Category: Children

SIJS VICTORY: 4TH CIR. EN BANC MAJORITY GIVES “NO DEFERENCE” TO USCIS’S MISINTERPRETATION OF LAW!  — Perez Perez v. Cooch

http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/181330.P.pdf

Perez Perez v. Cooch, 4th Cir., En Banc, 02-10-20, published

BEFORE:  GREGORY, Chief Judge, and WILKINSON, NIEMEYER, MOTZ, KING, AGEE, KEENAN, WYNN, DIAZ, FLOYD, THACKER, HARRIS, RICHARDSON, QUATTLEBAUM, and RUSHING, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY:  Judge King, joined by Chief Judge Gregory and Judges Motz, Keenan, Wynn, Diaz, Floyd, Thacker, and Harris 

DISSENTING OPINION: Judge Quattlebaum, in which Judges Wilkinson, Niemeyer, Agee, Richardson, and Rushing joined.

KEY QUOTES:

Felipe sought judicial review of the Agency’s rejection of his SIJ application, initiating these proceedings in October 2016 in the Western District of North Carolina against the Director of USCIS.1 In March 2018, the federal district court denied Felipe’s motion to set aside the Agency’s final action and granted the summary judgment motion of USCIS. Felipe then timely noted this appeal from the judgment of the district court. Unlike that court, we conclude that the Agency’s interpretation of the SIJ provision — that clause (i) requires a permanent custody order — is entitled to no deference, defies the plain statutory language, and impermissibly intrudes into issues of state domestic relations law. Consequently, we reverse the judgment and remand with instructions to grant Felipe’s motion to set aside the Agency’s final action denying him SIJ status.

. . . .

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the dissent is that it accuses us of “plac[ing] this Court’s stamp of approval on a brazen scheme to game our federal immigration system.” See post 32. That is, despite the lack of any determination from the North

Carolina district court or even from USCIS that Felipe has acted dishonestly or corruptly, 27

the dissent boldly declares that Felipe engaged in an “obvious manipulation of the state juvenile court to circumvent federal immigration laws.” See id. The dissent specifically finds that Felipe “used, at best, dubious claims of an emergency to obtain an ex parte order at a time close enough to his eighteenth birthday that the order would never receive a proper review.” See id. And, as if it demonstrates bad intent, the dissent points to the request in Mateo Perez Perez’s complaint for custody of his brother Felipe “that the North Carolina court make the precise findings that would permit [Felipe] to apply for SIJ status and then apply for a permanent visa to remain in the United States.” See id. at 34 (commenting that the “benefits [of obtaining SIJ status] were far from lost on [Felipe]”).

The dissent’s endeavor to demonize Felipe is wholly inappropriate, unfair, and dispiriting. First of all, the principle “that appellate courts do not make factual findings” is an “axiomatic” one. See Robinson v. Wix Filtration Corp., 599 F.3d 403, 419 (4th Cir. 2010) (citing Columbus-Am. Discovery Grp. v. Atl. Mut. Ins. Co., 56 F.3d 556, 575-76 (4th Cir. 1995) (“It is a basic tenet of our legal system that, although appellate courts often review facts found by a judge or jury . . . , they do not make such findings in the first instance.”)). The dissent’s fact finding is particularly objectionable here because it tramples upon the exclusive authority of the North Carolina district court to adjudicate Felipe’s custody. See Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 570 U.S. 637, 656 (2013) (Thomas, J., concurring) (emphasizing that “domestic relations is an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States” (internal quotation marks omitted)); cf. Ojo v. Lynch, 813 F.3d 533, 539 (4th Cir. 2016) (explaining that “it is well understood that, in

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the United States, our various state courts exercise full authority over the judicial act of adoption”).

Furthermore, the dissent’s theory that Felipe acted dishonestly and corruptly is in no way compelled by the record. Indeed, many of the adverse inferences that the dissent draws against Felipe are patently unreasonable. For example, without acknowledging that Mateo filed his complaint for custody of Felipe nearly six months before Felipe turned eighteen, the dissent finds that Felipe plotted to obtain an unreviewable emergency custody order from the North Carolina district court within days of his eighteenth birthday. And although Felipe was required by federal regulation to submit to USCIS a state juvenile court order containing findings necessary to his SIJ application, see 8 C.F.R. § 204.11(d)(2), the dissent negatively cites the request for those findings made in Mateo’s complaint for custody of Felipe. The dissent even maligns Felipe for appreciating the benefits of SIJ status, as if a mere desire to live in the United States is evidence of immigration fraud.

There is no justification for the dissent’s dismal portrait of Felipe. The North Carolina district court certainly did not indicate that it thought itself manipulated in the custody proceedings, and USCIS did not attribute its rejection of Felipe’s SIJ application to any chicanery. Rather, the state court gave every indication it believed that Felipe was the victim of abuse, neglect, and abandonment by his biological parents in Guatemala and that placing him in the custody of Mateo was in Felipe’s best interests. Thereafter, USCIS denied Felipe SIJ status solely because he lacked the type of custody order — a permanent one — that the Agency has interpreted clause (i) of the SIJ provision to require. All we 29 say today is that, because USCIS’s clause (i) interpretation is not in accordance with law, the Agency must take another look at Felipe’s SIJ application.8

KEY QUOTE FROM THE DISSENT:

Finally, in addition to suffering from the legal deficiencies described above, I fear

our decision will have serious and far reaching ramifications. First, in adopting Perez’s arguments, we sanction a scheme to game United States immigration laws. As noted above, Perez’s brother alleged to a court of law and either Perez or his brother swore in an affidavit that temporary emergency custody of Perez was needed to protect Perez from imminent, serious physical harm from Perez’s parents. But at the time the motion containing this allegation and the supporting affidavit were filed, his parents were still in Guatemala. In

other words, Perez had been in the United States, over 2,700 miles from his parents, for 47

over a year. When asked by the panel at oral argument the basis of the purported emergency, counsel for Perez was unable to provide any explanation. He likewise provided none before the entire court sitting en banc. No one, at any time, has articulated any sort of emergency.3

If there was an actual emergency, one would expect Perez’s brother to have filed the motion for an emergency order at the time the complaint was filed, or even sooner. But he did not do so. Instead, he waited until June 2015, just weeks before Perez turned eighteen, to file the motion.4 By doing so, Perez was able to obtain the ex parte, emergency order without any meaningful examination of the allegations since the parents had no way to know the motion was even filed. And since Perez was about to turn eighteen on July 6, Perez and his brother knew the July 22, 2015 hearing the state court ordered would never happen. Perez’s scheme makes a mockery of the immigration laws passed by Congress. What’s more, by sanctioning this scheme, we are sending the clear message: Gaming the federal laws is fine with us. Keep doing it.

In insisting the record does not support my characterization of Perez’s conduct, the majority invokes John Adams’ famous reminder that “facts are stubborn things.” Indeed

3 The language cited by the majority at pages 6-7 of its opinion refer to circumstances that allegedly existed when Perez lived in Guatemala. Even if true, they offer no basis for an emergency, ex parte order hearing a year and a half after Perez left Guatemala and came to the United States.

4 Perez flip-flopped on this issue at the en banc oral argument. He first suggested that he promptly filed the motion and the delay was due to the slow pace of the North Carolina court. When pressed, however, he conceded that he had not filed the motion until six months later, in June.

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they are. The fact here is that the purported emergency on which Perez’s motion was based involves events that occurred years ago and thousands of miles away. J.A. 116-117. The fact here is that Perez’s brother waited until just before Perez turned eighteen to seek emergency relief. J.A. 88, 127. The fact here is that Perez’s brother sought emergency custody of Perez without providing any notice to their parents in Guatemala. J.A. 88-89, 129-130. The fact here is that the order on which Perez’s SIJ petition was based only preserved the status quo until a hearing with due process rights could be held. J.A. 130. All these facts are plainly in the record, and my good colleagues in the majority do not suggest otherwise. They simply come to a different, and in my view implausible, conclusion about them.5

5 In considering whether Perez’s conduct is part of a scheme to game our immigration laws, I note the remarkable similarities between the facts here and those of Reyes v. Cissna, 737 F. App’x 140 (4th Cir. 2018). There, Reyes lived with her grandparents from the time she was eleven until she was sixteen. Id. at 142. At age sixteen, she entered the United States unlawfully, was apprehended and, pending a removal hearing, was moved to North Carolina where her father lived. Id. Almost two years later, and four days before Reyes’ eighteenth birthday, Reyes’ father, represented by the same lawyers as Perez, filed an action in North Carolina state court to terminate the parental rights of Reyes’ mother. Id. Reyes’ father also filed a motion seeking emergency custody of Reyes because Reyes had been abandoned by her mother. Reyes’ father claimed he should be awarded custody of Reyes on an emergency basis even though the alleged abandonment took place seven years earlier when Reyes was eleven and even though Reyes lived with her grandparents from that time until she came to the United States illegally. The North Carolina state court granted the emergency relief and set a hearing just five days later to determine custody. Id. at 143. Like our case, however, Reyes turned eighteen just before the hearing, depriving the North Carolina state court of jurisdiction to make a custody determination. Despite that, Reyes used the emergency order, obtained without any due process provided to her mother, to petition for federal SIJ benefits. Id. at 143. Sound familiar?

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Second, our decision effectively transfers much of the responsibility of determining eligibility for SIJ benefits from the Agency—which is where Congress placed it—to state juvenile courts. In doing this, we pave the way for immigrants to seek orders from state juvenile courts in order to gain an immigration advantage. I agree that, as a general rule, neither federal agencies nor federal courts should wade into the waters of state domestic relations law. But the Agency did not make any state domestic relations law determinations. And giving appropriate respect to state courts in the area of domestic relations does not mean that the Agency must abdicate its role, rubber stamp a barebones set of “findings” or ignore the circumstances of an SIJ submission. Certainly nothing in the INA suggests that result.

Third, beyond the damage to our immigration laws, this scheme and our approval of it marginalizes the importance of parents having custody over their children. Our decision approves a scheme that terminated the custodial rights of Perez’s parents without a scintilla of due process. Here, although North Carolina law requires notice and a hearing for a custody determination, Perez made an end run around that requirement with his dubious claim of emergency. And although an emergency order normally only holds the status quo in place until a hearing of which all parties receive notice and are given an opportunity to be heard, Perez’s strategic timing of the emergency motion in relation to his eighteenth birthday assured that hearing would not take place. Then, the INA and its accompanying regulations, which assume that the state court order would have been carried out with due process protections, do not require the parents to be notified of the SIJ petition.

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Perez’s scheme, like a thief in the night, terminates his parents’ custodial rights without the parents even knowing.

Last, these results would be bad enough if they affected American citizens. But here, courts in the United States are being used to eviscerate the rights of citizens of Guatemala whose parental rights should be governed by the laws of that country. Imagine the outrage we would rightly feel if another country’s courts terminated the custodial rights of American citizen parents over an American child. International comity means nothing if these schemes are endorsed.

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

I had significant experience with SIJS during my 13 years on the bench in Arlington. I also worked some on enactment of the original SIJS law that was part of IMMACT 90 during my days in private practice.

Leaving aside the facts of this particular case, whatever they might be, I found SIJS to be a “life saver” for many deserving young people who might well have been severely harmed or abused, perhaps killed or forced to “join gangs or die,” if returned to their home countries. 

Some of them were individuals who should have been granted asylum, but were improperly excluded from that relief by intentional misinterpretations of asylum law directed against refugees from Central America which predated this Administration; such injustices obviously have been aggravated by the the Trump/Miller shameless White Nationalist agenda now being directed at asylum seekers of color, all too often with the wooden approval of life-tenured appellate judges who should know better.

Human lives are at stake here!  

PWS

02-11-20

Related posts:

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LETTER FROM 21 DEMOCRATIC SENATORS HIGHLIGHTS  FRAUD, “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN TRUMP REGIME’S BOGUS “SAFE THIRD COUNTRY AGREEMENTS” WITH SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS AND INHOSPTABLE COUNTRIES FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS!

Trump Refugee Policy
Trump Refugee Policy

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.02.05%20Letter%20to%20State,%20DOJ,%20DHS%20about%20Northern%20Triangle%20Asylum%20Cooperative%20Agreements.pdf

 

The Honorable Michael R. Pompeo Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20037

The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001

The Honorable Chad F. Wolf
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security U.S. Department of Homeland Security 3801 Nebraska Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20528

tinitrd ~tatrs ~rnatr WASHINGTON. DC 20510

February 5, 2020

Dear Secretary Pompeo, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Secretary Wolf:

We write regarding the “asylum cooperative agreements”1 (ACAs) that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has signed in recent months with Guatemala? El Salvador,3 and Honduras,4 countries collectively referred to as the “Northern Triangle.” These agreements outline a framework that could enable the United States to expel asylum seekers to each ofthese countries, regardless of where the migrants are from or which countries they have transited en

1 Sometimes referred to as “safe third country agreements.” U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-20 19-11-19/pdf/20 19-25137.pdf.

2 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Republic of Guatemala on Cooperation Regarding the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed July 26,2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6232982-Signed-Agreement- English.html#document/p 1.

3 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative- Agreement.html.

4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic of Honduras for Cooperation in the Examination of Protection Claims,” signed September 25, 2019, https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/47/a5/85ea59444cb89bb2f3eca15880f3/us-honduras- asylum-cooperative-agreement.pdf.

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route to the United States.5 The Trump Administration’s approach to asylum seekers is not only inhumane and potentially illegal; it could also overwhelm the asylum systems ofGuatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and further destabilize those countries. As such, these agreements could have serious and detrimental implications for U.S. national security.

There is significant evidence that the Northern Triangle countries are unlikely to provide safety or adequate protection for asylum seekers, both because ofthe pervasive violent crime and targeted persecution there as well as their governments’ weak or practically non-existent asylum capacities. We are also concerned that expelling asylum seekers under this framework raises serious legal and procedural questions, including the degree to which the Administration complied with relevant law in producing and signing these agreements.

