"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
To no one’s surprise, this past week the bipartisan border bill, creatively named “The National Security Act, 2024” and introduced by an all white cast of Senators, failed to pass the chamber. Many Democratic Senators who once stood beside immigration advocates at rallies to push back against the proposal fell in line with their president and voted in favor of a flawed and dangerous bill that would fall short of mitigating migration. None but the beltway nerds and press were paying attention to C-SPAN as the proposal died, triggering Democratic political operatives to salivate over the “gotcha” vote that’ll be used against Republicans on the campaign trail.
Beatriz Lopez Deputy Director Immigration Hub PHOTO: Immigration Hub
For many of us battle-tested, seasoned advocates, there was no true satisfaction at seeing Republicans implode or an undesirable proposal fall apart. Hanging above our heads like a Florida cockroach threatening to fly into our faces was the fact that the Biden administration, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Chris Murphy, and Democrats who voted for the bill had officially moved the goalpost on immigration.
‘Tis a slippery slope to empower the nation’s president to shut the border down to block asylum seekers and codify measures to make it nearly impossible to claim asylum and easier and faster to deport people back to dangerous conditions while hoping a developing nation with its own set of serious problems cracks down on vulnerable children and families seeking safety and refuge. To be okay with all of this means you’ve – as Isabel Wilkerson so aptly wrote – gone through a “process, a programming” to dehumanize both the issue and those at our doors, begging for shelter and freedom.
And look I get it. I’ve heard the rhetorical, exasperated questions: what else are Democrats supposed to do when migrants keep coming to the border? When Republicans keep hammering us on the border? And Chicago and New York are struggling to manage those bussed into the cities? And in a pivotal election year, these questions carry an extra ounce of GTFO.
And to them I say – I hear you. I’m listening. I’m worried, too. But I’m not concerned about the tenacity and brilliance of local leaders and NGOs on the ground working to help newly-arrived immigrants to settle in this powerful and abundant country. Or least of all anxious over visionary funders and creative mayors and governors seeking ways to welcome new settlers into regions eager for consumers and workers. I’m not even worried about Trump and Republicans relentlessly attacking Democrats on the campaign trail – it’s nothing new.
What I am truly troubled by is Democrats choosing flight over fight.
The current conundrum that President Biden and Democrats find themselves in goes beyond the challenges of global migration. Since 2017, Democratic messaging has been devoid of pro-immigrant messaging. Were it not because of the loud cries of a toddler separated from her mother and the incredible journalistic accounting that shook the soul of America did it spring even moderate Democrats into action. But, when it came to political advertising and a constant drumbeat of both values-based immigration messaging and Republican accountability on the issue, you had to search far and wide to find solid examples. Thanks to the David Shor’s of the political class, most Democrats chose to avoid the issue, leaving a vacuum gladly filled by Stephen Miller types.
The Democratic choice to neither proudly display their position on immigration or celebrate the immigration wins has left the American people believing they’re for “open borders” or wondering where they stand on the issue and have they done anything on it? What’s worse, they consistently fail to counter their opponent’s radical, Trumpian rhetoric and anti-immigrant ideas. While racist and radical media and online influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, yell anti-immigrant obscenities and the GOP spend millions upon millions trying to convince Americans that immigrants are bad people who are trying to replace them, infiltrate their communities with drugs and crime, and steal their jobs and social security, Democrats have responded by pivoting to other kitchen table issues.
The gradual damage of this messaging to America’s psyche and perception of the other – immigrants – has created the current moment. Now, even reporters from major news outlets are asking me why and how Trump dismantled our immigration system and what actions President Biden had taken to restore the system. The first question often leaves me baffled, for how quick we forget the heinous wrongs of the past, and the second is no surprise, just sad.
It’s really disappointing that not many people, reporters included, don’t know that the Biden administration has taken over 500 actions that have had such a positive impact on women, families, children and workers in the U.S.
No Democrat should be afraid of their immigration shadow. It’s time to stop running away or running to the right of the issue. You can be sensible without spite. Until Republicans can treat the cancer that is Trump, Democrats have to go to bat for the issue with gutsy resolve, bold solutions and radical empathy. They have to be in it for the short and long game. Like investing in an index fund or supporting reproductive rights or gay marriage, it’ll pay off to tell Americans and Republicans that Democrats stand for an immigration system that lives up to our values and meets our nation’s economic demands, that we’ll secure our border with smart and humane solutions – not band-aids that create chaos and jeopardize lives – that we’ll do whatever it takes to deliver a path to citizenship for Dreamers and hard-working immigrants who have waited too long for our government to act, and that we’ll fight like hell against Trump and anyone who threatens to separate families, deport our neighbors en masse, and divide our communities.
No one is immune to mistakes or bad votes. For Democrats, this is a moment to reflect and admit you fucked up. Now do better. Yes, use the vote to hold Trump and Republicans accountable – but don’t you dare use that bill as a model for legislation or campaign rhetoric.
You can’t out-Trump Trump.
Humanize the issue. Show courage and compassion. Talk solutions. Remind voters what and who you stand for and what’s at stake if Trump and anti-immigrant Republicans have it their way. Be disciplined and keep repeating. Throw some money behind that messaging. And I promise you, you’ll win.
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Thanks, Beatriz!
This should be required reading for every Dem politico!
Case in point: A very recent Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”) study reaffirmed what those who work with migrants have always known: Directly contrary to the GOP and media myths, migrants of all types — regardless of status — are a huge source of economic growth for America. They will help fuel a $7 trillion boost in the U.S. economy over the next decade!See, e.g., https://time.com/6692645/immigration-economy-us-gdp-growth-cbo-report/.
But, you sure wouldn’t know this from the one-sided “debate” about migration going on today. The GOP spreads (and the media promotes, largely without critical analysis) blatant lies and myths about the largely fabricated and often self-created “burdens” of migration (see, Abbott, DeSantis). Yet rather than rebutting them and embracing truth, Dems basically look the other way and try to change the conversation.
This has caused them to “run away from” and “downplay” one of the Biden Administration’s most important positive achievements — functioning parole programs that move migrant flows from the “irregular” to the “regular!” Moreover, that processing takes place in advance, outside the United States, rather than adding to the border pressure or becoming part of the overhyped asylum backlog resulting from poor performance by Administrations of both parties and Congress over decades (but hugely aggravated by the Trump kakistocracy). Even the immediate work authorization problem is solved by the advance parole programs.
Are these programs perfect? No, they are far too limited both in terms of numbers and scope of eligible nationalities. They also don’t answer questions about the long-term fate of those paroled. But, they are certainly a step in the right direction that could be built upon and “model” the case for more durable long-term legislative expansions of visa programs.
The GOP’s irrational attacks on what is working and helps our country and the world shows just how little they care about solving problems or the long-term prosperity, stability, and strength of our nation. Yet, the largely indisputable benefits of parole and the willingness of the Administration to engage in creative and successful problem-solving gets scant mention from either the Biden campaign or Congressional Dems.
And, the media is no better. Given the current high-profile of immigration on the national scene, one might reasonably have expected “front page coverage” of the CBO report and findings, particularly since it directly contradicts many of the false claims raised by both parties during the recent failed “Senate compromise” proposal. Instead, even I had to do some “digging” to come up with articles featuring the CBO report.
Curiously, the GOP plays to the most extreme, dangerous, and unreasonable elements of its far right base.
Conversely, Dems run against the values and views of some of the most reasonable, dedicated, and energizing elements of their progressive base.
Reena Diamante reports for the Spectrum News El Paso:
. . . .
