Department of Defense – Page 2 – immigrationcourtside.com

RETIRED MILITARY LEADERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST TRUMP’S WANTON DESTRUCTION OF U.S. RFUGEE PROGRAM — “When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.”

Admiral Robert J. Natter — United States Navy Official photo of ADM (Line) [Now Retired] Robert J. Natter, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations N3/N5. As of August 1999.

Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling — Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling
U.S. Army

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/08/cutting-refugee-admissions-will-have-severe-consequences-us-military/

Admiral (Ret.) Robert J. Natter & Lt. General (Ret.) Mark P. Hertling write in WashPost:

Robert J. Natter is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who served as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces from 2000 to 2003. Mark P. Hertling is a retired lieutenant general who served as commanding general of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012.

America was founded as a safe haven to persecuted people and a beacon of hope, liberty and freedom to people around the world. Those themes reflect our values, and the welcoming of refugees to our shores is one of our proudest legacies and a fundamental part of who we are as a nation.

As military leaders, we spent nearly four decades defending these values. But today, a core American legacy is at risk, as the Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing severe, unprecedented cuts — potentially even zeroing out — the bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the established legal means of entry for these deserving people.

This week, we joined a group of 27 retired generals and admirals — all of whom have been operational leaders in military conflicts and exhibited courage in defending our values on the battlefield — in writing to President Trump expressing grave concerns about the direction of this vital program.

That’s because for many of us, welcoming refugees is not just a matter of smart policy and a reflection of our national values; it is also personal. Many of us know these refugees: They worked for and with us in our fight against terrorists and insurgents. The tangible and significant improvements we were able to make in the lives of millions as well as efforts to protect our own soldiers, sailors and Marines would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, logisticians, engineers and others.

Many of those individuals were targeted because of their assistance to us. They and their families have often been threatened for working with coalition forces, yet they bravely continued in their service at every level from translating conversations at the infantry squad level to contributing to task-force-level diplomatic missions. They may claim different cultures and speak different languages, but they have all put their lives on the line along with our citizens as part of our team.

Many of our partners continue to live in fear, given the continued hazardous situations in various parts of the world. In Iraq alone, more than 100,000 await entry to the United States. We promised our Iraqi partners support and safety when they were shoulder to shoulder with us fighting a despicable enemy. If today we turn these people away, or reduce the numbers who are allowed entry, it will be extremely difficult to ask others to assist us in the future.

Providing safety to people who assist American troops is a core function of our refugee program, but it does not stop there. We are living in a moment of unprecedented global displacement. Of the nearly 26 million refugees across the globe, most are hosted by low- and middle-income countries bordering the unstable areas that people are fleeing. A small proportion of the most vulnerable — less than 5 percent — are selected for resettlement. In addition to humanitarian assistance, resettling refugees is a concrete way that the United States offers support to these countries, while also strengthening regional stability and reducing the risk that people will be forced to return to conflict zones.

We know firsthand that both the humanitarian and strategic consequences of conflicts in Iraq, Syria, the Balkans and East and West Africa would be much worse had neighboring countries closed their borders. We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.

When we slam the door on refugees, we encourage other nations to do the same, contributing to a less compassionate and more dangerous world, one in which our military will increasingly be called to provide stability.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has welcomed about 3 million refugees from around the world who have gone on to contribute to and strengthen this country in immeasurable ways. The average refugee admission level across both Republican and Democratic administrations is 95,000 annually. Yet in the last two years, admissions have plummeted 75 percent.

In the next two weeks, the president will decide how many refugees we will admit in 2020. That decision will determine whether we uphold America’s legacy as a haven for the persecuted, and it will send a powerful message to the world about who we are as a people. We strongly recommend that this lifesaving humanitarian program be restored to historic bipartisan-supported levels.

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“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

So much for the Trump Administration’s “solution” of returning refugees and other forced migrants to danger zones in their own countries or to countries that are equally or more dangerous. Killing and abusing forced migrants through improper returns and “deterrents” intended to make them “die in place” is reminiscent of other types of “final solutions” that were disastrous for humanity. Only, this time, the U.S. is the “leader of the pack” downward rather than one of those fighting to save humanity.

A thoroughly cowardly performance by Trump and his White Nationalist gang.

Also, for the more than four decades I have been involved in immigration and refugee issues, overseas refugee admissions have received overwhelming bipartisan support. What has happened to the GOP which suddenly has “swallowed the whistle” in the face of Trump’s cowardly White Nationalism?

It appears that retired military leaders, like former U.S. Immigration Judges, can make a “full time job” out of speaking out against the stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane policies of the Trump Administration.

PWS

09-10-19

SPLIT DECISION: Supremes Deliver “Gut Punch” To Transgender Americans, But Give Another Round To Dreamers

SPLIT DECISION: Supremes Deliver “Gut Punch” To Transgender Americans, But Give Another Round To Dreamers

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

United States Immigration Judge (Retired)

On Tuesday, a divided Supreme Court allowed a portion of Trump’s homophobic ban on certain transgender troops to go into effect. At the same time, they properly squelched the arrogantly disingenuous attempt by Trump and his “go along to get along” Solicitor General Noel Francisco to “expedite” review of lower court rulings that found that Trump, former Attorney General Sessions, and DHS acted lawlessly and without any apparent legal rationale in terminating the “DACA” program. In simple terms, decisions that required the Administration to follow the law.

Prior Solicitors General have sometimes balked at representing liars and presenting disingenuous arguments in behalf of their Government “clients.” (Actually, somewhat of a bureaucratic misnomer, because the “institutional client” is really the “People of the U.S.” who pay Government salaries, regardless of whether they are citizens or can vote.) Not this one, who seems to savor the opportunity to carry Trump’s more than ample “dirty water” and reduce the credibility of his one-respected office to around zero. As I predicted, nobody serves Trump without being tarnished.

For the LGBTQ community, it’s a horrible signal that a narrow majority of the Supremes are unwilling to move into the 21^stcentury and recognize their Constitutional rights to equal protection under the 14^thAmendment as well as their rights as human beings. It’s also shockingly disrespectful to those who have stepped forward to risk their lives in the name of our country, something Trump took great pains to avoid. It’s doubly disappointing that Chief Justice John Roberts joined his far-right colleagues on this one, at least in part (he rejected the bogus argument for immediate review put forth by Francesco and instead sent the case back to the lower courts for further development).

Unlike some of his colleagues on the right, Roberts has some sense of institutional history, the horror and existential dangers to democracy of Trump as Chief Executive, and the future. Come on, “Chiefie,” we can all get smarter as we get older! Don’t blow your chance to “get on the right side of history.” Leave the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” behind in their dust and join your four more enlightened colleagues in moving America forward and showing some leadership and courage on the Supremes. As this month has shown, you might be the only person able to save America.

Paraphrasing what many pundits have said, “The Supremes can basically do anything they want, whenever they want to, for any reason they can come up with, because they are Supreme.” With that caveat in mind, the Court’s well-deserved slap down of Trump on DACA basically leaves the full protections in effect for Dreamers until the end of the Trump Administration. At that point, we’ll either get a new President, or there won’t be any country left for the “Dreamers,” the Supremes, or the rest of us to “dream about” or live in. The so-called “American Dream” will be at a tragic end. We’ll all be living in a continuing nightmare of cruelty, incompetence, and randomness.

I think the Supremes would be wise not to take up the DACA issue ever. It needs to be resolved by the lower courts, who have for the most part done a fine job, and the Congress, which hasn’t. But, assuming the Supremes do take the issue, they probably wouldn’t schedule argument before the October Term 2020. That makes it highly unlikely that they would reach and issue any final decision before the November 2020 elections. There would certainly be no reason for them to “rush to judgement” on this one.