As you know, the Northern Triangle countries have some ofthe highest homicide rates in the world and are experiencing massive forced displacement both internally and across borders.6•7•8 The Department of State’s own human rights reports for these countries describe the dangers of rape, femicide, forced child labor, and threats against the LGBTQ community.9 Gang violence is pervasive and often transcends borders; some ofthese criminal organizations are so dangerous that even some police forces trained to combat gang violence are themselves fleeing to the United States.10 Despite these troubling facts, on November 21,2019, the Administration expelled a Honduran man to Guatemala in the first transfer under these agreements.11 ·

The Administration has since expelled more than 250 migrants from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala.12 At first, the Administration said it would transfer only single adults.13 However,

5 The agreements do not allow for returning an asylum seeker to the country oftheir own nationality. But they allow, for example, for a Honduran or a Cameroonian asylum seeker to be deported to Guatemala. U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19,2019, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019-25137.pdf.

6 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide 2019,” July 2019, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html.
7 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018,” June 20, 2019, p. 48, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/5d08d7ee7/unhcr-global-trends-2018.html. (In 2018, over 282,000 people from the Northern Triangle countries had asylum applications pending adjudication worldwide)
8 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Painting the Full Picture: Persistent data gaps on internal displacement associated with violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” November 2019, pp. 10-15, http://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/painting-the-full-picture-displacement-data-gaps-in-the-ntca.
9 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustoin/420abb692c/.
10 Washington Post, “It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country,” Kevin Sieff, March 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the americas/its-so-dangerous-to-police-ms-13-in-el- salvador-that-officers-are-fleeing-the-countrv/2019/03/03/e897dbaa-2287-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084 stmy.html

11 Reuters, “Shifting asylum ‘burden’: U.S. sends Guatemala first Honduran migrant,” Sofia Menchu, November 21, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-guatemala/shifting-asylum-burden-us-sends-guatemala- frrst-honduran-migrant-idUSKBN1XV1 WM.
12 The Intercept, “One year into ‘Remain in Mexico,’ the U.S. is enlisting Central America in its crackdown on asylum,” Sandra Cuffe, January 29, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/remain-in-mexico-year-anniversary- central-america/.

13 LA Times, “In a first, U.S. starts pushing Central American families seeking asylum to Guatemala,” Molly O’Toole, December 10, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-10/u-s-starts-pushing-asylum- seeking-families-back-to-guatemala-for-first-time.

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the Administration has begun to transfer children and families, including a Honduran mother with two children who had been hospitalized.14 Reportedly, many ofthese migrants are not even aware in advance ofthe country to which they are being transferred. Upon arrival, they are told that they have 72 hours to either apply for asylum or leave, but are reportedly given practically no information about the process.15

Because ofthe lack ofprotection offered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, these agreements raise serious legal questions. On November 18,2019, the Department ofJustice and DHS released an interim fmal rule (“Rule”) amending departmental regulations in order to implement the ACAs.16 The Rule, effective November 19, 2019, characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides that asylum seekers may be removed under the following conditiop.s:

“[I]fthe Attorney General determines that the alien may be removed, pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement, to a country (other than the country ofthe alien’s nationality or, in the case ofan alien having no nationality, the country of the alien’s last habitual residence) in which the alien’s life or freedom would not be threatened on account ofrace, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and where the alien would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection, uilless the Attorney General fmds that it is in the public interest for the alien to receive asylum in the United States.”17

The Rule provides that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security will make “categorical” determinations as to whether the Northern Triangle countries offer access to a “full and fair procedure” for determining asylum claims. Written information provided to our offices by the Administration indicates that “[t]he Attorney General and Secretary ofHomeland Security determined that Guatemala’s asylum system provides full and fair access to individuals seeking protection, as required by U.S. law, prior to the ACA entering into force on November 15.”18

The notion that Guatemala or the other two Northern Triangle countries offers such a procedure strains credulity-their systems for determining asylum claims are, at best, deeply flawed and under-resourced, and at worst, practically non-existent. According to the State Department’s human rights reports, in Guatemala, “identification and referral mechanisms for potential asylum seekers were inadequate… [and] migration and police authorities lacked adequate training

14 Associated Press, “Advocates: Honduran mother, children deported to Guatemala,” Nomaan Merchant, January 21, 2020, https://apnews.com/583a7dl0644f407e8035e5b6eddlc8f7.
15 Washington Post, “The U.S. is putting asylum seekers on planes to Guatemala- often without telling them where they’re going,” Kevin Sieff, January 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/worldlthe americas/the-us- is-putting-asylum-seekers-on-planes-to-guatemala–often-without-telling-them-where-theyre- going/2020/01/13/0f89a93a-3576-llea-alff-c48cld59a4a1 story.html.

16 U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Register Notice, “Implementing Bilateral and Multilateral Asylum Cooperative Agreements Under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” effective November 19, 2019. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-11-19/pdf/2019- 25137.pdf.

17 8 USC§ 1158(a)(2)(A). Emphasis added.
18 U.S. Department of State, Answer to Question for the Record to Deputy Secretary of State Nominee Stephen Biegun by Senator Bob Menendez (#235), Submitted November 20, 2019.

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concerning the rules for establishing refu,gee status.”19 Guatemala does not have a dedicated office for resolving asylum cases; instead, a commission offour officials from several ministries and the immigration department.meet a few times a year to decide cases.20 Reportedly, these officials did not resolve a single case in the first seven months of2019.21 Honduras and El Salvador do not have a single full-time asylum officer. By contrast, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has about 500 asylum officers who are currently tasked with adjudicating over 300,000 pending asylum cases.22 Thus, the Northern Triangle countries are not remotely equipped to fully and fairly handle even a small fraction ofthese cases.

The lack of asylum capacity poses a grave risk that these Northern Triangle governments w ill- whether inadvertently or willfully-return asylum seekers to their country ofpersecution, constituting the serious human rights violation of refoulement that is prohibited under Section 208(a)(2)(A) ofthe U.S Immigration and Nationality Act.

This provision ofU.S.law codifies U.S. obligations prohibiting the return ofrefugees to a territory where his or her life or freedom would be threatened as a state party to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The ACAs may also violate U.S. obligations as a party to the 1984 Convention against Torture.23 Indeed, in response to the publication ofthe Rule, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released a statement, saying it “has serious concerns about the new U.S. policy on asylum,” calling it “an approach at variance with international law that could result in the transfer ofhighly vulnerable individuals to countries where they may face life-threatening dangers.”24 A recently filed lawsuit details additional legal violations posed by the implementation ofthe ACAs.25

The ACAs recently signed by DHS appear to have been drafted in haste, with multiple typographical errors introduced into the agreements.26 There is little sign that they were

19 U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,” 2018, https://www.state.gov/reportlcustom/420abb692c/.
20 Wall Street Journal, “Asylum Seekers at U.S. Southern Border Can Now Be Sent to Guatemala Instead,” Michelle Hackman and Juan Montes, November 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/asy1um-seekers-at-u-s-southern- border-can-now-be-sent-to-guatemala-instead-11574187109.
21 Univision News, “Guatemala’s ’embryonic’ asylum system lacks capacity to serve as safe U.S. partner, experts say,” David C. Adams, August 2, 2019, https://www.univision.com/univision-news/immigration/guatemalas- embcyonic-asylum-system-lacks-capacity-to-serve-as-safe-u-s-partner-experts-say.
22 Government Executive, “Homeland Security Says It Will Dramatically Increase Asylum Workforce by Year’s End,” Eric Katz, October 23, 2019, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2019/10/homeland-security-says-it-will- dramatically-increase-asylum-workforce-years-end/160828/.
23 Protocol Relating to the Status ofRefugees, January 31, 1967; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 12, 1984; “Benchbook on International Law,” Diane Marie Amann (ed.), pp. ill.E-51, 2014, https://www.asil.org/sites/defau1t/files/benchbook/humanrights4.pdf.
24 UNHCR, “Statement on new U.S. asylum policy,” press release, November 19, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en- us/news/press/2019/11/5dd426824/statement-on-new-us-asylum-policy.html.
25 U.T. v. Barr, “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” United States District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.ac1u.org/sites/default/files/field document/complaint – u.t. v. barr 1 15 2020.pdf.
26 For example, the agreement with El Salvador refers to “El Salvadornian [sic] migration law, although this language is incorrect. A Google search for “El Salvadornian” produces zero results.:_the most common English- language demonym is “Salvadoran,” though “Salvadorian” and “Salvadorean” are also used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadorans. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Agreement between the Government ofthe United States and the Government ofthe Republic ofEl Salvador for Cooperation in the

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negotiated in a meaningful way individually with each country. Furthermore, the President’s actions leading up to the agreements’ signing-including social media statements threatening to withhold, and subsequent withholding of, Congressionally-appropriated aid to the region- indicate that Central American officials may have accepted the terms under duress.27

~ Additionally, one news report indicated that, in a private meeting with President Trump, Secretary Pompeo criticized the agreement with Guatemala, “ca:lled the agreement flawed and a mistake,” and told the President that ”the Guatemalan government did not have the ability to carry out its terms.”28 This raises questions about the degree to which the State Department was involved in policy deliberations and decisions underlying these agreements.

Accordingly, please provide answers to the following questions by February 18, 2020:

  1. Did any officials within the State Department raise concerns abol)t the feasibility of implementing these ACAs due to the lack of capacity of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum systems, or for any other reason? Please provide any such memoranda or communications in which any such concerns were articulated.
  2. What specific concerns about the agreement with Guatemala were raised by Secretary Pompeo in the reported Oval Office meeting with the President? Have these concerns been addressed?
  1. Were any assessments of the Northern Triangle countries’ asylum adjudication procedures made prior to the negotiation or conclusion ofthe ACAs? Please provide any documents related to any such assessments.
  2. The ACAs indicate that the parties shall develop standard operating procedures and plans regarding the implementation ofthese agreements. What is the status ofthese plans in each Northern Triangle coll.ntry?

4.. The ACAs indicate that they shall enter into force upon “exchange ofnotes” indicating that both countries have compl~ted the n~cessary domestic legal procedures for bringing the agreement into force. Which ofthe ACAs are in force? Please include copies ofany and all records related to this required exchange of notes.

  1. Reportedly, Honduran officials wanted to delay transfers until both countries “provided notification that they have complied with the legal and institutional conditions necessary for proper implementation of this agreement” but DHS officials wrote that this request read to them as an “escape-hatch not to implement the ACA.”29 Should this be taken as an indication that DHS considers the ACAs to be in force even in the absence of such “notification” by both countries?

Examination ofProtection Claims,” signed September 20, 2019, p. 2, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6427712-US-El-Salvador-Cooperative-Agreement.html.
27 Politico, “Trump warns ofretaliation against Guatemala after immigration deal falls through,” Rishika Dugyala and Sabrina Rodrigues, July 23, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/23/trump-guatemala-retaliation- immigration-deal-1426722; NPR, “Trump Froze Aid To Guatemala. Now Programs Are Shutting Down,” Tim McDonnell, September 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/17/761266169/trump-froze- aid-to-guatemala-now-programs-are-shutting-down.
28 New York Times, “Trump Officials Argued Over Asylum Deal With Guatemala. Now Both Countries Must Make It Work,” Michael D. Shear and.Zolan Kanno-Youngs, August 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/safe-third-guatemala.html.
29 BuzzFeed News, “Trump Wants To Start Deporting Asylum-Seekers To Honduras By January,” Hamed Aleaziz, November 25, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/asylum-seekers-deportation-honduras- trump.

5

  1. The Rule indicates that the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security will make a categorical determination that each ofthe Northern Triangle countries offers a “full and fair procedure” for adjudicating asylum claims.
    1. Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland

Security determined do have a “full and fair procedure”? Which, if any countries have the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security determined do not have a “full and fair procedure”? For each country, when were any such determinations reached?

    1. How are the Attorney General and the Secretary ofHomeland Security reaching these determinations? Please provide copies of any determinations made by DOJ and DHS and any related documentation ofdiscussions ofthis issue.
  2. The Rule characterizes the ACAs as “safe third country” agreements as described in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Besides the ACAs, the only “safe third country” agreements signed in the 50 years since the enactment ofthe Immigration and Nationality Act was the agreement with Canada. Over two years elapsed between December 5, 2002, when that agreement was signed, and December 29, 2004, when it came into force.30 In contrast, less than four months elapsed between July 26, 2019, when the ACA with Guatemala was signed, and November 15,2019, when it came into force.
  1. In the ACA signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Guatemala’s Minister of Interior and Home Affairs said that “Guatemala is definitely clear on the responsibility that it has. We are clear that we have to make changes.”31 What changes, if any, did Guatemala make to strengthen their asylum procedures in these four months? Please provide any communications between the government of Guatemala.and the Administration related to improvements made to Guatemala’s asylum system since the agreement was signed in July.
  1. In order to ensure that the United States fulfills its obligations to refrain from sending a person to a place where such person will face harm, what procedures will the Administration follow if asylum seekers face torture, ill treatment, or persecution after being transferred to the Northern Triangle? ·
  2. Is DHS transferring asylum seekers under the ACAs to Northern Triangle countries on the same flights as deportees? How is DHS ensuring that asylum seekers are not transferred in the company of individuals who may threaten their life or freedom after their arrival in country?
  3. What, ifanything, was promised or offered by U.S. officials to the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras in exchange for their signing onto these agreements?

30 “AgreementbetweentheGovernmentofCanadaandtheGovernmentoftheUnitedStatesofAmericaFor cooperation in the examination ofrefugee status claims from nationals ofthird countries,” signed December 5, 2002, https://www.canada.ca/enlimmigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions- agreements/agreements/safe-third-country-agreementlfmal-text.html.
31 White House, “Remarks by President Trump at Signing ofSafe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala,” July 26, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-signing-safe-third-country- agreement-guatemala/.

