HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations!

https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/05/deported-danger/united-states-deportation-policies-expose-salvadorans-death-and

February 5, 2020

Deported to Danger

United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse

Summary

February 5, 2020

US: Deported Salvadorans Abused, Killed

Stop Deporting Salvadorans Who Would Face Risks to Their Safety, Lives

The US government has deported people to face abuse and even death in El Salvador. The US is not solely responsible—Salvadoran gangs who prey on deportees and Salvadoran authorities who harm deportees or who do little or nothing to protect them bear direct responsibility—but in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm’s way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely.

Of the estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans living in the United States who are not US citizens, just under one-quarter are lawful permanent residents, with the remaining three-quarters lacking papers or holding a temporary or precarious legal status. While Salvadorans have asylum recognition rates as high as 75 percent in other Central American nations, and 36.5 percent in Mexico, the US recognized just 18.2 percent of Salvadorans as qualifying for asylum from 2014 to 2018. Between 2014-2018, the US and Mexico have deported about 213,000 Salvadorans (102,000 from Mexico and 111,000 from the United States).

No government, UN agency, or nongovernmental organization has systematically monitored what happens to deported persons once back in El Salvador. This report begins to fill that gap. It shows that, as asylum and immigration policies tighten in the United States and dire security problems continue in El Salvador, the US is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm.

Some deportees are killed following their return to El Salvador. In researching this report, we identified or investigated 138 cases of Salvadorans killed since 2013 after deportation from the US. We found these cases by combing through press accounts and court files, and by interviewing surviving family members, community members, and officials. There is no official tally, however, and our research suggests that the number of those killed is likely greater.

Though much harder to identify because they are almost never reported by the press or to authorities, we also identified or investigated over 70 instances in which deportees were subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm, usually at the hands of gangs, or who went missing following their return.

In many of these more than 200 cases, we found a clear link between the killing or harm to the deportee upon return and the reasons they had fled El Salvador in the first place. In other cases, we lacked sufficient evidence to establish such a link. Even the latter cases, however, show the risks to which Salvadorans can be exposed upon return and the importance of US authorities giving them a meaningful opportunity to explain why they need protection before they are deported.

The following three cases illustrate the range of harms:

In 2010, when he was 17, Javier B. fled gang recruitment and his particularly violent neighborhood for the United States, where his mother, Jennifer B., had already fled. Javier was denied asylum and was deported in approximately March 2017, when he was 23 years old. Jennifer said Javier was killed four months later while living with his grandmother: “That’s actually where they [the gang, MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha-13)] killed him.… It’s terrible. They got him from the house at 11:00 a.m. They saw his tattoos. I knew they’d kill him for his tattoos. That is exactly what happened.… The problem was with [the gang] MS [-13], not with the police.” (According to Human Rights Watch’s research, having tattoos may be a source of concern, even if the tattoo is not gang-related).

In 2013, cousins Walter T. and Gaspar T. also fled gang recruitment when they were 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were denied asylum and deported by the United States to El Salvador in 2019. Gaspar explained that in April or May 2019 when he and Walter were sleeping at their respective homes in El Salvador, a police patrol arrived “and took me and Walter and three others from our homes, without a warrant and without a reason. They began beating us until we arrived at the police barracks. There, they held us for three days, claiming we’d be charged with illicit association (agrupaciones ilícitas). We were beaten [repeatedly] during those three days.”

In 2014, when she was 20, Angelina N. fled abuse at the hands of Jaime M., the father of her 4-year-old daughter, and of Mateo O., a male gang member who harassed her repeatedly. US authorities apprehended her at the border trying to enter the US and deported her that same year. Once back in El Salvador, she was at home in October 2014, when Mateo resumed pursuing and threatening her. Angelina recounted: “[He] came inside and forced me to have sex with him for the first time. He took out his gun.… I was so scared that I obeyed … when he left, I started crying. I didn’t say anything at the time or even file a complaint to the police. I thought it would be worse if I did because I thought someone from the police would likely tell [Mateo].… He told me he was going to kill my father and my daughter if I reported the [original and three subsequent] rapes, because I was ‘his woman.’ [He] hit me and told me that he wanted me all to himself.”

As in these three cases, some people deported from the United States back to El Salvador face the same abusers, often in the same neighborhoods, they originally fled: gang members, police officers, state security forces, and perpetrators of domestic violence. Others worked in law enforcement in El Salvador and now fear persecution by gangs or corrupt officials.

Deportees also include former long-term US residents, who with their families are singled out as easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse. Former long-term residents of the US who are deported may also readily run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.

Nearly 900,000 Salvadorans living in the US without papers or only a temporary status together with the thousands leaving El Salvador each month to seek safety in the US are increasingly at risk of deportation. The threat of deportation is on the rise due to various Trump administration policy changes affecting US immigration enforcement inside its borders and beyond, changes that exacerbated the many hurdles that already existed for individuals seeking protection and relief from deportation.

Increasingly, the United States is pursuing policies that shift responsibility for immigration enforcement to countries like Mexico in an effort to avoid any obligation for the safety and well-being of migrants and protection of asylum-seekers. As ever-more restrictive asylum and immigration policies take hold in the US, this situation—for Salvadorans, and for others—will only worsen. Throughout, US authorities are turning a blind eye to the abuse Salvadorans face upon return.

Some people from El Salvador living in the United States have had a temporary legal status known as “Temporary Protected Status” or “TPS,” which has allowed those present in the United States since February 2001 (around 195,000 people) to build their lives in the country with limited fear of deportation. Similarly, in 2012, the Obama administration provided some 26,000 Salvadorans with “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or “DACA” status, which afforded some who had arrived as children with a temporary legal status. The Trump administration had decided to end TPS in January 2020, but to comply with a court order extended work authorization to January 2021. It remains committed to ending DACA.

While challenges to both policies wend their way through the courts, people live in a precarious situation in which deportation may occur as soon as those court cases are resolved (at the time of writing the DACA issue was before the US Supreme Court; and the TPS work authorization extension to January 2021 could collapse if a federal appellate court decides to reverse an injunction on the earlier attempt to terminate TPS).

Salvadoran asylum seekers are also increasingly at risk of deportation and return. The Trump administration has pursued a series of policy initiatives aimed at making it harder for people fleeing their countries to seek asylum in the United States by separating children from their parents, limiting the number of people processed daily at official border crossings, prolonging administrative detention, imposing fees on the right to seek asylum, extending from 180 days to one year the bar on work authorization after filing an asylum claim, barring asylum for those who transited another country before entering the United States, requiring asylum seekers to await their hearings in Mexico, where many face dangers, and attempting to narrow asylum.

These changes aggravated pre-existing flaws in US implementation of its protection responsibilities and came as significant numbers of people sought protection outside of El Salvador. In the decade from 2009 to 2019, according to government data, Mexican and United States officials made at least 732,000 migration-related apprehensions of Salvadoran migrants crossing their territory (175,000 were made by Mexican authorities and just over 557,000 by US authorities).

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the number of Salvadorans expressing fear of being seriously harmed if returned to El Salvador has skyrocketed. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of Salvadoran annual asylum applicants in the US grew by nearly 1,000 percent, from about 5,600 to over 60,000. By 2018, Salvadorans had the largest number (101,000) of any nationality of pending asylum applications in the United States. At the same time, approximately 129,500 more Salvadorans had pending asylum applications in numerous other countries throughout the world. People are fleeing El Salvador in large numbers due to the violence and serious human rights abuses they face at home, including one of the highest murder rates in the world and very high rates of sexual violence and disappearance.

Despite clear prohibitions in international law on returning people to risk of persecution or torture, Salvadorans often cannot avoid deportation from the US. Unauthorized immigrants, those with temporary status, and asylum seekers all face long odds. They are subjected to deportation in a system that is harsh and punitive—plagued with court backlogs, lack of access to effective legal advice and assistance, prolonged and inhumane detention, and increasingly restrictive legal definitions of who merits protection. The US has enlisted Mexico—which has a protection system that its own human rights commission has called “broken”—to stop asylum seekers before they reach the US and host thousands returned to wait for their US proceedings to unfold. The result is that people who need protection may be returned to El Salvador and harmed, even killed.

Instead of deterring and deporting people, the US should focus on receiving those who cross its border with dignity and providing them a fair chance to explain why they need protection. Before deporting Salvadorans living in the United States, either with TPS or in some other immigration status, US authorities should take into account the extraordinary risks former long-term residents of the US may face if sent back to the country of their birth. The US should address due process failures in asylum adjudications and adopt a new legal and policy framework for protection that embraces the current global realities prompting people to flee their homes by providing “complementary protection” to anyone who faces real risk of serious harm.

As immediate and first steps, the United States government should adopt the following six recommendations to begin to address the problems identified in this report. Additional medium- and long-term legal and policy recommendations appear in the final section of this report.

The Trump administration should repeal the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP); the two Asylum Bans; and the Asylum Cooperation Agreements.

The Attorney General of the United States should reverse his decisions that restrict gender-based, gang-related, and family-based grounds for asylum.

Congress and the Executive Branch should ensure that US funding for Mexican migration enforcement activities does not erode the right to seek and receive asylum in Mexico.

Congress should immediately exercise its appropriation power by: 1) Refraining from providing additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless and until abusive policies and practices that separate families, employ unnecessary detention, violate due process rights, and violate the right to seek asylum are stopped; 2) Prohibiting the use of funds to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Asylum Bans,” or the Asylum Cooperation Agreements, or any subsequent revisions to those protocols and agreements that block access to the right to seek asylum in the United States.

Congress should exercise its oversight authority by requiring the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General to produce reports on the United States’ fulfilment of its asylum and protection responsibilities, including by collecting and releasing accurate data on the procedural experiences of asylum seekers (access to counsel, wait times, staff capacity to assess claims, humanitarian and protection resources available) and on harms experienced by people deported from the United States to their countries of origin.

Congress should enact, and the President should sign, legislation that would broadly protect individuals with Temporary Protected Status (including Salvadorans) and DACA recipients, such as the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, but without the overly broad restrictions based on juvenile conduct or information from flawed gang databases.

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History will neither forget nor forgive the many Article III Judges who have betrayed their oaths of office and abandoned humanity by allowing the Trump regime to run roughshod over our Constitution, the rule of law, and simple human decency.

Future generations must inject integrity, courage, and human decency into the process for appointing and confirming Article III Judges. Obviously, there is something essential missing in the legal scholarship, ethical training, and moral integrity of many of our current batch of shallow “go along to get along” jurists! Human lives matter!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-06-20

THE LATEST FROM HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE: Rethinking Chevron In The Era Of Weaponized Immigration Courts Acting As Adjuncts Of DHS Enforcement, & Further Adventures Of The Round Table!

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog

jeffreyschase.com

In the present climate, immigration lawyers must continue to present judges with creative, intelligent arguments; to present the public with proof of what is wrong with the current system; and to present those in power to change what is wrong with solutions.

I’ve added posts that address each these points. First, I discuss some recent articles in which scholars raise creative legal arguments as to the limits of Chevron deference in appeals to the federal courts. I have also posted a statement of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges to the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship subcommittee that was made part of the record of its hearing last Wednesday on solutions to the present crisis in the immigration courts.

I have also posted the group statement of our Round Table on the one-year anniversary of the MPP, or “Remain in Mexico” policy that was drafted by former Immigration Judge Ilyce Shugall, who has volunteered her time to travel to Texas to observe MPP hearings that is meant to raise awareness of the need to end this awful program.

SUN, FEB 02

Rethinking Chevron?

The powers of the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals to influence law by issuing binding precedent decisions is greatly enhanced by what is known as Chevron deference. The principl

Read More

TUE, JAN 28

Statement to the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration Court Reform

On Wednesday, January 29 at 9:30 am, the House Judiciary Committee, Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee is holding a hearing entitled “Courts in Crisis: The State of Judicial Independence and

Read More

TUE, JAN 28

Statement on the One Year Anniversary of the MPP Program

January 28, 2020

The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges is comprised of former immigration judges who are dedicated to due process in the immigration system. As former immigration judges, we

Read More

jeffreyschase.com, 500 4th Ave., Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Another article that ties in well with a critical re-examination of Chevron in immigration cases is Tess Hellgren’s recent wonderful short article: “Faced with the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the immigration courts against asylum-seeking individuals, the role of the federal courts is more important than ever.” I recently republished it here: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

As we see the results of the regime’s Article III-enabled and encouraged nativist, racist policies like an expanded “Travel Ban” that now includes a large portion of Africa, new non-legislative restrictions on legal immigration, unmitigated expansion of the deadly “New American Gulag,” intentional mistreatment of children, and the continuing abrogation of both Due Process and our binding obligations to protect refugees at our Southern Border and elsewhere, Tess’s last sentence is particularly prophetic:

As the Attorney General and other executive officials attempt to expand their authority to define the terms of immigration adjudication, federal courts should heed the Seventh Circuit’s decision – and remember the foundational legal principle that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

So far, the Supremes and the Circuits have largely “vacated the province and shirked their duties” to the nation and our laws by shrinking and cowering in the face of the regime’s continuing lawlessness, bullying, bias, and tyranny. Indeed, the Supremes have shown a disturbing favoritism to unjustified requests by Trump’s Solicitor General to short-circuit the litigation system and the rules that bind all others.

