Central America – Page 34 – immigrationcourtside.com

TAL @ CNN: ADMINISTRATION PLANNING END RUN AROUND FLORES SETTLEMENT BY ISSUING NEW REGULATION!

White House reviewing plan to end court settlement on immigrant child detention

By Tal Kopan, CNN

The White House is reviewing a plan that could nullify a settlement that immigrant children that arrive with their families be released from custody within 20 days, a rule they have blamed for their separation of thousands of families at the border.

The action to finalize regulations on the topic, revealed in a government database, comes after repeated attempts to change the Flores Settlement Agreement have been resoundingly rejected by a federal judge and amid continuing fallout over the Trump administration’s related decision to separate families at the border.

The Trump administration has made the Flores settlement a frequent target of its ire — blaming the agreement for its decision to implement a policy at the border that resulted in thousands of families being separated. It has also repeatedly said only Congress can act to overrule the settlement. But lawmakers have shown little appetite to do so and have so far failed to pass any immigration legislation under this administration.

Key provisions of the agreement dictate minimum standards of care of immigrants in detention, as well as requiring that children who arrive with their families be released from custody within 20 days unless their parent agrees to them being held longer. But three weeks is faster than their immigration court cases can be processed, leading the Trump administration to complain the agreement forces them to either release the families together or separate them.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/08/02/politics/trump-administration-flores-settlement/index.html

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Sounds pretty scofflaw! Can they get with it?

Flores doesn’t purport to create Constitutional rights for the class members. Congress clearly could, and should, merely enact the Flores protections for children into statute. But, realistically, that’s not going to happen under Trump, and even if it did, Trump would undoubtedly veto it.

Conversely, perhaps Congress could overrule Flores by statute. But, if Flores turns out to be setting forth Constitutional minimum requirements, then the statute would be held unconstitutional. On the other hand, if no Constitutional issues are involved, Congress would be free to act. However, Congress hasn’t shown any enthusiasm for immigration legislation, particularly something as sensitive and potentially controversial as Flores.

Additionally, just because Congress could change the law doesn’t necessarily mean that the Administration could do so by regulation. Indeed, if the Administration could void a court-approved settlement simply by publishing a regulation, settlements with the Government would cease to have any meaning or enforceability.

Also, at the time of the original Flores settlement it seems to me that both parties and the court wisely wanted to avoid protracted litigation on the Constitutional question of long-term detention of children which had risks for both parties.

At a minimum, an attempt to “undo” Flores by regulation would allow the plaintiffs to raise the Constitutional issue in court. It’s seems to me that there must be some Constitutional limits on child detention. So, the Government could well end up enjoined to follow Flores while the litigation on the Constitutional question works its way up the system — a process likely to take until beyond 2020. I’d also say that the Administration’s stupidity and lawlessness on separating children from parents tends to make the “litigating context” very favorable for plaintiffs.

So, to me, it looks like another dumb, counterproductive, “in your face” move by the Trumpsters. But, that doesn’t mean they won’t try it. In fact, most of their so-called “litigating strategy” seems to fit this mold. It’s an Administration that has made immorality, lies, fraud, waste, and abuse of public resources the norm. However this issue comes out, that couldn’t bode well for the future of our country.

PWS

08-03-18

NPR: FRONTLINE TAKES YOU INSIDE THE POLICY DECISIONS THAT LED TO FAMILY SEPARATION — Featuring Michelle Brane Of The Women’s Refugee Commission

Dear Paul,I hope you saw the new “Frontline” episode, Separated: Children at the Border, last night on PBS. The episode provides an in-depth, factual look at the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and the treatment of families seeking safety at the border.

I was interviewed about the work of the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) on behalf of women and children seeking asylum and what I witnessed on a recent monitoring visit to a processing center at the border.

We want you to know that WRC is unyielding in our commitment to hold the Trump administration accountable for its cruel policies — we will not stop until families seeking safety at the U.S. border are treated humanely and have their human rights respected.

Thank you for standing with us.

Warm regards,

Michelle Brané,

Director of Migrant Rights and Justice

WATCH IT HERE

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The Trump Administration specializes in avoiding accountability. The masters of the lie always blame the courts, the victims, the Democrats, the press, lawyers, everybody but them. That was on display this week during Senate oversight hearings where nobody took responsibility for the child separation policy that everyone agreed was a bad idea. Of course, missing from the hearing lineup was the unapologetic and disingenuous “mastermind” of the “zero tolerance policy” Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions.

The video also shows how badly the Obama Administration screwed up the treatment of arriving asylum applicants with counterproductive policies like the abominable “family detention.” Not much acceptance of responsibility there either. Indeed, this is when the policy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by the DOJ and White House politicos went into high gear sending the Immigration Court backlog careening out of control.

PWS

08-02-18

LA TIMES: SESSIONS IS “DECONSTRUCTING” OUR ASYLUM SYSTEM, AND IT’S A NATIONAL OUTRAGE THAT CONGRESS SHAMEFULLY REFUSES TO FIX – “Many more people with legitimate claims are likely being sent home to perilous conditions despite federal and international laws recognizing the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries. That is unconscionable.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=8434794c-eb73-4a2e-a2cd-3dafee637733

By the LA Times Editorial Board:

A shameful retreat on asylum

Here’s the disheartening reality about the Trump administration’s policies toward those arriving at the borders seeking asylum: Many more people with legitimate claims are likely being sent home to perilous conditions despite federal and international laws recognizing the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries. That is unconscionable.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University reports that immigration judges — who work for the Justice Department, not the federal courts — are granting asylum seekers’ appeals half as often as they did a year ago. Through June, courts revived less than 15% of the asylum claims that had been rejected by immigration agents, who make the initial determination whether an asylum seeker had a credible fear of persecution if returned home.

What changed from the first half of 2017? The reduction of successful appeals coincided with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions’ comments that the asylum system “is being gamed” (there’s little evidence of that), his demands that immigration courts handle appeals more quickly, and the roll-out of performance quotas to force immigration judges to clear cases faster. That’s what changed.

The TRAC analysis further found that rate of successful appeals varies wildly by geographic region and even among judges within the same regional court — a systemic inconsistency that predates the Trump administration. That justice is so fickle is neither fair nor meets our moral and legal obligations to those fleeing persecution.