6

Sincerely,

un· ed States Senator

k4-/a…~ Richard Blumenthal
United States Senator

~~~~

Kirsten E. Gillibrand Benjamin L. Cardin

United States Senator

United States Senator

‘0…=.>–·-topher S. Murphy United States Senator

United States Senator

~%Markey ·~ United States Senator

Edward J.

Bernard Sanders United States Senator

Thomas R. Carper United States Senator

~~

United States Senator

—

7

Tim Kaine
United States Senator

Christopher A. Coons United States Senator

8

Cory A. Booker United States Senator

 

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

All good points. But, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a reply from the regime.

Obviously, in the process of selling out America, the GOP just authorized the regime to “give a big middle finger” to any type of Congressional oversight.

Once you get beyond the fraud, lawlessness, and intentional cruelty of the regime’s agreements, here’s the reality of what’s awaits those illegally “orbited” to dangerous failed states in the Northern triangle: death, torture, rape, extortion, etc.:

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

This isn’t “normal.” It’s politically and judicially enabled neo-fascism unfolding right in front of us.

PWS

02-10-20

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

Fernanda Echavarri
Fernanda Echavarri
Reporter
Mother Jones

https://apple.news/AyKjNs5gOQJqIJ2_IeeQvcg

Fernanda Echavarri reports for Mother Jones:

“A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2;
PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face.

Eleven children and six adults—all of them from Central America, all of them in court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board government buses headed to immigration court in downtown San Diego, Kevlar-vested federal agents in tow. Like the dozens of families jam-packed into the lobby and the six other courtrooms, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, often for months, as part of the Trump administration’s controversial border policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols.

O’Connor has a docket full of MPP cases today, like every day. Before he gets to them, though, he quickly postpones a non-MPP case to January 2021, explaining to a man and his attorney that he simply doesn’t have time for them today, motioning to the families in the gallery. While he’s doing this, the little girl in front of me keeps asking her mom if she can put on the headphones that play a Spanish translation of the proceedings. A guard motions the little girl to be quiet. 

For months, immigration attorneys and judges have been complaining that there’s no fair way to hear the cases of the tens of thousands of Central Americans who have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their claims inch through the courts. MPP has further overwhelmed dockets across the country and pushed aside cases that already were up against a crippling backlog that’s a million cases deep, stranding immigration judges in a bureaucratic morass and families with little hope for closure anytime in the near future.

I went last month to San Diego—home to one of the busiest MPP courts, thanks to its proximity to Tijuana and the more than 20,000 asylum seekers who now live in shelters and tent cities there—expecting to see logistical chaos. But I was still surprised at how fed up immigration judges like O’Connor were by the MPP-driven speedup—and by the extent to which their hands were tied to do anything about it.

Once O’Connor is done rescheduling his non-MPP case, he leans forward to adjust his microphone, rubs his forehead, and starts the group removal hearing. The interpreter translates into Spanish, and he asks if the adults understand. “Sí,” they say nervously from the back of the courtroom. O’Connor goes down his list, reading their names aloud with a slight Spaniard accent, asking people to identify themselves when their names are called. He reprimands those who do not speak up loud enough for him to hear.

O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench in 2010, is known for being tough: Between 2014 and 2019, he has denied 96 percent of asylum cases. He explains to the migrants that they have the right to an attorney, although one will not be provided—there are no public defenders in immigration court. O’Connor acknowledges finding legal representation from afar is difficult, but he tells them it’s not impossible. He encourages them to call the five pro bono legal providers listed on a sheet of paper they received that day. The moms sitting in front of me have their eyes locked on the Spanish interpreter, trying to absorb every bit of information. Their kids try their best to sit quietly.

As he thumbs through the case files, O’Connor grows increasingly frustrated: None of them has an address listed. “The government isn’t even bothering to do this,” he grumbles. The documents for MPP cases list people’s addresses as simply “Domicilio Conocido,” which translates to “Known Address.” This happens even when people say they can provide an address to a shelter in Mexico or when they have the address of a relative in the United States who can receive their paperwork. “I’ve seen them do this in 2,000 cases since May,” O’Connor says, and the Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t even bothered to investigate.” He looks up at the DHS attorney with a stern look on his face, but she continues shuffling paperwork around at her desk.

O’Connor picks up a blue form and explains to the group that they have to change their address to a physical location. The form is only in English; many of the adults seem confused and keep flipping over their copies as he tells them how to fill it out. O’Connor tells them they have to file within a week—perhaps better to do it that day, he says—but it’s unclear to me how they could follow his exacting instructions without the help of an attorney. He points out other mistakes in the paperwork filed by DHS and wraps up the hearing after about 45 minutes. The families don’t know that’s typical for a first hearing and seem perplexed when it ends. 

O’Connor schedules the group to come back for their next hearing in five weeks at 8:30 a.m. That will mean showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry at 4:30 a.m.; the alternative, he says, is being barred from entering the United States and seeking forms of relief for 10 years. “Do you understand?” he asks. The group responds with a hesitant “Sí.”

The Trump administration designed MPP to prevent people like them from receiving asylum, and beyond that, from even seeking it in the first place. First implemented in San Diego in late January 2019 to help stem the flow of people showing up at the southern border, the policy has since sent somewhere between 57,000 and 62,000 people to dangerous Mexican cities where migrants have been preyed upon for decades. Their cases have been added to an immigration court that already has a backlog of 1,057,811 cases—up from 600,000 at the time when Obama left office—according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The skyrocketing immigration court backlog

View on the original site.

According to immigration judge Ashley Tabaddor, who spoke to me in her capacity as union president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, MPP has constituted a fundamental change to the way courts are run. DHS, she says, is “creating a situation where they’re physically, logistically, and systematically creating all the obstacles and holding all the cards.” The MPP program has left the court powerless, “speeding up the process of dehumanizing the individuals who are before the court and deterring anyone from the right to seek protection” All this while the Department of Justice is trying to decertify Tabbador’s union—the only protection judges have, and the only avenue for speaking publicly about these issues—by claiming its members are managers and no longer eligible for union membership. Tabaddor says the extreme number of cases combined with the pressure to process them quickly is making it difficult for judges to balance the DOJ’s demands with their oath of office.

Immigration attorneys in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego have told me they are disturbed by the courtroom disarray: the unanswered phones, unopened mail, and unprocessed filings. Some of their clients are showing up at border in the middle of the night only to find that their cases have been rescheduled. That’s not only unfair, one attorney told me, “it’s dangerous.” Central Americans who speak only indigenous languages are asked to navigate court proceedings with Spanish interpreters. One attorney in El Paso had an 800-page filing for an asylum case that she filed with plenty of time for the judge to review, but it didn’t make it to the judge in time. 

As another lawyer put it, “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is designed to fail.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty People line up at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana in May 2019.

COURTROOM #4; PRESIDING: JUDGE PHILIP LAW

Down the hall, a Honduran woman I’ll call Mari stands up next to her attorney and five-year-old son, raises her right hand, and is sworn in. 

Mari’s hearing isn’t much of a hearing at all. Stephanie Blumberg, an attorney with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, who is working the case pro bono, asks for more time because she only recently took the case; Judge Philip Law says he will consolidate the cases of mother and child into one; and he schedules her next hearing for the following week at 7:30 a.m., with a call time of 3:30 a.m. at the border.

Just as it’s about to wrap up, Bloomberg says her client is afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to know what is going to happen with me. I don’t want to go back to Mexico—it’s terrible,” Mari says in Spanish, an interpreter translating for the judge. “I have no jurisdiction over that,” Law says. “That’s between you and the Department of Homeland Security.” Law then turns to the DHS attorney, who says he’ll flag the case and “pass it along.”

While nine families begin their MPP group hearing, Mari tells me back in the waiting room that she and her son crossed the border in Texas and then asked for asylum. They were detained for two days and then transported by plane to San Diego, where she was given a piece of paper with a date and time for court and then released in Tijuana. She didn’t know anyone, barely knew where she was, and, trying to find safety in numbers, stuck with the group released that day. Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.

Mari’s voice gets shaky, and she tries to wipe the tears from her eyes, but even the cotton gloves she’s wearing aren’t enough to keep her face dry. I tell her we can end the conversation and apologize for making her relive those moments. She looks at her son from across the room and says she’d like to continue talking.

“I thought about suicide,” she whispers. “I carried my son and thought about jumping off a bridge.” Instead, she ended up walking for a long time, not knowing what to do or what would happen to them because they didn’t have a safe place to go.

“I haven’t talked to my family back home—it’s so embarrassing because of the dream I had coming here, and now look,” she says. “We’re discriminated against in Mexico; people make fun of us and the way we talk.” Her boy was already shy but has become quieter and more distrusting in recent months.

In the last year, I’ve spoken to dozens of migrants in border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana who share similarly horrific stories. Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 public reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, and murder against asylum seekers sent to Mexico in the last year. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies is challenging MPP on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the “United States’ duty under international human rights law” not to return people to dangerous conditions.

“The system has not been set up to handle this in any way,” says Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of the groups listed on the pro bono sheet Judge O’Connor handed out earlier in the day. They’re the only ones with a WhatsApp number listed, and their phones are constantly ringing because “it’s clear that people don’t know what’s going on or what to expect—and they’re in fear for their lives,” Clark says. Still, her 8-person team working MPP cases can only help a small percentage of the people coming through the courtroom every day.

Later that afternoon, shortly after 5, two large white buses pull up to the court’s loading dock. Guards in green uniforms escort about 60 people out from the loading dock. Moms, dads, and dozens of little kids walk in a straight light to get on a bus. They are driven down to the border and sent back to Tijuana later that night.

A few days later, Mari’s attorney tells me that despite raising a fear of retuning to Mexico in court, US port officials sent Mari back to Tijuana that night.

COURTROOM #2; PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

I find myself back in O’Connor’s courtroom for his afternoon MPP hearings. This time, the only people with legal representation is a Cuban family who crossed in Arizona in July 2019 and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. This is their first time in court, and their attorney calls in from out of state.

Right away, O’Connor wants to address a different kind of clerical error from the one that bothered him earlier in the day—and one that he thinks matters even more. It involves the first document that DHS issues to “removable” immigrants, known as a Notice to Appear (NTA) form. Although the form allows agents to check a box to categorize people based on how they encountered immigration officials, O’Connor points out that in this case it was left blank—and that “this is fairly typical of the overwhelming majority of these cases.”

He isn’t the first or only judge to notice this; I heard others bring up inconsistent and incomplete NTAs. Border officials are supposed to note on the form if the people taken into custody are “arriving aliens,” meaning they presented at the port of entry asking for asylum, or “aliens present in the United States who have not been admitted or paroled,” meaning they first entered illegally in between ports of entry. Thousands of MPP cases have forms without a marked category. As far as O’Connor is concerned, that’s a crucial distinction. He believes that this Trump administration policy shouldn’t apply to people who entered the country without authorization—meaning countless immigrants who applied for MPP should be disqualified from the get-go.

In the case of the Cuban family, like dozens more that day, the DHS attorney filed an amended NTA classifying them as “arriving aliens.” O’Connor points out is not how they entered the United States. The DHS attorney is unphased by the judge’s stern tone and came prepared with piles of new forms for the other cases of incomplete NTAs. The family’s lawyer says maybe the government made a mistake. O’Connor, unsatisfied, interrupts her: “There was no confusion. I’ve seen 2,000 of theseâ¦the government is not bothering to spend the time.” After a lengthy back-and-forth, a testy O’Connor schedules the family to come back in three weeks.

O’Connor’s stance and rulings on this issue have broader implications. He terminated a case in October because a woman had entered the country illegally before turning herself in and wrote in his decision that DHS had “inappropriately subjected respondent to MPP.” He is among the loudest voices on this issue, saying that MPP is legal only when applied to asylum-seekers presenting at legal ports of entry—though it’s unclear to many lawyers what it might mean for their clients to have their cases terminated in this way. Would these asylum seekers end up in immigration detention facilities? Would they be released under supervision in the United States? Would they be deported back to their home countries?

Since MPP cases hit the courts last March, asylum attorneys have been critical of DHS for not answering these questions. I was present for the very first MPP hearing in San Diego and saw how confused and frustrated all sides were that DHS didn’t seem to have a plan for handling these cases. Now, almost a year later, little has changed.

Tabaddor, the union president, tells me that “there are definitely legal issues that the MPP program has presented” and that judges are having to decide whether the documents “are legally sufficient.” “The issue with DHS—frankly, from what I’ve heard—is that it seems like they’re making it up as they go,” she says.

Last week, Tabaddor testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and for the independence of immigration courts from the political pressures of federal law enforcement. There are approximately 400 immigration judges across more than 60 courts nationwide, and almost half of those judges have been appointed during the Trump era. (According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, dozens of judges are quitting or retiring early because their jobs have become “unbearable” under Trump.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, an immigrants’ rights supporter in Congress, argued during the hearing that the immigration courts are in crisis and the issue requires urgent congressional attention. “In order to be fully effective, the immigration court system should function just like any other judicial institution,” she said. “Immigration judges should have the time and resources to conduct full and fair hearings, but for too long, the courts have not functioned as they should—pushing the system to the brink.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty Asylum seekers in Tijuana in October

COURTROOM #1; PRESIDING: JUDGE SCOTT SIMPSON

“I don’t want any more court,” a woman from Guatemala pleads just before lunchtime. “No more hearings, please.”

Unlike many of the people who were there for their first hearing when I observed court in San Diego, this woman has been to court multiple times since mid-2019. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a lawyer, she tells Judge Scott Simpson. She’s had enough.

“We’ve reached a fork on the road, ma’am,” Simpson says in a warm, calm tone. “You either ask for more time for an attorney to help you or you represent yourself.”

“No, it’d be a loss since I don’t know anything about the law,” the woman responds, her voice getting both louder and shakier. Simpson explains to her again the benefits of taking time to find an attorney.

