"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ripped more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents’ arms with no plan or procedures for reuniting them, resulting in some 500 children remaining effectively orphaned even today, five months after the fact. Now it proposes a new policy for jailing migrant children indefinitely, one that ensures they “are treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”
That assurance, along with its rich irony, is offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has proposed the policy in a brazen attempt to escape the strictures of a two-decade-old court settlement forbidding the long-term incarceration of minors who cross the border seeking asylum in the United States.
Ms. Nielsen, who was instrumental in executing the zero-compassion policy that traumatized so many toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens this spring and summer, now would have Americans believe her department recognizes children as particularly vulnerable human beings, deserving of dignity and respect. How will that dignity and respect be meted out when those children are confined, along with their parents, in long-term detention facilities that the administration now proposes to build?
Ms. Nielsen, along with immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, are convinced that so-called catch-and-release policies are largely to blame for the flow of families across the southern border. Among the factors contributing to those policies is the 1997 court agreement known as Flores, which arose from abundant evidence that migrant children had been harmed by long-term detention, and forbade it.
The reality is that Flores has been in effect for more than 20 years, during which migrant flows have dipped and surged. When the Trump administration tried, just a few months ago, to amend the Flores agreement to permit long-term detention of families, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee rejected its argument that the agreement was to blame for a recent surge in border crossings. “Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge wrote.
The administration’s proposal sets up a new court fight, one that will test Homeland Security’s risible insistence that the new policy would “satisfy the basic purpose” of the Flores agreement while freeing the government to get tougher on migrants. The “basic purpose” of Flores was to protect children from harm; confining them defeats that mandate.
It is legitimate to take concrete steps to ensure that migrant families appear in immigration court when ordered to do so. Ankle bracelet monitors, bail and other means of achieving that have been effective, and their use can be expanded. What’s less effective, and at odds with American values, is the administration’s abiding faith in punitive measures where children are concerned. There’s no evidence that they work to cut illegal border-crossing; there’s plenty of evidence of their cruelty.
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
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Undocumented immigrants at a bus station in McAllen, Tex.CreditCreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
For all the human brain’s mysteries, its development is quite well understood. Early childhood and adolescence are crucial times of unparalleled neural growth. Just as trust and stability can enhance that growth, fear and trauma can impede it. Institutionalization, in particular, can have profound and deleterious effects, triggering a range of developmental delays and psychiatric disorders from which recovery can be difficult, if not impossible.
In light of that knowledge, the Trump administration’s latest move against immigrant children is especially troubling. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations that would allow the government to detain migrant children indefinitely. Officials are now prohibited from detaining such minors for more than 20 days by an agreement known as the Flores settlement, which has been in place since 1997. The new rules would end that settlement and would likely open the door to an expansion of detention centers across the country.
D.H.S. says that by eliminating Flores, officials will deter illegal immigration, reasoning that undocumented adults will be less likely to enter the country to begin with if they know they can’t avoid long-term detention simply by having a child in tow. Immigration activists say the proposed rule’s true aims are both simpler and more diabolical than that: “They want to strip away every last protection for detained immigrant children,” says Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Even with Flores in place, those protections have proved thin. Youth migrant shelters — there are roughly 100 such facilities housing more than 10,000 minors across the country — have been cited for a long list of abuses, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, blatant medical neglect, the forcible injection of antipsychotic medications, the unlawful restraint of children in distress and harsh rules that prohibit even siblings from hugging one another. The shelters in question, several of which are facing lawsuits, are part of a network that has received billions of federal dollars in the past four years alone. That money has continued to pour in even as abuse allegations have multiplied.
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For more on detained migrant children
Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers
Opinion | The Editorial Board
The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children
The administration bears unique responsibility for these violations, in no small part because its disastrous and short-lived separation policy has wreaked havoc on a system that was already rife with problems. Shame alone should have federal officials working hard to undo the damage of that policy and to prevent further harm to the children under their charge, never mind that it’s the right thing to do under any number of international agreements and norms.