Not since the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback” (obviously one of the regime’s “models” of lawless disregard for human and legal rights, not to mention basic morality) has our national Government shown such overt racism and contempt for migrants of color. Yet, rather than standing tall and delivering a united, powerful, intellectually courageous defense of our Constitution, the “GOP Gang of Five Supremes” backed the dehumanization and demonization of migrants on racial and religious grounds for transparent and invidious political reasons in the “Travel Ban case.” They basically invited and then approved a demonstrably false and “bad faith” national defense “pretext” which the Administration has “jumped on” to justify other attacks on the rule of law.

Now the “ban” has remarkably, but predictably, been extended to a large part of Africa, including its largest economy, Nigeria. Hardly a whimper as Trump disembowels both Constitutional norms and human decency. What’s next on the agenda, Supremes, a bogus Executive ban on all non-White, non-Christian immigration? Who’d be surprised at this point?

Of course, with “constitutional de-personification” well under way with Article III approval, the next targets will be US citizens of color and others who “dare to differ” like the LGBTQ community, women, political opponents, journalists, lawyers, and, finally, judges themselves once their usefulness to Trump and his authoritarian regime is exhausted. The all-powerful, unrestrained, “unitary Executive” has no need of legislature, judiciary, or the people except to “ratify” their authoritarian abuses.

The failure to defend and reinforce the courageous legal community challenging the regime’s authoritarian overreach and the pathetically weak defense of the integrity of judicial colleagues who have tried to hold the regime accountable by Roberts has done nothing but confirm and reinforce Trump’s pre-existing belief that courts are “his” tools and judges “his toadies.”

America deserves better from its life-tenured judiciary! What’s the purpose of a supposedly independent life-tenured judiciary that sides with powerful, dishonest, lawless, bullies over the rights of individuals and is unwilling to stand up for the rights and human dignity of the most vulnerable among us?

PWS

02-04-20

BIA: ANY OL’ NOTICE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ENDANGERED ASYLUM SEEKERS ORBITED TO MEXICO & BEYOND – MATTER OF J.J. RODRIGUEZ — How Judges At All Levels Are Abandoning The Rule Of Law & Enabling Abuse Of the Most Vulnerable!

http://go.usa.gov/xdDRq

Matter of J.J. RODRIGUEZ, 27 I&N Dec. 762 (BIA 2020)

PANEL: MALPHRUS, Acting Chairman; CREPPY and CASSIDY, Board Members.

OPINION BY: Acting Chairman Malphrus

BIA HEADNOTE:

Where the Department of Homeland Security returns an alien to Mexico to await an immigration hearing pursuant to the Migrant Protection Protocols and provides the alien with sufficient notice of that hearing, an Immigration Judge should enter an in absentia order of removal if the alien fails to appear for the hearing.

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Let’s put this in context!

This is an unrepresented asylum seeker “orbited” back to dangerous and chaotic conditions in Mexico. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.

He’s a native of Honduras. Obviously, he fled Honduras and sought admission to the United States for a reason. His only chance of not being returned to Honduras would be to show up for his hearing. Therefore, he would have no obvious reason for failing to appear at his hearing if he were able to do so.

In the past, in cases such as this, the DHS would have either: 1) released the respondent on bond to a known address in the United States that they would have recorded and furnished to EOIR; or 2) detained the respondent.

In the former case, the DHS would have been obliged to provide EOIR with a facially valid address to serve notices at the time of filing the Notice to Appear with the court. In the latter case, the DHS would be responsible for producing the respondent for all scheduled hearings.

Instead, in this case, the DHS chose under the mis-named “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”) (which are actually designed to reject rather than protect migrants) to abdicate its normal duties and send the respondent to an unknown location in Mexico without any reasonable safeguards to insure access to the hearing process or to counsel.

The DHS has no practical idea where they sent the respondent in Mexico and no reasonable method for contacting him or retrieving him.

Incredibly, and apparently with a straight face, the BIA lists the address of the respondent as “Domicilio Conocido, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.” That’s roughly the equivalent of “Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.” Good luck with that!

How would a U.S. lawyer get in touch with the respondent? How would the Immigration Court notify the respondent of the ever-changing times and dates of hearings? How would the DHS serve the respondent with notices of evidence? Obviously, they wouldn’t.

And, if the respondent failed to appear for a non-existent hearing, he undoubtedly would be “in absentia’d” under the BIA’s warped view of what is fair and reasonable. This whole MPP has obviously been constructed by DHS, with EOIR complicity, as an exercise in naked bad faith and intentional and unreasonable inconvenience to the respondents caught up in it.

In formalizing the MPP, the DHS could have worked cooperatively with the Mexican Government and the private bar to guarantee the respondent’s statutory rights to: 1) return to the United States for his removal hearing; and 2) reasonable access to pro bono counsel in the United States. The DHS chose not to do either, thereby leaving these statutory obligations potentially unachievable for this respondent. Through the BIA’s mental gymnastics, the DHS’s intentional indolence becomes the respondent’s problem!

It’s common knowledge that individuals returned to Mexico under the MPP are often forced to live on the streets and are in constant danger of kidnaping, extortion, robbery, rape, assault, starvation, and exploitation while in Mexico awaiting hearings.

There also are credible reports that some individuals returned under the MPP are sent to the interior of Mexico, to the Southern Border of Mexico, or returned to their home countries, thus making it impossible for them to appear for their scheduled hearings. See,e.g., https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-15/buses-to-nowhere-mexico-transports-migrants-with-u-s-court-dates-to-its-far-south, “Mexico sends asylum seekers south — with no easy way to return for U.S. court dates.”

The DHS makes no effort to ascertain what happens to those sent back to Mexico under the MPP and takes no steps to insure that they are able to return to the U.S. border for their hearings.

The DHS has provided no reason to believe that individuals “relocated” after returning to Mexico either understand what is happening to their hearing rights or have any realistic mechanism for retuning.

Under these circumstances, there is a rebuttable presumption that individuals returned under the MPP who do not appear for immigration hearings have been denied both their statutory right to the hearing process and their statutory right to representation by counsel of their own choosing at no expense to the Government. These statutory rights are integral to insuring due process in the removal hearing process.

The DHS may rebut this presumption by showing either: 1) they made reasonable efforts to locate this respondent in Mexico; or 2) there are reasonable procedures in place with the Mexican Government and with pro bono providers to provide reasonable access to hearings and pro bono counsel that were available to the respondent in this case.

Since the DHS has made no such showing in this case, the Immigration Judge’s decision to terminate the proceedings without an in absentia order is reasonable and proper under the law. Indeed, it is the only lawful outcome.

This is especially true because there doesn’t appear to be any effective way an individual who was inhibited from return to the United States from Mexico for his hearing can seek to reopen an in absentia hearing from Mexico or some other country to which he might have been “orbited” by the Mexican Government.

Indeed, the process followed by the DHS in this case appears to be an intentional derogation of the normal statutory right to a stay of removal from the United States to which an individual challenging an in absentia removal order ordinarily would be legally entitled.

This is, of course, without prejudice to the DHS reinstituting removal proceedings in the future if the respondent is encountered at the border or in the United States.

Sadly, the BIA isn’t the only tribunal to “blow off” their statutory and constitutional responsibilities.

The feckless judges of the Ninth Court of Appeals “took a dive” on their oaths of office by “greenlighting” the illegal (not to mention totally dishonest and immoral) MPP by vacating the District Court’s properly issued preliminary injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan.

As a result of the Ninth Circuit’s dereliction of duty, thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers have been irreparably injured.

Eventually, the MPP will go down as not only fraudulent and invidiously racially motivated, but as one of the most horrible, and preventable, failures of justice in modern American jurisprudence. It will rank right up there with Dred Scott., the Fugitive Slave Laws, “separate but equal,” Chinese Exclusion Laws, and Japanese internment of supposedly bygone ages. Dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse of Government authority is a common theme. It will indelibly stain the reputations of every bureaucrat and judge who touched it without “just saying no.”

While it might already be too late for many of the innocent victims of MPP, no amount of legal gobbledygook or “alternative facts” will save those responsible for initiating, carrying out, and enabling the MPP and similar violations of legal, constitutional, and human rights, and well as human morality, from the judgments of history!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

01-31-20

THE NDPA STRIKES BACK: ACLU Sues In DC To End The Regime’s Bogus “Safe Third Country” Abuse Of Human Rights & The Rule Of Law! — Regime’s Actions Could Be Characterized As “Crimes Against Humanity!”

https://apple.news/ALbDFozeyQemj7zT-zO0VUA

Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports for CBS News:

ACLU files lawsuit to halt Trump policy of sending asylum-seekers to Guatemala

Washington — The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday mounted the first legal challenge against the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants who seek protection at the U.S.-Mexico border to Guatemala, a country with a skeletal asylum regime that has seen an exodus of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in the past two years because of extreme poverty and endemic violence.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to halt the implementation of a controversial asylum agreement with the Guatemalan government. Under the deal forged last summer, the U.S. has sent more than 150 asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, denying them access to America’s asylum system and requiring them to choose between seeking refuge in the Central American country or returning home.

The agreement, the ACLU said in its 54-page complaint, amounts to “a deadly game of musical chairs that leaves many desperate asylum-seekers without a safe haven, in violation of U.S. and international law.”

“If this rule remains in effect, it means that the U.S. can completely wash their hands of any responsibility to provide safe haven for people fleeing persecution,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration litigator, told CBS News. “It would end asylum at the southern border, plain and simple.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that while it cannot comment on litigation, “the U.S. Government and the Government of Guatemala remain committed to the asylum cooperative agreement and stand behind the integrity of the program.”

For lead plaintiff, returning home isn’t an option

As of last week, 158 Honduran and Salvadoran migrants have been rerouted by the U.S. to Guatemala, including dozens of families and at least 43 children, according to the Guatemalan migration institute. Nine people initially chose to request protection in Guatemala, but five of them have since abandoned their claims, the institute said. The rest have asked for help returning to their home countries.

The lead plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit is a gay man from El Salvador who was sent by the U.S. to Guatemala after asking for asylum at the southern border. The man, identified only by the initials U.T., says he was sexually abused as a child, disowned by his family because of his sexuality and threatened by a gang member who solicited him for sex in El Salvador.

When he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, he was told he would be sent to Guatemala. He told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, who make the initial determination about whether migrants should be subject to the U.S.-Guatemala deal, that he feared being sent to Guatemala. His concerns fell on deaf ears.

He was then referred for an interview with an asylum officer and again expressed fear of persecution in Guatemala. Nonetheless, he was deported to the country shortly afterward.

During these types of interviews, migrants must affirmatively say they fear being sent to Guatemala. Even if they do, they have to meet a fear of persecution threshold that is much higher than that of the typical “credible fear” interviews most asylum-seekers at the southern border are subject to.

The ACLU says the man applied for asylum once in Guatemala, but officials there advised him to seek protection in Mexico instead, since Guatemala is “unsafe for gay people.” The State Department warns of “societal discrimination” and police abuse against LGBTI people in Guatemala.

Returning to El Salvador is not an option for the asylum-seeker, who is currently in Mexico, since he “fears that he will be attacked or killed for his sexual orientation if he tries to live openly as a gay man,” according to the ACLU.

“A way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck”

There are five other individual plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, including a woman and two families who were sent to Guatemala by the U.S. The Tahirih Justice Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, two organizations that provide legal services to asylum-seekers, are also named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit — which the National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and Human Rights First joined the ACLU in filing.

The group is asking the court to prohibit officials from enforcing a regulation the administration unveiled in November to implement the Guatemala deal and similar agreements that the U.S. brokered with Honduras and El Salvador which have not yet been implemented. The suit also challenges a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance document for asylum officers carrying out the agreement.

The ACLU alleged that both measures violate U.S. statutes designed to prevent officials from sending asylum-seekers to places where they may face persecution and that provide legal safeguards for migrants the government seeks to deport quickly. The group also said the policy violates administrative law, since the administration did not give the public a chance to comment on it and failed to provide “reasoned explanations” for dramatically changing the asylum system at the southern border.

The administration maintains that its agreements with Guatemala and the other countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle will foster the “distribution” of asylum claims among nations in the region and provide protection to migrants “closer to home.” But the ACLU says the so-called “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” represent a dramatic departure from the “safe third country” provision in U.S. law that the administration is using to defend their legality.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law an act that codified the “safe third country” concept, allowing the U.S. to enter into bilateral or multilateral agreements to send asylum-seekers to third countries, as long as the U.S. government made sure those asylum-seekers would not face persecution based on a protected ground under U.S. asylum law and would have access to a “full and fair” process to request protection in those nations.

