"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.
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Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.CreditLeft, Jeenah Moon for The New York Times; right, Zach Gibson/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.
On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishingsplit-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.
Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.
Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”
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The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.
A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.
Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.
But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.
As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.
He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.
Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.
What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.
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Cohen and Manafort Are in Deeper Legal Trouble. Mueller Could Benefit.
Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction
Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts
A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels
While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:
In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.
Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.
And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.
As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).
For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Unfortunately, the Trump Circus is just picking up steam. We’re sure to be subjected to a “carpet bombing” of lies, tweets, insults, and threats as the Emperor’s clothes come off piece by piece while the emasculated GOP Congress merely sits and watches. And, of course, there will be the “normal” Trump strategy of attempting to shift blame to the victims and away from himself and the other corrupt individuals associated with him. Seems Trumpie owes Stormy (and Melania) an apology
Associate professor at Morgan State University and politics editor for the Root
August 15
Omarosa Manigault Newman — who once declared that “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump” — evolved from mentee to frenemy to antagonist before her nonstop media blitz promoting her new post-White House tell-all, during which she’s touted the existence of a recording of Trump using the n-word. It’s all sent the White House scrambling, with the president tweetingMonday that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday she “can’t guarantee” Americans will never hear audio of Trump using the slur.
It doesn’t matter.
Trump is a racist. That doesn’t hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It’s about the totality of his presidency, and after 18 months you can see his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not.
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Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump’s antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In the ’70s, his real estate company was the subject of a federal investigation that found his employees had secretly marked the paperwork of minority apartment rental applicants with codes such as “C” for “colored.” After black and Latino teenagers were charged with sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, he took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. He never backtracked or apologized when the teenagers’ convictions were overturned. He championed birtherism, and wouldn’t disavow the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya until the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president, he’s targeted African American athletes for criticism, whether it’s ranting, “Get that son of a bitch off the field,” in reference to professional football players silently protesting police brutality or tweeting that:
Calling African American Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) a “low IQ person” is now a routine bit at his political rallies. He was quoted referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole” countries. He announced his campaign in 2015 by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Later that year, he called for the United States to implement a “total and complete” Muslim ban.
After taking office, he hired xenophobes such as Stephen Miller — an architect of the ban, whose hostility toward immigrants is so stark, and hypocritical, that his uncle excoriated him this week in an essay for Politico Magazine, writing of Miller and Trump that “they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.”
I could go on. The point is that Trump’s view of nonwhites is out in the open. As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci notes, there’s every reason “to believe that an n-word tape wouldn’t torpedo Trump’s presidency”; there’s no indication his supporters “will turn against him because he used a racial slur.” Trump’s words and deeds over time have demonstrated his racism — it doesn’t hinge on being outed, Paula Deen-style, by a tape of him using the word. Racism hardly ever does.
I’m not saying it would be okay for Trump to use any variation of the n-word — in jest, in anger, singing along to the lyrics of a song, with or without the hard “R.” But the feverish speculation about whether he ever deployed the term wrongly implies that a verdict on his racist character turns on its use. What matters more about Trump are the positions he’s taken and the policy choices he’s made that harm communities of color. In his first year as president, Trump evolved from mere interpersonal racist to racist enabler when he proclaimed there were “very fine people, on both sides” when white supremacists and anti-racist protesters converged in Charlottesville last year. Jeff Sessions, a senator from Alabama who, three decades ago, was denieda federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee over concerns that he was a racist, was installed by Trump as attorney general.
Since assuming that role, Sessions has worked to undermine consent decrees meant to restrain racially abusive police departments and explicitly articulated the administration’s intent to use family separation to deter immigration. The Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos, is dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Trump hired Manigault Newman as a liaison to black constituent groups based on their reality TV relationship and, according to him, her willingness to say “GREAT things” about him, despite almost universal criticism of her appointment and subsequent work by African American Republicans and Democrats.
Being a racist — which entails belief in a fixed racial hierarchy and the power to act upon that belief in commerce, government or social spaces — is not now, and never has been, about one word or one slip of the tongue. It is about the ability of those in power to use public and private resources to enforce a racial hierarchy, whether that means having black people arrested for sitting in Starbucks, refusing to hire or promote qualified black job applicants or staffing a presidential administration with people who tolerate or encourage white nationalists. Trump’s statements and his approach to governance suggest he believes in a set racial hierarchy, and the possible existence of a hyped tape doesn’t change that. So far, and as far as I know, no one’s produced audio of white nationalist participants in last Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington using the n-word. Presumably, by the logic of some Trump defenders, that would mean there’s no proof they’re racist, either.
If American public discourse on race continues to revolve around a game of “gotcha,” with sentiments and smoking guns, divorced from an acknowledgment of how racists use their power, we won’t make any progress, during this administration or any other.
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Johnson states a simple truth that some don’t want to acknowledge. But, racist anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Mexican American, xenophobic “dog whistles” were at the heart of Trump’s campaign and remain at the heart of his policies, particularly on immigration, refugees, and law enforcement.
Does that mean that the majority of Americans who don’t endorse racism don’t need to deal with the fact that Trump is President and that Sessions and Miller are exercising outsized control over our justice system? Or that today’s Trumpist GOP isn’t your grandparents’ GOP (in my case, my parents’ GOP) and, although they might occasionally mutter a few insincere “tisk, tisk’s,” are firmly committed to enabling Trump and his racist policies including, of course, voter disenfranchisement. Of course not. Just think of how African-Americans, Hispanics, and liberals had to deal in practical terms with Southern political power in the age of Jim Crow (which is basically the “Age of Jeff Sessions”).