But their latest plan is more likely to exacerbate existing problems than to resolve them. The proposed regulations would eliminate the standing requirement that detention centers submit to state inspections and would narrow the scope of relatives to whom children can be released to only parents and legal guardians — no aunts, uncles or other extended family members. It would also trigger a proliferation of new facilities: The administration projects that Immigration and Customs Enforcement-run family detention would increase from 3,000 beds to 12,000. The number of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors may also grow.
The proposals will be open to public comment for the next 60 days before they can be finalized. Readers who wish to register their concern can do so on the Federal Register’s website.
After that period, the issue is almost certainly headed to court. Observers say the same judge who has ruled against past attempts to undermine Flores is likely to thwart this attempt as well.
Which paints a stark reality for what’s motivating this move and what it ultimately means: The administration surely knows what a long shot this proposal is, but it will undoubtedly excite President Trump’s political base as the midterm elections approach. So while the administration plays politics, the well-being of thousands of children who came to America seeking protection and safety will be put at risk — today and, developmentally, for the rest of their lives.
The Trump administration wants no limits on how long it can detain migrant kids and their parents.
Of all the appalling things the Trump administration has done, the cruelest has to be arresting and detaining asylum seekers, and separating them from their children. Seeking to deter desperate families from entering the United States by detaining parents for weeks or months apart from their children is so hard-hearted it shocks the conscience. The cruelty has been compounded by ineptitude, as hundreds of migrant children have been stranded in the United States without their parents, who have been deported.
Thankfully, the administration’s callousness has been held in check by a court order left over from President Clinton’s second term. The 1997 settlement agreement in Flores vs. Reno requires, among other things, that children facing deportation be held in detention for no more than 20 days, and in the least restrictive environment possible. Courts later extended the agreement to include families with minors in detention centers. (The government has been sued at least five times for allegedly violating the order.)
Now the Trump administration wants to scrap the agreement entirely by instituting even more draconian regulations that would allow it to detain families with minors as long as it may take to resolve their deportation cases. That’s beyond the pale.
Migrant children seeking permission to remain in the U.S. should not be detained regardless of whether they have a parent to accompany them in confinement. It’s especially troubling that one of the administration’s stated reasons for doing so is to send a threatening message to other families who might seek asylum in the U.S. from dangerous circumstances in their home countries.
Of course, the government has the right and duty to set immigration laws and enforce them. And we have a system for that, broken as it might be. Current U.S. law allows asylum to be granted to people facing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” If immigration courts rule that applicants don’t meet those requirements, or reject appeals by people seeking permission to stay on humanitarian grounds, the government is entirely within its rights to send them to their home countries. But it should not (and may not, under international agreements) incarcerate them — especially when they are children — unless there is good cause to think the migrants are a flight risk or pose a threat to public safety.
Remember, most of these families arrive seeking official permission to stay, so they have a powerful incentive not to skip their court hearings or break the law: doing so only leads to deportation orders. Advocates argue that most of the aslyum seekers who do miss court dates never received an appearance notice, often because the process takes so long that their addresses change and official records don’t catch up. As for public safety, a raft of studies has found that immigrants, regardless of their status, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.
If no-shows truly are the administration’s concern, it inherited a new Family Case Management Program from the Obama administration that matched eligible asylum-seeking families with housing, healthcare, schooling for the children and legal advice to help navigate the immigration court system. Families in that program had a 99% show-rate for court hearings. But Trump killed it last year.
Under the Flores agreement, the government can hold minors only in state-licensed facilities. But states tend not to license facilities for families, which, the government argues, means that it must release the families while the deportation cases continue.
The new regulations would let the federal government do the licensing of facilities, paving the way for a massive expansion of the detention system. The government currently uses three family detention centers with a total of 3,500 beds. They are secured, dormitory-style facilities with shared bathrooms, common areas, play space and rooms for classes. Trump wants to add 15,000 more beds, but that may just be the start; border agents caught 77,674 people migrating as families in 2016 alone.
It is fundamentally inhumane to incarcerate children — with or without their parents — while immigration courts try to figure out what to do with them. Psychiatrists warn of the damage even from short-term detentions, and some of those who have been held for months have shown signs of severe emotional distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. So in its obsessive quest to stop migrants from seeking asylum, the Trump administration is willing to, in essence, commit child abuse. That’s a stain not just on the presidency, but on the nation.