Thus, Trump’s hollow offer of meager “Dreamer relief,” no path to green cards or citizenship and less than they have now under the court decisions, is even less of a legitimate “bargaining chip” than it was before. And, “poisoning the well” with Stephen Miller’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, child-abuse agenda shows how intellectually dishonest Trump and the GOP are and that the rancid “thousand pages of vile gibberish” that they launched as a “fake offer to reopen our Government” is a pure political stunt and an insult to 800,000 unpaid Government workers.

Moreover, all of this nonsense must be viewed in context of reality. That’s something that seldom intrudes on the daily intentionally created chaos and national dysfunction of this Administration. The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere! Almost all of them have legitimate applications for immigration relief that they can file in Immigration Court, including cancellation of removal, asylum, withholding of removal, or relief under the CAT.

Trump, Sessions, and now Whitaker have totally destroyed the U.S. Immigration Court system. I’m not sure it will be able to reopen even when the Trump shutdown finally ends. With a politically-created backlog of well over one million cases, growing by tens of thousands with every day of the mindless Trump shutdown, virtually no “Dreamer” (other than a minute percentage who might be convicted of crimes and probably would have had their DACA status revoked or denied on that basis) would be scheduled for removal proceedings within the next four years, let alone by 2020. Indeed, if Congress doesn’t step in and provide Dreamer relief and an Article I independent Immigration Court to replace the current dysfunctional mess in the DOJ, some of these cases may well still be pending a decade from now!

This context also reaffirms the total disingenuous absurdity of SG Francisco’s argument that this is an “emergency” requiring “early intervention” by the Supremes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only “emergency” is the one intentionally caused by his “client” Trump — by illegally and unnecessarily trying to shut down the DACA program and aggravated by his Administration’s wanton destruction of our U.S. Immigration Courts, and by the “Trump shutdown.”

The Supremes must take a “hard line” against being “sucked in” to the many bogus “emergencies” that Trump creates to detract attention from his and his party’s inability to govern in even a minimally fair and effective manner. Perhaps, it’s also time for Francisco to reread the rule of ethics for lawyers and have a “heart to heart” with his “client” about abusing the Federal Courts with semi-frivolous litigation and presenting lies as “facts.” It’s never too late to learn!

PWS

01-23-19

GONZO’S WORLD: STILL A BIG LOSER! – He’s Gone, But His Scofflaw Positions Continue To Be Hammered By The Real (“Article III”) Courts! – Federal Judges Smoke Illegal “Sanctuary Cities” & “Transgender Troops” Abuses By Administration!

https://apple.news/Aw1vvPVvPTMGBMle4Z4fXow

Sophie Tatum reports for CNN:

US judge rules against Trump administration in suit over policing grants to ‘sanctuary cities’

Updated 5:21 PM EST November 30, 2018
Washington

A federal judge ruled against the Justice Department on Friday in a lawsuit over withholding federal money from so-called sanctuary cities, the latest blow to the Trump administration’s hardline immigration tactics.

The lawsuit challenged the Justice Department’s efforts to punish sanctuary cities by withholding a key law enforcement grant the department said was available only to cities that complied with specific immigration enforcement measures.

In July 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that applicants for Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants would have to comply with federal immigration enforcement in ways that were unlike years past, like allowing federal law enforcement agents to have access to detainees in jails for questioning about their immigration status.

According to the ruling, the seven states involved in the lawsuit, as well as New York City, had been receiving the grant money since Congress created the fund for the “modern version of the program in 2006,” and the funds “collectively totaled over $25 million.”

“In 2017, for the first time in the history of the program, the U.S. Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) and Attorney General (collectively, ‘Defendants’) imposed three immigration-related conditions that grantees must comply with in order to receive funding,” wrote Judge Edgardo Ramos, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, in his ruling.

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood led the suit and was joined by New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington state and Virginia.

Underwood said in a statement on Friday that the ruling was “a major win for New Yorkers’ public safety.” CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

This isn’t the first ruling of its kind — in April, a panel of three judges from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling in favor of the city of Chicago that blocked the Justice Department from adding new requirements for the policing grants.

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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/419170-judge-refuses-to-hold-or-limit-ruling-on-transgender-military-ban

Lydia Wheeler reports in The Hill:

A federal district court judge on Friday denied the Trump administration’s request to block or limit the scope of a ruling that temporarily prohibits the government from enforcing its ban on transgender people serving in the military.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the court is not convinced the government will suffer irreparable harm without a stay of the court’s October 2017 preliminary injunction.

The government had asked for a stay pending any potential, future proceedings in the Supreme Court. Bypassing normal judicial order, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court last week to review the case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Arguments before the appeals court are scheduled for Dec. 10.

At the very least, the government asked the district court to limit the nationwide scope of the injunction while the court weighs in, but Kollar-Kotelly refused. She said the government had not convinced the court that a more limited injunction is appropriate.

“Without supporting evidence, defendants’ bare assertion that the Court’s injunction poses a threat to military readiness is insufficient to overcome the public interest in ensuring that the government does not engage in unconstitutional and discriminatory conduct,” she said.

“After all, ‘it must be remembered that all Plaintiffs seek during this litigation is to serve their nation with honor and dignity, volunteering to face extreme hardships, to endure lengthy deployments and separation from family and friends, and to willingly make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives if necessary to protect the Nation, the people of the United States, and the Constitution against all who would attack them,’ ” she said.

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Not surprisingly, policies stemming from racism and homophobia being advanced for crass political reasons aren’t doing very well in Federal Courts. There, the judges tend to prefer cogent legal arguments. The latter is something for which Gonzo was never known. Indeed, a number of the biased based positions he advanced in support of the Administration were so outlandish that the judges actually gave the Government additional time to develop a legal rationale. But, that also proved to be time wasted, because there never was any legal rationale for these policies and legal positions. Just hate and bias, and an ignorance of the real meaning of our Constitution.

There’s lots of irony, indeed total absurdity, in Sessions’s audaciously bogus claim that he “stood for the rule of law.” Safe to say that no Attorney General since “John the Con” Mitchell has done so much to undermine our Constitutional system and the real “rule of law.”

PWS

12-03-18

MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: Trump Administration Already Violating Law By Turning Away Asylum Applicants At Ports Of Entry: “Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-immigrants-asylum-20181031-story.html

Molly reports in the LA Times:

Migrants arriving at the U.S. border to seek asylum are routinely subjected to tactics that immigration rights advocates say are designed to drive them away in violation of their rights under federal law.

The tactics include forcing them to wait at the border indefinitely or sending them back into Mexico to join a backlogged list maintained by Mexican immigration officials.

The Trump administration says such measures are necessary because it is not equipped to deal with a large increase in the number of asylum seekers, many of them from Central America. Last year, U.S. immigration courts handled 120,000 asylum requests, a fourfold increase since 2013.

But immigrant advocates contend the government is violating the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, which says any foreigner who reaches the U.S. has the right to apply for asylum.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is violating the law and turning away asylum seekers on Texas bridges,” said Shaw Drake, an El Paso-based attorney with the Texas ACLU’s Border Rights Center.

He said forcing immigrants to join a long waiting list is tantamount to turning them away.

“To turn them away with some amorphous instructions is illegal,” he said.

The issue is likely to come to a head when a caravan of several thousand Central Americans now heading north through Mexico arrives at the U.S. border. Many are expected to claim asylum, which they can do based on fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.

Trump, who has vowed to close the border, said in an interview Monday with conservative TV and radio host Laura Ingraham that the U.S. would allow migrants to file asylum claims but that they would be forced to live in “tent cities” while they await court rulings, a process that can take years.

“We’re not going to build structures and spend all of this, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Trump said. “We’re going to have tents. They’re going to be very nice and they’re going to wait and if they don’t get asylum, they get out… They don’t usually get asylum.”