But, it is essential for us to know and acknowledge who and what we are dealing with and not to let political expediency totally obscure the harsh truth. Trump is a racist. And, that sad but true fact will continue to influence all of his policies for as long as he remains in office. Indeed, “Exhibit 1,” is the failure of the GOP to achieve “no-brainer” Dreamer protection over the last two years and the stubborn insistence of Sessions and others in the GOP to keep tying up our courts with bogus attempts to terminate already limited protections for those who aren’t going anywhere in the first place.
The rate of non-immigration prosecutions at the southern U.S. border was down 57 percent in June compared to March as federal officials changed focus under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, according to a new report.
In March 2018, non-immigration prosecutions accounted for one in seven (14 percent) of all total prosecutions at the southern border’s five federal districts.
That rate fell steadily over the next several months, and by June the ratio had fallen to one in seventeen (or six percent) of all prosecutions, according to an analysis of government data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
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In March 2018, non-immigration prosecutions accounted for one in seven (14 percent) of all total prosecutions at the southern border’s five federal districts. By June the ratio had fallen to one in seventeen (or six percent) of all prosecutions
‘Unless crimes are suddenly less prevalent in the districts along the southwest border, the odds of being prosecuted for many federal offenses have declined,’ the report found.
The timing of the change coincides with the Trump administration’s April 6 announcement that the government was taking a zero-tolerance approach to immigration at the southern U.S. border.
Statisticians at TRAC concluded that the push to prioritize prosecuting illegal border crossers had taken focus away from other crimes that federal prosecutors are charged with enforcing – including narcotics trafficking, weapons offenses and pollution crimes, among other things.
‘There are these capacity issues; everything can’t be your top priority,’ said Susan Long, a statistician for TRAC. ‘I think it’s difficult to believe that the stepped-up immigration prosecutions were just happenstance and didn’t have anything to do with policy.’
Former immigration judge Paul Wickham Schmidt agreed, saying most illegal immigration cases are misdemeanors that result in time served – typically 2-3 days.
‘Courts have limited capacity, prosecutors have limited capacity and when you prioritize one thing that means deprioritizing something else,’ he said. ‘In this case, what they’ve deprioritized is absolutely insane. There are real crimes out there.’
The TRAC report also bolsters assertions by San Diego-based Justice Department prosecutor Fred Sheppard that the zero-tolerance policy would be ‘diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly’ from non-immigration cases, according to a June report by USA Today.
Sheppard warned border authorities that prioritizing immigration cases would ‘occupy substantially more of our resources,’ according to an email obtained by the paper.
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Clearly, Sessions’s obscene, irrational, xenophobic fixation on brown skinned asylum seekers (who, in most cases should just be taken to the nearest port of entry and processed civilly through the credible fear/removal system) is destroying the U.S. Justice system. His insane program ignores the fundamental truth of law enforcement in any system: putting minor first offenders of regulatory laws in court displaces the cases of major offenders.
That’s why no well functioning justice system does it! What would you think if your local courts and prosecutors were so busy processing jaywalking cases that they couldn’t investigate and prosecute burglaries and bank robberies? But, that’s essentially what Sessions is doing here.
Moreover, the Federal Prosecutors, Federal Judges, and Federal, Magistrates who have failed to use their independent authority to put an end to these abuses are also complicit.
While much has been written about the supposed “resilience” of our democratic institutions and their ability to stand up to Executive abuses and tyranny, in this case it’s not happening. The system is essentially letting Sessions “get away with murder.” As Americans we should all be both outraged and appalled by this failure!
Stop the abuses! Stand up for Due Process, humanity, and rationality!
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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greetings. The push to prioritize prosecuting illegal border crossers has begun to impact the capacity of federal prosecutors to enforce other federal laws. In March 2018, immigration prosecutions dominated so that in the five federal districts along the southwest border only one in seven prosecutions (14%) were for any non-immigration crimes. But by June 2018, this ratio had shrunk so just one in seventeen prosecutions (6%) were for anything other than immigration offenses.
Federal prosecutors are responsible for enforcing a wide range of important federal laws – designed to combat narcotics trafficking and weapons offenses, battle those polluting air and water, counter corporate and other schemes to defraud the public, and much more. There is a combined population in these five southwest border districts of close to 30 million people. However, the number of prosecutions for committing any non-immigration crimes dwindled from a total of 1,093 in March 2018 to just 703 prosecutions in June 2018.
Meanwhile, immigration prosecutions continue to climb. The latest available case-by-case records for June 2018 reveal a total of 11,086 new federal prosecutions were brought as a result of referrals from Customs and Border Protection in the five federal judicial districts along the southwest border. June numbers were up 20.3 percent from the 9,216 such prosecutions recorded during May, and up 74.1 percent over March figures. Despite this increase, only 46 percent of all Border Patrol arrests of adults in June were criminally prosecuted.
The number of families arrested by the Border Patrol showed little indication of materially dropping. Numbers have remained quite similar during April, May and June. This meant that Border Patrol officials still had to pick and choose which adults to refer to federal prosecutors, and which adults not to criminally prosecute.