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The White Nationalist Scofflaws are at it again! Even if were effective as a deterrent (which all reliable data and experience show it isn’t), detention for deterrence would still be illegal.
Join the New Due Process Army and fight to uphold our Constitution and true American values against the White Nationalism, racism, cruelty, xenophobia, and lawlessness of Trump, Sessions, and their cronies! Put an end to Sessions’s “New American Gulag” (“NAG”)!
In July, I left my wife and two little girls and traveled from Denver to Dilley, Texas, to join a group of volunteers helping migrant women in detention file claims for asylum. I am not a lawyer, but I speak Spanish and have a background in social work. Our task was to help the women prepare for interviews with asylum officers or to prepare requests for new interviews.
The women I worked with at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley had been separated from their children for up to two and a half months because of a policy instituted by the Trump administration in April 2018, under which families were targeted for detention and separation in an attempt to dissuade others from embarking on similar journeys. Although the separations have stopped because of the resulting public outcry, hundreds of families have not been reunited (including more than 20 children under 5), families continue to be detained at higher rates than adults crossing the border alone, and the trauma inflicted on the women and children by our government will have lifelong consequences.
To be clear, this is a policy of deliberately tormenting women and children so that other women and children won’t try to escape life-threatening conditions by coming to the United States for asylum. I joined this effort because I felt compelled to do something to respond to the humanitarian crisis created by unjust policies that serve no purpose other than to punish people for being poor and female ― for having the audacity to be born in a “shithole country” and not stay there.
I traveled with a group of amazing women gathered by Carolina, a powerhouse immigration lawyer and artist from Brooklyn. My fellow volunteers were mostly Latinas or women whose histories connected them deeply to this work. Through this experience, we became a tight-knit community, gathering each night to process our experiences and try to steel ourselves for the next day. Working 12-hour shifts alongside us were two nuns in their late 70s, and it was one of them who best summed up the experience as we entered the facility one morning. “What is happening here,” she said, “makes me question the existence of God.”
It was a nun who best summed up the experience as we entered the facility one morning. ‘What is happening here,’ she said, ‘makes me question the existence of God.’
I am still in awe of the resilience I witnessed. Many of the women I met had gone for more than two weeks without even knowing where their children were. Most had been raped, tormented, threatened or beaten (and in many cases, all of the above) in their countries (predominantly Honduras and Guatemala). They came here seeking refuge from unspeakable horrors, following the internationally recognized process for seeking asylum. For their “crime,” they were incarcerated with hundreds of other women and children in la hielera (“the freezer,” cold concrete cells with no privacy where families sleep on the floor with nothing more than sheets of Mylar to cover them) or la perrera (“the dog kennel,” where people live in chain link cages). Their children were ripped from their arms, they were taunted, kicked, sprayed with water, fed frozen food and denied medical care. Yet the women I encountered were the lucky ones, because they had survived their first test of will in this country.
Woman after woman described the same scene: During their separation from their children ― before they learned of their whereabouts or even whether they were safe ― the women were herded into a room where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials handed them papers. “Sign this,” they were told, “and you can see your children again.” The papers were legal documents with which the women would be renouncing their claims to asylum and agreeing to self-deport. Those who signed were deported immediately, often without their children. Those who refused to sign were given sham credible-fear interviews (the first step in the asylum process), for which they were not prepared or even informed of asylum criteria.
The women were distraught, not knowing what ICE had done with their children or whether they would see them again. Their interviews were conducted over the phone, with an interpreter also on the line. The asylum officer would ask a series of canned questions, and often the women could reply only, “Where is my child? What have you done with my child?” or would begin to give an answer, only to be cut off midsentence. Not surprisingly, almost all of them got negative results — exactly the outcome this policy was designed to produce. Still, these women persisted.
