"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.
“ABC’s Brian Ross says that Michael Flynn—the former national security adviser who pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—is prepared to testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump has directly denied having any knowledge that anyone involved with his campaign was in contact at any point with Russian officials.
Mike Pence would certainly be a truly horrible President. And, probably far more effective than Trump at pushing his far-right religious/social agenda down the throats of Americans.
But, at least, he 1) appears to be basically honest, although misguided; 2) is pretty predictable; 3) probably could conduct meetings with foreign leaders without putting his foot in his mouth and making America look totally foolish; 4) has never been accused of sexual misconduct; 5) isn’t known for tweeting; 6) although having retrograde views on race, gender, and immigration, does not pander quite as directly to the White Nationalist and extremist hate groups as does Trump (although he might well turn out to be a “willing enabler” of hate groups, I actually don’t see him retweeting bogus materials from known hate groups to intentionally divide America and the world); 7) generally speaks in complete, relatively coherent sentences; 8) doesn’t appear to have any immediate extended family or business ties who intend to corruptly profit from his Presidency.
It’s not a great prospect, but far better than what we have now. Just an indication of how low we have fallen as a nation.
Here is some more in depth analysis from ABC News of the Flynn plea and why despite the predictably pathetic attempts at deflection by the White House, this can’t be good news for Trump!
“San Francisco (CNN) A jury on Thursday found Jose Ines Garcia Zarate not guilty of homicide charges in the July 2015 death of Kate Steinle in San Francisco.
Jurors convicted the undocumented immigrant of being a felon in possession of a firearm after deliberating for more than 24 hours over six days.
The case became a political lightning rod in the debate over immigration policy. Proceedings lasted about one month.
Garcia Zarate, a Mexican citizen, is subject to immediate deportation.
He had been deported from the United States five times prior to Steinle’s death.
Garcia Zarate, 45, faced a charge of second-degree murder, but jurors also were allowed to consider first-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter convictions.
Garcia Zarate was accused of fatally shooting Steinle, 32, with a Sig Sauer .40-caliber handgun as she and her father walked on San Francisco’s Pier 14.
. . . .
Garcia Zarate’s undocumented status and San Francisco’s status as a “sanctuary city” prompted widespread debate over immigration policies.
Officials sued after Kate Steinle's death
Officials sued after Kate Steinle’s death 02:00
Garcia Zarate had been deported from the United States back to Mexico five times. Before the shooting, officials in San Francisco released him from custody instead of turning him over to immigration authorities.
Steinle’s death became a rallying cry for President Donald Trump and others, who have invoked the case in decrying sanctuary cities and promoting the construction of a border wall between the US and Mexico.
“This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately,” Trump said in July 2015. “This is an absolutely disgraceful situation and I am the only one that can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk about it. That won’t happen if I become President.”
Trump also mentioned Steinle in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention after winning the Republican presidential nomination.
In June, the House of Representatives passed “Kate’s Law,” a bill that would create harsher penalties for repeat illegal entry to the US. The bill would also expand US law to pressure local cities to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
This summer, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3004, dubbed “Kate’s Law” — a measure named for Steinle. The legislation would increase maximum prison penalties for immigrants caught repeatedly entering the US illegally.
The measure was introduced in the Senate but failed to get the 60 votes needed to pass.“
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has refused to say whether Donald Trump asked him to hinder the Russian investigation, a member of the House Intelligence Committee has claimed.
Representative Adam Schiff updated reporters after a closed-door meeting between Mr Sessions and the Intelligence Committee, of which Mr Schiff is a ranking member. The committee is one of several investigating possible Russian meddling in the US presidential election.
“I asked the attorney general whether he was ever instructed by the president to take any action that he believed would hinder the Russia investigation, and he declined to answer the question,” Mr Schiff told reporters after the meeting.
READ MORE
Sessions admits there is not enough evidence to investigate Clinton
Mr Sessions was an early supporter of Mr Trump, and a close adviser to his campaign. He was one of two people the President said he consulted about firing James Comey, the former FBI Director charged with overseeing the Russian investigation at the time.
In March, Mr Sessions recused himself from running the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. He had recently come under scrutiny for failing to disclose several meetings with Russian officials during the campaign. Mr Sessions maintains that nothing nefarious occurred during the meetings.”
***************************************
Read the complete article at the link.
Seems like a pretty simple yes or no question. But, no question or answer under oath is simple where Gonzo is involved. While Sessions disses lawyers representing vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers, he had the foresight to show up for this hearing with his own “mouthpiece” former DOJ politico Chuck Cooper in tow.
“Economists and tax experts are overwhelmingly skeptical that the bills in the House and Senate can generate meaningful job growth and economic expansion. Many view the legislation not as a product of genuine deliberation, but as a transfer of wealth to corporations and affluent individuals — both generous purveyors of campaign contributions. By 2027, people making $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion cut, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office.
“When you put all these pieces together, what you’re left with is we are squandering a giant sum of money,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a former chief of staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation who teaches law at the University of Southern California. “It’s not aimed at growth. It is not aimed at the middle class. It is at every turn carefully engineered to deliver a kiss to the donor class.”
In a recent University of Chicago survey of 38 prominent economistsacross the ideological spectrum, only one said the proposed tax cuts would yield substantial economic growth. Unanimously, the economists said the tax cuts would add to the long-term federal debt burden, now estimated at more than $20 trillion.