“It’s been almost a year. I don’t want to continue the case. I want to leave it as is,” she tells him. After more explanation from the judge, the woman says she’d like to represent herself today so that decisions can be made. Simpson asks what she would like to do next, and the woman says, “I want you to end it.”

This woman’s pleas are increasingly common. Tabaddor says MPP has taken “an already very challenging situation and [made] it exponentially worse.” The new reality in immigration courts “is logistically and systematically designed to just deter people from seeking or availing themselves of the right to request protection,” Tabaddor says.

After hearing the Guatemalan woman ask for the case to be closed multiple times, Simpson takes a deep breath, claps his hands, and says there are four options: withdrawal, administrative close, dismissal, or termination. He explains each one, and after 10 minutes the woman asks for her case to be administratively closed. The DHS attorney, however, denies that request. Simpson’s hands are tied.

The judge tells the woman that because DHS filed paperwork on her case that day, and because it’s only in English, that he’s going to give her time to review it, because “as the judge I don’t think it would be fair for you to go forward without the opportunity to object to that.” He schedules her to come back in a month.

“MPP is not a program I created,” he says. “That decision was made by someone else.” 

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard.

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

“Malicious incompetence,” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” — it’s all there on public display in this deadly “Theater of the Absurd.”

Here, from a recent Human Rights Watch report on over 200 of those illegally returned to El Salvador without Due Process and in violation of the rule of law:

138 Killed;

70 Sexually abused, tortured, or otherwise harmed.

Here is the HRW report as posted on Courtside:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

Where, oh where, has our humanity and human decency gone?

And, how do spineless jurists on Article III Courts who continue to “rubber stamp” and overlook the disgraceful abrogation of Due Process and fundamental fairness going on in a grotesquely biased and mismanaged “court system” controlled by a White Nationalist, nativist regime look at themselves in the mirror each morning. Maybe they don’t.

Abuse of the most vulnerable among us might seem to them to be “below the radar screen.” After all, their victims often die, disappear, or are orbited back to unknown fates in dangerous foreign lands. Out of sign, out of mind! But, what if it were their spouses, sons, and daughters sent to Tijuana to be raped while awaiting a so-called “trial.”

Rather than serving its intended purpose, promoting courage to stand up against government tyranny and to defend the rights of individuals, even the downtrodden and powerless, against Government abuse of the law, life tenure has apparently become something quite different. That is, a refuge from accountability and the rules of human decency.

John Roberts, his “Gang of Five,” and the rest of the Article III enablers will escape any legal consequences for their actions and, perhaps more significant, inactions in the face of unspeakable abuses of our Constitution, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and the obligations we owe to other human beings.

How about those cowardly 9th Circuit Judges who ignored the law, betrayed human decency, and enabled rapes, killings, and other “crimes against humanity” by “green lighting” the unconstitutional and clearly illegal “MPP” — better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” with their absurdist legal gobbledygook in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan. They are enjoying life in the ivory tower while their human victims are suffering and dying.

But, folks like Fernanda and many others are recording their abuses which will live in history and infamy, will forever tarnish their records, and be a blot on their family names for generations to come. 

There is no excuse for what is happening at our borders and in our Immigration Courts today. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Flood the Article IIIs with examples and constant reminders of their handiwork and dereliction of duty! Let the bodies pile up on their collective doorsteps until the stench is so great that even they can no longer ignore and paper over their own complicity and moral responsibility with legal banalities. Force them to see their own faces and the faces of their loved ones in the scared, tormented faces and ruined lives of those destroyed by our scofflaw regime and its enablers. 

Also, if you haven’t already done so, tell your Congressional representatives that you have had enough of this grotesque circus!

Here’s what I wrote to my legislators, and some from other states, recently:

I hope you will also speak out frequently against the grotesque abuses of human rights, Due Process, and human decency, not to mention the teachings of Jesus Christ and almost all other religious traditions, that the Trump Administration is carrying out against refugees of color, many of them desperate and vulnerable women and children, at our Southern Border.

Additionally, under Trump, the U.S. Immigration Courts, absurdly and unconstitutionally located within a politically biased U.S. Department of Justice, have become a mockery of justice, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. I urge you to join with other legislators in abolishing the current failed (1.1 million case backlog) and unfair system and replacing it with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. It’s time to end the abuse! This must be one of our highest national priorities.

I invite you and your staff to read more about the grotesque abuses of law, human rights, and fundamental human decency being committed daily on migrants and other vulnerable humans by the Trump Administration in my blog: immigrationcourtside.com, “The Voice of the New Due Process Army.” This is not the America I knew and proudly served for more than three decades as a Federal employee.

Due Process Forever; Trump’s Perverted View of America Never!

Thanks again.

With my appreciation and very best wishes,

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Feckless Legislators, Never!

PWS

02-07-20

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

U.S. JUDGE THWARTS (FOR NOW) TRUMP REGIME’S PERSECUTION/PROSECUTION OF HUMANITARIAN AID WORKERS – Regime’s Religious Hypocrisy Runs Deep!

Carol Kuruvilla
Carol Kuruvilla
Religious Affairs
Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-no-more-deaths-religious-liberty_n_5e3adf4ec5b6d032e76d1313

 

Carol Kuruvilla in HuffPost:

 

A federal judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration, which often boasts about defending religious liberty, has violated the religious rights of a group of volunteers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration has spent years cracking down on the work of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, a Unitarian Universalist ministry in Arizona that provides water and food to migrants crossing a treacherous stretch of desert along the border where dozens have died. Various members of No More Deaths have faced fines and even jail for what they consider to be faith-based, life-saving humanitarian aid.

But for the second time in months, a judge has ruled that the government shouldn’t be punishing these volunteers for putting their faith into practice.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez ruled Monday that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” As a result, the government substantially burdened the volunteers’ religious liberty by prosecuting them for this work, Marquez said.

“Given Defendants’ professed beliefs, the concentration of human remains on the [refuge], and the risk of death in that area, it follows that providing aid on the [refuge] was necessary for Defendants to meaningfully exercise their beliefs,” the judge wrote.

Márquez’s ruling reversed the decision of a lower court, where another judge dismissed the volunteers’ religious liberty claims and sentenced them to probation and fines last March.

A federal judge has ruled that four volunteers who left water and food for migrants at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge were acting according to their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” From left, they are Natalie Hoffman, Madeline Huse, Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, and Oona Holcomb.

The case against the four volunteers ― Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick ― goes back to December 2017, a year when 32 sets of human remains were recovered from the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The volunteers were charged with misdemeanors for entering the wildlife refuge without proper permits and leaving behind jugs of water and cans of beans, which the government called abandonment of property.

The volunteers’ defense hinged on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The law states that if a defendant can prove that the government is substantially burdening her “sincerely held religious beliefs,” then the government has to show that it’s using the “least restrictive” path to achieving its goals.

This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe.Parker Deighan, spokesperson for No More Deaths

RFRA initially had broad bipartisan support. But more recently, the religious right has been using RFRA as a way to secure exemptions for conservative beliefs about abortion and LGBTQ rights. The evangelical Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores famously used RFRA to avoid paying for insurance coverage for contraception.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice has urged a narrow reading of RFRA claims made by people of faith who do not share the administration’s policy goals, according to Katherine Franke, faculty director of Columbia University’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project.

“The Trump Department of Justice has taken a biased approach to defending and enforcing religious liberty rights under RFRA, robustly protecting the rights of conservative Evangelical Christians while prosecuting people whose faith moves them to oppose the government’s policies,” Franke told HuffPost in an email.

Michael Bailey, the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for Arizona, said his team has no issue with Márquez’s finding that strong religious beliefs motivated the defendants’ acts.

“We highly value religious freedom without regard to where on the spectrum one’s beliefs might fall,” Bailey told HuffPost in a statement.

A volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths delivers water along a trail used by undocumented immigrants in the desert on May 10, 2019 near Ajo, Arizona.

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No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist ministry. But all four volunteers are technically religiously unaffiliated, which means they are part of a growing group of Americans who decline to identify with any specific religious tradition.

During testimonies, the four described feeling a spiritual calling to volunteer, inspired by beliefs about the sanctity of human life. They also spoke about taking moments of silence in the refuge to reflect on the suffering of those crossing the desert.

Holcomb said that she had constructed a “personal altar” at her home that included a ring of water bottles she picked up in the desert.

“There is … for me, I will say, like a deep spiritual need and a calling to do work based on what I believe in the world,” Holcomb testified, according to the judge’s opinion.

In its response to the volunteers’ appeal, the government argued that their beliefs were not truly religious because they didn’t explain how they fit into a “particular system of religious or spiritual beliefs.” The government also asserted that the volunteers were “draping religious garb” over “secular philosophical concerns.”

In her opinion, Márquez said that the volunteers’ RFRA claims can’t be dismissed just because they described their beliefs in broad terms and don’t belong to an established religion. She pointed out that religious and political motivations overlapped in the Hobby Lobby case. ThatSupreme Court verdict has shown that government faces an “exceptionally demanding” obligation to be minimally restrictive while imposing on a person’s religious exercise, Márquez said.

Ultimately, the government had failed to demonstrate that prosecuting the volunteers was the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling governmental interest, the judge said.

Scott Warren, a volunteer for the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, walks into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to deliver food and water along remote desert trails used by undocumented immigrants on May 10, 2019, near Ajo, Arizona.

Márquez’s decision comes months after another No More Deaths volunteer, Scott Warren, was acquitted of a federal misdemeanor charge for leaving water jugs in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for migrants. The judge in that case also acknowledged that Warren’s action was protected by his right to religious freedom. That was one of the first times progressive religious beliefs related to immigration have been protected in this way, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project told HuffPost in November.

Franke said there are other cases where progressive people of faith are making religious exemption claims. The Rev. Kaji Douša, a New York pastor and immigrant rights activist, claims the federal government violated her religious freedom when she was detained and placed on a watch list for ministering to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.  The government has “trivialized” Douša’s RFRA claims and urged the court to dismiss them, Franke said.

In Philadelphia, the DOJ is trying to prevent a faith-based overdose prevention organization from opening a safe injection site, arguing that its “true motivation is socio-political or philosophical — not religious — and thus not protected by RFRA.”

Franke said that when Congress passed RFRA in 1993, the statute was meant to protect the religious liberty of people across a wide spectrum of beliefs, “not just some, and certainly not only those who hold religious beliefs that were shared with the current federal administration.”

Parker Deighan, a spokesperson for No More Deaths, told HuffPost that Márquez’s ruling on Monday reaffirms that “providing humanitarian aid is never a crime.”

“This ruling shows that religious freedom is not just for the Christian right, as the Trump administration would have us believe,” she said. “We hope that that Judge Marquez’s ruling signifies a shift towards religious freedom exemptions being used to protect the work of people and organizations fighting on the side of justice, such as migrant solidarity organizations and indigenous peoples fighting for protection of their sacred lands and traditions, rather than protection for discrimination and bigotry.”

 

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So, here’s the deal.

The Trump (the least religious and most immoral President in U.S. History) regime uses a bogus “religious protection” rationale to cloak far-right programs of hate, intolerance, dehumanization, marginalization, and cruelty directed at people of color, the LGBTQ community, migrants, refugees, women, children, Muslims, Jews, and other vulnerable groups. According to the regime, “religious freedom” is limited to the “extremist religious right.”

Then, the regime attempts to misuse “the law” to punish those who actually “show Christ-like love in word and in deed.” To her credit, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez “just said no” to this disingenuous nonsense.

The only way to stop the intellectual dishonesty, mockery of religious humanitarian principles, and misuse of our laws is to oust Trump and his enablers from office at every level. Otherwise, we can expect the persecution and cruelty to continue.

And don’t be surprised if the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes find a way to manipulate the system to enable the persecution of others to continue and grow worse. It’s what complicit “judges” do in the face of tyrants.

While the regime is using your tax dollars to pervert the law to persecute humanitarian workers, they are simultaneously violating our Constitution, our statutes, and our international obligations, with the connivence of the Supremes and Federal Appeals Courts who choose to look the other way rather than standing up for individuals’ rights against authoritarian overreach.

It’s time to stand up for our Constitutional rights, human rights, and human decency. Throw the corrupt and immoral GOP and their collaborators out of office at the next election, and bring in Government officials, legislators, and life-tenured judges who are willing and able to stand up for their oaths of office!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-06-20

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!
  3. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  4. 🤮NO PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TOWARD MEN (WOMEN, OR ESPECIALLY CHILDREN) FROM REGIME OF “BAD SANTAS” 🦹🏿‍♂️🎅🏻— Illegally Separated Families Continue To Suffer Irreparable Trauma, 😰 Volunteer Groups 😇🗽⚖️ Left To Pick Up Pieces — A Reminder That Defeated Regime Has Mocked, Disparaged, & Trashed Christ’s Values & Assaulted Humanity Over Four Christmases!🏴‍☠️🤮☠️⚰️👎🏻

HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/05/deported-danger/united-states-deportation-policies-expose-salvadorans-death-and

February 5, 2020

Deported to Danger

United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse

Summary

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February 5, 2020

US: Deported Salvadorans Abused, Killed

Stop Deporting Salvadorans Who Would Face Risks to Their Safety, Lives

The US government has deported people to face abuse and even death in El Salvador. The US is not solely responsible—Salvadoran gangs who prey on deportees and Salvadoran authorities who harm deportees or who do little or nothing to protect them bear direct responsibility—but in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm’s way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely.