Edgar Hernandez Gonzalez, right, his daughter Sherly and girlfriend Sofia Alvarez Favela wait to request asylum on the Santa Fe International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said he and his family were being threatened and were fleeing crime in Juarez. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Last week, after 20 immigrants from Cuba, Honduras, Mexico and Russia arrived at the border bridge in El Paso, U.S. officers stationed in the middle of the bridge — the “limit line” — told them to wait. And so they did, some for days in the cold and rain. Others stayed at a nearby shelter.

“We’ll wait and see, night and day, because I don’t have anywhere to go,” said Alexander Narzilloev, 35, who was with his wife and sons, ages 3 and 6.

Narzilloev ran a construction supply business in Moscow but fled after he was extorted by local mafia and received death threats, including one from a man who called and said he knew where Narzilloev’s son attended kindergarten, he Narzilloev said.

The family had originally gone to the crossing in Calexico, Calif., where officers told them they didn’t have space. After waiting a week and spending what remained of their $8,000 savings on a hotel, Narzilloev and his family caught a bus to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in hopes of entering El Paso.

“I heard in the news Trump said close all the borders. Has it happened yet?” he said. “That’s supposed to be for illegals. We are legal.”

Last week, several House Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen requesting a briefing on why and how asylum seekers were being turned away. Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, issued a statement calling for “fair and orderly processing of asylum seekers.”

“Any attempts to deny these families and individuals their right to seek asylum are wrong,” he said.

The Trump administration has tried a variety of approaches to deter people from trying to reach the United States — most controversially a “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging every adult migrant who crosses the border illegally, separating parents from their children.

The policy resulted in 2,654 children being separated and widespread outrage before Trump canceled it in June.

The administration still wants to detain families indefinitely and has been battling immigrant advocates in hopes of overturning a federal judge’s 1997 order that requires children be held for no longer than 20 days. Federal prosecutors have also fought to narrow the definition of political asylum.

But the government has been flummoxed by what Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, calls the “asylum gap”: the inability to stop people from making false claims for asylum and living legally in the U.S. for years while their cases proceed.

Immigrant advocates say the new tactics at the border are aimed at discouraging asylum claims. The ACLU of Texas noted Tuesday that Customs and Border Protection, the largest federal law enforcement agency, with a staff and budget doubled in the last 20 years, processed 1.1 million fewer people at the southern border last year than it did in 2000.

Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.

Cuban migrant Yunier Reyes, 35, waits with other migrants from Honduras and Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In El Paso, customs officers have told immigrants to return in a few hours, or simply “later.” The San Ysidro crossing in San Diego has been using a process called “metering,” in which asylum seekers have had to make appointments through Mexican immigration officials.

In a federal class-action lawsuit filed last year that’s still pending, Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado and other advocacy groups argued on behalf of more than a dozen immigrants that the policy violates international law and the right to due process.

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently reported that the practice of metering may have increased illegal border crossings.

During a visit to San Ysidro last week, McAleenan praised metering and said it’s likely to expand to other crossings if there’s a “significant increase in arrivals” in coming weeks.

He said the process didn’t amount to turning away immigrants because “they can stay in line if they want.”

“If somebody arrives and they have a claim, we are providing access,” he said, adding that some officers have been investigated, disciplined and retrained after turning away asylum seekers.

Other allegations were unsubstantiated, he said.

Edith Tapia, a policy research analyst with the Hope Border Institute, center, talks with a Mexican couple and their children who hope to request asylum in the U.S. at the foot of an international Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Workers from the nonprofit Hope Border Institute visit El Paso bridges to document cases of asylum seekers being turned away. On Oct. 24, they found Pedro Morales, 21, and girlfriend Janet Macola, 19.

The two said they fled Cuba after authorities halted their attempt to open a beauty salon and threatened to throw Morales in jail. Now they were seeking asylum.

So was a family of four from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. They said that their area had become a ghost town, controlled by a mayor in league with organized crime, and that they were too scared to be quoted by name.

The Cuban couple and the Mexican family approached U.S. officers at the center of the bridge and were told the same thing: “It’s full right now.”

The asylum seekers lingered on the bridge.

“What can we do?” the Mexican mother said.

Out of money and options, they would wait.

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The Trump Administration is squandering $50 million of your money to send troops to the US border for no tactical reasons whatsoever. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-migrant-caravan-border-troops-1194215

And this is just for starters — the first few months. The total tab is likely to be multiples of $50 million.

The troops are prohibited by law from enforcing US immigration and criminal laws. As one critic of the previous, much smaller, deployment stunt indicated, the soldiers were basically used to “shovel horse manure” out of the Border Patrol’s stalls!https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/392582-national-guard-soldiers-trump-sent-to-border-are-shoveling-manure

It’s all a ridiculous political stunt that Secretary Mattis has shamefully gone along with. Talk about someone forgetting his oath — allowing the US Military to be used as a “political prop” for “White Nationalist Nation.” Presumably historians and biographers will remember “Mad Dog’s” dereliction of duty at a critical point in our country’s existence.

The real point is that for much less money than Trump is wasting on his “military stunt” he could place enough USCIS Asylum Officers at or near ports of entry on the Mexican border to promptly, professionally, and humanely process applicants in accordance with our laws. That would also encourage and reward individuals for appearing for orderly processing and security screening at the proper places, rather than entering the country surreptitiously. It would also reduce the strain on the Border Patrol by reducing incentives for illegal crossings of asylum seekers between ports of entry.

But, this isn’t about sensible or lawful border and asylum policy. It’s about a White Nationalist demagogue putting on a “show” for his “base.”

PWS

10-31-18

LAND OF THE NOT SO BRAVE & NOT SO WISE: AS USUAL, TRUMP’S CLUMSY EXECUTIVE ORDER ON DETAINING FAMILIES LIKELY TO CAUSE MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVES — Strategy Appears Designed To Fail & (Dishonestly) Shift Blame Elsewhere!

Text of Trump’s order reversing family separation policy –

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq., it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of this Administration to rigorously enforce our immigration laws. Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time. When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment under section 1325(a) of title 8, United States Code. This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise. It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.

Sec. 2. Definitions. For purposes of this order, the following definitions apply: (a) “Alien family” means

(i) any person not a citizen or national of the United States who has not been admitted into, or is not authorized to enter or remain in, the United States, who entered this country with an alien child or alien children at or between designated ports of entry and who was detained; and

(ii) that person’s alien child or alien children.
(b) “Alien child” means any person not a citizen or national of the United States who

(i) has not been admitted into, or is not authorized to enter or remain in, the United States;

(ii) is under the age of 18; and

(iii) has a legal parent-child relationship to an alien who entered the United States with the alien child at or between designated ports of entry and who was detained.

Sec. 3. Temporary Detention Policy for Families Entering this Country Illegally. (a) The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary), shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.

(b) The Secretary shall not, however, detain an alien family together when there is a concern that detention of an alien child with the child’s alien parent would pose a risk to the child’s welfare.

(c) The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available measures to provide to the Secretary, upon request, any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families, and shall construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.

(d) Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes. The Secretary, to the extent permitted by law, shall be responsible for reimbursement for the use of these facilities.

(e) The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the

Central District of California to modify the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions, CV 85-4544 (“Flores settlement”), in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.

Sec. 4. Prioritization of Immigration Proceedings Involving Alien Families. The Attorney General shall, to the extent practicable, prioritize the adjudication of cases involving detained families.