“A president doesn’t have the unilateral authority to shut down the border. If a president did, the prior president would have done it,” said Alberto Benitez, director of the Immigration Clinic at George Washington University Law School. “Even the prior president, who had a particular perspective on immigration, never shut down the border. There needs to be buy-in from Congress that a border shutdown is necessary, which there never has been.”
. . . .
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You can read the full article at the link.
Professor Benitez modestly quipped that this was: “My five seconds of fame on Spectrum News!”
You are always in the “NDPA Hall of Fame,” my friend!
Liz Mineo, Staff Writer, interviews Professor Neuman in The Harvard Gazette:
. . . .
What should be done about border security, enforcement, and the immigration court backlog?
In terms of enforcement, there is no easy solution. A border fence is merely a symbol and no solution. Clearly, the adjudication system needs more resources, and adjustments to improve both efficiency and fairness. For both sides, justice delayed is justice denied, and that should be an important part of the focus.
Another priority, contrary to some claims, is to reduce reliance on detention. The U.S. is engaged in arbitrary detention of migrants who really don’t need to be detained; they could be subject to surveillance.
The country should also respect its international obligations not to send people back to countries where they will be persecuted, tortured, or killed. It cannot suspend its international obligations on that front, and it should not openly violate them, as it did under COVID.
What measures should be taken to reduce the flow of migrants into the U.S?
In terms of enforcement, the important point to stress is that this is not an issue that the U.S. can solve unilaterally. There must be a regional solution. It’s obvious to anyone who looks at the logistics of the problem that the solutions depend on cooperation with Mexico. Congress can’t just impose a solution and assume that Mexico will go along with it. More broadly, there are other countries that need to be involved in protecting refugees and in solving some of the problems that lead to migration.
Some experts say the asylum system is a parallel immigration system and that it should be revamped. What’s your take on this?
I’d like to use the term asylum broadly, not legalistically, to cover forms of protection from persecution, killing, and torture. The U.S. asylum system is too opaque and too inconsistent: Valid claims may be rejected, and claims that are made in perfectly good faith may turn out to be invalid.
On the other hand, some people seek desperately to come to the U.S. for reasons that are not covered by asylum, such as poverty, loss of livelihood, or to join family members. The system needs to winnow those claims out while remaining open to valid claims for protection. It would also benefit from greater clarity on which claims are valid, and from more consistent adjudication, but now, the system is not meeting its obligations to persecuted people.
Finally, what are your realistic hopes for changes in immigration policies?
For now, my hopes would be that any new legislation would increase funding and would help give the public the sense that the border situation is being addressed.
And meanwhile that the executive would use the authority that it already has to manage the situation better, including by negotiating with other countries. The executive should resist efforts that obstruct its compliance with its obligations.
There is danger that any new legislation would decrease protection, which would mean that we would be taking no steps forward, and several steps backward, and that nonetheless, issues about migration would remain just as divisive as they are now.
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Read the full (edited) interview at the link.
“Decrease protection” seems to be a toxic bipartisan goal of Congress and the Administration. What’s preventing it? They can’t agree on the amount of cruelty, suffering, and dehumanization to inflict on vulnerable forced migrants who overwhelmingly seek only to have the USG process their legal claims for protection in a fair and timely manner! That reality has clearly been lost in the rancid, one-sided, often secret “negotiations” in Congress; the insipid statements of the Biden Administration promising more border closures, cruel, inhuman, degrading, expensive, and wasteful detention; and treacherous “bipartisan” abrogation of well-established “life or death” legal rights to fair consideration of claims!
Professor Neuman says “this is not an issue that the U.S. can solve unilaterally.” There is general consensus among migration experts on this fundamental truth! Yet, Congress and the Administration keep pretending otherwise, with little critical, informed “pushback” from the media.
Why isn’t Kristen Welker interviewing Professor Neuman and other migration experts, rather than making “Meet the Press” a “Foxlike Forum” for those promoting White Nationalist lies about the border and national security? Welker hasn’t bothered to inform herself about the human lives and human rights involved with forced migration at the border. Therefore, her feeble attempts to stop GOP nativist politicos from rambling on with their border myths are somewhere between ineffective to pathetic, but certainly must be maddening to anyone involved with assisting the actual humans seeking protection under our dysfunctional legal system!
Garland’s inexcusable failure to fix EOIR and get it working fairly, professionally, expertly, and in real time is a drag on the Biden Administration immigration policies and an existential threat to our democracy!
Laura Trask
Director of Development & Communications media@ayuda.com
Washington, D.C. (February 5, 2024) – Yesterday, Senate negotiators released language for the supplemental funding bill that would dramatically alter the U.S. asylum system in exchange for foreign aid and humanitarian assistance.
Ayuda joins immigrant communities and advocacy organizations across the country in strongly condemning this proposal that would lead to more families separated, children detained, and asylum seekers sent back to face persecution and even death.
Amongst many of the draconian changes proposed, this legislation would create a new authority, with narrow exceptions, that would allow officials to summarily expel asylum seekers. It would also restrict screening standards for asylum seekers and expedite asylum claims to the extent that many will not be able to access counsel or adequately represent themselves.
Ayuda and our partner organizations believe there are far more effective solutions to immigration policy failures. We call on the Senate to reject this framework, disentangle humanitarian assistance from changes that would eviscerate U.S. asylum law, and recommit themselves to building compassionate and humane immigration system.
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About Ayuda:
Ayuda provides direct legal, social, and language access services to low-income immigrants in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Since 1973, Ayuda has served more than 150,000 immigrants throughout the region. Ayuda is the only nonprofit service provider in the area that provides a wide range of immigration and family law assistance, social services, and language access support for all immigrants – including women, men, and children – from anywhere in the world.
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FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a proud member of the AYUDA Advisory Council.
I’m pleased to be part of an organization that stands up for human rights and the right to seek asylum and opposes scofflaw proposals to “punish” legal asylum seekers for the USG’s decades-long failure to establish a fair, accessible, timely asylum screening and adjudication system as required by law.
Many thanks to Paula Fitzgerald, Laura Trask, Alicja Johnson, and the rest of the “Due Process Team” at AYUDA for issuing this statement!
In a stunning blow to Republican leaders, the House rejected an effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday after a number of Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.
The final vote was 214 to 216.
The vote was incredibly dramatic. It was tied 215 to 215 for several minutes, with every Democrat voting no along with three Republicans: Reps. Ken Buck (Colo.), Tom McClintock (Calif.) and Mike Gallagher (Wis.). A tied vote meant the effort would fail, so Democrats began shouting “Order!” at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to drop the gavel and end it.
Republicans were furiously prodding Gallagher to change his vote, but he wouldn’t. At the last minute, Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) voted no, not because he opposed the measure but because it would allow the House to bring it back up again another day. That bumped the final tally to 214-216.
Republicans appeared to be counting on one Democrat to be absent in order to squeak through the vote: Rep. Al Green of Texas. He had been out following surgery. But he showed up for Tuesday’s vote.
“I always intended to be here,” Green told reporters after the vote. “I had surgery. I’m recovering, but this was important.”
The whole effort was a political stunt, with one goal: helping Donald Trump look tough on border issues ahead of November’s presidential election. The GOP’s two articles of impeachment accused Mayorkas of “willful” refusal to comply with immigration laws, and of breaching public trust.
But they never produced any evidence that Mayorkas had committed crimes ― let alone crimes that meet the threshold for impeachable offenses. The Constitution spells out that impeachment is reserved for rare instances of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” like bribery or treason.
In the case of Mayorkas, a Cabinet secretary charged with carrying out immigration laws, the GOP was essentially attacking him for policies it doesn’t like.
. . . .
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Read the full article at the link.
