"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Leon Krauze in the WashPost tells us what’s really happening at the border. WARNING: It has little to do with the myths and false narratives being peddled by the GOP, the Administration, and the media.
The current emergency at the border has found the U. S. media at its most solipsistic. Coverage seems more focused on whether the emergency should be called “a crisis” (it should) and what the political fallout for the Biden administration will be. With few exceptions — like the remarkable work of MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff or Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez — many news outlets seem utterly uninterested in the stories of the migrants themselves.
This is wrong because it fails to provide one crucial piece of the puzzle: the very concrete context of human suffering.
. . . .
This by no means excuses the stories of anguish and confinement that have emerged over the last few weeks from within the facilities set up by the Biden administration to deal with the number of young migrants crossing the border, nor does it absolve the president himself from delivering on his promise of a humane immigration system, diametrically opposed to Trump’s cruel policies, designed in collaboration with unapologetic racist xenophobes like Stephen Miller.
The Biden administration can and should do better. But the current debate cannot ignore the very concrete despair facing thousands of immigrant families who, under the direct threat of violence or abuse, chose to push their young children to the United States, in search of safety.
If the alternative was famine, gang violence, kidnapping, rape or sexual slavery, wouldn’t you bet it all on the journey north? If more people understood this, the political debate and the coverage surrounding the crisis would be much more empathetic and we would get closer at delivering concrete, humane solutions.
Now, let’s hear more “simple truth” from Suzanne Gamboa over at NBC News:
Suzanne Gamboa, Political Editor, NBCLatino, NBC NewsDate: October 21, 2013 Place: Washington, DC Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS Creative Commons License
America’s immigration impasse — an endless loop across different administrations — is largely self-inflicted, because Congress has repeatedly failed to acknowledge one simple thing: Immigration happens.
Accordingly, immigration laws must be continually adjusted, reformed and revised, experts say.
“People will always want to come to the U.S., and the U.S. will always need people,” said former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was a top immigration adviser to President George W. Bush.
Until there is a system that allows enough legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs, there will be illegal immigration, Gutierrez said.
“That’s just part of how our economy is set up. It’s part of demographics,” Gutierrez said. “Our birthrate is not high enough to be able to fill the needs of our economy.”
The coronavirus pandemic reinforced the importance of immigrant labor to the American economy, including labor by the undocumented.
All of those people and many other immigrants, including young immigrants — often called “Dreamers” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — will play a key role in helping the economy recover from its pandemic bust.
But immigration requires periodic calibration, and the economics and the changing patterns are lost in the politics.
“People are going to move — as they are all around the world — where they think they can find places to better feed their children. That’s the bottom line, and that’s the history of migration to the United States,” said Luis Fraga, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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Everyone should read the rest of the stories at the above link.
Degrading Ourselves As A Nation Won’t Stop Human Migration
By Judge (Ret) Paul Wickham Schmidt
“Courtside” Exclusive
March 26, 2021
Notwithstanding the endlessly disingenuous and self-centered alarmist rhetoric coming from all directions on the border mess, often mindlessly regurgitated by the press (not just Fox News), the real “crisis” involves the human lives at stake and the unnecessary human misery we are causing by failing to establish, professionally staff, and fairly and competently operate the legal refugee and particularly asylum systems required by law. This “due process crisis” actually has devastating and debilitating practical effects, starting with the dysfunctional immigration, refugee, and asylum system and the beyond dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Heck, we don’t even pretend to comply with Constitutionally-required due process of law for asylum seekers who present themselves to us seeking life-saving refuge. Most of those who show up at legally-established border ports are told that the border is “closed” and that there is no way for them to apply. OK, so they attempt to cross between ports and immediately present themselves to the Border Patrol. But, they also are told there is no way to apply and are orbited back to some of the most dangerous countries in the world without any process whatsoever, let alone due process of law. Who are we kidding with all our dishonest pontificating about “the rule of law?”
It’s a strange way to implement the statutory command that any foreign national “irrespective of . . . status, may apply for asylum,” along with a constitutional guarantee that “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Gee, you don’t even need one of those fancy Ivy League law degrees to understand that language. You just have to be able to read, comprehend, and act.
What you do have to do to get where we are today is to view asylum seekers and other migrants (predominantly people of color) as less than human — “non-persons” in a constitutional sense. It’s what some of us call “Dred Scottification of the other” and it has accelerated over the past four years — not just in immigration.
The whole idea of a “court system” being run by the Executive who also is the chief of enforcement is beyond constitutionally preposterous. It’s a “negative tribute” to the Supremes and other Article III life-tenured judges who have grown so distant from their own humanity and immigration stories as to become willfully blind to the ongoing farce that constitutes “justice” and “due process of law” for asylum seekers and other immigrants in the U.S.
Today’s nearly non-existent “asylum system” is a deadly and illegal “catch 22,” with the Supremes sitting in their marble palace refusing to do the primary task that justifies their continued existence: enforce the Constitution against Government misbehavior and in favor of the “little guys” and the “vulnerable.” No thanks, not up to the job!
The real tragedy is that there are plenty of folks out here with the knowledge, integrity, courage, and ability to establish a legal system that would actually comply with out laws, our Constitution, and further offer the hope of constructively addressing some problems before refugees arrive at our borders. But, they remain “benched,” even by the Biden Team. So the “good guys”are going to keep attacking the corrupt and broken system in court and at the polls for as long as it takes to get some course correction — years, decades, centuries — ask most African Americans how long it takes to achieve the true justice that America promises to all, but historically has only delivered to some.
In the long run, a fair system would undoubtedly accept many more legal refugees and asylum seekers. That’s what happens in refugee situations — it’s the core of what we call “forced migration” — when you sign on to international conventions intended to prevent the “next holocaust,” and you fairly and humanely apply the rules meant to protect refugees and those who face torture. And, as they have in the past, the overwhelming number of refugees and asylees, like the overwhelming majority of immigrants (essentially all of us, except Native Americans) will adapt, fit in, and contribute to the health, wealth, and future of our nation. They will change, but so will we — ultimately for the better!
Sure, America wouldn’t be as white, “Christian” (to the extent that adherence to a nominal Christian denomination, rather than actually performing Christ’s extremely difficult, self-sacrificing, risky, compassionate mission, defines Christianity), and nominally heterosexual as it was when White Nationalist myths and whitewashed history ruled the roost. But, it would be a better nation — one that actually has a chance of prospering, realizing the full potential of all its residents, and leading the world in the 21st century. A nation that could devote more human, natural, and monetary resources to building and exporting greatness, rather than to an endless stream of cruel, inhuman, stupid, and wasteful enforcement and deterrence gimmicks.
Bottom line, folks are going to come to America, as they have throughout history. Some will stay, some won’t. But, come they will, unless and until those like Trump and the GOP create such a mess that our own people start fleeing to foreign shores. Immigration, regardless of status, is a sign of strength. Xenophobia a sign of fatal weakness.
Our real choice isn’t whether we want to “close” borders, bar refugees, and abuse children as the Cottons, Cruzes, Millers, and Hawleys advocate. It’s whether we create a robust, orderly, rational legal system to screen, regulate, and distribute the inevitable flow or whether, as we have for the past decades, we force millions to reside and work underground — part of an “extralegal” or “black market” system that pols of both parties and those who profit from that underground system have created.
Sprawling mismanaged enforcement bureaucracies, dysfunctional “courts,” armies of publicly-paid lawyers defending the indefensible, for-profit civil prisons, big agriculture, hospitality giants, loads of upwardly mobile professionals who need child care to pursue careers, communities that live off of marketing ethnic culture, meat packing conglomerates, architects and construction firms who are “building America,” even news media fixated on hyping the problem rather than fixing it (see, e.g., yesterday’s Biden press conference), the list of those who profit from a talented, hard working, reliable, loyal, yet politically and socially disenfranchised, workforce is endless.
Even the GOP’s “Cotton-Cruz crowd” benefits from having an imaginary enemy to rant and rail and gin up hate against — safe in the knowledge that the tanking of our economy, upheaval of society, and possible threat to their privilege that would result from realizing their disingenuous call to boot the entire undocumented population will never happen. Their kids and grandkids can continue to reap the privilege that comes from exploiting an essential, yet politically neutered, workforce. It’s really more about institutionalizing racism to maintain economic and political power over the eventual non-white majority that drives their bogus and ugly narratives.
We can degrade ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽🧑🏽⚖️Due Process Forever! It’s a vision based on a written promise, not a “pipe dream!”
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Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.
No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.
If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.
All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.
Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.
That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).
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Read the rest of Rich’s article at the link.
“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!
Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .
But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.
I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”
Catherine Rampell Opinion Columnist Washington Post
Catherine writes in the Washington Post:
You’ve heard of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, Poverty, even Women. Well, welcome to the War on Children.
It’s being waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing public officials, regardless of any claimed “family values.”
For evidence, look no further than the report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’s own inspector general. It details the trauma suffered by immigrant children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s evil “zero tolerance” policy.
Thousands of children were placed in overcrowded centers ill-equipped to provide care for them physically or psychologically. Visits to 45 centers around the country resulted in accounts of children who cried inconsolably; who were drugged; who were promised family reunifications that never came; whose severe emotional distress manifested in phantom chest pains, with complaints that “every heartbeat hurts”; who thought their parents had abandoned them or had been murdered.