Sec. 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented in a manner consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP”

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Section 1 maintains the abusive policy of prosecuting every misdemeanor illegal entry case (“zero-tolerance,” a/k/a “zero common sense,” a/k/a “zero humanity”). Most of those duressed into pleading guilty in assembly line Federal criminal courts are sentenced to “time served,” thus illustrating the absurd wastefulness of this policy and how it detracts from real law enforcement. Trump also throws in a gratuitous and totally disingenuous jab at Congress and the courts for causing the problem that he & Sessions actually created.
Section 3(a) directs the detention of families throughout criminal proceedings and until the end of Immigration Court proceedings (which often takes many months or even years), an abominable, costly, inhumane, unnecessary, and unsustainable policy originally developed during the Obama Administration. The Government lacks adequate family detention facilities, which are supposed to be non-secure facilities licensed by a child welfare agency. Additionally, asylum applicants in Removal Proceedings generally have a right to bond. In most cases, there would be no legitimate reason to deny bond. Contrary to the Administration’s bogus suggestions and intentionally misleading statistics, studies show that those who are represented by counsel and understand the asylum process show up for their hearings more than 90% of the time. I found it was close to 100%. This suggests that a “saner” policy would be to help individuals find lawyers and then release them.
Section 3(c) makes the Secretary of Defense, an official without any qualifications whatsoever, responsible for providing family jails on military bases. It shouldn’t take the courts too long to find these facilities unsuitable for family immigration detention.
Section 3(e) recognizes that this order is largely illegal in that it contravenes the order of the U.S. District Court in Flores v. Sessions which was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. Flores orders the release of juveniles from immigration detention within 20 days unless they present a significant public safety risk or are likely to abscond. Where juveniles don’t meet the release criteria, they must be held in the least restrictive setting appropriate to age and special needs. While Trump orders the Attorney General to seek a modification of Flores, there is no legal rationale for that action. In fact, the abusive “fake emergency” situation that Trump & Sessions have created, shows exactly why Flores is needed, now more than ever. It also makes a compelling case for Congress to enact Flores protections into law, thereby making them permanent and avoiding future abuses by the Executive.
Section 4 basically orders the Attorney General to engage in more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”) in the U.S. Immigration Courts by prioritizing cases of recently arrived families, many of whom have not had a chance to obtain lawyers and document applications, at the expense of cases that are already on the docket and ready for final hearings. That’s why the Immigration Court backlog is 720,000 cases and continuing to grow. It also shows why the Immigration Courts are a facade of Due Process, totally mismanaged by politicos, and must be removed from the DOJ and become a truly independent court system that establishes court priorities and procedures without Executive interference.
The order is silent on whether it applies to those families who have already been separated and how those families might be reunited.

In summary, this “Temporary Executive Order” is not a credible attempt to solve the problem of family separation. Rather, it is another “designed to fail” charade intended to provoke litigation so that the predictable mess can be blamed on the courts, Congress, the asylum applicants and their families (“blaming the victims”), and their courageous lawyers. In other words, anyone except Trump and his cronies who are responsible for the problem.

It’s a prime example of what life in a Kakistocracy is and will continue to be until there is “regime change.”

What would a “real solution” to this issue look like. Well, I’ve said it before:

The real choices are 1) a dangerous 4,000 mile journey to a place where you might be able to save your life and that of your loved ones; or 2) the much more dangerous option of remaining in a place where you will likely be beaten, raped, extorted, tortured, impressed against your will, or killed by gangs, who are not just “street criminals” (as falsely portrayed by Sessions and other restrictionists) but who exercise quasi-governmental authority with the knowing acquiescence of the recognized governments.

Realistically, folks are going to opt for #1. We could recognize them as refugees; screen them abroad to weed out gang members and criminals and to take the danger out of the 4,000 mile journey; work with the UNHCR and other countries to distribute the flow; open more paths to legal immigration for those who want to leave but might not fit easily within the refugee definition; and encourage those who still arrive at our borders without documents seeking protection to go to a port of entry where they will be treated respectfully, humanely, and be given a prompt but full opportunity to present their cases for protection with access to counsel in a system that satisfies all the requirements of Constitutional Due Process, with the additional understanding that if they lose they will have to return to their home country.

Alternatively, we could double down on our current failed policies of detention, deterrence, and lawless and immoral Governmental behavior; send the message that folks shouldn’t bother using our legal system because it’s a fraud that has intentionally been fixed against them; encourage the use of smugglers who will charge ever higher fees for developing new and more dangerous means of entry; and send the message that if folks really want to survive, they should pay a smuggler to get them into the interior of our country where they have at least a fighting chance of blending in, hiding out from immigration enforcement, behaving themselves, and working hard until they are caught and removed, die, conditions improve and they leave voluntarily for their country of origin, or we finally give them some type of legal recognition.

My first alternative could likely be established and operated for a fraction of what we are now spending on failed immigration enforcement, useless and unnecessarily cruel detention, unnecessary criminal prosecutions, and a broken Immigration Court system.

Plus, at a time of low birth rate and low unemployment, it would give us a significant economic boost by bringing a highly motivated, hard-working, family oriented, and appreciative workforce into our society. It might also inspire other stable democratic nations to join us in an effort to save lives (which also happens to fit in well with religious values), resettle individuals, and, over time, address the horrible situation in the Northern Triangle that is creating this flow.

Alternative two, which is basically a variation on what we already are doing, will guarantee a continuing “black market flow”of migrants, some of whom will be apprehended and removed at significant financial and societal costs, while most will continue to live in an underground society, subject to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and law enforcement, underutilizing their skills, and not being given the opportunity to integrate fully into our society.

Don’t hold your breath! But, eventually the New Due Process Army will win the war and enough elections to finally bring sanity, humanity, and reality to the U.S. immigration system.

PWS

06-20-18

ELIZABETH BRUENIG @ WASHPOST: Trump Lacks The Moral Authority To Lead A “Just War!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/under-trump-there-can-be-no-just-war/2018/04/12/5ea5ab72-3dc5-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html

Bruenig writes:

. . . .

The moral sense is worth emphasizing. Trump’s White House is characterized not only by permanent chaos but also by constantly shifting flickers of vision — will it be right-populism, typical business conservatism, ultrapatriotic nationalism or something else altogether? One waits to find out each day, which doesn’t bode well for a regime contemplating military action. Moreover, Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — both rested on his gleeful indifference to people fleeing violence, be they immigrants from the global south or refugees from the Middle East. In what world could his administration be expected to become a just steward of their interests now? Is it really possible a government that can’t rush to turn back or exile the helpless fast enough has the moral capability to attempt any kind of just war, much less the practical means to carry it out? I doubt it.

And I worry. Careful restraint is harder than impulsive action; doubting one’s own moral capacities harder than ignoring the matter altogether. This means that governments least equipped to execute just action on the international stage may be the most likely to give it a try anyway, no matter its cost in blood and souls.

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

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

The Syrian bombing has absolutely nothing to do with saving lives or taking a stand against the use of chemical weapons and everything to do with power and Trump’s ego. Trump sand his supporters have little difficulty turning their backs on desperate and dying Syrian refugees, including children, (who, unlike the children dying from chemical weapons attacks could actually be saved without too much trouble on the so-called “Western Powers” part) every day of the week.

Nor do they have any difficulty with proposing to truncate the already limited rights of refugee children arriving at our borders, sending them back to near certain abuse, death, or perhaps forced recruitment by gangs in the Northern Triangle. In other words, Trump and his GOP cronies Are “Immoral Situational Opportunists” who care nothing whatsoever for human life except in certain “staged” political contexts such as the abortion debate or debates over “death with dignity laws.” And, even then it has absolutely nothing to do with the lives supposedly at stake and everything to do with political capital to be gained by disallowing free will.

A scummy group won’t be made less scummy by going to war, no matter what the purported cause!

PWs

04-14-18

N. RAPPAPORT IN THE HILL: Trump Follows In Bush’s & Obama’s Footsteps By Sending National Guard To The Southern Border

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/382136-by-sending-national-guard-to-border-trump-follows-bush-obama

Nolan writes:

. . . .