Of the estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans living in the United States who are not US citizens, just under one-quarter are lawful permanent residents, with the remaining three-quarters lacking papers or holding a temporary or precarious legal status. While Salvadorans have asylum recognition rates as high as 75 percent in other Central American nations, and 36.5 percent in Mexico, the US recognized just 18.2 percent of Salvadorans as qualifying for asylum from 2014 to 2018. Between 2014-2018, the US and Mexico have deported about 213,000 Salvadorans (102,000 from Mexico and 111,000 from the United States).

No government, UN agency, or nongovernmental organization has systematically monitored what happens to deported persons once back in El Salvador. This report begins to fill that gap. It shows that, as asylum and immigration policies tighten in the United States and dire security problems continue in El Salvador, the US is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm.

Some deportees are killed following their return to El Salvador. In researching this report, we identified or investigated 138 cases of Salvadorans killed since 2013 after deportation from the US. We found these cases by combing through press accounts and court files, and by interviewing surviving family members, community members, and officials. There is no official tally, however, and our research suggests that the number of those killed is likely greater.

Though much harder to identify because they are almost never reported by the press or to authorities, we also identified or investigated over 70 instances in which deportees were subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm, usually at the hands of gangs, or who went missing following their return.

In many of these more than 200 cases, we found a clear link between the killing or harm to the deportee upon return and the reasons they had fled El Salvador in the first place. In other cases, we lacked sufficient evidence to establish such a link. Even the latter cases, however, show the risks to which Salvadorans can be exposed upon return and the importance of US authorities giving them a meaningful opportunity to explain why they need protection before they are deported.

The following three cases illustrate the range of harms:

  • In 2010, when he was 17, Javier B. fled gang recruitment and his particularly violent neighborhood for the United States, where his mother, Jennifer B., had already fled. Javier was denied asylum and was deported in approximately March 2017, when he was 23 years old. Jennifer said Javier was killed four months later while living with his grandmother: “That’s actually where they [the gang, MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha-13)] killed him.… It’s terrible. They got him from the house at 11:00 a.m. They saw his tattoos. I knew they’d kill him for his tattoos. That is exactly what happened.… The problem was with [the gang] MS [-13], not with the police.” (According to Human Rights Watch’s research, having tattoos may be a source of concern, even if the tattoo is not gang-related).

 

  • In 2013, cousins Walter T. and Gaspar T. also fled gang recruitment when they were 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were denied asylum and deported by the United States to El Salvador in 2019. Gaspar explained that in April or May 2019 when he and Walter were sleeping at their respective homes in El Salvador, a police patrol arrived “and took me and Walter and three others from our homes, without a warrant and without a reason. They began beating us until we arrived at the police barracks. There, they held us for three days, claiming we’d be charged with illicit association (agrupaciones ilícitas). We were beaten [repeatedly] during those three days.”

 

  • In 2014, when she was 20, Angelina N. fled abuse at the hands of Jaime M., the father of her 4-year-old daughter, and of Mateo O., a male gang member who harassed her repeatedly. US authorities apprehended her at the border trying to enter the US and deported her that same year. Once back in El Salvador, she was at home in October 2014, when Mateo resumed pursuing and threatening her. Angelina recounted: “[He] came inside and forced me to have sex with him for the first time. He took out his gun.… I was so scared that I obeyed … when he left, I started crying. I didn’t say anything at the time or even file a complaint to the police. I thought it would be worse if I did because I thought someone from the police would likely tell [Mateo].… He told me he was going to kill my father and my daughter if I reported the [original and three subsequent] rapes, because I was ‘his woman.’ [He] hit me and told me that he wanted me all to himself.”

As in these three cases, some people deported from the United States back to El Salvador face the same abusers, often in the same neighborhoods, they originally fled: gang members, police officers, state security forces, and perpetrators of domestic violence. Others worked in law enforcement in El Salvador and now fear persecution by gangs or corrupt officials.

Deportees also include former long-term US residents, who with their families are singled out as easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse. Former long-term residents of the US who are deported may also readily run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.

Nearly 900,000 Salvadorans living in the US without papers or only a temporary status together with the thousands leaving El Salvador each month to seek safety in the US are increasingly at risk of deportation. The threat of deportation is on the rise due to various Trump administration policy changes affecting US immigration enforcement inside its borders and beyond, changes that exacerbated the many hurdles that already existed for individuals seeking protection and relief from deportation.

Increasingly, the United States is pursuing policies that shift responsibility for immigration enforcement to countries like Mexico in an effort to avoid any obligation for the safety and well-being of migrants and protection of asylum-seekers. As ever-more restrictive asylum and immigration policies take hold in the US, this situation—for Salvadorans, and for others—will only worsen. Throughout, US authorities are turning a blind eye to the abuse Salvadorans face upon return.

Some people from El Salvador living in the United States have had a temporary legal status known as “Temporary Protected Status” or “TPS,” which has allowed those present in the United States since February 2001 (around 195,000 people) to build their lives in the country with limited fear of deportation. Similarly, in 2012, the Obama administration provided some 26,000 Salvadorans with “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or “DACA” status, which afforded some who had arrived as children with a temporary legal status. The Trump administration had decided to end TPS in January 2020, but to comply with a court order extended work authorization to January 2021. It remains committed to ending DACA.

While challenges to both policies wend their way through the courts, people live in a precarious situation in which deportation may occur as soon as those court cases are resolved (at the time of writing the DACA issue was before the US Supreme Court; and the TPS work authorization extension to January 2021 could collapse if a federal appellate court decides to reverse an injunction on the earlier attempt to terminate TPS).

Salvadoran asylum seekers are also increasingly at risk of deportation and return. The Trump administration has pursued a series of policy initiatives aimed at making it harder for people fleeing their countries to seek asylum in the United States by separating children from their parents, limiting the number of people processed daily at official border crossings, prolonging administrative detention, imposing fees on the right to seek asylum, extending from 180 days to one year the bar on work authorization after filing an asylum claim, barring asylum for those who transited another country before entering the United States, requiring asylum seekers to await their hearings in Mexico, where many face dangers, and attempting to narrow asylum.

These changes aggravated pre-existing flaws in US implementation of its protection responsibilities and came as significant numbers of people sought protection outside of El Salvador. In the decade from 2009 to 2019, according to government data, Mexican and United States officials made at least 732,000 migration-related apprehensions of Salvadoran migrants crossing their territory (175,000 were made by Mexican authorities and just over 557,000 by US authorities).

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the number of Salvadorans expressing fear of being seriously harmed if returned to El Salvador has skyrocketed. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of Salvadoran annual asylum applicants in the US grew by nearly 1,000 percent, from about 5,600 to over 60,000. By 2018, Salvadorans had the largest number (101,000) of any nationality of pending asylum applications in the United States. At the same time, approximately 129,500 more Salvadorans had pending asylum applications in numerous other countries throughout the world. People are fleeing El Salvador in large numbers due to the violence and serious human rights abuses they face at home, including one of the highest murder rates in the world and very high rates of sexual violence and disappearance.

Despite clear prohibitions in international law on returning people to risk of persecution or torture, Salvadorans often cannot avoid deportation from the US. Unauthorized immigrants, those with temporary status, and asylum seekers all face long odds. They are subjected to deportation in a system that is harsh and punitive—plagued with court backlogs, lack of access to effective legal advice and assistance, prolonged and inhumane detention, and increasingly restrictive legal definitions of who merits protection. The US has enlisted Mexico—which has a protection system that its own human rights commission has called “broken”—to stop asylum seekers before they reach the US and host thousands returned to wait for their US proceedings to unfold. The result is that people who need protection may be returned to El Salvador and harmed, even killed.

Instead of deterring and deporting people, the US should focus on receiving those who cross its border with dignity and providing them a fair chance to explain why they need protection. Before deporting Salvadorans living in the United States, either with TPS or in some other immigration status, US authorities should take into account the extraordinary risks former long-term residents of the US may face if sent back to the country of their birth. The US should address due process failures in asylum adjudications and adopt a new legal and policy framework for protection that embraces the current global realities prompting people to flee their homes by providing “complementary protection” to anyone who faces real risk of serious harm.

As immediate and first steps, the United States government should adopt the following six recommendations to begin to address the problems identified in this report. Additional medium- and long-term legal and policy recommendations appear in the final section of this report.

  • The Trump administration should repeal the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP); the two Asylum Bans; and the Asylum Cooperation Agreements.
  • The Attorney General of the United States should reverse his decisions that restrict gender-based, gang-related, and family-based grounds for asylum.
  • Congress and the Executive Branch should ensure that US funding for Mexican migration enforcement activities does not erode the right to seek and receive asylum in Mexico.
  • Congress should immediately exercise its appropriation power by: 1) Refraining from providing additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless and until abusive policies and practices that separate families, employ unnecessary detention, violate due process rights, and violate the right to seek asylum are stopped; 2) Prohibiting the use of funds to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Asylum Bans,” or the Asylum Cooperation Agreements, or any subsequent revisions to those protocols and agreements that block access to the right to seek asylum in the United States.
  • Congress should exercise its oversight authority by requiring the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General to produce reports on the United States’ fulfilment of its asylum and protection responsibilities, including by collecting and releasing accurate data on the procedural experiences of asylum seekers (access to counsel, wait times, staff capacity to assess claims, humanitarian and protection resources available) and on harms experienced by people deported from the United States to their countries of origin.
  • Congress should enact, and the President should sign, legislation that would broadly protect individuals with Temporary Protected Status (including Salvadorans) and DACA recipients, such as the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, but without the overly broad restrictions based on juvenile conduct or information from flawed gang databases.

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History will neither forget nor forgive the many Article III Judges who have betrayed their oaths of office and abandoned humanity by allowing the Trump regime to run roughshod over our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency.

Future generations must inject integrity, courage, and human decency into the process for appointing and confirming Article III Judges. Obviously, there is something essential missing in the legal scholarship, ethical training, and moral integrity of many of our current batch of  shallow “go along to get along” jurists!  Human lives matter!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-06-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. WHEN ARTICLE III COURTS FAIL: U.S. “Orbits” Refugee Families To Dangerous Chaos In Guatemala Under Clearly Fraudulent “Safe Third Country” Arrangements As Feckless U.S. Courts Fail To Enforce Constitutional Due Process & U.S. Asylum Laws In Face Of Trump Regime’s Contemptuous Scofflaw Conduct!
  4. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!

T.C. WILLIAMS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TEAM MAKES IMMIGRATION VIDEO FOR C-SPAN STUDENTCAM 2020 COMPETITION!

T.C. WILLIAMS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TEAM MAKES IMMIGRATION VIDEO FOR C SPAN STUDENTCAM 2020 COMPETITION!

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T.C. Williams HS Logo
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Recently, I had the honor of working with a team of three talented T.C. Williams High School students and Mary Giovagnoli, Senior Counsel for Legal Strategy at , on a video interview about immigration issues in the upcoming 2020 election. Here is the result produced by the amazing student team of Amal Sharif, Ben Janusz, and Alex Conkey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja10WHkEDGU&t=4s 

This video is an entry in the C-Span StudentCAM 2020 Competition.

T.C. Williams is the public high school for ‘Alexandria, Virginia, where Cathy and I have lived since 1973. All three of our adult children, Wick, Will, and Anna, attended the Alexandria City Public Schools and are proud graduates of T.C. Williams High School (“Remember the Titans”).

GO T.C.!

PWS

02-05-20

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. “IT’S 1939” & WHITE NATIONALIST AMERICA IS FAILING HUMANITY AGAIN: THE ST. LOUIS REPLAY: History Will Neither Forget Nor Forgive Us For Wrongfully Sending Refugees To Their Doom – Nor Will The Complicit Roles Of The Supremes & Other Life-Tenured Federal Judges Be Buried Beneath Their Cowardly Legal Gobbledygook! — “Extermination As Deterrence” Is Not “OK Policy!”
  3. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

THE LATEST FROM HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE:  Rethinking Chevron In The Era Of Weaponized Immigration Courts Acting As Adjuncts Of DHS Enforcement, & Further Adventures Of The Round Table!

Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
jeffreyschase.com
In the present climate, immigration lawyers must continue to present judges with creative, intelligent arguments; to present the public with proof of what is wrong with the current system; and to present those in power to change what is wrong with solutions.

I’ve added posts that address each these points. First, I discuss some recent articles in which scholars raise creative legal arguments as to the limits of Chevron deference in appeals to the federal courts. I have also posted a statement of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges to the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship subcommittee that was made part of the record of its hearing last Wednesday on solutions to the present crisis in the immigration courts.

I have also posted the group statement of our Round Table on the one-year anniversary of the MPP, or “Remain in Mexico” policy that was drafted by former Immigration Judge Ilyce Shugall, who has volunteered her time to travel to Texas to observe MPP hearings that is meant to raise awareness of the need to end this awful program.
SUN, FEB 02

Rethinking Chevron?

The powers of the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals to influence law by issuing binding precedent decisions is greatly enhanced by what is known as Chevron deference.  The principl
Read More
TUE, JAN 28

Statement to the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration Court Reform

On Wednesday, January 29 at 9:30 am, the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee is holding a hearing entitled “Courts in Crisis:  The State of Judicial Independence and
Read More
TUE, JAN 28

Statement on the One Year Anniversary of the MPP Program

January 28, 2020

The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges is comprised of former immigration judges who are dedicated to due process in the immigration system.  As former immigration judges, we
Read More
jeffreyschase.com, 500 4th Ave., Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Another article that ties in well with a critical re-examination of Chevron in immigration cases is Tess Hellgren’s recent wonderful short article: “Faced with the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the immigration courts against asylum-seeking individuals, the role of the federal courts is more important than ever.” I recently republished it here: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