To read the full report, including additional details by district, go to:
In addition to these most recent overall figures, TRAC continues to offer free monthly reports on selected government agencies such as the FBI, ATF, DHS and the IRS. TRAC’s reports also monitor program categories such as official corruption, drugs, weapons, white collar crime and terrorism. For the latest information on prosecutions and convictions through June 2018, go to:
Even more detailed criminal enforcement information for the period from FY 1986 through June 2018 is available to TRACFed subscribers via the Express and Going Deeper tools. Go to http://tracfed.syr.edu for more information. Customized reports for a specific agency, district, program, lead charge or judge are available via the TRAC Data Interpreter, either as part of a TRACFed subscription or on a per-report basis. Go to http://trac.syr.edu/interpreter to start.
If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:
TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563 trac@syr.edu http://trac.syr.edu
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The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.
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No real surprises here.
All the adverse effects of Sessions’s White Nationalist fixation on helpless migrants, most of whom desire only to apply for refuge under our law, as they are legally entitled to do, are hard to quantify. It’s clear that there are no positives and that he has wasted taxpayer money, endangered lives, weakened law enforcement, abused children, damaged future generations, and violated both our Constitution and international human rights laws.
Yet, he goes on with his racist program with impunity — without being held truly accountable by either the Congress or the Courts. Indeed, his intended victims are most often blamed, and civil servants are stuck trying to mitigate or undo some of the worst effects. Pretty disgusting.
We need regime change while there is still some Government left to salvage.
Dear Paul,I hope you saw the new “Frontline” episode, Separated: Children at the Border, last night on PBS. The episode provides an in-depth, factual look at the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and the treatment of families seeking safety at the border.
I was interviewed about the work of the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) on behalf of women and children seeking asylum and what I witnessed on a recent monitoring visit to a processing center at the border.
We want you to know that WRC is unyielding in our commitment to hold the Trump administration accountable for its cruel policies — we will not stop until families seeking safety at the U.S. border are treated humanely and have their human rights respected.
The Trump Administration specializes in avoiding accountability. The masters of the lie always blame the courts, the victims, the Democrats, the press, lawyers, everybody but them. That was on display this week during Senate oversight hearings where nobody took responsibility for the child separation policy that everyone agreed was a bad idea. Of course, missing from the hearing lineup was the unapologetic and disingenuous “mastermind” of the “zero tolerance policy” Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions.
The video also shows how badly the Obama Administration screwed up the treatment of arriving asylum applicants with counterproductive policies like the abominable “family detention.” Not much acceptance of responsibility there either. Indeed, this is when the policy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by the DOJ and White House politicos went into high gear sending the Immigration Court backlog careening out of control.
A top health official told lawmakers Tuesday that the Trump administration was warned about instituting “any policy” resulting in family separations because of the effects such separations could have on the wellbeing of immigrant children.
The official’s response came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked every federal immigration official at Tuesday’s hearing over family separations to answer a particular question: “Did anyone on this panel say, maybe [separating families] wasn’t such a good idea?”
After a pause, Blumenthal directed his question first to Commander Jonathan White of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who said he and the Office of Refugee Resettlement raised a number of concerns in the previous year about “any policy which would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child as well about whether that would be operationally supportable with the bed capacity we had.”
The Democratic senator asked the commander to further explain his response in layman’s terms, asking if he told the administration that children would “suffer” as a result of its “zero tolerance” policy.
“Separation of children from their parents entails significant harm to children,” White said in response. “There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” he added, shortly after.
White also said that the administration’s response was that family separation was not a policy. As stated before, there is no current law that mandates the separation of migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.
The Trump administration implemented its “zero-tolerance” policy this spring. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in June to halt the separations.
In recent weeks, lawsuits filed against the separation policy have produced testimonies from lawyers and the separated families they represent, alleging that the government’s actions resulted in trauma to their children.
In one personal declaration presented earlier this month in court, one mother said her son “is not the same since we were reunited.”
“I thought that, because he is so young he would not be traumatized by this experience, but he does not separate from me. He cries when he does not see me,” Olivia Caceres said of her 1-year-old son. “That behavior is not normal. In El Salvador he would stay with his dad or my sister and not cry. Now he cries for fear of being alone,” she wrote.
Here are several other key moments from Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Read the entire article at the link.
The lack of accountability and acceptance of responsibility by the Administration is astounding, as was Sen. Cornyn’s tone deaf comment. The reason why other laws aren’t being enforced is because of the cruel, wasteful, unconstitutional “zero tolerance” policy instituted by Sessions. Stop blaming the victims, Senator!
And why isn’t Sessions being held accountable for the mess he “masterminded?”
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández writes in HuffPost:
When President Barack Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of U.S. citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him.
Within days of entering the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” To Republicans, prosecutorial discretion subverts the rule of law. Or so they say.
Government data about the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy toward border crossers reveal that it, too, is picking and choosing whom to target. In May, at the height of its policy of tossing parents into criminal proceedings while their children were hauled to government-run prisons, Border Patrol agents sent 9,216 people to prosecutors. That is about 1,000 more than in April and over 5,000 more than the same month a year earlier. The increase was especially noticeable in the family separation epicenter of McAllen, Texas, where I was born and where my law firm is based. Lawyers in my hometown saw 841 prosecutions in April jump to 2,079 in May.
That is a lot of people, but it’s not everyone. In May, Border Patrol agents stationed across the southwest border caught almost 29,000 adults clandestinely entering the United States. Eighty-five percent had no children; the rest are the parents whose anguish has been heard across the world.