Thanks to GOP Reps. Ken Buck (Colo.), Tom McClintock (Calif.), and Mike Gallagher (Wis.) for standing up for common sense and the Constitution.
The determination of MAGAMike and his crew NOT to solve problems and instead to create unnecessary chaos, while wasting time and resources, is stunning, but perhaps not surprising!
The Senate finally released the full text of its long-awaited bipartisan immigration bill on Sunday evening.
If passed, the bill would:
fund military support for Ukraine and Israel while defunding UNRWA
establish new emergency powers that would allow the president to shut down the border
create a higher threshold for credible fear interviews and new asylum pathways at the US-Mexico border
provide a pathway to green cards for Afghan refugees in the United States
expands electronic monitoring and immigrant detention
and make a range of other changes to the immigration system—some good for migrants, some bad
It also provides more funding to immigration agencies, including:
$440M for IJs
$12M to combat smuggling
$7B to CBP
$8B to ICE
$4B to USCIS
I read the bill tonight twice. I am still thinking through not simply the text of the bill, but what the bill represents as a vision for immigration change. What are the values that this bill represents? How would these provisions be implemented in practice? How would we measure the effects of these various changes?
Excerpt of the Senate Immigration Bill.
But don’t feel like you need to get too into the weeds here. The likelihood that the bill will live through the night is looking slim as people from across the political spectrum fight over pillows to smother the bill in its sleep tonight.
Prominent conservatives are already up in arms over the fact that the emergency border powers don’t kick in until several thousand encounters per day. They read the text as saying that anything less than 5,000 is, therefore, “acceptable”.
Most of these talking points align closely to Donald Trump’s goal of preventing the bill from moving forward (even though is captures many classic Republican immigration goals and very few of Democrats’) so that he can run on the “immigration crisis” in the next election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said on a certain website that Shall Not Be Named:
I’ve seen enough. This bill is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created. As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, “the border never closes.” If this bill reaches the House, it will be dead on arrival.
Prominent progressives have also rejected the viability of the bill on grounds that it eviscerates asylum. Las Americas, an immigrant rights advocacy group in El Paso, Texas, released a statement tonight that included the following bleak assessment:
“Closing the border, creating a new ‘metering’ system, and debilitating our asylum laws will do nothing to address the underlying issues that force vulnerable children and families to flee their homes, seeking safety and a better life. Although the bill contains small silver linings, they come at too high a cost. This deal will ultimately subject more families to an unsafe migratory journey. They will be forced to wait on the other side of the border for days or even weeks, which will further expose them to those who will prey upon them as they try to navigate these impossible policies.
I’ve looked for supporters and so far, the only one I can find, are the folks at the Niskanen Center who released a statement tonight praising bipartisan efforts:
We applaud the bipartisan group of Senators who have invested weeks of hard work to negotiate a border security compromise. Despite facing opposition and resistance from their parties and leaders, Senators Chris Murphy, James Lankford, and Kyrsten Sinema have continued to work towards a solution palatable to Members on both sides of the aisle while ensuring that Congress can ultimately unlock much-needed supplemental funding to aid our allies.
I’m sure we’ll see the immigration bill in the news first thing in the morning, although the coverage is likely to be mostly negative.
My suggestion is, if you read this, you’ve probably given the bill as much attention as you need to give it for now. Don’t get too excited or upset. Spend your limited emotional energy on something else, because I don’t think this is going anywhere.
To access the full text of the bill, click the link below.
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Thanks, Austin! Sounds like prudent advice for conserving energy and focusing on the battle to save lives while maintaining good emotional health regardless of whether this bill or some version of it ever becomes law!
People close to Mr. Biden said he had always supported enforcing the law. Some of his top aides, such as Susan E. Rice, who served as his domestic policy adviser until last summer, and Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, embodied that tough-minded approach.
“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1,” Ms. Rice had said early on in Mr. Biden’s presidency.
Contrary to these border myths, which the NYT article does not really adequately take on, “the law” requires that individuals be given a chance to apply for asylum regardless of “status” and “entry point.” Congress provided a “quick screening” process called “credible fear” to deal with “mass migration” situations.
Assuming for the sake of argument that “the law” also requires that individuals be “detained” while credible fear screening and adjudication of claims by those who pass takes place, four elements are necessary for the legal system to work in a fair and timely manner.
Humane, NGO-operated reception centers, with on-site representation available, in locations preferably removed from the immediate border for screening to take place;
A huge corps of true expert Asylum Officers to do credible fear screening and outright grant clearly valid cases wherever possible;
A large corps of true expert Immigration Judges and BIA Appellate Judges to guide Asylum Officers, review their work, and, where the case can’t be granted at first instance, conduct timely full adjudication of claims for those who pass credible fear, prioritizing those claims most likely to succeed;
A functional resettlement program for those granted asylum and those whose cases require more in-depth process.
These four steps are the core of what real law enforcement at the border is all about! Prioritize them, accomplish them, and the other pieces will fall in place.
Contrary to Susan Rice, Jake Sullivan, and what the NYT article suggests, a plan to accomplish this 1) isn’t rocket science; 2) does not require legislation; and 3) needed to be “ready to go” with dynamic, courageous, due-process-focused leadership on Day 1 of the Administration or very shortly thereafter.
As always in Government, it’s a question of priorities, courage, and leadership. Despite the “overabundance” of proven, creative legal and administrative talent then in the private sector, most of whom were available to assist Biden, the Administration was not “ready to roll” with this program on Day 1 (as Steven Miller was with his vile “kill asylum and asylum seekers” agenda).
Sadly, even today, the Administration has not come close to putting in place any of these four critical requirements for success. It was highly predictable to any informed expert that forced migrants would continue to arrive at the border in large numbers and that GOP White Nationalists would “leverage” the Administration’s failure to achieve order at the border.
There is something else that’s completely predicable: That, if passed (a big if), the “nativist-driven compromise” now being “debated” by Congress and the Administration will NOT solve the humanitarian issue of forced migration BUT WILL create more death, trauma, and failure at the border and beyond.
Until America elects humanitarian-focused, problem-solving leaders with the vision to regularize fair asylum processing and the courage and skills to implement it, our border will continue to be a godawful mess: Just as GOP White Nationalists want! And, the great opportunity presented by talented asylum seekers who want only to save their and their families’ lives while helping us succeed will be squandered.
The long-awaited bipartisan Senate deal on immigration contains no real reforms, such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It’s all about “securing” the border.
Biden and Senate Democrats have caved to Senate Republican hardliners. Among other restrictions, the bill would make it much harder for people to apply for asylum.
On Friday evening Biden called the bill “the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.”
Then Biden went further — endorsing a full border shutdown. He said the bill “would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
I very much doubt Biden would shut the border if he signs this bill into law.
So what’s going on here? The underlying politics here has nothing to do with funding Ukraine. It doesn’t have to do with reforming immigration. It doesn’t even have much to do with the practical challenge of securing the border.
It has everything to do with the 2024 election, in which border security has become a big issue.
The nation does have to take reasonable action to stem the illegal flow of immigrants. But Trump has stoked American’s fears with lies (see below).
Trump and Biden are engaged in a giant pre-election kabuki fight over the border.
Biden wants to take the border issue away from Trump and figures this bill will do it. Which is exactly why Trump doesn’t want the bill enacted. “As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible, open-borders betrayal of America,” Trump said on Saturday. “It’s not going to happen, and I’ll fight it all the way.”
Trump says he welcomes criticism from GOP senators. “Please, blame it on me. Please, because they were getting ready to pass a very bad bill.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump’s lapdog-in-chief, says the bill is “dead on arrival” in the House. Besides, he now says, it isn’t needed because Biden already has all the authority he needs to close the border.