Such state-sanctioned child abuse was designed to serve as a “deterrent” for asylum-seeking families, as then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other administration officials made clear.
Of course, they failed to recognize just how horrific are the conditions these asylum-seeking children are fleeing — conditions that further decreased HHS’s ability to adequately care for them.
“Staff in multiple facilities reported cases of children who had been kidnapped or raped” back in their home countries, the IG report states. Other children witnessed family members raped or murdered.
But hey, Trump believes these kiddos must be punished further for the crime of seeking refuge — a.k.a., the “invasion” of America.
Despite this and other abundant evidence that government facilities are not able to care for children for extended periods, last month, the administration also announced a new policy that would allow it to keep children (along with their families) in jail-like conditions for longer periods of time.
This is hardly the only way the administration has knowingly enacted policies that harm children.
In August, it finalized a rule that would make it more difficult for immigrants to receive green cards if they have used certain safety-net services they’re legally entitled to — or if government officials suspect they might ever use such services. Confusion and fear about the policy and whom it affects abound. This has already created a “chilling effect” for usage of social services, with immigrant parents disenrolling even their U.S.-citizen children just to be safe.
Last fall, for instance, I interviewed a green-card-holding mother who decided not to enroll her underweight newborn in a program that would have provided free formula (even though the program in question was not mentioned in the rule, and the baby is a U.S. citizen). Huge recent declines in children’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment are also believed to be at least partly a result of fears about this policy change.
If Your Dog Does This, It Could Be Them Signaling A Warning
And lest you think only immigrant or brown children are being targeted in this war: U.S. servicemembers’ children, of all sorts of backgrounds, are being hurt, too.
The Trump administration is siphoning billions from various defense projects to fund border wall construction, despite promises that Mexico would pay for it. This might sound unlikely to affect kids, but somehow the Trump administration found a way. Among the projects losing funds are schools for the children of U.S. servicemembers based in Kentucky, Germany and Japan, and a child-care center at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
Trump’s proposed federal budgets have likewise axed funding for other programs that serve children, such as subsidized school meals and Medicaid. Indeed, both federal and state GOP officials more broadly are still working to kill the Medicaid expansion, as well as other Affordable Care Act provisions that benefit kids.
The GOP has likewise ignored the pleas of children who want their lives protected from gun violence, or who want their futures protected from a warming planet.
A year ago, I offered a suggestion : that Democrats make children the theme of their midterm campaign. They mostly ignored me and still did okay. Nonetheless, I’m re-upping it.
Because even without Trump’s baby jails and proposed Medicaid cuts, our country’s emphasis on children’s well- being is seriously deficient.
Last year, for the first time on record, we spent a greater share of the federal budget servicing the national debt than we did on children, according to an analysis out next week from First Focus on Children. Spending on children as a share of the federal budget is also expected to shrink over the coming decade, crowded out by both debt service and spending on the elderly.
This is despite the fact that spending on children (especially low-income children) has among the highest returns on investment of any form of government spending.
Whatever the opposite of Trump’s War on Children is, that’s what Democrats should be running on.
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Thanks, Catherine, for speaking out so clearly and articulately about what has become our #1 National Disgrace: Trump’s War On Human Decency & Future Generations and its sleazy cast of supporting characters like Pence, Kelly, Miller, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” Homan, Albence, Morgan, “Cooch Cooch,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, Cotton, Graham, and others with their glib immorality and disregard for truth, our Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human values.
Who thought the U.S. would ever stoop so low — to use our government’s power and might to abuse defenseless, already traumatized, and highly vulnerable children. (Catherine’s article does’t even get into how, with the help of scofflaw Attorneys General Sessions and Barr and some complacent Article III Judges, the Administration has manipulated asylum law and Immigration “Court” procedures to deny children and other asylum seekers the legal protection to which they are entitled under U.S. and international laws.)
There are many groups out there in the “New Due Process Army” fighting every day against this kind of outrageous behavior by our elected leaders, their corrupt cronies, and their many “go along to get along” enablers in the bureaucracy. Join or donate to one today!
The war to save America and humanity from Trump’s vile and cowardly agenda is one that we can’t afford to lose: For the sake of future generations!
Louise Radnofsky and Natalie Andrews report for the WSJ:
WASHINGTON—President Trump will make a fresh bid Thursday to remake U.S. immigration policy, propos-ing an expansion of skills-based visas offset by new restrictions on family members’ immigration—a proposal likely to ignite a dispute over issues that divide political parties and the country.
Mr. Trump is set to unveil an immigration plan devised in part by son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner that incorpo-rates several ideas that have been gaining currency in Republican circles.
Chief among them: a bill crafted by conservative Republicans that would establish a visa system prioritizing immigrants based on criteria such as education, English-language ability and high-paying job offers.
The proposal also would eliminate the diversity-visa lottery long derided by Mr. Trump as well as immigra-tion routes for family members such as siblings. Moreover, it would limit the number of refugees offered permanent residency to 50,000 a year.
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Those with WSJ access can read the complete article at the link.
More Trump “smoke and mirrors.” No, it isn’t about “diversity” as one Trump toady falsely claims. Trump eliminates the current diversity visas.
It’s largely about the (likely false) assumption by Trump and others in the GOP that they have cleverly defined “merit” in a restrictive way that will bring in more white, English-speaking, highly-educated individuals from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and fewer Africans, Hispanics, Haitians, and Syrians, etc.
Contrary to nativist expectations when the basic current system was enacted in 1965, “immigrants of color” have dramatically increased their share of legal immigration over the past half-century. That has led to a diverse, talented, innovative, dynamic, successful yet “less white” America. According to nativist stereotypes, dumping on family members and refugees and increasing skill, educational, and English-language requirements will result in a “whiter” (that is “more meritorious”) immigrant population going forward.
However, like the nativists of 1965, Trump and his nativists might be surprised by the likely results of their own stereotypical assumptions. Actually, English-speaking immigrants from Africa, Haiti, the Middle East, Mexico, and Venezuela are among the highest skilled and best educated.
Of course, Trump’s elitist proposal also ignores that some of our greatest needs for immigrants pertain to important, but less glamorous, occupations for which neither education nor instant English language skills are a requirement. To keep our economy moving, we actually need more qualified roofers, construction workers, agricultural workers, child care workers, health assistants, security guards, janitors, landscapers, and convenience store operators than we do rocket scientists.
And, no, Tom Cotton and David Purdue, there aren’t enough “American workers” available to fill all these positions, even at greatly increased wages (which, incidentally, your fat cat GOP business supporters have no intention of paying anyway)! How high would the wages have to be to make guys like Cotton and Purdue give up their legislative sinecures (where they do nothing except show up for a few judicial votes on far right candidates scheduled by McConnell) and lay roofs correctly in 100-degree heat?
Rather than working against market forces to artificially restrict the labor supply, those wanting to improve wages and working conditions for American workers should favor higher minimum wages, aggressive enforcement of wage and hour and OSHA laws, and more unions. But, the GOP hates all of those real solutions.
The proposal also ignores “Dreamers,” which is sure to be a sore point with the Democrats. On the other side, it fails to sharply (and mindlessly) slash overall legal immigration levels as demanded by GOP nativists. While this proposal does not directly target children or dump on refugees from the Northern Triangle based on race and nationality, the ever slimier Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham has introduced a bill that promises to do both.
Beyond the purely humanitarian considerations, refugees make huge contributions to our economy and society. So, why would we want to screw them over? Family immigrants arrive not only with skills, but with a “leg up”on adjustment and assimilation. So, why would we want to dump on them?
For the most part, this looks more like a Trump campaign backgrounder or a diversion from his endless stream of lies, unethical behavior, and downright stupid actions that are a constant threat to our national security. What it doesn’t look like is a serious bipartisan proposal to give America the robust, expanded, more realistic, market responsive legal immigration, asylum, and refugee systems we need to secure our borders from real dangers (which doesn’t include most asylum seekers and would-be workers) and move America forward in the 21st century. Without regime change and a sea change that would break the GOP’s minority hold on Congress through the Senate, immigration is likely to remain a mess.
Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.
Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.
I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”
Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.
However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.
Like dreamers of today, those black soldiers and sailors also had families and attended churches; some were enrolled in schools. They could dream of a future, anchored in the rights and privileges that come with democracy. But they had no legal claim to an existence within America’s borders.
My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.
Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
And even then, they started their service to the United States one step behind.
In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.
Yet, serve they did.
As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”
Volunteering was a start. They still had something to prove.
According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .
King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.
The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.
It wasn’t until 1868 that the threat of removal from the United States was lifted by the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in this country, including former slaves.
The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.
For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.
That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.
Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.
That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.
While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”
It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?
POLITICS
The Senate Just Passed a Major Criminal Justice Bill. But the Fight’s Not Over Yet
The US Capitol is seen in Washington, DC on Dec. 17, 2018. Saul Loeb—AFP/Getty Images
PHILIP ELLIOTT @PHILIP_ELLIOTT
December 19th, 2018
In a surprise end-of-the-year move, the Senate late Tuesday passed a sweeping and bipartisan rewrite of the nation’s criminal code with 87 votes in favor of the most ambitious changes in a generation.