Gelernt and his group believe the accords with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras violate this law because the countries do not have fully functioning asylum regimes, unlike Canada — the only nation which has an official “safe third country” agreement with the U.S.

“There is no way the administration can plausibly claim that Guatemala can provide a safe, fair and full asylum process. This administration has simply thumbed their nose at Congress,” Gelernt said, noting that Canada, a developed country with a robust asylum system, is a safe place for refugees.

“This is not a way to provide people with a fair asylum process but a way for the U.S. to simply pass the buck,” he added.

Guatemala has experienced moderate economic growth since the end of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, but it continues to grapple with high homicides rates, drug trafficking, political instability and widespread poverty, especially among its large indigenous communities in the Western highlands of the country. Only about 262 migrants sought refuge in Guatemala in 2018, according to the United Nations.

The ACLU also noted in its lawsuit that the Trump administration hasn’t publicly revealed any designations certifying that the Northern Triangle countries have the capacity to take in migrants rerouted there by the U.S., despite a requirement that such a certification be included in the government regulation to enforce the asylum agreements.

Sweeping implications for asylum-seekers

All three agreements the U.S. made last year suggest that they could grant the U.S. the power to reroute most asylum-seekers from any country in the world, barring a few exceptions, like unaccompanied children, to Central America. The ACLU underscored the sweeping nature of the deals in its suit, saying that in practice, the U.S. could send asylum-seekers from Afghanistan to one of the Northern Triangle countries, even if they did not travel through there to get to the U.S. southern border.

The administration believes it can include “all populations” in the agreements, and it recently announced it was planning to send Mexican asylum-seekers to Guatemala. The move sparked scathing criticism at home and abroad, with Mexico’s government objecting to the proposal.

Unlike migrants from Honduras and El Salvador, Mexican asylum-seekers do not travel through Guatemalan territory to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. A plan to subject Mexicans to the U.S.-Guatemala accord could, in practice, lead to the U.S. flying a Mexican asylum-seeker from Tijuana, San Diego’s neighboring city, some 1,500 miles away, asking her to seek protection in Guatemala.

How Guatemala continues to implement its “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” with the Trump administration will now be decided by conservative government of President Alejandro Giammattei, who took office on Tuesday.

The asylum agreements with countries in Central America are part of a series of policies the administration rolled out over the past year to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. These also include a sweeping rule that renders most non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum and the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which has required more than 57,000 asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities for the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings.

First published on January 15, 2020 / 4:19 PM

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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

The bogus “Safe Third Country Agreements” with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, clearly unsafe countries without functioning asylum systems, in violation of U.S. and international laws, are daunting acts of malicious fraud. This fraud is undertaken, in the open, by a neo-fascist regime that has contempt for humanity and human rights, believes itself above the law, and has no fear of being held accountable by the Federal Courts or Congress (notwithstanding Trump’s impeachment).

The regime’s unlawful fraudulent actions are defended in court by DOJ lawyers who believe the obligation of truthfulness before tribunals and other ethical requirements simply don’t apply to them. And, that’s probably with good reason.

The Trump regime has been peddling lies, false narratives, and bad faith legal arguments to the Federal Courts, all the way up to the Supremes, for nearly three years now with no consequences to the lawyers or their political clients. Indeed, Wilbur Ross lied under oath in the “Census Case,” but continues to be the Secretary of Commerce; to my knowledge, the Government lawyers who tried to present, defend, and rationalize. Ross’s census fraud are still on the payroll. A few Supremes even voted to sweep it all under the rug. It took an unusual display of backbone by Chief Justice Roberts to prevent the fraud from being perpetrated on American voters, particularly targeting voters of color.

Private lawyers who conducted themselves in a similar manner would likely be facing state disciplinary proceedings. A private executive who lied under oath like Ross probably would have been referred for a perjury prosecution or held in contempt of court.

But, Federal Judges, who are used to giving U.S. government lawyers pretty much a “free pass,” don’t seem to “get” that they are now dealing with a willfully corrupt, thoroughly dishonest, neo-fascist regime, not “just another Administration.”

When the laws, rules, and our Constitution don‘t apply to our Government, and nobody is held accountable for outrageous official wrongdoing (arguably “crimes against humanity” in the “Safe Third Country Fraud”) we all lose!

Due Process Forever! Complicity In The Face Of Tyranny, Never!

PWS

01-16-20

BAD NEWS FOR TEX. GOV. “GREG THE BIGOT” ABBOTT: U.S. District Judge Blocks Trump’s Illegal Anti-Refugee Order — But, Will Often Complicit Appellate Courts Uphold The Rule Of Law Or “Toady Up” To The Trump Regime’s White Nationalist Agenda?

Michelle Hackman
Immigration Reporter
Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-judge-blocks-trump-executive-order-on-refugees-11579108138?emailToken=575893ec6fe4b185f88708c59e175ef6CwUCcHqk/fEL6ReRFZZtuTxDwMXs7aS/qFBj8SMDh/g7NCEloF0znbPD48wkR6yiC0BZsPXe7V5mlXkbIptEUFTrxSHC0xOnxMYTwzWXscuGXaA/C7v5DN5I0vAE+Hef&reflink=article_email_share

Brent Kendall and Michelle Hackman report for the WSJ:

A federal judge in Maryland blocked President Trump’s executive order giving state and local governments the ability to say no to having refugees placed in their communities.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday that barred the administration from implementing the president’s order. He said refugee-resettlement organizations that sued to challenge the policy “are clearly likely to succeed in showing, that, by giving states and local governments veto power over the resettlement of refugees within their borders, the order is unlawful.”

Giving states the power to determine whether refugees will be received “flies in the face of clear congressional intent,” Judge Messitte, a Clinton appointee, said in the opinion.

. . . .

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

Those with WSJ access can read the complete article at the above link.

This “victory” might be little more than symbolic for refugee advocates. In an unprecedented action, the Trump Administration has slowed the flow of legal refugees to a trickle and could simply use the “bureaucratic veto” to prevent any more from coming, as they have gotten away with in other areas.

Certainly, this should give lie to the Trump Administration’s inevitable argument to Federal Appeals Courts that this is an “emergency” requiring them to intervene prior to the completion of District Court proceedings. But, up until now, neither law nor reality has been much of a factor when it comes to the Supremes, and sometimes the Circuits, going “belly up” and allowing the regime to run roughshod over human lives and the rule of law in the immigration and refugee areas.

Chief Justice Roberts wonders why the judiciary is treated with contempt by the regime and is losing respect from the large majority of the legal community not subservient to Trump. The answer is all too often pretty obvious.

Per MKL, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s an important message that all too many Federal Judges and other (supposedly responsible) public officials seem to have forgotten in the “Age of Trump” and his corrupt and overtly White Nationalist regime.

PWS

01-15-20

FRANK RICH @ NY MAGGIE: TRUMP TOADIES WILL FACE A RECKONING — “With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it . . . .”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.html

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

By Frank Rich

@frankrichny

Photo: Getty Images

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trump’s America. It’s the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of “facts” has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that it’s impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say you’re sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.

No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse — whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions — their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We don’t know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it won’t be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.

Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots.

That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).

. . . .

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

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

“Tomorrow will come, eventually.” Yup!

Just yesterday, the usually reliable “Trump Toadies” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) were whining and sputtering upon learning what toadyism really means after being “treated like Democrats” during an insulting and clownish “after the fact briefing” on Iran. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/impeachment-watch-january-8/index.html .

But, that moment of lucidity and outrage will pass quickly, and they will undoubtedly rejoin their colleagues like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Teddy Cruz (R-TX), Sen. John “Vladimir” Kennedy (R-LA), Lindsey “Braindead” Graham (R-SC), and the rest of the “Party of Putin” in groveling before their Clown-in-Chief.

I would include the Article III judges who tanked in the face of tyranny and failed to protect the legal and human rights of the most vulnerable in the list of those whose misdeeds, spinelessness, and complicity in the face of tyranny eventually will be “outed.”

PWS

01-09-20

“SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were THEIR Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?

“SITTING DUCKS” IN “UNSAFE THIRD COUNTRIES” — How The Supremes, The 9th Circuit, The 5th Circuit, & Other Complicit Federal Appellate Courts Aid & Abet The Trump Regime’s Human Rights Violations — Would The “Privileged Robed Ones” Take Due Process & The Rule Of Law More Seriously If It Were Their Kids & Grandkids Being Kidnapped & Held for Ransom For The “Crime” Of Seeking Protection Under U.S. Laws?

Robbie Whelan
Mexico City Correspondent
Wall Street Journal

\https://apple.news/A7aogQqflTgq9ZgbhJJzr1A

Robbie Whelan reports for the WSJ:

Latin America

Violence Plagues Migrants Under U.S. ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program

Migrants seeking shelter in the U.S. under Trump administration policy report rising numbers of kidnappings by criminal groups

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico—Every morning, Lorenzo Ortíz, a Baptist pastor who lives in Texas, drives a 12-seat passenger van packed with food and blankets across the border to pick up migrants who have been dropped off in Mexico and ferry them to shelters.

His mission is to keep the migrants safe from organized crime groups that prowl the streets of this violent Mexican border town. Since the Trump administration began implementing its Migrant Protection Protocols program at the start of 2019—widely known as Remain in Mexico—some 54,000 migrants, mostly from Central America, have been sent back to northern Mexico to wait while their asylum claims are processed. Mexico’s government is helping implement it.

But in cities like Nuevo Laredo, migrants are sitting ducks. Over the years, thousands have reported being threatened, extorted or kidnapped by criminal groups, who prey upon asylum seekers at bus stations and other public spaces.

“Over the last year, it’s gotten really bad,” Mr. Ortíz said.

A typical scheme involves kidnapping migrants and holding them until a relative in the U.S. wires money, typically thousands of dollars, in ransom money. Gangs have also attacked shelters and even some Mexican clergy members who help migrants.

There have been 636 reported cases of kidnapping, rape, torture and other violent crimes against migrants returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico, according to Human Rights First, which interviews victims in border cities and advocates for migrants’ due process rights. At least 138 of these incidents involved kidnappings of children.

Many more cases of extortion and violence go unreported for fear of retribution. As more migrants are returned to dangerous areas such as Nuevo Laredo under Remain in Mexico, the situation is expected to worsen, the nonprofit Human Rights First said in a recent report.

The Mexican government has played down the violence. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard recently acknowledged kidnapping incidents, but said that “it’s not a massive number.” Only 20 such cases have been investigated by the government, he added.

The Trump administration has credited the program with deterring migrants from attempting to cross into the U.S. Monthly apprehensions of migrants at the U.S. Southern border have plunged from more than 144,000 in May to 33,500 in November. The Remain in Mexico program was expanded in June.

On a recent visit to the border, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the program has been a “game-changer” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because it has freed them from having to perform humanitarian duties.

But Mr. Ortíz’s daily commute back and forth over the border highlights what migrants’ advocates say is a key element of the program—it isolates migrants not only from the legal counsel they need to argue their asylum claims, but from resources like food, shelter and medical care that are abundant on the U.S. side, but near-nonexistent in Mexico.

“You have all this infrastructure to help feed and clothe and house people set up on this side, in Laredo and Del Rio and Eagle Pass, and then suddenly the administration changes the policy, and you have to send it all to Mexico, because now everyone is on the other side,” said Denise LaRock, a Catholic Sister who helps distribute donations to asylum seekers through the nonprofit Interfaith Welcome Coalition. Mexico has been unable to provide enough safe shelter and other resources to migrants.

In Matamoros, another large recipient of asylum seekers under the program across the border from Brownsville, Texas, a tent city of more than 3,000 people has sprung up. Migrants there have complained of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and insufficient medical treatment. In November, a migrant from El Salvador was murdered in Tijuana, opposite San Diego, while waiting with his wife and two children for an asylum hearing under the Remain in Mexico program.

On a recent, briskly-cold Wednesday, Mr. Ortíz, dressed in a ski vest and a baseball cap with the logo of the U.S. Chaplain International Association, picked up six migrants, including two children aged 8 and 14, at the immigration office in Nuevo Laredo. All were from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, and were returning from legal appointments in the U.S. Hearings take place in makeshift courts set up in tents in Laredo, just across the bridge over the Rio Grande that separates the two cities.

At the front door of the office, six young men sat idly around a motorcycle, hats pulled low over their heads, watching the scene unfold, periodically walking up to the church van and peering in. Mr. Ortíz said these men were “hawks” or lookouts for criminal gangs.

“They know who I am, I know who they are,” he said. “You have to know everyone to do this work. The cartels respect the church. I’ve driven all around Nuevo Laredo in this van, full of migrants, and they never mess with me.”

At one point two of the lookouts asked the pastor for some food. He gave them two boxes of sandwich cookies. They clapped him on the shoulder, eating the treats as they walked back to their observation post.