Um … just last year, Johnson argued that Congress must tighten immigration laws to strengthen the president’s hand. When he was president, Trump sought similar additional authority from Congress.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are about to begin impeachment proceedings against Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary, for allegedly being too soft on border security — even though Mayorkas worked with Senate Republicans to come up with this hardline border deal.
We need to deal with the border, but Republicans are now the ones sitting on their hands because they’re beholden to Trump. We also need to deal with immigration in a humane way by offering a broad and reasonable path to citizenship, but Democrats seem to have forgotten this basic goal.
The public, meanwhile, is utterly confused by Trump’s demagoguing. Here are Trump’s biggest lies, followed by the truth.
Trump claims Biden doesn’t want to stem illegal immigration and has created an “open border.”
Rubbish. Since he took office, Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border control.
Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’ve voted to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocked passage of Biden’s $106 billion national security supplemental that includes border funding.
Trump blames the drug crisis on illegal immigration.
Trump claims that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.
Baloney. America’s southern border has not been an entry point for terrorists. For almost a half-century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.
Trump says undocumented immigrants are stealing American jobs.
Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want. The surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: Unemployment has been below 4 percent for roughly two years, far lower than the long-term average rate of 5.71 percent. It’s now 3.7 percent.
Trump claims undocumented immigrants are responsible for more crime in America.
More BS. In fact, a 2020 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited by the Department of Justice, showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants. Despite the recent surge in illegal immigration, America’s homicide rate has fallen nearly 13 percent since 2022 — the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.
Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.
Now he’s moving into full-throttled neofascism, using the actual language of Hitler to attack immigrants — charging that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying they’re “like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.” He promises to use the U.S. military to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into “camps.”
The parallels with Nazi Germany are chilling. In 1932, the canny Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels called for “a thick wall around Germany,” to protect against immigrants. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.”
Trump and his enablers want us to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
Immigration has been good for America. As the median age of Americans continues to rise, we’ll need more young people from around the world.
The central question shouldn’t be how to secure our borders. It should be how to create an orderly and humane path to citizenship.
“Kabuki Theater” with human lives! The REAL “national security threats” — Trump, Abbott, DeSantis, and their MAGA toadies like MAGAMike — subvert our democracy in plain view! ATTRIBUTION: Creative Commons 2.0
Lost in the overheated and too often misleading media hype of this issue is a simple truth: Congress and Administrations of both parties have failed to fulfill our Government’s duties under international and domestic laws (which are based on international requirements) to establish a fair, generous, expert, timely asylum adjudication system — one that complies with due process and actually gives asylum applicants the required “benefit of the doubt.”
Now, in a show of supreme political cowardice, egged on by the White Nationalist right and their lies, politicos of both parties and in all three branches of Government seek to cover up their failure by punishing and endangering the lives of their victims! The latter are legal asylum seekers — human beings — who overwhelmingly present themselves to authorities at the border in an orderly fashion to get a fair adjudication of their claims. Our Government routinely denies them that fundamental right through ridiculous delays, bad precedents, poor quality adjudications, underfunding, deficient leadership, and coercive gimmicks like bogus prosecutions, imprisonment, denial of access to counsel, and illegal and immoral family separation.
Meanwhile, Dems are failing to stand up for the human and legal right to seek asylum, which is being violated right and left and which the “Senate compromise” promises even more scofflaw violations of human rights and basic human dignity.
We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration — particularly forced migration!
Artem Marchuk needed to escape Ukraine or die. He didn’t see any other options.
He and his wife and children had been living in Bakhmut, the site of the war’s deadliest battle. Even when they made it out of the city, nothing in Ukraine felt safe.
“My kids were very hungry,” Artem’s wife, Yana, said in an interview from the family’s home in Baltimore, where the U.S. government resettled them in 2022. “There was darkness everywhere.”
The Marchuks are among more than a million people whom the Biden administration has allowed into the United States over the past three years under an authority called humanitarian parole, which allows people without visas to live and work in the United States temporarily. Parole has been extended to Ukrainians, Afghans and thousands of people south of the U.S.-Mexico border fleeing poverty and war.
Now the program is at the heart of a battle in Congress over legislation that would unlock billions of dollars in military aid for some of President Biden’s top foreign policy priorities, such as Ukraine and Israel.
Republicans want to see a severe crackdown on immigration in exchange for their votes to approve the military aid — and restricting the number of people granted parole is one of their demands.
For Mr. Marchuk, the fact that a program that saved his family has become a bargaining chip on Capitol Hill feels wrong. Although the latest version of the deal would mostly spare Ukrainians seeking parole, he feels a deep sense of solidarity with other people — regardless of their nationality — who may be left behind if Congress imposes limits on the program.
Americans, he said, should welcome people like his family. Mr. Marchuk, a former technology in Ukraine, said he has found work helping other refugees with the advocacy organization Global Refuge, as well as driving for DoorDash, UPS and Amazon since he arrived in Baltimore.
“Refugees deliver these packages,” said Mr. Marchuk, 36. “American citizens who have an education,” he said, very often don’t want to work as drivers.
. . . .
The particulars of the deal in Congress are still being negotiated. A deal that is being discussed in the Senate seeks to reduce parole numbers by tightening immigration enforcement at the southern border.
That would not have a direct impact on the route that many Ukrainians took to America, since they generally do not arrive by the southern border. (Some Ukrainians do make it to the United States that way, however.)
But there is still deep uncertainty about whether the program will survive without changes.
Even some congressional Democrats who oppose substantially changing the parole program have acknowledged they may need to give in to some Republican demands to limit the program if they have any chance of passing the military aid package.
. . . .
As lawmakers debate the merits of the parole program, some immigrants in the United States say all the political talk glosses over the calamities in their home countries.
“People are dying left and right, being kidnapped and it’s just impossible,” said Valerie Laveus, who came to America from Haiti nearly 20 years ago and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2008. “I am concerned because I feel like a lot of times these people are having these conversations and they’re forgetting the human factor. They’re forgetting that they’re talking about lives.”
. . . .
Mr. Biden’s allies say restricting use of parole would very likely backfire.
“It means that people in desperate circumstances, who need protection, who need to leave, who need to flee, their options will be more limited, which increases the likelihood they choose the dangerous option of coming to the border,” said Cecilia Muñoz, one of Mr. Biden’s top immigration officials during the transition and co-chair of Welcome.US, an organization that helps Americans sponsor the resettlement of refugees to the United States.
Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.
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Notably, according to this article, Congress appears ready to carve out a “White Guy Exception” for Ukrainians arriving from Europe. So much for the idea that current immigration policy by both parties isn’t “race driven” — with Hispanics and Blacks generally on the short end of the stick.
By contrast, high level politicos of the Biden Administration and Congressional Dems avoid the border like the plague, except for the few who represent border districts. They are not that much different from GOP nativists. They refuse to engage with border experts, those who have devoted their lives to assisting forced migrants at the border, and the migrants themselves, who certainly will face severe harm, even death, due to the cowardly “sellout” by Congressional Dems and the Administration.
Let’s be very clear about the documented consequences of eliminating asylum at the border:
NEW YORK – With Congress considering codifying additional policies that will trap asylum seekers in Mexico, Human Rights First today reports that it has tracked over 1,300 reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, extortion, and other violent attacks on asylum seekers and migrants stranded in Mexico since the administration’s asylum ban was enacted in May.
Basically, those pushing to appease the GOP White Nationalist restrictionists at the border are knowingly and intentionally advocating for deadly human rights violations! How is that acceptable?