Despite the headline-grabbing action, skeptics warned that there are still plenty of ways this can be derailed, especially as Congress is trying to pass a basic measure to keep the government’s doors open before a Friday deadline. The House still needs to accept changes made by the Senate, and President Donald Trump will need to sign it.
But, at least for the moment late Wednesday, a bill that would help low-risk offenders caught up in a sentencing matrix of mandatory minimums seems headed to becoming a law.
Outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately tweeted that he looked forward to helping send the bill to the President for his signature. According to one GOP aide, the House would begin considering the bill on the floor Thursday, although the schedule is fluid. Earlier this year, the House passed a version of this law by a bipartisan 360-59 vote.
And, at the White House, officials said Trump was on-board with a topic championed by West Wing senior adviser Jared Kushner. “I look forward to signing this into law!” the President tweeted in a sign that, maybe, this would be an easy win for advocates of criminal justice reform.
Critics on both sides of the aisle seemed to temper their criticism of the bill for the moment. As passed, the legislation falls short of the ambitious goals outlined for both parties and still leaves behind thousands of inmates. The bill does not address state or local laws, meaning tens of thousands of inmates would not benefit from the changes made at the federal levels. Even so, Congress’ internal think tank estimated that some 53,000 inmates would be affected over the next 10 years out of a federal population of 181,000.
“We’re not just talking about money,” said Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who is in his final weeks as the No. 2 member of his party in the Senate. “We’re talking about human potential. We’re investing in the men and women who want to turn their lives around once they’re released from prison, and we’re investing in so doing in stronger and more viable communities, and we’re investing tax dollars into a system that helps produce stronger citizens.”
Officially called The First Steps Act, the measure provides anti-recidivism programing for those currently incarcerated, job training and rehabilitation programs for federal prisoners. It also provides an early-release provision for non-violent offenders and removes a disparity between power cocaine and crack, a distinction that is widely seen as racially motivated.
Still, there are landmines ahead. For instance, if Congress votes to aid convicts but not to fund border security, conservative critics will pounce. And liberal groups, who sought more from this measure, will criticize the effort for not doing more to address sentencing laws they see as racist. With many departing members counting their time in Washington in hours and not weeks, the tenuous agreement is largely seen as in peril at best. On top of all of this, many of the lawmakers casting votes were shown the door in November’s elections, a typical criticism of such lame-duck sessions.
These worries did little to mute the enthusiasm seen on the Senate floor Tuesday night. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, was ending his turn as Judiciary Committee chairman on a high note, sporting a red sweater as the vote proceeded. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., was seen enthusiastically shaking hands with and hugging Republican colleagues. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was personally lukewarm at best on the proposal, cracked a smile as he voted for the measure. Earlier, he was coy about whether he would vote in favor of the measure.
Addressing the criminal justice system has become an unlikely bipartisan meeting of interests. Conservatives see the ballooning federal prison population as an unacceptable cost. Liberals see it as the manifestation of social and racial injustice. Groups with divergent ideological views, such as the conservative network of organizations funded by Charles Koch and the liberal Centers for American Progress, found common ground on this topic.
McConnell agreed to a series of changes in recent days but rejected others. On the floor late Tuesday, lawmakers rejected a series of last-minute additions that were seen as ways to derail the whole package. Their chief authors, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and John Kennedy of Louisiana, watched as the so-called poison-pill amendments were rejected.
If the vote late Tuesday was a sign, it appears the coming two years in Washington under a divided government might not be a complete logjam. McConnell relented to allow a vote and, at least for now, progressive lawmakers did not allow themselves to be derailed in pursuit of the perfect at the cost of the good. Republicans dropped their tough-on-crime rhetoric and Democrats dropped their social-justice arguments. And, at least on Twitter, Trump seemed to break with his all-or-nothing approach to criminals in order to notch a win.
With reporting by Alana Abramson in Washington
Tags
# CONGRESS# CRIMINAL JUSTICE# JUSTICE
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How do we know this legislation is good for America? It was opposed by Jim Crow White Nationalists Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK). Just shows that if you can keep guys like that out of the way of progress, some good things actually could get done. Doesn’t mean they will; just shows the potential.
Just think of the potential if Trump fired neo-Nazi immigration adviser Stephen “Hairboy” Miller and got some practical, informed, non-racist advice on immigration policy! Unfortunately for America and the world (and, perhaps for Trump too) Miller is one of the few non-Trump-Family “survivors” in the West Wing.
A GOP-led House committee delivered a rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration policies this week — an unusual bipartisan move that may ultimately spell trouble for must-pass spending measures later this year.
The powerful House Appropriations Committee passed a measure that would essentially reverse Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s guidanceearlier this year that immigrants will not generally be allowed to use claims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum. The provision was adopted as part of a larger spending bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security, an already contentious measure because of disputes over funding for President Trump’s border wall.
But one influential Senate Republican and ally of the White House warned that keeping the asylum provision could sink the must-pass funding bill, and other conservatives who support a tougher line on immigration began denouncing it Thursday.
“Why is @HouseAppropsGOP voting to undermine AG Sessions’s asylum reforms & throw open our borders to fraud & crime?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), who often has Trump’s ear on key issues. “The amendment they adopted [Wednesday] is the kind of thing that will kill the DHS spending bill.”
The amendment, written by Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), would bar funding from government efforts to carry out Sessions’s asylum directive. It passed the committee unanimously.
Sessions laid out guidance last month that said victims of domestic abuse and gang violence that is “perpetrated by non-governmental actors” will generally not be allowed to obtain asylum in the United States, an effort he said was meant to cut down on fraud.
But Democrats and immigrant rights advocates have criticized Sessions’s move, warning that it would disqualify tens of thousands of immigrants fleeing violence in their home countries. His decision came as the administration was implementing a “zero-tolerance” policy that subjected everyone who crossed the border illegally to criminal prosecution, causing migrant parents to be separated from their children.
One senior Republican official said it was unlikely that the provision would stay intact once the House and Senate merge their spending measures, adding that “not every vote taken is to make law, but to move the process forward.”
With their respective bills for DHS funding, the two chambers are already headed for a clash over border wall spending, with the House allocating about $5 billion for it, while the Senate sets aside $1.6 billion.
Still, both advocates and opponents of more generous immigration policies were surprised at the committee’s move to approve the asylum measure unanimously.
“I think there was a general impression that things like that, that would undermine what the administration’s policies are, would be partisan fights and partisan battles,” said Josh Breisblatt, a senior policy analyst for the American Immigration Council.
Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), who leads the panel overseeing DHS funding, spoke in favor of the Democratic-sponsored provision, saying: “As a son of a social worker, I have great compassion for those victims of domestic violence anywhere, especially as it concerns those nations that turn a blind eye to crimes of domestic violence.”
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that Yoder flew on Air Force One just this week and that Trump had already singled out Yoder for praise on Twitter, thanking him for securing the $5 billion in wall money in the DHS spending measure.
“He got the funding for the wall in there, and the president endorsed him, and he approved this amendment and spoke in favor of it,” Krikorian said. “That basically makes the wall not all that useful, at least for immigration purposes.”
Seung Min KimSeung Min Kim is a White House reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Trump administration through the lens of Capitol Hill. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, she spent more than eight years at Politico, primarily covering the Senate and immigration policy. Follow
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Well, at least Sessions’s scofflaw actions are creating some bipartisanship in the House of all places (even though, as the article suggests, there is almost no chance of this actually becoming law).
You know folks are doing the smart and right thing when leading restrictionist zanies like Sen. Tom Cotton and Mark Krikorian go bonkers!
A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He announced on Wednesday that he would legalize the “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall and ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.
There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio launched his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, declared in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney promised in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”
Trump has turned that distinction on its head. He’s willing to legalize the “dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than those who don’t.
What explains this? Trump’s great hidden advantage during the 2016 Republican presidential primary was his lack of support from the GOP political and donor class. This allowed him to jettison positions—in support of free trade, in support of the Iraq War, in support of cutting Medicare and Social Security—that enjoyed support among Republican elites but little support among Republican voters. He did the same on immigration, where the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction turned out to be much more popular among the party’s leaders than among its grassroots. Cribbing from Ann Coulter’s book, Adios America, Trump replaced the legal-illegal distinction with one that turned out to have more resonance on the activist right: The distinction between white Christian immigrants and non-white, and non-Christian ones.The words “illegal immigration” do not appear in Trump’s presidential announcement speech. Instead, Trump focused on immigrants’ country of origin. “When Mexico sends its people,” he declared, “they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists … It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.”
Trump, who often says bluntly what other Republicans say in code, probably realized that “illegal immigrant” was, for many voters, already a euphemism for Latino or Mexican-immigrants. In their book White Backlash, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal cite a poll showing that 61 percent of Americans believe that most Latino immigrants are undocumented even though only about a quarter are. “When Americans talk about undocumented immigrants, Latinos or immigrants in general,” they note, “the images in their heads are likely to be the same.”