If the package does have a guiding philosophy, it is a return to trickle-down economics, an enduring story line in which the wealthy are supposed to spend and invest their tax breaks, creating jobs and commercial opportunities for everyone else.
As President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes in the 1980s, he argued that citizens, not bureaucrats, should decide how to spend their money. President George W. Bush bestowed enormous tax cuts on the affluent.
But the trickle-down story has yet to achieve its promised happy ending. Only the beginning reliably transpires, the part where wealthy people get relief. The spoils of resulting economic growth have largely been monopolized by those with the highest incomes. Pay for most American workers has been stagnant since the mid-1970s, after the rising costs of housing, health care and other basics are factored in.
Nonetheless, Republicans are staging a trickle-down revival.
“Either it’s a religious belief, a belief where no amount of evidence would change that, or they are using the argument cynically and they just want more money for themselves,” the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, said.
Mr. Stiglitz has long warned of the perils of growing inequality while deriding tax-cutting inclinations. Yet even those who have favored lighter tax burdens are critical of the current proposals.
In the late 1970s, Bruce Bartlett developed what would become the locus of the Reagan tax cuts while working for Representative Jack Kemp, a conservative Republican from New York. Those cuts helped cushion the pain from sharp increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, Mr. Bartlett maintains. But Reagan was lowering the highest tax rate on individuals from 70 percent down to 28 percent by 1986.
“What they have here is a big tax cut for the rich paid for with random increases in taxes for various constituencies,” Mr. Bartlett said. “It’s ridiculous. And it’s telling that they are ramming this through without any debate. All of the empirical evidence goes against the tax cut.”
The meat of the package is a permanent lowering of the corporate tax rate, to 20 percent from 35 percent, which business leaders have long wanted. Proponents assert that this would prompt multinational companies to expand operations in the United States.
“We’ve been bleeding corporate headquarters and production for a long time,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the American Action Forum, a nonprofit that promotes smaller government.
But recent history suggests that when corporations get tax relief, they find abundant uses for money that do not involve paying higher wages. They give dividends to shareholders and stock options to executives. They stash earnings in tax havens.
In 2004, Congress invited American corporations to bring home overseas earnings at a sharply reduced rate, pitching it as a means of bolstering investment. But the corporations spent as much as 90 percent of their windfall buying back their shares, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis research.
If Congress bestows fresh relief on major businesses, signs suggest a similar result. Many companies are enjoying record profits. Those in the Fortune 500 had $2.6 trillion salted away overseas as of last year.
“In our boardroom, the number-one thing we’re talking about is not taxes,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of Yelp, the online review platform. “Having a strong middle class out there spending money is what’s most important for our business.”
If the tax bill widens inequality, local communities will likely find themselves with fewer resources to aim at helping struggling people.
A key feature of the Senate bill is the elimination of a federal deduction for state and local taxes. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council have sought to end the deduction as a means of reining in government spending.
In high-tax states like California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — where electorates have historically shown a willingness to finance ample safety-net programs — the measure could change the political calculus. It would magnify the costs to taxpayers, pressuring states to stay lean or risk the wrath of voters.
Some see in this tilt a reworking of basic principles that have prevailed in American life for generations.
. . . .
Since the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security, unemployment benefits and other pillars of the safety net to combat the Great Depression, crises have been tempered by some measure of government support. Recent decades have brought cuts to social services, but the impact of the current bill could be especially consequential.
“This is a repudiation of the social contract that Franklin Roosevelt announced at the New Deal,” Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, said of trimming benefits for lower- and middle-income families to finance bigger rewards for the wealthy. Health coverage would shrink under the Republican plan while multimillion-dollar estates would not have to pay a penny in taxes.
The tax cut package, for instance, could trigger rules mandating cuts to Medicare, the government health care program for seniors, the Congressional Budget Office warned. Some 13 million people could lose health care via the elimination of a key plank of Obamacare. Insurance premiums are also expected to rise by 10 percent.
“This tax bill is a grand deception,” said Arnold Hiatt, the former chief executive of Stride Rite, which makes children’s shoes. “It hurts the most vulnerable, and hurts health care and education, which are essential for a healthy economy.”
The proposals break from seven decades’ worth of federal efforts to broaden access to higher education.
Since World War II, the guiding sense has been that “it is government’s responsibility to provide higher education for all those who can benefit from it,” said David Nasaw, a historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. That idea was behind the G.I. Bill, which helped generations of veterans pay for college and training.
The House bill includes provisions that would end the deductibility of tuition waivers for graduate students and repeal the deduction for interest paid on student loans. Both chambers’ bills would tax investment earnings from university endowments.
The endowment tax, in particular, threatens the ability of low-income students to pursue college and graduate studies, said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Proceeds from endowments subsidize students from lower-income families, while allowing students across the board to graduate with less debt.
“When the time of reckoning comes to fix huge deficits, social safety-net programs will be first on the chopping block,” Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said.
“It’s very far-reaching,” he added, “but there hasn’t been much of a debate.”
*****************************************
Read the complete, revealing but disturbing, article at the link. We’re ultimately going to look more like a (at least temporarily) well-to-do “Banana Republic” with the rich on top and in power; everyone else scrambling; lots of excess guns and ammo; and a lower standard of living for average folks to support the privileged power class. And, the GOP has managed to pull all of this off at the ballot box and without any true debate or public accounting, relying on the overall inability of the electorate to figure out that they are being fleeced by their own representatives. Pretty impressive!