Foreign-born workers consistently have a higher labor market participation rate than native-born workers. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-american-workforce/. Consequently, there is little reason to doubt that new waves of migration ultimately will benefit the U.S., particularly the many U.S. cities, large and small, in danger of depopulation and “death.” Ironically, many of the localities with the most to gain from robust migration are in “red” states.https://apple.news/AQkO0JQjKS9aXF-V-RD9-_Q
Instead of planning to avoid these “ghost towns,” using the influx of individuals who seek to help us as an opportunity, we’re “strategizing” and spending huge amounts of money expelling, “deterring,” imprisoning, rejecting, dehumanizing, and even killing those who seek refuge!
There are legitimate issues as to how to “front” services for asylum seekers until they can obtain work authorization and find jobs. THIS, is where bipartisan cooperation, creative solutions, and resources could be focused, rather than exclusively on counterproductive and expensive gimmicks to punish, deter, and deny. But, there’s no chance of that!
Instead, in an example of how far the one-sided debate has departed from reality and human decency, Biden now vows to “shut the border” if Congress will only give him the authority! https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/26/biden-vows-shut-down-an-overwhelmed-border-if-senate-deal-passes/. But, that’s apparently not enough cruelty and xenophobia for MAGAMike and his White Nationalist insurrectionists! They seek eradication of the lives and humanity of anybody with the temerity to seek refuge in the U.S.
And so it goes, ever onward and downward. The media has developed amnesia on the well-documented unmitigated disaster and cascade of human suffering that our nation’s most recent border shutdown generated. As stated by expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on “X:”
Will the DC press (not those on the immigration beat) continue to ignore the fact that the last time we “shut down the border” under Title 42, it did not work and in fact led to 15 out of 20 of the highest months for border apprehensions in the 21st century?
We don’t know yet who the “winners” of the 2024 election will be, other than traffickers, cartels, exploiters, private prison corporations, undertakers, and body bag makers! But, we already know the “losers:” asylum seekers, Dreamers, human rights, persons of color, and those brave souls who continue to stand up for truth and equal justice for all!
Dem politicos and the Administration seem to be counting on the view that the Trump GOP is so horrible and antithetic to democracy that Dems can afford to dehumanize migrants, ignore their supporters, and break campaign promises without consequences. Just what they are getting in return isn’t obvious. From an immigrants rights’ and humanitarian standpoint, it’s “zilch.”
With Dems supposedly in charge of the Presidency and the the Senate, why are they ready to gift GOP restrictionists with what many have characterized as a “generational chance” to destroy asylum, hamstring legal immigration avenues, and squander even more money on hyper-cruel, race-driven, “sure to fail” border militarization and human rights violations?
Talk about “selling your soul!” That appears to have become the Democrats’ mantra in 2024. Whether it will prove a successful political strategy, remains to be seen!
The outcry of those claiming the United States has an “open border” reminds me of the “everything must go” or “for a limited time only” advertisements. People come only to discover it’s a bait and switch. Let me be clear: Migrants are not risking their lives solely because they believe false claims that the border is open. The overwhelming majority are fleeing desperate situations in their home countries; however, the drumbeat of “open borders ending soon” lends an urgency to their plight. Apprehensions of migrants entering illegally in December 2023 are projected to be a record high of 302,000.
The irony is that many conservative members of Congress try to blame the Biden administration for the surge in migrants, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has long interpreted the Constitution as giving Congress plenary power over immigration. Since the 19th century, this authority of Congress to control our national borders and determine whether a foreign national may enter or remain has been preeminent.
The executive branch is able to work only along the margins of immigration law through regulations and executive orders. When the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations tried to push these tools, the federal courts typically stopped them. Recent research by the Bipartisan Policy Center analyzing the border policies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations alongside apprehension data did not find clear-cut evidence that any particular executive branch action was more effective than another.
. . . .
As others and I have stated, the migration pressures at the U.S. southern border are not due to lack of enforcement of U.S. law; instead, these pressures result in part from laws written to address migration flows that differed sharply from the numbers of people we are dealing with today. Current law is based on the assumption that most migrants apprehended along the southern border are solo adults who can be turned back easily because they are motivated by economic reasons. Yet migrants today include many more families and children, people fleeing violence, people displaced by climate change, people leaving failed states, and people who are being persecuted — people who are afforded protections under U.S. law.
Regrettably, the House-passed border security legislation, as well as several of the other alternatives Congress is discussing, naively offers to tighten up the enforcement and narrow the categories of people who might be eligible to enter. Do they really think that raising the bar will deter people who are running for their lives? Such reforms portend an increase in the urgency of desperate people and ensuing chaos.
Immigration has always been a phenomenon that drives America’s success story, that undergirds our greatness. Time is overdue for us to reform our immigration laws — to create new pathways and update the old ones — to better reflect the national interest and our values. It will not be easy, as few critical issues are, but it is imperative that Congress gets to work.
Ruth E. Wasem is senior fellow at College of Public Affairs and Education, Cleveland State University. She has more than 30 years of experience in U.S. domestic policy, including immigration, employment, and social welfare policies.
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Read Ruth’s full article at the link! Also, congrats, Ruth, on your new appointment as Senior Fellow at the College of Public Affairs and Education, Cleveland State University!
As Ruth points out, the reason why all reputable studies show little if any relationship of forced migration to changing precedents and policies in “receiving nations,” is in the nature of forced migration. Forced migration is forced by combinations of conditions at or near the “sending” countries that operate largely without regard to unilateral actions in the U.S. or any other major receiving nation or group of nations.
At best, such futile unilateral actions have marginal, transitory effects, usually by forcing strategy adjustments and pricing changes within the world of human smuggling. But, like most markets, the human trafficking market eventually adjusts and the next, largely self-inflicted, “border crisis” ensues.
And thus, the cycle continues, with receiving nations investing more and more and doubling down on “proven to fail” cruelty and deterrence. Rather than acting rationally and responsibly — by listening to experts and those with experience managing refugee migrations — politicos falsely claim that the reason for their failed policies were that they weren’t draconian or expensive enough. But, throwing more money and personnel exclusively at enforcement and deterrence never works in a practical sense.
What it does do, however, is give certain moneyed groups a huge interest in uncontrolled border militarization. It also causes cynical politicos, largely but not exclusively on the right, to invest in sure to fail policies that will be a rallying point for White Nationalists without actual disrupting the supply of exploitable, disenfranchised, largely disposable “cheap labor” popular with many U.S. businesses and political contributors.
Ruth’s article states important truths about the border and migration echoed by expert after expert that are consistently, shamefully, and improperly being ignored by legislators and other politicos. For example, another leading “practical scholar,” Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr of Cornell Law recently “warned that detaining and quickly expelling migrants before asylum screenings would not solve the influx problem for cities like New York, which is grappling with a surge of migrants.” Read more: https://loom.ly/CLCoxqA.
Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr Cornell Law
So cowardly and misguided is the GOP’s approach that they waste public funds on a disingenuous “show trip” to the Texas border, but lack the guts and human decency to meet with and listen to the folks actually affected by their toxic policies and proposals.
Melissa Del Bosque Border Reporter PHOTO: Melissadelbosque.com
As reported by Melissa del Bosque in The Border Chronicle (in her overall discouraging and depressing forecast of the deadly political shenanigans that will be rolled out by GOP nativists during the 2024 campaign):
MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives, holding emergency funding hostage for Ukraine, cut out early from Congress for Christmas vacation, but they were willing to shorten their holiday break to make an appearance in Eagle Pass, Texas, on January 3, setting the tone for the coming months leading up to the general election. House Republicans will begin holding hearings on border security in February and are planning to impeach DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
In Eagle Pass, House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with 60 other Republicans, held a press conference in front of coils of razor wire placed along the Rio Grande by Texas governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. During the visit, Republicans declined to meet with local community leaders who had erected a public memorial in Eagle Pass for more than 700 people who had died trying to cross the border in 2023.