What really drove Republican opinion about immigration, Trump realized, was not primarily the fear that the United States was becoming a country of law-breakers. (Republicans, after all, were not outraged about the lack of prosecution of tax cheats.) It was the fear that the United States—which was becoming less white and had just elected a president of Kenyan descent—was becoming a third world country.When the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution asked Americans in 2016 their views of immigration from different parts of the world, it found that Republicans were only three points more likely than Democrats to want to reduce immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” and only seven points more likely to want to reduce immigration from Europe. By contrast, they were 33 points more likely to support reducing immigration from Mexico and Central America and 41 points more likely to support reducing immigration from “predominantly Muslim countries.” What really drives Republican views about immigrants, in other words, is less their legal status than their nation of origin, their religion, and their race.
Trump grasped that during the campaign, and in coalition with a bevy of current and former Southern Senators—Jeff Sessions, David Perdue and Tom Cotton—he has used it to turn the GOP into a party devoted to slashing legal immigration. On Thursday, when presented with a bill that traded the legalization of dreamers for more border security but did not reduce legal immigration, only eight Republican Senators voted yes. However, 37 voted for a bill that legalized the “dreamers,” added more border security and substantially reduced legal immigration.
But there’s another reason Trump has succeeded in erasing the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction that for years governed GOP immigration debate. He’s made Republicans less concerned with legality in general. In 2012, the GOP—which was then-outraged by executive orders that supposedly displayed President Barack Obama’s contempt for the constitutional limits of his office—titled the immigration section of its platform, “The Rule of Law: Legal Immigration.” The seven paragraph-section used variations of the word “law” fourteen times.That emphasis is harder now. In his ongoing battles with the FBI, Justice Department, judiciary and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Trump has convinced many Republicans that the “rule of law” is often a cloak for the partisan biases of the “deep state.” As a result, Republicans are now 22 pointsless likely to hold a positive opinion of the FBI than they were in 2015.
What really matters for many Republicans in Trump’s standoff with Mueller and the FBI is not who has the law on their side, since the bureaucracy can twist the law to its own advantage. What really matters is who enjoys the backing of “the people,” the authentic America that resides outside the swamp, a construct that definitely does not include the imagined beneficiaries of “chain migration” and the “visa lottery.”
In the Trump era, Republicans now justify their immigration views less by reference to law than by reference to tribe. Which, not coincidentally, is how they justify Trump’s presidency itself.”
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Marco Rubio has already seen the downside of trying to become a national force in the GOP by advocating a moderate, pro-business, pro-immigrant, not overtly anti-Hispanic policy. I suspect if and when Ambassador Nikki Haley tries to make a bid for national office in the GOP she’ll find out that the Miller-Sessions-Cotton-Perdue-King group and Trump supporters will treat her with the same disrespect, bias, and disdain that they usually reserve for smart, capable Latinas, children fleeing for their lives from the Northern Triangle, and “Dreamers.”
And folks like Sen. Tim Scott will find that even consistent support for a right-wing GOP that regularly disses African-Americans and Hispanics won’t give him “White Guy” status in the larger GOP world. A useful vote in the Senate. That’s about it. Reportedly, Scott once talked to Trump about the latter’s “tone” on race. How did that work out, Tim? But, hey, as long as you vote for big tax breaks for the wealthy, cuts in health care, and are happy to threaten the benefits, remaining dignity, and lives of the poor, you can at least retain your status a “club member at the retail level.”
“Washington (CNN)As the ink dried Friday on a major budget compromise deal in Congress, immigration advocates were taking stock of getting left behind — again — without a resolution for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants on the verge of losing protections.
It’s an open question if there are cards left to play in the push to enshrine the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy into law. While no advocates say they are giving up, many also openly admit that Democrats and allies gave up their best negotiating position on the issue without another clear avenue coming up.
In the meantime, a pending court decision on DACA, which President Donald Trump is terminating, means the immigrants protected by it and who mostly have never known another country than the US, won’t begin losing their protections as planned on March 5 — but their fate could be reversed at any moment by another court decision.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who has long served as one of the most outspoken advocates in Congress for immigration reform, was pessimistic with reporters early Friday morning as Congress passed the deal with virtually every Democratic priority except DACA in it.
“No, I don’t, I don’t,” he said when asked if there was any other way Democrats could exert leverage on the issue. Gutierrez said the plan from the beginning was to either attach a DACA compromise to the must-pass budget deal or raising the debt ceiling, both of which were passed in the early morning hours Friday without DACA. Arizona Democrat Raul Grijalva called the episode “disheartening.”
close dialog
“We have decoupled the issues. Your leverage is you want them one and the same,” Gutierrez said. “Do we need a new way forward? Yeah, we’re going to figure out a new way forward.”
There is one glimmer of hope for advocates. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made good on his promise to tee up an immigration debate on the Senate floor next week. Moments after the Senate passed the deal, McConnell filed to have a vote to open debate on an unrelated bill Monday evening — which will kick off a process where an as-yet-unknown number of amendments will be able to compete for a procedural threshold of 60 votes to then pass the Senate.
It was that promise that put in motion the deal that eventually severed DACA from other negotiations but also offers a rare opportunity for lawmakers to compete on a neutral playing field for bipartisan support.
“We’re pivoting, what can you do?” said longtime advocate Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-immigration group America’s Voice. “We’ve had our doubts about the viability of a standalone legislative process but that’s what we’re left with, so we’re hoping to make the most of it. … That will put pressure on the President and the House to do the same.”
Already, groups of lawmakers are preparing for the floor debate, even as it remains unclear how many amendments will be offered, how debate will be structured and how long it might last.
A group of roughly 20 bipartisan senators is drafting legislation over the weekend to offer perhaps multiple amendments and potentially keep the debate focused on a narrow DACA-border security bill. Advocates on the left may offer a clean DACA fix like the Dream Act, and some on the right are drafting a version of the White House proposal that would include $25 billion for a border wall and heavy cuts to legal immigration with a pathway to citizenship — though neither is expected to have 60 votes.
“First of all, we have the Senate procedure, which is my hope. We’re working with the (bipartisan group) to see if we can come to a two-pillar solution,” said Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who has long worked on the issue, when asked Thursday what comes next for DACA. “Hopefully we could gather 60 votes for that. And then that would be it — we’d resist everything else, any other amendments, and then go back to the House and create all the pressure in the House to make it happen.”
Step 2: Pressure Ryan
If the Senate can pass a bill, lawmakers hope Trump will fully embrace it, freeing House Speaker Paul Ryan to call it up.
Already as the budget deal was on track for passage, House advocates began a pressure campaign to urge Ryan to make a promise like McConnell — though Ryan continually demurred and insisted instead he’s committed to the issue of immigration and passing a bill the President can support.
“I think we have to be realistic,” said Arizona’s Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego. “We’re going to have to deal with reality and find whatever means possible to put pressure on Speaker Ryan and the Republican Party to bring, again, a fair vote on the Dream Act to the floor.”
“I think for me the strategy has to be pressure Ryan and bring it to the floor,” Grijalva said, adding the process should allow any proposal to vie for a majority — even if it doesn’t have a majority of Republican votes. “The Senate, when they gave up on not voting for it, at the very minimum extracted a time certain and a debate on something. We don’t even have that.”
Democrats also may have some Republican supporters in the House to pressure Ryan. A bipartisan group of lawmakers that includes two dozen Republicans sent a letter to Ryan asking to open a floor debate like McConnell.
Republican Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said he’s been urging fellow moderates to use their numbers the way that conservatives on the right flank do.
“The Freedom Caucus has been effective because they’ll use their power of 24 (votes to deny a majority), and they take the hostage, they’ll do what they have to do,” Dent said. “I tell our members, we put our votes together, we can really direct an outcome. … I suspect if the Senate sends us a bipartisan DACA bill, that’s when we’re going to have to flex our muscles.”
But others have doubts. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the bipartisan group, says he learned his lesson in 2013, when he co-authored legislation that passed the Senate with wide margins but died in the House.
“There are some who believe that if we get a bunch of votes it’ll force the House to do it. I don’t agree,” Rubio said. “We could vote on it 90-10. … This notion that the House is going to listen to what a senator tells them to do is not real.”
Step 3: Other leverage
If the legislative process can’t produce success, advocates say, they will look for any other leverage points they can.
“If that doesn’t work out, then there’s still an omnibus at the end of the day,” said Menendez, referring to the spending bills due in March to fund the government under the topline two-year budget deal passed Friday.
But Gutierrez doubted that approach — scoffing at the idea that Democrats would be taken seriously if they threatened to withhold their votes yet again without success.
“Really?” Gutierrez said about the omnibus as leverage. “Is it plausible? Is it realistic? Can you continue to threaten with something?”
Other options could include a temporary, one-year or two-year extension of DACA without a permanent solution, though lawmakers have decried that option.
Still, many aren’t ready to give up hope.
“This President clearly wants to get it done, I think the majority of Republicans want to get it done and the majority of Democrats want to get it done. Can we reach that balance? We can get there, I feel very confident we can get there,” said Florida’s Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.”