“Republicans prepping letter to Ryan urging DACA fix
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
Dozens of House Republicans are preparing a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan urging a fix for young undocumented immigrants by the end of the year, adding pressure to high-stakes government funding discussions that could hinge on such a deal, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The letter, organized by Virginia Rep. Scott Taylor, already has signatories numbering in the 20s, according to a source familiar with the letter, and could reach into the 30s by the time it is sent. Taylor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, revealed the work on the letter in a pen-and-pad session with reporters Thursday on Capitol Hill.
Two other GOP sources confirmed the letter’s development to CNN.
Grisham characterized the letter as “telling Ryan, ‘You’ve got to fix this. You’ve got nine days. What is your plan, what is your path?'”
The “nine days” refers to the December 8 deadline to fund the government. Democrats have said if Republicans need their votes to pass a government funding bill, which they have in the past, then they need to resolve the situation for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Donald Trump is ending by the end of the year.
Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, have said any DACA deal should not be included in year-end spending legislation. They have not ruled out, though, the possibility of timing a vote on a DACA deal with one on spending legislation.
Grisham referenced a Democratic-led discharge petition to force a vote on one legislative proposal, the Dream Act, which two Republicans have signed and which needs only 22 more members to support it to force a vote on the floor, though the letter does not threaten that its signatories will back the bill, according to one of the sources.
The letter’s signatories include members who have long pushed for a DACA fix and some who have been less vocal.
According to one of the GOP sources, the letter tells Ryan that the group would like DACA resolved this year and warns that while they agree a legislative solution should include border security, it should not contain measures sought by members like Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte and the White House. Some of those measures include cuts or changes to overall legal immigration, mandatory workforce verification and hardline enforcement measures.
The letter has come together quickly, just this week, and is being teed up for release Friday.”
**********************************************
At least some modest reason for optimism on the “DACA Front.” It’s also refreshing and encouraging to learn that there are a significant number of responsible Republican legislators who don’t necessarily “by into” the false narrative being peddled by Trump, Goodlatte, Perdue, Cotton, Sessions, Miller and other GOP restrictionists about the need to “offset” the Dreamers or decrease (the worst possible course of action) legal immigration avenues into the United States.
“A Republican lawmaker on Tuesday joined congressional Democrats in saying he won’t support government funding at the end of the year without a resolution for young undocumented immigrants, adding heat to already tense negotiations.
Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo has long been pushing for a permanent version of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that President Donald Trump has decided to end, but Tuesday was the first time he committed to withhold a vote for funding in search of a deal.
“I’m announcing today that I will not support any appropriations bill that funds the government beyond December 31 unless we get this DACA issue resolved,” Curbelo said at a panel on immigration reform in Florida held by the pro-immigrant business group IMPAC Fund and the University of Miami.
Curbelo had stopped short of the threat just before leaving for Thanksgiving recess. Tuesday’s move puts him in the same camp as a growing number of Democrats, who have said they would not support any funding bill without a solution on DACA, which protects young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation.
. . . .
Curbelo said he has no requirements about what the deal might entail, other than a reasonable compromise, and said he would be supportive of either combining it with spending or a standalone bill, but that it would have to be done by the end of the year.
Republican leadership has been disinclined to combine the two efforts and has pointed to the March deadline set by Trump for permits to begin expiring. Republican senators said after meeting with Trump earlier this month that they had ruled out putting DACA on a funding bill.
“I don’t think it’s going to be resolved in the context of the year-end omnibus, I think it’s going to be handled separately,” Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CNN in the Capitol on Monday, but he didn’t say whether they could be accomplished at the same time.
“We’re not there yet. We’re still talking,” he said.
Curbelo also said during the event that the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus is near completion on its proposal for a compromise.
“What we’ve essentially done is taken the (Recognizing America’s Children Act, which Curbelo authored) and the Dream Act and married them and then taken some border security components and put them into a bill. That’s almost ready to go,” Curbelo said.
His bill has 35 co-sponsors in the House, all but one of which are Republicans. It has a Senate companion, as well.
Democratic Florida Reps. Frederica Wilson and Ted Deutch were also on the panel and supported Curbelo’s position on funding.”
*********************************
Read Tal’s complete article at the link.
Stay tuned! I’d say it’s still “too close to call.”
“Seven years later, after a series of TPS extensions had been granted, Duke announced that the conditions which were the basis for Haiti’s TPS designation no longer existed.
Among other things, the number of people displaced by the earthquake has decreased by 97 percent. Steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens, and Haiti is now able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens. Moreover, Haiti has demonstrated a commitment to preparing for the return of its nationals when the TPS designation is terminated.
The Haitian TPS aliens have little recourse if they disagree with Duke’s evaluation of conditions in Haiti. Section 244(b)(5)(A) prohibits judicial review of any determination with respect to the designation, termination, or extension of TPS.
Moreover, it is apparent that Congress did not want TPS aliens to remain in the U.S. when their status has been terminated. Section 244(h)prohibits the senate from considering legislation that would adjust the status of TPS aliens to that of a lawful temporary or permanent resident.
This prohibition can be waived or suspended but it requires a supermajority, “an affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members of the Senate duly chosen and sworn,” which is very difficult to obtain.
If Haitian TPS aliens want to remain lawfully in the U. S. when their status expires, they have to find a way to obtain lawful status that would not be related to their TPS status, or seek a new grant of TPS on the basis of current conditions in Haiti.”