Mr. Ortíz, a native of central Mexico, came to the U.S. at age 15 and eventually built a small contracting business in Texas. He became an ordained Baptist minister about a decade ago and three years ago began ministering to migrants full time. This year, he converted several rooms of his home in Laredo, Texas, into a dormitory for migrants and built men’s and women’s showers in his backyard.

After picking up the migrants, Mr. Ortíz ferried the group to an unmarked safe house with a chain-locked door on a busy street in the center of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Inside, about 90 migrant families crowded into rows of cots set up in a handful of bedrooms and a concrete back patio. Among the Central Americans are also migrants from Peru, Congo, Haiti, Angola and Venezuela.

Reports of migrant kidnappings have increased since the Remain in Mexico program began, Mr. Ortíz said. In September, armed men stormed the safe house—one of two that the pastor brings migrants to—and detained the shelter’s staff for about an hour.

Since then, Mr. Ortíz said, the volunteer staff has stopped allowing migrants to leave the house unaccompanied, even to buy milk for young children at a nearby store.

Rosa Asencio, a schoolteacher fleeing criminal gangs in El Salvador and traveling with her two children ages 4 and 7, was returned to Nuevo Laredo under Remain in Mexico. She says she hasn’t been outside the shelter for nearly three weeks. “They can kidnap you anywhere,” she said.

María Mazariegos, an Honduran housekeeper, said she was kidnapped along with her 12-year-old daughter Alexandra from the bus station in Nuevo Laredo in September.

Gang members held her in a windowless cinder-block room that bore signs of torture for three days with one meal of tortillas and beans. She was released after her family members in the U.S. convinced her captors that they didn’t have the money to pay a ransom.

Then, two weeks later, while she was returning from a court appointment in the U.S., a shelter staff member confirmed, another group tried to kidnap her. An escort from the shelter was able to talk the kidnappers out of it.

She has court hearing under Remain in Mexico rules on Jan. 22, where a judge is expected to decide on her asylum case. If she is rejected, she plans to move to the Mexican city of Saltillo, where she has heard there are more jobs and less violence.

“Just about anywhere is better than here,” Ms. Mazariegos added.

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com

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

These two quotes really tell you all you need know about this grotesquely immoral and illegal “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” (sometimes totally disingenuously referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols”) and the sleazy U.S. Government officials responsible for it:

There have been 636 reported cases of kidnapping, rape, torture and other violent crimes against migrants returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico, according to Human Rights First, which interviews victims in border cities and advocates for migrants’ due process rights. At least 138 of these incidents involved kidnappings of children.

. . . .

On a recent visit to the border, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the program has been a “game-changer” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers because it has freed them from having to perform humanitarian duties.

Let’s not forget that the Immigration “Court” system that has life or death power over these asylum claims has been twisted and “gamed” against legitimate asylum seekers, particularly women and children with brown skins, by the White Nationalist politicos who unconstitutionally control it. All this while the Article III appellate courts look the other way and “swallow the whistle” on protecting the legal and constitutional rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Let’s see, essentially: “It’s great program because it allows us to evade our humanitarian duties under humanitarian laws and concentrate on faux law enforcement directed against individuals who are not legitimate targets of law enforcement.” Doesn’t say much for the legal and moral authority of the Article III, life-tenured judges who think this is acceptable for our country.

Obviously, this has less to do with the law, which is clearly against what the “regime” is doing, or legitimate law enforcement, which has little to do with the vast majority of legal asylum seekers, and lots to do with vulnerable, brown-skinned individuals desperately seeking justice being “out of sight, out of mind” to the exalted, tone-deaf Article III Judges who are failing to do their Constitutional duties. “Going along to get along” appears to be the new mantra of far too many of the Article III appellate judges.

Assuming that our republic survives and that “Good Government” eventually returns to both the Executive and the Legislative Branches, an examination of the catastrophic failure of the Article III Judiciary to effectively stand up for the Constitutional, legal, and individual human rights of asylum seekers obviously needs reexamination and attention.

The glaring lack of legal expertise in asylum, immigration, and human rights laws as well as basic Constitutional Due Process, and the total lack of human empathy among far, far too many Article III appellate jurists is as stunning as it is disturbing! The past is the past; but, we can and should learn from it. At some point, if we are to survive as a nation of laws and humane values, we need a radically different and more courageous Article III Judiciary that puts humanity and human rights first, not last!

The “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” will not go down in history as a “law enforcement success” as Wolf-man and the other Trump regime kakistocrats and their enablers and apologists claim; it eventually will take its place as one of the most disgraceful and cowardly abandonments of American values in our history. And, the role of the complicit Supreme Court Justices and Court of Appeals Judges who turned their backs on our asylum laws, our Constitution, and human decency will also be spotlighted!

As I was “indexing” this article, I “scrolled through” the name and thought of my old friend the late Arthur Helton, a courageous humanitarian, lawyer, teacher, role model, and occasional litigation opponent (during my days at the “Legacy INS”). Arthur, who literally gave his life for others and his steadfastly humane view of the law, was a believer in the “fundamental justice” of the American judicial system. I wonder what he would think if he were alive today to see the cowardly and complicit performance of so many Article III appellate judges, all the way up to and including the Supremes, in the face of the unlawful, unconstitutional, institutionalized evil, hate, and tyranny of our current White Nationalist regime.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

12-31-19

“THE GIFTS OF THE MAGA-I:” DESPAIR, DEHUMANIZATION, DEATH — “[W]e keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

Kristin Clarens, Esquire
Project Adelante

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-tent-cities-mpp-killing-immigrant-children.html

JURISPRUDENCE

Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

DEC 23, 20191:17 PM

The tent camp set up by asylum-seekers next to the bridge to the U.S. in Matamoros, Mexico, seen on Dec. 9.

John Moore/Getty Images

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On this week’s episode of Amicus, Slate’s podcast about the Supreme Court, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Kristin Clarens, an attorney with Project Adelante, a group of multidisciplinary professionals, including lawyers, doctors, ministers, and psychologists, working across the country to help mobilize and concentrate support for asylum-seekers at the border. A transcript of the interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can you just start by explaining what it is that you do and how as a lawyer you were able to kind of amble in and out of border facilities, detention facilities?

Kristin Clarens: People who previously would have been detained [in the U.S.] are now living in sort of makeshift refugee camps on the Mexico side of the border because of the “Remain in Mexico” policy. So now it’s incredibly easy to amble in and out, as easy as it is for the cartel members and other organized criminals who are circulating in these camps.

The Remain in Mexico policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols, is just about a year old. Can you describe what the world was like before it, what the world has been like since?

The estimates are that there are around 3,000 people [in the tent camp in Matamoros] living just in squalor and in tents, and that 80 percent of them are families with young children. A year ago, in the Rio Grande Valley, most of those people would come to the United States either after asking for permission at a port of entry or after crossing without permission and they would be apprehended, put into one of the temporary facilities that so many of us have seen on the news with the kids in cages and the very overcrowded conditions, lack of sanitation and medical care. After that, the families and young kids were sent to longer-term detention centers where many of us, many lawyers who speak Spanish, have worked across the country.

As of June or July of this year, the United States government started implementing something that they call, I think very ironically, the Migrant Protection Protocols, which is a policy guideline that says that border patrol agents are able to return asylum-seekers to Mexico for the duration of their immigration hearings. So now an asylum-seeker who comes up from Central America arrives in these incredibly sketchy and stressful border towns, asks for asylum at the port of entry, and after a quick trip to one of the cage facilities, they are sent back into the streets of Mexico.

That moment where they’re shoved back into Mexican territory from the U.S. officials is an incredibly vulnerable one. It’s kind of like bad guys lurking on the sides.

Now that you’re looking at the tent cities in Mexico, what kinds of things are you seeing, what kinds of legal aid are you able to provide if you are in Matamoros trying to help?

The legal aid that we’re able to provide at this point is becoming so much more limited because the statistics out now are that 0.1 percent of asylum-seekers who have their cases heard in the MPP courts—many of whom have valid claims, who would have succeeded with time and due process and legal support—0.1 percent are succeeding. Nothing has changed with respect to the nature of the cases—single women who have been persecuted specifically because they’re vulnerable in their home countries by gangs and by other types of organized crime. They’re incredibly vulnerable living in these—it’s just like a tent, the kind of tent that you would take to go camping in the woods in the summer. Except for single women—sometimes pregnant with young children with no other form of support, no network whatsoever—living for months at a time in freezing cold conditions in rain and in superhot conditions the next day, just incredibly exposed on every single level.

The circumstances change almost weekly with respect to the parameters and expectations, the due process provided in the MPP camp, and also, with respect to just the feasibility of [the legal support] we can offer as the numbers of people on the ground grow and the backlog increases in the MPP courts.

The camp facility where people are sort of constrained physically has somewhere between 2,600 and 3,000 people in it at any given day, and it’s growing. But the total number of people who’ve been returned to Mexico under MPP is closer to 68,000. So only a small fraction of the people who need legal services are even visible at this point.

On the ground and at least at Matamoros, people don’t have enough showers, they don’t have enough food. There’s rampant illness. I mean, you are seeing kids with tremendous medical and nutritional and other needs that are not getting that.

There’s sort of a group that’s come onto the scene over the past month that’s providing mobile health care via a clinic and also a humanitarian support to try and improve the shelters. They’re all volunteer based. It’s kind of all of us rolling up our sleeves and trying to figure out the best way to get support in there. But it’s subject essentially to the whims of the Mexican government. At any point, this could be shut down, or relocated, or people could just be forced to scatter. You just don’t know how things are going to unfold when the United States government’s policies might be enjoined, or when the Mexican government may decide that it can no longer tolerate these large refugee camps.

“How many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?”

— Kristin Clarens

The Mexican government initially restricted humanitarian groups’ access to sort of building things like toilets and showers and did so themselves in Matamoros. But the facilities that they built were really not adequate. They have showers that are not linked to any sort of drainage systems so there’s just big puddles of disgusting water that smelled bad and it’s just really kind of dehumanizing. Prior to the existence of the showers though, people were bathing in the river, which is contaminated with human waste, and people were getting sick and these awful skin infections all over. Little kids were swimming in the same place where little kids were also vomiting and having diarrhea. It’s just kind of a recipe for humanitarian crisis, within 100 feet of an American city.

You’ve been dealing this week with a critically ill child.

It’s really difficult for people who could die at any minute of their illnesses to get medical care in Matamoros for a variety of reasons. It’s hard for them to get around. It’s a scary city and it’s not safe. And so, this past week, we heard about several more critically ill migrants waiting at the tent city, including a 7-year-old who had, I think it can best be described as, sort of a breach in her abdominal wall.

So her fecal matter was leaking out and kind of reinfecting her, kind of getting reabsorbed by parts of her body as she wasn’t able to access clean water or water at all, to drink or to bathe herself to prevent just massive infection that could really quickly turn to a life-and-death situation. So, we did the best we could. I’ve been on the bridge trying to cross with people and been kind of mistreated and treated aggressively by the Border Patrol agents, and I know how scary and hard that is. I can’t imagine having gotten that experience as a 7-year-old girl who has to wear a diaper because her stomach is no longer able to contain her intestines. Fortunately, she was able to cross after, I think, a collective eight or nine hours waiting on the bridge and advocating and negotiating with Border Patrol. She was able to get across and get to the hospital on Tuesday night.

I had to try to twist your arm to get you to come talk about her story, because nobody died so it feels like nobody is going to care?

That’s the sense that I get in trying to focus attention on this in such a stressful time in America. It seems scary. Our government is unstable and stressful right now, and at the same time, these incredible egregious human rights violations are happening at our Southern border. And it’s like, how do we cut through this noise and really stand up for the weakest people that our country is negatively impacting right now? And I don’t have those answers, but we keep wondering, how many 7-year-old girls would need to die for this to be something that would get in the headlines and stay in the headlines for a day or two?

You can listen to Amicus in the player below or via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, and the Courts

Divided Realities

Lawyers on the crisis at the border, and a cacophony of bad faith in the Capitol.

01:10:57

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Donald Trump Immigration Mexico

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As the article points out, vulnerable refugees with valid asylum claims that might well have been granted prior to the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy are now being railroaded without legal representation or any semblance of fairness, impartiality, or due process.

Another way of putting Kristin Clarens’s very valid concerns: “How many seven-year old girls would have to die before complicit, tone-deaf, life-tenured Supreme Court Justices and Article III Appellate Judges take off their blinders, get out of their ivory towers, stop kowtowing to Trump and the forces of White Nationalist darkness and evil, and start seeing Trump’s victims as human beings, or even as their own children or grandchildren?”

Thank goodness for courageous, talented, dedicated folks like Kristin who represent the “True Spirit of Christmas” in an age where kindness, compassion, mercy, and justice have been forgotten and are daily being trampled by the regime, its supporters, and enablers.