Expert organizations, like the Center for Migration Studies (“CMS”) with decades of experience studying what works and what doesn’t at the border have offered straightforward plans for “Managing the Border Without Sacrificing Human Rights,” only to have them arrogantly and insultingly ignored by Congress and the Biden Administration. See https://cmsny.org/statement-manage-border-without-sacrificing-human-rights/.
Michael Posner, Professor & Director, Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern School of Business PHOTO: Linkedin
Long-time refugee expert/scholar Professor Michael Posner, writing in Forbes, also offers a far more nuanced and realistic approach to the b order that both parties are ignoring:
Rather than enacting the draconian measures Republicans are now proposing that will, in effect, deny everyone their right to seek asylum, the goal should be to strengthen the system so that the cases of genuine refugees are heard quickly, while those who don’t qualify are placed in deportation proceedings. The way forward is not to curtail everyone’s right to seek asylum, but to make the system both fairer and more efficient.
The idea that the constitutional right to due process and fundamental fairness and the right of refuge guaranteed by international agreements that we signed and long-standing domestic implementing laws are “negotiable” is simply outrageous and fundamentally un-American!
Meanwhile, Dems cower and run away from the border issue, apparently irrationally believing that ignoring it and ceding ground to the GOP will “make it go away” in 2024. News Flash: It won’t!
Sadly, while experts and advocates who actually understand the border and migration fruitlessly rally, demonstrate, write op-ed’s, and file research-backed reports in favor of protecting asylum rights, Senate Dems by most accounts are busy negotiating them away in response to GOP demands. See, e.g.,https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/10/senate-border-ukraine-negotiations/.
Ignoring the advice of experts and acting out of fear, myths, and bias seems to be the “order of the day” for both parties!🤯That’s a national problem that won’t be solved by ever more extreme and wasteful doses of cruelty, repression, and bogus “deterrence,” no matter how politically and financially profitable continued failure might be to some within our nation’s power structure.
Families arriving at the border today likely to find those in power parrot the words of Christ while ignoring his teachings about mercy, humility, humanity. IMAGE: SojournersTodd Miller Border Correspondent Border Chronicle PHOTO: Coder Chron
I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.
I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.
I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?
In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.
At the height of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph walked for days, fleeing a Caesar Augustus’s occupying force—a story that resonates with more than 184 million people on the move today. I am reminded of my dear friend Irene Morales, a nun with the Madres of the Eucaristia, who I worked with two decades ago and who told me day after day—as we traveled through northern Mexico and the U.S. borderlands—that she saw Christ in the faces of people on the move. In the early 2000s, thousands of people were arriving to Altar, Sonora, to cross through the Arizona deserts. The people I talked to and interviewed were mostly from southern Mexico, and in many cases they were migrating because they could no longer make ends meet. From about 2002 to 2005, I talked to hundreds of people, and often it was parents thinking about their children, parents who talked about skipping meals for their children, wanting their children to get an education, or sometimes it was children on the move for a sick parent. So often it was a story of sacrifice at a time in a post-9/11 era characterized by a massive ramp-up on the border, with terrorism and migration blurring into each other at a policy level. “El rostro de Cristo,” Irene told me.
Stanton Street Bridge at sunset with a long line of people crossing from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso as is typical during the holidays. (Photo credit: Todd Miller)
As I stand on the bridge in Juárez, where everything seems basically the same, I know a lot has happened over the last year, and we have covered much of it at The Border Chronicle. I, for one, have been following that contaminated river and have gone into Chihuahua to report on border water struggles for a forthcoming book, and I have shared some photo essays here. Melissa also wrote about Chihuahua earlier this year for The New Yorker, focusing on the epidemic of journalists assassinated in Mexico, which she summarized in The Border Chronicle. I feel so fortunate to work alongside Melissa, who not only wrote (and talked to experts) about the innards of this massive border fortification, whether it be the surge of wall building, deadly vehicle chases, Operation Lone Star, or Florida cops patrolling the border—and the right-wing rhetoric that so often propels it (not to mention the Elon Musk circus)—but also about people in border communities for inspiration and solutions such as border artists, a brilliant sidewalk school, or a doctor who spends his time treating border crossers (Doctor Brian Elmore also penned an op-ed for us). And that’s just a taste. This year, I had the opportunity to go to Yale and debate border enforcement, a humbling and educational experience, to say the least. As I wrote about my losing effort, some of the dynamics we constantly struggle with in this sort of border journalism were clearly revealed.
Much has changed over the last year, but—from what I can tell suspended between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—much has remained the same. The border policy is the same, there is more money in the budgets, there is more money in as-of-yet-unpassed supplemental funding bills, there are more and more contracts for private industry. And now we have an election year. And, as we all know, during an election year, the border is a politician’s sacrificial lamb. So be prepared for a good dose of border theater, and we’ll be here with our coverage, commentary, interviews, and podcasts. The last thing I want to do is stand on that bridge a year from now and watch people wade through the trickling Rio Grande to “pedir posada” at a large gate at an even more fortified border wall in El Paso. That is, however, the likely outcome of 2024, and we will cover all of it. But we will also find the spaces where people are trying to make change, we will listen to the border communities, and we will document the humanitarian efforts. And trust me you, we will be looking in the places where there is generosity toward the stranger.
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40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25:40
It’s very straightforward. Yet, somewhere between the Nativity and MAGAMike Johnson, the message got lost! The real “War on Christmas” and Judeo-Christian values is being conducted by those in powerful positions who disingenuously press for deadly, illegal, inhumane, dehumanizing treatment of forced migrants!
I read somewhere that God’s eternal promise of Christmas is a closeness with humanity, forgiveness of sins and a radical, unconditional love for all. We ain’t there yet.
Also lost in the rush to cruelty and “deterrence:” Individuals have a legal right to apply for asylum at the U.S. border regardless of whether they arrive at a port of entry. See, INA, section 208.
The so-called “illegal” crossings are driven largely by the USG’s failure to implement timely and fair screening and processing at ports of entry. Even so, many individuals cross nearby the ports and wait patiently, in an orderly manner, outdoors, often in harsh conditions, to be “processed” by CBP.
This is hardly a “law enforcement crisis.” It’s a humanitarian crisis that, despite warnings and plenty of constructive ideas from experts, Congress and the Executive have jointly failed to address in a reasonable and responsible manner.
How unserious are Congress and the Administration about addressing the situation at the border in a responsible manner? The increasing flow of asylum seekers is predictable, considering that it is part of a worsening worldwide refugee flow.
So one logical, obvious thing to do, rather than building walls, prisons, and installing barbed wire, would be to hire and “surge” more USCIS Asylum Officers to the Southern Border to screen asylum seekers for credible fear, perhaps even expanding operations to foreign territory.
Rekha Sharma-Crawford ESQUIRE Partner and Co-Founder Sharma-Crawford Law Kansas City, KS
Rekha writes on LinkedIn:
A major step towards acknowledging that the best interest of the child must play a critical role in immigration cases. This was an idea I raised over 10 years ago with my friend and colleague, the brilliant Lory Rosenberg. Later the idea again was put forward with two additional brilliant colleagues, Paul Schmidt and Susan Roy. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but the right approach can’t be hidden forever.So pleased to see it is finally seeing some daylight.