Trump isn’t the first president to use the National Guard this way. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did it when they were presidents. Their National Guard operations were successful, and Trump’s probably will be too, if his operation is similar to theirs.

Apparently, the Border Patrol feels that way too. According to Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, experience has shown that the military can supplement the work of agents on the ground.

We do not know yet how the troops will be used. The memorandum gives the secretary of Defense, working with DHS and the attorney general, 30 days to submit an action plan detailing what resources and actions are needed, including federal law enforcement and U.S. military resources.

. . . .

In any case, it doesn’t make sense to use the number of apprehensions as the criterion for determining how secure the border is. What about the aliens who were not apprehended? There is no way of knowing how many aliens succeeded in making an illegal entry without being detected by the Border Patrol.

Ultimately, Trump’s decision to send Border Patrol agents to the border should not be considered unusual or inhumane. Instead, it is a continuation of his existing immigration policies and even presidential precedent.

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

As Nolan points out, sending the National Guard to the border is neither unusual nor unprecedented. But, that doesn’t mean it’s smart, effective, or cost efficient.

I’m aware of no hard evidence that sending the National Guard makes any long-term difference in border enforcement or security.

A number of commentators have also questioned whether the somewhat marginal short-term enforcement benefits of sending troops outweighs the substantial costs and negative perception issues. See e.g.,

https://www.dailysignal.com/2014/07/16/sending-military-border-good-idea/

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/04/08/what-happened-when-bush-obama-sent-troops-to-mexico-border/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/03/trump-mexico-wall-military-guards-obama-bush-not-first-president

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160421171156.htm

I see no evidence of any real security crisis at the Southern Border. Certainly, Trump’s panic about the so-called “Caravan” (actually largely made up of desperate women and children) is totally bogus, apparently based on over-hyped reports by Fox News.

It’s obvious that having blown the chance to get funding for his Wall, Trump is looking for some way to hype a non-existent “Southern Border Crisis” to show his base that he hasn’t given up on his racist approach to immigration. He also keeps raising his bogus claims that we need to further truncate the already too limited existing rights of children and asylum seekers and expand the “New American Gulag.” What total BS

There is an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Northern Triangle causing individuals to undertake the journey North. That’s been going on for many years, and is almost certain to continue as long as folks like Trump are in charge. It’s not like Obama or Bush helped the situation either. Indeed, the US policy toward Latin America has been screwed up during my entire lifetime and shows no signs of changing.

Nothing Trump does is going to change that. Indeed, by almost any rational measure, Trump’s enforcement bluster is likely to make the situation even worse. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if Trump actually goes through with his stated wish to expel Hondurans and Salvadorans currently here in TPS status, that would almost certainly further destablilize both countries, further strengthen the hands of gangs, and guarantee an even larger northward flow.

PWS

04-09-18

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S UGLINESS IS EVERYWHERE IN AMERICA! – Beloit College Grad/Honorably Discharged Army Vet Target For ICE Removal Despite Mattis’s Assurances To The Contrary!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/alex-horton

Alex Horton reports for the Washington Post:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to have ignored a directive from prevent the deportation of noncitizen troops and veterans, seeking to remove a Chinese immigrant despite laws that allow veterans with honorable service to naturalize, court filings show.

Xilong Zhu, 27, who came from China in 2009 to attend college in the United States, enlisted in the Army and was caught in an immigration dragnet involving a fake university set up by the Department of Homeland Security to catch brokers of fraudulent student visas.

Zhu paid tuition to the University of Northern New Jersey, created by DHS to appear as a real school, long enough to ship to basic training using the legal status gained from a student visa issued to attend that school.

Then ICE found him and asked the Army to release him for alleged visa fraud. He left Fort Benning, Ga., on Nov. 10, 2016, in handcuffs as an honorably discharged veteran. He was detained for three weeks and released.

Zhu is waiting for a Seattle judge’s ruling on his removal proceedings, which are based on allegations by ICE that he failed to attend classes in violation of his student visa. His attorney says his client is a victim of federal entrapment.

Zhu’s case comes amid Trump administration pressure on immigration judges to speed up deportation proceedings in an apparent move to adjudicate more removals, aligning with President Trump’s stated goals.

But it also comes after Mattis said he would protect certain immigrant recruits who enlist through a program designed to trade fast-tracked citizenship for medical and language skills. Those assurances followed sustained controversy over how the Pentagon has exposed more than a thousand foreign-born recruits to deportation. A background-screening logjam began in late 2016 when fears of insider threats slowed clearances to a glacial pace.

[ A deported veteran has been granted U.S. citizenship, after 14 years of living in Mexico ]

“Anyone with an honorable discharge … will not be subject to any kind of deportation,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon in February, describing exceptions for those who commit a “serious felony” and anyone who has been authorized for deportation in an agreement he said was made with DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Zhu’s attorney, retired Army officer Margaret Stock, told The Washington Post those exceptions do not apply to him.

DHS referred questions to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Spokesman Jonathan Withington declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. ICE declined to provide a comment attributable by name.

But through court documents, ICE has interpreted the Mattis directive applies to a narrow group of foreign recruits that exclude Zhu. It’s unclear whether ICE consulted with the Pentagon on the subject, or if the agency has moved to deport other immigrant recruits since Mattis spoke in February.

Xilong Zhu at Army basic training graduation in 2016. (Xilong Zhu)

Zhu graduated from basic training on June 9, 2016, and was handed over to ICE custody months later, after the Army lost a battle to retain him, Stock said. Zhu was included in a group of “holdovers,” an Army term he disdains that refers to soldiers who fail training.

That wasn’t him.

“It made me nauseous to be lumped into that group,” he told The Post.

How Zhu got in his predicament is a strange, bureaucratic odyssey after he graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin in 2013. He wanted to become a U.S. citizen, so he decided to enlist through the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program that his father in China had read about. It trades expedited citizenship for language and medical skills in short supply among U.S.-born recruits.

. . . .

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

Gee whiz, I thought that spending a week with the grandchildren in Beloit, Wisconsin might get us away from most of the Trump zaniness. But, no such luck as this story about a Beloit College graduate hit during the week. No end to the ways that ICE can think up to waste taxpayer money, clog already overwhelmed Immigration Court dockets with cases that no responsible prosecutor would even file, and exhibit mindless cruelty and irrationality in the process. Small wonder that some pols are starting to suggest that American would be safer and better off without ICE.

PWS

04-06-18

TOTALLY UNHINGED PREZ PANICS & SENDS NATIONAL GUARD TO BORDER TO “GUARD” US AGAINST A FEW HUNDRED UNARMED (LARGELY) SCARED WOMEN & CHILDREN SEEKING LEGAL REFUGE FROM NORTHERN TRIANGLE! – Wow, What Would This Guy Do If Ever Faced With A REAL Crisis? — Lightweight Sycophant Nielsen Has No Idea How & Why We’re Doing This Except To Read Off Of Moronic Restrictionist Cue Cards! Trump’s Attempt To Manufacture “Border Crisis” To Appease “Base” Both Wasteful & Unconnected To Reality!

http://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politics/trump-national-guard-troops-border/index.html

Trump admin sending National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border

By Tal Kopan, CNN

President Donald Trump will sign a proclamation directing agencies deploy the National Guard to the southwest border, Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced Wednesday.

“The President has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy the National Guard to our southwest border,” Nielsen said at the White House.

The formal move follows days of public fuming by Trump about immigration policy, during which he has tweeted about immigration legislation in Congress, a caravan of migrants making its way through Mexico and what he calls weak border laws.