**********************************
Go on over to The Hill at the link to read Nolan’s complete article.
Nobody outside of the Trump Administration and GOP restrictionists believes that the conditions in Haiti have significantly improved to the point where 60,000 individuals can be safely resettled.
Indeed, the Haitian Government itself refutes that idea:
“A visit to Haiti would offer you insight on the challenges that we continue to face,” Altidor wrote. The country, he said, has faced several devastating blows — including flooding from Hurricanes Irma and Maria — since the initial designation in 2010 after Haiti’s deadly earthquake.
“The detrimental impacts of the recent hurricanes have complicated our ability to recover from the 2010 earthquake,” he said. Cholera and Hurricane Matthew…have exacerbated the situation on the ground, resulting in major disruptions of living conditions in the short term.”
In any event, the idea that the Trump Administration would find itself “legally compelled” to terminate TPS is questionable. Certainly, given the Haitian Government’s position, it would have been possible for the Administration to find that conditions had not significantly improved. However, this wouldn’t have suited their political purposes or played to their anti-immigrant base.
Returning the Haitian TPS individuals at this point is little short of nonsensical. A responsible Administration would have proposed some type of long-term legislative solution that would allow the Haitians, who are indeed now part of and contributing to our society, particularly in Florida, to remain in some type of legal status, with or without a “path to citizenship.”
ALANNA DURKIN RICHER REPORTS FOR ASSOCIATED PRESS ON ABC NEWS:
“Dozens of Indonesians fighting deportation from the United States won another reprieve Monday when a judge ruled that a federal court has the authority to take up their case.
U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris in Boston rejected the government’s argument that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction in the matter and that immigration officials should be allowed to immediately deport the Indonesians.
An attorney for roughly 50 Christian Indonesians, who fear persecution if returned home, called the judge’s decision “enormously significant.”
“It reaffirms the central role of the federal courts in ensuring that there is a fair process when someone’s life may be at stake,” said Lee Gelernt, of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The court soundly rejected the government’s position that the federal courts lack authority to ensure that individuals have an opportunity to present their case before an immigration judge before they’re removed.”
The judge is blocking immigration officials from removing the Indonesians until the court considers their request for a preliminary injunction. She had initially put their deportation on hold until she could decide whether the court had authority to take up the matter.
The government already appealed the judge’s earlier decision to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and is likely to challenge her latest ruling.
Many of the Indonesians went to seacoast communities in New Hampshire, where they found jobs and raised families. In a deal brokered by Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, in 2009, they were allowed to stay as long as they regularly reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
But in recent months, they were told during their visits to the immigration office that they should buy plane tickets and prepare to leave the country. Some said they fear returning to Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country, due to an uptick in intolerance and violence against Christians and other minorities.
Shaheen said she’s “very encouraged” by the ruling.
“New Hampshire should continue to be a sanctuary to the Indonesian community that fled religious persecution,” Shaheen said in a statement. “Deporting these individuals will needlessly split families and communities, and put lives in danger. I’ll continue to make every effort to prevent these deportations so that the Indonesian community can continue to live peacefully in New Hampshire.”
A federal judge in Michigan ruled in July that a U.S. district court has jurisdiction in a similar immigration case. The government is challenging that ruling, which halted the deportation of 1,400 Iraqi nationals, including many Christians fearing persecution.”
Yet another setback for the Trumpsters in their quest to deny legal and human rights to the most vulnerable among us. This one also appears on its face to be politically motivated. When will Christian Evangelicals finally wake up to the threat that this Administration poses to everyone in America?
PROFESSOR CÉSAR CUAUHTÉMOC GARCÍA HERNÁNDEZ writes in the NY Times:
“At the door of the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse in Denver one Friday in April, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tackled a man to the ground. A chilling video shows the man — who, according to his lawyer, was there to deal with a traffic ticket — yelling “No!” “My hand!” and “Why?” in Spanish. Sheriff’s deputies order passers-by to stand back, and the violent arrest continues.
The next month, ICE agents returned and arrested another man. His lawyer can be heard in a video of the incident asking the agents if they had a warrant. One responds, “Yes, sir.” The lawyer asks, “Can I see it?”
The agent’s response: “No, sir.”
Both men, according to their lawyers, were taken to immigration detention centers.
This type of arrest is on the rise. Lawyers and judges in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington all reported in the first year of the Trump administration that immigration officials were breaking with tradition to descend upon their courthouses. Such arrests in New York have increased by 900 percent in 2017, according to the Immigrant Defense Project.
This is a deeply worrisome trend because arrests at courthouses don’t just derail the lives of the unsuspecting people who are detained, they threaten the very operation of our judicial system. Such arrests scare people away from the courts, keeping them, for example, from testifying at trials or seeking orders of protection. By using this tactic, the nation’s lead immigration law enforcement agency is undermining a pillar of our democracy.
. . . .
Courthouses have a special place in American society. It’s only in a court of law that we can be confident that disputes will be mediated deliberately, and according to a set of rules intended to ensure justice for all parties. As the Supreme Court declared in 1907: “The right to sue and defend in the courts is the alternative of force. In an organized society it is the right conservative of all other rights, and lies at the foundation of orderly government.”
