“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.

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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

BIG MAC SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO PRESENT HIS LITANY OF LIES & TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS INVITATION TO “DIALOGUE” (ABOUT THE ENFORCEMENT PROGRAMS IMPLEMENTED BY DHS WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC “DIALOGUE” WHATSOEVER & AGAINST THE OVERWHELMING ADVICE OF PROFESSIONALS & EXPERTS, EVEN AT DHS) — Then, He Should Have Been Questioned About His Knowingly False Restrictionist Narratives & Human Rights Abuses! – Here’s What He REALLY Stands For, & It’s Got Nothing To Do with “Dialogue!” — “This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,”. . . . People are living in squalor.”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=d5727889-43e3-4481-bedb-dd0055e280af&v=sdk

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times from the Southern Border:

. . . .

In addition to the asylum seekers returned to Mexico to await their hearings, more than 26,000 are on waiting lists to enter U.S. border crossings and claim asylum, according to Human Rights Watch. Many on the lists are from Central America, but in recent weeks, large groups have been arriving from rural areas of Mexico’s interior, fleeing drug cartel violence.

The camp at the foot of the bridge in Matamoros has grown to hold more than a thousand migrants, most camped in scores of tents. Many have children and babies, and meals and water are sporadic, provided by volunteers.

“This Remain in Mexico program is a complete disaster,” Castro said after touring the camp next to the Rio Grande, where he saw migrants bathing near half a dozen crosses honoring those who drowned this summer while trying to make the dangerous crossing. “People should not be living like this.”

As Castro left the river, migrants standing in the reeds called to him in Spanish:

“Our children are sick!” said one man.

“We’ve been here for months!” said another.

“Our next court date isn’t until January!” said a woman.

“I’m sorry,” Castro replied in Spanish. “I know you’re suffering.”

Castro, who served as Housing and Urban Development secretary and San Antonio mayor, isn’t the first candidate to join asylum seekers at the border. In late June, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas met with migrants returned to Mexico at a shelter in Juarez. Days later, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker accompanied five pregnant women in the Remain in Mexico program across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.

Castro called on the Trump administration to end the Remain in Mexico policy, noting that he had met several vulnerable migrants who should not have been returned, including a woman who was seven months pregnant.

“This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,” he said. “People are living in squalor.”

By 5 p.m., all 12 asylum seekers who had crossed with Castro had been returned to Mexico.

“I feel so defeated,” said Rey, a 35-year-old Cuban who had joined the group only to find himself back in Matamoros by evening.

Dany was upset when she was returned to the camp at dusk. As migrants gathered, she told them that the U.S. official who had interviewed her by phone had been unsympathetic.

“I told him I was in danger in Matamoros. That didn’t matter to him,” she said. “There’s no asylum for anyone … the system is designed to end with us leaving.

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

Read Molly’s complete report at the link.

LGBTQ, sick, disabled, pregnant, the cruelty of the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” program touted by Big Mac and his flunkies knows no bounds.

One can only hope that someday, somewhere, in this world or the next, “Big Mac” and his fellow toadies carrying out the Trump/Miller unprecedented program of intentional human right abuses against the most vulnerable individuals (and actions directed against the pro bono lawyers and NGOs courageously trying to help them) will have to answer for their “crimes against humanity.”

How do you have a “dialogue” with someone like “Big Mac” whose insulting, condescending, false, and “in your face” prepared remarks, that he never got to give at Georgetown, in fact invited no such thing.

You can read Big Mac’s prepared compendium of lies that he never got to deliver here:

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2019/10/07/statement-department-homeland-security-following-acting-secretary-s-appearance

Here was my immediate reaction:

He falsely minimizes the powerful push factors, maximizes the pull factors (which his “maliciously incompetent” enforcement has contributed to), blames the legal system (the Constitution and refugee protection statutes that implement international treaties) and Congress (that is, Democrats, who have stood up for human rights), lies about failures to appear (this should be particularly galling to the many members of the Georgetown Community who have taken part in pro bono activities and know that pro bono representation actually solves that problem), ignores all reasonable solutions, and engages in mindless (and expensive) enforcement that maximizes the ability of oppressors while dehumanizing and killing some of the victims and virtually guaranteeing that there never will be a humane outcome. Seems like the “All-American solution” to me.

That being said, I wish folks had heard him out and asked him questions about his misstatements and lies during the Q&A. I actually would have liked to hear his answer when confronted by the studies that show that almost everyone who has a chance to be represented shows up for the hearings and why he is blocking, rather than facilitating, one of the key solutions — pro bono representation? Why it’s OK to negotiate Safe Third Country agreements with countries that essentially are war zones and have no functioning asylum systems? Why he claimed that detention conditions were improving and more detention was necessary when his own Inspector General said just the opposite? Why he took a contemptuous position before Judge Dolly Gee that indefinite detention of families addressed her requirements, when it clearly didn’t? Why he blamed Judges and laws for problems he has either caused or aggravated? There wouldn’t have been enough time, I suppose.

Talking about free speech, it’s not like the Trump Administration engages in any type of dialogue with the public or professional experts before unilaterally changing policies. And, it’s not like they provide any forum for opposing views. Indeed, even U.S. Legislators, Judges, State Officials, and their own Asylum Officers who speak out against the Administration’s biased and wrong-headed views are routinely attacked, threatened, slandered, mocked, and denigrated.

Yesterday, I did a Skype training session for D.C. Affordable Law. There, I actually had a “dialogue” with those attorneys courageously and selflessly trying to help asylum applicants through the unnecessarily complicated and intentionally hostile environment in Immigration Court and at the BIA that Big Mac and his propaganda machine along with scofflaws Sessions, Barr, and McHenry have created. There are many “winnable” asylum cases out there, even after the law has intentionally been misconstrued and manipulated by the Trump Administration in a racist attempt to disqualify all asylum seekers from Central America.

One thing we all agreed upon was that nobody, and I mean nobody, without competent representation and a chance to gather necessary documentation would have any chance of getting asylum under the current hostile environment. That means that when “Big Mac” and others tout “immediate decisions at the border” (sometimes by untrained Border Patrol Agents, no less, rather than professional Asylum Officers) what they REALLY are doing is insuring that few individuals have access to the necessary pro bono counsel and legal resources necessary to actually win an asylum case under today’s conditions. That’s an intentional denial of Constitutional, statutory, and human rights by Big Mac!

Then, Big Mac has the audacity and intellectual dishonesty to use bogus statistics generated by a system he and others have intentionally manipulated so as to reject or not even hear very legitimate asylum claims as “proof” that most of those claims are “without merit.” While I’m afraid it’s too late for those killed, tortured, or suffering because of Big Mac’s wrongdoing, I certainly hope that someday, someone does an assessment of all the improperly rejected, denied, and blocked asylum, withholding, CAT, SIJS, T, and U claims that should have been granted under an honest interpretation of asylum law and a fair adjudication and hearing process.

A real dialogue on solving the Southern Border would start with how we can get the necessary professional adjudicators and universal representation of asylum seekers working to make the system function fairly and efficiently. And that probably would mean at least 20% to 25% “quick grants” of strong cases that would keep them out of the Immigration Court and Courts of Appeals systems without stomping on anyone’s rights. It would also enable asylees to quickly obtain work authorization and start making progress toward eventual citizenship and full integration so that they could maximize their great potential contributions to our society.

For the money we are now wasting on cruel, inhuman, and ultimately ineffective enforcement gimmicks being promoted by “Big Mac,” we could actually get a decent universal representation program for asylum seekers up and running. Under a fair system, rejections would also be fair and as expeditious as due process allows, making for quicker and more certain returns of those who are not qualified and perhaps even sending a more understandable and acceptable “message” as to who actually qualifies under our refugee and asylum systems.

It’s highly unlikely that there will ever be any real dialogue on immigration and human rights as long as Trump and neo-Nazi Stephen Miller are “driving the train” and “Big Mac with Lies” and other like him are serving as their “conductors” on the “Death Express.” Trump and his policies have intentionally “poisoned the well” so that debate and constructive solutions are impossible. As long as we start, as Big Mac does, with a litany of lies and fabrications, and reject all truth and knowledge, there is no starting point for a debate.

PWS

10-08-19

DERANGED TRUMP WANTED TO MURDER & MAIM LAWFUL ASYLUM SEEKERS, WHILE AIDES COVERED UP FOR HIM RATHER THAN “BLOWING THE WHISTLE” — “Go Along To Get Along” Supremes & Appellate Courts Enabled & Encouraged Abuses By Failing To Take A Strong, Unified Position Against Trump’s Bogus “National Emergency,” Unconcealed Racial & Religious Bias Against Migrants, & Patently Evident Plans To Run Roughshod Over U.S. Constitution! — Aides Racing To Get Cost Estimates On Moats With Snakes & Alligators! — This Is Where The Dereliction Of Constitutional Duty By The GOP & The Roberts Court Has Gotten Us!

Michael D. Shear
White House Reporter
NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirshfeld Davis report for the N.Y. Times:

WASHINGTON — The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, a s Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,” he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff.

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. She had always been viewed with suspicion by the president, who told aides she was “a Bushie,” and part of the “deep state” who once contributed to a group that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn.

That March day, he was furious at Mr. Pompeo, too, for having cut a deal with Mexico to allow the United States to reject some asylum seekers — a plan Mr. Trump said was clearly failing.

A complete shutdown of the border, Mr. Trump said, was the only way.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. Even Mr. Kushner, who had developed relationships with Mexican officials and now sided with Ms. Nielsen, could not get through to him.

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.”

The Start of an Overhaul

The president’s advisers left the meeting in a near panic.

Every year more than $200 billion worth of American exports flow across the Mexican border. Closing it would wreak havoc on American farmers and automakers, among many others. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said in an interview at the time that a border shutdown would have “a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country.”

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That night, White House advisers succeeded in convincing the president to give them a reprieve, but only for a week, until the following Friday. That gave them very little time to change the president’s mind.

They started by pressuring their Mexican counterparts to rapidly increase apprehensions of migrants. Mr. Kushner and others in the West Wing showered the president with emails proving that the Mexicans had already started apprehending more migrants before they could enter the United States.

White House advisers encouraged a stream of corporate executives, Republican lawmakers and officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tell Mr. Trump how damaging a border closure would be.

Mr. Miller, meanwhile, saw an opportunity.

It was his view that the president needed to completely overhaul the Homeland Security Department and get rid of senior officials who he believed were thwarting efforts to block immigrants. Although many were the president’s handpicked aides, Mr. Miller told him they had become part of the problem by constantly citing legal hurdles.

Ms. Nielsen, who regularly found herself telling Mr. Trump why he couldn’t have what he wanted, was an obvious target. When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

When Ms. Nielsen tried to get him to focus on something other than the border, the president grew impatient. During a briefing on the need for new legal authority to take down drones, Mr. Trump cut her off midsentence.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?”

But the problem went deeper than Ms. Nielsen, Mr. Miller believed. L. Francis Cissna, the head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services until earlier this year, regularly pushed back on Mr. Miller’s demand for a “culture change” at the agency, where Mr. Miller believed asylum officers were bleeding hearts, too quick to extend protections to immigrants.

They needed to start with the opposite point of view, Mr. Miller told him, and start turning people away.

John Mitnick, the homeland security general counsel who often raised legal concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was also on Mr. Miller’s blacklist. Mr. Miller had also turned against Ronald D. Vitiello, a top official at Customs and Border Protection whom the president had nominated to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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By midweek, the campaign to change Mr. Trump’s mind about closing the border seemed to be working.

Maybe there’s another way to do this, the president told Ms. Nielsen. How about if I impose tariffs on the Mexicans, or threaten to impose tariffs? Tariffs are great.

But the staff worried that his retreat would only be temporary. The president never really let go of his obsessions.

They were right. On a trip to California late in the week, Mr. Trump turned to Mr. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief, with a new idea: He wanted him to stop letting migrants cross the border at all, with no exceptions. If you get into any trouble for it, Mr. Trump told him, I’ll pardon you.

The Turning Point

Once on the ground, Mr. Trump met up with Ms. Nielsen and worked a room filled with Border Patrol agents. Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full.

After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned.

As she and her staff flew back to Washington that Friday evening, Ms. Nielsen called the president. She knew he was angry with her.

“Sir, I know you’re really frustrated,” she told him. The president invited her to meet with him on Sunday in the White House residence.

Ms. Nielsen knew that Miller wanted her out, so she spent the flight huddled with aides on a strategy for getting control of the border, a Hail Mary pass. She called it the “Six C’s” — Congress, Courts, Communications, Countries, Criminals, Cartels.

Unbeknown to her, Ms. Nielsen’s staff started work on her letter of resignation.

When Ms. Nielsen presented her plan to Mr. Trump at the White House, he dismissed it and told her what he really needed was a cement wall.

“Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.” They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Ms. Nielsen told him. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed.

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The president responded that it was time for her to go, Mr. Trump recalled later. “Kirstjen, I want to make a change,” he said.

The president said he would wait a week to announce her resignation, to leave time for a transition. But before Ms. Nielsen had left the White House that day, the word was leaking out. By evening, Mr. Trump was tweeting about it.

“Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position,” Trump wrote, “and I would like to thank her for her service.”

The dismissal was a turning point for Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the start of the purge that ushered in a team that embraced Mr. Miller’s policies.

Mr. Trump quickly dismissed Claire M. Grady, the homeland security under secretary, and moved Mr. McAleenan to take Ms. Nielsen’s old job. Within two months, Mr. Cissna was out as well, replaced by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general and an immigration hard-liner.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Cuccinelli announced that the government would deny green cards for immigrants deemed likely to become “public charges.” Nine days later, Mr. McAleenan announced regulations to allow immigrant families to be detained indefinitely.

In the months since the purge, the president has repeated his threat of placing tariffs on Mexico to spur aggressive enforcement at the border. Mr. McAleenan and Mr. Cuccinelli have embraced restrictive asylum rules. And the Pentagon approved shifting $3.6 billion to build the wall.

Mr. Trump has continued to face resistance in the courts and public outrage about his immigration agenda. But the people who tried to restrain him have largely been replaced.

In the interview with The Times this past summer, Mr. Trump said he had seriously considered sealing the border during March, but acknowledged that doing so would have been “very severe.”

“The problem you have with the laws the way they are, we can have 100,000 of our soldiers standing up there — they can’t do a thing,” Mr. Trump said ruefully.

This article is adapted from “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Oct. 8.

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

Trump’s inherent dishonesty and lack of credibility are well established. His ham-handed attacks on the rule of law and the Constitution are obvious even to non-lawyers. So, what’s the excuse for the Supremes in the Travel Ban Cases & East Side Sanctuary Covenant and the Ninth Circuit in Innovation Law Labs? None, that I can see!

Trump is a dangerous and cruel lunatic, being appeased, enabled, and coddled by corrupt and immoral GOP legislators, a feckless and spineless Supreme Court, and cowardly, immoral aides who try to please an “off the rails” Mafia boss rather than blowing the whistle on the horrors of the Trump White House and the endless illegal schemes, gimmicks, abuses of Government authority, and, frankly, “crimes against humanity” being plotted there.

Failing to stand up to, expose, and publicly oppose Trump has potentially fatal consequences. Two branches of Government have failed. That’s where we need leadership and courage from the Supremes. So far, they have flunked the test — miserably!

PWS

10-02-19

“FLOATERS” IN THE RIO GRANDE: How Is This An Appropriate Response Of World’s Most Prosperous Country To Individuals Seeking Protection Under Our Laws Or, At Worst, A Better Life?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/border-patrols-september-on-the-rio-grande-bodies-cartel-lookouts-footprints-in-the-mud-and-fewer-migrants/2019/09/23/26cf9884-d40a-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html

Abigail Hauslohner reports for WashPost:

ABRAM, Tex. — The dead man was face down near the riverbank, visible mostly because of the slivers of red on the soles of his sneakers.

“We’ve got a floater,” U.S. Border Patrol agent Deborah Villarreal called out to the rest of her unit. She swung the patrol boat around to get a closer look.

It was predawn, early in Villarreal’s shift, and the purplish-pink sky reflected in the placid waters of the Rio Grande. She furrowed her brow at the grim start to her day, and she thought about the family out there somewhere, missing this man, wondering where he was, not knowing he was dead.

“I hate to see that,” she said.

Villarreal sees dead bodies regularly, floating in this river that separates Mexico from the United States. This was the second her unit had spotted along this particular stretch in about a week.

By the end of her day, she would have steered the boat up and down the river a couple dozen more times, passing the body again and again before Mexican authorities arrived to take it away. She would pass the same series of concrete sheds — holes drilled into the sides so the drug cartels can use them as lookout points — and the same run-down riverfront cafe, where a black car loitered, and a man watched the boat pass. She would wave to the Mexican national guardsmen at their sleepy encampment, push through a cloud of skunk odor — it was their mating season — scour the river reeds for signs of footsteps into the United States, and send her agents up the bank and into the brush after a pair of Mexican migrants, ultimately catching up to them on the edge of a cane field.

This, relative to recent months, was a slow day in the Rio Grande Valley.

The winding body of the river here in South Texas — with its submerged remnants of rafts, its banks trampled by migrant families and cartel workers, and now, by Mexican forces — is a microcosm of all the ebbs and flows of the nation’s approach to immigration. This sliver of the 1,954-mile border with Mexico is primed to deliver a verdict on the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s border policies.

It is here that the spring influx of migrant families and children reached its peak, inundating U.S. Border Patrol stations with too many detainees. But apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley have dropped 55 percent since May, down from nearly 50,000 to just more than 22,000 in August. Though this area still sees more migrant crossings than any other sector of the border, border agents here have witnessed how Washington policies aimed at decreasing the flow have played out in real time.

To them, it is President Trump’s deal with Mexico to intercept migrants before they cross into the United States that has seemed to have the most impact. They do not know the details of the accord or how long it will last, but they can see the Mexican forces on the other side of the Rio Grande.

“You see a difference,” said Ryan Ansbro, a Border Patrol agent who works alongside Villarreal.

Villarreal and her team, who patrol the river by boat, rush to intercept migrants and smugglers before they cross, and they pluck people from the water when they wind up in it. The precipitous summer decline in migrant crossings has meant quieter shifts on a river that is suddenly more manageable, less frantic.

But the constants remain: the desperation that cannot be deterred by danger; the drug cartels that devise new methods as fast as authorities try to thwart them; the everyday logistical challenges facing the Border Patrol, even as Trump focuses money and rhetorical energy on a border wall.

Though lower than earlier in the year, last month still saw more crossings than any other August in a decade. Will large groups of families and children — sometimes as many as 300 people at once — again pull agents away from their patrol duties, forcing them to become processors and jail guards? Will Mexican troops be able to sustain their effort?

“We’re all in limbo,” Villarreal said. “We don’t know if it’s going to skyrocket again or if this is going to be what helps us. It’s just an unknown.”

The chase is always on

On the river, the chase is always on. Cartel scouts along the Mexican side keep watch for the Border Patrol, launching rafts to the United States full of migrants or drugs whenever they find a gap.

The agents, in turn, speed back and forth, hoping to keep up. They rely heavily on eyes in the sky: helicopters, blimps with cameras, and stationary surveillance technology mounted on the edges of walls and fields to warn them of a raft hitting the water. If they get to the launch point quickly enough, the rafts often double back — sometimes tossing migrants into the water as they do.

“Our job is more of a deterrence unit,” Villarreal said. “And we are involved in a lot of rescues.”

The pale-green water in this region is flat and still, its current barely discernible from the boat deck, as it winds snakelike through the thick scrubland, with curves and switchbacks. Some of the narrowest areas and favored crossing points are less than a football field wide. But the water can be deceiving.

“You look at it right now, and you think there’s no current,” Ansbro said. “But you get in, and you find out there is a current. And a lot of them can’t swim,” he said of the migrants. Others get disoriented in the thick brush on the U.S. side, and in their exhaustion, they try to swim back.

Thick tangles of reeds, known locally as carrizo cane, create dense jungles that stretch from the riverbanks inland, thwarting the movements of migrants and the Border Patrol agents seeking to apprehend them.

The Border Patrol agents tell stories of the people they have found: the 18-year-old who medic Salvador Pastran discovered face up and arms spread in the middle of a dirt road a few years ago, the body reminding him of a snow angel; the young woman and three babies that agent Sheymarie Rosa and colleagues spotted recently, so close to a road, but all dead; or the group of 20 children and adults who Villarreal and her team rescued from the reeds at the water’s edge earlier in the summer.

In three days on the river this month, agents from the McAllen Border Patrol station, including Villarreal’s unit, encountered migrants during every shift who were suffering from heat exhaustion in the cane fields and citrus orchards between the river and the roads, even though the weather was cooler — in the 80s — than it had been in weeks.

‘This is the new Ellis Island, and we are turning people away’: A lawyer struggles to help migrants

(Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

There was a Nicaraguan man who told agents he had lost consciousness in the brush after being deposited there by smugglers early in the morning. Hours later, he came to and crawled out onto a levee, where he was able to seek help from two U.S. National Guardsmen who have been deployed to the border in recent months to assist the Border Patrol.

There was another migrant, who agents believed to be a Chinese national, who began vomiting incessantly — a common symptom of heat exhaustion, Pastran said — shortly after they gave him water to drink.

Many of the migrants are leaving behind abject poverty, gangs, violence — and the dangers of a northbound trek and a hazardous crossing do not dilute the potential promise of life in the United States.

“The conditions here are still better,” Ansbro said.

Echoing the broad contours of arguments the Trump administration has made about why it is necessary to more aggressively deport those who are in the country illegally, Villarreal, Ansbro and other agents said they believe little can be done to stop the flow of migrants without tightening the laws to make it more difficult for asylum seekers and illegal entrants to remain in the United States.

“If they think they can come and stay, they’re going to do it,” Villarreal said.

Policies such as the administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which pushes asylum seekers back into Mexico to await U.S. court hearings, and other restrictions such as requiring migrants to first seek asylum in countries they transit on their way to the United States, are aimed at preventing people from even attempting a crossing.

But the Mexican forces are the only policy that the agents on the river can see for themselves.

Change on the Rio Grande

The change came earlier this summer.

Early one morning, Villarreal and her unit caught a glimpse of something unusual in the dark. There, on the Mexican side of the river, was a collection of colorful tent canvases, like a family campsite at a national park. But this was the bank of the Rio Grande, just north of the Mexican city of Reynosa, where the government had notoriously little authority in the face of cartel control. It was only after the tents’ occupants came to life under the beams of the Border Patrol’s flashlights that Villarreal and her agents realized what they were seeing.

“Oh, it’s the Mexican military,” she said, recalling her surprise, referring to the Mexican national guard forces. “We woke those poor guys up.”

There is little direct communication between the agents and the Mexican authorities. An international liaison handles that.

But on this day, Villarreal waved to the men in fatigues as her boat passed. We haven’t seen much today, she calls out to them in Spanish through the boat’s loudspeaker, “but we’ll let you know if we do.”

Two of the men responded with a thumbs-up.

When a late morning call came in over the radio about a group crossing downriver, the intelligence was coming from an agent watching an aerial camera, and Villarreal’s boat unit took off at 47 mph, past the inlet where agents have seen alligators, and past the remnants of a dozen green plastic rafts snagged on tree branches in the shallows.

“Mira,” Rosa told Villarreal in Spanish. “Look.”

The boat slowed next to a forested bank across from an empty Mexican cafe.

“There’s a guy right there.” Across the river, a man was watching them.

They moved up and down along the river bank, searching for signs of trampled reeds. The raft had already crossed. Finding fresh footprints in the mud, Ansbro and Rosa set off in pursuit through the brush, where their uniforms snagged on blades of cane and the air felt heavy and suffocating.

They followed the tracks out to a dirt road along another dense field of cane, and up the road, a snake slipping over the sandy berm to get out of their way. A helicopter moved in overhead.

“Fifty yards ahead of you, there’s going to be two of them,” came a voice from the helicopter over the radio after several minutes. “Right shoulder. Go into the field right there.” And the agents plunged into the cane, emerging seconds later with two muddied men handcuffed together.

They sat them down on the road to collect their belongings and to begin the typical questioning. One was a 44-year-old fisherman from the southern Mexican state of Veracruz. The other was a 32-year-old from Guerrero. Both were fathers of three. Both were exhausted.

They had not eaten in two or three days, the fisherman said. They had come to the United States to look for work.

The agents led them back to the boat, took them upriver, and handed them off to another agent with a truck. They would likely face swift deportation.

In the afternoon, the tiny boat Villarreal had been waiting for since dawn appeared around a river bend. Two bomberos — Mexican firefighters in red vests — stood side-by-side as they steered upriver. Villarreal’s team guided them to the body they had reported that morning.

The man, whose name they would likely never know, was just as they had left him, the red of his sneakers still peeking above the murky green in the shadow of the reeds. They guessed he had been dead for days, and Villarreal furrowed her brow again, this time in pity for what the firefighters would have to do.

“I feel bad for the bomberos. They pay them nothing,” she said as she watched them delicately tie the body to a rope attached to their boat.

When bodies end up on the U.S. side of the border, agents call the local sheriff’s office or justice of the peace to handle the remains and seek identification. When they are on the Mexican side, it is up to the bomberos.

Ansbro and Rosa asked what would become of him. Villarreal shrugged. If he has no identification, she said, he rwill probably be placed in a grave of unknowns.

The bomberos motored away, dragging the man in the boat’s wake.

Villarreal picked up the radio.

“The body has been recovered.”

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

“Floaters” were actually once live human beings, like you and me.

Dehumanization of migrants and forcing them into life-threatening situations is a morally and legally unacceptable means of “deterrence.” To what depths will we sink under Trump?

PWS

09-30-19

COURTS OF INJUSTICE: How Systemic Bias, Bad Precedents, Gross Mismanagement, & Poor Decision-Making Threaten Lives In Immigration Court — What Should Be “Slam Dunk” Grants Of Protection Are Literally “Litigated To Death” Adding To Backlogs While Mocking Justice! — Featuring Quotes From “Roundtable” Leader Hon. Jeffrey Chase!

