and some would be killed. That would be a terrible stain on the nation’s conscience.
I’m tempted to add that it would be a stain on Trump’s conscience as well, but it’s not clear that he has one.
Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
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I remember walking through the “St. Louis Exhibit” at the Holocaust Museum (on an EOIR-sponsored tour, no less, for a long ago and far away Annual Judges Conference — my how official racism & xenophobia have changed things) and asking myself how we could have done that to our fellow human beings.
Then, we had a “special session” explaining the catastrophic failure and cowardice of the German Judiciary during the Nazi rise to power. Judge after judge “adhered to the rule of law” even when those laws unfairly disenfranchised Jews, deprived them of their properly and lawful occupations, and eventually sentenced them to mass death!
I’ve now come to the unhappy realization that the St. Louis might have represented the norm, rather than the exception, to the reality of American democracy and its serious anti-Semitic and racially biased undertones. And, the actions of the corrupt & cowardly German judges of that era are certainly what Trump, Sessions, and their cronies are referring to when they disingenuously pontificate about “the rule of law” and looking for judges, Government officials, and lawyers who are committed to applying it in a biased and one-sided fashion
It’s their rule of law, as they consistently misconstrue it to protect only their favored political and racial groups, and misuse it “punish enemies” and to carry our their increasingly racist, White Nationalist agenda.
And yet 40% of our fellow countrymen are enthusiastically supportive of this heinous agenda. What’s wrong with them? Why ask ourselves how Nazism could have overtaken Germany when we’re in the process of trying to repeat that sordid history here? It’s pretty easy to see Hitler rallies of the 1930s in the Trump rallies of today. The same vicious disregard of both the truth and humanity, scapegoating, and an attacks on the true rule of law and on those who stand up for democracy, all wrapped in an appeal to false religious nationalism!
We’re failing as a nation on both a moral and a legal basis. It remains to be seen whether the resistance to Trump, his supporters, and his enablers will be sufficient to preserve democracy and human decency in America.
PWS
05-01-18
Eli Hager of The Marshall Project in the NY Times:
On April 4, the White House posted a fact sheet on its website warning that legal “loopholes” were allowing tens of thousands of immigrant children who entered the country on their own to remain in the United States.
The next day, another post went up: “Loopholes in Child Trafficking Laws Put Victims — and American Citizens — At Risk.”
And the same week, the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services not normally known for its politics, announced that it “joins the President in calling for Congress to close dangerous loopholes.”
Over the past month, the Trump administration has taken aim at a set of child protection laws created to protect young people who cross into the United States without a parent or guardian, perhaps aided by smugglers. The administration now sees some of these same youths as a threat, and is portraying the laws as “loopholes” that are preventing the quick deportation of teenagers involved in gangs.
The campaign is aimed at Capitol Hill, but the Trump administration is not waiting for legislation: In a series of at least a dozen moves across multiple federal agencies, it has begun to curtail legal protections for unaccompanied children who cross the border. Many of these safeguards were created by a 2008 law that provided protections for children who might otherwise be forced into labor or prostitution.
The young people affected by the administration’s measures have been fleeing deadly gang violence in Central America since 2014, when civil strife erupted in the region. They are a less politically shielded group of young people than the so-called “Dreamers,” most of whom came to this country as toddlers with their parents.
The new directives appear aimed at detaining more of these youths after their arrival and speeding deportation back to their home countries — where they may face violent reprisals from gangs or other forms of abuse.
“It has been national law and policy that as adults we look out for children,” said Eve Stotland, director of legal services for The Door, a youth advocacy organization in New York. “No longer.”
Endangered Central American Children
Among the many new directives, the State Department in November gave just 24 hours’ notice to endangered children in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador before canceling a program through which they could apply for asylum in the United States before getting to the border. About 2,700 of them who had already been approved and were awaiting travel arrangements were forced to stay behind in the troubled region.
The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has sharply cut back on granting a special legal status for immigrant juveniles who have been abused, neglected or abandoned; the program dropped from a 78 percent approval rate in 2016 to 54 percent last year, according to statistics compiled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In New York, Texas and elsewhere, the agency in recent months has also begun revoking this protection for children who had already won it, according to legal aid organizations in the states.
The Justice Department has also issued legal clarification for courts and prosecutors about revoking “unaccompanied child” status, which allows minors to have their cases heard in a non-adversarial setting rather than in immigration court with a prosecutor contesting them. (The White House has said that it intends to remove this protection altogether, but has not yet done so.)