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Although it should be a “no brainer,” I’m not as confident as Rep. Diaz-Balart that this group can “get to yes.” A fair resolution of the “Dreamers” situation just isn’t very high on the GOP agenda, particularly in the House. And, both the Dreamers and the Dems are coming to grips with the obvious reality: if you want to set or control the agenda, you have to win elections!
We need Julia Preston to lock these folks in a room for awhile!
Tom Cotton’s lies make him a dangerous prospect to head the CIA.
By WILLIAM SALETAN
Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, is becoming President Trump’s right arm in the Senate. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and Cotton, a right-wing ideologue, is helping to steer the president. Either way, Trump’s behavior in the immigration debate—turning against a legislative compromise after Cotton was summoned to a White House meeting to oppose it—illustrates the young senator’s influence. In fact, Trump is said to be considering him as the next CIA director.
Cotton’s emergence is alarming. In part, that’s because what endears Cotton to Trump—and makes them particularly dangerous together—is Cotton’s unflinching willingness, in pursuit of an agenda, to say things that aren’t true.
Cotton is a veteran. He served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan. But when he came home, he brought back the psychology of war. He treats liberals and moderates as the enemy. In 2015, he blocked one of President Obama’s ambassadorial nominees over an unrelated issue—she eventually died waiting for approval—because Cotton knew she was Obama’s friend. He depicts Obama as a traitor. Last month, Cotton said of the Iran nuclear agreement: “Barack Obama was willing to give away anything to get that deal.”
On immigration, Cotton takes a hard line, and he savages anyone who doesn’t. He calls senators who seek an immigration compromise “the Gang of Amnesty.” He labels their ideas “preposterous” and “utterly ridiculous.” Last week, he scoffed that fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, an immigration moderate, “didn’t even make it off the kiddie table in the debates” during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. On Tuesday, after the government shutdown, Cotton crowed that Democrats had “capitulated entirely.”
Cotton is quick to charge others with lying. Two weeks ago, he accused colleagues of floating a “disingenuous” immigration compromise. He said Democrats had “misrepresent[ed]” immigration talks. On Friday, Cotton accused Graham of conspiring with Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin: “Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin are not adversaries in negotiating. They are allies strategizing.” That line has been used exactly once before, by an anonymous member of Congress—presumably Cotton—who accused House Speaker Paul Ryan of treachery on the same issue. Tucker Carlson reported the accusation last fall:
As one of their colleagues told us just this morning, when Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan sit down to talk immigration, they aren’t opponents negotiating, they are allies strategizing … Earlier this year we had Speaker Ryan on this show and he assured us Congress would be working hard on funding the border wall. That was a lie.
In the war at home, Cotton fights for Trump. Each time he’s faced with a choice between Trump and the truth, Cotton protects Trump. Two months ago on Face the Nation, John Dickerson asked Cotton about unresolved sexual misconduct allegations against the president. Cotton brushed the allegations aside, arguing that “the American people had their say on that” when they elected Trump. Last month, when an AP reporter asked Cotton about collusion between Trump and Russia, Cotton dismissed the question, claiming that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein had “said she’d seen no evidence of collusion.” Actually, what Feinstein had said was, “It’s an open question because there’s no proof yet that it’s happened, and I think that proof will likely come with [Special Counsel] Mueller’s investigation.”
Now Cotton is protecting Trump again. On Jan. 11, during an Oval Office meeting, Trump said he wanted fewer immigrants from “shithole” countries in Africa and Haiti and more from Norway and Asia. The president’s comments were leaked, and Durbin, who had witnessed the exchange, publicly recounted them the next day. Cotton, who had also attended the meeting, went on TV to defend Trump. He portrayed Durbin as a liar, saying Trump had never used the expletivereported by Durbin. Dickerson asked Cotton whether Trump, in the meeting, was in any way “grouping people based on the countries they came from.” Cotton denied it. He insisted that Trump had “reacted strongly against” such thinking and that “what the president said he supports is [to] treat people for who they are,” not “where they’re from.”
I’ve seen Cotton at least twice on “Meet the Press.” Each time I was impressed by the number of lies, distortions, misrepresentations, and evasions he could pack into a relatively short interview with Chuck Todd. You could tell that even the perennially affable Todd was having a hard time keeping a straight face at some of Cotton’s antics and facially absurd answers.
That this is what passes for “leadership” in today’s GOP should give us all pause.
“Some 70% of Americans support a legislative solution that would allow DACA recipients who entered the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the United States—but the fight to pass that legislation has stalled so much that it led to the shutdown of the federal government. In part, that’s because some Republicans are making divisive and hardline demands about broader reforms to the immigration system in exchange for DACA protections.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reportedly passed out a four-page memo at a meeting earlier this month that includes a bulleted list of the administration’s 46 “must haves” on immigration negotiations, according to Politico, which published the memo on Wednesday.
The site reports President Donald Trump had not seen the list of demands before the January 9 meeting and reportedly told attendees to ignore the list. But according to Politico, the memo is backed by White House chief of staff John Kelly and xenophobic White House senior adviser Stephen Miller—who has wielded major influence on the administration’s immigration policy—as well as Nielsen. It also echoes bills introduced in both the House and Senate.
The memo—titled “MUST HAVE’S: AUTHORITIES & FUNDING FOR IMMIGRATION DEAL”—includes some some well-known demands, like $18 billion to fund Trump’s wall, but it also lists dozens of lesser known “must haves.”
One is a call for immediate access to federal lands and expedited acquisitions of other properties to “eliminate certain geographical limitations” in order to find space for the border wall. This could mean long legal fights with Native American reservations along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The memo also calls for re-classifying overstaying a visa as a misdemeanor. Currently, that is handled as a civil violation in immigration court proceedings.
The memo’s “must haves” call for even more immigration agents than previously proposed, including 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, 8,000 new Border Patrol agents, 1,000 new ICE attorneys, and 370 new immigration judges. (Since the Border Patrol can’t even meet minimum staffing levels mandated by Congress, getting 8,000 extra agents seems unlikely.)
The administration also wants to make it tougher for unaccompanied children and asylum seekers to prove they have a legitimate credible fear of returning to the countries they fled. And when they can prove they’re being persecuted, the Trump administration now wants to send them to “safe third countries.”
The memo also includes all the other stuff we’ve heard about, like limiting “sanctuary cities,” ending family reunification programs (what Trump calls “chain migration”) and the elimination of the diversity visa lotteries.
To top it all off, the memo calls for making the legalization process even more expensive for immigrants who are authorized to be here legally, by imposing additional surcharges on visa, immigration, and border crossing fees.”
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Sick and tired of racist, “21st Century Know Nothings,” like Steven Miller and Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions running immigration policy, spineless “go along to get along” bureaucrats like Kirstjen Nielson in change of important Government immigration agencies, and restrictionist pols like Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. David Perdue, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, and Rep. Raul Labrador blocking sensible, humane immigration reform.
That’s why Ballot Boxes were invented! Vote these evil, ignorant, clowns who are ruining America out of office at your earliest opportunity!
CNN)The government shutdown went into a second day Sunday with recriminations deepening between the parties and with no sign of progress towards ending the impasse.
The House and the Senate will be back at work by early afternoon, but after a day of futility on Saturday, there are few hopes of a sudden breakthrough to resolve a showdown over the refusal of Senate Democrats to vote to fund the government until President Donald Trump agrees to deal with the fate of 700,000 people brought to the US illegally as children.
The White House, and Republican and Democratic leaders spent most of Saturday apportioning blame as they sought to shape the political fallout from the shutdown that will only truly begin to hit home on Monday when government departments stay dark after the weekend as federal workers are furloughed.
“Everyone’s dug in. No movement at all from either side,” said a Democratic aide.
Trump had been hoping to be the star of the show at a glitzy fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida Saturday celebrating the anniversary of his inauguration. But he was forced to hole up in Washington when his trip was canceled because of the shutdown.
. . . .
Both sides are convinced they have the upper hand — one reason why the shutdown could last for a while.
Republicans feel confident that they’re on the right side of the shutdown. While House Republicans were the ones who failed to deliver the votes when the government shut down in 2013. This time around, members say they want their leadership to stand firm against Senate Democrats who they believe will feel the pressure sooner or later.
Democrats believe that the fact that the GOP controls the House, the Senate and the White House will prompt voters to blame Trump and his troops.
CNN’s Ashley Killough, Deirdre Walsh, Abby Phillip, Manu Raju, Kevin Liptak and Ryan Nobles contributed to this report.”
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Read the complete article at the above link. Doesn’t sound promising; but, they are going to keep at it.
“Anti-immigration activists, whether deliberately or inadvertently, use a great deal of misinformation (on wages, competition against native-born workers, etc.) and shoddy economic analysis (e.g., the “lump of labor fallacy“) while ignoring well-established data on immigrants’ homeownership, participation in the workforce, entrepreneurialism, contribution to growth, etc. Welcome to the Fox News/Trumpian world, where facts are no longer facts.