Merry Christmas,

PWS

12-25-19

REGIME’S NEWEST SCHEME TO SCREW ASYLUM SEEKERS: BOGUS REGS THAT WOULD ILLEGALLY & UNNECESSARILY EXTEND THE GROUNDS OF “MANDATORY DENIAL,” DECREASE ADJUDICATOR DISCRETION, & SHAFT REFUGEE FAMILIES — Regime’s Outlandish “Efficiency Rationale” Fails to Mask Their Cruelty, Racism, Fraud, Waste, & Abuse – Julia Edwards Ainsley (NBC News) & Dean Kevin R. Johnson (ImmigrationProf Blog) Report

Julia Edwards Ainsley
NBC News Correspondent

https://apple.news/AXSXjJIOxRUSM4ZOgQm9plQ

Trump admin announces rule further limiting immigrants’ eligibility for asylum

DUIs, drug paraphernalia possession and unlawful receipt of public benefits would be among seven triggers barring migrants from even applying for asylum.

by Julia Ainsley | NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a new rule Wednesday that would further limit immigrants’ eligibility for asylum if they have been convicted of certain crimes, including driving under the influence and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The rule, if finalized, would give asylum officers seven requirements with which to deem an immigrant ineligible to apply for asylum.

Other acts that would make an immigrant ineligible for asylum under the new rule include the unlawful receipt of public benefits, illegal re-entry after being issued a deportation order and being found “by an adjudicator” to have engaged in domestic violence, even if there was no conviction for such violence.

The rules could eliminate large numbers of asylum-seekers from ever having their cases heard in court. Currently, immigration courts have a backlog of over 1 million cases, according to data kept by Syracuse University.

In a statement, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security said the new rule would “increase immigration court efficiencies.”

Andrew Free, an immigration attorney based in Nashville, said the new regulation is “calculated to enable the denial of as many claims as possible.”

Free said the most common charges he sees for his immigrant clients are driving under the influence, domestic violence and driving without a license. Driving without a license is particularly common for immigrants who have had to use fake travel documents to enter the U.S. and live in states that do not give licenses to undocumented migrants.

“People who are fleeing persecutions and violence are not going to be able to get travel documents from the governments inflicting violence upon them. If you have to resort to other means of proving your identity, you won’t be eligible [for asylum,]” Free said.

The Trump administration has unveiled a number of new requirements meant to curb asylum applications this year. The most successful of those policies has been “Remain in Mexico” or MPP, that requires lawful asylum-seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions, until their court date in the United States. Over 60,000 asylum-seekers are currently waiting in Mexico for a decision to be made in their case, a process that can take over a year.

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The Beat Goes On! Joint Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Restrict Certain “Criminal Aliens'” Eligibility for Asylum

By Immigration Prof

Share

Consistent with the efforts to facilitate removal of “criminal aliens,” the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security released the announcement below today:

“The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security (collectively, “the Departments”) today issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would amend their respective regulations in order to prevent certain categories of criminal aliens from obtaining asylum in the United States. Upon finalization of the rulemaking process, the Departments will be able to devote more resources to the adjudication of asylum cases filed by non-criminal aliens.

Asylum is a discretionary immigration benefit that generally can be sought by eligible aliens who are physically present or arriving in the United States, irrespective of their status, as provided in section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1158. However, in the INA, Congress barred certain categories of aliens from receiving asylum. In addition to the statutory bars, Congress delegated to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to establish by regulation additional bars on asylum eligibility to the extent they are consistent with the asylum statute, as well as to establish “any other conditions or limitations on the consideration of an application for asylum” that are consistent with the INA. Today, the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security are proposing to exercise their regulatory authority to limit eligibility for asylum for aliens who have engaged in specified categories of criminal behavior. The proposed rule will also eliminate a regulation concerning the automatic reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum applications in limited cases.

The proposed regulation would provide seven additional mandatory bars to eligibility for asylum. The proposed rule would add bars to eligibility for aliens who commit certain offenses in the United States.Those bars would apply to aliens who are convicted of:

(1) A felony under federal or state law;

(2) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A) or § 1324(a)(1)(2) (Alien Smuggling or Harboring);

(3) An offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1326 (Illegal Reentry);

(4) A federal, state, tribal, or local crime involving criminal street gang activity;

(5) Certain federal, state, tribal, or local offenses concerning the operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence of an intoxicant;

(6) A federal, state, tribal, or local domestic violence offense, or who are found by an adjudicator to have engaged in acts of battery or extreme cruelty in a domestic context, even if no conviction resulted; and

(7) Certain misdemeanors under federal or state law for offenses related to false identification; the unlawful receipt of public benefits from a federal, state, tribal, or local entity; or the possession or trafficking of a controlled substance or controlled-substance paraphernalia.

The seven proposed bars would be in addition to the existing mandatory bars in the INA and its implementing regulations, such as those relating to the persecution of others, convictions for particularly serious crimes, commission of serious nonpolitical crimes, security threats, terrorist activity, and firm resettlement in another country.

Under the current statutory and regulatory framework, asylum officers and immigration judges consider the applicability of mandatory bars to asylum in every proceeding involving an alien who has submitted an application for asylum. Although the proposed regulation would expand the mandatory bars to asylum, the proposed regulation does not change the nature or scope of the role of an immigration judge or an asylum officer during proceedings for consideration of asylum applications.

The proposed rule would also remove the provisions at 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) regarding reconsideration of discretionary denials of asylum. The removal of the requirement to reconsider a discretionary denial would increase immigration court efficiencies and reduce any cost from the increased adjudication time by no longer requiring a second review of the same application by the same immigration judge.” (bold added).

KJ

December 18, 2019 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

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What total, unadulterated BS and gratuitous cruelty!

For example, 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(e) and §1208.16(e) are humanitarian provisions that seldom come up except in highly unusual and sympathetic cases. The idea that they represent a “drain” on IJ time is preposterous! And, if they did, it would be well worth it to help to keep deserving and vulnerable refugee families together!

I had about three such cases involving those regulations in 13 years on the bench, although I cited the existing regulation for the proposition that discretionary denials are disfavored, as they should be under international humanitarian laws. Federal Courts and the BIA have held that asylum should not be denied for “discretionary reasons” except in the case of “egregious adverse factors.” Therefore, an Immigration Judge properly doing his or her job would very seldom have occasion to enter a “discretionary denial” to someone eligible for asylum. Obviously, the regime intends to ignore these legal rulings.

One of my colleagues wrote “they are going to capture a lot of people and force IJs to hear separate asylum applications for each family member. So counterproductive.”

Cruelty, and more “aimless docket reshuffling” is what these “maliciously incompetent gimmicks” are all about.

I note that this is a “joint proposal” from EOIR and DHS Enforcement, the latter supposedly a “party” to every Immigration Court proceeding, but actually de facto in charge of the EOIR “judges.” That alone makes it unethical, a sign of bias, and a clear denial of Due Process for the so-called “court” and the “Government party” to collude against the “private party.”

When will the Article IIIs do their job and put an end to this nonsense? It’s not “rocket science.” Most first year law students could tell you that this absurd charade of a “court” is a clear violation of Due Process! So, what’s the problem with the Article IIIs? Have they forgotten both their humanity and what they learned in Con Law as well as their oaths of office they took upon investiture?

Right now, as intended by the regime with the connivance and complicity of the Article IIIs, those advocating for the legal, constitutional, and human rights of asylum seekers are being forced to divert scarce resources to respond to the “regime shenanigan of the day.” It’s also abusing and disrespecting the Article III Courts. Why are they so blind to what’s REALLY going on when the rest of us see it so clearly? These aren’t “legal disputes” or “legitimate policy initiatives.” No, they are lawless outright attacks on our Constitution, our nation, our human values, and our system of justice which Article III Judges are sworn to uphold!

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect our democracy from the White Nationalist Regime and the complicit life-tenured judges who enable and encourage it!

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” & Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-21-19

KILLERS ON THE BENCH: The 9th Circuit Mindlessly “Greenlighted” The Trump Regime’s Illegal & Unconstitutional “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” – Now, Their Victims Are Doing Just That – The Deadly Costs Of Complicit Courts!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=861153e4-7431-4885-988f-89818194bf2f

Wendy Fry reports for the San Diego Union Tribune:

By Wendy Fry

TIJUANA — A 35-year-old man from El Salvador returned to Mexico under a controversial Trump administration program was brutally killed in Tijuana while waiting for an outcome to his U.S. asylum case, according to his family’s attorney.

During a seven-month period, the man and his family repeatedly told U.S. officials — including a San Diego immigration court judge, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — that they were not safe in Tijuana, the lawyer said.

Customs and Border Protection returned the man and his family to Tijuana anyway, records show. In November, he was killed in Zona Norte, one of Tijuana’s more dangerous regions near the border.

“I don’t know how there’s an argument that Mexico is a safe country,” said Richard Sterger, the family’s immigration attorney. “My clients begged not to be sent back there.”

The family fled El Salvador and presented themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in May asking to be allowed into the United States to assert their legal right to seek asylum, Sterger said.

The family was placed into the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as MPP or “Remain in Mexico.” The man’s wife and their two children are not being identified because they fear for their lives after reporting and speaking about his slaying.

Sterger said he could not discuss details of their asylum claim, such as why they fled El Salvador, because it is part of their ongoing immigration case.

Between May and September, the family members waited in Tijuana for their first court appearance, he said.

During their Sept. 11 immigration court hearing, they pleaded with a San Diego immigration judge to not be sent back to Mexico because they feared for their safety. At the time, the family did not have legal representation, Sterger said.

“I told the judge that I was afraid for my children because we were in a horrible, horrible place, and we didn’t feel safe here,” the widow told the Spanish-language news station Telemundo 20.

The judge referred the case to ICE, a process called “red sheeting,” and the family was interviewed about its fears of returning to Tijuana without a legal representative, the attorney said.

A spokeswoman for ICE said a “red sheet” is placed at the top of a person’s immigration court case file to alert Customs and Border Protection officials that an interview needs to be done about whether or not a family can continue safely waiting in Mexico.

She said she could not comment specifically on the man’s case because of privacy and identification policies.

Under international law, countries are forbidden to return asylum seekers to any nation where they are likely to face danger of persecution because of their “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The legal principle is known as “non-refoulement.”

Migrant rights advocates have been warning the public that the U.S. government is violating the “non-refoulement” principle with the MPP program, which is facing numerous challenges and lawsuits in federal court.

Sterger said his clients’ case is a perfect example.

After telling U.S. officials they were afraid to be in Tijuana, the members of the family were sent back anyway without explanation.

A Baja California death certificate says the husband and father died Nov. 20 of stab wounds to his neck. It also says he had cuts and stab wounds all over his torso that a Baja California investigator confirmed could indicate torture.

Started under the Trump administration, MPP requires that migrants trying to legally enter the United States remain in Mexico during the immigration court process.

That process usually takes several months, sometimes up to a year, and involves multiple court hearings, which requires migrants to present themselves at El Chaparral border crossing near the San Ysidro Port of Entry to travel to immigration court in San Diego.

Officials with the Baja California prosecutors’ office said that during the process of repeatedly presenting themselves at the border, U.S. asylum seekers can easily be spotted and targeted by criminal groups as potential victims.

In Tijuana, the threat of violence for migrants is so severe that Baja California state police have been going around to various migrant shelters giving presentations on how to avoid becoming a victim since the MPP program began.

Under the program, rolled out in January in Tijuana and then expanded across the U.S.-Mexico border, tens of thousands of U.S. asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico.

Immigration advocacy groups, attorneys and human rights organizations have been urgently warning the U.S. government that border cities are not safe places for asylum seekers to be forced to wait while their cases are processed.

The nonprofit group Human Rights First identified 636 publicly reported cases of “rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults against asylum seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico by the Trump administration.”

Of that, at least 138 cases involved children being kidnapped or nearly kidnapped in Mexico, according to a report by the group.

“The MPP fear screening process is a sham with interviews that have become increasingly cursory and adversarial resulting in the return of vulnerable and victimized asylum seekers to new dangers,” the report highlighted.

Sterger agreed.

“We are literally putting people’s lives at risk,” he said.

The attorney said that after the father and husband of the family was brutally slain, the mother ran to the border with her children, both younger than 10. She told border officers what happened and begged to be let into the United States.

Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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

The Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan travesty just keeps on killing, abusing, torturing, and dehumanizing every day. Encouraged by the 9th Circuit’s cowardly dereliction of duty and the Supremes evident lack of concern for the safety, lives, and human dignity of asylum seekers, the regime has taken it to a new level with fraudulent and illegal “Safe Third Country” agreements with the super dangerous Northern Triangle states, none of which has any semblance of a credible asylum adjudication system.

I guess the further way we can kill ’em, the more complacent the Article IIIs are going to be. “No blood on their spiffy black robes!” And, after all, it’s not them or their families being abused. and killed by the regime, so “What, me worry?”

Also, something to keep in mind the next time “Big Mac With Lies” appears on the “speaking circuit” to tout his many “accomplishments” at DHS.

I’m, glad Wendy reports on these continuing “crimes against humanity.” But, it must be tough being on the “Watchdog & Accountability Team” in a system where complicit and complacent Federal Judges are unwilling to hold the regime accountable for their outrageously illegal and unconstitutional (not to mention unconscionable) behavior.