And the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which provides social services to vulnerable immigrant youth, is now placing all children with any gang-related history in secure detention instead of foster care, whether or not they have ever been arrested or charged with a crime, according to an August memo to the President’s Domestic Policy Council.
“It’s law enforcement mission creep, and our office is ill-prepared for it,” said Robert Carey, who was director of the refugee agency under President Barack Obama.
A Focus on Gangs
The Trump administration has said that its actions are necessary to stem the tide of violent crime. It has focused on teenagers belonging to or associated with the Salvadoran-American street gang MS-13, which has been linked by the police since 2016 to at least 25 homicides on Long Island — a testing ground for many of the president’s new policies.
About 99 of the more than 475 people arrested in the New York City area during ICE raids for gang members had come to the U.S. as unaccompanied children, a representative for the agency said.
To fortify the “loophole” narrative, official announcements of these ICE actions often point out that a number of those arrested were in the process of applying for various forms of child protection.
Yet 30 of 35 teenagers rounded up during these ICE raids last year and who later filed a class-action lawsuit have subsequently been released because the gang allegations against them were thin, according to the ACLU. And the Sacramento Bee reported that a juvenile detention center in California recently cut back its contract with the federal government and complained that too many immigrant teens were being sent there with no evidence of gang affiliation.
The refugee agency acknowledged in its August memo to the White House that only 1.6 percent of all children in its care have any gang history.
“The arguments they’re making are just really challenging to basic logic,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor at the University of Texas who teaches a clinic for immigrant families.
“The arguments they’re making are just really challenging to basic logic,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor at the University of Texas who teaches a clinic for immigrant families.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link.
I met many of these kids and families coming through my court over the years. While there were a tiny number of “bad actors” (which the DHS did a good job of discovering) the vast, vast majority were nothing like what Trump, Sessions and others are describing. They actually much better represented “true American values,” courage, and the “American work ethic” than do Trump and his valueless cronies.
That’s right folks! OUR U.S. Government is using racist-inspired lies to conduct a war against Hispanic children and to illegally return many of them to deadly and life threatening situations! Bad things happen to nations that let bullies and cowards bully, demean, and harm children!
The Trump Administration’s abuse of migrant children and their legal and Constitutional rights could be taken right out of a State Department Country Report on human rights abuses in a Third World Dictatorship. Is this they way YOU want to be remembered by history?
No, Constitutional and statutory protections for children are NOT “loopholes.” What kind of human beings speak such trash? The Trump Administration’s response to the “rule of law” when, as is often the case, it doesn’t fit their White Nationalist agenda is always to tell lies, rail against it, and look for ways around it.
05-01-18
The WashPost Editorial Board writes:
INFANTS, TODDLERS, tweens, teens — Trump administration officials are less interested in the age of an unauthorized child migrant than they are in removing the child from his or her parents as a means of deterring illegal border-crossers. That plan, first floated by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last year when he was homeland security secretary, was widely regarded as so callous and such a radical departure from historical practice that it was unthinkable for any U.S. government.
If only.
In fact, not only has the idea of systematically separating undocumented children and parents gained currency among top officials determined to turn the tide on illegal entry, it’s already happening with increasing frequency. The Department of Homeland Security insists it has not adopted the practice as a matter of official policy — despite White House pressure to do so — but administration officials acknowledge that hundreds of children, including scores younger than 4, have been taken from their parents in the past few months.
By now it’s clear that there are few red lines President Trump is unwilling to cross in his crusade to rid the United States of undocumented immigrants. For Mr. Trump, having washed his hands of the “dreamers” — young migrants, most in their 20s, raised and educated in the United States after being brought here as children — it’s hardly a moral leap to inflict lasting psychological damage on younger children by taking them from their parents if it will further his goal of combating illegal immigration.
As reported by The Post’s Maria Sacchetti, top immigration and border officials have recommended that all parents who enter the country illegally with their children be detained and prosecuted, meaning the automatic separation of minors, who cannot legally be held in jails or detention centers designed for adults. Until recently, that was extremely uncommon; most parents who crossed the border with children would be released pending an immigration court hearing, or, in some cases, detained together in a facility designed for families. Prosecuting parents for illegal entry, a misdemeanor under federal law, has been exceedingly rare — specifically because of the harm it would cause blameless children.