Since the passage of the government spending package for the year — which included $1.6 billion for border security but only a few dozen miles of new border barrier construction and a nearly equal amount of replacement fencing — Trump has been critical of Congress for denying him more money. Trump privately floated the idea of funding construction of a southern border wall through the US military budget in conversations with advisers, two sources confirmed to CNN last week — a plan that faces likely insurmountable obstacles in Congress.

Sending National Guard troops to the border is not unprecedented. Both of Trump’s predecessors also did so, though the moves were criticized for being costly and of limited effectiveness.

US law limits what the troops can actually do. Federal law prohibits the military from being used to enforce laws, meaning troops cannot actually participate in immigration enforcement. In the past, they’ve served support roles like training, construction and intelligence gathering.

From 2006-2008, President George W. Bush deployed 6,000 guardsmen to Southern border states, costing $1.2 billion and assisting with 11.7% of total apprehensions at the border and 9.4% of marijuana seized in that time.

From 2010-2012, President Barack Obama sent 1,200 guardsmen to the border to the tune of more than $110 million, and they assisted with 5.9% of the total apprehensions and 2.6% of the marijuana seizures on the border.

CNN’s Catherine Shoichet, Dan Merica and Betsy Klein contributed to this report

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

Read Tal’s complete report at the link.

Here’s what you really need to know:

There’s no “border crisis” facing us except for that created in the minds of Trump and his White Nationalist restrictionist cronies;
The real threat to our “National Security” is Trump and his White Nationalist cabal;
According to all reliable reports, the few hundred “caravan” members who actually get to the border (the majority are “dropping out,” remaining in Mexico, or already have been removed by Mexican authorities) merely intend to apply for asylum, after consulting with lawyers, which they have every right to do under both U.S. and international law;
The more serious issue is that many observers have reported that the Trump DHS is violating U.S. and international laws by refusing to allow individuals who properly present themselves at a port of entry to apply for asylum (there is a law suit currently pending on this issue);
Trump is wasting time, money, personnel, and attention on a false “self-created” crisis that presents no realistic threat to the U.S.;
The Obama and Bush II Administrations did largely the same thing with disastrous results (actually helping to generate the “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” culminating in today’s near-700,000 Immigration Court case backlog).

When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

04-04-18

JRUBE IN THE WASHPOST: “A dangerous fool for a president,” supported by “useful idiots” & “Republican tribalists in Congress” are an “easy mark” for Putin & the Russians — Our Administration Is An Existential Threat To Our National Security!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/11/12/russias-mark-a-dangerous-fool-for-a-president/

Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post:

“President Trump’s authoritarianism, narcissism and racism threaten our democracy, but his gullibility threatens our national security. A man so uneducated and incurious about the world is willing, like his followers, to buy any crackpot conspiracy theory that makes its way to him via the Infowars-“Fox & Friends” pipeline. On the world stage, that makes him a sitting duck for slick manipulators and experienced flatterers.

All that was much in evidence on Saturday. CNN reports:

“He said he didn’t meddle. He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew from Da Nang to Hanoi in Vietnam. Trump spoke to Putin three times on the sidelines of summit here, where the Russia meddling issue arose. “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’” Trump said. “And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.” “I think he is very insulted by it,” Trump added.

Could Trump actually believe that the ex-KGB operative is insulted by the accusation he pulled off a masterful plot, at very little cost, to tip the scales in an American presidential election and get the candidate of his choice? Certainly, Trump is not only gullible but also running scared as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III breathes down his neck.

. . . .

Trump and his followers are willing to believe anything because they want to believe anything that confirms their counterfactual world. Anyone who sides with their alternative universe (Sebastian Gorka, Vladimir Putin, Bill O’Reilly, Roy Moore) is a hero and a victim of those pro-immigrant, globalist, anti-Christian elites. Anyone who presents cold, hard facts (the mainstream media, scientists, allied governments, Democrats, #NeverTrumpers) that explode their dearly held myths is an enemy of the people.Yes, that’s the mental universe in which Trump and his ilk reside. It renders Trump susceptible — eager, even — to believe our enemies, even — especially! — at the expense of American values, security and interests. He’s putty in the hands of wily autocrats. He’s therefore the type of target that counterintelligence operatives dream of — an arrogant fool. Clinton Watts, a former FBI special agent on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, earlier this year explained:

Russian influence of Trump most likely falls into the category of what Madeleine Albright called a “Useful Idiot” – a “useful fool” – an enthusiast for Putin supportive of any issue or stance that feeds his ego and brings victory. Russian intelligence for decades identified and promoted key individuals around the world ripe for manipulation and serving their interests. Trump, similar to emerging alternative right European politicians, spouts populist themes of xenophobia, anti-immigration, and white nationalist pride that naturally bring about a retrenchment of U.S. global influence. By spotting this early, Russia could encourage Trump’s ascension and shape his views via three parallel tracks. First, Russia led a never before seen hacking and influence campaign to degrade support for Hilary Clinton and promote Trump among a disenfranchised American populace. As a “useful idiot,” Trump not only benefited from this influence effort, but he urged Russia to find Hilary Clinton’s missing emails – a public call a “Manchurian Candidate” would not likely make. Trump even fell for false Russian news stories citing a bogus Sputnik news story at a presidential rally – a glaring and open mistake that would reveal a true “Manchurian Candidate.”

What’s more, the Kremlin now has useful idiots in the persons of Fox News hosts, right-wing American bloggers, talk show hosts and Stephen K. Bannon (who is out recruiting like-minded Senate candidates) to buck up their pet U.S. president. Most of all, the Kremlin can count on the Republican tribalists in Congress who will explain away evidence and savage the president’s accusers to protect the GOP tribe and its leader — who just so happens to be an easy mark for our most formidable international foe.“

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

Read the full op-ed at the link.

Pretty scary stuff. Putin must be walking on air. First, dumb US electorate votes for its own demise. Trump stokes racial and political divisions while trashing the environment, destroying government, offending allies, undermining health care, damaging the Constitution, shrugging his shoulders at random gun violence, and carrying on with plans to loot US Treasury for benefit of the rich and leave everyone else holding the bag. Then, Trump sets off for Asia where he cedes economic and moral leadership to China while enunciating a totally selfish “Third World, Me First” philosophy and absurdly defends his “puppetmaster” Putin.

All these years the “Legacy Soviets” thought they could only defeat America by a military buildup. Now, they discover they can do it without firing a shot or invading anyone just by using our own stupidity and the Alt-Right against us.

PWS

11-12-17

TRUMP’S TRANSGENDER TROOP BAN LATEST BIAS-BASED POLICY TO BE WHACKED BY US JUDGE!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-transgender-military-ban-blocked_us_59f7572ce4b0aec146792e00?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

HuffPost reports:

“Trump’s reasons for the controversial ban “do not appear to be supported by any facts,” the judge found.

By Lydia O’Connor

7.5k

200

A federal judge blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces on Monday.

“I am directing the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, to return to the longstanding policy and practice on military service by transgender individuals that was in place prior to June 2016,” United Stated District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her order.

Trump’s memorandum on the ban, which he released in August after first announcing the policy change in a series of tweets in July, has faced legal challenges from current and aspiring transgender service members who “fear that the directives of the Presidential Memorandum will have devastating impacts on their careers and their families,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

The reasons the Trump administration gave for enacting the ban, she continued, “do not appear to be supported by any facts.” While Trump defended the policy change as a cost-saving measure, analyses of the military budget found that spending on health care for transgender service members would be miniscule.

Read the full court order here.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.”

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

Fact-free, biased, and prejudice-based policies are a specialty of the Trump Administration.