PWS

12-13-19

HAMED ALEAZIZ @ BUZZFEED: REGIME KID KILLERS ENABLED BY COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS THAT IGNORE THE CONSTITUTION & ACT AS IF THEY ARE IMMUNE FROM THE HUMAN MISERY THEY COUNTENANCE!

A Child’s Forehead Partially Removed, Four Deaths, The Wrong Medicine — A Secret Report Exposes Health Care For Jailed Immigrants

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails around the US received medical care so bad it resulted in two preventable surgeries, including an 8-year-old boy who had to have part of his forehead removed, and contributed to four deaths, according to an internal complaint from an agency whistleblower.

The allegations appear in an explosive Department of Homeland Security memo, obtained by BuzzFeed News, containing reports of detainees being given incorrect medication, suffering from delays in treating withdrawal symptoms, and one who was allowed to become so mentally unstable he lacerated his own penis and required reparative surgery.

To Read the Full Whistleblower Report, click here.

The whistleblower reported that three people had died in ICE lockup after receiving inadequate medical treatment or oversight, and said official reports on a fourth person’s death were “very misleading.” One man died from meningitis following “grossly negligent” care. Another killed himself after saying he would do exactly that months earlier.

The allegations were laid out in a March 20 memorandum signed by Cameron Quinn, DHS’s officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and sent to top ICE leadership. The memo describes the whistleblower as someone within the ICE Health Service Corps, or IHSC, which provides medical care and oversight for detainees in the agency’s custody. BuzzFeed News does not know the person’s identity.

The whistleblower’s allegations were first received by the Homeland Security’s inspector general in April 2018. In July of that year, the inspector general sent the allegations to Quinn’s office, which will investigate the medical care and oversight IHSC provides at a time when President Donald Trump demonizes immigrants, detains them in record numbers, and enacts restrictive policies to keep them out of the US.

The allegations in the DHS memo, if corroborated, are a cry from someone working for ICE echoing what advocates, lawsuits, and other media reports have been saying for years: The medical care ICE provides and oversees for immigrants in private and local jails could be very bad.

This internal memo is one of a trove of remarkable secret documents — including emails, briefing materials, and draft reports — BuzzFeed News has obtained throughout 2019 uncovering how the Trump administration’s immigration policies were formed and executed, and how those policies confused or harmed people who sought to immigrate to the US. These records have revealed how immigrants locked up at the US border had no access to showers and how children were held in closed and crowded cells; that US border officials apparently pressured the asylum office to deny immigrants entry into the US; that a Texas detention center waited more than seven hours to transfer an ailing 37-year-old Mexican man to a hospital, where he died from bleeding in his brain; and that in the final days before launching a controversial plan to deport Central American asylum-seekers to Guatemala, US officials scrambled to answer basic questions such as how people would get shelter, food, and social services.

BuzzFeed News has retyped the memo based on the whistleblower’s allegations, providing its full text, because metadata or other information in the original could compromise a source’s identity. BuzzFeed News redacted the names of most immigrants and ICE middle managers and their contact information.

[Make more work like this possible: Become a BuzzFeed News member today.]

The memo describes what happened to 17 different immigrants who were held at nine facilities across six states, from Georgia to Washington. The allegations include:

That immigrants received incorrect medications. One man was given an antidepressant instead of an antipsychotic drug, likely worsening his condition. Another was given aspirin despite having thin blood — he nearly died.

That four immigrants endured severe withdrawal symptoms while in ICE custody. One man addicted to opioids was the subject of a “medication error”; two men with a benzodiazepine addiction saw delays in treatment; and one man “went into severe alcohol withdrawal and delirium and was admitted to the hospital in the intensive care unit.”

That IHSC leadership was unresponsive or even dishonest when confronted. They “failed to take appropriate action” when told of policy violations in 10 of the cases; “did not respond” to concerns about one case in which a detainee with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma died under “deplorable” conditions; and were “erroneous” and told others to “hold off” when looking into several cases.

Overall, the memo says, the whistleblower alleged that IHSC “has systematically provided inadequate medical and mental health care and oversight to immigration detainees across the U.S.” The memo also says the inspector general will investigate the whistleblower’s allegation that they were retaliated against for raising the issues.

The memo was distributed within the agency — but a former senior ICE official who was aware of the allegations and the response told BuzzFeed News that ICE leadership appeared to not take a close look at the allegations.

“This is significant and very damning,” the former official, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said. “It blows up a lot of the ICE responses to allegations of poor medical care and about how it provides ‘the highest care of detainees.’ This makes that seem pretty false, which it is.”

An ICE spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in a statement it “is committed to ensuring that those in our custody reside in secure, humane environments and under appropriate conditions of confinement. The agency takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care, including those who come into ICE custody with prior medical conditions or who have never before received appropriate medical care. It also uses a multi-layered inspections program to ensure its facilities meet a certain threshold of care as outlined in our contracts with facilities, as well as the National Detention Standards and the Performance Based National Detention Standards.”

The agency added that it maintains a detainee helpline and created an independent oversight body “to conduct independent oversight of detention conditions for ICE detainees through facility reviews and targeted site visits.” The agency also said senior officials have a council that examines serious issues, especially “critical incidents,” to make sure leadership knows about incidents and “and that all required investigation and coordination is undertaken in a timely fashion.”

[Read ICE’s full statement here.]

ICE referred BuzzFeed News to DHS for questions about investigations into the memo’s allegations. DHS didn’t return a request for comment by deadline.

A detainee receives prescribed medications from an employee at the regional detention center for immigrants in Tacoma, recently renamed the Northwest ICE Processing Center, Sept. 10.

ICE has expanded the number of people it detains to record levels under Trump. Thousands of immigrants in its custody had passed their initial asylum screenings, a practice that in the past generally led to release from custody.

The peak came this summer when around 55,000 immigrants were in custody in local jails and private prisons across the country. To pay for it all, DHS had to transfer money earmarked for disaster relief and other efforts. In recent weeks, it has dipped to around 44,000 people in custody, still above the numbers during the Obama administration.

In the 2019 fiscal year, eight people died in ICE custody. The highest number of deaths in recent years came in the 2017 fiscal year, which included the end of the Obama administration, when 12 people died in ICE custody.

ICE’s sprawling detention system relies on a variety of methods to provide medical care. In some facilities, the agency provides it directly; in others, it has a few ICE employees assist private or public contractors; and in many, it oversees care provided by a contractor.

On Dec. 5, 2017, an 8-year-old boy’s mother told officials at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley that her son’s earache had been worsening for two weeks, the memo says. Medical personnel diagnosed him with swimmer’s ear — an external ear infection — and gave him ear drops.

More than two weeks later, on Dec. 23, the boy had seizures and was taken to the hospital. Doctors there diagnosed him with Pott’s puffy tumor, a rare infection inside the skull that spread from the child’s ear to his facial bone and formed abscesses under the skull. To treat it, they surgically removed part of the boy’s frontal bone, which makes up the forehead.

The whistleblower said that ICE’s Medical Quality Management Unit analyzed the case, and found that the “inadequate medical care provided by [the detention center] was a contributory factor resulting in harm.”

The quality control unit’s report was forwarded to IHSC leadership who, the whistleblower said, “failed to take appropriate action.”

“Allegedly, delayed medical care and misdiagnosis led to an infection that spread from the child’s ear to his facial bone, requiring a partial bone resection. According to the information provided, on December 5, 2017, the child’s mother first reported that her child had a progressively worsening earache for the past two weeks. The child was subsequently treated using nursing guidelines for Allergies/Fever/Pain, diagnosed with Swimmer’s Ear, and given ear drops. However, on December 23, 2017, the child was noted to have seizure activity and was transferred to the hospital where he was diagnosed with Pott’s Puffy Tumor with epidural and subdural abscess resulting in partial frontal bone resection. Further, the complainant alleged that MQMU performed an analysis of the case and found that the inadequate medical care provided by STFRC was a contributory factor resulting in harm. MQMU’s report was forwarded to IHSC leadership and MQMU requested findings and/or interventions from Clinical Services, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’

At the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, a man was “was reportedly bleeding through his skin and having vision changes,” the whistleblower said.

Instead of taking him to the hospital, a doctor continued his aspirin regimen — which thins the blood — for six days “despite [the detainee] having extremely thin blood,” the memo reads.

The result was “his coughing up large amounts of blood.” He was taken “in critical condition” to the hospital, where he was “not expected to survive.”

The quality control unit reviewed the case “and determined that that Asprin therapy may have caused harm that could have resulted in a fatality.”

“A delay in care,” the memo reads, “occurred after medical staff were notified of the detainee’s critical lab result that should have resulted in immediate medical intervention.”

The quality control unit notified IHSC of “policy and procedure violations,” the memo reads, but “leadership failed to take appropriate action.”

“Allegedly, a delay in care occurred after medical staff were notified of the detainee’s critical lab result that should have resulted in immediate medical intervention.[Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was reportedly bleeding through his skin and having vision changes. Despite having extremely thin blood, the physician allegedly kept him on aspirin regimen for six days, resulting in his coughing up large amounts of blood. [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was taken to the hospital in critical condition and not expected to survive. MQMU performed an analysis of the case and determined that that Asprin therapy may have caused harm that could have resulted in a fatality. The findings were forwarded to IHSC leadership for consideration of a root cause analysis, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’

And at the Eloy Federal Contract Facility in Arizona, the quality control unit notified the detention center’s psychiatrist several times about an immigrant’s “worsening psychosis-related symptoms, but the psychiatrist failed to treat him,” the memo reads.

The man “became so unstable that he lacerated his penis, requiring hospitalization and surgery.”

“According to the complaint, IHSC Medical Quality Management Unit (“MQMU’) notified the facility psychiatrist several times about[Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] worsening psychosis-related symptoms, but the psychiatrist failed to treat him. [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] allegedly became so unstable that he lacerated his penis, requiring hospitalization and surgery.’

A detainee rests at the infirmary of Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas.

The whistleblower referred to the case of Ronald Cruz, whose real name is Ronal Romero.

Romero came to the US in 2002 and lived for more than a decade in Missouri, where he found a community of friends and worked long hours at local restaurants in management positions, his family told BuzzFeed News.

In January 2016, he was convicted of driving under the influence and sentenced to two days in jail. Romero had a previous deportation order, and was picked up by ICE officials and sent back to Honduras.

Ronal Romero

Romero returned to the US because of the lack of opportunity and dangerous conditions in his home country, his family said. Romero was arrested by Customs and Border Protection officials on May 9, 2018, and was transferred to ICE’s Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, on May 14.

By the next day, he began feeling sick and was in serious pain, according to a death review conducted by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility and obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.

He told the medical staff at the ICE facility that he had been receiving ear drops and antibiotics for an ear infection while he was in CBP custody. He was treated and given medication. But later that day he became confused, not knowing where he was, and had trouble waking up. He died the next day in a hospital.

His family did not hear from him while he was in ICE custody, they said, and his death came as a shock: “I cried deeply — I was like a father and an oldest brother to him,” said one of his brothers, who requested anonymity to speak freely. Their father, the brothers explained, had been murdered years ago in Honduras.

An autopsy performed by a private entity found that Cruz died of “sepsis complication with meningitis.” An internal death review conducted by ICE found the facility was compliant with its medical standards.

But the whistleblower called the medical care rendered to Cruz “grossly negligent” and challenged ICE’s review, alleging “that the mortality review committee was erroneous in concluding that the care rendered to Mr. Cruz was appropriate.”

Cruz’s two older brothers have tried to convince people that the treatment their brother received was substandard.

“I’m grateful to the whistleblower for the strength to share this information in this way — it’s very sad what happened with my brother,” one of Cruz’s siblings told BuzzFeed News. “We believe he should be here with us. He was our little brother — he was everything to us. He was treated like an animal.”

Andrew Free, an immigration attorney in Georgia who represents Cruz’s family, said the existence of the memo was illuminating: “To hear an insider who has knowledge of government records saying this was grossly negligent is at once tragic, and oddly validating.”

“You should know,” his older brother said, “he was a hard worker who treated others well. He wasn’t a bad person. He was a good brother and a good friend.”

“According to the complainant, the medical care rendered to Mr. Cruz was ‘grossly negligent.’ Mr. Cruz’s preliminary cause of death on May 16, 2018 was ruled as meningitis. The complainant alleged that the mortality review committee was erroneous in concluding that the care rendered to Mr. Cruz was appropriate.’

The whistleblower alleged other widespread issues, such as detainees with psychological problems who were allegedly left without observation or provided incorrect medication.

Officials were notified about Efrain De La Rosa’s deteriorating mental health at Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, Georgia. De La Rosa said on April 26, 2018, that he’d be dead in three days — he killed himself about 11 weeks later.