In addition, many of the parents who would be prosecuted are eligible under U.S. law to seek and be granted asylum. That’s hardly a stretch for migrants from El Salvador and Honduras, beset by drug cartels, gang violence, domestic abuse and some of the world’s highest homicide rates. In the last three months of 2017, more than two-thirds of the 30,000 asylum seekers crossed into the country illegally — and it is far-fetched to exempt from prosecution only those who announce themselves as asylum seekers at legal ports of entry, as Homeland Security officials propose. Are desperate, impoverished people fleeing violence to be penalized because they enter the United States in the wrong place?
The United States has a legitimate interest in deterring illegal border-crossing. It is within its rights to detain and deport individuals and families who fail to make a persuasive case for asylum. But to splinter families and traumatize children in the name of frightening away migrants, many of whom may have a legitimate asylum claim, is not just heartless. It is beyond the pale for a civilized country.
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Pretty ugly! Eventually our country, particularly future generations, will pay a high price for abandoning civilized values and human decency. The world is watching and the historical record is being made of the Trump Administration’s cowardly response to humanitarian tragedies and the folks who are enabling him and his White Nationalist cronies.
Get on the “right side of history!” Join the New ‘Due Process Army!”
PWS
04-30-18
Nick Miroff reports for the Washington Post:
TIJUANA, Mexico — The American president, a former real estate mogul, does not want Byron Garcia in the United States. But the Honduran teenager was too busy building his own hotel empire this week to worry much about that.
Vermont Avenue and Connecticut Avenue were his. Now he was looking to move up-market.
The mini-Monopoly board on the dusty floor of the migrant shelter was small, but it fit well in the small space beside the tents. His older sister, Carolina, rolled a 2 and landed on Oriental Avenue.
“That’ll be $500,” said Garcia, 15, gleefully extending his hand. “I love this game!”
Garcia is coming to America on Sunday. Or maybe not. His mother, Orfa Marin, 33, isn’t sure it will be a good day to walk up to the border crossing and tell a U.S. officer that her family needs asylum. She knows President Trump wants to stop them.
Marin and her three children are among the 300 or so remaining members of the migrant caravan who have arrived here at the end of a month-long geographic and political odyssey, a trip that has piqued Trump’s Twitter anger and opened new cracks in U.S.-Mexico relations.
Central American migrant children play Monopoly at the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter on April 26, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)The organizers of the caravan say they are planning to hold a rally Sunday at Friendship Park, the international park where a 15-foot border fence splits the beach. From there, activists and attorneys plan to lead a group of the migrants to the U.S. port of entry at San Ysidro, Calif., where they will approach U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and formally request asylum.
. . . .
Trump has ordered U.S. soldiers to deploy and Homeland Security officials to block the migrants. But the diminished version of the caravan that has arrived here, mostly women and children, has only underscored its meekness.
Migrant families arrive on a bus at the Ejercito de Salvacion shelter on April 26, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico after driving from Mexicali, Mexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)The families are drained after weeks of travel, coughing children and pinto beans. They have crowded here into shelters in the city’s squalid north end, where the sidewalks are smeared with dog droppings and skimpily dressed women hand out drink promotions among the strip clubs and brothels. The tall American border fence is two blocks away.
Children play on the sidewalks outside the shelters, the boredom broken whenever a car with donations arrives to drop off clothes and toys.
Central Americans migrants in Mexico have long been treated as a kind of renewable natural resource, ripe for exploitation by thieves, predators and politicians. The geopolitical importance attached to this particular group was a sign to many here that the U.S. president had recognized an opportunity, too.
“We’re not terrorists or bad people,” Marin said.
Regardless of its size, Trump officials have measured this caravan in symbolic terms, as an egregious example of the “loophole” they want to shut and an immigration system whose generosity is being abused, they say, by hundreds of thousands of Central Americas trying to dupe it.
. . . .
“These people have no option but to seek refuge in another country, and they have every right to seek asylum, they have decided to face the consequences and to be strong in demanding what is their right,” said Leonard Olsen, 26, a law student and one of several caravan organizers from the United States. He wore a tattered Philadelphia Eagles cap and arrived in Tijuana on Thursday with a busload of women and children.
. . . .
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I can understand why guys like Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, and Homan would be scared by mothers with talented kids who show the kind of courage, honesty, humanity, and respect for law that they themselves so conspicuously lack.
Without 5th Amendment protections, who would join the Trump Administration?
PWS
04-28-18