Here’s the Memorandum from EOIR Director David L. Neal:
As noted by my Round Table colleague “Sir Jeffrey” Chase, our Round Table has spoken out about the need for a separate Immigration Court system for children:
As you know, our Round Table signed on to a letter of support for proposed legislation to create a Children’s Immigration Court.
[Director Neal’s statement is] a positive administrative development.
Here’s my take:
While progress is always welcome, this statement shrouds the concept of “best interest of the child” (“BIC”) with legal gobbledygook and bureaucratic doublespeak. (P. 3 of Neal Memo under “Legal Standards”).
Here’s what a clear, correct statement on BIC would look like:
BIC, regardless of whether or not presented by a “Child Advocate” or incorporated in a “Best Interests Determination” (“BID”), can be directly relevant to issues of removability. For example, evidence of removability obtained by methods that clearly conflict with the BIC could be found unreliable or the result of “egregious misconduct” for the purposes of determining removability.
The BIC can also be highly relevant to issues of eligibility for relief. For example, a government or society that deprives certain children of all meaningful educational oportunities might well be engaging in persecution.
In addition, in NLPR cancellation cases, the BIC could be persuasive, even determinative, evidence that removal of a parent will result in “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a USC or LPR child or children.
3) Finally, since the EOIR Director is an administrator, not a quasi-judicial official, his or her policies have a distinct “you can take it or leave it” effect in Immigration Court. Therefore ameliorative statements from the Director, no matter how well-intended, are only effective if the BIA is willing and able to insist on and enforce “best practices” on Immigration Judges, preferably through precedent decisions and reassigning cases away from those IJs who show repeated contempt for due process and best practices.
Unfortunately, the current version of the BIA has, as a body, shown neither much sympathy nor concern for the substantive and due process rights of asylum seekers and other immigrants in Immigration Court. Unless and until Garland “cleans house” and appoints a BIA where all Appellate Judges are immigration/human rights experts laser focused on due process and best practices in Immigration Court — and not afraid of enforcing them uniformly in individual cases and incorporating them in binding precedents — the Director’s latest somewhat ameliorative statement is likely to be as toothless in practice as past efforts.
To a large extent, that’s a “nutshell” of why Garland’s Immigration Courts are in dire failure that threatens our entire democracy.
Unfortunately, that we are three years into this Administration and Garland is still bumbling along with a BIA that largely represents the mistakes and shortcomings of his predecessors suggests that waiting for him to “get religion” on the need for expertise, due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices at EOIR will continue to be an exercise in “Waiting for Godot!”
Immigration practitioners waiting for Garland to institute “due process, fundamental fairness, and best practices” as the sole mission of his EOIR “courts.” It could be a long wait. Very long! Too long! Naseer’s Motley Group in The Rose Bowl Merlaysamuel Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Waiting for Godot in Doon School.jpg Copy [[File:Waiting for Godot in Doon School.jpg|Waiting_for_Godot_in_Doon_School]] Copy December 8, 2011
Some Republican lawmakers are flagging Hamas’ attack on Israel as an example of why more security is needed at the southern U.S. border. Hamas militants breached a border fence and attacked Israeli villages bordering the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.
“Potential terrorists are attempting to cross our southern border. In September alone, 18 illegal immigrants on the terror watchlist were caught at the border,” U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., posted Oct. 21 on X. “The attack on Israel should serve as a warning as to why we must secure the border.”
The next day, U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., also mentioned the terrorist watchlist on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
“We just caught 18 people, just last month, on the FBI terrorist watchlist, coming across our border,” McCarthy said. “More than 160 have done it this year, a record breaking.”
U.S. immigration officials have encountered rising numbers of people on the watchlist. But not everyone on the list is a terrorist, and not everyone encountered is allowed to enter the country.
Terrorism and immigration experts say that the threat of attacks in the U.S. and Israel are incomparable.
“They both involve borders, but the comparison ends there,” David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, previously told us. “People aren’t crossing the border to conduct terrorist attacks or take over parts of the United States. A very small percentage may come to commit ordinary crimes, like selling drugs, but overwhelmingly, they are coming for economic opportunity and freedom.”
McCarthy’s office did not respond to our query for more information. A Blackburn spokesperson pointed us to a Fox News reporter’s post on X. Customs and Border Protection did not confirm whether 18 people were stopped in September.
Here’s what we know about who is on the terrorist watchlist, and what the data can and can’t tell us.
. . . .
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Read Maria’s complete article which includes comments from real experts like Professor Stephen Yale Loehr, Professor Denise Gilman, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and others in addition to David Bier. They stand in sharp and long overdue contrast with the GOP’s alarmist, out of context, claims.
It’s little wonder that a party of anti-democracy activists, insurrectionists, and election deniers would want to deflect attention from themselves onto folks who are overwhelmingly coming to save their lives and to work hard and contribute to our economic growth!
I have previously “called out” Kristen Welker and NBC’s Meet the Press for giving McCarthy an unnecessary public forum for his alarmist narrative. See, e.g.,https://immigrationcourtside.com/2023/10/23/🚩politics-gops-bakuninist-clown-show-sows-american-chaos🤮☠️/. Worse yet, there was no effective “pushback” from Welker on McCarthy’s attempt to blame vulnerable asylum seekers for the political disorder and threats to our democracy that he and his righty GOP buddies helped sow!
Many thanks to Maria for setting the record straight and to the experts who were interviewed from her article!You actually did the “due diligence” that Welker and others often brush off when “doing immigration.”
Of course border security is important! A significant, achievable improvement would be to establish a fair, timely, functional asylum screening and adjudication system at ports of entry so that those seeking asylum will be motivated to use it (rather than attempting to “punish” and “deter” those who can’t use the current dysfunctional DHS/EOIR “system.”) That would give CBP a chance to concentrate on the real law enforcement challenge: identifying and stopping those who seek to harm the U.S. That’s going to take even better intelligence and more sophisticated efforts.
I also wouldn’t minimize that, as pointed out by the experts, CBP has been able to identify and deny entry to individuals on their list. That’s a sign of success, not failure!
To state the obvious, further cutting or restricting asylum (as many in the GOP disingenuously advocate) would only force even more of those seeking refuge into the hands of smugglers and push them into the dangerous lands between ports of entry. Misdirecting enforcement resources to fruitlessly and improperly trying to “deter” and “apprehend” those legitimately seeking refuge will only further dilute the attention that CBP can pay to any real dangers lurking at the border!
On October 25, after several weeks that saw dysfunction, chaos, humiliation, and anonymous threats to at least one lawmaker’s wife, Republicans finally elected a Speaker of the House to succeed Kevin McCarthy: Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana who has the distinction of being the least experienced Speaker in more than a century.
At the time of Johnson’s accession, a lot of Americans likely had no idea who he was; actual Republican senator Susan Collins, for one, told a reporter she didn’t know Johnson but planned to remedy that by googling him. And if you weren’t familiar with Johnson, you might’ve assumed that that was maybe even a good thing—that he was just a quiet Republican who hadn’t gotten wrapped up in the insanity plaguing the GOP over the last seven or so years. He didn’t have the name recognition of, say, Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz, but perhaps that simply spoke to the fact that he wasn’t leading a series of absurd hearings in an attempt to take down Joe Biden; or bragging about being so devoted to Donald Trump that he answered his phone calls during sex. Maybe, you might have thought, he wasn’t someone you’d have to constantly worry about re: undermining democracy or trying to take away people’s rights.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with Johnson, who may not have been well known prior to being given one of the most powerful jobs in government but is very much someone whose extremist views and actions should keep you up at night.