We can rail against the Justice Department’s failings, but the responsibility rests with Congress. It granted the department wide latitude in handling asylum requests from people facing persecution based on race, religion, race, political beliefs, nationality or membership in a social group.

That last, ill-defined category gave the government flexibility as times and needs warranted, but it also has led to uncertainty and politicization. Sessions, for instance, recently overturned an Obama-era immigration court definition that made asylum available to women who faced domestic violence in countries where police failed to protect them. So a political change in the attorney general’s office can weigh more heavily than precedents set by immigration judges.

This is fixable if we ever get a Congress willing to compromise and craft comprehensive immigration reforms framed within a humanitarian context and informed by the nation’s best interests — in terms of diversity and economic growth — and not one that panders to the current mood in the capital of nationalistic antipathy for the foreign-born. In the meantime, we must insist that people who are deserving of sanctuary receive it, and not get turned away to satisfy the current political whims.

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What’s happening to our U.S. Immigration Courts and to our asylum system is indeed a national outrage that requires Congressional action. That corrective action, at a minimum, must 1) establish an independent, Article I Immigration Court outside the Executive Branch; and 2) specify that persecution based upon gender constitutes persecution on account of a “particular social group.”

Not going to happen under this Congress! That’s why regime change is so critical. And, getting out the vote this November and thereafter is key to the majority no longer being subject to the whims of a toxic minority Government that has abandoned our Constitution, human rights, human decency, common sense, and the common good.

PWS

08-02-18

TRAC: THE SESSIONS EFFECT — DENIALS OF DAY IN COURT FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS SPIKE — Country Conditions Remain Horrible & Asylum Statute Hasn’t Changed, But Many More Asylum Applicants Now Denied Access To Immigration Court Hearings — Huge Individual Discrepancies Among Judges On “Credible Fear” Findings!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
==========================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Greetings. Immigration Court outcomes in credible fear reviews (CFR) have recently undergone a dramatic change. Starting in January 2018, court findings of credible fear began to plummet. By June 2018, only 14.7 percent of the CFR court decisions found the asylum seeker had a “credible fear.” This was just half the level that had prevailed during the last six months of 2017.
These very recent data from the Immigration Court provide an early look at how the landscape for gaining asylum may be shifting under the current administration. Unless asylum seekers, including parents with children, arriving at the southwest border pass this initial CFR review, they are not even allowed to apply for asylum. As a consequence, individuals who don’t pass these reviews face being quickly deported back to their home countries.

The latest available case-by-case court records obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University document that depending upon the particular Immigration Court undertaking the credible fear review, the proportion of asylum seekers passing this screening step varied from as little as 1 percent all the way up to 60 percent – a sixty-fold difference. Since October 2015, for example, at least half passed their credible fear reviews when these were conducted by the Immigration Courts in Arlington, Virginia (60% passed), Chicago, Illinois (52% passed), Pearsall, Texas (51% passed), and Baltimore, Maryland (50% passed). In contrast, few were found to have credible fear when their review took place in Immigration Courts based in Lumpkin, Georgia (only 1% passed) and Atlanta, Georgia (only 2% passed).

Which judge is assigned to undertake this review can also have a dramatic impact. Judges on the Pearsall, Texas and San Antonio, Texas Immigration Courts found as few as 4 percent demonstrated credible fear, while others on the same two courts found 94 percent with such fear.

Previous reports by TRAC and others have long documented wide judge-to-judge disparities in asylum decisions. This report breaks new ground in showing that similar differences also exist earlier in the asylum process in the determination of who is allowed to apply for asylum.

To read the full report, including specifics for each Immigration Court, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/523/

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through June 2018. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563

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To state the obvious, if we believe in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, we simply can’t tolerate a “court” run, improperly influenced, and manipulated by a xenophobic, White Nationalist, racist enforcement zealot like Jeff Session.

Time for “regime change” that includes an independent U.S. Immigration Court dedicated to insuring Due Process! Get out the vote this fall!

PWS

08-01-18

PBS: ADMINISTRATION WARNED OF LASTING DAMAGE CAUSED BY SEPARATION — PROCEEDED ANYWAY

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-was-warned-of-traumatic-psychological-injury-from-family-separations-official-says

Joshua Barajas reports for PBS:

A top health official told lawmakers Tuesday that the Trump administration was warned about instituting “any policy” resulting in family separations because of the effects such separations could have on the wellbeing of immigrant children.

The official’s response came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked every federal immigration official at Tuesday’s hearing over family separations to answer a particular question: “Did anyone on this panel say, maybe [separating families] wasn’t such a good idea?”

After a pause, Blumenthal directed his question first to Commander Jonathan White of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who said he and the Office of Refugee Resettlement raised a number of concerns in the previous year about “any policy which would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child as well about whether that would be operationally supportable with the bed capacity we had.”

The Democratic senator asked the commander to further explain his response in layman’s terms, asking if he told the administration that children would “suffer” as a result of its “zero tolerance” policy.

“There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”

“Separation of children from their parents entails significant harm to children,” White said in response. “There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” he added, shortly after.

READ MORE: How the toxic stress of family separation can harm a child

White also said that the administration’s response was that family separation was not a policy. As stated before, there is no current law that mandates the separation of migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.

The Trump administration implemented its “zero-tolerance” policy this spring. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in June to halt the separations.

In recent weeks, lawsuits filed against the separation policy have produced testimonies from lawyers and the separated families they represent, alleging that the government’s actions resulted in trauma to their children.

In one personal declaration presented earlier this month in court, one mother said her son “is not the same since we were reunited.”

“I thought that, because he is so young he would not be traumatized by this experience, but he does not separate from me. He cries when he does not see me,” Olivia Caceres said of her 1-year-old son. “That behavior is not normal. In El Salvador he would stay with his dad or my sister and not cry. Now he cries for fear of being alone,” she wrote.

Here are several other key moments from Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

. . . .

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Read the entire article at the link.

The lack of accountability and acceptance of responsibility by the Administration is astounding, as was Sen. Cornyn’s tone deaf comment. The reason why other laws aren’t being enforced is because of the cruel, wasteful, unconstitutional “zero tolerance” policy instituted by Sessions. Stop blaming the victims, Senator!

And why isn’t Sessions being held accountable for the mess he “masterminded?”