There is one giant untruth that outweighs all others — and it is easily debunked. Will Wilkinson of the libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center writes:
Between 2000 and 2015, 109 countries saw their immigrant population grow at a faster rate than that of the United States. Among countries with any net international in-migration, the U.S. is resolutely on the closed side of the continuum. … It is veryeasy to say is that the U.S. status quo is much closer to “completely closed” than “completely open” under even the most modest estimates of movement under the “completely open” counterfactual. If we move out of the [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] into the broader world, the current world champ in immigrant population is Qatar, which makes extensive use of guest workers, with about 22 migrants per 1000 people. If we use Qatar as the open end of the closed-to-open continuum, the United States’ 4 migrants per 1000 people is in comparison very, very close to “completely closed.” …
Nevertheless, the immigration restrictionists who warn of swamping under open borders tend to be the same people who characterize the status quo as an “open borders” system. It’s obvious why they traffic in this sort of rank dishonesty. They want to further harden our already very hardened borders, and this is easier to justify if you can systematically mislead people about the fact that the American immigration system is relatively closed even when compared to other wealthy liberal democracies.
In other words, by scaring Americans that our borders are “open” (or that immigration reformers want “open borders”), opponents of immigration are pulling the wool over the eyes of the public and policymakers, just as they do when falsely accusing illegal immigrants of causing a crime wave.
Moreover, there is some powerful evidence that we need more immigration, not less. Ron Brownstein points out that Trump’s aging, mostly white base will need more immigrants to pay into entitlement programs because “the 2020 Census will find that non-white kids represent a majority of all Americans younger than 18; kids of color are already a majority of all K-12 public school students.” He explains: “What these numbers make clear is that, whatever Trump does to restrict immigration, there is no cavalry of white kids coming to fill the jobs that the mostly white baby boom is vacating. Non-white young people — reinforced by future immigrants — will drive almost all of the workforce’s future growth, according to widely respected projections by the non-partisan Pew Research Center.” Without that population growth, Brownstein explains, “each worker will be required to fund 80% more seniors than they do now. That demographic imbalance represents a political tourniquet that will inexorably increase pressure for cuts in Social Security and Medicare.”
This demographic reality underscores another fact that anti-immigration advocates would prefer to ignore: One big reason immigrants aren’t “taking jobs from Americans” is that Americans are aging and leaving the workforce without enough workers to backfill those positions. The gap is made up in part by automation and in part by immigrants, who tend to be younger, with many years in the workforce ahead of them.
Perhaps it is foolhardy to argue facts with anti-immigration advocates. If Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) dissembled about the president’s racist rhetoric, they aren’t likely to be any more honest when it comes to facts that undercut their economically catastrophic plan to slash legal immigration in half. Nevertheless, we surely hope that other lawmakers and the public refuse to be bamboozled by outright false claims.”
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Yeah, as Rubin points out, it’s by no means the only bogus information or shoddy, result-oriented “research” that the White Nationalist restrictionists use to support their racially motivated program.
We’ve already seen how as illegal immigration levels off and ceases to become anything other than a “made up” problem for America (the vast bulk of so-called “undocumented” migrants are gainfully employed, useful, law-abiding members of the American community, many with U.S. citizen children and spouses, whose legalization would be both an economic and social benefit to the U.S.), the restrictionists have set their sights on our already unrealistically limited and far too overly bureaucratic legal immigration system.
Don’t be fooled! The restrictionists are out to destroy America’s future for their outdated vision of a racially, ethnically, and religiously homogenous and “pure” nation (one that, in truth, has never existed except in their imaginations and fantasies). Don’t let them get away with it!
Folks, as we take a few minutes today to remember Dr. King, his vision for a better America, and his inspiring “I Have A Dream Speech,” we have to face the fact that everything Dr. King stood for is under a vicious and concerted attack, the likes of which we haven’t seen in America for approximately 50 years, by individuals elected to govern by a minority of voters in our country.
So, today, I’m offering you a “potpourri” of how and why Dr.King’s Dream has “gone south,” so to speak, and how those of us who care about social justice and due process in America can nevertheless resurrect it and move forward together for a greater and more tolerant American that celebrates the talents, contributions, and humanity of all who live here!.
On Martin Luther King’s birthday, a look back at some disquieting events in race relations in 2017.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop and looked out over the promised land. In a powerful and prophetic speech on April 3, 1968, he told a crowd at the Mason Temple in Memphis that while there would certainly be difficult days ahead, he had no doubt that the struggle for racial justice would be successful.
“I may not get there with you,” he said. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I am happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything.”
The following day, he was assassinated.
The intervening years have been full of steps forward and steps backward, of extraordinary changes as well as awful reminders of what has not changed. What would King have made of our first black president? What would he have thought had he seen neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., so many years after his death? How would he have viewed the shooting by police of unarmed black men in cities around the country — or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement? He would surely have heard the assertions that we have become a “post-racial” society because we elected (and reelected) Barack Obama. But would he have believed it?
This past year was not terribly heartening on the civil rights front. It was appalling enough that racist white nationalists marched in Charlottesville in August. But it was even more shocking that President Trump seemed incapable of making the most basic moral judgment about that march; instead, he said that there were some “very fine people” at the rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Racial injustices that bedeviled the country in King’s day — voter suppression, segregated schools, hate crimes — have not gone away. A report released last week by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on inequities in the funding of public schools concludes — and this should surprise no one — that students of color living in poor, segregated neighborhoods are often relegated to low-quality schools simply due to where they live. States continued in 2017 to pass laws that make it harder, rather than easier, for people of color to vote.
The Trump administration also seems determined to undo two decades of Justice Department civil rights work, cutting back on investigations into the excessive use of force and racial bias by police departments. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in March ordered a review of all existing federal consent decrees with local police departments with the possibility of dismantling them — a move that could set back police reform by many years.
Here in Los Angeles County, this statistic is telling: 40% of the estimated 57,000 homeless people — the most desperate and destitute residents of the county — are black. Yet black residents make up only 9% of the L.A. County population.
But despite bad news on several fronts, what have been heartening over the last year are the objections raised by so many people across the country.
Consider the statues of Confederate generals and slave owners that were brought down across the country. Schools and other institutions rebranded buildings that were formerly named after racists.
The Black Lives Matter movement has grown from a small street and cyber-protest group into a more potent civil rights organization focusing on changing institutions that have traditionally marginalized black people.
When football quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest, as he said, a country that oppresses black people, he was denounced by many (including Trump) but emulated by others. Kaepernick has been effectively banished from professional football but he started a movement.
Roy Moore was defeated for a Senate seat in Alabama by a surge of black voters, particularly black women. (But no sooner did he lose than Joe Arpaio — the disgraced, vehemently anti-immigrant former Arizona sheriff — announced that he is running for Senate there.)
So on what would have been King’s 89th birthday, it is clear that the United States is not yet the promised land he envisioned in the last great speech of his life. But we agree with him that it’s still possible to get there.”
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See this short HuffPost video on “Why MLK’s Message Still Matters Today!”
Read about how the Arizona GOP has resurrected, and in some instances actually welcomed, “Racist Joe” Arpaio, an unapologetic anti-Hispanic bigot and convicted scofflaw. “Racist Joe” was pardoned by Trump and is now running for the GOP nomination to replace retiring Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake, who often has been a critic of Trump. One thing “Racist Joe’s” candidacy is doing is energizing the Latino community that successfully fought to remove him from the office of Sheriff and to have him brought to justice for his racist policies.
Spared from the threat of deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, she campaigned to oust Joe Arpaio when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection as Maricopa County sheriff in 2016. She knocked on hundreds of doors in south Phoenix’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods to register voters. She made phone calls, walked on college campuses. Her message was direct, like the name of the group she worked with, Bazta Arpaio, a take on the Spanish word basta — enough Arpaio.
But now, the 85-year-old former sheriff is back and running for Senate. Sanchez, who had planned to step away from politics to focus on her studies at Grand Canyon University, is back as well, organizing once more.
“If he thinks he can come back and terrorize the entire state like he did Maricopa County, it’s not going to happen,” Sanchez, 20, said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”
Arpaio enters a crowded Republican primary and may not emerge as the party’s nominee, but his bid has already galvanized Arizona’s Latino electorate — one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing voter blocs.
Organizers like Sanchez, who thought they might sit out the midterm elections, rushed back into offices and started making calls. Social media groups that had gone dormant have resurrected with posts reminding voters that Arpaio was criminally convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos.
“We’ve been hearing, ‘Is it true Arpaio is back? OK, what can we do to help?’” said Montserrat Arredondo, director of One Arizona, a Phoenix nonprofit group focused on increasing Latino voter turnout. “People were living in terror when Arpaio was in office. They haven’t forgotten.”
In 2008, 796,000 Latinos were eligible to vote in the state, according to One Arizona. By 2016, that potential voting pool jumped to 1.1 million. (California tops the nation with the most Latinos eligible to vote, almost 6.9 million.)
In 2016, Latinos accounted for almost 20% of all registered voters in Arizona. Latinos make up about 30% of Arizona’s population.
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Last year, President Trump pardoned Arpaio of a criminal conviction for violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos. When announcing his candidacy Tuesday, Arpaio pledged his full support to the president and his policies.
On Saturday, Arpaio made his first public appearance since announcing his candidacy, attending a gathering of Maricopa County Republicans. He was unmoved when asked about the enthusiasm his candidacy has created among Latinos.