Herein, a running list of the absolute most WTF things the new Speaker has said and done on everything from the 2020 election to abortion to LGBTQ+ rights and more.
Abortion
Johnson is proudly antiabortion. When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, he called it “a great, joyous occasion,” later writing, “We will get the number of abortions [in Louisiana] to ZERO!!” As an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, he worked on efforts to shut down abortion clinics in the state. In Congress, he cosponsored legislation that would have banned abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy, i.e., a time when many people do not even know they’re pregnant. He’s beloved by the antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has given him an A+ rating. In 2015, he blamed school shootings on abortion, telling writer Irin Carmon, “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
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In some real Handmaid’s Tale shit, he declared during a House hearing that if women were forced to have more children, a.k.a. “able-bodied” workers, there would be more funding for Social Security and Medicare:
On at least one occasion, he declared that doctors who perform abortions should be sentenced to “hard labor”:
Oh, and like many antiabortion zealots, Johnson doesn’t seem to like contraception either.
LGBTQ+ rights
Hoo boy, where to start? Here are some things that Johnson has said about LGBTQ+ people, same-sex marriage, and gay sex between consenting adults:
“States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse, including concerns for public health…safety, morals, and the promotion of healthy marriages.”
“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone. Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
In his work as an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, Johnson also argued in court that same-sex couples should not receive domestic partnership benefits, and officially opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize gay sex between consenting adults. In the Louisiana House of Representatives, he proposed a bill that critics say would have made it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. (In response, he claimed he was not a “bigot,” adding: “I know that I brought this bill for the right reason.”) Meanwhile, in Congress, he introduced a national bill seemingly modeled after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law; voted against the 2022 bipartisan bill to codify gay marriage; and last year cosponsored a bill making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to anyone under 18, despite the American Academy of Pediatrics backing such care.
“I would be hard-pressed to think of a worse member to be elected Speaker of the House,” Allen Morris, policy director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, told The 19th.
Separation of church and state
If you guessed that Johnson doesn’t believe in it, you guessed right. In April—as in, just a few months before he was elected Speaker—the congressman railed against what he referred to as the “so-called separation of church and state,” saying, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”
In addition to blaming abortion for mass shootings, Johnson has also claimed that the teaching of evolution has played a part. In a 2016 sermon, he told the audience, “People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation—a couple generations now—of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”
In related news, a year prior, Johnson filed a lawsuit for an organization to receive tax subsidies to build a Noah’s Ark–focused theme park in Kentucky. “When the Ark Project sails, everybody will benefit,” he wrote in an op-ed, “even those who are stubbornly trying to sink it.” The Ark Encounter is operated by a fundamentalist Christian group that believes in creationism.
Climate
Where does Johnson, not exactly a man of science, land on global warming? Well, per The New York Times:
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the newly elected House Speaker, has questioned climate science, opposed clean energy, and received more campaign contributions from oil and gas companies than from any other industry last year. Even as other Republican lawmakers increasingly accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is dangerously heating the planet, the unanimous election of Mr. Johnson on Wednesday suggests that his views may not be out of step with the rest of his party.
A former constitutional lawyer, he does not sit on committees that decide the fate of major energy issues. But he has consistently voted against dozens of climate bills and amendments, opposing legislation that would require companies to disclose their risks from climate change and bills that would reduce leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He has voted for measures that would cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2017, Johnson opined: “The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
The 2020 election
By now you’ve likely heard that Johnson spent a significant amount of time and energy trying to overturn the 2020 election—an effort that included leading the amicus brief signed by more than 100 GOP lawmakers that asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Johnson also objected to the certification of Biden’s win on January 6; his arguments for doing so were adopted by a significant number of Republicans, leading the Times to call him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” One day prior, per Politico, he told colleagues, “This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually,” before pressing them to oppose the Electoral College results. Oh, and he was a Dominion truther:
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Where does Johnson stand on the 2020 election now? Before the floor vote, he refused to answer a reporter’s question about the matter, and after officially becoming Speaker, he did just the same:
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Go on over to the Levin Report at the above link to get all the gory (perhaps an understatement) details on America’s Retrograde Speaker!
MAGAMike often pretends as if the his interpretation of the Bible, not the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, were our founding document.
But, believe it or not, the founding fathers were actually “revolutionaries,” not “reactionaries,” who overthrew tradition to arrive at a different place. In the process they incorporated what in those days were some “enlightenment” ideals to replace “traditionalist” regressive principles like the “divine” right of kings and a purely hierarchical society where there was no escape from the status assigned at birth!
One can debate the exact religious beliefs of the founders. But, they certainly foresaw a non-static society, open to change, and tolerating more than one viewpoint. They weren’t theocrats, and they weren’t wedded to the view that society can’t change and evolve to adapt to new norms and practical realities.
One could read the teachings of Christ as promoting love, kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, perspective, and siding with society’s outcasts. MAGAMike and his zealots appear to have a quite different “take.” That’s their prerogative. But, they shouldn’t be allowed to impose their peculiar, wayward views on the rest of us.
Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected House speaker, has repeatedly flirted with what’s known as the “great replacement theory,” the idea that Democrats are scheming to supplant American voters with immigrants. The Louisiana Republican’s views show how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Republican Party at the highest levels of power.
“This is the plan of our friends on this side — to turn all the illegals into voters,” Johnson said at a congressional hearing in May 2022, gesturing at Democrats. “That’s why the border’s open.”
The “open borders” trope is a lie, and while a few municipalities allow voting for noncitizens in local elections, in no sense do national Democrats have any such “plan” for “all the illegals.” As far as I can determine, no House speaker in recent memory has been quite as reckless and incendiary with this kind of language.
Johnson employs it regularly. He reiterated the claim in an interview this year with the right-wing outlet Newsmax, accusing President Biden of “intentionally” encouraging undocumented migration to “turn all these illegals into voters for their side.” On numerous other occasions, he has made similar charges, even declaring that Democrats’ express goal is the “destruction of our country at the expense of our own people.”
On immigration, as well as on abortion and gay rights, Johnson’s elevation is a triumph for the far right. It has been widely noted that Johnson doesn’t come across as a MAGA bomb-thrower, despite his extreme views. That’s true on immigration, too: He voices high-minded platitudes about how providing asylum to the persecuted is a noble ideal, but he’s a big booster of the wildly radical House GOP border bill that would functionally gut asylum entirely.
The pro-immigrant group America’s Voice, which tracks lawmakers’ positions on the issue, has not documented any comparable rhetoric in Johnson’s predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. “Johnson has gone farther than most of his Republican colleagues in elevating alarmist and dangerous rhetoric,” says Vanessa Cardenas, the group’s executive director.
Other predecessors, such as John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan, were supporters — nominally, at least — of reforms that would legalize large numbers of undocumented immigrants, though they ultimately failed to deliver. Not even Newt Gingrich, the most extreme House speaker of the modern era, went as far as Johnson, says Nicole Hemmer, author of a history of conservatism in the 1990s.
“Even at his most anti-immigrant, he spoke largely in fiscal and law-and-order terms,” Hemmer told me, while eschewing the “eliminationist rhetoric” at the core of great replacement theory.
Yet little by little, those more extreme ideas have penetrated GOP leadership circles. In 2021, Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a top House Republican, charged Democrats with scheming to replace conservative voters with Democratic-leaning immigrants.
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Greg Sargent Opinion Writer Washington Post
Read Greg’s full column at the link.
Bigot, racist, theocrat, misogynist, liar, election denier, anti-democracy zealot — “MagaMike” is the disgraceful embodiment of today’s extremist GOP. Just when we think that the GOP can’t sink any lower, they surprise us!
MAGA Mike