The pursuit of justice depends on getting the parties in the same room. That’s why courts have the power to drag in unwilling participants with subpoenas. They can compel witnesses to testify or risk contempt charges. Courts rely on their hard-earned legitimacy as the rightful locations for resolution of disagreements.
Courthouse arrests by ICE deter not only undocumented immigrants but also people who are here legally but are nervous that they might have somehow compromised their status (or that an officer will think they have). That’s a nuance that is next to impossible for the average person to discern, and those complicated legal questions are exactly what immigration judges spend a lot of energy trying to answer.
. . . .
The harm this causes is bigger than the people whom ICE arrests. United States citizens are not immune to the impact of ICE activity in courthouses. All of us — including those of us who could easily prove our immigration status — depend on courts to do their job, and all of us suffer if the fear of ICE keeps people away.
ICE understands its actions can paralyze important institutions. Longstanding ICE policy discourages questioning or arresting people in schools and churches. It is time to add courthouses to that list. But top administration officials have vigorously defended courthouse arrests.
With no change to federal policy in sight, it is up to cities and states to push back. Elected officials must take seriously their legal obligation to keep courthouses accessible. In addition, the cities and states that own and operate most courthouses and ensure that no one uses their courts in a way that halts judicial business — protesters can’t block the doorway, bail bondsmen aren’t allowed to set up shop in the lobby — should do the same here for immigration agents.
ICE should no longer get free rein to tackle, handcuff and haul away immigrants, sending a message to others that they should think twice before trusting in the courts.
DHS: “Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke announced her decision to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Haiti with a delayed effective date of 18 months to allow for an orderly transition before the designation terminates on July 22, 2019. This decision follows then-Secretary Kelly’s announcement in May 2017 that Haiti had made considerable progress, and that the country’s designation will likely not be extended past six months.”
ImmProf: “A federal judge has permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to cut funding from “sanctuary cities,” cities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration enforcement authorities. U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick issued the ruling [] in lawsuits brought by two California counties, San Francisco and Santa Clara. Judge Orrick said Trump cannot set new conditions on spending approved by Congress. The ruling is here. Download Summary-Judgment”
CNN: “Durbin and Graham remained flexible as to whether the immigration deal would decide their votes. If Congress is unable to pass a spending bill by midnight on December 8, the government will shut down.”
WaPo: “Across agencies and programs, federal officials are wielding executive authority to assemble a bureaucratic wall that could be more effective than any concrete and metal one.”
Reuters: “Dozens of police departments in the United States have been granted new powers, or are seeking them, to check the immigration status of people they arrest, aiding President Donald Trump’s broad crackdown on people living in the country illegally.”
“For more than five hours, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sat in a hearing room on Capitol Hill this month, fending off inquiries on Washington’s two favorite topics: President Trump and Russia.
But legislators spent little time asking Sessions about the dramatic and controversial changes in policy he has made since taking over the top law enforcement job in the United States nine months ago.
From his crackdown on illegal immigration to his reversal of Obama administration policies on criminal justice and policing, Sessions is methodically reshaping the Justice Department to reflect his nationalist ideology and hard-line views — moves drawing comparatively less public scrutiny than the ongoing investigations into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin.
Sessions has implemented a new charging and sentencing policy that calls for prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible, even if that might meanminority defendants face stiff, mandatory minimum penalties. He has defended the president’s travel ban and tried to strip funding from cities with policies he considers too friendly toward undocumented immigrants.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Nov. 14. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Sessions has even adjusted the department’s legal stances in cases involving voting rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in a way that advocates warn might disenfranchise poor minorities and give certain religious people a license to discriminate.
Supporters and critics say the attorney general has been among the most effective of the Cabinet secretaries — implementing Trump’s conservative policy agenda even as the president publicly and privately toys with firing him over his decision to recuse himself from the Russia case.
. . . .
In meetings with top Justice Department officials about terrorist suspects, Sessions often has a particular question: Where is the person from? When officials tell him a suspect was born and lives in the United States, he typically has a follow-up: To what country does his family trace its lineage?
While there are reasons to want to know that information, some officials familiar with the inquiries said the questions struck them as revealing that Sessions harbors an innate suspicion about people from certain ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Sarah Isgur Flores, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in a statement, “The Attorney General asks lots of relevant questions in these classified briefings.”
Sessions, unlike past attorneys general, has been especially aggressive on immigration. He served as the public face of the administration’s rolling back of a program that granted a reprieve from deportation to people who had come here without documentation as children, and he directed federal prosecutors to make illegal-immigration cases a higher priority. The attorney general has long held the view that the United States should even reduce the number of those immigrating here legally.
In an interview with Breitbart News in 2015, then-Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke favorably of a 1924 law that excluded all immigrants from Asia and set strict caps on others.
“When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy and it slowed down immigration significantly,” Sessions said. “We then assimilated through 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America.”
Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in the Obama administration who now works as chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Sessions seems to harbor an “unwillingness to recognize the history of this country is rooted in immigration.”
“On issue after issue, it’s very easy to see what his worldview is of what this country is and who belongs in this country,” she said, adding that his view is “distinctly anti-immigrant.”
Those on the other side of the aisle, however, say they welcome the changes Sessions has made at the Justice Department.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for moderating levels of immigration, said she would give the attorney general an “A-plus” for his work in the area, especially for his crackdown on “sanctuary cities,” his push to hire more immigration judges and his focus on the MS-13 gang.