PWS

08-01-18

SESSIONS’S CLAIM THAT HE WAS “REQUIRED BY LAW” TO PROSECUTE ALL ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSERS IS BOGUS — CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS ARE ALWAYS DISCRETIONARY — “[W]hen it comes to prosecuting immigration laws, it’s never not a choice.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-hernandez-family-separations_us_5b5a0a30e4b0fd5c73cd2e59

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández writes in HuffPost:

When President Barack Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of U.S. citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him.

Within days of entering the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” To Republicans, prosecutorial discretion subverts the rule of law. Or so they say.

Government data about the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy toward border crossers reveal that it, too, is picking and choosing whom to target. In May, at the height of its policy of tossing parents into criminal proceedings while their children were hauled to government-run prisons, Border Patrol agents sent 9,216 people to prosecutors. That is about 1,000 more than in April and over 5,000 more than the same month a year earlier. The increase was especially noticeable in the family separation epicenter of McAllen, Texas, where I was born and where my law firm is based. Lawyers in my hometown saw 841 prosecutions in April jump to 2,079 in May.

That is a lot of people, but it’s not everyone. In May, Border Patrol agents stationed across the southwest border caught almost 29,000 adults clandestinely entering the United States. Eighty-five percent had no children; the rest are the parents whose anguish has been heard across the world.

Of all the adults apprehended that month, most were not prosecuted criminally. Only one-third were charged with a federal immigration crime. The rest presumably ended up in the civil immigration court system or in fast-track legal proceedings in which immigration officials deport people without taking them in front of a judge. Zero tolerance apparently didn’t mean zero exceptions.

It makes complete sense that the government did not go after everyone. The federal courts can’t handle that many cases. Picking and choosing is a part of every big law enforcement system. The important question isn’t whether that happens ― despite Republican insistence, it always does. The important question is why law enforcement officers choose to target some people over others.

. . . .

When it comes to taking a child from her parent, nothing is simple. And when it comes to prosecuting immigration laws, it’s never not a choice.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is an associate professor of law at the University of Denver, publisher of the blog crimmigration.com, and of counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law.

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

Of course separating children from parents has always been a choice driven by Sessions’s racism, White Nationalism, and xenophobia and having nothing whatsoever to do with sound law enforcement policy.

Indeed, studies have shown that so-called “zero tolerance” enforcement programs are failures across the board from a law enforcement standpoint. And, low level immigration prosecutions such as those promoted by Sessions have no documented deterrent effect. But, they have been shown to reduce the amount of time that Federal prosecutors and Federal Judges have to spend on “real” law enforcement, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, organized crime, and fraud.

PWS

07-31-18

EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST: RACIST, WHITE NATIONALIST ADMINISTRATION DEHUMANIZES MIGRANTS OF COLOR — “All of this is happening because Trump has no respect for law or due process and no sense of empathy. He was reportedly upset this spring by a rise in border crossings by asylum-seekers, who by law had to be allowed to stay pending resolution of their claims. He and Sessions seized upon the pretext — for which they have not provided evidence — that children were being “trafficked” into the country for some reason.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/does-the-trump-administration-see-central-americans-as-human/2018/07/30/90dc17d4-9432-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html?utm_term=.17b3b808d283

Robinson writes:

. . . .

If you have children, imagine how you would feel seeing them taken away like that. Hug your kids. Imagine not knowing where they are or whether you’ll ever get to hug them again.

Now imagine the terror and despair those 711 “ineligible” children must feel. It is monstrous to gratuitously inflict such pain. It is, in a word, torture.

In 120 cases, according to the government, a parent “waived” reunification with the child. This claim cannot be taken at face value, however, since immigration advocates cite widespread reports of parents being coerced or fooled into signing documents they did not understand.

Human nature binds parents with their children. It shocks and depresses me to have to write this, but I wonder whether Trump and his minions see these Central Americans — brown-skinned, with indigenous features — as fully human.

In 431 cases involving children between 5 and 17, officials reported, the parents have been deported. Where are they now? How could the government let this happen? If these parents were going to be denied permission to stay in the United States, what was the big hurry to kick them out? Why couldn’t the administration wait until their children could be brought back from wherever they were being kept?

Even more incredibly, in 79 cases, the children’s parents have been released into the United States. In other words, the parents have some legal status — but the government has their children.

And in 94 cases, according to Trump administration officials, the parents cannot be located. What are the odds, do you think, that these men and women will ever be found? Where do parents go to begin the process of tracking down their children? How do you tell a 5-year-old that she may never see her mother and father again?

That’s the reported situation for children 5 and older. The government is also still holding 46 children younger than 5 whom officials cannot or will not give back to their parents. Think of the trauma being inflicted on 2-year-olds — to make a political point.

All of this is happening because Trump has no respect for law or due process and no sense of empathy. He was reportedly upset this spring by a rise in border crossings by asylum-seekers, who by law had to be allowed to stay pending resolution of their claims. He and Sessions seized upon the pretext — for which they have not provided evidence — that children were being “trafficked” into the country for some reason.

“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said in May. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.”

Think, for a moment, of the millions of Irish, Italian, Eastern European and other immigrants who “smuggled” children into the United States — families such as Trump’s own. The only difference is that those earlier immigrants, though sometimes rejected at first, came to be seen as white.

Brown immigrants need not apply. Not if they want to see their kids again.

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Read Robinson’s complete op-ed at the above link.

“Right on” Eugene! We need “regime change,” sooner rather than later. And, we still don’t have an answer to Eugene’s earlier question: When, if ever, will Sessions and other Trump Administration officials be held accountable for their intentionally lawless and unconstitutional behavior?

PWS

07-31-18

WASHPOST CHRONICLES THE TRUMP/SESSIONS SELF-CREATED HUMAN RIGHTS DISASTER — Incredible Cruelty, Incompetence, Bias, & Just Plain Old Stupidity!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/deleted-families-what-went-wrong-with-trumps-family-separation-effort/2018/07/28/54bcdcc6-90cb-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html

Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein, and Maria Sacchetti report for the Washington Post:

Social Issues

‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort

5:41

Why hundreds of migrant children are still separated from their parents

Hundreds of migrant children remain in custody after the Trump Administration scrambled to reunite separated families under a court-imposed deadline.(Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)

By Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria SacchettiJuly 28 at 1:15 PMEmail the author

When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.

They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.

Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.

So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”

But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.

The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back together.

Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.

After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.

“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”

This account of the separation plan’s implementation and sudden demise is based on court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current and former government officials, advocates and contractors, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give candid views and diagnose mistakes.

Trump officials have insisted that they were not doing anything extraordinary and were simply upholding the law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings and did not anticipate the raw emotional backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents for crossing the border illegally…

. . . .

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Read “the team’s” entire much, much more detailed article at the link! By the end you will be disgusted by this Administrtion’s intentional dehumanization, stunning incompetence, dishonesty, and lack of any sense whatsoever of responsible government or prudent use of taxpayer resources.

No wonder deficits are soaring while essential services are being cut. This Administration consistently and intentionally misuses our taxpayer dollars on counterproductive and totally misguided efforts such as this which have little or nothing whatsoever to do with legitimate law enforcement. And think of the monumental amounts of attorney and court time being wasted because of the Government’s lawless, racially motivated actions! What if these efforts and resources were it toward actually solving problems, rather than creating them?

The Administraton’s explanations don’t make sense. In court before Judge Sabraw, DOJ attorneys have always conceded that intentional separation of children from parents for deterrence purposes would be unconstitutional. They initially claimed that there was no such policy.

But, it’s clear that separating children from parents for deterrence was exactly what Sessions, Nielsen, and others in the Administration intended. Moreover, they had no intention of ever reuniting the children with families, which is why they didn’t bother to set up a system to keep track of them,

This seems like a very clear and intentional violation of our Constitution and lack of candor before a tribunal by Sessions, not to mention failure to fully and in good faith comply with the court’s order. That should lead to civil liability under Bivens or punishment for contempt of court, or both.

Also, seems that the DOJ lawyers who misrepresented the nature of the program their boss was running should be in line for disciplinary action from the District Court and from their respective state bars. One would only have had to watch a Sessions news clip (as many reporters did) to know that what they were telling the court was untrue or at least required some further explanation from Sessions.

Back to Eugene Robinson. Why are we putting families seeking the protection of the law in jail instead of dishonest, disingenuous scofflaws like Jeff Sessions? Maybe “Ol Gonzo” shouldn’t be up in front of the young neo-Nazis leading “lock her up” chants. What goes around comes around!

And, if I were Judge Sabraw, I might want to know why Sessions was out there leading nationalist chants rather than busting his tail to comply fully with the court’s order for reunification of families.

We need regime change! Vote the scofflaws and their enablers out of office in November! Vote only for candidates pledged to hold Jeff Sessions and the other scofflaws in this Administration accountable for their actions through meaningful oversight (of which there has been none since Trump took office).

PWS

07-28-18

SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ (D-HI) @ LA TIMES: NO, FAILURE TO REUNITE MORE MIGRANT FAMILIES ISN’T JUST ABOUT THIS ADMINISTRATION’S UNDOUBTED INCOMPETENCE – IT’S REALLY ABOUT SESSIONS’S PURE, INTENTIONAL CRUELTY & RACISM! — “This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-schatz-family-reunification-20180727-story.html

Senator Schatz writes:

The failure of the U.S. government to reverse the kidnapping of migrant children from their parents has been chalked up to incompetence. People want to believe that this act of extraordinary cruelty — and the Trump administration’s inability to fix it — stems from our leaders’ lack of experience or common sense.

But this too is a failure — of our collective imagination. Although the government claimed it met the Thursday deadline to reunite families, it admitted that hundreds of parents had been deported without their children. The separation policy was designed to inflict harm. And the resolution process is chaotic by design.

How else can we explain what has happened to these families? Some 14 million checked bags are managed by the Transportation Security Administration — and that’s just during Thanksgiving weekend. Even high school students can manage a coat check for an evening without losing everyone’s coats. They match each coat and owner with corresponding tickets, and do not store the coats outside the building, or even thousands of miles away from the event.

This administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies.

The administration did not take even these basic measures when it began to separate children — not coats! — from their parents. It did not use corresponding numbers for the files of parents and children, or take photos of families together, or hand out hospital-style bracelets. It did not house families near one another, choosing instead to hold mothers in California and daughters in Chicago, fathers in Texas and sons in New York City.

In fact, the administration seems to have taken a comprehensive inventory of confiscated items — sneakers, toothpaste, rosaries — everything except which child belongs to which parent.

These are the actions of a government that intended to separate families but did not intend to reunite them. It meant to inflict so much suffering that other families wouldn’t make the dangerous trek. No matter how bad the violence might be in Central America, surely these families would choose to stay united rather than come and be separated.

In fact, through all the blather, the Trump administration has admitted as much.

“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America,” White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2017. Even separate children from their parents, asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer? “Yes.”

“We expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect,” Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Steven Wagner told reporters in June.

“Hopefully people will get the message,” Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said casually on Fox News in June.

But according to the Department of Homeland Security, no one has been deterred. The number of families stopped at the border actually increased by 64% in the months after the administration began to separate families. So even if you could stomach traumatizing toddlers, this policy did not accomplish Sessions’ objective of sending a warning across the desert.

Still, cruelty has its uses. Across the country, Republicans have made the Trump administration’s immigration stance their rallying cry for reelection, running more than 14,000 campaign ads this year bragging about their efforts to “stop illegals.” And last month, Sessions spelled out the administration’s plan to use all the bad press for good.

“We do not want to separate parents from their children,” he clarified. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”

In other words, this administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies. But let’s be clear: No lawmaker of any party should ever accede to a legislative demand in response to the intentional infliction of harm.

The American people must also speak up. Our government has kidnapped children from their parents. It forces these lost boys and girls to say the Pledge of Allegiance while they are held captive in building wings named for U.S. presidents. (It is not hard to believe that President Reagan would be aghast.)

This is not who we are, we want to say, but that isn’t quite true. This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.

Will it work again? That’s up to us.

Brian Schatz representsHawaii in the U.S. Senate.

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

Senator Schatz provides a clear, succinct, powerful statement as to why we need regime change if American is to remain a great, diverse nation that uses the full abilities and respects the lives, dignity, potential, and rights of all of those who reside here now and may do so in the future.

“MAGA” has always been a not-so-thinly veiled exhortation to “Keep America As White As Possible For As Long As Possible No Matter How Much Damage We Inflict.”