After a court battle, my clients were reunited with their children and were fortunate enough to have access to free legal representation (many do not) through the CARA Pro Bono Project. The women arrived looking shell-shocked, tired, determined. Some of their children clung to them, afraid to be apart even for a few minutes, making it very hard for the women to recount their experiences, which often included sexual violence, death threats and domestic abuse. Other children stared into space or slept on plastic chairs, exhausted from sleepless nights and nightmares. Still others ran manically around the legal visitation trailer. But some of the children showed incredible resilience, smiling up at us, showing off the few English words they knew, drawing pictures of mountains, rivers, neat little houses. They requested stickers or coloring pages, made bracelets out of paper clips. We were not allowed to give them anything ― no treats or toys or books. We were not allowed to hug the children or their mothers ― not even when they sobbed uncontrollably after sharing the details of their ordeals.
In the midst of this sadness and chaos, the humanity of these women shined through. One of my clients and her son, who had traveled here from Guatemala, took great pleasure in teaching me words in their indigenous language, Mam. She taught me to say “courageous” ― hao-tuitz ― and whenever our work got difficult, we would return to this exhortation. These lessons were a welcome break from reviewing the outline of the experiences that drove them to leave, fleshing it out with details for their interview. They wearied of my pressing them to remember facts I knew the asylum officer would ask about. They wanted only to say that life is very hard for indigenous people, that their knowledge of basic Spanish was not enough to make them equal members of society. Mam is not taught in schools, and almost everyone in Guatemala looks down on those who speak it. They were so happy to have a licenciada (college graduate) interested in learning about their culture. We spent almost an hour finding their rural village on Google Earth, zooming in until we could see pictures of the landscape and the people. As we scrolled through the pictures on the screen, they called out the people by name. “That’s my aunt!” and “There’s my cousin!” There were tears of loss but mostly joy at recognizing and feeling recognized ― seen by the world and not just dismissed as faceless criminals.
A diabetic woman who had not had insulin in over a week dared to ask for medical attention, an infraction for which she was stripped naked and thrown in solitary confinement.
There were stories of the astonishing generosity of people who have so little themselves. One colleague had a client who had been kidnapped with her daughter and another man by a gang while traveling north from Guatemala. The kidnappers told the three to call their families, demanding $2,000 per person to secure their release. The woman was certain she and her daughter were going to die. Her family had sold, mortgaged and borrowed everything they could to pay for their trip. They had never met the man who was kidnapped with them. She watched as he called his family. “They’re asking for $6,000 for my release,” she said he told them. He saved three lives with that phone call. When they got to the U.S.-Mexico border, they went separate ways, and she never saw him again, never knew his last name.
Not everything I heard was so positive. Without exception, the women described cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of ICE officials at the Port Isabel immigrant processing center, near Brownsville, Texas. There was the diabetic woman who had not had insulin in over a week and dared to ask for medical attention, an infraction for which she was stripped naked and thrown in solitary confinement. Women reported being kicked, screamed at, shackled at wrists and ankles and told to run. They described the cold and the humiliation of not having any privacy to use the bathroom for the weeks that they were confined. The children were also kicked, yelled at and sprayed with water by guards, then awoken several times a night, ostensibly so they could be counted.
Worse than the physical conditions were the emotional cruelties inflicted on the families. The separation of women from small children was accomplished by force (pulling the children out of their mothers’ arms) or by deceit (telling the women that their children were being taken to bathe or get medical care). Women were told repeatedly that they would never see their children again, and children were told to stop crying because they would never see their mothers again. After the children were flown secretively across the country, many faced more cruelty. “You’re going to be adopted by an American family,” one girl was told. Some were forced to clean the shelters they were staying in and faced solitary confinement (el poso) if they did not comply. Children were given psychotropic drugs to ameliorate the anxiety and depression they exhibited, without parental permission. One child underwent surgery for appendicitis; he was alone, his cries for his mother were disregarded, and she was not notified until afterward.
The months of limbo in which these women wait to learn their fate borders on psychological torture. Decisions seem arbitrary, and great pains are taken to keep the women, their lawyers and especially the press in the dark about the government’s actions and rationales for decisions. One woman I worked with had been given an ankle bracelet after receiving a positive finding at her credible fear interview. Her asylum officer had determined that she had reason to fear returning to her country and granted her freedom while she pursues legal asylum status. Having cleared this hurdle, she boarded a bus with others to be released, but at the last moment, she was told her ankle bracelet needed a new battery. It was removed, and she was sent instead to a new detention center without explanation. A reporter trying to cover the stories of separated families told me about her attempt to follow a van full of prisoners on their way to be reunited with their children so that she could interview them. First ICE sent two empty decoy vans in different directions, and then it sent a van with the detainees speeding down a highway, running red lights to try to outrun her. Every effort is being made to ensure that the public does not know what is happening.