Of all the adults apprehended that month, most were not prosecuted criminally. Only one-third were charged with a federal immigration crime. The rest presumably ended up in the civil immigration court system or in fast-track legal proceedings in which immigration officials deport people without taking them in front of a judge. Zero tolerance apparently didn’t mean zero exceptions.
It makes complete sense that the government did not go after everyone. The federal courts can’t handle that many cases. Picking and choosing is a part of every big law enforcement system. The important question isn’t whether that happens ― despite Republican insistence, it always does. The important question is why law enforcement officers choose to target some people over others.
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When it comes to taking a child from her parent, nothing is simple. And when it comes to prosecuting immigration laws, it’s never not a choice.
Of course separating children from parents has always been a choice driven by Sessions’s racism, White Nationalism, and xenophobia and having nothing whatsoever to do with sound law enforcement policy.
Indeed, studies have shown that so-called “zero tolerance” enforcement programs are failures across the board from a law enforcement standpoint. And, low level immigration prosecutions such as those promoted by Sessions have no documented deterrent effect. But, they have been shown to reduce the amount of time that Federal prosecutors and Federal Judges have to spend on “real” law enforcement, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, organized crime, and fraud.
If you have children, imagine how you would feel seeing them taken away like that. Hug your kids. Imagine not knowing where they are or whether you’ll ever get to hug them again.
Now imagine the terror and despair those 711 “ineligible” children must feel. It is monstrous to gratuitously inflict such pain. It is, in a word, torture.
In 120 cases, according to the government, a parent “waived” reunification with the child. This claim cannot be taken at face value, however, since immigration advocates cite widespread reports of parents being coerced or fooled into signing documents they did not understand.
Human nature binds parents with their children. It shocks and depresses me to have to write this, but I wonder whether Trump and his minions see these Central Americans — brown-skinned, with indigenous features — as fully human.
In 431 cases involving children between 5 and 17, officials reported, the parents have been deported. Where are they now? How could the government let this happen? If these parents were going to be denied permission to stay in the United States, what was the big hurry to kick them out? Why couldn’t the administration wait until their children could be brought back from wherever they were being kept?
Even more incredibly, in 79 cases, the children’s parents have been released into the United States. In other words, the parents have some legal status — but the government has their children.
And in 94 cases, according to Trump administration officials, the parents cannot be located. What are the odds, do you think, that these men and women will ever be found? Where do parents go to begin the process of tracking down their children? How do you tell a 5-year-old that she may never see her mother and father again?
That’s the reported situation for children 5 and older. The government is also still holding 46 children younger than 5 whom officials cannot or will not give back to their parents. Think of the trauma being inflicted on 2-year-olds — to make a political point.
All of this is happening because Trump has no respect for law or due process and no sense of empathy. He was reportedly upset this spring by a rise in border crossings by asylum-seekers, who by law had to be allowed to stay pending resolution of their claims. He and Sessions seized upon the pretext — for which they have not provided evidence — that children were being “trafficked” into the country for some reason.
“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said in May. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.”
Think, for a moment, of the millions of Irish, Italian, Eastern European and other immigrants who “smuggled” children into the United States — families such as Trump’s own. The only difference is that those earlier immigrants, though sometimes rejected at first, came to be seen as white.
Brown immigrants need not apply. Not if they want to see their kids again.
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Read Robinson’s complete op-ed at the above link.
“Right on” Eugene! We need “regime change,” sooner rather than later. And, we still don’t have an answer to Eugene’s earlier question: When, if ever, will Sessions and other Trump Administration officials be held accountable for their intentionally lawless and unconstitutional behavior?
Here’s Emily Kassie’s short documentary containing actual descriptions from victims and their abusers. Also starring refugee advocates Michele Brane of the Women Refugee Commisson, Barbara Hines, Esq., and others who “blow the whistle” on Sessions’s depraved policies and the unnecessary pain and suffering they are causing!
I Just Simply Did What He Wanted’: Sexual Abuse Inside Immigrant Detention Facilities – Video – NYTimes.com
So, get this! Gonzo, for no particular reason, reverses a well-established, working precedent — agreed upon by all parties, sponsored by DHS, and the product of 15 years of painstaking work by attorneys on both sides — that protected abused women under our refugee laws. This precedent, Matter of A-R-C-G-, actually saved lives and helped some of the most deserving and long-suffering refugees I dealt with in my decades long career enter and contribute to U.S. society. It was a perfect example of how asylum law could and should work to protect the most vulnerable! A “win – win” for the refugees and for our country!
Then, Sessions intentionally creates a system where these already abused refugees are detained and further abused and persecuted in the United States. Then, he returns them (without fair consideration of their claims for protection) to the countries in which they were persecuted to face further abuse, torture, or death.
The problems faced by women in detention were well-known in the Obama Administration. In fact, the Trump Administration immediately abolished the office within DHS that had been established to deal with allegations of sexual abuse. So, this isn’t “mere negligence.” It’s knowing and intentional misconduct! Usually, that results in criminal prosecution or civil liability!
How perverse is Sessions? I’ll go back to Eugene Robinson’s question from a recent blog posted on “courtside:” Why aren’t kidnappers, child abusers, and promoters of sexual abuse like Sessions and his White Nationalist cronies in jail rather than holding high office?https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2O8
WE ARE DIMINISHING OURSELVES AS A NATION, BUT, THAT WON’T STOP HUMAN MIGRATION!