Beth Fertig
Senior Reporter
Immigration, Courts, Legal
WNYC & The Gothamist

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog

https://gothamist.com/news/they-fled-gang-violence-and-domestic-abuse-nyc-immigration-judge-denied-them-asylum

Beth Fertig reports for WNYC:

They Fled Gang Violence And Domestic Abuse. An NYC Immigration Judge Denied Them Asylum

BY BETH FERTIG, WNYC

SEPT. 26, 2019 5:00 A.M.

Seventeen year-old Josue and his mom, Esperanza, were visibly drained. They had just spent more than four hours at their asylum trial inside an immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, answering questions from their attorney and a government lawyer. We are withholding their full names to protect their identities because they’re afraid.

“It was exhausting,” said Josue, whose angular haircut was neatly combed for the occasion. In Spanish, he told us the judge seemed nice but, “you feel bad if you don’t know if you are going to be allowed to stay or if you have to go.”

The teen and his mother crossed the U.S. border in California in the summer of 2018. At the time, a rising number of families were entering the country, and the Trump administration wanted to send a message to them by swiftly deporting those who don’t qualify for asylum. But immigration judges are so busy, they can take up to four years to rule on a case. In November, judges in New York and nine other cities were ordered to fast track family cases and complete them within a year.

This is how Esperanza and Josue wound up going to trial just 10 months after they arrived in the U.S. and moved to Brooklyn. They were lucky to find attorneys with Central American Legal Assistance, a nonprofit in Williamsburg that’s been representing people fleeing the troubled region since 1985.

Listen to reporter Beth Fertig’s WNYC story on Josue and Esperanza’s cases.

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Winning asylum was never easy. But in 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it tougher for people like Josue and Esperanza when he issued his own ruling on an immigration case involving a woman from El Salvador who was a victim of domestic violence. He wrote: “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.”

Immigration judges were bound to give heavy weight to that ruling. Their courts are run by the Department of Justice, whose boss is the Attorney General. And the AG’s boss, President Trump, frequently asserts that too many migrants lie about being threatened by gangs when they’re just coming for jobs. “It’s a big fat con job, folks,” he said at a Michigan rally this year.

Esperanza and Josue went to court soon after Sessions’ decision. She was fighting for asylum as a victim of domestic abuse; Josue claimed a gang threatened his life. Both would eventually lose their cases.

Josue’s case

Esperanza and Josue are typical of the Central American families seeking asylum these days, who say they’re escaping vicious drug gangs, violence and grinding poverty. The two of them came from a town outside San Pedro Sula, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

During their trial, Josue testified under oath about how gang members repeatedly approached him outside his high school, asking him to sell drugs to the other students. He tried to ignore them, and gave different excuses for resisting, until one day when they spotted him playing soccer and became more aggressive. That’s when he said the gang leader put a gun in his face.

“He told me that if I didn’t accept what he wanted he was going to kill my whole family, my mother and sister,” he said, through a Spanish interpreter.

“I was in shock,” he said. “I had no other choice to accept and said yes.”

He told his mother and they left Honduras the next day. When Josue’s lawyer, Katherine Madison, asked if he ever reported the threat to the police he said no. “That was practically a suicide,” he said, explaining that the police are tied to the gang, because it has so much power.

Josue said his older sister later moved to Mexico because she was so afraid of the gang.

Winning asylum is a two-step process. You have to prove that you were persecuted, and that this persecution was on account of your race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. Madison, Josue’s attorney, argued that in Honduras, defying gangs is a risky political statement.

“They function in many ways as the de facto government of the areas where people like Josue lived,” she told WNYC/Gothamist, summing up the arguments she submitted to the judge. “They make rules. They charge basically taxes, they say who can live there and who can’t.”

And they’re known to kill people who don’t obey.

In her ruling, issued in August, Immigration Judge Oshea Spencer found Josue did experience persecution. But she denied his application for asylum. She said much of what he described “were threats and harm that exist as part of the larger criminal enterprise of the gangs in Honduras and not on the basis of any actual or perceived opposition to the gangs.”

Esperanza’s case

Esperanza’s attorney argued that her life was at risk because the gang member threatened Josue’s family. But Spencer didn’t find that specific enough. She wrote that the gang members “were motivated by their efforts to expand their drug trade, not the family relationship.” Among other cases, she referred to a recent decision by the current Attorney General, William Barr, that makes it harder for the relatives of someone who’s been threatened to win asylum.

Esperanza also lost on a separate claim that she deserved asylum because she was repeatedly beaten by Josue’s father. In court, she testified about years of abuse culminating in an incident in which he chased her with a machete. She said she couldn’t get the police to issue a restraining order, and said he kept threatening her after she moved to another town to stay with relatives.

Madison argued that women like Esperanza belong to a persecuted social group: they can’t get help from the authorities in Honduras because they’re viewed as a man’s property. The country is one of the deadliest places to be a woman; police are known to ignore complaints; and it’s extremely hard for women to get justice.

But Spencer ruled that there is no persecuted social group made up of “Honduran women who are viewed as property” for being in a domestic relationship.

Echoing the Sessions’ ruling, the judge said these categories “all lack sufficient particularity,” and called them “amorphous” because they could be made up of a “potentially large and diffuse segment of society.”

She also cited evidence submitted by the government that showed conditions in Honduras are improving for women. This evidence came from a 2018 State Department report on human rights in Honduras. Immigration advocates claim it’s been watered down from the much harsher conditions described in the last report from 2016. It’s also much shorter in length.

Jeffrey Chase, an immigration lawyer and former New York immigration judge, said it’s not surprising that Esperanza and Josue would each lose asylum. Judge Spencer only started last fall and is on probation for her first two years in the job.

“This was decided by a brand new judge who didn’t have any immigration experience prior to becoming an immigration judge,” he said, referring to the fact that Spencer was previously an attorney with the Public Utility Commission of Texas. He said she went through training which, “These days, includes being told that we don’t consider these to be really good cases.”

Sitting judges don’t talk to the media but Chase noted that they must consider the facts of each individual case, meaning the former Attorney General’s ruling doesn’t apply to all cases. He noted that some women who were victims of abuse are still winning asylum. He pointed to a case involving a Guatemalan woman who was raped by her boss. A Texas immigration judge found she did fit into a particular social group as a woman who defied gender norms, by taking a job normally held by a man.

During Josue and Esperanza’s trial, there was a lot of back and forth over their individual claims. A trial attorney from Immigration and Customs Enforcement questioned why Esperanza didn’t contact the police again after moving to another town, where she said her former partner continued to threaten her. Esperanza said it was because her brother chased him away and the police “don’t pay attention to you.”

The ICE attorney also asked Josue if his father was physically violent with anyone besides Esperanza. Josue said he did fight with other men. San Diego immigration lawyer Anna Hysell, who was previously an ICE trial attorney, said that could have hurt Esperanza’s case.

“The government was able to make the arguments that he didn’t target her because of being a woman that was in his relationship,” she explained. “He just was probably a terrible person and targeted many people.”

Hysell added that this was just her analysis and she wasn’t agreeing with the decision.

Attorney Anne Pilsbury said she believes Esperanza would have won her case, prior to the asylum ruling by Sessions, because she suffered years of abuse. But she said Josue would have had a more difficult time because gang cases were always tough. And like a lot of migrants, Josue had no evidence — he was too afraid to go to the cops. Pilsbury said immigration judges are even more skeptical now of gang cases.

“They’re getting so that they won’t even think about them,” she said. “They aren’t wrestling with the facts. They’re hearing gang violence and that’s it.”

She said Judge Spencer does sometimes grant asylum, and isn’t as harsh as other new judges. New York City’s immigration court used to be one of the most favorable places for asylum seekers. In 2016, 84 percent of asylum cases were granted. Today, that figure has fallen to 57 percent, according to TRAC at Syracuse University. Meanwhile, the government is forcing migrants to wait in Mexico for their immigration court cases or seek asylum in other countries before applying in the U.S., as the national backlog of cases exceeds one million.

Pilsbury, who founded Central American Legal Assistance in 1985, said immigration courts are now dealing with the result of a regional crisis south of the border that’s never been properly addressed since the wars of the 1980s.

“The anti-immigrant people feel it’s broken because people get to come here and ask for asylum and we feel it’s broken because people’s asylum applications aren’t seriously considered,” she explained. “We should be doing more to understand what’s going on in those countries and what we can do to help them address the chronic problems.”

Esperanza and Josue’s cases will now be appealed. Madison said she believes the judge ignored some of her evidence about gangs. She’s now turning to the Board of Immigration Appeals. However, it’s also controlled by the Justice Department — meaning the odds of getting a reversal are slim. If they lose again, the family can go to a federal circuit court which may have a broader definition of who’s eligible for asylum.

But Esperanza and Josue won’t be deported as long as their case is being appealed. On a late summer day, they seemed relaxed while sitting in a Brooklyn park. Esperanza talked about how happy she is that Josue is safe at his public high school, and can even ride a bike at night with his friends.

“He goes out and I’m always trusting the Father that just as he goes out, he comes back,” she said.

Even if they knew they would lose their asylum case, both said they still would have come to the U.S. because the risk of staying in Honduras was too great. Josue said the gang would definitely find him if he ever returned because their networks are so deep throughout the country. He’s now taking the long view. He knows there will be a Presidential election next year.

“It’s like a game of chess,” Josue said. “Any mindset can change at any moment. Maybe Trump changes his mind or maybe not. But I would have always made the decision to come.”

With translation assistance from Alexandra Feldhausen, Lidia Hernández-Tapia and Andrés O’Hara.

Beth Fertig is a senior reporter covering immigration, courts and legal affairs at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig.

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this posting incorrectly identified Beth’s network affiliation. She reports for WNYC.

By clicking on the link at the top and going to Beth’s article on The Gothamist, you will be able to get a link to the original WNYC audio broadcast of this story.

It’s not “rocket science.” Better, fairer outcomes were available that would have fulfilled, rather than mocked, our obligation to provide Due Process and protection under our own laws and international treaties.

Here’s how:

Esperanza’s claim is a clear asylum grant for “Honduran women” which is both a “particular social group” (“PSG”) and a persecuted group in Honduras that the government is unwilling or unable to protect.
- Here’s a much better recent decision along those lines from Judge Howard Hom of the same Immigration Court granting a very similar case based on the PSG of “Guatemanlan women.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/09/19/the-good-news-gender-based-asylum-claims-continue-to-win-in-the-post-a-b-era-the-bad-news-applicants-subjected-to-let-em-die-in-mexico-compl/
Although the last two Administrations have intentionally twisted the law against Central American asylum seekers, Josue has a clear case for asylum as somebody for whom opposition to gang violence was an “imputed political opinion” that was “at least one central reason” for the persecution. See, e.g, https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/6/3/3rd-generation-gangs-and-political-opinion.
In any event, on this record, Josue clearly showed that he faced a probability of torture by gangs with the acquiescence of the Honduran government, and therefore should have been granted mandatory protection by the Immigration Judge under the Convention against Torture (“CAT”).
The Immigration Judge’s assertion that things are getting better for women in Honduras, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for women where femicide is rampant, not only badly misapplies the legal standard (“fundamentally changed conditions that would eliminate any well founded fear”) but is also totally disingenuous as a factual matter. See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/05/opinion/honduras-women-murders.html.
Additionally, Honduras remains in a state of armed conflict. See, e.g., https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23740973.2019.1603972?needAccess=true. Under an honest Government, granting TPS to Hondurans (as well as Salvadorans and Guatemalans affected by environmental disasters heightened by climate change) would be more than justified.
Under honest Government following the rule of law, well-documented cases like this one could be quickly granted by the USCIS Asylum Officer or granted on stipulation in short hearings in Immigration Court. Many more Central Americans could be granted CAT relief, TPS, or screened and approved for asylum abroad. They could thereby be kept off of Immigraton Court dockets altogether or dealt with promptly on “short dockets” without compromising anybody’s statutory or constitutional rights (compromising individual rights is a “specialty” of all the mostly ineffective “enforcement gimmicks” advanced by the Trump Administration).
Over time, the overwhelming self-inflicted Immigration Court backlogs caused by the Trump Administration’s “maliciously incompetent” administration of immigration laws (e.g., “Aimless Docket Reshuffling”) would be greatly reduced.
- That, in turn, would allow the Immigration Courts to deal with cases on a more realistic timeline that would both aid rational, non-White-Nationalist immigration enforcement and provide real justice for those seeking protection under our legal system.
As I’ve said before, it’s not “rocket science.” All it would take is more honest and enlightened Government committed to Due Process, good court management, and an appropriate legal application of laws relating to refugees and other forms of protection. I doubt that it would cost as much as all of the bogus “enforcement only gimmicks” now being pursued by Trump as part of his racist, anti-migrant, anti-Hispanic agenda.
Poor judicial decision making, as well illustrated by this unfortunate wrongly decided case, not only threatens the lives of deserving applicants for our protection, but also bogs down an already grossly overloaded system with unnecessarily protracted litigation and appeals of cases that should be “clear grants.”
Contrary to the intentionally false “party line” spread by “Big Mac With Lies” and other corrupt Trump sycophants at the DHS and the DOJ, a much, much higher percentage, probably a majority, of asylum applicants from the Northern Triangle who apply at our Southern Border should properly be granted some type of legal protection under our laws if the system operated in the fair and impartial manner that is Constitutionally required. The Trump Administration aided by their sycophants and enablers, all the way up to the feckless Supremes, are literally “getting away with murder” in far, far too many instances.
Consequently, quickly identifying and granting relief to the many deserving applicants would be a more efficient, humane, and lawful alternative to the “Kill ‘Em Before They Get Here” deterrence programs being pursued by Trump, with the complicity of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit, and some of the other Federal Circuit Courts who have been afraid to put a stop to the extralegal nonsense going on in our Immigraton Courts, detention centers (the “New American Gulag”), our Southern Border, and countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and El Salvador where we are basically encouraging extralegal abuses and gross human right violations against migrants. It will eventually come back to haunt our nation, or whatever is left of our nation after Trump and his gang of White Nationalist thugs, supporters, appeasers, apologists, and enablers, are done looting and destroying it.