“Mr. De La Rosa’s preliminary cause of death was ruled a suicide. According to the complainant, IHSC leadership was notified of Mr. De La Rosa’s deteriorating mental health condition via SEN report on several occasions between April 25, 2018 and May 6, 2018. On April 26, 2018, a SEN report indicated that while on suicide watch, Mr. De La Rosa’s had stated to staff that he would be dead in three days. The complainant noted that several months earlier, IHSC leadership directed MQMU to cease reviewing SEN and segregation reports, despite concerns raised to IHSC leadership that this restriction could negatively impact detainee safety.’

De La Rosa has been the subject of investigations by the Intercept, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Young Turks. The Young Turks previously obtained an internal email sent to ICE’s current acting director, Matthew Albence, that relayed issues with ICE’s medical care.

These outlets reported that De La Rosa was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and was being held in solitary confinement on suicide watch. He seemed obsessed with death. When he was transferred from a mental health facility to Stewart, the staff there didn’t register his issues. ICE said it is “committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review of this incident.”

One man at Eloy Federal Contract Facility in Arizona was supposed to receive antipsychotic medication — but allegedly got antidepressants instead, the memo said, “which likely worsened his psychosis.” Senior leadership allegedly told colleagues “to ‘hold off’ on notifying IHSC Clinical Services unless and until the detainee became psychotic and suicidal again.”

“Allegedly, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was not treated appropriately for serious mental illness with psychotic-like symptoms. According to the complainant, MQMU warned IHSC senior leadership on two occasions about [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] increased risk of adverse outcomes due to his auditory hallucinations and suicidal ideations. This allegedly resulted in [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] not receiving anti-psychotic medication, despite the IHSC chief psychiatrist’s agreement with the MQMU’s findings and recommendation that [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] receive anti-psychotic medication. Instead, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] received an anti-depressant which likely worsened his psychosis. The complainant further claimed that following MQMU’s second notification of inadequate mental health care and treatment, IHSC senior leadership allegedly advised MQMU to ‘hold off’ on notifying IHSC Clinical Services unless and until the detainee became psychotic and suicidal again.’

Four cases alleged forcible medication at two facilities: the El Paso Service Processing Center in Texas and the Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility in Louisiana. In these cases, the memo was concerned with “policy and procedure violations” around the injections. And each time, the memo said, “IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.”

Both cases in Louisiana involved forced injections of Ativan, a medication that aims to treat patients with mental illness and agitation. There, a woman was sent to the hospital for erratic behavior and convulsions. When she returned, she was found eating toilet paper and Styrofoam. She was allegedly “given forced intramuscular injection of Ativan.”

“[Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was sent to the hospital Emergency Room due to erratic behavior and convulsions. When she returned to the facility, she was observed eating toilet paper and styrofoam in the Medical Housing Unit (MHU). According to the complainant, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was placed at higher than normal risk for mental status deterioration and given forced intramuscular injection of Ativan. Further, the complainant alleged that MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’ “Allegedly, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was forcibly medicated with multiple Ativan injections for repeated behavioral issues. Further, MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership dialed to take appropriate action.’ “According to the information provided, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was observed with a sweatshirt around his neck and four correctional officers held him down while medical staff administered ahaloperidol intramuscularly by force. According to the complainant, MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet, IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’ “Allegedly, [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] was forcibly medicated for reported behavioral issues. MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’

In at least four cases, detainees were allegedly not appropriately treated for their alcohol or opioid withdrawal.

“Allegedly, facility medical staff did not follow policies and procedures concerning withdrawal protocols for [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] alcohol withdrawal. [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] a stated during his intake screening that he consumed one bottle of vodka and two bottles of beer daily. [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] subsequently went into severe alcohol withdrawal and delirium and was admitted to the hospital in the intensive care unit (ICU). Further, according to the complainant, MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’ “Allegedly, facility medical staff did not follow policies and procedures concerning withdrawal protocols for [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] opioid withdrawal. According to the complainant, the detainee was not treated until MQMU staff called the facility following a review of a significant event notification (SEN). The detainee was subsequently found to be in severe benzodiazepine withdrawal and was admitted to the hospital. Further, the complainant alleges that MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’ “Allegedly, facility medical staff did not follow policies and procedures concerning withdrawal protocols for [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] benzodiazepines withdrawal. According to the complainant, medical staff did not address his withdrawal at intake, despite his reporting high levels of daily consumption of benzodiazepines. [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] subsequently went into drug withdrawal seizures and was admitted to the hospital. Further, the complainant alleges that MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’ “Allegedly, facility medical staff did not follow policies and procedures concerning withdrawal protocols for [Name withheld by BuzzFeed News] opioid withdrawal, and a medication error occurred during the course of his treatment. Further, according to the complainant, MQMU performed an analysis of the case and the findings included policy and procedure violations, which were forwarded to the IHSC leadership for review and action, yet IHSC leadership failed to take appropriate action.’

And Roger Rayson died in ICE custody at the LaSalle Detention Facility of bleeding in the brain. The whistleblower described the care provided to him as “deplorable.”

“According to the complainant, Mr. Rayson healthcare was “deplorable.’Mr. Rayson’s preliminary cause of death was ruled as subdural hemorrhages resulting in a traumatic brain injury. The complainant claimed that multiple requests for the Uniform Corrective Action Plan (UCAP) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) were made to IHSC leadership, but IHSC did not respond.’

Rayson, a 47-year-old Jamaican immigrant, died approximately two months after being taken into ICE custody and a month “after being transferred to a hospital for nausea, vomiting, and pain,” according to a report by four advocacy groups. At the hospital, the report said he was diagnosed with “a fast-growing but treatable form of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and died nine days later.”

Medical experts interviewed by BuzzFeed News said the series of allegations required additional scrutiny, including from Congress.

“The allegations, if they are true, are serious and deserve really careful scrutiny about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and it is very possible they represent a more fundamental problem with the ICE health care system,” said Marc Stern, a public health expert and faculty member at the University of Washington.

Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer for the New York City jail system who has closely studied care in correctional facilities, told BuzzFeed News he was concerned that “IHSC is not acting in a way to not repeat the same type of preventable death over and over in different places around the country.”

Venters said that, in his experience, when health professionals such as the whistleblower take their complaints outside of their own system, “they do so because they don’t see a path to improving the system from the inside — they don’t see hope for addressing what are detention-related deaths that are preventable that flow from lack of access to quality health services.”

A box for grievances is seen in the cafeteria at the ICE South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, Aug. 23.

ICE has been criticized for its detainee medical care for years. In 2019 alone, the family of an Iranian man who the ACLU claims failed to receive proper treatment for methadone withdrawal and later died in ICE custody in Colorado sued the private prison contractor he was held in, GEO Group. In August, immigrant advocates sued ICE on behalf of 15 individuals detained at 8 different facilities in 6 states over what they described as the federal government’s failure to provide adequate medical and mental health treatment. The groups allege that the detainees have been denied necessary surgeries or even provided medication, such as insulin, for serious medical issues.

ICE officials have long said that they are dedicated to providing timely and comprehensive medical care to immigrants in their custody, noting that they have access to a daily sick call and 24-hour emergency care. The agency has publicized that it spends more than $269 million each year on health care services.

The former senior ICE official told BuzzFeed News that some at the agency brush away allegations of substandard medical care. “‘The care is better than they got in their home countries’ — you hear that a lot,” the former official said.

The official said it was unlikely that the agency would dramatically alter or add resources to its medical care system.

“It’s not going to happen under this administration,” the former official said. “That would take away money from beds and they are high on beds. They are not going to want to use that money in a different way.” ●

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From the Supremes on down, Article III Courts have had more than ample opportunities to put an end to unconstitutional, arbitrary, punitive imprisonment through the disingenuous fiction of “civil” detention. The dead bodies are piling up at their ivory tower doors.

Perhaps if their kids and grandkids foreheads were being hacked off, we’d get the judicial courage and integrity needed to stop the unlawful killing of the most vulnerable among us.

Until we do, the slaughter of the innocents will continue!

The cruel irony: If convicted criminals were treated this way the Article IIIs would hold it unconstitutional in an eye blink.

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

PWS

12-13-19

NEW FROM CMS: Accessible Citizenship Is A Huge Win – Win For The U.S. & The Citizens — Trump Regime Works Overtime To Create A Lose – Lose!

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Robert Warren
Senior Visiting Fellow
Center For Migration Studies

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The Center for Migration Studies Releases New Report on the Benefits of Citizenship and the Barriers to Naturalization

The well-being and contributions of immigrants increase as they advance toward citizenship, but new impediments to permanent residence and naturalization deny access to citizenship.

New York, NY — The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) today released a report finding that the well-being of immigrants and their contributions to the United States increase as they advance to more permanent and secure immigration statuses, culminating in naturalization. The report finds that naturalized citizens match or exceed the native-born by key metrics, including: college degrees (35% vs. 29%); percent employed (96% vs. 95%); and average personal income ($45,600 vs. $40,600).

The report – authored by CMS Executive Director Donald Kerwin and CMS Senior Visiting Fellow Robert Warren – argues that the administration’s “America first” ideology obscures a far-reaching set of policies that significantly impede the ability of immigrants to “move forward” on the path to naturalization, to their own detriment and the detriment of their families and communities.

“The report finds that policy makers should encourage naturalization rather than making it unnecessarily difficult,” said Warren. “Another important finding is that the US legal immigration system currently produces the same percentage of high skilled workers as the native-born population.”

The report documents the Trump administration’s policies that seek to prevent undocumented persons from gaining status, divest documented persons of status, cut legal admissions and immigration by decree, create new barriers to permanent residence and naturalization, and make citizenship a less valuable and less secure status.

It finds that at least 5.2 million current US citizens – 4.5 million children and 730,000 adults – who are living with at least one undocumented parent, obtained US citizenship by birth. It concludes that current immigration enforcement priorities effectively deny the full rights and benefits of citizenship to the US citizen children of undocumented parents, and it warns that eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents would create a permanent underclass of US-born denizens.

“US citizenship represents the principle marker of full membership and equality under the law in our constitutional democracy,” said Kerwin. “Yet this administration has adopted policies to make naturalization far less accessible and to make citizenship a less secure and valuable status for some disfavored citizens.”

The report is now available at: https://cmsny.org/publications/citizenship-kerwin-warren/

MEDIA CONTACT

Emma Winters

(212) 337-3080 x. 7012

ewinters@cmsny.org

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

Making losers out of everyone is a specialty of the Trump Regime’s “myth-based” White Nationalist agenda. “Malicious incompetence” in action!

PWS

12-13-19

PROFILES IN JUDICIAL COWARDICE: AS FEDERAL COURTS FAIL, DUE PROCESS DIES, & THE REGIME SIMPLY THUMBS ITS NOSE AT THE LAW BY RETURNING ASYLUM SEEKING FAMILIES TO “DEATH ZONES!” — “Experts, advocates, the United Nations and Guatemalan officials say the country doesn’t have the capacity to handle any sizable influx, much less process potential protection claims. Guatemala’s own struggles with corruption, violence and poverty helped push more than 270,000 Guatemalans to the U.S. border in fiscal 2019.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-10/u-s-starts-pushing-asylum-seeking-families-back-to-guatemala-for-first-time

Molly O’Toole reports for the LA Times:

In a first, U.S. starts pushing Central American families seeking asylum to Guatemala

A woman leaves the market in Guatemala City with a bundle of bamboo culms. (Luis Soto / Associated Press)

By MOLLY O’TOOLE STAFF WRITER

DEC. 10, 2019 6:58 PM

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have started to send families seeking asylum to Guatemala, even if they are not from the Central American country and had sought protection in the United States, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

In July, the Trump administration announced a new rule to effectively end asylum at the southern U.S. border by requiring asylum seekers to claim protection elsewhere. Under that rule — which currently faces legal challenges — virtually any migrant who passes through another country before reaching the U.S. border and does not seek asylum there will be deemed ineligible for protection in the United States.

A few days later, the administration reached an agreement with Guatemala to take asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border who were not Guatemalan. Although Guatemala’s highest court initially said the country’s president couldn’t unilaterally enter into such an agreement, since late November, U.S. officials have forcibly returned individuals to Guatemala under the deal.

At first, U.S. officials said they would return only single adults. But starting Tuesday, they began applying the policy to non-Guatemalan parents and children, according to communications obtained by The Times and several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

One family of three from Honduras, as well as a separate Honduran parent and child, were served with notices on Tuesday that they’d soon be deported to Guatemala.

The Trump administration has reached similar agreements with Guatemala’s Northern Triangle neighbors, El Salvador and Honduras, in each case obligating those countries to take other Central Americans who reach the U.S. border. Those agreements, however, have yet to be implemented.

The administration describes the agreements as an “effort to share the distribution of hundreds of thousands of asylum claims.”

The deals — also referred to as “safe third country” agreements — “are formed between the United States and foreign countries where aliens removed to those countries would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” according to the federal notice.

Guatemala has virtually no asylum system of its own, but the Trump administration and Guatemalan government both said the returns would roll out slowly and selectively.

The expansion of the policy to families could mean many more asylum seekers being forcibly removed to Guatemala.