PWS

10-30-17

“ANOTHER SETBACK FOR TRUMP-SESSIONS “GONZO IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT” PROGRAM – U.S. District Judge Enjoins Ending Of Special Natz Program For GIs – Finds Administration’s Actions Likely “Arbitrary And Capricious!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/u-s-judge-bars-pentagon-from-blocking-citizenship-applications-by-immigrant-recruits/2017/10/26/475630e2-ba74-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.f79293797396&wpisrc=nl_sb_smartbrief

Spencer S. Hsu reports for the Washington Post:

“A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department not to block fast-tracked citizenship applications that it promised to about 2,000 foreign-born U.S. Army Reserve soldiers under their enlistment contracts.

The order Wednesday came in an ongoing lawsuit over the department’s year-old effort to kill a program designed to attract foreign-born military recruits who possess medical or language skills urgently needed in U.S. military operations. In exchange for serving, those recruits were promised a quicker route to citizenship.

U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle of Washington issued a rare preliminary injunction saying that while the lawsuit can move ahead, the government cannot in the meantime withhold a form that three named Army plaintiffs and other military members in similar situations need to start the vetting for citizenship.

Huvelle in her order also said that the members of the military in the lawsuit probably would succeed in proving the Pentagon’s latest moves in the crackdown on immigrant recruits were “arbitrary and capricious.”

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

Read the complete article at the link.

“Arbitrary and capricious” is a good description of most of the Trump-Sessions “Gonzo Immigration Enforcement” program. But, screwing immigrants who have loyally and faithfully served our country in the Armed Forces has to be a new low, even for the Trumpsters.

PWS

10-27-17

INSTEAD OF DOUBLING DOWN ON FAILED POLICIES, SESSIONS SHOULD TRY ANTI-GANG STRATEGIES THAT ACTUALLY WORK!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/sunday/trump-gangs-soccer-education.html

Lauren Markham writes in the NY Times:

“SundayReview | OPINION

The Wrong Way to Fight Gangs
By LAUREN MARKHAMSEPT. 28, 2017

Lester, who is among the recent Central American students at Oakland International High School who crossed into the US, during soccer practice for the Soccer Without Borders program. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Oakland, Calif. — Young migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador come to this country fleeing violence and lives that are often dictated by savage gangs. It’s expensive to get here. They often arrive with thousands of dollars of high-interest debt and little or no English skills. And they face an administration that insists that they are gangsters bringing bloodshed and gang warfare to American cities.

In fact, these young people are often fleeing gangs. And the challenges they face in the United States make them particularly vulnerable for recruitment into the same violent gangs they left home to escape.

“They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields,” President Trump said of the members of MS-13, a transnational gang composed largely of Central American youth; its activity has been growing in recent years, both in the United States and in Central America. A few weeks ago, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told law enforcement officers that these young, undocumented immigrants were “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

I work at Oakland International High School in Oakland, Calif. It is a public school with a population made up entirely of recently arrived immigrant students. Today, over 25 percent are unaccompanied minors — young people who crossed into the United States without papers or parents — who have been released from immigration custody and placed in deportation proceedings to await their day in court. Since we opened 10 years ago, our students’ gang involvement has markedly decreased. This is because we have gotten better at what we were meant to do, namely: provide programs that teach skills, offer support services that reduce barriers to coming to school, and foster a sense of community.

We offer what the gangs offer, but better.

I had one student who came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor from Honduras. His mother left him when he was little, and he never knew his father. He lived with his grandmother until she died. He was just 13. For two years he lived alone in her house, selling water bottles on the street on behalf of a neighboring family. Sometimes they invited him over for dinner; other times they didn’t.

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He told me that he saw this life in Honduras as a dead end. He crossed into Guatemala, rode on top of trains through Mexico, hiding what little money he had pressed against the inside of his cheek, and swam across the Rio Grande. He was apprehended at the border, placed into a youth detention center, and sent to live with his aunt in Oakland, pending his deportation hearing. He enrolled at Oakland International but, after a couple of weeks, his attendance waned. Soon he stopped coming altogether.

“I didn’t know anything,” he told me. Being in school felt impossible to him because he felt unable to succeed at it. He had an upcoming court case and no lawyer; that, he knew, would cost money he didn’t have.

One Saturday, I took the train into San Francisco to meet a friend. As I waited at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station outside the Civic Center, I watched as, in broad daylight, Latino teenagers sold drugs to the area’s vagrants. I knew this drug ring was connected to MS-13. There, on the other side of the plaza, was my student.

“These are animals,” President Trump said of MS-13 members. Most often, rather, they are like my student: young people, not unlike child soldiers, who enter a violent life by either force or force of circumstance. They do not come to the United States to participate in gang life; it winds up as the only option.

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Our school kept trying with this particular student. We conducted home visits in East Oakland, where he lived with his aunt, found him a therapist he could see at school, and encouraged him to join our school soccer team. He got a free lawyer. He quit selling at the Civic Center. He came back to school.

Newly arrived immigrants are a fast-growing demographic in American schools, and they will continue to be, regardless of the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Yet the Trump administration is pushing for cuts that will affect their ability to succeed in school, or even attend school at all.

The proposed 2018 education budget includes approximately $9 billion in cuts — 13.5 percent of the total. The cuts include an evisceration of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a $1 billion earmark which provides funding for enrichment opportunities for students in high-poverty schools.

Nearly all of the support our school was able to offer my student, and so many like him, was a result of 21st Century funding. It pays for Soccer Without Borders, which serves more than half of our student population, and for an organization called Refugee Transitions, which offers tutoring and homework help. It pays for mental health interns to provide therapy to youth in six languages.

Quality public education is a fundamental, if aspirational, American value. But altruism aside, investing in newcomer education makes practical sense. It costs far more to lock someone up for a year than it does to educate him.

“We’re going to destroy the vile, criminal cartel MS-13,” President Trump announced to a group of law enforcement officers on Long Island, N.Y., in July. To focus on police intervention rather than education isn’t only shortsighted, it’s also been proven not to work. All we have to do is look at El Salvador, where a series of failed iron fist campaigns that combined police crackdowns with a lack of social alternatives served to increase violence.

We could also look at history. MS- 13 was born in the United States among disenfranchised, traumatized immigrant youth in the 1980s and, through deportation, was exported to El Salvador (then spread to Honduras and Guatemala) — where it now relies on vulnerable young recruits, teenage and even younger, to grow its ranks.

Central America’s endemic violence is not going away anytime soon, so, like it or not, these young people will keep coming, regardless of the walls we build or the immigration policies we enact. Excluded and disenfranchised young people seek inclusion elsewhere: on the margins, in the shadows, in society’s dark underbelly. Gangs provide that sense of belonging, along with a feeling of success and upward mobility, for those who are not offered the same in mainstream society.

Last Tuesday afternoon, on a warm fall day in Oakland, more than 60 young men from more than a dozen countries played soccer together out on our misshapen soccer pitch. An additional 50 or so students sat in the cafeteria, working with teachers and volunteers to practice their English and finish their homework. A group of parents met in a classroom to help plan the year’s activities. It was just a typical day at the school — a day full of activities that depend on money that could disappear. If 21st Century funds go away, these programs vanish. Which means the students will find somewhere else to take them in.

MS-13, as it happens, welcomes young people with open arms.”

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Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. There ways of getting the job done. We really need to use them!