PWS

09-30-19

BIG DAY FOR NDPA: “Trip Wins” In USDC On Friday Over Trump Administration’s Unlawful Immigration Programs Shows Both The Promise & The Problems Of Relying On Federal Courts To Stand Up To Trump’s Abuses — Supremes & Courts Of Appeals Haven’t Consistently Defended Constitution & Rule Of Law Against Trump’s Illegal Actions!

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=ee3650e6-aa94-4a5e-a8b5-174d0f25f52d&v=sdk

Brittany Mejia and Joel Rubin report for the LA Times:

Trump dealt 3 legal defeats on immigration

White House assails ‘misguided’ court rulings it says hinder law enforcement.

By Brittny Mejia and Joel Rubin

In a third defeat in less than a day for the Trump administration, a federal judge blocked it from vastly extending the authority of immigration officers to deport people without first allowing them to appear before judges.

The decision late Friday came before the policy, which was announced in July, was even enforced. The move would have applied to anyone in the country less than two years.

The decision came just after a federal judge barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement from relying solely on flawed databases to target people for being in the country illegally.

Early Friday, the administration suffered what would be its first defeat on the immigrant front in less than 24 hours when a federal judge blocked its plan to dismantle protections for immigrant youths and indefinitely hold families with children in detention.

Those protections are granted under the so-called Flores agreement, which was the result of a landmark class-action court settlement in 1997 that said the government must generally release children as quickly as possible and cannot detain them longer than 20 days, whether they have traveled to the U.S. alone or with family members.

In a statement Saturday, the White House responded angrily to the decision to halt its plans for expedited removal of immigrants.

“Once again, a single district judge has suspended application of federal law nationwide — removing whole classes of illegal aliens from legal accountability,” the statement read in part. “For two and a half years, the Trump administration has been trying to restore enforcement of the immigration laws passed by Congress. And for two and a half years, misguided lower court decisions have been preventing those laws from ever being enforced — at immense cost to the whole country.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which had sought the injunction, granted just before midnight, celebrated the result.

“The court rejected the Trump administration’s illegal attempt to remove hundreds of thousands of people from the U.S. without any legal recourse,” said ACLU attorney Anand Balakrishnan, who argued the case. “This ruling recognizes the irreparable harm of this policy.”

In the first setback Friday for the Trump administration, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee said new rules it planned to impose violated the terms of the Flores settlement. Gee issued a strongly worded order shortly after, slamming the changes as “Kafkaesque” and protecting the original conditions of the agreement.

Gee wrote that the administration cannot ignore the terms of the settlement — which, she pointed out, is a final, binding judgment that was never appealed — just because leaders don’t “agree with its approach as a matter of policy.”

Barring a change in the law through congressional action, she said, “defendants cannot simply impose their will by promulgating regulations that abrogate the consent decree’s most basic tenets. That violates the rule of law. And that this court cannot permit.”

The new regulations would have eliminated minors’ entitlement to bond hearings and the requirement that facilities holding children be licensed by states.

They also would have removed legally binding language, changing the word “shall” to “may” throughout many of the core passages describing how the government would treat immigrant children.

The government is expected to appeal.

In the second decision Friday, U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. issued a permanent injunction barring ICE from relying solely on databases when issuing so-called detainers, which are requests made to police agencies to keep people who have been arrested in custody for up to two days beyond the time they would otherwise be held.

ICE is also blocked from issuing detainers to state and local law enforcement in states where there isn’t an explicit statute authorizing civil immigration arrests on detainers, according to the judge’s decision.

The decision affects any detainers issued by an ICE officer in the federal court system’s Central District of California.

That designation is significant because the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, a facility in Orange County, is an ICE hub from which agents send out detainer requests to authorities in 43 states, Guam and Washington, D.C. It is covered by the Central District.

“ICE is currently reviewing the ruling and considering our legal options,” Richard Rocha, an agency spokesman, said in a statement.

“Cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement agencies is critical to prevent criminal aliens from being released into our communities after being arrested for a crime.”

Tens of thousands of the requests are made each year to allow ICE agents additional time to take people suspected of being in the country illegally into federal custody for possible deportation. Approximately 70% of the arrests ICE makes happen after the agency is notified about someone being released from local jails or state prisons.

In fiscal year 2019, ICE has lodged more than 160,000 detainers with local law enforcement agencies, according to the agency.

Although police in California do not honor these ICE requests because of earlier court rulings that found them unconstitutional, agencies in other parts of the country continue to enforce them.

The civil case, which has wound its way through years of delays and legal wrangling, has broad implications for President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as the ACLU and other groups sought to upend how immigration officers target people for being in the country illegally.

“I think the decision is a tremendous blow to ICE’s Secure Communities deportation program and to Trump’s effort to use police throughout the country to further his deportation programs,” said Jessica Bansal, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

The class-action lawsuit, which represents broad categories of people who have been or will be subjected to detainers, alleged the databases that agents consult are so badly flawed by incomplete and inaccurate information that ICE officers should not be allowed to rely on them as the sole basis for keeping someone in custody.

The judge agreed with that assessment, finding that the databases often contained “incomplete data, significant errors, or were not designed to provide information that would be used to determine a person’s removability.”

These errors, according to the decision, have led to arrests of U.S. citizens and lawfully present noncitizens. From May 2015 to February 2016, of the 12,797 detainers issued in that time frame, 771 were lifted, according to ICE data. Of those 771, 42 were lifted because the person was a U.S. citizen.

The detainer process begins when police arrest and fingerprint a person. The prints are sent electronically to the FBI and checked against the prints of millions of immigrants in Homeland Security databases. If there is a match — such as someone who applied for a visa or was apprehended by Border Patrol — it triggers a review process, which often culminates with an agent at the center deciding whether to issue a detainer.

Last year, the Pacific Enforcement Response Center issued 45,253 detainers and alerted agents at field offices to more than 28,000 additional people released from law enforcement custody before ICE could detain them.

Trump has singled out police in California and elsewhere for their refusal to honor detainers, using them to highlight what he says are problems with the country’s stance on immigration enforcement and the need to take a more hard-line approach.

In the years since the lawsuit was filed, ICE has amended its policies, saying the changes made the process for issuing detainers more rigorous.

Times staff writers Andrea Castillo and Molly O’Toole and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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These are important decisions by the Federal District Courts upholding the Constitution and the rule of law. Whether the higher Federal Courts will do their duty by “Just Saying No” to Trump’s abuses or go “belly up” as they did in Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant and Innovation Law Lab v.McAleenan remains to be seen.

Go New Due Process Army! Beat back the Trump Administration’s extralegal attacks on migrants and the rule of law.

PWS

09-29-19

PREDICTABLY, US DISTRICT JUDGE DOLLY GEE REJECTS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S BAD FAITH REGULATORY PROPOSAL TO TERMINATE FLORES AND ENABLE CHILD ABUSE BY THE GOVERNMENT – But, Will Feckless Supremes Once Again Short-Circuit The System & “Greenlight” Illegal & Immoral Actions Invidiously Directed At Asylum Seekers?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/federal-judge-blocks-trump-administration-from-detaining-migrant-children-for-indefinite-periods/2019/09/27/49a39790-e15f-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

Maria Sacchetti reports for WashPost:

A federal judge in Los Angeles has blocked the Trump administration from activating new regulations that would have dramatically expanded its ability to detain migrant children with their parents for indefinite periods of time, dealing a blow to the president’s efforts to tamp down unauthorized border crossings.

U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee issued the permanent injunction Friday, hours after hearing arguments from the Justice Department and advocates for immigrants in a long-running federal case in the Central District of California.

Lawyers for the Justice Department had urged Gee to allow the Trump administration to withdraw from the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 federal consent decree that sets basic standards for detaining migrant children. The decree led to a 20-day limit for holding children in detention facilities that have not been licensed by the states for the purpose of caring for minors.

[Trump administration moves to terminate court agreement, hold migrant children and parents longer]

President Trump has called Flores a “loophole” that has enabled hundreds of thousands of families, many from impoverished Central American countries, to cross the southern boundary and claim asylum. Those migrants generally are quickly released into the United States because of the 20-day limit on detaining children.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules in August that sought to terminate the settlement and lift the 20-day limit by allowing the federal government to license such facilities.

In the ruling Friday, Gee wrote that the regulations “fail to implement and are inconsistent with the relevant and substantive terms of the Flores Settlement Agreement,” and therefore cannot take effect, noting that the agreement is a binding contract that was never appealed.

“Defendants cannot simply ignore the dictates of the consent decree merely because they no longer agree with its approach as a matter of policy,” she wrote. “Defendants cannot simply impose their will by promulgating regulations that abrogate the consent decree’s most basic tenets.”

The Justice Department is widely expected to appeal the decision, but a spokesman for the department did not signal the administration’s next steps Friday.

“The Department of Justice is disappointed that the court is continuing to impose the outdated Flores Agreement even after the government has done exactly what the Agreement required: issue a comprehensive rule that will protect vulnerable children, maintain family unity, and ensure due process for those awaiting adjudication of their immigration claims,” a spokesman said. “The Trump Administration will continue to work to restore integrity to our immigration system and ensure the proper functioning of the duly enacted immigration laws.”

Withdrawing from the settlement is part of Trump’s “beautiful puzzle,” an assortment of tough immigration enforcement measures designed to reduce the flow of Central American families and unaccompanied minors streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), chair of the congressional Hispanic Caucus, hailed the ruling Friday.

“I am pleased that our justice system has stopped the Trump Administration plans to indefinitely detain families in prisonlike conditions,” Castro said. “This victory gives us hope and is a reminder to us all — elected officials, immigration lawyers, organizers, and advocates — to keep fighting. Flores is not a loophole — it’s a lifesaving standard that protects the basic rights and dignity of migrant children.”

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who has pushed for the termination of the Flores pact, said officials did not want to hold families longer than 50 days, but critics said the proposed regulations left open the possibility that minors could be detained for months or years.

More than 800,000 migrants have been taken into federal custody at the border this year, and the majority have been in family units. Advocates say they are fleeing dangerous and unstable regions in Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” the nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

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Undoubtedly, Trump’s personal “Solicitor General,” Noel Francisco, will ask the Supremes to bypass the Ninth Circuit and endorse official child abuse. And, based on she Supremes’ majority’s totally spineless performance in allowing the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” program to proceed, notwithstanding its blatant Constitutional, statutory, and regulatory defects, why not? (Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant). The Supremes are establishing themselves as “Trump’s Court” – a feckless and complicit body of judicial cowards — just like he arrogantly claims.

How many more kids and families will die, be mistreated, or scarred for life because the supposedly most powerful judges in our nation are afraid to stand up to lawless, immoral, and inhumane actions by Trump & his toadies?

PWS

09-27-19

REFUGEES FLEEING FOR THEIR LIVES UNLIKELY TO BE DETERRED BY TRUMP’S & FEDERAL COURTS’ ILLEGAL & UNETHICAL “DETERRENCE THROUGH EXTREME CRUELTY” PROGRAM! — “The bleak reality is that, to deter people from seeking safety in our country, we would have to do so much worse than locking them up with their children indefinitely. Unless we are willing to be more cruel than what they are fleeing, deterrence is not an option.”

Dr. Eleanor Emery
Indian Health Services
New Mexico

https://apple.news/ARH8b07vVRPqkUzmRMrNNlw

Dr. Eleanor Emery writes in USA Today:

opinion

Asylum seekers I meet flee something even worse than Trump’s unethical immigration agenda

Our immigration policies seek to discourage border crossings by making life difficult for migrants. But almost nothing could be worse than going home.

Updated 8:38 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019

The Trump administration recently announced it intends to end the Flores settlement, an agreement that has been in place since 1997 and sets minimum standards for the treatment of children in detention. Under Flores, the detainment of children is restricted to a maximum of 20 days in order to limit their exposure to the harsh conditions and negative health impacts of detention. Overturning this agreement would allow children to be detained with their families indefinitely.

As a physician who works with adults seeking asylum in the United States, part of my role is to understand the magnitude of violence that a person has experienced and that has motivated their journey to our country. The stories I hear, and the physical and psychological scars that these asylum seekers bear, are a vivid portrayal of the forces driving migration.