As we see the results of the regime’s Article III-enabled and encouraged nativist, racist policies like an expanded “Travel Ban” that now includes a large portion of Africa, new non-legislative restrictions on legal immigration, unmitigated expansion of the deadly “New American Gulag,” intentional mistreatment of children, and the continuing abrogation of both Due Process and our binding obligations to protect refugees at our Southern Border and elsewhere, Tess’s last sentence is particularly prophetic:

As the Attorney General and other executive officials attempt to expand their authority to define the terms of immigration adjudication, federal courts should heed the Seventh Circuit’s decision – and remember the foundational legal principle that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

So far, the Supremes and the Circuits have largely “vacated the province and shirked their duties” to the nation and our laws by shrinking and cowering in the face of the regime’s continuing lawlessness, bullying, bias, and tyranny. Indeed, the Supremes have shown a disturbing favoritism to unjustified requests by Trump’s Solicitor General to short-circuit the litigation system and the rules that bind all others. 

Not since the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback” (obviously one of the regime’s “models” of lawless disregard for human and legal rights, not to mention basic morality) has our national Government shown such overt racism and contempt for migrants of color. Yet, rather than standing tall and delivering a united, powerful, intellectually courageous defense of our Constitution, the “GOP Gang of Five Supremes” backed the dehumanization and demonization of migrants on racial and religious grounds for transparent and invidious political reasons in the “Travel Ban case.” They basically invited and then approved a demonstrably false and “bad faith” national defense “pretext” which the Administration has “jumped on” to justify other attacks on the rule of law.  

Now the “ban” has remarkably, but predictably, been extended to a large part of Africa, including its largest economy, Nigeria. Hardly a whimper as Trump disembowels both Constitutional norms and human decency. What’s next on the agenda, Supremes, a bogus Executive ban on all non-White, non-Christian immigration? Who’d be surprised at this point?

Of course, with “constitutional de-personification” well under way with Article III approval, the next targets will be US citizens of color and others who “dare to differ” like the LGBTQ community, women, political opponents, journalists, lawyers, and, finally, judges themselves once their usefulness to Trump and his authoritarian regime is exhausted. The all-powerful, unrestrained, “unitary Executive” has no need of legislature, judiciary, or the people except to “ratify” their authoritarian abuses.

The failure to defend and reinforce the courageous legal community challenging the regime’s authoritarian overreach and the pathetically weak defense of the integrity of judicial colleagues who have tried to hold the regime accountable by Roberts has done nothing  but confirm and reinforce Trump’s pre-existing  belief that courts are “his” tools and judges “his toadies.”

America deserves better from its life-tenured judiciary! What’s the purpose of a supposedly independent life-tenured judiciary that sides with powerful, dishonest, lawless, bullies over the rights of individuals and is unwilling to stand up for the rights and human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

PWS

02-04-20

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

BIA: ANY OL’ NOTICE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ENDANGERED ASYLUM SEEKERS ORBITED TO MEXICO & BEYOND – MATTER OF J.J. RODRIGUEZ — How Judges At All Levels Are Abandoning The Rule Of Law & Enabling Abuse Of the Most Vulnerable!

 

http://go.usa.gov/xdDRq

Matter of J.J. RODRIGUEZ, 27 I&N Dec. 762 (BIA 2020)

 

PANEL: MALPHRUS, Acting Chairman; CREPPY and CASSIDY, Board Members.

OPINION BY: Acting Chairman Malphrus

 

BIA HEADNOTE:

Where the Department of Homeland Security returns an alien to Mexico to await an immigration hearing pursuant to the Migrant Protection Protocols and provides the alien with sufficient notice of that hearing, an Immigration Judge should enter an in absentia order of removal if the alien fails to appear for the hearing.

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

Let’s put this in context!

 

This is an unrepresented asylum seeker “orbited” back to dangerous and chaotic conditions in Mexico. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.

 

He’s a native of Honduras. Obviously, he fled Honduras and sought admission to the United States for a reason. His only chance of not being returned to Honduras would be to show up for his hearing. Therefore, he would have no obvious reason for failing to appear at his hearing if he were able to do so.

 

In the past, in cases such as this, the DHS would have either: 1) released the respondent on bond to a known address in the United States that they would have recorded and furnished to EOIR; or 2) detained the respondent.

 

In the former case, the DHS would have been obliged to provide EOIR with a facially valid address to serve notices at the time of filing the Notice to Appear with the court. In the latter case, the DHS would be responsible for producing the respondent for all scheduled hearings.

 

Instead, in this case, the DHS chose under the mis-named “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”) (which are actually designed to reject rather than protect migrants) to abdicate its normal duties and send the respondent to an unknown location in Mexico without any reasonable safeguards to insure access to the hearing process or to counsel.

The DHS has no practical idea where they sent the respondent in Mexico and no reasonable method for contacting him or retrieving him.

Incredibly, and apparently with a straight face, the BIA lists the address of the respondent as “Domicilio Conocido, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.” That’s roughly the equivalent of “Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.” Good luck with that!

How would a U.S. lawyer get in touch with the respondent? How would the Immigration Court notify the respondent of the ever-changing times and dates of hearings? How would the DHS serve the respondent with notices of evidence?  Obviously, they wouldn’t.

And, if the respondent failed to appear for a non-existent hearing, he undoubtedly would be “in absentia’d” under the BIA’s warped view of what is fair and reasonable. This whole MPP has obviously been constructed by DHS, with EOIR complicity, as an exercise in naked bad faith and intentional and unreasonable inconvenience to the respondents caught up in it.

In formalizing the MPP, the DHS could have worked cooperatively with the Mexican Government and the private bar to guarantee the respondent’s statutory rights to: 1) return to the United States for his removal hearing; and 2) reasonable access to pro bono counsel in the United States. The DHS chose not to do either, thereby leaving these statutory obligations potentially unachievable for this respondent. Through the BIA’s mental gymnastics, the DHS’s intentional indolence becomes the respondent’s problem!

It’s common knowledge that individuals returned to Mexico under the MPP are often forced to live on the streets and are in constant danger of kidnaping, extortion, robbery, rape, assault, starvation, and exploitation while in Mexico awaiting hearings.

There also are credible reports that some individuals returned under the MPP are sent to the interior of Mexico, to the Southern Border of Mexico, or returned to their home countries, thus making it impossible for them to appear for their scheduled hearings. See,e.g., https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-15/buses-to-nowhere-mexico-transports-migrants-with-u-s-court-dates-to-its-far-south, “Mexico sends asylum seekers south — with no easy way to return for U.S. court dates.”

The DHS makes no effort to ascertain what happens to those sent back to Mexico under the MPP and takes no steps to insure that they are able to return to the U.S. border for their hearings.

The DHS has provided no reason to believe that individuals “relocated” after returning to Mexico either understand what is happening to their hearing rights or have any realistic mechanism for retuning.

Under these circumstances, there is a rebuttable presumption that individuals returned under the MPP who do not appear for immigration hearings have been denied both their statutory right to the hearing process and their statutory right to representation by counsel of their own choosing at no expense to the Government. These statutory rights are integral to insuring due process in the removal hearing process.

The DHS may rebut this presumption by showing either: 1) they made reasonable efforts to locate this respondent in Mexico; or 2) there are reasonable procedures in place with the Mexican Government and with pro bono providers to provide reasonable access to hearings and pro bono counsel that were available to the respondent in this case.

Since the DHS has made no such showing in this case, the Immigration Judge’s decision to terminate the proceedings without an in absentia order is reasonable and proper under the law. Indeed, it is the only lawful outcome.

This is especially true because there doesn’t appear to be any effective way an individual who was inhibited from return to the United States from Mexico for his hearing can seek to reopen an in absentia hearing from Mexico or some other country to which he might have been “orbited” by the Mexican Government.

Indeed, the process followed by the DHS in this case appears to be an intentional derogation of the normal statutory right to a stay of removal from the United States to which an individual challenging an in absentia removal order ordinarily would be legally entitled.

This is, of course, without prejudice to the DHS reinstituting removal proceedings in the future if the respondent is encountered at the border or in the United States.

Sadly, the BIA isn’t the only tribunal to “blow off” their statutory and constitutional responsibilities.

The feckless judges of the Ninth Court of Appeals “took a dive” on their oaths of office by “greenlighting” the illegal (not to mention totally dishonest and immoral) MPP by vacating the District Court’s properly issued preliminary injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan.

As a result of the Ninth Circuit’s dereliction of duty, thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers have been irreparably injured.

Eventually, the MPP will go down as not only fraudulent and invidiously racially motivated, but as one of the most horrible, and preventable, failures of justice in modern American jurisprudence. It will rank right up there with Dred Scott., the Fugitive Slave Laws, “separate but equal,” Chinese Exclusion Laws, and Japanese internment of supposedly bygone ages. Dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse of Government authority is a common theme. It will indelibly stain the reputations of every bureaucrat and judge who touched it without “just saying no.”

While it might already be too late for many of the innocent victims of MPP, no amount of legal gobbledygook or “alternative facts” will save those responsible for initiating, carrying out, and enabling the MPP and similar violations of legal, constitutional, and human rights, and  well as human morality, from the judgments of history!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

01-31-20

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. “SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?  

PROTECTING KIDS FROM THE REGIME:  Legal Scholars & NGOs File Brief Supporting Children’s Rights Under International Law To Be Saved From The “Trump Kiddie Gulag” — Flores v. Barr

Ian M. Kysel
Ian M. Kysel
Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Here’s a summary from New Due Process Army stalwart and Georgetown Law graduate Ian M. Kysel, Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School:

 

As the amicus briefs in the 9th circuit appeal in Flores rolled in last night, I wanted to flag one in particular on which I am co-counsel: anamicus brief by more than 125 legal scholars and non-governmental organizations. It is attached. In it, we argue that a decision by the 9th circuit allowing the government’s regulations to enter into force would violate U.S. international law obligations. The amici on this brief include several current or former senior UN human rights experts from around the world (including members of the UN Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Rights of the Child) as well as the former Deans of both Harvard Law School and Yale Law School (the latter, Harold Hongju Koh, also formerly served in government as both Legal Adviser and Assistant Secretary of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State). It is unusual to have so many senior experts on an amicus brief at the court of appeals level. The experts make clear to the 9th circuit that the government’s effort to permit indefinite detention of migrant children, including asylum seekers, in secure or more secure facilities with limited ability to challenge aspects of their detention, would violate core human rights protections (including children’s right to be free from unlawful detention and their rights to special measures of protection and to consideration of the best interests of the child) and that the regulations should remain enjoined, as continued enforcement of the settlement remains in the public interest.

 

Here’s a link to the brief, a “mini-treatise” on the rights of child migrants under international law:

2020 01 28 Flores Amicus Draft 4842-1836-6386 v.12[6]

KEY QUOTE FROM BRIEF:

INTRODUCTION

Under Article VI of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, U.S. courts have an obligation to enforce customary international law binding on the United States, as well as to construe federal law consistently with the United States’ obligations under customary international law and treaties ratified by the United States. The Government’s enjoined regulations,2 which repudiate the terms of the Stipulated Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Barr (“Flores Settlement”), would violate international law, including the United States’ treaty obligations and customary international law. This Court should decide the appeal in a manner consistent with U.S. obligations under international law. The policy changes the Government asks this Court to approve would violate the United States’ obligations to safeguard the rights of children to be free from unlawful detention. Under international law, the United States must provide children with special measures of protection and ensure children’s best interests are always a primary consideration. This Court should therefore affirm the District Court.

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

Thanks to Ian and all of his wonderful colleagues for speaking up for the legal (and human) rights of some of the world’s most vulnerable children to be protected against further intentional abuses by the Trump regime and its corrupt intellectually and morally bankrupt bureaucratic toadies (past, present, and, unfortunately, future).

I had the great pleasure of working with Ian and some of his colleagues, including some of my own students and former students, on the International Migrants’ Bill of Rights Initiative at Georgetown Law now continuing at Cornell Law under the leadership of Ian and my long time friend and colleague Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr.

The original International Migrants’ Bill of Rights Initiative at Georgetown Law was the “brainchild” of my good friends, renowned public international law expert Professor David Stewart, former Georgetown Law Dean and U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Alex Aleinikoff, CALS Asylum Clinic Director Professor Andy Schoenholtz, and many others.

It’s hard to describe how satisfying it is to see younger folks that I have taught and/or mentored during my career go on to become leaders of the New Due Process Army and to continue the generational battle to make Due Process for migrants a reality, rather than the cruel and lawless charade and parody of justice that it has some under this regime.

Thanks again to Ian and all the others like him for taking up up the fight. And, of course, many thanks to Steve and other scholars and teachers like him for “keeping the fires of Due Process burning bright even during one of American Democracy’s darkest nights!”

Due Process Forever!

 

PWS

01-30-20

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: AILA Blasts Appointment Of Prosecutors Without Judicial Qualifications To Top Judicial Positions in Billy the Bigot’s Weaponized Anti-Due-Process “Court” System — Dysfunction, Bias, Illegitimate Decisions Run Rampant As Congress, Article IIIs Fail to Enforce U.S. Constitution!
  4. LEE SUNDAY EVANS @ WATERWELL: “The Power of Transcripts”— “It wasn’t hard to recognize the power of each individual story, and the patterns revealed when reading two, three, ten testimonies were a disturbing depiction of how the protections outlined in the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) were being violated.”

🤡WELCOME TO CLOWN COURT: Where The Lives Of Millions Of Humans & The Future Of America Are Treated Like A Cruel Joke, As Complicit Article III Courts Watch This Grotesque Unconstitutional Spectacle & Parody Of Justice Unfold On Their Watch!

Kate Brumback
Kate Brumback
Reporter
Associated Press
DEEPTI HAJELA
Deepti Hajela
Reporter
Associated Press, NY
Amy Taxin
Amy Taxin
Reporter
Associated Press

https://apple.news/A9aA4TWFpQoSBoXVeAOv_Rg

By KATE BRUMBACK, DEEPTI HAJELA and AMY TAXIN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a locked, guarded courtroom in a compound surrounded by razor wire, Immigration Judge Jerome Rothschild waits — and stalls.

A Spanish interpreter is running late because of a flat tire. Rothschild tells the five immigrants before him that he’ll take a break before the proceedings even start. His hope: to delay just long enough so these immigrants won’t have to sit by, uncomprehendingly, as their futures are decided.

“We are, untypically, without an interpreter,” Rothschild tells a lawyer who enters the courtroom at the Stewart Detention Center after driving down from Atlanta, about 140 miles away.