“Many of them hate me for enforcing the law,” he said. “I can’t change that. … All I know is that I have my supporters, they’re going to support who they want. I’m in this to win it though.”
Arpaio, gripping about a dozen red cardboard signs that read “We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio in DC,” walked through the crowd where he mingled with, among others, former state Sen. Kelli Ward and U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, who also are seeking the GOP Senate nomination. Overall, Arpaio was widely met with enthusiasm from attendees.
“So glad you’re back,” said a man wearing a “Vietnam Veteran” hat.
“It’s great to be back,” Arpaio replied.
Arpaio, who handed out business cards touting his once self-proclaimed status as “America’s toughest sheriff,” said he had no regrets from his more than two decades in office.
“Not a single one,” he said. “I spoke my mind and did what needed to be done and would do it the same in a minute.”
In an interview, Arpaio, who still insists he has “evidence” that former President Obama’s birth certificate is forged, a rumor repeatedly shown to be false, did not lay out specific policy platforms, only insisting he’ll get things done in Washington.
During his tenure as sheriff, repeated court rulings against his office for civil rights violations cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.”
Read the complete story at the link.
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Professor George Yancy of Emory University writing in the NY Times asks “Will America Choose King’s Dream Or Trump’s Nightmare?”
“Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written, spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about itself.
So, as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live, and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head on.
On the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.
We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy.
So many Americans suffer from the obsessive need to claim “innocence,” that is, to lie to ourselves. Yet such a lie is part of our moral undoing. While many will deny, continue to lie and claim our national “innocence,” I come bearing deeply troubling, but not surprising, news: White racism is now comfortably located within the Oval Office, right there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, embodied in our 45th president, one who is, and I think many would agree, must agree, without any hesitation, a white racist. There are many who will resist this characterization, but Mr. Trump has desecrated the symbolic aspirations of America, exhumed forms of white supremacist discourse that so many would assume is spewed only by Ku Klux Klan.”
Read the rest of Professor Yancy’s op-ed at the link.
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From lead columnist David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick at the NY Times we get “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”
Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. More recently, his political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.
The New York Years
Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.
Trump treated black employees at his casinos differently from whites, according to multiple sources. A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”
In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
In 1989, on NBC, Trump said: “I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.”
He uses the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants. Among many other statements, he has suggested that Obama’s protection of the Dreamers — otherwise law-abiding immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children — contributed to the spread of MS-13.
In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.
In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
At the White House on Jan. 11, Trump vulgarly called forless immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.”
The disgusting list goes on and on. Go to the link to get it all!
“I find nothing more useless than debating the existence of racism, particularly when you are surrounded by evidence of its existence. It feels to me like a way to keep you fighting against the water until you drown.
The debates themselves, I believe, render a simple concept impossibly complex, making the very meaning of “racism” frustratingly murky.
So, let’s strip that away here. Let’s be honest and forthright.
Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.
The history of America is one in which white people used racism and white supremacy to develop a racial caste system that advantaged them and disadvantaged others.
Understanding this, it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.
It is not a stretch to say that Trump is racist. It’s not a stretch to say that he is a white supremacist. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump is a bigot.
Those are just facts, supported by the proof of the words that keep coming directly from him. And, when he is called out for his racism, his response is never to ameliorate his rhetoric, but to double down on it.
I know of no point during his entire life where he has apologized for, repented of, or sought absolution for any of his racist actions or comments.
Instead, he either denies, deflects or amps up the attack.
Trump is a racist. We can put that baby to bed.
“Racism” and “racist” are simply words that have definitions, and Trump comfortably and unambiguously meets those definitions.
We have unfortunately moved away from the simple definition of racism, to the point where the only people to whom the appellation can be safely applied are the vocal, violent racial archetypes.
Racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness. We want racism to be fringe rather than foundational. But, wishing isn’t an effective method of eradication.
We have to face this thing, stare it down and fight it back.
The simple acknowledgment that Trump is a racist is the easy part. The harder, more substantive part is this: What are we going to do about it?
First and foremost, although Trump is not the first president to be a racist, we must make him the last. If by some miracle he should serve out his first term, he mustn’t be allowed a second. Voters of good conscience must swarm the polls in 2020.
But before that, those voters must do so later this year, to rid the House and the Senate of as many of Trump’s defenders, apologists and accomplices as possible. Should the time come where impeachment is inevitable, there must be enough votes in the House and Senate to ensure it.
We have to stop thinking that we can somehow separate what racists believe from how they will behave. We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.
And finally, we have to stop giving a pass to the people — whether elected official or average voter — who support and defend his racism. If you defend racism you are part of the racism. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you’re an egalitarian, how much you say that you are race blind, how much you say that you are only interested in people’s policies and not their racist polemics.
As the brilliant James Baldwin once put it: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” When I see that in poll after poll a portion of Trump’s base continues to support his behavior, including on race, I can only conclude that there is no real daylight between Trump and his base. They are part of his racism.
When I see the extraordinary hypocrisy of elected officials who either remain silent in the wake of Trump’s continued racist outbursts or who obliquely condemn him, only to in short order return to defending and praising him and supporting his agenda, I see that there is no real daylight between Trump and them either. They too are part of his racism.
When you see it this way, you understand the enormity and the profundity of what we are facing. There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.
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Back over at the Washington Post, op-ed writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., tells us the depressing news that “We could be a much better country. Trump makes it impossible.”
Dionne concludes his piece with the following observations about our current “Dreamer” debate:
“Our current debate is frustrating, and not only because Trump doesn’t understand what “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” even mean. By persistently making himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation, Trump is blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward.
And while Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will do all they can to avoid the issue, there should now be no doubt (even if this was clear long ago) that we have a blatant racist as our president. His reference to immigrants from “sh–hole countries” and his expressed preference for Norwegians over Haitians, Salvadorans and new arrivals from Africa make this abundantly clear. Racist leaders do not help us reach mutual toleration. His semi-denial 15 hours after his comment was first reported lacked credibility, especially because he called around first to see how his original words would play with his base.
But notice also what Trump’s outburst did to our capacity to govern ourselves and make progress. Democrats and Republicans sympathetic to the plight of the “dreamers” worked out an immigration compromise designed carefully to give Trump what he had said he needed.
There were many concessions by Democrats on border security, “chain migration” based on family reunification, and the diversity visa lottery that Trump had criticized. GOP senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) bargained in good faith and were given ample reason by Trump to think they had hit his sweet spot.
Trump blew them away with a torrent of bigotry. In the process, he shifted the onus for avoiding a government shutdown squarely on his own shoulders and those of Republican leaders who were shamefully slow in condemning the president’s racism.
There are so many issues both more important and more interesting than the psyche of a deeply damaged man. We are capable of being a far better nation. But we need leaders who call us to our obligations to each other as free citizens. Instead, we have a president who knows only how to foster division and hatred.”
Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
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Our “Liar-in-Chief:” This short video from CNN, featuring the Washington Post’s “Chief Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler deals with the amazing 2000+ false or misleading claims that Trump has made even before the first anniversary of his Presidency: “Trump averages 5-6 false claims a day.”
Also on video, even immigration restrictionists sometimes wax eloquent about the exceptional generosity of U.S. immigration and refugee laws (even as they engage in an unending battle to undermine that claimed generosity). But, the reality, as set forth in this short HuffPost video is that on a regular basis our Government knowingly and intentionally returns individuals, mostly Hispanics, to countries where they are likely to be harmed or killed because we are unable to fit them within often hyper-technical and overly restrictive readings of various protection laws or because we are unwilling to exercise humanitarian discretion to save them..
I know first-hand because in my former position as a U.S. Immigration Judge, I sometimes had to tell individuals (and their families) in person that I had to order them returned to a country where I had concluded that they would likely be severely harmed or killed because I could not fit them into any of the categories of protection available under U.S. law. I daresay that very few of the restrictionists who glory in the idea of even harsher and more restrictive immigration laws have had this experience.
And clearly, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Steven Miller, Bob Goodlatte and others in the GOP would like to increase the number of humans we return to harm or death by stripping defenseless juveniles and other vulnerable asylum seekers of some of the limited rights they now possess in the false name of “border security.” Indeed, Sessions even invented a false narrative of a fraud-ridden, “attorney-gamed” (how do folks who often don’t even have a chance to get an attorney use attorneys to “game” the system?) asylum system in an attempt to justify his totally indefensible and morally bankrupt position.
Check out this video from HuffPost, entitled “This Is The Violent And Tragic Reality Of Deportation” to see the shocking truth about how our removal system really works (or not)!
Thinking of MLK’S “I have a dream,” next, I’ll take you over to The Guardian, where Washington Correspondent Sabrina Siddiqui tells us how “Immigration policy progress and setbacks have become pattern for Dreamers.”
“Greisa Martínez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.
Martínez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca.
She considers herself “one of the lucky ones”. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.
Martínez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines.
In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trump’s reported – if contested – reference to African and Central American nations as “shithole countries”.
“It feels like a sequel,” Martínez told the Guardian, adding that Trump’s adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. “This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.”
Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants “rapists” and “killers”, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.
He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers – despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.
Then, less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.
“People are picking their jaws up from the table and they’re trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.