The Trump administration has rationalized their decision to overturn Flores using the concept of deterrence. Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, explained the decision this way:

“This is a deterrent, because they know that instead of rushing the border, which is what’s been going on for a number of years now, by using the massive numbers coming to the border and overwhelming our facilities and our capacity to hold folks and our court rulings, which is what the Flores rule was, that now they can and will to the extent we’re able to do so, hold them until those hearings happen.”

In other words, if migrant families know they face prolonged detainment in the United States, they might reconsider making the journey at all. This flawed logic exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the context of migration to our southern border today.

‘Push’ and ‘pull’ — but especially ‘push’

Migration is driven by a combination of “push” and “pull” factors. In economic migration, migrants are being pulled to the USA by promises of better jobs or educational opportunities in the destination country.

But much of the record level of migration from Central America here has been driven, not by the allure of better opportunities, but by an epidemic of violence in the home countries — by push factors. In fact, a recent Doctors Without Borders report found that nearly 40% of migrants cited direct attacks or threats to themselves or their families as the main reason for fleeing their countries. The majority of these people originate from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — the Northern Triangle — one of the most violent parts of the world today.

Latinos have no excuse: I asked Latinos why they joined immigration law enforcement. Now I’m urging them to leave.

The principle of deterrence is based on the idea that any act has associated positive and negative outcomes. If you are able to increase the associated negative outcomes, then you may ultimately reach a tipping point where it is no longer in the actor’s best interests to perform the act.

In the case of migration, if you can increase the negative consequences of crossing the border without legal status, then at some point the harm of doing so outweighs the potential benefit. But as I listen to the histories of asylum seekers — to the accounts of torture, of gang rape, of family members, including children, being murdered in front of you — deterrence seems not only morally dubious but futile. When this is the push, is there anything in the world that could deter you from running?

How cruel are we willing to be?

I recently met one asylum seeker fleeing years of imprisonment and brutal sexual violence by a gang in her home country in the Northern Triangle. After a harrowing escape and journey leading to our border, she presented herself to Customs and Border Patrol Protection agents and requested asylum. She was taken into custody and sent to a detention facility in California, where she had been awaiting her asylum hearing for months.

After sitting with her for hours, hearing her story and examining her scars, I asked her how she felt about being in detention. She shrugged. When she arrived at the U.S. border seeking safety, she certainly hadn’t expected to be put in jail. But she also told me that the detention center wasn’t all that bad — no one rapes her there.

Our immigration policies hurt Americans: An illegal immigrant killed my daughter. Trump’s right — we must complete the border wall.

Many of the asylum seekers I have met give a similar, stark assessment of the pros and cons of migrating to the USA. I have led clinics in New York, Massachusetts and California that conduct forensic medical evaluations for people seeking asylum, and the terror that they are fleeing is consistent.

Through my work with the Los Angeles Human Rights Initiative, I met another young woman who had been imprisoned by a gang and subjected to torture and gang rape before escaping and coming to the United States. She told me she would rather die in detention than be deported home to the Northern Triangle to face her former captors who awaited her there.

A third woman in California, who was applying for asylum on the grounds of domestic violence, was resolute when she spoke with me about her heart-breaking decision to leave her son behind with family when she fled her ruthless husband, a police officer in her town. When I asked whether she ever regretted her decision, she said no. Leaving her son had felt like dying, but the abuse her husband had subjected her to was worse than death.

Apart from being unethical, the human rights abuses generated by the Trump administration’s immigration policies will simply not accomplish their objective of stemming the tide of migration. The bleak reality is that, to deter people from seeking safety in our country, we would have to do so much worse than locking them up with their children indefinitely. Unless we are willing to be more cruel than what they are fleeing, deterrence is not an option.

Dr. Eleanor Emery is a member of the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network and a program officer at the Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy at Cambridge Health Alliance. She lives and practices internal medicine with the Indian Health Service in New Mexico. Her views do not reflect the views of her employer.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

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Originally Published 6:00 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019

**Updated 8:38 am EDT Sep. 24, 2019**

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

Unfortunately, I think that Dr. Emery has underestimated the racism-fueled intentional cruelty of the Trump Administration as well as the cowardice and fecklessness of many Federal Judges, particularly at the appellate level.

Sending asylum applicants to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, some of the most dangerous country in the world, plagued by corruption, and without functional asylum systems takes lawlessness, cruelty, complicity, and open mockery of our justice system to a new level!

I agree with her that it probably won’t be enough to stop refugees from coming. But, it might well be enough to stop them from using our legal system and to just take their chances with the smugglers and the extralegal immigration system that Trump and his courts have been working so hard to expand and enable.

As I have said numerous times, Trump and his immoral scofflaw DHS & DOJ sycophants are the “best friends” of professional smugglers, cartels, gangs, rapists, kidnappers, and extortionists. By diverting attention and resources from real law enforcement to punishing individuals who are trying to use our legal system, Trump and his cronies and enablers have been an amazing boon and “profit center” for criminals.

PWS

09-25-19

TWO MORE FROM HON. JEFFREY CHASE EXPOSING TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & HOW THE COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS FURTHER THESE ABUSES! — “How innocent women and children resigning themselves to being severely beaten, raped, and killed in their home countries constitutes all problems being solved is beyond comprehension.”

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/9/16/the-cost-of-outsourcing-refugees

The Cost of Outsourcing Refugees

It seems perversely appropriate that it was on 9/11 that the Supreme Court removed the legal barrier to the Trump Administration’s most recent deadly attack on the right to asylum in this country. I continue to believe that eventually, justice will prevail through the courts or, more likely, through a change in administration. But in the meantime, what we are witnessing is an all-out assault by the Trump Administration on the law of asylum. The tactics include gaming the system through regulations and binding decisions making it more difficult for asylum seekers to prevail on their claims. But far uglier is the tactic of degrading those fleeing persecution and seeking safety here. Such refugees, many of whom are women and children, are repeatedly and falsely portrayed by this administration and its enablers as criminals and terrorists. Upon arrival, mothers are separated from their spouses and children from their parents; all are detained under dehumanizing, soul-crushing conditions certain to inflict permanent psychological damage on its victims. In response to those protesting such policies, Trump tweeted on July 3: “If illegal immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detention centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!”

How innocent women and children resigning themselves to being severely beaten, raped, and killed in their home countries constitutes all problems being solved is beyond comprehension.

Those in Trump’s administration who have given more thought to the matter don’t seek to solve the problem, but rather to make it someone else’s problem to solve. By disqualifying from asylum refugees who passed through any other country on their way to our southern border or who entered the country without inspection; by forcing thousands to remain exposed to abuse in Mexico while their asylum claims are adjudicated, and by falsely designating countries with serious gang and domestic violence problems as “safe third countries” to which asylum seekers can be sent, this administration is simply outsourcing refugee processing to countries that are not fit for the job in any measurable way. Based on my thirty-plus years of experience in this field, I submit that contrary to Trump’s claim, such policies create very large, long-term problems.

I began my career in immigration law in the late 1980s representing asylum seekers from Afghanistan, many of whom were detained by our government upon their arrival. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Afghans constituted the largest group of refugees in the world. At one point, there were more than 6 million refugees from Afghanistan alone, most of whom were living in camps in Pakistan. Afghan children there received education focused on fundamentalist religious indoctrination that was vehemently anti-western. The Taliban (which literally means “students”) emerged from these schools. The Taliban, of course, brought a reign of terror to Afghanistan, and further provided a haven for Al-Qaeda to launch the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The outsourcing of Afghan refugees to Pakistan was the exact opposite of “all problems solved,” with the Taliban continuing to thwart peace in Afghanistan up to the present.

Contrast this experience with the following: shortly before I left the government, I went to dinner with a lawyer who had mentioned my name to a colleague of his earlier that day. The colleague had been an Afghan refugee in Pakistan who managed to reach this country as a teen in the early 1990s, and was placed into deportation proceedings by the U.S. government. By chance, I had been his lawyer, and had succeeded in obtaining a grant of asylum for him. Although I hadn’t heard from him in some 25 years, I learned from his friend that evening that I had apparently influenced my young client when I emphasized to him all those years ago the importance of pursuing higher education in this country, as he credited me with his becoming a lawyer. Between the experiences of my former client and that which led to the formation to the Taliban, there is no question as to which achieved the better outcome, and it wasn’t the one in which refugees remained abroad.

In 1938, at a conference held in Evian, France, 31 countries, including the U.S. and Canada, stated their refusal to accept Jewish refugees trapped in Nazi Germany. The conference sent the message to the Nazis on the eve of the Holocaust that no country of concern cared at all about the fate of Germany’s Jewish population. The Trump administration is sending the same message today to MS-13 and other brutal crime syndicates in Central America. Our government is closing the escape route to thousands of youths (some as young as 7 years old) being targeted for recruitment, extortion, and rape by groups such as MS-13, while simultaneously stoking anti-American hatred among those same youths through its shockingly cruel treatment of arriving refugees. This is a dangerous combination, and this time, it is occurring much closer to home than Pakistan. Based on historic examples, it seems virtually assured that no one will look back on Trump’s refugee policies as having solved any problems; to the contrary, we will likely be paying the price for his cruel and short-sighted actions for decades to come.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/9/14/former-ijs-file-amicus-brief-in-padilla-v-ice

Former IJs File Amicus Brief in Padilla v. ICE

The late Maury Roberts, a legendary immigration lawyer and former BIA Chair, wrote in 1991: “It has always seemed significant to me that, among all the members of the animal kingdom, man is the only one who captures and imprisons his fellows. In all the rest of creation, freedom is the natural order.”1 Roberts expressed his strong belief in the importance of liberty, which caused him consternation at “governmental attempts to imprison persons who are not criminals or dangerous to society, on the grounds that their detention serves some other societal purpose,” including noncitizens “innocent of any wrongdoing other than being in the United States without documents.”2

The wrongness of indefinitely detaining non-criminals greatly increases when those being detained are asylum-seekers fleeing serious harm in their home countries, often after undertaking dangerous journeys to lawfully seek protection in this country. The detention of those seeking asylum is at odds with our obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which at Article 31 forbids states from penalizing refugees from neighboring states on account of their illegal entry or presence, or from restricting the movements of refugees except where necessary; and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees at Article 9, para. 4 the right of detainees to have a court “without delay” determine the lawfulness of the detention order release if it is not.

In 1996, in response to an increase in asylum seekers at ports of entry, Congress enacted a policy known as expedited removal, which allows border patrol officers to enter deportation orders against those noncitizens arriving at airports or the border whom are not deemed admissible. A noncitizen expressing a fear of returning to their country is detained and referred for a credible fear interview. Only those whom a DHS asylum officer determines to have a “significant possibility” of being granted asylum pass such interview and are allowed a hearing before an immigration judge to pursue their asylum claim.

In 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent decision stating that detained asylum seekers who have passed such credible fear interview are entitled to a bond hearing. It should be noted that the author of this decision, Ed Grant, is a former Republican congressional staffer and supporter of a draconian immigration enforcement bill enacted in 1996, who has been one of the more conservative members of the BIA. He was joined on the panel issuing such decision by fellow conservative Roger Pauley. The panel decision was further approved by the majority of the full BIA two years after it had been purged of its liberal members by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. In other words, the right to bond hearings was the legal conclusion of a tribunal of conservatives who, although they did not hold pro-immigrant beliefs, found that the law dictated the result it reached.

14 years later, the present administration issued a precedent decision in the name of Attorney General Barr vacating the BIA’s decision as “wrongly decided,” and revoking the right to such bond hearings. The decision was immediately challenged in the courts by the ACLU, the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and the American Immigration Council. Finding Barr’s prohibition on bond hearings unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman issued a preliminary injunction blocking the decision from taking effect, and requiring bond hearings for class members within 7 days of their detention. The injunction additionally places the burden on the government to demonstrate why the asylum-seeker should not be released on bond, parole, or other condition; requires the government to provide a recording or verbatim transcript of the bond hearing on appeal; and further requires the government to produce a written decision with particularized determinations of individualized findings at the end of the bond hearing.

The Administration has appealed from that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On September 4, an amicus brief on behalf of 29 former immigration judges (including myself) and appellate judges of the BIA was filed in support of the plaintiffs. Our brief notes the necessity of bond hearings to due process in a heavily overburdened court system dealing with highly complex legal issues. Our group advised that detained asylum seekers are less likely to retain counsel. Based on our collective experience on the bench, this is important, as it is counsel who guides an asylum seeker through the complexities of the immigration court system. Furthermore, the arguments of unrepresented applicants are likely to be less concise and organized both before the immigration judge and on appeal than if such arguments had been prepared by counsel. Where an applicant is unrepresented, their ongoing detention hampers their ability to gather evidence in support of their claim, while those lucky enough to retain counsel are hampered in their ability to communicate and cooperate with their attorney.

These problems are compounded by two other recent Attorney General decisions, Matter of A-B- and Matter of L-E-A-, which impact a large number of asylum claimants covered by the lawsuit who are fleeing domestic or gang violence. Subsequent to those decisions, stating the facts giving rise to the applicant’s fear can be less important than how those facts are then framed by counsel. Immigration Judges who are still navigating these decisions often request legal memoranda explaining the continued viability of such claims. And such arguments often require both a legal knowledge of the nuances of applicable case law and support from experts in detailed reports beyond the capability of most detained, unrepresented, newly-arrived asylum seekers to obtain.