The accounts of the horrors that women were fleeing are almost too graphic to repeat. Of the many women I spoke to, only one did not report having been raped.
The accounts of the horrors that women were fleeing are almost too graphic to repeat. Of the many women I spoke to, only one did not report having been raped. The sexual assaults the women described often involved multiple perpetrators, the use of objects for penetration and repeated threats, taunting and harassment after the rape. A Mormon woman I worked with could barely choke out the word “rape,” much less tell anyone in her family or community what had happened. Her sweet, quiet daughter knew nothing of the attack or the men who stalked the woman on her way to the store, promising to return. None of the women I spoke with had any faith that the gang-ridden police would or could provide protection, and police reports were met with shaming and threats. Overwhelmingly, the women traveled with their daughters, despite the increased danger for girls on the trip, because the women know what awaits their little girls if they stay behind. Sometimes the rapes and abuse were at the hands of their husbands or partners and to return home would mean certain death. But under the new directives issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, domestic violence is no longer a qualifying criterion for asylum.
Two things I experienced during my time in Dilley made the purpose of the detention center crystal clear. The first was an interaction with an employee waiting in line with me Monday morning to pass through the metal detector. I asked if his job was stressful, and he assured me it was not. He traveled 80 minutes each day because this was the best-paid job he could get, and he felt good about what he was doing. “These people are lucky,” he told me, “They get free clothes, free food, free cable TV. I can’t even afford cable TV.” I did not have the presence of mind to ask him if he would give up his freedom for cable. But his answers made clear to me how the economy of this rural part of Texas depends on prisons. The second thing that clarified the role of the detention center was a sign in the legal visitation trailer, next to the desk where a guard sat monitoring the door. The sign read, “Our stock price today,” with a space for someone to post the number each day. The prison is run by a for-profit corporation, earning money for its stockholders from the incarceration of women and children. It is important to note the exorbitant cost of this cruel internment project. ICE puts incarceration costs at $133 per person per night, while the government could monitor them with an ankle bracelet for $10 to $15 a day. We have essentially made a massive transfer of money from taxpayers to holders of stock in private prisons, and the women and children I met are merely collateral damage.
I have been back home for almost a month now. I am finally able to sleep without seeing the faces of my clients in my dreams, reliving their stories in my nightmares. I have never held my family so tight as I did the afternoon I arrived home, standing on the sidewalk in tears with my 7-year-old in my arms. I am in constant contact with the women I volunteered with, sharing news stories about family detention along with highlights of our personal lives. But I am still waiting for the first phone call from a client. I gave each of the women I worked with my number and made them promise to call when they get released. I even told the Mormon woman that I would pray with her. No one has called.
I comb the details of the Dilley Dispatch email, which updates the community of lawyers and volunteers about the tireless work of the on-the-ground team at Dilley. This week the team did 379 intakes with new clients and six with reunified families. There were three deportations ― two that were illegal and one that was reversed by an ACLU lawsuit. Were the deported families ones I worked with? What has become of the Mam-speaking woman and her spunky son, the Mormon woman and her soft-spoken daughter, the budding community organizer who joked about visiting me? Are they safely with relatives in California, North Carolina and Ohio? In each case, I cannot bear to imagine the alternative, the violence and poverty that await them. I have to continue to hope that with the right advocates, some people can still find refuge here, can make a new life ― that our country might live up to its promises.
Catherine Powers is a middle school social studies teacher. She lives in Colorado with her wife and two daughters.
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Yes, every Administration has used and misused immigration detention to some extent. I’ll have to admit to spending some of my past career defending the Government’s right to detain migrants.