PWS

09-28-17

CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION: When USG’s Own Studies Prove The Economic Benefits Of Refugees, Those Seeking To Further The White Nationalist False Narrative Do The Obvious — Suppress The Facts & Lie About It! — Anyway, Refugee Admissions Aren’t About Making Money — The Immorality Of The Trump Administration Runs Deep!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-revenue-cost-report-trump.html

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Somini Sengupta report for the NYT:

“WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program, led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.
Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed.
The internal study, which was completed in late July but never publicly released, found that refugees “contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government” between 2005 and 2014 through the payment of federal, state and local taxes. “Overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the 10-year period, at $63 billion.”
But White House officials said those conclusions were illegitimate and politically motivated, and were disproved by the final report issued by the agency, which asserts that the per-capita cost of a refugee is higher than that of an American.
“This leak was delivered by someone with an ideological agenda, not someone looking at hard data,” said Raj Shah, a White House spokesman. “The actual report pursuant to the presidential memorandum shows that refugees with few skills coming from war-torn countries take more government benefits from the Department of Health and Human Services than the average population, and are not a net benefit to the U.S. economy.”
John Graham, the acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the health department, said: “We do not comment on allegedly leaked documents” and that no report had been finalized. He noted that Mr. Trump’s memorandum “seeks an analysis related to the cost of refugee programs. Therefore, the only analysis in the scope of H.H.S.’s response to the memo would be on refugee-related expenditures from data within H.H.S. programs.”
The three-page report the agency ultimately submitted, dated Sept. 5, does just that, using government data to compare the costs of refugees to Americans and making no mention of revenues contributed by refugees.
“In an average year over the 10-year period, per-capita refugee costs for major H.H.S. programs totaled $3,300,” it says. “Per-person costs for the U.S. population were lower, at $2,500, reflecting a greater participation of refugees in H.H.S. programs, especially during their first four years” in the United States.
It was not clear who in the administration decided to keep the information out of the final report. An internal email, dated Sept. 5 and sent among officials from government agencies involved in refugee issues, said that “senior leadership is questioning the assumptions used to produce the report.” A separate email said that Mr. Miller had requested a meeting to discuss the report. The Times was shown the emails on condition that the sender not be identified. Mr. Miller personally intervened in the discussions on the refugee cap to ensure that only the costs — not any fiscal benefit — of the program were considered, according to two people familiar with the talks.
He has also played a crucial role in the internal discussions over refugee admissions, which are capped by an annual presidential determination that is usually coordinated by the National Security Council and led in large part by the State Department.
This year, officials at the State Department as well as the Department of Defense have argued vociferously that the United States should admit no fewer than the 50,000-refugee cap that Mr. Trump imposed in January as part of the travel ban, but Mr. Miller has advocated for a much lower number — half or less, according to people familiar with the internal talks who described them on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to detail them. The Department of Homeland Security last week proposed a cap of 40,000. The limits being debated would be the lowest in more than three decades.
“We see an administration that’s running a program that it’s intent on destroying,” said Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, one of nine refugee resettlement agencies opposing the cut in admissions. “We do have champions in the White House and in the administration, but they’re not being given a voice in this.”
The issue is coming to a head as Mr. Trump attends the United Nations General Assembly this week for the first time as president. The United Nations has repeatedly appealed to nations to resettle 1.2 million refugees fleeing war and persecution from all over the world, and former President Barack Obama used the gathering last year to tout his goal of admitting 110,000 refugees in the fiscal year that ends this month, and to pressure other countries to follow the lead of the United States in embracing more displaced people.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, has highlighted his goal of radically cutting refugee admissions. The president moved swiftly after taking office to crack down on refugees, issuing his original ban against travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries only a week after taking office.
Facing legal challenges to that order, his administration released a second travel ban two months later against six countries, along with a presidential memorandum in which Mr. Trump called on the secretary of state to consult with the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security and his White House budget director and submit within 180 days “a report detailing the estimated long-term costs of the United States Refugee Admissions Program at the federal, state, and local levels, along with recommendations about how to curtail those costs.”
The budget Mr. Trump released in May argued that refugees and other immigrants were a fiscal drain. “Under the refugee program, the federal government brings tens of thousands of entrants into the United States, on top of existing legal immigration flows, who are instantly eligible for time-limited cash benefits and numerous noncash federal benefits, including food assistance through SNAP, medical care and education, as well as a host of state and local benefits,” the document said.
It would be less costly, it argued, if there were fewer refugees, since “each refugee admitted into the United States comes at the expense of helping a potentially greater number out of country.” Inside the administration, those who espouse this view argue that any research purporting to illustrate fiscal benefits of refugees is flawed and reflects only wishful thinking.
As Mr. Trump deliberates privately about the issue, a coalition of human rights and religious groups as well as former national security officials in both parties has formed to encourage him not to allow the refugee cap to plummet.
“From a national security standpoint, while we can’t take an unlimited number of refugees, we need to show our friends and allies that we stand with them and this is a shared burden,” said Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush.
“They’ve generated a lot of economic value,” Mr. Chertoff added in an interview. “I don’t think refugees are coming to take American jobs.”
Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.
Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New York.”

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Get a complete copy of the report the Administration is trying so hard to suppress at the NYT link above.

In the Trump Administration “truth” has become a “political agenda” of those who aren’t willing to skew facts and tell lies in support of a bankrupt White Nationalist restrictionist agenda. It’s telling that the DOD is one of the agencies pushing for more refugee admissions.

Moreover, as has been pointed out in previous blogs, admitting refugees is not simply a question of “what can they do for our economy” (although the answer to that is “amazing things”). It’s also about our international obligations, our obligations to the world community, and our obligations as human beings to other humans in need. In other words, simple decency and morality, concepts that guys like Trump, Sessions, and Miller consistently sweep under the rug as they roll out their false political narrative.

PWS

09-20-17

SHAFTING THE BRAVE!– U.S. Military Sticks It To Migrant Recruits — “It’s a dumpster fire ruining people’s lives. The magnitude of incompetence is beyond belief . . . . We have a war going on. We need these people.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/09/15/army-kills-contracts-for-hundreds-of-immigrant-recruits-sources-say-some-face-deportation/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-card-national%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.780a7e57ba01

Alex Horton writes in the Washington Post:

“U.S. Army recruiters have abruptly canceled enlistment contracts for hundreds of foreign-born military recruits since last week, upending their lives and potentially exposing many to deportation, according to several affected recruits and a retired Army officer familiar with their situation.

Many of these enlistees have waited years to join a troubled immigration recruitment program designed to attract highly skilled immigrants into the service in exchange for fast-track citizenship.

Now recruits and experts say that recruiters are shedding their contracts to free themselves from an onerous enlistment process to focus on individuals who can more quickly enlist and thus satisfy strict recruitment targets.

The Pentagon and Army Recruiting Command, which oversees policy and guidance at its recruitment centers across the country, did not answer repeated requests for comment.

Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer central to the creation of the immigration recruitment program, told The Post that she has received dozens of frantic messages from recruits this week, with many more reporting similar action in Facebook groups. She said hundreds could be affected.

“It’s a dumpster fire ruining people’s lives. The magnitude of incompetence is beyond belief,” she said. “We have a war going on. We need these people.”

Stock said a recruiter told her there was pressure from the recruiting command to release foreign-born recruits, with one directive suggesting they had until Sept. 14 to cut them loose without counting against their recruiting targets, an accounting quirk known as “loss forgiveness.”

The recruiter told Stock the Army Reserve is struggling to meet its numbers before the fiscal year closes Sept. 30, and canceling on resource-intensive recruits is attractive to some recruiters.

Half a dozen recruits from across the country tell The Post their contracts have been or will be canceled. Some are now out of legal immigration status and fear deportation.

Lola Mamadzhanova, who immigrated to the United States from Kyrgyzstan in 2009, said she heard that Army recruiters in Evanston, Ill., texted immigrant recruits last week asking whether they still wanted to enlist, with an unusual condition: They had 10 minutes to respond. She never received the text message.”

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Read the full story at the link.

No wonder we can’t win wars; it’s a failure of leadership.

PWS

09-15-17

“We also know that conflicts can restart when refugees are sent home prematurely. Of the 15 largest returns of refugees since 1990, a third have resulted in the resumption of conflict and the slaughter of innocents.”

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