“He was able to hit the ground running because he has so much expertise already in immigration enforcement and related public safety issues and the constitutional issues, so he’s accomplished a lot in a very short time,” Vaughan said.”
****************************************
Read the compete article, which deals with much more than immigration, at the link.
Immigrants, refugees, immigration advocates, and career civil servants involved in immigration at the DOJ seems to be “star-crossed.” After decades of relative indifference to the importance of immigration, an Attorney General finally shows up who makes it his highest priority.
Only problem is that he’s a committed xenophobe and White Nationalist whose largely false and exaggerated narrative on immigration comes right from the alt-right restrictionist playbook and harks back to the Jim Crow era of the American South — only this time with Hispanics and Muslims as the primary targets.
In any “normal” American business, obsession with tracing back lineage of someone’s family would be prima facie evidence of prohibited “national origins discrimination.” But, for Gonzo, it’s just another day at the office.
Notwithstanding his less than stellar performances before Congress and that he’s fallen off Trump’s “A-Team” (notwithstanding probably doing more to deconstruct the Constitution and “Good Government” than any other cabinet officer), he’s unlikely to be going anywhere soon. So the damage will continue to add up for the foreseeable future. It’s not like Senator Liz Warren and others didn’t try to warn America about this dude!
Meanwhile, perhaps not to be outdone, over at the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is proceeding to deconstruct the Career Foreign Service and reduce the Stated Department and our Diplomatic Corps to “administrative roadkill.” You can read about that debacle in this NY Times article:
“It has been a long and unproductive year for President Trump. Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act cratered. The wall on the U.S.-Mexico border hasn’t been built or even funded. Tax reform, though moving forward, is still well short of a Rose Garden signing ceremony. Despite unified Republican control of government, Trump’s got little to show for it.
Yet it has also been a long and quite productive year for the president. He has dramatically changed the direction of federal policy toward the environment, the energy industries, immigration, education, civil rights, trade and the federal workforce, and he is rapidly remaking the federal court system. What President Barack Obama started in many of these areas, Trump has started to reverse.
The president’s tweets draw outsize attention to his grievances and his petty feuds. The absence of notable legislative successes focuses criticism on his style of leadership. Those realities overshadow what he has done and is doing unilaterally, to the extent of his executive powers. In other ways, his presidency seems unique. In the arena of executive action, he is pursuing a model established by his recent past predecessors, with worrisome consequences to constitutional governance.
That’s the conclusion of an essay in the most recent issue of the Forum, a nonpartisan journal of ideas and political analysis. Sidney M. Milkis and Nicholas Jacobs, both of the University of Virginia, argue that Trump’s deployment of what they call “executive-centered partisanship” is both in keeping with the modern presidency and a potentially damaging shift in our politics.
The authors take note of Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, where he said that he, an outsider, knew better than anyone how to solve the problems of broken government. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said. “Which is why I alone can fix it.”
The first year of his presidency appears to make a mockery of that statement, given the problems he’s had in Congress and the fact that his approval ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in his term as far back as there was polling.
Yet, as the authors note, “Often overlooked among the disappointments and recriminations of Trump’s frenzied beginning is his administration’s aggressive and deliberate assault on the Liberal state. . . . Since day one, Trump has forcefully — and sometimes successfully — taken aim at the programmatic achievements of his predecessor.”
*************************************************
Read the complete article at the link.
Immigration is one of the key areas in which Trump has been able to change the landscape and undo much of Obama’s legacy without any significant legislative changes. And, there is no obvious reason why he can’t keep it up. Unlike other areas, Trump has his own “captive” Federal Immigration Judiciary, run by Jeff Sessions. And, Congress has proved unwilling, unable, or both to wade into significant immigration legislation for more than a decade.
Expedited Removal is Not the Answer to the Backlog
With the immigration court backlog at over 600,000 cases and rising, immigration law commentator (and fellow BIA alum) Nolan Rappaport recently suggested that the present administration might view the increased use of expedited removal as “the only viable alternative” to shrink the swelling tide of cases. My fellow blogger Paul Schmidt has opposed such approach; I wish to join him in adding my arguments as to why the expansion of expedited removal would be unacceptable.
If the criminal court system were to be flooded to the breaking point, the solution could not be to let supervisory police officers decide which defendants might have a reasonable enough chance of being found innocent and get to go to court, and just find the rest guilty without the right to a trial. However, that is pretty much the premise of expedited removal. An overwhelming volume of cases cannot be used to justify the stripping away of due process protections.
Our immigration courts have evolved significantly over the decades. Deportation hearings were once conducted by “special inquiry officers,” who were attorneys working for the INS. Beginning in 1973, immigration judges began presiding over hearings. In 1983, those judges were separated from the INS into a separate adjudicatory agency, EOIR. In 2002, INS was moved into three components within the newly-created DHS, while EOIR remained in the Department of Justice. The strong motive behind these developments was that the agency charged with enforcement was not suited to serve as a neutral factfinder and decision maker. Increasing the scale of expedited removal would undo the above progress and return decision-making into the hands of the enforcement branch – the legal equivalent of having the fox guard the hen house.