Our brief also argues that the injunction’s placement of the burden of proof on DHS “prevents noncitizens from being detained simply because they cannot articulate why they should be released, and takes into account the government’s institutional advantages.” This is extremely important when one realizes that, under international law, an individual becomes a refugee upon fulfilling the criteria contained in the definition of that term (i.e. upon leaving their country and being unable or unwilling to return on account of a protected ground). Therefore, one does not become a refugee due to being recognized as one by a grant of asylum. Rather, a grant of asylum provides legal recognition of the existing fact that one is a refugee. 3 Class members have, after a lengthy screening interview, been found by a trained DHS official to have a significant possibility of already being a refugee. To deny bond to a member of such a class because, unlike the ICE attorney opposing their release, they are unaware of the cases to cite or arguments to state greatly increases the chance that genuine refugees deserving of this country’s protection will be deported to face persecution

The former Immigration Judges and BIA Members signing onto the amicus brief are: Steven Abrams, Sarah Burr, Teofilo Chapa, Jeffrey S, Chase, George Chew, Cecelia Espenoza, Noel Ferris, James Fujimoto, Jennie Giambiastini, John Gossart, Paul Grussendorf, Miriam Hayward, Rebecca Jamil, Carol King, Elizabeth Lamb, Margaret McManus, Charles Pazar, George Proctor, Laura Ramirez, John Richardson, Lory D. Rosenberg, Susan Roy, Paul W. Schmidt, Ilyce Shugall, Denise Slavin, Andrea Hawkins Sloan, Gustavo Villageliu, Polly Webber, and Robert D. Weisel.

We are greatly indebted to and thankful for the outstanding efforts of partners Alan Schoenfeld and Lori A. Martin of the New York office of Wilmer Hale, and senior associates Rebecca Arriaga Herche and Jamil Aslam with the firm’s Washington and Los Angeles offices in the drafting of the brief.

Notes:

Maurice Roberts, “Some Thoughts on the Wanton Detention of Aliens,”Festschrift: In Celebration of the Works of Maurice Roberts, 5 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 225 (1991).

Id. at 226.

UNHCR,Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status Under the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees at Para. 28.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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

Thanks, Jeffrey, my friend, for courageously highlighting these issues. What a contrast with the cowardly performance of the Trump Administration, Congress, and the ARTICLE IIIs!

I’m proud to be identified with you and the rest of the members of our Roundtable of Former Judges who haven’t forgotten what Due Process, fundamental fairness, refugee rights, and human rights are all about.

Also appreciate the quotation from the late great Maurice A. “Maury” Roberts, former BIA chair and Editor of Interpreter Releases who was one of my mentors. I‘m sure that Maury is rolling over in his grave with the gutless trashing of the BIA and Due Process by Billy Barr and his sycophants.

PWS

09-24-19

HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE BLOG PRESENTS “THE FLORES EXHIBITS” – Truth, No Matter How Terrible & Disturbing, Is The Best Antidote To Notorious Human Rights Abuser “Big Mac With Lies” & His Truly Despicable Knowingly False Narratives & Immoral Actions! – “At this time when our nation is led by scoundrels, we are in need of heroes.”

Elora Mukherjee
“American Hero”
Clinical Professor of Law & Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic
Columbia Law School

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/9/22/vjwdefjb62lfre600ktwsfj8q1dsab

The Flores Exhibits

“I’m held with my son in a cage. There are about 60 people in my cages, and more in some of the other cages. There are six cages in my area. They are all very, very full.”

The above words are part of “Exhibit 29,” which is read by my friend Lenni Benson, a professor at New York Law School and founder of the school’s Safe Passage Project, which provides representation to unaccompanied children in immigration court. The words are the sworn declaration of a 17-year-old girl, identified by the initial “L.”

There are 65 such declarations, each the actual statement of a child detained at border detention facilities in this country in June 2019. Recently, Waterwell, the wonderful civic-minded theater and film production company responsible for the immigration court based play The Courtroom filmed a number of actors, lawyers, clinical professors, advocates, and other interested individuals in a dark studio in the East Village in New York City. I was honored to be one of those filmed. We each sat at a simple table with the written exhibit and a glass of water, and under the direction of Waterwell’s Artistic Director, Lee Sunday Evans, each read a single declaration.

Article 37(b) of the Convention of the Rights of the Child states that “No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.” A 1997 settlement agreement, known as the Flores Settlement, legally binds our government in limiting the length of time it can detain immigrant children, and holding the government to a standard of humane treatment under prescribed conditions of health, hygiene, education, and privacy. From the contents of the declarations, the Trump Administration has made a mockery of these rules.

Exhibit 3, read by David Gomez, the president of Hostos Community College, memorializes the words of a five year old from Honduras separated from his father upon arrival at the border, as he states “I have not been told how long I have to stay here. I am frightened, scared, and sad.” My fellow former immigration judge, Betty Lamb, read the statement of a 14 year old girl, who was taking care of two younger parentless girls (one of them 4 years old and sick), who said that she was holding the two in her lap as she spoke trying to comfort them. She then added “I need comfort, too. I’m bigger than they are, but I am a child, too.” (Exhibit 54).

At this time when our nation is led by scoundrels, we are in need of heroes. Towards this end, please take a moment to write down the name of Elora Mukherjee, a true hero. She is a clinical professor of law and Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She has devoted her career to aiding immigrant children, whom she began visiting in detention facilities in 2007, and litigating violations of the Flores Settlement. Watching her read her own 22 minute statement gave me nightmares. She described the overwhelming stench of the hundreds of detained children, who were very hungry and seriously traumatized. One six year old she tried to question ended up sitting in her lap crying inconsolably, until a guard eventually gave him a lollipop “as an incentive to bring him back to his cell.” (Exhibit 63). Many of the children were seriously in fear of the guards. A number of the children were sick.

I am a native-born American citizen. I have lived here my entire life. Yet I never felt more foreign than while watching these videos. I hope that readers of these words feel the same way. No government of a country that is truly ours, that reflects the morals and values that we possess and believe in, could ever treat children this way. And no decent, moral people, regardless of their political affiliation or their views on immigration, could ever support or approve of the government responsible for such treatment. These children will never get over this. It is one thing for children to arrive here already traumatized and be granted safe haven under our laws. It is entirely another matter for the government of this country to deliberately cause children to suffer in a way that will scar them for life.

Please visit the site of these powerful videos through this link. You can also view the one-minute trailer here. And then please, please help amplify by sharing through social media and email.

Thanks for this project go to Columbia Law School’s Center for Institutional and Social Change and Immigrants’ Rights Clinic; to Waterwell, the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and Project Amplify; and to all those who participated as readers in the videos.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

(Below: iPhone photo of me filming my segment, taken by Elizabeth Lamb).

Go to Jeff’s blog at the link for the picture of him presenting.

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

What kind of country tortures and torments vulnerable children in search of legal protection while actually employing their corrupt, cowardly, and totally dishonest abusers, like Kevin “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan, on the public payroll? Big Mac was at it again today, presenting a fictionalized defense of the Administration’s policy of promoting and encouraging human rights abuses, lying about the Flores settlement, and endangering the lives of refugee families!

McAleenan and his fellow immoral sycophants are a disgrace to America!

And, as I have said before, both Congress and the Federal Judges who have enabled these crimes against humanity by failing to take strong action to stop the Trump Administration’s abuse and to hold perpetrators like McAleenan legally accountable also share a major part of the responsibility!

PWS

09-23-19

BLOOD ON THEIR JUDICIAL ROBES! — WHEN A CORRUPT, XENOPHOBIC, RACIST GOVERNMENT IS ASSISTED BY COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS, HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIVES OF THE REFUGEES THEY ARE BETRAYING: “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.”

https://apple.news/AHwi8LL9GT8qKZ3YHhAPcrQ

Leon Krauze reports for Slate:

The World

Mexico’s Capitulation to Trump Has Put Thousands of Lives in Danger

The Mexican foreign minister says his government has nothing to be ashamed of. He’s wrong.

September 20 2019 4:51 PM

In recent months, at least 3,000 immigrants have been sent back to towns along the Mexican border between Tamaulipas and Texas, one of the country’s most dangerous areas. What they have faced there defies the imagination. The city of Nuevo Laredo is a well-known hotbed of extortion and kidnapping. Immigrants make easy targets. “These people have been thrown into the lion’s den,” local journalist Daniel Rosas told me recently.

According to Rosas, President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program has been particularly harmful, placing thousands of immigrants in imminent danger. “If even us locals are going through a very difficult time dealing with violence here, just imagine what life is like for an immigrant who doesn’t have a home and doesn’t know anyone. This place is completely unsafe,” Rosas told me. In the city of Nuevo Laredo, Rosas described a Dantean scene in which people working for cartels are tasked with identifying and abducting immigrants, who are then taken away to safehouses where they are held for ransom.

“In Tamaulipas, migrants are the most vulnerable. They suffer every kind of abuse imaginable,” he told me. Rosas seemed particularly worried for women and children in Tamaulipas. “They are completely defenseless,” Rosas told me. “When they were waiting and trying to rest under the bridge, there were kids sleeping on cardboard, without any help. They live through sheer horror,” he said.

This nightmare is the predictable result of recent actions by governments on both sides of the border. Three months ago, faced with Trump’s tariff blackmail, Mexico’s government capitulated and agreed to a series of unprecedented measures to reduce the flow of Central American immigrants reaching the United States. Terrified by the possibility of a trade war, President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s administration deployed thousands of troops along Mexico’s southern border, gave control of the country’s immigration authority to an expert in incarceration and enforcement, and pledged full cooperation with some of Trump’s more controversial immigration policies. As part of the deal, Mexican government officials agreed to return to Washington every few months with evidence of results, a recurrent humiliating pilgrimage in search of Trump’s approval and a renewed deferral of the looming tariff threat.

Ten days ago, after his first assessment in Washington with Trump’s inner circle—and, briefly, the president himself—Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard gave a victorious but ultimately unfortunate news conference. Ebrard claimedthat the much-touted downward trend in the number of immigrants reaching the United States would likely be “permanent,” although historical trends suggest the flow of immigrants will likely increase during the fall. Ebrard then said the Mexican government had demanded new and strict gun control measures in the United States. The goal, Ebrard boasted, was to “freeze” gun trafficking along the border. This is disingenuous. Ebrard knows any sort of significant reduction in gun smuggling from the United States would require legislative measures that the Trump administration and the Republican Party will not pursue.

Ebrard then concluded by saying the López Obrador administration had nothing to apologize for on immigration. “We do not regret anything of what’s been implemented,” Ebrard said. “We haven’t done anything we should be ashamed of.”

He is wrong.

The Mexican government’s cooperation with Donald Trump’s punitive immigration strategy has created a calamity along the country’s northern border. Of the many complications, none is more potentially catastrophic than the broad implementation of Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The measure forces potential refugees to wait for months (or years) in Mexico for a slim chance at asylum in the United States. It has opened the door to the creation of a massive community of rootless and marginalized immigrants living in perilous limbo in some of Mexico’s most dangerous areas. There are now close to 38,000 immigrants waitingin Mexico because of MPP. After meeting with Ebrard, the White House announcedthe program would be expanded “to the fullest extent possible,” dramatically increasing the number of potential refugees returned to Mexico, many to regions of the country where they face almost certain peril.

No place seems safe, not even shelters run by religious organizations, one of the few reliable options in other border towns like Tijuana. In Nuevo Laredo, organized crime knows no bounds. Just last month, local pastor Aarón Méndez, who runs the “Casa del Migrante AMAR” shelter in the city, reportedly tried to protect a group of Cuban migrants from a group of abductors. They kidnapped Méndezinstead. No one has heard from him since.

Things aren’t much better in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. In recent years, the city has seen “open warfare” between rival cartels. American attorneyKristin Clarens, who has been traveling to the region over the past few months to assist potential refugees and make sense of the dire situation in the region, told me she has never met an asylum-seeking immigrant who felt safe in Mexico. “To the contrary,” Clarens said, “most of the people I’ve met described routine and regular acts of violence, such as kidnapping, assault, and extortion.” According to Clarens, migrants in Matamoros, like those in Nuevo Laredo, are facing a full-blown humanitarian crisis. “The heat is intense and unrelenting, and they lack access to sanitation, water, shade, food, and basic shelter,” she told me. “People hike down to the river and use the river to clean themselves, wash their clothes, and occasionally drink. Children and adults are sick and covered with bug bites and lesions.”

Like Rosas, Clarens believes “Remain in Mexico” has complicated the already formidable immigration challenge in the region. “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.” Clarens thinks the crisis will likely worsen. “I know that Mexico can be a safe and stable place for many people, but impoverished and incredibly vulnerable Central Americans who are desperate for security and are leaving their countries of origin for the first time are not able to stay safe,” she told me.

If Mexico continues to quietly go along with the radical expansion of the MPP program, the number of immigrants waiting for asylum in the country could reach the hundreds of thousands. With Mexico’s official refugee agency operating on a ridiculous $1.3 million yearly budget, the López Obrador administration is not remotely ready for such an undertaking. The consequences could be severe. If that happens, Ebrard should be asked again if Mexico really has nothing to be ashamed of.