Experts, advocates, the United Nations and Guatemalan officials say the country doesn’t have the capacity to handle any sizable influx, much less process potential protection claims. Guatemala’s own struggles with corruption, violence and poverty helped push more than 270,000 Guatemalans to the U.S. border in fiscal 2019.

Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

POLITICSWORLD & NATION

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Molly O’Toole

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Molly O’Toole is an immigration and security reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy covering the 2016 election and Trump administration, and a politics reporter at the Atlantic’s Defense One. She has covered migration and security from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf, and South Asia. She is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU, but will always be a Californian.

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To be an Article III Federal Appellate Judge or Supreme Court Justice these days seems to be little more than a license to take a “what me worry approach” to Due Process, immigration, asylum, racism, and the human tragedy unfolding around us every day. As long as it isn’t their kids and families being harassed, abused, allowed to die in prison, or unlawfully sent to potential “death camps” in some of the most dangerous regions of the world, who cares?

Abuse of others, particularly the less fortunate and most vulnerable: “Out of sight, out of mind.” As long as the paychecks keep coming and the security is good in the ivory tower, the legal gobbledygook and spineless task evasion will keep flowing until our nation finally goes out of business under Trump’s anti-Constitutional authoritarian onslaught.

Will it affect those lifetime judicial pensions? Just don’t let the screams of the abused, tortured, and dying keep you up at night judges! But do authoritarian dictatorships really need “judges,” even subservient ones?

PWS

12-11-19

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

Jodi Goodwin, Esquire
Immigration Attorney
Harlingen, TX

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remain-in-mexico-policy-immigrant-kids_n_5deeb143e4b00563b8560c69

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

A few times a week, attorney Jodi Goodwin walks across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to a refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, to meet with asylum-seekers. Her clients are among the more than 2,500 immigrants crammed into tents while they wait for U.S. immigration hearings ― often stuck for months in dirty and dangerous conditions.

The forced return to Mexico of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. is one of President Donald Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, yet it hasn’t received nearly the attention that his family separation and prolonged detention practices have.

Since January, under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” initiative ― also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) ― the U.S. government has sent at least 54,000 immigrants to wait for their court dates in Mexican border towns. Instead of staying with relatives in the U.S., families are sleeping in tents for up to eight months, in unprotected areas where infections spread within crowded quarters and cartel kidnappings are commonplace. Family separation ended a year ago. But Trump’s mistreatment of asylum-seekers continues in a different form.

Some parents are so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending their children across the bridge alone, since unaccompanied kids who arrive at the border cannot be turned away under MPP. Since October, at least 135 children have crossed back into the U.S. by themselves after being sent to wait in Mexico with their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Mexico, many of these migrants don’t have access to lawyers and are forced to plead their cases in makeshift tent courts set up along the U.S. border where overwhelmed judges conduct hearings via video teleconference. The courts have limited public access ― lawyers and translators say that they have been barred from attending hearings. Migrants’ advocates argue that the tent courts violate due process, and immigrant rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the use of videoconferencing.

Goodwin, who has 42 clients, said there is a serious shortage of lawyers willing to represent immigrants staying in another country where crime is rife. She spoke with HuffPost about why the Remain in Mexico policy is even more traumatic than separating thousands of families and why it hasn’t sparked public outrage.

AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Jodi Goodwin (center) at the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

HuffPost: Immigrant parents forced to wait in Mexico are making the heart-wrenching choice to send their kids to the U.S. alone. What are the conditions like at the camp in Matamoros?

Jodi Goodwin: It smells like urine and feces. There’s not enough sanitation. There’s 10 port-a-potties for thousands of people. Up until recently, there was no potable water available at all. People were bathing in the Rio Grande river, getting sick and, in some cases, drowning. People were seriously dehydrated.

The camp sounds completely unfitting for any human being, let alone children.

It’s a horrific situation to put families in. It’s great to live in a tent for the weekend when you’re going to the lake. It’s not great to live in a tent for months at a time where you don’t have basic necessities.

Are kids getting sick?

The kids are sick every day. I’ve seen all kinds of respiratory illnesses and digestive illnesses. I’ve seen chronic illnesses like epilepsy. I saw a baby that appeared to have sepsis who was forced to wait on the bridge for more than three hours before being taken to a hospital.

And what about the kidnappings? Have you heard of families being taken by cartel members who then try and extort an immigrant’s U.S. relatives for money?

About half of the people I’ve spoken to in Mexico have been kidnapped. The cartel knows if they can grab an immigrant, they’re likely to be able to work out a ransom. If they don’t, then they just kill them.

Any specific examples?

I dealt with one case where a mom from El Salvador and her 4-year-old son were kidnapped within an hour of being sent back to Mexico under MPP. They were taken for eight days before her brother in the U.S. paid the kidnappers $7,000.

The lady was terrified. She was sleep-deprived, food-deprived and water-deprived. She said that the people who had kidnapped her were extremely violent and hit her kid. They were drinking alcohol and raping people at a stash house where several other people were being held.

LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS

Migrants, most of them asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico from the U.S. under the “Remain in Mexico” program, occupy a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, on Oc. 28, 2019.

The last time we spoke, you were on the frontlines of family separation, visiting detention centers where mothers were hysterically crying after being ripped apart from their children. How does the trauma of MPP compare, particularly for parents who are sending their kids across the border alone?

It’s way worse. I can’t with any confidence say that they will ever see their children again.

Why not?

I knew there were legal ways to get out of family separation. We were able to talk with our clients and didn’t have to go off to another country. And for those parents who got through their interviews or their court hearings, we were able to get them back with their kids.

With MPP, the assault is not only on human rights but also on due process within the court systems, which has completely hijacked the ability to be able to fix things. The parents can’t even get into the country to try to reunify with their kids.

Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. Do you think a similar number of families will be ripped apart because of Remain in Mexico?

It could be more. Over 55,000 people have been sent back to Mexico. I’ve talked to so many parents who have sent their kids across. It’s a heart-wrenching decision process that they go through. How do you give up your baby?

It reminds me of Jewish parents who were captives in Nazi Germany and had to convince their kids to get on a different train or go in a different line to save their own lives.

Have you witnessed these separations firsthand?

In November I saw a little boy and his 4-year-old sister sent across the bridge with an older child, who was about 14 years old. The teenager carried the baby boy, who still had a pacifier in his mouth, and the girl was holding onto the older kid’s belt loop.

I was standing on the bridge between Matamoros and the U.S. and I turned around to look down at the bank of the Rio Grande river. Every single parent who has sent their kid to cross tells me the same thing: As soon as they say goodbye and hug their kids, they run to the bank to watch them. [Her voice breaks] I knew there was somebody probably standing on that bank hoping those kids made it across.

Do you still think about those kids?

Oh yeah. The green binky that the little baby was sucking on is knitted in my mind.

VERONICA CARDENAS / REUTERS

The Mexican National Guard patrols an encampment where asylum-seekers live as their tents are relocated from the plaza to near the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros on Dec. 7, 2019.

You’ve been working hundreds of hours a month to try and help people stranded in Matamoros. This work must take a toll on you personally.

I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me.

I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.

Family separation resulted in massive outcry from the public, which eventually pressured the government to end the zero-tolerance policy. Why is MPP not getting the same attention?

There is no public outrage because it’s not happening on our soil. It’s happening literally 10 feet from the turnstile to come to the U.S. But because it’s out of sight and out of mind, there is no outrage. What ended family separation was public outrage. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It had everything to do with shame, shame, shame.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

I’m with you, Jodi! Thanks for your dedication to justice for the most vulnerable!

What’s wrong with this scenario: life-tenured Federal Judges who won’t stand up for the rule of law, Due Process, and Equal Protection in the face of an arrogantly and overtly lawless White Nationalist Regime; DOJ and other U.S. Government lawyers who defend immoral and disingenuous positions in Federal Court, often, as in the Census Case and the DACA Case using pretextual rationales and knowingly false information; dehumanization, with overwhelming racial and religious overtones, of those who deserve our protection and rely on our sense of fairness; undercutting, mistreating and humiliating the brave lawyers like Jodi who are standing up for justice in the face of tyranny; GOP legislators who are lawyers defending Trump’s mockery of the Constitution, human decency, and the rule of law and knowingly and defiantly spreading Putin’s false narratives.

Obviously, there has been a severe failure in our legal and ethical education programs and our criteria for Federal Judicial selections, particularly at the higher levels, and particularly with respect to the critical characteristic of courage. Too many “go alongs to get alongs!” I can only hope that our republic survives long enough to reform and correct these existential defects that now threaten to bring us all down.

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Where’s our humanity?

We should also remember that many asylum seekers from Africa, who face extreme danger in Mexico, are also being targeted (“shithole countries?”) and abused as part of the Regime’s judicially-enabled, racially driven, anti-asylum, anti-rule-of-law antics at the Southern Border. https://apple.news/AyYSWSXNfSdOm63skxWaUTQ

Also, morally corrupt Trump Regime officials continued to tout “Crimes Against Humanity” as an acceptable approach to border enforcement and “reducing apprehensions!” Will machine gun turrets be next on their list? Will Article III Judges give that their “A-OK?”

We’re actually paying Article III Federal Judges who are knowingly and intentionally furthering “Crimes Against Humanity.” Totally outrageous!

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-10-19

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: TRUMP REGIME OFFICIALS SCHEMED TO UNCONSTITUTIONALLY SEPARATE FAMILIES WITHOUT SYSTEM TO REUNITE THEM — “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-many-immigrant-families-separated_n_5ddebbbbe4b0913e6f782022

Angelina Chapin reports in HuffPost:

Last year, the Trump administration ripped apart thousands of immigrant families despite knowing it did not have a tracking system in place that would ensure they could be reunited, according to a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

As a result, the public will likely never know how many immigrant children have been separated from their parents.

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The Trump administration was prepared to separate more than 26,000 children from their families between May and September 2018 under a zero tolerance policy for unauthorized border crossing, according to the inspector general report released on Wednesday. But in spite of the plan for mass separations ― ultimately blocked in court in June 2018 ― the government didn’t have the technology to track family separations.

The estimate that roughly 3,000 children were taken from their parents between May and June 2018 is undoubtedly lower than the true number.

The Department of Homeland Security failed to accurately record the family relationships of roughly 1,400 children over a year and a half, from October 2017 to February 2019, according to the report.

Immigration officials knew about these technical issues long before the zero tolerance policy was implemented. But they failed to fix them before taking children from their families en masse, making an already traumatic situation for parents and kids all the more chaotic.

“It just confirms that the real policy and attitude of dehumanization of this population,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.”

DHS and HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I really think a part of this administration’s approach is that we don’t view this population as having human rights.

Michelle Brané, director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission

The Trump administration has admitted that it didn’t have a proper system to track separated families across both DHS and HHS. HHS is responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children, including those taken from their families at the border.

In April, after an internal watchdog report revealed the Trump administration had likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously known, HHS officials said it could take up to two years to identify them because of the disorganized data. In a court filing, a deputy director at HHS called the process of tracking down these children a “burden” and said the department didn’t have enough staff to take on the project.

During family separation, DHS’s IT system did not have the ability to properly label separated family members or track them after they were split up, according to the inspector general report. As a result, employees came up with various ad hoc methods of tracking families. But they were not standardized across the department and caused widespread confusion once the data reached ICE officers.

Agents were also not properly trained on how to use the existing technology, and mistakes were rampant. Shortly after the zero tolerance policy was implemented, eight children were separately entered into the system despite being from the same family, according to the report. There was also no plan to reunify families post-separation, despite the fact that parents were being deported without their children.

While the stated goal of the zero tolerance policy was to prevent immigrants from being apprehended and released into the U.S. while they awaited legal proceedings ― a process derisively known as “catch-and-release” ― the result was that children were traumatized and detained for record amounts of time.

Brané said the government has still failed to take accountability for its faulty tracking system and the lifelong trauma it has caused these families.

“There was an affirmative decision not to record,” she said. “They continue to drag their feet and act defensive as though this was some sort of natural disaster that happened to them that they didn’t respond to in the best way.”

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So, the victims of these human rights violations continue to suffer while the regime’s “perps” go free and even brag about their White Nationalist racist dehumanization actions. Some are still in Government positions, others are giving speeches, and the evil mastermind of “zero tolerance” Jeff Sessions is running for office. Incredibly, Sessions was actually in charge of insuring that our Government complied with the law and respected individual rights. Instead, he carried out a Jim Crow racist program of human rights abuses, demeaning the Department of Justice and the rule of law in the process. How does this make sense?

This happens when regime flunkies believe that they will never be held accountable for their actions and abuses. Obviously, that’s a view that starts with their Supreme Leader and his party of enabling sycophants.

PWS

11-30-19

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

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What total, unadulterated BS and gratuitous cruelty!

Join the New Due Process Army and fight to protect our democracy from the White Nationalist Regime and the complicit life-tenured judges who enable and encourage it!

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” & Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

12-21-19

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