Yeah, I remember that after his confirmation, I was willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt” and hope that he meant his sworn testimony that he would rise above his past as a partisan Senator and represent the rights and dignity of all Americans (which, of course, would include those Americans residing here and protected by our Constitution regardless of “status”).

However, it didn’t take long to see that it was just more of the perjury and lies that roll so effortlessly off Sessions’s tongue. What he actually intended all along was to use his good fortune in being somewhat unexpectedly elevated to the Attorney Generalship to carry out a heinous, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, restrictionist, extreme right program directed against people of color, women, children, and other vulnerable minorities. This is the type of horrible program that had always driven him, but that had been able to inflict little actual damage on America due to Sessions’s “outlier” position, even among his fellow GOP Senators.

To be fair, that’s precisely what Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Corey Booker, and the Black Caucus tried to tell the Senate and the rest of American during the confirmation process. But, they were silenced or ignored. Now, innocent kids, families, abused women, and the international reputation of our entire nation are all “paying the price” for Sessions as AG.

Vote for “regime change” this November. Vote for accountability, decency, the real “rule of law,” and to rein in and ideally remove Jeff Sessions from office before he can do further damage to humanity and to our country!

PWS

07-27-18

GONZO’S WORLD: HOW BAD WAS SESSIONS’S DECISION IN MATTER OF A-B-, GRATUITOUSLY REWRITING U.S. ASYLUM LAW TO STRIP WOMEN, VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, & GANG VIOLENCE OF ESSENTIAL ASYLUM PROTECTION? – So Bad, That House GOP-Controlled Appropriations Committee Unanimously Approved A Provision That Would Reverse Matter of A-B-!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gop-led-house-committee-rebuffs-trump-administration-on-immigrant-asylum-claim-policy/2018/07/26/3c52ed52-911a-11e8-9b0d-749fb254bc3d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e5e5bb03b491

Seung Min Kim reports for the Washington Post:

A GOP-led House committee delivered a rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration policies this week — an unusual bipartisan move that may ultimately spell trouble for must-pass spending measures later this year.

The powerful House Appropriations Committee passed a measure that would essentially reverse Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s guidanceearlier this year that immigrants will not generally be allowed to use claims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum. The provision was adopted as part of a larger spending bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security, an already contentious measure because of disputes over funding for President Trump’s border wall.

But one influential Senate Republican and ally of the White House warned that keeping the asylum provision could sink the must-pass funding bill, and other conservatives who support a tougher line on immigration began denouncing it Thursday.

“Why is @HouseAppropsGOP voting to undermine AG Sessions’s asylum reforms & throw open our borders to fraud & crime?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), who often has Trump’s ear on key issues. “The amendment they adopted [Wednesday] is the kind of thing that will kill the DHS spending bill.”

The amendment, written by Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), would bar funding from government efforts to carry out Sessions’s asylum directive. It passed the committee unanimously.

Sessions laid out guidance last month that said victims of domestic abuse and gang violence that is “perpetrated by non-governmental actors” will generally not be allowed to obtain asylum in the United States, an effort he said was meant to cut down on fraud.

[Sessions: Victims of domestic abuse and gang violence generally won’t qualify for asylum]

But Democrats and immigrant rights advocates have criticized Sessions’s move, warning that it would disqualify tens of thousands of immigrants fleeing violence in their home countries. His decision came as the administration was implementing a “zero-tolerance” policy that subjected everyone who crossed the border illegally to criminal prosecution, causing migrant parents to be separated from their children.

One senior Republican official said it was unlikely that the provision would stay intact once the House and Senate merge their spending measures, adding that “not every vote taken is to make law, but to move the process forward.”

With their respective bills for DHS funding, the two chambers are already headed for a clash over border wall spending, with the House allocating about $5 billion for it, while the Senate sets aside $1.6 billion.

Still, both advocates and opponents of more generous immigration policies were surprised at the committee’s move to approve the asylum measure unanimously.

“I think there was a general impression that things like that, that would undermine what the administration’s policies are, would be partisan fights and partisan battles,” said Josh Breisblatt, a senior policy analyst for the American Immigration Council.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), who leads the panel overseeing DHS funding, spoke in favor of the Democratic-sponsored provision, saying: “As a son of a social worker, I have great compassion for those victims of domestic violence anywhere, especially as it concerns those nations that turn a blind eye to crimes of domestic violence.”

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that Yoder flew on Air Force One just this week and that Trump had already singled out Yoder for praise on Twitter, thanking him for securing the $5 billion in wall money in the DHS spending measure.

“He got the funding for the wall in there, and the president endorsed him, and he approved this amendment and spoke in favor of it,” Krikorian said. “That basically makes the wall not all that useful, at least for immigration purposes.”

Seung Min KimSeung Min Kim is a White House reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Trump administration through the lens of Capitol Hill. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, she spent more than eight years at Politico, primarily covering the Senate and immigration policy. Follow

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

Well, at least Sessions’s scofflaw actions are creating some bipartisanship in the House of all places (even though, as the article suggests, there is almost no chance of this actually becoming law).

You know folks are doing the smart and right thing when leading restrictionist zanies like Sen. Tom Cotton and Mark Krikorian go bonkers!

PWS

07-27-18

HUFFPOST: UNDER TRUMP & SESSIONS, ICE ASSISTS DOMESTIC ABUSERS!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ice-domestic-violence-abuse_us_5b561740e4b0b15aba914404

Melissa Jeltsen reports for HuffPost:

Domestic abusers are known to be crafty, finding inventive ways to exert power and control over their victims. They use smart home gadgets to spy on their partners. They post revenge porn online. They rack up debt in their victims’ names. And as a recent incident in North Carolina demonstrates, abusers now have another powerful tool in their arsenal: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

On July 9, ICE agents arrested an undocumented woman and her 16-year-old son at a courthouse in Charlotte after they appeared at a domestic violence hearing.

The woman, who is being identified only as Maria, is living in a domestic violence shelter and has a protective order against her ex. But that morning, she was in court as a defendant, facing what her lawyer described as “bogus” retaliatory charges brought by her ex after she left him.

Those charges have since been thrown out, but they put Maria in ICE’s crosshairs. Now, she faces possible deportation.

Advocates say her case sends a chilling message to undocumented victims that abusers can essentially wield the immigration system as a weapon against them, and that ICE will be more than willing to help.