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Those who should really be ashamed are the cowardly life-tenured judges of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit who as a group have utterly failed to protect migrants’ statutory, Constitutional, and Human Rights from lawless, invidious, and very intentional abuse by Trump’s White Nationalist regime and his DHS and DOJ sycophants.

Article III Federal Judges are absolutely immune from liability for their wrongdoing and abuses. But, they shouldn’t be immune from shame and the judgment of history for abandoning our system of justice and the most vulnerable it is supposed to protect at their greatest time of need. That’s basically the definition of legal incompetence and moral cowardice.

PWS

09-22-19

SUPREME DISGRACE: Instead Of Protecting The Individual Rights Of Our Most Vulnerable Asylum Seekers, The Supremes’ Majority Joins The White Nationalist Assault On Refugee Laws & Human Dignity!

Azam Ahmed
Bureau Chief, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean
NY Times

https://apple.news/AzVf9gcH2QyOC67VugroXQg

By Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas

MEXICO CITY — Thousands of people fleeing persecution, most from Central America, line up at the United States’ southern border every day hoping for asylum. They wait for months, their names slowly crawling up a hand-drawn list until they are allowed to present their case to American immigration authorities.

After the United States Supreme Court issued an order this week, almost none of them will be eligible for asylum.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the Trump administration to enforce new rules that bar asylum applications from anyone who has not already been denied asylum in one of the countries they traveled through on their way to the United States.

The rule is among the most stringent measures taken by this administration in its battle to halt migration, upending decades of asylum and humanitarian norms. It is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of migrants traveling through Mexico to reach the United States: Eritreans and Cameroonians fleeing political violence. Nicaraguans and Venezuelans fleeing repression.

And the largest group of all: Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans escaping the twin scourges of poverty and gangs.

“This takes away all hope,” said Eddie Leonardo Caliz, 34, who left San Pedro Sula in Honduras with his wife and two kids three months ago to try to escape gang violence, and spoke from a shelter in southern Mexico. With measures like this, he said, the Trump administration “is depriving us of the opportunity to be safe.”

The new rule, which has been allowed to take effect pending legal challenges, is consistent with the Trump administration’s posture of hostility and rejection for those seeking protection in the United States.

Whether by separating families of migrants, by drastically limiting the number of asylum applications accepted on a given day or by returning those entering the United States to Mexico to await their hearings, the administration has shown a dogged determination to discourage migration.

Central American migrants at the Amar shelter in Nuevo Laredo in July.

Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

And it has put tremendous pressure on Mexico to help meet its goal, threatening months ago to escalate tariffs on all Mexican goods if the nation did not buffer the surge of migrants heading to the United States from Central America and elsewhere.

Mexico responded. This week, when Mexican and American officials met in Washington to discuss progress on the issue, the Mexican delegation took great pains to show how its crackdown along its border with Guatemala and throughout the country has reduced migration flows to the United States by more than 50 percent in the last three months.

Mexico’s actions, though applauded by Trump administration officials this week, have overwhelmed its troubled migration system. The number of individuals applying for asylum in Mexico has already skyrocketed in the last few years, as the United States has tightened its borders.

This rule could add to that burden, with many more applying for asylum in Mexico, despite the danger of remaining in Mexico. Violence there has soared to the highest levels in more than two decades. Stories of migrants kidnapped along the border abound, as criminal organizations await their return from the United States or pick them off as they attempt to cross the border.

Several migrants who are making their way north said in interviews on Thursday that the new rule would not deter them. For most, the hope of a new life in the United States outweighed whatever legal worries might lie ahead.

“I know things are getting more and more complicated in the U.S.,” said Noel Hernández, 21, who was staying at a migrant shelter in Guatemala after leaving his home in Tegucigalpa, in Honduras, a few days ago.

“It’s like flipping a coin,” he said. “I either win or I lose.”

Others said they would try to make it in Mexico, despite the violence, or in Guatemala, a nation with a barely functional asylum system.

Oscar Daniel Rodríguez, 33, from San Salvador, has been in Guatemala with his wife and 3-year-old son for a month now, and says he will apply for asylum there.

He had applied for asylum in Mexico during a previous trek, and was rejected. If he is denied in Guatemala, he will try again in Mexico, he said. If they deny him again, he will try the United States.

Migrants from a caravan, along with organizers and legal observers, at the pedestrian crossing that will lead them to the U.S, in 2018.

Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

“No matter how long it takes, and how long we have to wait, what we want is to give our son a better future,” he said.

Mexican asylum applicants, who don’t have to transit through another country to reach the United States, are not impacted by the new policy.

Like past efforts by the Trump administration to curb migration, Wednesday’s order could prove a burden for Mexico.

A senior Mexican official who spoke anonymously because the government has not addressed the issue publicly said that, for now, individuals who seek to apply will not fall under a previous provision, called Migrant Protection Protocol. That provision sends those applying for asylum in the United States back to Mexico to await their hearings.

Instead, migrants will either have to apply for another form of relief in the United States — with a higher bar for acceptance and fewer protections — or be deported back to their home countries.

Mexico is already playing host to tens of thousands of migrants awaiting their asylum hearings in the United States. Its migrant detention facilities can be overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary.

Asylum applications there have soared in the last year, reaching about 50,000 through August, compared to fewer than 30,000 applications in the same period a year ago. This has placed a strain on Mexican society and on a system ill-equipped to handle such demand.

“We see detention centers crammed with migrants and children, riots, social problems arising, human rights abuses, and rising xenophobia among Mexicans,” said Jorge Chabat, a professor of international relations the University of Guadalajara. “The Mexican government has then little to no other choice but to design long-term migration policies to deal with the large number of migrants coming and staying now in Mexico.”

“There is not much else we can do,” he added, ruefully, “besides maybe lighting a candle for the Virgin of Guadalupe and praying for Trump not to be re-elected.”

Raftsmen wait for clients at a river crossing between the Guatemala-Mexico border.

Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

The initial rule to block asylum sent shock waves among immigrant rights advocates when it was issued by the Trump administration in July of this year. It was almost immediately challenged in lawsuits.

The initiative was a unilateral move by the Trump administration after failed negotiations with Mexico and Guatemala to reach deals, called safe third country agreements, that would have required those countries to absorb asylum seekers who passed through them on their way to the United States.

Though Guatemala eventually caved to the administration’s pressure, and reached a safe third country agreement with the United States, Mexico remained firm in its refusal.

Now, with the Supreme Court allowing the asylum rule to go into effect, some feel the United States got what it wanted anyway — without the other countries’ consent.

“This is the latest step in terms of Trump’s policies to push Mexico to become a safe third country, and to make a big chunk of the migration flow stay in Mexico permanently and deter them from traveling north,” said Raúl Benítez, a professor of international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The Mexican government, for its part, insists the move is not the same as a safe third country arrangement, which would require a bilateral agreement and would automatically send the majority of asylum seekers back to Mexico for good.

Neither Mexican officials nor independent experts believe it will lead to an immediate influx of returnees to Mexico. Instead, it could leave those who have been returned to Mexico while they await hearings more likely to stay because they will not be granted protection in the United States.

While the new rules will inhibit most migrants from applying for asylum, there are other forms of protected status that remain open to them, though the bar to entry is much higher.

Under current asylum law, individuals must show a credible fear, which is figured to be a 10 percent chance that they will face persecution if sent back home. The threshold for the two remaining protections now — so-called withholding status and qualification under the convention against torture — is reasonable fear. To qualify, the applicant must show a probability of being persecuted back home that is greater than 50 percent.

“The people affected by this policy are the most vulnerable — those without lawyers and those without knowledge of the system,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration attorney with the Immigration Council. “Those without lawyers are being asked to meet a standard almost impossible for someone uneducated in asylum law to meet.”

Daniele Volpe contributed reporting from Guatemala City.

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

So, just why are Justices like Breyer and Kagan tarnishing their legacies by joining with their White Nationalist enabling brethren in this all out assault on the Refugee Act of 1980, the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the U.S. Constitution, Human Rights, and human dignity?

The latest Trump Administration illegal absurdity encouraged, aided, and abetted by the Supremes: Honduras, one of the most dangerous and corrupt refugee sending countries in the world without a functioning asylum system, as a “Safe Third Country.” Obviously, the actions of an Administration confident that the majority of the Supremes share their corruption and cowardice when it comes to enforcing America’s long-standing human rights obligations.

Although it might not have occurred to the geniuses of the Trump Administration, and certainly not to the Supremes’ majority who apparently believe themselves exempt from the practical consequences of their actions, each of the failed states in the Northern Triangle has a seacoast which would allow ocean transit to the U.S. without touching any other country. So, the Trump White Nationalists and their Supreme enablers could be triggering another “Golden Venture” debacle or the type of even more dangerous sea exodus that happened in the Mediterranean when the EU restricted asylum applicants at its land borders.

Or, it’s possible that smugglers will simply “sell” refugees on the very plausible idea that the U.S. refugee system and our commitment to the “rule of law” is nothing but a joke. In that case, smuggling individuals into the interior of the U.S will become an even bigger business. No way they will ever all be caught, even with ICE acting as Trump’s “New American Gestapo.” Higher risk means more profits for smugglers, more death and exploitation for migrants, and more unscreened “extralegal migration” into the U.S.

Up until Trump, the U.S. had been lucky. Most asylum seekers presented themselves at ports of entry or nearby Border Patrol Stations and trusted themselves to the U.S. asylum system for orderly processing. Even those who managed to enter the U.S. usually “affirmatively applied” through the USCIS Asylum Offices.

The current mess in the legal system was almost entirely self-created by the “malicious incompetence” on the part of the Government’s immigration enforcement authorities. The “new message” is clear: only fools should use the US legal system, which in the case of asylum now more closely resembles a Third World dictatorship.

Once folks abandon the U.S. legal system, all of the land and sea borders and indeed the entire land mass of the U.S. will potentially “come into play” for smugglers and their desperate human cargoes of forced migrants. No wall will be long and high enough, no jail cells big enough, no child abuse severe enough, and no extralegal Supreme Court endorsed racist program nasty enough to control the flow of forced migrants seeking shelter. It might well lead to an internal police force that will trample the individual rights of all Americans. But, it won’t stop human migration until the U.S. downward spiral finally reaches the point where we are no better than the “sending countries” from which people are fleeing.

The other possibility is that conditions in the sending countries improve over time so that most folks will stay put. But, the Administration has shown no interest in investing in long term solutions to forced migration.

Immigration is a sign of a strong country; xenophobia a weak and cowardly one. Unhappily, the Supremes have have abandoned the former vision and become front and center in encouraging and enabling the latter.

PWS

09-13-19

RUTH ELLEN WASEM @ THE HILL: When Child Abuse Becomes Our Nation’s Official Policy, We All Share The Shame!

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/460349-report-on-migrant-children-documents-the-painfully-obvious

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG)’s new report found the Trump administration’s policy changes in 2018 exacerbated the mental health needs of “unaccompanied alien children” in their custody. The unaccompanied alien children in this study are overwhelmingly asylum seekers from Central America. No one should be surprised that the OIG found two particular policies — separating children from their parents and prolonging the time children are in custody — are especially harmful to the children’s mental health.

Researchers, mental health professionals and policymakers have known for years that refugee children are likely to have experienced traumas that challenge their mental health. Studies in the United States and in Europe have established that asylum-seeking children and adolescents are likely to have post-traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, depression and externalizing behaviors. Given that the escape of many of these Central American children was prompted by violence and deprivation in their home countries, they certainly are at high risk of developing mental disorders.

Last year I wrote that the Trump administration “knew it would cause lasting harm, and still took children from parents.” In July 2018, Jonathan White, the former deputy director of children’s programs in the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), testified to Congress that he had warned administration officials, early in the discussions to ramp up the zero tolerance toward asylum seekers, about the harm such policies pose to children. White argued that the separation of children from parents entails “significant risk of harm to children” as well as “psychological injury.” But administration officials overruled White.

The policy of family separation happens less frequently now; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that 911 children were taken from their asylum-seeking parents in the year after the June 26, 2018, court order to stop the practice. About 30 children whom DHS took from their parents during the peak of the policy in 2018 still remain separated from their parents. The new OIG report documents the deleterious effects this policy has had on the mental health of these children.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform in July released a report of their investigation of the child-separation policy. The committee’s set of findings on how long children were held in custody is among the deeply troubling results — and not just because they found evidence the administration violated federal law on how long DHS can hold a child in detention. After DHS transferred custody to ORR, the committee reports that “records show that children of all ages were held in ORR custody for extensive periods of time.” The average was 90 days, with some children in ORR custody for more than 18 months.

When the committee’s findings are overlaid on the OIG study, the picture of the extensive damage to children’s mental health becomes even sharper. More precisely, the other policy the OIG found that was especially damaging to asylum-seeking children is the practice of prolonging the time children are in custody. “Facilities reported that children with longer stays experienced more stress, anxiety, and behavioral issues, which staff had to manage. Some children who did not initially exhibit mental health or behavioral issues began reacting negatively as their stays grew longer.”