ERO shouldn’t terrorize anyone, but it has to be able to arrest deportable aliens where they can be found.
The main reason for wanting to abolish ICE is likely to prevent undocumented aliens who are here for a better life from being deported.
But if ICE were to be abolished, its responsibilities would be assigned to another agency and Trump would require the new agency to implement the same policies.
Trump’s enforcement policies
President Barack Obama focused his immigration enforcement programprimarily on aliens who had been convicted of crimes in the United States, had been caught near the border after an illegal entry, or had returned unlawfully after being deported.
Once an undocumented alien had succeeded in crossing the border without being apprehended, he did not have to worry about being deported unless he was convicted of a serious crime. He was home free.
This created a “home free magnet” which encouraged more undocumented aliens to come and do whatever they had to do to cross the border.
“We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
He directed DHS “to employ all lawful means to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States against all removable aliens.”
Nevertheless, he prioritized removing aliens who are inadmissibleon criminal and related grounds, on security and related grounds, and for misrepresentations, or who are deportable for criminal offenses or on security and related grounds, and removable aliens who:
Have been convicted of any criminal offense;
Have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved;
Have committed acts that constitute a criminal offense;
Have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or government application;
Have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits;
Are subject to a final order of removal but have not left the United States; or
In the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.
Sanctuary policies prevent local police departments from turning inmates over to ERO when they are released from custody, so ERO is spending more of its time looking for deportable aliens in communities. This resulted in arresting 40,000 noncriminal aliens in FY 2017.
But ERO should not be engaging in improper behavior to make these or any other arrests.
If you see an ICE officer doing something improper, report him. This is far more likely to improve the situation than calling for the abolishment of ICE.
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Go on over to The Hill at the link for Nolan’s complete article.
I agree with Nolan that ICE isn’t going anywhere under Trump.
I also agree that the essential functions of ICE will still need to be performed, regardless of the ultimate fate of the organization.
I think it’s great that the “Abolish ICE Movement” has focused more attention on the cruel, unnecessary, and highly counterproductive enforcement and prosecutorial policies of ICE under Trump.
Indeed, the counterproductive nature of the Trump/Sessions immigration enforcement is a major reason why a group of Senior ICE Agents who actually perform real law enforcement functions — anti-smuggling, anti-human trafficking, immigration fraud, anti-terrorism — want to ditch the ICE label, because they know it’s inhibiting cooperation with other agencies and communities and thereby diminishing real law enforcement.
Most true law enforcement professionals that I have known don’t want to be associated with a group that glorifies cruelty and de-humanizes ordinary people. Having ICE on your resume today wouldn’t be a plus for most folks interested in a legitimate law enforcement career.
While the “essential functions” of ICE will continue, lots of today’s ICE enforcement has little to do with “essential enforcement.” The latter would be targeted at criminals, fraudsters, spouse abusers, traffickers, and recent arrivals who don’t have applications pending.
The lack of any semblance of common sense and responsibility in ICE’s abusive refusal to exercise prosecutorial discretion and actually putting properly closed cases back on the docket is a major contributor to the absolute mess in today’s Immigration Courts.
It’s also a reason why the Immigration Court mess is unlikely to be solved until Congress, the courts, and/or some future Executive force some fundamental changes in ICE enforcement and prosecutorial policies to reflect the same type of prudent, respectful, and realistic use of judicial time and prosecutorial discretion that is employed, to some extent, by every other major law enforcement agency in the U.S.
It never hurts to complain. I’m a big fan of making a “running record” of misconduct.
But, in the Trump Administration a record is about all you’ll get. Nothing is going to be done to correct misconduct because misconduct comes from the top.
My experience with ICE Chief Counsel’s Office in Arlington was highly positive. The attorneys were overwhelmingly fair, smart, responsive, respectful, and part of the “team” with the private, bar, the courts, and the interpreters that made the justice system work in Arlington in the past.
Indeed, working with the Arlington Chief Counsel’s Office made me proud to have led the major reorganization that established the forerunner to the “Modern Chief Counsel System” at the “Legacy INS” during the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The Arlington Chief Counsel’s Office was exactly what former General Counsels Dave Crosland, Mike Inman, Regional Counsel Bill Odencrantz, and I had envisioned when we planned and carried out the reorganization (over considerable internal opposition, I might add).
My overall experiences with the officers of ICE and it’s forerunner INS Investigations were positive. I found and worked with plenty of capable, dedicated, professional, and humane officers during my decades of dealing with immigration enforcement in some form or another.
All of that suggests that the major problems in ICE have arisen almost entirely under the Trump Administration. That’s because of truly horrible leadership from the top down.
ICE won’t improve until we get “regime change.” When that happens, ICE will have to be reorganized, reinvented, and “rebranded.” Professional management — one that pays particular attention to its relationship to local communities — must be reestablished. Sane enforcement and prosecutorial discretion policies will have to be reinstated.
My experiences with ICE suggest that the right people to lead an “ICE-type” agency in the future are likely already somewhere in ICE. They just aren’t in the right leadership and management positions. Maybe they will all quit before the end of the Trump Administration If not, they could serve as a “professional core” for rebuilding and reforming ICE.
I’m skeptical that so-called “Catch and Release” has a significant effect on what’s happening on the Southern Border.