“ICE is effectively partnering with abusers to keep their victims from seeking help from law enforcement and the judicial system,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Maria’s arrest comes during a period of heightened immigration enforcement that has undocumented victims of domestic violence laying low. As deportations ramp up across the country, victims are trapped in a Catch-22: Ask for help and risk deportation, or stay with a violent partner and risk their lives. Many are afraid to contact police, pursue civil or criminal cases, or go to court for any reason. Advocates say abusers use this to their advantage, threatening to turn victims over to immigration officials and filing frivolous complaints to get them in trouble.

Maria, who is originally from Colombia, legally entered the U.S. in August 2016 but overstayed her visa.

In January of this year, Maria made the difficult decision to call police for help, her public defender, Herman Little, told HuffPost. According to Little, Maria’s ex-fiancé had beaten her, and when her son, then 15, had stepped in to stop him, the ex beat him too, injuring his arms and face.

“He was a brave young man to try to protect his mom from a grown man,” Little said.

Maria’s ex was arrested and charged with assault on the teenager. Maria fled to a domestic violence shelter with her children.

Nine days later, she was due in court to get a temporary protective order against her ex. That same day, her ex told authorities he wanted to press charges against Maria for allegedly assaulting him. Experts in domestic violence say it’s a common tactic for abusers to bring charges against victims. He later brought more charges, claiming that Maria had stolen items from his house. According to Little, the “stolen” items were personal belongings that she took when she fled to the shelter, like the baby’s crib.

“He used the criminal justice system as his bully pulpit,” Little said. The charges against Maria were dismissed by the district attorney’s office on Tuesday, he added. An attorney for the ex-fiancé did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On July 9, Maria and her son appeared at the Mecklenburg County courthouse to attend two hearings ― one for the charges against Maria and one for the charges against her ex involving her son. But inside the courthouse, plainclothes ICE agents arrested the mother and son and whisked them off to an ICE office, leaving behind Maria’s 2-year-old child, who was being looked after at the court day care.

It is unclear how ICE knew Maria was undocumented and would be in court on July 9, but Little recalls seeing her ex talking on the phone before the agents showed up. He suspects her ex called them.

At a rally on Friday in Charlotte, Maria described the arrest as “one of the most humiliating and embarrassing experiences I’ve ever endured” and said she was terrified about being separated from her 2-year-old.

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In an email to HuffPost, a spokesman for ICE, Bryan Cox, defended the decision to arrest Maria, saying the criminal charges against her prompted ICE’s actions.

“This person was in court as the defendant facing criminal charges themselves, not as a plaintiff,” Cox wrote. “You’ll have to ask local authorities why those charges were filed as ICE cannot speak to charges filed by another entity, but this fact is not in dispute.”

He did not explain why Maria’s son, who was in court as a victim in a pending domestic violence case against her ex-partner, was also arrested.

Archi Pyati, chief of policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works with immigrant women and girls who have survived gender-based violence, said ICE’s actions demonstrate “this administration’s willful blindness towards the realities of domestic violence and how they play out.”

Pyati noted this is not the first instance of ICE agents targeting domestic violence victims at court appearances. In February 2017, an undocumented woman was arrested while seeking a domestic violence protective order against her boyfriend.

In another case, ICE agents allegedly threatened to deport a domestic violence victim with an open U visa application ― which is intended to protect victims of crime from deportation after they come forward to work with law enforcement ― unless her estranged husband turned himself over to federal immigration agents. The woman has lived in Wisconsin for 20 years and does not know where her estranged husband is, according to a statement from Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee immigration rights organization.

Wilmarie Santos, a bilingual advocate who takes calls for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said a growing number of callers are reporting that their abusers are using their immigration status as a way to control and psychologically torment them. She described one caller who said her abuser threatened to hurt himself and tell authorities that she did it, and another who said her abuser threatened to falsely claim she’d kidnapped the children so she would be arrested.

“They basically comply with whatever is demanded of them,” Santos said. “Right now, contacting the police or getting help is not really an option for women [who are undocumented]. It’s terrifying actually ― their options are very limited and trust is a big deal for any victim of abuse, and on top of this you have this extra barrier.”

“The degree of fear and anxiety is at a level I’ve never experienced before,” said Monica Trejo, the director of phone service at the hotline, where she has worked for 12 years. “There’s definitely an increase in hopelessness.”

Maria is now in deportation proceedings, which her immigration lawyer, Lisa Diefenderfer, said they will fight.

“Had ICE done any minimal investigating they would have quickly discovered that the charges against her were retaliatory and going to be dismissed. She is not a danger to our community, she is a victim of domestic violence,” Diefenderfer said. “This completely changes her life.”

This story has been updated to reflect that the charges brought against Maria by her ex were later dismissed.

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

Sure, I know, Sessions technically isn’t in charge of ICE. But, let’s be honest about it: Kirstjen Nielsen is a lightweight sycophant appointed solely because she wasn’t going to resist or get in the way of the White Nationalist, racist immigration agenda of Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and Trump. And, she certainly hasn’t disappointed, demonstrating intellectual vapidity, moral cowardice, ignorance, and sycophancy in every possible way.

Sessions is a well-known unapologetic racist, xenophobe, and misogynist who has demonstrated his hatred and contempt for migrants, Hispanics, women, refugees, asylum seekers, and domestic violence survivors in every possible way. Apparently not satisfied with just abusing children, returning Latina refugees to harm’s way, and torturing individuals in the “New American Gulag,” he has now targeted domestic violence victims in the United States for abusive retaliation.

Behind the fake “law and order” facade, Sessions continues to be one of the greatest enablers, encouragers, and abettors of serious criminal conduct in modern American history! We can only hope that someday he will be held accountable for his actions.

PWS

07-26-18

SESSIONS & TRUMP: MS-13’S BEST FRIENDS! – Tal Kopan @ CNN Confirms What I Have Been Saying All Along! – Administration’s “Gonzo” Immigration Enforcement Strengthens, Empowers, Emboldens Gangs While Harming Victims!

Trump admin was warned a policy change could strengthen MS-13. They did it anyway.

By Tal Kopan, CNN

The Trump administration was warned that ending US protections for more than 300,000 Central Americans would strengthen and grow MS-13 and gangs that President Donald Trump has called “animals,” according to an internal report obtained by CNN.