In its disorder, this is, in fact, a typical day in the chaotic, crowded and confusing U.S. immigration court system of which Rothschild’s courtroom is just one small outpost.

Shrouded in secrecy, the immigration courts run by the U.S. Department of Justice have been dysfunctional for years and have only gotten worse. A surge in the arrival of asylum seekers and the Trump administration’s crackdown on the Southwest border and illegal immigration have pushed more people into deportation proceedings, swelling the court’s docket to 1 million cases.

“It is just a cumbersome, huge system, and yet administration upon administration comes in here and tries to use the system for their own purposes,” says Immigration Judge Amiena Khan in New York City, speaking in her role as vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

“And in every instance, the system doesn’t change on a dime, because you can’t turn the Titanic around.”

The Associated Press visited immigration courts in 11 different cities more than two dozen times during a 10-day period in late fall. In courts from Boston to San Diego, reporters observed scores of hearings that illustrated how crushing caseloads and shifting policies have landed the courts in unprecedented turmoil:

–Chasing efficiency, immigration judges double- and triple-book hearings that can’t possibly be completed, leading to numerous cancellations. Immigrants get new court dates, but not for years.

–Young children are everywhere and sit on the floor or stand or cry in cramped courtrooms. Many immigrants don’t know how to fill out forms, get records translated or present a case.

— Frequent changes in the law and rules for how judges manage their dockets make it impossible to know what the future holds when immigrants finally have their day in court. Paper files are often misplaced, and interpreters are often missing.

In Georgia, the interpreter assigned to Rothschild’s courtroom ends up making it to work, but the hearing sputters moments later when a lawyer for a Mexican man isn’t available when Rothschild calls her to appear by phone. Rothschild is placed on hold, and a bouncy beat overlaid with synthesizers fills the room.

He moves on to other cases — a Peruvian asylum seeker, a Cuban man seeking bond — and punts the missing lawyer’s case to the afternoon session.

This time, she’s there when he calls, and apologizes for not being available earlier, explaining through a hacking cough she’s been sick.

But by now the interpreter has moved on to another courtroom, putting Rothschild in what he describes as the “uneasy position” of holding court for someone who can’t understand what’s going on.

“I hate for a guy to leave a hearing having no idea what happened,” he says, and asks the lawyer to relay the results of the proceedings to her client in Spanish.

After some discussion, the lawyer agrees to withdraw the man’s bond petition and refile once she can show he’s been here longer than the government believes, which could help his chances.

For now, the man returns to detention.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link.  Yes, there’s lots of blame to go around: Administrations of both parties, an irresponsible Congress, several decades of underfunding and poor management.

But that doesn’t change these simple truths:

  • We have a scofflaw regime that glories in committing “crimes against humanity” directed at migrants;
  • We have a feckless Congress that won’t legislate responsibly as long as “Moscow Mitch” McConnell and his Trump-toady GOP control the Senate;
  • The only branch of Government that could put a stop to this unconstitutional and unconscionable mess is the Article III Federal Judiciary;
  • And, this highly privileged group of jurists, the only public officials I’m aware of with the “protective insulation” of life tenure, has stood by and watched their fellow humans being “thrown to the lions” in this disgraceful display of unconstitutional injustice.

Do your duty Article IIIs and put an end to the EOIR Clown Show! History is recording your failures to act, every day!

Due Process Forever; Clown Courts 🤡 and Their Complicit Enablers, Never!

PWS

01-17-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 
  3. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

THE NDPA STRIKES BACK:  ACLU Sues In DC To End The Regime’s Bogus “Safe Third Country” Abuse Of Human Rights & The Rule Of Law! — Regime’s Actions Could Be Characterized As “Crimes Against Humanity!”

Camilo Montoya-Galvez
Camilo Montoya-Galvez
CBS Journalist

https://apple.news/ALbDFozeyQemj7zT-zO0VUA

 

Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News:

 

 ACLU files lawsuit to halt Trump policy of sending asylum-seekers to Guatemala

Washington — The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday mounted the first legal challenge against the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants who seek protection at the U.S.-Mexico border to Guatemala, a country with a skeletal asylum regime that has seen an exodus of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in the past two years because of extreme poverty and endemic violence.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to halt the implementation of a controversial asylum agreement with the Guatemalan government. Under the deal forged last summer, the U.S. has sent more than 150 asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, denying them access to America’s asylum system and requiring them to choose between seeking refuge in the Central American country or returning home.

The agreement, the ACLU said in its 54-page complaint, amounts to “a deadly game of musical chairs that leaves many desperate asylum-seekers without a safe haven, in violation of U.S. and international law.”

“If this rule remains in effect, it means that the U.S. can completely wash their hands of any responsibility to provide safe haven for people fleeing persecution,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration litigator, told CBS News. “It would end asylum at the southern border, plain and simple.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that while it cannot comment on litigation, “the U.S. Government and the Government of Guatemala remain committed to the asylum cooperative agreement and stand behind the integrity of the program.”

For lead plaintiff, returning home isn’t an option

As of last week, 158 Honduran and Salvadoran migrants have been rerouted by the U.S. to Guatemala, including dozens of families and at least 43 children, according to the Guatemalan migration institute. Nine people initially chose to request protection in Guatemala, but five of them have since abandoned their claims, the institute said. The rest have asked for help returning to their home countries.

The lead plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit is a gay man from El Salvador who was sent by the U.S. to Guatemala after asking for asylum at the southern border. The man, identified only by the initials U.T., says he was sexually abused as a child, disowned by his family because of his sexuality and threatened by a gang member who solicited him for sex in El Salvador.

When he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, he was told he would be sent to Guatemala. He told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, who make the initial determination about whether migrants should be subject to the U.S.-Guatemala deal, that he feared being sent to Guatemala. His concerns fell on deaf ears.

He was then referred for an interview with an asylum officer and again expressed fear of persecution in Guatemala. Nonetheless, he was deported to the country shortly afterward.

During these types of interviews, migrants must affirmatively say they fear being sent to Guatemala. Even if they do, they have to meet a fear of persecution threshold that is much higher than that of the typical “credible fear” interviews most asylum-seekers at the southern border are subject to.

The ACLU says the man applied for asylum once in Guatemala, but officials there advised him to seek protection in Mexico instead, since Guatemala is “unsafe for gay people.” The State Department warns of “societal discrimination” and police abuse against LGBTI people in Guatemala.

Returning to El Salvador is not an option for the asylum-seeker, who is currently in Mexico, since he “fears that he will be attacked or killed for his sexual orientation if he tries to live openly as a gay man,” according to the ACLU.

“A way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck”

There are five other individual plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, including a woman and two families who were sent to Guatemala by the U.S. The Tahirih Justice Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, two organizations that provide legal services to asylum-seekers, are also named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit — which the National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and Human Rights First joined the ACLU in filing.

The group is asking the court to prohibit officials from enforcing a regulation the administration unveiled in November to implement the Guatemala deal and similar agreements that the U.S. brokered with Honduras and El Salvador which have not yet been implemented. The suit also challenges a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance document for asylum officers carrying out the agreement.

The ACLU alleged that both measures violate U.S. statutes designed to prevent officials from sending asylum-seekers to places where they may face persecution and that provide legal safeguards for migrants the government seeks to deport quickly. The group also said the policy violates administrative law, since the administration did not give the public a chance to comment on it and failed to provide “reasoned explanations” for dramatically changing the asylum system at the southern border.

The administration maintains that its agreements with Guatemala and the other countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle will foster the “distribution” of asylum claims among nations in the region and provide protection to migrants “closer to home.” But the ACLU says the so-called “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” represent a dramatic departure from the “safe third country” provision in U.S. law that the administration is using to defend their legality.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law an act that codified the “safe third country” concept, allowing the U.S. to enter into bilateral or multilateral agreements to send asylum-seekers to third countries, as long as the U.S. government made sure those asylum-seekers would not face persecution based on a protected ground under U.S. asylum law and would have access to a “full and fair” process to request protection in those nations.

Gelernt and his group believe the accords with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras violate this law because the countries do not have fully functioning asylum regimes, unlike Canada — the only nation which has an official “safe third country” agreement with the U.S.

“There is no way the administration can plausibly claim that Guatemala can provide a safe, fair and full asylum process. This administration has simply thumbed their nose at Congress,” Gelernt said, noting that Canada, a developed country with a robust asylum system, is a safe place for refugees.

“This is not a way to provide people with a fair asylum process but a way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck,” he added.

Guatemala has experienced moderate economic growth since the end of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, but it continues to grapple with high homicides rates, drug trafficking, political instability and widespread poverty, especially among its large indigenous communities in the Western highlands of the country. Only about 262 migrants sought refuge in Guatemala in 2018, according to the United Nations.

The ACLU also noted in its lawsuit that the Trump administration hasn’t publicly revealed any designations certifying that the Northern Triangle countries have the capacity to take in migrants rerouted there by the U.S., despite a requirement that such a certification be included in the government regulation to enforce the asylum agreements.

Sweeping implications for asylum-seekers

All three agreements the U.S. made last year suggest that they could grant the U.S. the power to reroute most asylum-seekers from any country in the world, barring a few exceptions, like unaccompanied children, to Central America. The ACLU underscored the sweeping nature of the deals in its suit, saying that in practice, the U.S. could send asylum-seekers from Afghanistan to one of the Northern Triangle countries, even if they did not travel through there to get to the U.S. southern border.

The administration believes it can include “all populations” in the agreements, and it recently announced it was planning to send Mexican asylum-seekers to Guatemala. The move sparked scathing criticism at home and abroad, with Mexico’s government objecting to the proposal.

Unlike migrants from Honduras and El Salvador, Mexican asylum-seekers do not travel through Guatemalan territory to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. A plan to subject Mexicans to the U.S.-Guatemala accord could, in practice, lead to the U.S. flying a Mexican asylum-seeker from Tijuana, San Diego’s neighboring city, some 1,500 miles away, asking her to seek protection in Guatemala.

How Guatemala continues to implement its “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” with the Trump administration will now be decided by conservative government of President Alejandro Giammattei, who took office on Tuesday.

The asylum agreements with countries in Central America are part of a series of policies the administration rolled out over the past year to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. These also include a sweeping rule that renders most non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum and the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has required more than 57,000 asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities for the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings.

First published on January 15, 2020 / 4:19 PM

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

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

The bogus “Safe Third Country Agreements” with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, clearly unsafe countries without functioning asylum systems, in violation of U.S. and international laws, are daunting acts of malicious fraud. This fraud is undertaken, in the open, by a neo-fascist regime that has contempt for humanity and human rights, believes itself above the law, and has no fear of being held accountable by the Federal Courts or Congress (notwithstanding Trump’s impeachment).

 

The regime’s unlawful fraudulent actions are defended in court by DOJ lawyers who believe the obligation of truthfulness before tribunals and other ethical requirements simply don’t apply to them. And, that’s probably with good reason.

 

The Trump regime has been peddling lies, false narratives, and bad faith legal arguments to the Federal Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, for nearly three years now with no consequences to the lawyers or their political clients. Indeed, Wilbur Ross lied under oath in the “Census Case,” but continues to be the Secretary of Commerce; to my knowledge, the Government lawyers who tried to present, defend, and rationalize. Ross’s census fraud are still on the payroll. A few Supremes even voted to sweep it all under the rug. It took an unusual display of backbone by Chief Justice Roberts to prevent the fraud from being perpetrated on American voters, particularly targeting voters of color.

 

Private lawyers who conducted themselves in a similar manner would likely be facing state disciplinary proceedings. A private executive who lied under oath like Ross probably would have been referred for a perjury prosecution or held in contempt of court.

 

But, Federal Judges, who are used to giving U.S. government lawyers pretty much a “free pass,” don’t seem to “get” that they are now dealing with a willfully corrupt, thoroughly dishonest, neo-fascist regime, not “just another Administration.”

 

When the laws, rules, and our Constitution don‘t apply to our Government, and nobody is held accountable for outrageous official wrongdoing (arguably “crimes against humanity” in the “Safe Third Country Fraud”) we all lose!

 

Due Process Forever! Complicity In The Face Of Tyranny, Never!

 

PWS

 

01-16-20

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

US DISTRICT JUDGE DANA SABRAW REJECTS ACLU CLAIM THAT DHS HAS RETURNED TO POLICY OF “SYSTEMATICALLY SEPARATING” FAMILIES AT BORDER

Mica Rosenberg
Mica Rosenberg
National Immigration Reporter, Reuters
Kanishka Singh
Kanishka Singh
Political News Journalist
Reuters

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/judge-rules-in-favor-of-trump-administration-in-family-separation-case-idUSKBN1ZD1LY?il=0

Judge rules in favor of Trump administration in family separation case

(Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s ongoing separations of families at the U.S.-Mexico border based on parents’ criminal history or health exclusions are being carried out with proper discretion.

Mexican asylum seekers camping near the Paso del Norte international border crossing bridge while waiting to apply for asylum to the U.S. are evicted by the local government, who will move them to a local shelter, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico January 7, 2020. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, California, on Monday, was a rare victory for the government in a case that has been ongoing since 2018.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first brought the case over President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting all border crossers, which led to the separation of hundreds of families and sparked national outrage. Sabraw had ordered the administration to find and reunite separated families.

Trump officially halted the practice with an executive order on June 20, 2018. But the ACLU claimed in court that since then, the government has continued the practice and separated more than 1,000 families in violation of Sabraw’s order.

The government has said it separates families when it suspects the parent has a criminal record, a communicable disease, or when there are questions about the relationship between the adult and the migrant child. It claimed its current practice is no different than prior administrations.