“We always knew we were climbing a mountain … but it’s improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.”
As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trump’s remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.
Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship – an effort to appease Trump’s stance against so-called “chain migration” – but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status.
There would be other concessions to earn Trump’s signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall.
The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.
The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship.
The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.
Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trump’s ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.
“I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before,” Flake told the Guardian. “We’re going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. That’s the biggest difference.”
Read the rest of the story at the link.
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Finally, John Blake at CNN tells us “Three ways [you might not know] MLK speaks to our time.”
That’s a famous line from the 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it could also apply to a modern American hero: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the nation celebrates King’s national holiday Monday, it’s easy to freeze-frame him as the benevolent dreamer carved in stone on the Washington Mall. Yet the platitudes that frame many King holiday events often fail to mention the most radical aspects of his legacy, says Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College and author of several books on the civil rights movement.
“We turn him into a Thanksgiving parade float, he’s jolly, larger than life and he makes us feel good,” Theoharis says. “We’ve turned him into a mascot.”
Many people vaguely know that King opposed the Vietnam War and talked more about poverty in his later years. But King also had a lot to say about issues not normally associated with civil rights that still resonate today, historians and activists say.
If you’re concerned about inequality, health care, climate change or even the nastiness of our political disagreements, then King has plenty to say to you. To see that version of King, though, we have to dust off the cliches and look at him anew.
If you’re more familiar with your smartphone than your history, try this: Think of King not just as a civil rights hero, but also as an app — his legacy has to be updated to remain relevant.
Here are three ways we can update our MLK app to see how he spoke not only to his time, but to our time as well:
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But here’s one more uncomfortable thought that also explains why King remains so relevant:
The country is still divided by many of the same issues that consumed him.
On the last night of his life, King told a shouting congregation of black churchgoers that “we as a people” would get to “the Promised Land.” That kind of optimism, though, sounds like it belongs to another era.
What we have now is a leader in the White House who denies widespread reports that he complained about Latino and African immigrants coming to America from “shithole” countries; a white supremacist who murders worshippers in church; a social media landscape that pulsates with anger and accusations.
King’s Promised Land doesn’t sound boring when compared to today’s headlines. And maybe that’s what’s so sad about reliving his life every January for some people.
Fifty years after he died, King’s vision for America still sounds so far away.”
Read the complete article at the link.
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There you have it. A brief but representative sample of some of the many ways in which Dr. King’s dream of a “post racist America” is still relevant and why there’s still much more work still to be done than many of us might have thought several years ago.
So, the next time you hear bandied about terms like “merit-based” (means: exclude Brown and Black immigrants); “extreme vetting” (means: using bureaucracy to keep Muslims and other perceived “undesirables” out); “tax cuts” (means: handouts to the rich at the expense of the poor); “entitlement reform” (means: cutting benefits for the most vulnerable); “health care reform” (means: kicking the most needy out of the health care system); “voter fraud” (means: suppressing the Black, Hispanic, and Democratic vote); “rule of law” (means: perverting the role of Government agencies and the courts to harm Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, women, the poor, and other minorities); “job creation” (means: destroying our precious natural resources and the environment for the benefit of big corporations), “border security” (means: slashing rights for children and asylum seekers, and more money for building a wall and expanding prisons for non-criminal migrants, a/k/a/ “The New American Gulag”), “ending chain migration” (means keeping non-White and/or non-Christian immigrants from bringing family members) and other deceptively harmless sounding euphemisms, know what the politicos are really up to and consider them in the terms that Dr. King might have.
What’s really behind the rhetoric and how will it help create the type of more fair, just, equal, and value-driven society that majority of us in American seek to be part of and leave to succeeding generations. If it isn’t moving us as a nation toward those goals, “Just Say NO” as Dr. King would have done!
“Lots of the news from sub-Saharan Africa is about war, famine, poverty or political upheaval. So it’s understandable if many Americans think most Africans who immigrate to the United States are poorly educated and desperate.
That’s the impression that President Trump left with his comments to members of Congress opposing admission of immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa and elsewhere.
But research tells another story.
While many are refugees, large numbers are beneficiaries of the “diversity visa program” aimed at boosting immigration from underrepresented nations. And on average, African immigrants are better educated that people born in the U.S. or the immigrant population as a whole.
“It’s a population that’s very diverse in its educational, economic and English proficiency profile,” said Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington and coauthor of a report last year on sub-Saharan African immigrants in the U.S. “People came for a variety of reasons and at various times.”
Overall, their numbers are small compared with other immigrant groups but have risen significantly in recent years. The U.S. immigrant population from sub-Saharan Africa (49 countries with a total population of more than 1.1 billion) grew from 723,000 to more than 1.7 million between 2010 and 2015, according to a new report by New American Economy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. Still, they make up just half a percent of the U.S. population.
Drawing from U.S. surveys and Census Bureau data, the report found that the majority come from five countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa.
The Pew Research Center reported that African immigrants are most likely to settle in the South or Northeast, and that the largest numbers — at least 100,000 — are found in Texas, New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia. Many African refugees have also relocated to or have been resettled in states such as Minnesota and South Dakota.
The Refugee Act of 1980 made it easier for people fleeing war zones to resettle in the U.S., and today there are tens of thousand of refugees from Somalia, Sudan and Congo. About 22% of African immigrants are refugees, according to Andrew Lim, associate director of research at New American Economy.
At the same time, the diversity visa program — also known as the visa lottery — has opened the door to immigrants from more peaceful places. Of the sub-Saharan immigrants who have become legal permanent residents, 17% came through the program, compared with 5% of the total U.S. immigrant population, according to Batalova.
Applicants to the program must have completed the equivalent of a U.S. high school education or have at least two years of recent experience in any number of occupations, including accountant, computer support specialist, orthodontist and dancer.
As a result, the influx includes many immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who are highly skilled professionals.
Batalova’s research found that of the 1.4 million who are 25 and older, 41% have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30% of all immigrants and 32% of the U.S.-born population. Of the 19,000 U.S. immigrants from Norway — a country Trump reportedly told lawmakers is a good source of immigrants — 38% have college educations.
The New American Economy study found that 1 in 3 of these undergraduate degrees were focused on science, technology, engineering and math — “training heavily in demand by today’s employers.”
That report also found that African immigrants were significantly more likely to have graduate degrees. A total of 16% had a master’s degree, medical degree, law degree or a doctorate, compared with 11% of the U.S.-born population, Lim said.
African immigrants were more than twice as likely than the U.S. population overall to work in healthcare, Lim said. There are more than 32,500 nursing, psychiatric or home health aides, more than 46,000 registered nurses and more than 15,700 doctors and surgeons.
“Overwhelmingly the evidence shows that [African immigrants] make a significant, positive economic contribution to the U.S. economy,” both at a national level and in districts where they are concentrated, Lim said. “They contribute more than $10.1 billion in federal taxes, $4.7 billion in state and local taxes, and most importantly, they have significant economic clout to the point of $40.3 billion in spending power.”
That $40.3 billion pays for housing, transportation, consumer goods and education for their children — “things that actually stimulate the economy around them,” Lim said.
The biggest beneficiary is Texas, where their spending power is $4.7 billion, followed by California, Maryland, New York and Georgia.
“It’s a population that leverages its human resources and contributes to the U.S. economy by revitalizing communities, starting businesses, but also by working in a variety of professional fields,” Batalova said.
Even those with less education who arrive as refugees often fill certain lower-skill niches in healthcare, such as home health aides, researchers said.
“In the communities they were resettled in, they have made significant contributions,” Lim said.
In many towns and cities in the Great Lakes area of the Midwest, for example, they have started new businesses, infused local labor forces with younger workers, and expanded local tax bases, Lim said.
A report last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that immigrants in general had little to no negative effect on overall wages or employment levels for U.S.-born workers, and higher-skilled immigrants in fields such as technology and science had a positive influence on the U.S. labor force.
Still, supporters of stricter immigration policy back the Trump administration’s calls to end the visa lottery as well as programs that allow certain immigrants to sponsor family members to settle in the U.S. They believe that a merit system that selects immigrants based on individual skills should replace the current system.”
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Truth, facts, and helping American workers have never been part of the GOP restrictionist agenda. The xenophobia is no longer limited to so-called undocumented immigrants; it’s clear that guys like Purdue, Cotton, and Goodlatte really don’t like immigrants of any type, and particularly those of color or from “developing nations.” It’s really all about race with religion and culture thrown in — slowing down the “browning and blackening” of America, attacking the Hispanic American and African-American cultures, and trying to block or limit the immigration of non-Christians (including, of course, Muslims).
Trump’s racist remarks this week (which Perdue, Cotton, and Nielsen are rather disingenuously trying to claim never happened) and the GOP’s basic defense of the idea of drawing immigrants from White European countries rather than Haiti, Africa, or Central America has basically “blown the cover” off of so-called “merit based” immigration being pushed by some in the GOP. Trump was just articulating the hateful White Nationalist immigration agenda that he ran on and many (not all) in the GOP have now adopted under the code word “merit based.” That doesn’t bode well for bipartisan immigration reform of any type or, for that matter, for the future of a diverse “nation of immigrants.”