If you are thinking that these compelling, thorough reports are prompting an end to this human tragedy — enter stage right the new DHS rule for the “Apprehension, Processing, Care and Custody of Alien Minors and Unaccompanied Alien Children.” This regulation takes aim at the 1997 court-ordered consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that limits the detention of children and set standards for their care. Among other things, the new rule would allow DHS to indefinitely detain migrant families, including those arriving to seek asylum. Administration officials assured that they would provide high standards for the care of children. The official press release stated “all children in the Government’s care will be universally treated with dignity, respect and special concern, in concert with American values and faithful to the intent of the settlement.”

However, the new rule eliminates the requirement that facilities holding families with children be state-licensed facilities. DHS would be responsible for licensing the family detention centers. Given the reports this summer of squalid conditions at facilities overseen by DHS, including a scathing “management alert” report by DHS’s Office of Inspector General, a new policy of prolonged detention of families and children seeking asylum is frightful. Attorneys general representing 20 states have sued to stop the policy change.

Two wrongs don’t make a right — but they do make a place in this administration’s immigration policies.

Ruth Ellen Wasem is a professor of policy practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration. Follow her on Twitter @rewasem.

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Yup!

And, it’s only going to get worse, Ruth, as the Federal Courts have now joined in furthering and justifying the abuses of children, women, gays, and all migrants.

Astoundingly, we’re seeing an institutional failure of our democratic republic that took more than two centuries to build in a little more than two years of Trump’s lawless authoritarian rule.

Trump might not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but he has proved to have amazing talent for exploiting democracy’s weaknesses and co-opting and “weaponizing” supposedly democratic institutions to further his plan of destroying them completely. Lots of supposedly smart guys out there these days sucking up and doing his bidding.

PWS

09-12-19

IMMIGRATION JUDGE V. STUART CROUCH SYMBOLIZES AMERICA’S GROSS DISREGARD OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS & WELFARE!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/opinion/child-poverty-democratic-debate.html

Nicholas Kristof writes in The NY Times:

When a 2-year-old Guatemalan boy had trouble staying silent in an immigration courtroom, the judge pointed his finger at him.

“I have a very big dog in my office, and if you don’t be quiet, he will come out and bite you,” the judge, V. Stuart Couch, a former Marine, yelled at the toddler in a 2016 hearing, according to a formal complaint shared by the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy and first reported this week by Mother Jones.

“Do you want him to bite you?” Couch asked.

The boy, his mom and their advocate were all soon sobbing. Couch later acknowledged that he “did not handle the situation properly,” according to the judge who investigated the complaint, Deepali Nadkarni.

Clearly, Couch didn’t have a child’s well-being in mind on that day. But ignoring the welfare of our young is a day-to-day problem in America, where our children are falling behind those in other wealthy countries.

On Thursday, 10 Democratic presidential candidates will debate. It would be a natural opportunity to provoke a national conversation on the subject. But a question about child poverty hasn’t been asked at a presidential debate in 20 years, not since a Republican primary debate in 1999, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

Presidential candidates have been asked about the World Series, about cursing in movies, even about flag lapel pins more recently than they have been questioned about child poverty. We’ve had 147 presidential debates in a row without a single question on the topic (here’s a petition calling for more questions on the issue). I hope Thursday’s debate won’t be the 148th.

UNICEF says America ranks No. 37 among countries in well-being of children, and Save the Children puts the United States at No. 36. European countries dominate the top places.

American infants at last count were 76 percent more likely to die in their first year than children in other advanced countries, according to an article last year in the journal Health Affairs. We would save the lives of 20,000 American children each year if we could just achieve the same child mortality rates as the rest of the rich world.

. . . .

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Read Kristof’s complete op-ed at the link.

Couch is one of America’s worst judges. One might therefore fairly ask why he recently was “rewarded” for his bias, unprofessionalism, and documented poor performance when Trump Sycophant Barr “elevated” him to the appellate bench? Perhaps, so he can abuse more women and children across the country?

But, as the Supremes and the GOP have decided to endorse and encourage child abuse, the question is whether the Dems can get it together to end the abuse before it’s too late for America and the world.

Child abusers like Trump, Couch, Barr, and the gang over at DHS are used to getting away with it. They are encouraged by a do nothing Congress, complicit Federal Judges, and a Trump base that has declared war on traditional American values and human decency. But, the consequences of their misconduct, and the unwillingness of the US political and legal system to stand up for children, won’t end well in the long run.

In the meantime, remember the names of the abusers and their enablers, some of them serving in our highest court and as GOP Senators and Representatives.

Child abuse is wrong!

PWS

09-12-19

SUPREME TANK: COMPLICIT COURT ENDS U.S. ASYLUM PROTECTIONS BY 7-2 VOTE — Endorses Trump’s White Nationalist Racist Attack On Human Rights & Eradication Of Refugee Act Of 1980 — On 09-11-19, Supremes Celebrate By Joining Trump’s Attack On America & Humanity! — Only Justices Ginsburg & Sotomayor Have Guts To Stand Up For Constitution & Rule Of Law!

Death On The Rio Grande — Supremes Sign Death Warrants For Vulnerable Refugees, Trash Refugee Act of 1980

19a230_k53l

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 1 SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 19A230 _________________
WILLIAM P. BARR, ATTORNEY GENERAL, ET AL. v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY [September 11, 2019]
The application for stay presented to JUSTICE KAGAN and by her referred to the Court is granted. The district court’s July 24, 2019 order granting a preliminary injunction and September 9, 2019 order restoring the nationwide scope of the injunction are stayed in full pending disposition of the Government’s appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of the Government’s petition for a writ of certiorari, if such writ is sought. If a writ of certiorari is sought and the Court denies the petition, this order shall terminate automatically. If the Court grants the petition for a writ of certiorari, this order shall terminate when the Court enters its judgment.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins, dissenting from grant of stay.
Once again the Executive Branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution. Although this Nation has long kept its doors open to refugees—and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher—the Government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law. After several organizations representing immi- grants sued to stop the rule from going into effect, a federal district court found that the organizations were likely to prevail and preliminarily enjoined the rule nationwide. A

2 BARR v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
federal appeals court narrowed the injunction to run only circuit-wide, but denied the Government’s motion for a complete stay.
Now the Government asks this Court to intervene and to stay the preliminary decisions below. This is an extraordinary request. Unfortunately, the Court acquiesces. Because I do not believe the Government has met its weighty burden for such relief, I would deny the stay.
The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security promulgated the rule at issue here on July 16, 2019. See 84 Fed. Reg. 33829. In effect, the rule forbids almost all Central Americans—even unaccompanied children—to apply for asylum in the United States if they enter or seek to enter through the southern border, unless they were first denied asylum in Mexico or another third country. Id., at 33835, 33840; see also 385 F. Supp. 3d 922, 929–930 (ND Cal. 2019).
The District Court found that the rule was likely unlawful for at least three reasons. See id., at 938–957. First, the court found it probable that the rule was inconsistent with the asylum statute, 94 Stat. 105, as amended, 8 U. S. C. §1158. See §1158(b)(2)(C) (requiring that any regulation like the rule be“consistent”with the statute). Section 1158 generally provides that any noncitizen “physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States . . . may apply for asylum.” §1158(a)(1). And unlike the rule, the District Court explained, the statute provides narrow, carefully calibrated exceptions to asylum eligibility. As relevant here, Congress restricted asylum based on the possibility that a person could safely resettle in a third country. See §1158(a)(2)(A), (b)(2)(A)(vi). The rule, by contrast, does not consider whether refugees were safe or resettled in Mexico—just whether they traveled through it. That blunt approach, according to the District Court, rewrote the statute. See 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 939– 947, 959.

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 3
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
Second, the District Court found that the challengers would likely prevail because the Government skirted typical rulemaking procedures. Id., at 947–951. The District Court noted “serious questions” about the rule’s validity because the Government effected a sea change in immigration law without first providing advance notice and opportunity for public comment. Id., at 930; see also 5 U. S. C. §553. The District Court found the Government’s purported justifications unpersuasive at the preliminary-injunction stage. 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 948–951 (discussing statutory exceptions to notice-and-comment procedures).
Last, the District Court found the explanation for the rule so poorly reasoned that the Government’s action was likely arbitrary and capricious. See id., at 951–957; 5 U. S. C. §706. On this score, the District Court addressed the Government’s principal justifications for the rule: that failing to seek asylum while fleeing through more than one country “raises questions about the validity and urgency” of the asylum seeker’s claim, 84 Fed. Reg. 33839; and that Mexico, the last port of entry before the United States, offers a fea- sible alternative for persons seeking protection from persecution, id., at 33835, 33839–33840. The District Court examined the evidence in the administrative record and explained why it flatly refuted the Government’s assumptions. 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 951–957. A “mountain of evidence points one way,” the District Court observed, yet the Government “went the other—with no explanation.” Id., at 955.
After the District Court issued the injunction, the Ninth Circuit declined the Government’s request for a complete stay, reasoning that the Government did not make the required “ ‘strong showing’ ” that it would likely succeed on the merits of each issue. ___ F. 3d ___ (2019), 2019 WL 3850928, *1 (quoting Hilton v. Braunskill, 481 U. S. 770, 776 (1987)). Narrowing the injunction to the Circuit’s borders, the Ninth Circuit expedited the appeal and permitted

4 BARR v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
the District Court to consider whether additional facts would warrant a broader injunction. 2019 WL 3850928, *2– *3.
The lower courts’ decisions warrant respect. A stay pending appeal is “extraordinary” relief. Williams v. Zbaraz, 442 U. S. 1309, 1311 (1979) (Stevens, J., in chambers); see also Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1302 (2012) (ROBERTS, C. J., in chambers) (listing stay factors). Given the District Court’s thorough analysis, and the serious questions that court raised, I do not believe the Government has carried its “especially heavy” burden. Packwood v. Senate Select Comm. on Ethics, 510 U. S. 1319, 1320 (1994) (Rehnquist, C. J., in chambers). The rule here may be, as the District Court concluded, in significant tension with the asylum statute. It may also be arbitrary and capricious for failing to engage with the record evidence contradicting its conclusions. It is especially concerning, moreover, that the rule the Government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere—without affording the public a chance to weigh in.
Setting aside the merits, the unusual history of this case also counsels against our intervention. This lawsuit has been proceeding on three tracks: In this Court, the parties have litigated the Government’s stay request. In the Ninth Circuit, the parties are briefing the Government’s appeal. And in the District Court, the parties recently participated in an evidentiary hearing to supplement the record. In- deed, just two days ago the District Court reinstated a na- tionwide injunction based on new facts. See East Bay Sanc- tuary Covenant v. Barr, No. 4:19–cv–4073, Doc. 73 (ND Cal., Sept. 9, 2019). Notably, the Government moved to stay the newest order in both the District Court and the Ninth Circuit. (Neither court has resolved that request, though the Ninth Circuit granted an administrative stay to allow further deliberation.) This Court has not considered

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 5
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
the new evidence, nor does it pause for the lower courts to resolve the Government’s pending motions. By granting a stay, the Court simultaneously lags behind and jumps ahead of the courts below. And in doing so, the Court side-steps the ordinary judicial process to allow the Government to implement a rule that bypassed the ordinary rulemaking process. I fear that the Court’s precipitous action today risks undermining the interbranch governmental processes that encourage deliberation, public participation, and transparency.
***
In sum, granting a stay pending appeal should be an “extraordinary” act. Williams, 442 U. S., at 1311. Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal. Historically, the Government has made this kind of request rarely; now it does so reflexively. See, e.g., Vladeck, The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket, 133 Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming Nov. 2019). Not long ago, the Court resisted the shortcut the Government now invites. See Trump v. East Bay Sanc- tuary Covenant, 586 U. S. ___ (2018). I regret that my colleagues have not exercised the same restraint here. I respectfully dissent.

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

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent says it all, but, alas, in vain.

09-11-19 will be remembered as the day that justice, human rights, and human decency died in America!

Shame on Justices Breyer and Kagan for “going along to get along” with the dismantling of the Refugee Act of 1980. The “blood of the innocents” will be on their hands and the hands of their five colleagues.

The “Dred Scottification” (or “dehumanization”) of immigrants, Latinos, and other minorities that Justice Breyer once predicted, yet lacked the guts to speak out against in this case, is now in full swing. It will increase unabated, now that the Supremes’ sellout to authoritarian racism is assured. And don’t expect “Moscow Mitch” and his gang of toadies to put up any opposition.

The American justice system has been dismantled. But history will remember the roles of each of those “Black Robed Cowards” who participated in its demise.

With this atrocious decision, the Supremes have basically made themselves irrelevant to the battle for fairness and individual rights under the Constitution. As I have suggested before, self-created irrelevance might come back to haunt them.

PWS

09-11-19

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

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Jeffrey Chase, an immigration lawyer and former New York immigration judge, said it’s not surprising that Esperanza and Josue would each lose asylum. Judge Spencer only started last fall and is on probation for her first two years in the job.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this posting incorrectly identified Beth’s network affiliation. She reports for WNYC.

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09-11-19 will be remembered as the day that justice, human rights, and human decency died in America!

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