In the first place, the current situation is “a self-created crisis” initiated by Trump & Sessions. Otherwise it’s pretty much normal migration.
Seeking asylum at the border isn’t “illegal migration” at all. It’s asserting an internationally recognized right. Detention and family separation are not appropriate responses to individuals seeking in good faith to exercise their rights.
In any event, the primary drivers of migration outside the visa system are: 1) unmet needs of the U.S. labor market, and 2) political, social, and economic conditions in foreign countries. So-called “Catch and Release” has no established effect on either of these “drivers.” See, e.g.,https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/crisis-border-not-numbers.
After a month of outrage at the cruelty of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, last week we saw a stream of confounding and divergent statements on immigration: The president suggested depriving undocumented migrants of due process; Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted that every adult who crossed illegally would be prosecuted; and the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection announced that families would once again be released together to await trial. Meanwhile, thousands of separated children and their parents remain trapped in a web of shelters and detention facilities run by nonprofit groups and private prison, security and defense companies.
It is important to understand that the crisis of separation manufactured by the Trump administration is only the most visibly abhorrent manifestation of a decades-long project to create a “state of exception” along our southern border.
This concept was used by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to describe the states of emergency declared by governments to suspend or diminish rights and protections. In April, when the president deployed National Guard troops to the border (an action also taken by his two predecessors), he declared that “the situation at the border has now reached a point of crisis.” In fact, despite recent upticks, border crossings remained at historic lows and the border was more secure than ever — though we might ask, secure for whom?
For most Americans, what happens on the border remains out of sight and out of mind. But in the immigration enforcement community, the militarization of the border has given rise to a culture imbued with the language and tactics of war.
Border agents refer to migrants as “criminals,” “aliens,” “illegals,” “bodies” or “toncs” (possibly an acronym for “temporarily out of native country” or “territory of origin not known” — or a reference to the sound of a Maglite hitting a migrant’s skull). They are equipped with drones, helicopters, infrared cameras, radar, ground sensors and explosion-resistant vehicles. But their most deadly tool is geographic — the desert itself.
“Prevention Through Deterrence” came to define border enforcement in the 1990s, when the Border Patrol cracked down on migrant crossings in cities like El Paso. Walls were built, budgets ballooned and scores of new agents were hired to patrol border towns. Everywhere else, it was assumed, the hostile desert would do the dirty work of deterring crossers, away from the public eye.
. . . .
Such defenses also gloss over the patrol’s casual brutality: I have witnessed agents scattering migrant groups in remote areas and destroying their water supplies, acts that have also been extensively documented by humanitarian groups.
The principle of deterrence is behind the current administration’s zero-tolerance policy. In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, Mr. Sessions, pressed on whether children were being separated from parents to deter crossers, conceded, “Yes, hopefully people will get the message.”
Administration officials have claimed that even this policy is “humanitarian,” in part because it may dissuade future migrants from bringing their children on the dangerous journey.
This ignores decades of proof that no matter what version of hell migrants are made to pass through at the border, they will endure it to escape far more tangible threats of violence in their home countries, to reunite with family or to secure some semblance of economic stability.
Policymakers also ignore that new enforcement measures almost always strengthen cartel-aligned human trafficking networks, giving them cause to increase their smuggling fees and push vulnerable migrants to make riskier crossings to avoid detection.
Jason De León, the director of the Undocumented Migration Project, argues that the government sees undocumented migrants as people “whose lives have no political or social value” and “whose deaths are of little consequence.”
This devaluation of migrant life is not just rhetorical: CNN recently revealed that the Border Patrol has been undercounting migrant deaths, failing to include more than 500 in its official tally of more than 6,000 deaths over 16 years — a literal erasure of lives.
The logic of deterrence is not unlike that of war: It has transformed the border into a state of exception where some of the most vulnerable people on earth face death and disappearance and where children are torn from their parents to send the message You are not safe here. In this sense, the situation at the border has reached a point of crisis — not one of criminality but of disregard for human life.
We cannot return to indifference. In the aftermath of our nation’s outcry against family separation, it is vital that we direct our outrage toward the violent policies that enabled it.
Francisco Cantú, a former Border Patrol agent, is the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.”
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Read Cantu’s full article at the above link.
BTW, when I was at the “Legacy INS” I was told the “Maglite hitting the migrant’s skull” version of the Border Patrol’s definition of “toncs.”
Cantu confirms what I have said many times on this blog. Far from keeping us safer, the cruel, inhuman, dishonest, and racist policies of Trump & Sessions actually “strengthen cartel-aligned human trafficking networks,” thereby making us markedly less safe. They also degrade us as a nation and as human beings by essentially assisting in the deaths of desperate and vulnerable refugees who are only required to use the cartels in the first place because of the willful failures, incompetence, dishonesty, and immorality of our Government officials administering refugee and asylum programs!
Focus on this ugly truth: Under Trump, Sessions, Miller, and their White Nationalist buddies, our government sees undocumented migrants as people “’whose lives have no political or social value’ and ‘whose deaths are of little consequence.'”
Celebrate July 4 by “just saying no” to the Trump regime! Join the New Due Process Army, and stop the ugliness of Trump, Sessions, Miller, and their White Nationalist cabal! Channel your outrage into saving the lives of the most vulnerable among us and resisting the Trump kakistocracy! Restore the optimistic, progressive, inclusive, idealistic vision of America set forth by our Founding Fathers in their Declaration of Independence!