The rights group argued, however, that the administration was taking children from parents when they had only minor infractions like traffic violations or previous illegal border crossings.

Sabraw found government officials were “generally exercising their discretion to separate families at the border” in a manner consistent with migrants’ “rights to family integrity and the Court’s orders.”

The judge added there was no evidence before the court that the government has “returned to systematically separating families at the border.”

Sabraw did say that the government should use its rapid DNA testing technology to confirm parentage and not separate families based on “subjective concerns” alone.

The ACLU highlighted that part of the ruling in a statement: “The court strongly reaffirmed that the Trump administration bears the burden if it attempts to separate families based on an accusation that the adult is not the child’s parent,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said.

The group said it was considering its next move in the case.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis

 

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

While most news commentators to date have viewed this as a “victory” for the Trump Administration,” Judge Sabraw did reaffirm the principles of his original injunction that had forced a change in Government policy. He did, however, reject the ACLU’s request for expanded injunctive relief, except for timely DNA testing. He found no evidence that the DHS had failed to comply with the terms of the prior injunction on a systemic basis.

 

PWS

 

01-14-20

Related posts:

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  2. ACLU COURT EVIDENCE SUGGESTS McALEENAN LIED TO CONGRESS WHILE VIOLATING COURT ORDER ON CHILD SEPARATIONS — Continuing Separations Appear To Be Part Of Intentional Misapplication & Misinterpretation Of Narrow “Exception” — “Best Interests Of Child” Buried Beneath A Web Of Deception
  3. 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, “PERPS” ON THE LOOSE! — DOJ Internal Report Shows How “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton Conspired To Separate Migrant Kids In Violation Of 5th Amendment — When Will These Criminals Be Charged & Prosecuted Under 18 USC 242? — NY Times Reports!
  4. SCOFFLAWS OUTED AGAIN: U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP’S ILLEGAL ATTACK ON ASYLUM LAW: ORDERS PROCESSING OF ALL WHO APPLY TO RESUME! — “Whatever the scope of the president’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden!”

ROGER ALGASE @ ILW.COM: How The Trump Regime’s Gross Immorality, Inhumanity, & Illegality Have Replaced America’s Moral Leadership On The World Stage!

Roger Algase
Roger Algase
Immigration Attorney
New York, NY

https://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BXLvi&m=fxzs.sAL1oeaGWA&b=YSYqSh1DOxFOlVXvkRos2A

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ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post As asylum-seeker kills himself at the border, leading Jewish cleric condemns administration’s inhumanity toward desperate immigrants. Meanwhile, Trump ramps up hate for 2020 election By Roger Algase

01-10-2020, 09:08 AM

Update: January 11 1:42 pm:

For another viewpoint on the urgency of defeating Trump’s politics of hate against immigrants and other minorities in he upcoming election this November, see Kristian Ramos in The Hill (January 11):

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

We can’t let ‘white nativism’ politics cloud 2020 election

Update: January 11 at 9:15 am:

Two late-breaking January 10 news stories show that Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up the hate against legal non-European immigrants in preparation for this November’s election.

The Washington Post reports that Texas has become the first state to bar resettlement of refugees under Trump’s executive order giving them the authority to do so. Admission to the UIS of legal refugees this year is already at an historic low under the agenda of Trump and Miller. Miller reportedly didn’t want to any refugees at all to be admitted this year.

For more on this latest show of bigotry by Texas Republican governor Greg Abbot, see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2020/01/10/texas-becomes-first-state-publicly-reject-refugees-under-trump-order

On the same day, The Guardian reports that Trump is planning to add unspecified additional countries to his infamous Muslim ban order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/trump-travel-ban-expansion

Both of these developments, which involve barring legal immigrants whose ethnicity or religion doesn’t happen to fit in with Trump’s avowed goal of admitting only immigrants from “Countries like Norway” and with Miller’s goal (expressed in almost 1,000 recent emails) of taking America’s immigration system back to the openly racist 1924 regime (which Adolf Hitler expressed so much admiration for in Mein Kampf) show that exploiting and stirring up more hate against nonwhite immigrants, including those eligible to come to the US legally, will be the order of the day for Trump’s re-election campaign.

My earlier comment follows below:

While the media remain focused on Donald Trump’s apparently now-abandoned threat to commit a war crime by blowing up cultural heritage sites in Iran, as an end result of his dehumanizing 2017 Muslim Ban order; or on the travesty that Senate Republicans are planning in order to “acquit” Trump of cravenly timid Democratic impeachment charges which entirely ignore his High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the basic human rights of nonwhite immigrants, what could very arguably be considered a Crime Against Humanity that the Trump administration is carrying out against desperate asylum seekers at the Mexican border in service of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda is growing worse and worse.

The Guardian reports on January 9 that an obviously desperate Mexican asylum-seeker killed himself on the international bridge after being refused entry to the United States.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/mexico-asylum-seeker-refused-us-entry

This may be less surprising than it seems in light of the appalling, inhuman conditions that legitimate asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and other life-threatening conditions in Central America are forced to endure as a result of Trump’s racist and inhuman (as well as almost certainly illegal) “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy. See Vox (December 20, 2019):

In camps on the US-Mexico border, asylym-seekers have been abandoned

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/20/20997299/asylum-border-mexico-us-io,-unhcr-usaid-migration-international-humanitarian-aid-m…

See also: Slate:

Trump’s tent cities are on the verge of killing immigrant children

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

This horrendous display of inhumanity by the Trump administration as led to a protest by a leading Jewish religious leader, Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (in New York City) America’s leading institution for the Conservative branch of Judaism against what he calls America’s failure to carry out its moral obligation toward desperate asylum seekers and immigrants and other immigrants. See, The Hill, January 9:

https://the hill.com/opinion/immigration/477577/-our-moral-obligation-to-us-migrants-and-asylum-seekers

After visiting overcrowded immigrant border shelters , an ICE detention center and an asylum hearing courtroom along with other Jewish clergy, Eisen writes:

“What we saw was profoundly sobering. The predicament of those trapped at the Mexican border looks increasingly bleak as the federal government enacts more restrictive policies in the name of protecting Americans from the alleged invasion.”

Eisen then explains what motivated him to write:

“When people asked me why I was making this journey, my answer was simple: ‘Because I am a Jew.’ My grandparents arrived in this country seeking a better life, in some cases fleeing pogroms and persecutions, and the Torah’s command to care for the stranger summons me in a voice I dare not ignore. The Bible tells us that Jews are not permitted to stand by in the face of suffering and injustice.”

He then explains that this is not only a Jewish issue.:

“But the crisis at the border is a non-denominational issue and it should be non-partisan.” 

Unfortunately, in today’s America, the crisis caused by the Trumps administration’s egregious violations of essential human rights of nonwhite immigrants is anything but non-partisan. One party is blindly following its Leader into making hatred of non-European immigrants, both legal and “irregular”, as the centerpiece of its agenda, while the other party’s leaders are too cowardly to mount an effective defense of immigrants’ human rights which are being trampled on.

Ironically, the driving force of this agenda of anti-immigrant persecution, Stephen Miller, is also the grandchild of a Jewish immigrant. What kind of understanding of the Jewish heritage of care and compassion for the suffering of the stranger in our midst is he showing?

And how much understanding of this tradition of essential humanity does Miller’s boss Donald Trump, who claims to be a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people, show in his immigration policy, which includes drastic measures against even the most highly skilled and educated legal immigrants, not only asylum seekers and unauthorized immigrants?

Roger Algase

Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 01-11-2020, 01:43 PM.

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

Unfortunately, for America and the world, Roger has it pegged exactly right. Humanity, compassion, decency, and equal justice for all have disappeared from U.S. foreign and domestic policy under Trump. That’s the essence of a White Nationalist kakistocracy. And, as Roger also recognizes, there is more than a little anti-semitism and racism mixed in and driving these policies. It just so happens that Hispanics and folks with brown skins are the current “target of the day.”  

But, actually, nobody is safe in the “Age of Trump” as his sycophants and supporters have found out (see., e.g., Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Kristjen Nielsen, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, et al.). The only thing or person that Donald Trump has ever cared about is (surprise): Donald Trump. Everybody else, including our nation, the environment, and world civilization, is expendable.

I also appreciate Roger’s “outing” of bigoted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his ridiculous and disingenuous attempt to “bar” refugee resettlement in Texas. For the record, quite contrary to Abbott’s racist whining, few states have benefitted more than Texas from migrants, whether they be refugees, asylum recipients, documented, or undocumented.  See, e.g., https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-texas

In the “race to the bottom,” never count out Donald Trump and his GOP stalwarts!

PWS

01-13-20

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  3. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”

Clyde W. Ford
Clyde W. Ford
American Author

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-07/great-race-passing-trump

Ford writes:

OPINION

Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’

 

By CLYDE W. FORD

JAN. 7, 2020

 

3:01 AM

The images horrify.

On the banks of the Rio Grande, a child floats lifelessly, her arm around her father, both drowned while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe regularly drown. A Honduran mother dragging children flees from tear gas at the U.S. border. Children in cages.

The policies terrify. A border wall. Family separation. The purgatory of waiting for asylum in a third country.

In December, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to use migrant children in detention as bait. Adults who show up to claim them would be targeted for arrest and deportation.

The words incite fear. “Bad hombres.” “Rapists.” “Criminals.” “Shithole countries.” When uttered by a U.S. president, they carry even greater weight.

Britain, Poland, Italy, the United States. Around the world, countries once proud of welcoming immigrants seem determined to find ever more devious ways to keep them out. Are these signs of a newly ascendant nationalism? Or the last gasps of existential fear?

The worldwide immigration crisis — and the racism apparently driving it — can trace its roots in part to a century-old book, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.”

In publishing a centenary edition of the 1916 work, white nationalist Ostara Press praised the book as a “call to American whites to counter the dangers both from non-white and non-north Western European immigration.” Grant proposed a “Nordic race,” loosely centered in Scandinavia, as principally responsible for human social and cultural development. He feared immigration and intermarriage would dilute this race, dooming it to extinction.

Grant’s fears of his “great race” passing are very much alive today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing study of emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart News in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election document his affinity for white nationalism. Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, lauds former President Calvin Coolidge for signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which hardened non-white immigration and eased white immigration from Western Europe. It also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the predecessor of Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Grant’s writing is credited as part of the inspiration for the creation and passage of that 1924 Act. Hitler called Grant’s book, “my bible.” Grant’s ideas defined apartheid. His book fueled the U.S. eugenics movement.

Eugenics is a pseudoscience of race that seeks to breed and maintain a “Nordic stock” of human beings, while culling undesirables — blacks, Jews, Asians, South Americans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally ill, and others — through measures ranging from forced sterilization to death.

In Grant’s day, eugenics attracted the rich and famous — Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Kelloggs of Corn Flakes fame. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, saw birth control work as eliminating “human weeds” and Alexander Graham Bell presided over the scientific directors of the Eugenics Records Office, a research institute in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Eugenics is very much in vogue among white nationalists and far-right groups worldwide, though refashioned now into broader conspiracies like “replacement theory,” which originated in France with the writings of Renaud Camus and proposes that U.S. and European whites are being intentionally “replaced” through low birth rates and liberal immigration policies.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in 2017. A gunman in Norway who murdered 80 people in 2011 portrayed the act as a defense of the Nordic race from the scourge of Islamic immigration. Similar “replacement theory” fears influenced mass shooters in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Charleston.

Surprisingly, Grant was as an early conservationist who saw in the fate of endangered species — the moose, the buffalo, the redwood tree — a similar fate awaiting his “Nordics.” He helped establish the U.S. National Park system. Modern-day environmental and climate movements have roots in Grant’s work, leading to a convoluted, bizarre specter:

The U.S. and European countries that Grant lauded manufacture the “greenhouse gases” threatening the environment that Grant sought to protect. Meanwhile, the climate crisis produces refugees from countries that Grant abhorred, seeking shelter in countries with draconian immigration policies that Grant helped to create.

Yet Grant was right. His “great race” is passing. Studies cite 2050 as the tipping point, when U.S. whites will become a statistical minority, and most Americans will be people of color. Whether crafted in overtly racist language or couched in covertly racist immigration policies, fear of the “great race” passing is used to win elections, cling to power, manipulate public opinion and grow organizational membership.

Immigrants built America. This new wave is no different. They are the face of the future, deserving new lives in a country that helps them succeed.

Yes, the “great race” is passing. Good riddance. And we should turn to finding ways to help everyone accept this inevitability — and thrive from it.

Clyde W. Ford is the author of “Think Black,” a memoir about his father, the first black software engineer in America.

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

Like those who were behind or “went along to go along” with horrible parts of our history like Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, or Jim Crow, Trump’s supporters and enablers eventually will have much to answer for in the “court of history.”

“Fake news.” “alternative facts,” false narratives, and internet myths might be gospel to Breitbart, Fox News, GOP sycophants, and Trump voters, but eventually, particularly in an age of information and documentation, “truth will out.” And, it won’t be pretty for the “Modern Day Jim Crows” any more than it was for the segregationists and other racists who preceded them.

PWS

01-10-20

 

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  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
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FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

Frank Rich
Frank Rich
Writer-At-Large
NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.html

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

By Frank Rich

@frankrichny

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Photo: Getty Images

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.

Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.

That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).

. . . .

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Read the rest of Rich’s article at the link.

“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!

Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .

But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.

I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”

PWS

01-09-20

Related posts:

  1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”