Immigration judges render decisions independently, with no pressure or influence from their higher-ups. This is not true of asylum officers. I had one case years ago in which the asylum officer’s supervisor so adamantly opposed the grant of asylum that the officer had to wait until the supervisor went on vacation, and then had the acting supervisor sign off approving the grant. I have also heard of an asylum office director pressuring the staff to grant fewer cases in order to bring the office’s grant rate closer to the lower grant rate of another asylum office. Furthermore, to the extent that those seeking expedited removal are able to obtain counsel in the short time frame provided (and while detained, sometimes in remote settings), asylum officers allow attorneys a greatly reduced role in the process. In immigration court, the attorney makes legal arguments and objections, questions the respondent, and lays the foundation for documents to be offered into evidence. Even in full asylum office interviews, attorneys are relegated to sitting in the back row and taking notes. As the government’s own statistics show that represented asylum seekers are twice as likely to be granted relief, the asylum office’s minimizing of the attorney’s role clearly lessens the asylum seeker’s chance of success.
Expedited removal has really never worked well. In opposing its implementation in the mid-1990s, myself and other advocates argued that the legal threshold – the newly-created “credible fear” standard – was problematic. When the 1980 Refugee Act adopted the legal standard of “well-founded fear” for asylum claims, INS interpreted the term to mean “more likely than not;” it took seven years of litigation and a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to correctly define the standard as requiring only a 10 percent chance of persecution. But expedited removal asked us to trust the same INS to properly interpret the vague new “credible fear” standard, and this time without the right to seek judicial review. Not surprisingly, so many mistakes were made after the standard was implemented that by mid-1997, the then INS director of asylum instructed asylum officers to simply find all applicants professing a fear of persecution to have met the credible fear standard. Those who claimed no fear in their countries were summarily removed; INS claimed that the majority of arrivees were in this latter group.
But where they really? A person arriving in this country only gets a credible fear interview if they indicate to the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer who first encounters them that they fear return to their country. Two studies conducted over a decade apart by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government entity, found serious problems with the screening process of those arriving but not found admissible to the U.S. According to USCIRF, some arrivees were never asked whether they feared return; others who were asked and responded in the affirmative had “no” recorded in their statements, which were often not read back to them. The USCIRF report cited instances in which those wishing to seek asylum were pressured into signing inaccurate statements, or even into retracting their fear claims and withdrawing their applications for admission.
The answer to the immigration court backlog is clearly not to subject more people to the flawed and biased expedited removal system in lieu of removal hearings. To my knowledge, every other high volume court employs prosecutorial discretion and stipulated settlements to lessen the case load. Plea bargains are employed in everything from murder to traffic court cases. Under the Obama administration, prosecutorial discretion was employed in immigration court and significantly helped prosecutors and judges deal with the caseload. For unknown reasons, the present administration has ended this useful practice. DHS attorneys are also being instructed to oppose requests to terminate proceedings made by those wishing to leave the U.S. to attend immigrant visas abroad. These intending immigrants want to leave the country, and will only be allowed to return legally if they are found by a U.S. consular officer to be qualified and admissible to this country; under the prior administration, termination under these circumstances was readily agreed to by DHS. At the same time DHS is forcing so many immigrants to unnecessarily remain in removal proceedings, the agency will not put into proceedings those who want to be there in order to apply for certain types of relief that may only be granted by an immigration judge, such as cancellation of removal. Preventing immigrants from obtaining legal status to which they might be entitled seems suspiciously consistent with the present administration’s desire to stem the pace of naturalization in order to preserve the voting bloc that brought them to office last year.
Copyright 2017 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.
“The Russia investigation may be undercutting Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ credibility, but it has not undermined his efforts to take the U.S. Justice Department back in time.
The time Sessions wants to go back to features an unforgiving system of mass incarceration that disproportionately targets people of color in a legal structure too often stacked against them.
To do this, the attorney general has issued a slew of policy rollbacks — unfortunate for a Justice Department that was only incrementally making progress toward equal justice under President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
In this sense, Sessions’ Justice Department might be the most effective unit of the Trump administration. If Trumpism’s goal is, at least in, part to destroy the progress achieved under the Obama administration, Sessions’ scorecard so far outstrips his GOP colleagues in the Cabinet and former colleagues in the Senate.
In March, for example, the nation’s top law enforcement officer visited St. Louis, next-door to Ferguson, ground zero for the Black Lives Matter movement. Sessions was in St. Louis talking about crime initiatives but also seeming to criticize one of the most useful tools for documenting police brutality: civilian cell phone videos. The choice of venue could not have been a coincidence. By focusing on “targeted police killings,” he deflected attention from the challenges now confronting law enforcement.
In fact, Sessions has had little to say on how the Justice Department might address matters of police brutality, much less on the matter of Black Lives Mattering. Instead, he has mostly showcased President Donald Trump’s belief that strong policing and incarceration are key to maintaining law and civil order.
. . . .
It is as if Sessions’ Justice Department is operating on a set of alternative facts. Because the statistics are well known: Whites and blacks use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates, and African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population. Yet law enforcement records are remarkably different for each demographic. According to Human Rights Watch: “Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession. In 2014, Black adults accounted for just 14 percent of those who used drugs in the previous year but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession.” In many states, a felony conviction also means losing the right to vote.
It is as if Sessions’ Justice Department is operating on a set of alternative facts.
Sessions looks eager to re-open the “war on drugs” — or, more appropriately, the war on poor people who use drugs. No available metric on this decades-long war shows any significant success in limiting access to drugs in the United States or in reducing addiction to controlled substances.
What the “war on drugs” has been good at is: stigmatizing poor people afflicted with the disease of addiction; profiling black and brown folks and arresting them at rates exponentially greater than their white counterparts; and creating revenue streams for the Prison Industrial Complex.