But, no past Administration has used civil immigration detention with such evil, racist intent to penalize brown-skinned refugees, primarily abused women and children from the Northern Triangle, so that that will not be able to assert their legal and Constitutional rights in America and will never darken our doors again with their pleas for life-saving refuge. And, as Catherine Powers points out, under Trump and Sessions the “credible fear” process has become a total sham.
Even in the “Age of Trump & Sessions,’ we still have (at least for now) a Constitution and a democratic process for removing these grotesquely unqualified shams of public officials from office. It starts with removing their GOP enablers in the House and Senate.
Get out the vote in November to oust the GOP and restore humane, Constitutional Government that respects individuals of all races and genders and honors our legal human rights obligations. If decent Americans don’t act now, 1939 might be here before we know it!
The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog” — but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) had no interest in talking about it.
“I’ve got more important things on my mind, so I really don’t have a comment on that,” said the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, chuckling at the question.
Has President Trump ever said anything on race that made Cornyn uncomfortable? “I think the most important thing is to pay attention to what the president does, which I think has been good for the country,” the senator demurred.
What about his constituents back home — are they concerned? “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that,” Cornyn said, politely ending the brief interview in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. “I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.”
And so it went last week among Republicans: As Trump immersed the nation in a new wave of fraught battles over race, most GOP lawmakers tried to ignore the topic altogether. The studied avoidance is a reflection of the enduring reluctance of Republicans to confront Trump’s often divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, in part because the president remains deeply popular within a party dominated by older white voters.
The Washington Post reached out to all 51 Republican senators and six House Republican leaders asking them to participate in a brief interview about Trump and race. Only three senators agreed to participate: Jeff Flake of Arizona, David Perdue of Georgia and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate.
Trump has a history of mocking his black critics’ intelligence
President Trump insulted NBA player LeBron James’s intelligence in a tweet Aug. 3. It’s not the first time Trump has taken this approach.(Elyse Samuels /The Washington Post)
Flake, a frequent Trump critic who is retiring, rattled off examples when asked if there were times he felt Trump had been racially insensitive.
“It started long before his campaign, the whole Barack Obama, the birtherism . . . that was abhorrent, I thought,” Flake said in a phone interview. “And then you know, the Mexican rapists . . . on his first official day as a campaign. And then you know, Judge Curiel, the statement that he couldn’t judge because of his heritage. Failure to, you know, condemn in Charlottesville. Just the willingness to go there, all the time. Muslim ban. This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. It’s just — it’s been one thing after another.”
Six other lawmakers granted impromptu interviews when approached in the Capitol, although most declined to be specific about whether they were uncomfortable with any of Trump’s statements on race. One exception was Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, another Trump critic who is leaving Congress in January.
“It’s a formula that I think they think works for them, as it relates to winning,” Corker said, referring to the use of divisive racial issues by Trump and his advisers. “I think that’s their kind of governing. I think that’s how they think they stay in power, is to divide.”
Several other lawmakers said they did not like some of Trump’s language, especially on race, but did not consider Trump to be racist.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Trump’s description of former black adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog” was “not appropriate, ever.” But he stopped short of pointing to a time when he felt the president had crossed a racial boundary.
“I just think that’s the way he reacts and the way he interacts with people who attack him,” Thune said. “I don’t condone it. But I think it’s probably part built into his — it’s just going to be in his DNA.”
The month of August — which included the first anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville — has seen Trump unleash a steady tide of racially charged invective, including questioning the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James, attacking Chinese college students and reviving his attacks on anthem protests by black NFL players. At one point last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she could not guarantee that no audio recording exists of Trump using the n-word, as Manigault Newman alleges in her book.
Republicans have struggled over issues of race since the Civil Rights era, with periodic efforts to appeal to blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Trump’s critics within the party fear that, in an increasingly diverse nation, the president is reopening wounds many Republicans had sought to heal.
Trump and his allies frequently counter by offering economic data that they say is favorable to minorities, seeking to separate Trump’s harsh rhetoric from his policy agenda.
But some longtime party stalwarts worry about the long-term consequences of the party’s near-silence on race.
Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant and vocal Trump critic, bemoaned “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”
“Trump’s shtick is that he’s the grievance candidate,” Murphy said. “He’s focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter. . . . He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That’s Trump’s DNA.”