1) Government never had specific plan to reunify families, court testimony shows
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
In recent weeks, the government has stumbled trying to explain its plan for reunifying families in the wake of its much-criticized family separations policy at the border.
But newly reviewed court filings show that the byzantine system that has resulted in thousands of children separated for weeks and months from parents elsewhere in government custody was not an accident. It was always the design.
In fact, one of the women in an ongoing lawsuit over family separations can now was apparently one of the first separations that took place during a quiet pilot of the policy last year. The pilot program has been previously reported, but took on new attention on the heels of an NBC report about it Friday.
A government attorney admitted in court just days before the border-wide initiative was unveiled in early May that there was never a plan for parents like her to be proactively reunited with their kids.
And an analysis of the purported success of the pilot shows that the Department of Homeland Security’s justification that the program worked as a deterrent was likely based on dubious data.
A DHS official confirmed Friday that the agency first tested the policy of prosecuting parents caught illegally crossing the border in the El Paso sector in Texas from July to October of last year. The pilot had been previously reported, but was not widely known. NBC reported the effort anew Friday.
Ms. C, as she is known in court filings, was apprehended crossing the border illegally in late August 2017 and prosecuted in El Paso, according to court documents. She asked for asylum and in the midst of the legal process, the government took her 14-year-old son from her, sending him to a Health and Human Services facility in Chicago. They were separated for months.
2) Controversial ICE chief retiring, replacement expected to be named soon
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan is serving his last day Friday, as the controversial face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration retires.
Homan’s final day was confirmed by spokeswoman Liz Johnson.
The polarizing face of the administration’s immigration enforcement, and a favorite of President Donald Trump himself, Homan had announced in April he would be taking his long-delayed retirement this month.
Homan has told the story of receiving the request to stay on as chief of ICE under Trump while celebrating at his going away party — a retirement that was deferred for a year and a half.
According to a source familiar, acting CBP Deputy Commissioner Ronald Vitiello is expected to be named acting director of ICE in Homan’s stead as soon as Friday.
Vitiello has been a familiar face for the media as well, often speaking with reporters about the President’s border wall project.
The White House has not responded to a request for comment.
3) Trump administration may further restrict asylum rights
By: Laura Jarrett and Tal Kopan, CNN
The Justice Department is considering a regulation that would prevent people from claiming asylum if they’re convicted of illegally entering the US, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
Such a rule would be a dramatic change in the landscape of US immigration law and could conflict with domestic law and long-standing international obligations.
The draft regulation was described to CNN as being in its very early stages and has not yet been submitted to the White House for review. Should it be implemented, it would likely result in immediate legal challenges from asylum-seekers and advocates.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
The proposal was first reported by Vox.
Current law allows migrants to raise an asylum claim at any lawful port of entry to the US, as well as between valid ports of entry where crossing to the US is illegal.
The Immigration and Nationality Act states that anyone who arrives in the US “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” may apply for asylum if he or she has a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Yet another part of the law gives Attorney General Jeff Sessions the leeway to regulate which offenses “will be considered to be a crime,” in which case asylum is not available.
How exactly the rule will be tailored and whether it will include any exceptions remains unclear.
Join the New Due Process Army — Fight White Nationalism, Lies, Cowardice, and Bullying by Trump and his evil gang of immoral, scofflaw, racist “swamp monsters.”
When Magistrate Judge Peter E. Ormsby stepped into the federal courtroom here Tuesday morning, 75 defendants rose to their feet.
Their ankles were shackled, and they wore headsets through which the proceedings would be translated into Spanish. In the hallway, just beyond the door, was a pile of handcuffs that had been removed before they entered the courtroom.
Most of the defendants appeared dressed in the same filthy, sweat-saturated clothes they had been wearing two days before, when they were apprehended crossing the Rio Grande aboard rafts.
In all but 11 of their cases, this criminal misdemeanor was the first time they had ever been found to have violated U.S. law.
Ormsby informed them his was not an immigration court. Many had already signed away their rights to further proceedings and had orders for what is known as “expedited removal.” They had done that before the 17 lawyers of the public defender’s office had met with any of them for the first time, just hours before.
The next two hours would see each one of them plead guilty and be sentenced, most to time already served.
With few exceptions, each case would be dealt with in under 75 seconds.
This was just the morning docket. It is what President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy looks like here, where busloads of recently detained migrants roll up to the federal courthouse several times a day. Ormsby invited me and a handful of other observers there to sit in the jury box, because there was no room anywhere else.
The president contends that even this assembly-line version of justice is more than what those caught entering the country illegally should get.
“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”
On that latter point, the president is correct — but it is for the reverse of the reasoning he offers. His zero-tolerance policy is putting even more stress on a legal system that already gives migrants far less than their day in court.
The outcome for many might be different if they had fuller access to the legal system, to which they are entitled in theory if not practice, and given an opportunity to make their case to stay in this country.
Trump has mocked proposals for adding to the number of immigration judges, who handle separate proceedings for those who want to remain.
“We have thousands of judges already,” he has claimed. That is incorrect. The number actually stands at fewer than 350 across the country. They are facing a backlog of more than 700,000 cases.
Just as critical as the scarcity of judges is the fact that so few migrants ever have a chance to consult an attorney.