. . . .
Sessions’ success will be key if Trump wants to make good on his law-and-order promises.
Sadly, it is working. The Justice Department is slowly transforming into an injustice department right before our eyes.
Mass incarceration, its impact on families and communities and the often racially biased ways in which its policies operate is still one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time. It’s a shame that, in the era of Trump, we are unable to effectively address the challenges we face.
James Braxton Peterson is the author of three books, including “Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners.”
****************************
Read Peterson’s full article at the link.
Peterson doesn’t even get into Gonzo’s brazen attacks on justice for Latinos, immigrants, Dreamers, refugees, LGBTQ individuals, so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” lawyers, reporters, Federal Judges, critics of the Administration, forensic science, private property, or users of legalized marijuana. And, he only mentions in passing Gonzo’s disingenuous statements on Russia and his lackadaisical handling of the real threats Russia poses to our national security. Grim as Peterson’s article is, it actually substantially understates the true carnage that Gonzo is inflicting on our Constitution and our system of justice. It could turn out to be irreparable!
“One thing you can count on in 21st-century U.S. politics is that Republicans will lie about taxes. They did it under George W. Bush, they did it under Barack Obama and they’re still doing it under Donald Trump.
Yet this time is different. It’s not just that the lies have gotten even more brazen. There’s now a combination of incoherence and rage that we, or at least I, haven’t seen before. These days, they can’t even seem to get their fake story straight — and they literally start yelling obscenities when someone tries to point out the facts.
G.O.P. lies about taxes generally involve two issues: who is hurt or helped by tax changes, and what these changes will do to the budget.
Thus, when George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, he and his party repeatedly insisted that the tax cuts were primarily for the middle class. In fact, while there were some middle-class tax breaks in the package, such as an increase in the child tax credit, these were dwarfed by cuts in tax rates on high incomes, reduced taxes on dividends and repeal of the estate tax. Over all, the richest 1 percent saw a much larger increase in after-tax income than middle-class families did.
At the same time, the Bush administration used a series of gimmicks to hide the true fiscal cost of the plan, such as delaying the implementation of some tax cuts while pretending that others would expire when the actual intention was to make them permanent.
When Obama took office, these tricks were simply flipped on their head. Republicans insisted, falsely, that Obama had imposed a “massive tax increase” on the middle class; in fact, for the most part he actually cut middle-class taxes. Meanwhile, they insisted that the surge in the budget deficit caused by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was permanent, and ridiculed the Obama administration’s claims that deficits would fall sharply once crisis spending ended and tax receipts recovered; in fact, that’s exactly what happened.
So what’s different this time? As in the Bush years, Republicans are claiming to be offering a middle-class tax cut. But where Bush truly was cutting taxes on the middle class, just much less than he was on the wealthy, current Republican plans would raise those taxes on many lower- and middle-income families, even as they go down for the wealthy. (Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, claims that only “million-dollar earners”would see tax increases. This is the opposite of the truth.
Oh, and a memo to journalists: If you play it safe by reporting this as “Democrats say” that middle-class taxes will go up, you’re misleading your readers: Those estimates come from the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s own nonpartisan scorekeeper.
How can Republicans like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, pretend to be helping the middle class? It depends crucially on a new kind of budget gimmick: Both the House and Senate tax-cut bills do contain some middle-class tax breaks — but only for the first few years. Then they expire.
Take one of Ryan’s favorite examples, a family with two children and earning $59,000 a year. That family would indeed get a tax break next year. But the break would rapidly dwindle and turn into a tax increase by 2024.
The Republican response is to claim that these tax breaks wouldn’t really expire, that Congress would eventually renew them. That’s quite doubtful — and even if true, it means that the tax plans would add much more to the national debt than the G.O.P. admits. Which brings me to the whole budget deficit issue.
Not long ago, leading Republicans claimed to be deeply concerned about budget deficits. Only fools and centrists took the Republicans seriously. Still, the abrupt shift to nonchalance about adding trillions to the debt in order to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy is causing a bit of whiplash even among cynics. How do they justify the shift?
Well, they don’t seem to have settled on a story. Mnuchin keeps asserting that tax cuts will pay for themselves, going so far as to claim (falsely) that Treasury has released a study showing this. Mick Mulvaney, the budget director, cheerfully acknowledges that they’re using gimmicks to pass a bill that permanently cuts taxes on corporations, and not to worry. Whatever works, it seems.
So we’re really looking at an unprecedented level of dishonesty here. But what happens when you try to explain what’s going on? When Senator Sherrod Brown tried to point out, correctly, that the Senate G.O.P.’s tax bill heavily favors the rich, Senator Orrin Hatch exploded, calling it “bull crap” and asserting that he grew up poor (which is relevant why, exactly?).
Sorry, but this isn’t the righteous anger of a man falsely accused of wrongdoing. It’s the rage con men always exhibit when caught out in their con.
But what’s the con about? The very incoherence of the arguments Republicans are making for their plans shows that it’s not about helping the economy, let alone ordinary families. It really is about making the rich richer, at everyone else’s expense. If this be bull crap, make the most of it.”
***********************************************
As usual, the GOP counts heavily on voters being too biased or gullible to figure out that they are being fleeced. And, to date, they have been correct. So, why stop a “winning strategy” even if it is based on lies, demonstrably bogus assumptions, and other “cons?”