But the administration went on to end the protections for citizens of El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua regardless.

The warnings came from experts at the State Department in October 2017, and were attached to a letter from then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke.

The State Department also warned that ending the “temporary protected status” program could also hurt US national security and economic interests, including by driving up illegal immigration.

The program covers migrants in the US of countries that have been hit by dire conditions, such as an epidemics, civil war or natural disasters. Previous administrations spanning party had all opted to extend the protections for Central America every roughly two years.

“Many of the deportees would be accompanied by their US-born children, many of whom would be vulnerable to recruitment by gangs,” warned the section on Honduras.

“The lack of legitimate employment opportunities is likely to push some repatriated TPS holders, or their children, into the gangs or other illicit employment,” warned the section on El Salvador.

“With no employment and few ties, options for those returning to El Salvador and those overwhelmed by the additional competition will likely drive increased illegal migration to the United States and the growth of MS-13 and similar gangs,” the report added.

Trump has called MS-13 “animals.” “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in. … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals,” he said in May, later explaining he was speaking about the vicious gang.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/07/25/politics/trump-gangs-temporary-protected-status/index.html

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

Once again, ignorant and biased Administration political officials ignore the advice of the Government’s own experts!

This article doesn’t even focus on another major way in which Trump & Sessions empower MS-13. By unnecessarily sowing terror in ethnic communities in the U.S., they are precluding cooperation with local police against gangs, making young people in the community “easy marks” for gangs, and by dehumanizing all migrants they are sending a strong message that a young person can only be empowered and respected by joining a gang. Not only that, but the perception of “Old Anglo White Guys” like Trump & Sessions in charge of the Administration’s anti-gang initiatives makes them totally ineffective.

Combatting gangs in a difficult problem that requires well-considered, nuanced solutions involving local police, educators, social workers, positive role models, and local communities, including both documented and undocumented community members.

We’ve proven over and over again that “deportation only” approaches not only don’t solve gang problems, but make them much worse. When policies are driven by racism, bias, and White Nationalism, the result is almost certain to be stupidity and futility.

PWS

07-25-18

WASHPOST: THE LATEST VULNERABLE GROUP TARGETED BY THE TRUMP/SESSIONS DEATH SQUADS: LGBTQ REFUGEES!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-sending-lgbtq-migrants-back-to-hell/2018/07/24/eb305d72-8ec3-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html?utm_term=.c1e37f62bd81

From the Washington Post Editorial Board:

Trump is sending LGBTQ migrants ‘back to hell’

by Editorial BoardJuly 24 at 7:45 PM

IN THE 1990s, the United States was among the first countries to start granting sanctuary to LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution stemming from their sexual orientation or gender identity in their home countries. Now the Trump administration, intent on turning back the clock on almost every major facet of immigration policy, is increasingly complicit in their mistreatment.

As administration officials have intensified their efforts to hollow out the asylum system — narrowing eligibility criteria, creating bottlenecks for would-be asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and tearing apart families as a means of deterring future applicants — LGBTQ individuals have suffered inordinately. That is particularly true in the case of those from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Central America where sexual and gender-based violence is pervasive.

There are no statistics to indicate that LGBTQ asylum seekers are refused admittance to the United States more (or less) frequently than other applicants, though the rate at which migrants of all sorts are granted asylum seems to be plummeting because of the administration’s policies. However, sending LGBTQ migrants back across the southwestern border to Mexico subjects them to heightened risks: According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, two-thirds of such individuals reported that they had suffered sexual or gender-based violence in Mexico after entering that country.

In the case of those deported to their countries of origin in the Northern Triangle, their fates are often even worse. A report last year from the rights group Amnesty International said LGBTQ deportees were effectively “sent back to hell,” based on the horrific conditions from which they fled in the first place. The UNHCR reported that 88 percent of LGBTQ asylum seekers had been victims of sexual and gender-based violence in their countries of origin.

Police and other law enforcement authorities in Central America and Mexico are often indifferent, and frequently overtly hostile, to the fate of LGBTQ individuals. A 34-year-old transgender woman interviewed by Amnesty International said she had fled El Salvador after receiving threats from a police officer who lived near her; when she tried to report him, she said, “the response was that they were going to lock me and my partner up.” She finally fled to Mexico, where she was harassed and abused by officials before finally being granted refugee status.

Another Salvadoran transgender woman interviewed by Amnesty International said that after reaching the United States, she was detained for more than three months in a cell with men — “they never took account of my sexuality or that I was trans.” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement sometimes, but not always, detains transgender women in a dedicated facility whose capacity is 60 beds.)

To qualify for asylum in the United States, migrants must prove they are subject to persecution in their home countries based on specific criteria, including identification with a particular social group, and that the government is either complicit in their mistreatment or powerless to stop it. By any reasonable assessment, many or most LGBTQ asylum seekers meet those criteria.

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

The qualification of LGBTQ individuals for asylum was established more than two decades ago by the BIA’s decision in Matter of Tobaso-Alfonso, 20 I&N Dec. 819 (BIA 1990, 1994).

Since then, scores of well-documented LGBTQ asylum cases have been granted by the USCIS Asylum Office and in Immigration Court. Indeed, in the Arlington Immigration Court the cases were so well-documented by the counsel for the respondents that most could be “pre-tried” between the Assistant Chief Counsel and respondent’s counsel and placed on the Immigration Court’s “short docket” for brief hearings and granting of asylum.

Like refugees fleeing domestic violence, I found these cases to involve some of the most badly abused, most deserving, most grateful, and potentially most productive refugees that I dealt with over my many decades of involvement in t he U.S. refugee and asylum systems.

Once again, the biased, racist, White Nationalism of Trump, Sessions and their cronies have taken a well-working part of the asylum system and made it problematic.

We need regime change!

PWS

07-25-18

HON. NANCY GERTNER: CAN THE LOWER ARTICLE III COURTS SAVE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY FROM TRUMP, SESSIONS, AND THE SPINELESS SUPREMES’ MAJORITY? — “Then there is the even more absurd claim that family separation deters asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S. Asylum-seekers will not be deterred by Trump’s cruelty; they have already decided to risk a dangerous trek from Central America to the U.S. because they believe their families will be killed if they stay.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-gertner-judiciary-trump_us_5b50d5a0e4b0b15aba8cc82b

Retired U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner writes in HuffPost:

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s final writing as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, his concurrence in the travel ban case, was a cri de coeur. It simply, even pathetically, lamented the court’s limited role in controlling a lawless executive.