Only about 14 percent of those who are detained have access to counsel, says American Bar Association President Hilarie Bass, who was here from Miami. She added that migrant adults with lawyers win slightly more than half their cases and get to stay in this country, while 9 out of 10 of those without representation lose and are deported.
For unaccompanied children, the disparity in outcomes is even greater. As Bass noted: “How can you ask a 12-year-old to walk into court and make a case for themselves?”
Under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, more migrants are being prosecuted and deported on the border, rather than being sent to other parts of the country where they can await trial while staying with relatives or others who can take them in. That has compounded the challenge, because it adds to the backlog in this region and makes it more difficult for migrants to find lawyers.
In the current crisis, platoons of lawyers are arriving weekly to volunteer their services, but there are not nearly enough, says Kimi Jackson, director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. “What we need most here are Spanish-speaking immigration attorneys, particularly ones who can stay a little longer.” The need will remain for the foreseeable future, long after the journalists and cameras have moved on to the next story.
And even if help comes, it will be too late for most of those who appeared before Ormsby. As he worked his way through their cases, he expressed sympathy for the circumstances of poverty and violence that brought them from dangerous places in Honduras and El Salvador and Mexico to his courtroom. He wished them and their families well and urged them to go through the process of coming to the United States legally.
“Seeing the type of people you appear to be,” the magistrate added, “I hope that you will be successful with that.”
But everyone there knew that was a wish, and one unlikely to come true.
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Mostly first offenders who didn’t belong in criminal court anyway.
Why would nonviolent first offenders be shackled in court?
Anybody understand what they are pleading guilty to?
Everybody understand that they have a right to a full trial at which the Government would have to prove guilt?
Anybody understand what a port of entry is?
Anybody just looking for an officer to apply for asylum?
Anybody realize there are strong legal arguments that criminal sanctions can’t be invoked against good faith asylum seekers under international treaties to which the U.S. is party?
Anybody know the name of their court-appointed lawyer?
Anybody have a chance to speak with their lawyer in private in Spanish?
Anybody have a “know your rights” presentation about the immigration system?
Anybody know what a “credible fear” interview is, how to request one from the DHS, and how to get review of a denial?
Anybody know that asylum applicants who pass credible fear can request bond?
Anybody understand the consequences of a conviction?
Anybody pressured to plead guilty to get their kids back or get out of detention?
Anybody know how the asylum process works and how to apply?
Anybody know how important lawyers are for asylum seekers and how to get in touch with local pro bono lawyers?
Anybody separated from kids?
Anybody know that the Government has been ordered by a more conscientious Federal Judge to reunite families?
We’ll probably never know the answers, because that might have exceeded Judge Ormsby’s 75 second attention span and cut into his productivity stats.
I’ve commented before on the Judge Ormsby’s judicial performance (or lack thereof).
Judge Ormsby should be in line for a Jeff Sessions “Volume Is Everything — Due Process Is Nothing” award! He appears to be just the type of subservient judicial toady Trump & McConnell would love to have on the Supremes. And, I wouldn’t let the U.S. District Judges who are in charge of this judicial farce off the hook either.
Someday, the true history of the abuses of human values, human rights, and our Constitution now going on at our border under a White Nationalist regime will be written. And the “go along to get along” crowd will be held accountable for their conduct; by the judgment of history, if not by the law.
Trump fumes over immigration courts Sessions has focused on
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
President Donald Trump in recent days has fumed about the immigration courts that handle cases of people seeking entry into the US.
But Trump’s fixation on the courts and the judges who staff them flies in the face of what his attorney general has been trying to do to reshape the courts to align with the President’s vision, including hiring more immigration judges and restricting asylum laws.
The President tweeted that those stopped at the border should be simply told they can’t enter, rather than going through the system.
“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came,” Trump tweeted on Saturday.
Press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Monday that “virtually all Americans” agree that drawn-out court proceedings don’t make sense for migrants who enter the country illegally. Trump, she said, “would certainly like to see more expedited removal.”
“Just because you don’t see a judge doesn’t mean you aren’t receiving due process,” she said.
The immigration courts decide whether immigrants have a legal right to stay in the US or should be deported — and those cases include people arriving at the border as well people from the interior of the US, who may or may not have had legal status at some point.
But Trump’s suggestion has several problems, including the fact that there are fewer than 350 immigration judges nationwide and the Justice Department has budgeted for only 100 more.
In addition, the suggestion that the immigration courts could be done away with altogether would likely fly in the face of the Constitution and a host of domestic and international laws that bestow rights on everyone in the US and crossing the border, regardless of whether they are citizens.
There is no Due Process without an impartial decision maker (lots of doubt as to whether any Immigration Judge working for Jeff Sessions can be considered “impartial”).
Jeff Sessions has nothing to do with virtue. His disingenuous, racist, White Nationalist policies are the polar opposite of “virtue.”
As the Supreme Court has said, Due Process takes time — sometimes a lot, sometimes less.
Trump’s outrageous proposals violate our Constitution, our statutory law, and two international conventions to which we are party.
There is no crisis for the United States, except the unnecessary one that Trump and Sessions have created with their lawless behavior.
But, there is a crisis in the Northern Triangle for which we are at least partially responsible.
The stakes for the refugees are literally life or death — Trump and Sessions’s dehumanizing rhetoric is beyond disgusting.
Even those who fail to qualify for protection after full hearings likely face rape, torture, extortion, severe beatings, mutilation, or death upon return. We actually should be protecting more, not fewer, of them.