Throwing up his hands, he wrote that the acts of government officials often are not subject to judicial scrutiny, while adding that this “does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it protects. The oath is not restricted to the actions that the Judiciary can correct.”

Wrong message, Mr. Justice.

Even though the travel ban the court upheld is not related to the asylum crisis — the travel prohibition is about immigrants coming here for all sorts of reasons, not asylum seekers fleeing violence in their country — to President Donald Trump, it does not matter. The high court’s decision is perceived as a vindication of all of his immigration policies, no matter how lawless, cruel and dysfunctional. And with Kennedy’s concurrence, it risks signaling that the judiciary will abdicate its own obligations to uphold our country’s laws and ideals.

Take “zero tolerance.” When asylum-seekers so much as step across the border, they are violating the law, according to this administration, even if they immediately present claims to an immigration official. The rule of law, the president insists, requires the prosecution of all crimes, no matter how trivial. This from the same man who pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio after he was found guilty of flouting a court order to stop racial profiling.

Then there is the even more absurd claim that family separation deters asylum-seekers from coming to the U.S. Asylum-seekers will not be deterred by Trump’s cruelty; they have already decided to risk a dangerous trek from Central America to the U.S. because they believe their families will be killed if they stay. In fact, the number of asylum requests has increased notwithstanding Trump’s policies; its driving force is violence in asylum-seekers’ home countries, not U.S. immigration policy.

Nor are these asylum-seekers miscreants intent on defrauding the U.S. or committing crimes. This year, fewer than 1 percent of those apprehended have presented claims found to be false. Studies show that in general, undocumented immigrants — of whom asylum-seekers are a part — commit fewer crimes than those born in this country.

Worse, Trump now wants to deport asylum-seekers without any review. We don’t need more judges, he says, just more border cops. Where is the rule of law here?

HANDOUT . / REUTERS

A view of inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in Rio Grande City, Texas, last month.

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The Constitution’s due process requirement applies to anyone physically in the U.S., whether they have arrived legally or not. Likewise, international law requires us to review whether asylum-seekers’ claims of violence are credible, and if they qualify, let them in. And obviously, this government should not threaten to take children from their parents unless the families agree to voluntary deportation. That’s not just the absence of due process; it’s the presence of extortion.

If Kennedy signaled his belief that the court has very limited power to control an errant president, his putative replacement, federal Circuit Coury Judge Brett Kavanaugh, may well be worse. He does not just lament court’s limited power to control a president, he embraces it.

Kavanaugh has a particularly robust view of presidential power in certain areas — significantly, national security or immigration. In Klayman v. Obama, the D.C. Circuit ruled against a challenge to the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program on technical grounds, in a per curiam decision ― meaning an opinion of the entire court and not any individual judge. Kavanaugh, however, felt the need to file a concurring opinion.

Rather than simply signing on the decision, he went out of his way to make the breadth of the president’s national security power clear: Even if the collection program were the functional equivalent of a search, the government did not need to seek a warrant from a judge because the president said the program was necessary to combat terrorism and that need outweighed any impact on privacy.

Echoing Kennedy’s lament in the travel ban case, Kavanaugh added that while the chief executive and Congress may want to limit the program, until they do the judiciary was literally without the power to control it. Not only was the door to a constitutional challenge was firmly shut; he wanted to make certain that everyone knew it.

But there are judges who are not simply wringing their hands about the limits of judicial review over immigration issues, like Kennedy did, or who are bent on deferring to the president whenever he intones a national security rationale, as Kavanaugh might well do. They are working each day to prevent this president from running roughshod over the Constitution ― not just in the executive orders that he promulgates but in the way his orders and policies are implemented on the ground, in the day-to-day encounters on our borders.

A federal judge in California, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a nationwide injunction temporarily stopping the Trump administration from separating children from their parents at the border. Another in D.C. blocked the systematic detention of migrants who show credible evidence that they were fleeing persecution in their home countries, halting a practice that is an obvious and unlawful attempt to deter them and others from seeking refuge here.

There will surely be others, because these judges ― like the president ― also swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. But for them, unlike the president, it is not an empty promise.

Nancy Gertner served as a Massachusetts United States District Court judge from 1994 to 2011, when she retired to teach at Harvard Law School. Her first memoir, In Defense of Women, was published in 2011, and a judicial memoir, Incomplete Sentences, will be published in 2019.

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

Almost everything that Trump and Sessions have said about asylum seekers and border policy is absurd — clearly refuted by the facts and by past failures.

Lies, racism, xenophobia, absurd positions, claims that are demonstrably false, just plain stupidity, fraud, waste, abuse, it’s all in a day’s work for Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and the other White Nationalists firmly committed to the downfall of American democracy.

And, as Judge Gertner points out, they are aided and abetted by a spineless “go along to get along” Supreme Court majority unwilling to uphold their oaths of office and defend the Constitution and our country against the outrageously unconstitutional, cruel, unjustified, and immoral actions of the Trump Administration.

Can the lower Article IIIs stem the tide long enough for us to get “regime change” at the ballot box and save America? The answer is a resounding “maybe.”

Better get out the vote in November to throw the White Nationalists/Putinists and their fellow travelers out of office. Otherwise, it might be too late for the world’s most successful democracy.

PWS

07-22-18

FINALLY, SOME “PUSHBACK” IN THE ARTICLE III COURTS ON THE TRUMP/SESSIONS POLICY OF CHILD ABUSE AND DENIAL OF DUE PROCESS! – “New Lawsuit Seeks Due Process for Detained Kids”

Go on over to Dan Kowalski’s LexisNexis Immigration Community at this link to see how advocacy groups are striking back in behalf of defenseless children being tormented, tortured, and abused by our Government!

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/immigration-law-blog/archive/2018/07/18/new-lawsuit-seeks-due-process-for-detained-kids.aspx?Redirected=true

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

They come fleeing persecution in the Northern Triangle, only to find persecution and torture of a different type here. And, this is certainly “Government sponsored” persecution, even by “the Jeff Sessions test.”

Is this really how we want to be known to the world and remembered by future generations?

PWS

07-21-18

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