. . . .
Perdue said in an interview that he believes Trump is results-focused and “trying to be all-inclusive,” and that Democrats are the ones using race as a political issue.
“Well, I hope they will,” Perdue said. “I have many friends in the African American community and they’re tired of being treated as pawns.”
But Republicans who believe that Trump has galloped past norms of civil society on race and other issues worry about the costs the party may ultimately pay, both politically and morally.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Not surprising to see modern-day Jim Crows like Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) out there carrying water for the Trump/Sessions brand of 21st Century racism. After all, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that America needs more legal immigration and that family-based immigration is good for America, Perdue is one of the chief sponsors of the CIS-inspired bogus merit-based immigration bill that actually reduces legal immigration in a losing attempt to bar immigrants of color and “Keep America White As Long As Possible.” Donald Trump trying to be “all-inclusive?” How’s that David, by dissing African-Americans, calling them “dogs,” dehumanizing immigrants, slurring Hispanics, taking protections away from transgender kids, taking away security clearances of critics, attacking the free press, attacking the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community, promoting a false narrative about voter fraud, or telling thousands of lies since assuming office? Which one of these is “all inclusive?” The only “inclusive” thing about Donald Trump is that the majority of Americans who aren’t in his overwhelmingly White Guy “core.” are all included in his insults, lies, and disrespect!
I also thought that the final comment about the late George Wallace was telling. Yup, Wallace accomplished some things in Alabama including getting more textbooks. (Remember that Adolf Hitler built great Autobahns too!) But, the screaming crowds of White Folks who supported Wallace on the national stage weren’t excited about textbooks or better roads — they loved the message of racism and White Supremacy. And, that’s exactly how history will remember Wallace and his supporters — not for the textbooks, but for the public defense and advocacy of racism (just like Hitler isn’t remembered for his Autobahns). Which is how Trump, his “base,” and his many enablers (whether enthusiastic, merely willing, or downright cowardly) will also be remembered!
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
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I encourage you to read Coates’s entire totally cogent expose of the Supreme ugliness of Trump, his “team,” and his core supporters. No, you can’t really separate Donald Trump’s policies from his racism.
That’s why America needs regime change at the ballot box. NOW!
Associate professor at Morgan State University and politics editor for the Root
August 15
Omarosa Manigault Newman — who once declared that “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump” — evolved from mentee to frenemy to antagonist before her nonstop media blitz promoting her new post-White House tell-all, during which she’s touted the existence of a recording of Trump using the n-word. It’s all sent the White House scrambling, with the president tweetingMonday that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday she “can’t guarantee” Americans will never hear audio of Trump using the slur.
It doesn’t matter.
Trump is a racist. That doesn’t hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It’s about the totality of his presidency, and after 18 months you can see his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not.
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Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump’s antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In the ’70s, his real estate company was the subject of a federal investigation that found his employees had secretly marked the paperwork of minority apartment rental applicants with codes such as “C” for “colored.” After black and Latino teenagers were charged with sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, he took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. He never backtracked or apologized when the teenagers’ convictions were overturned. He championed birtherism, and wouldn’t disavow the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya until the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president, he’s targeted African American athletes for criticism, whether it’s ranting, “Get that son of a bitch off the field,” in reference to professional football players silently protesting police brutality or tweeting that:
Calling African American Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) a “low IQ person” is now a routine bit at his political rallies. He was quoted referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole” countries. He announced his campaign in 2015 by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Later that year, he called for the United States to implement a “total and complete” Muslim ban.
After taking office, he hired xenophobes such as Stephen Miller — an architect of the ban, whose hostility toward immigrants is so stark, and hypocritical, that his uncle excoriated him this week in an essay for Politico Magazine, writing of Miller and Trump that “they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.”
I could go on. The point is that Trump’s view of nonwhites is out in the open. As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci notes, there’s every reason “to believe that an n-word tape wouldn’t torpedo Trump’s presidency”; there’s no indication his supporters “will turn against him because he used a racial slur.” Trump’s words and deeds over time have demonstrated his racism — it doesn’t hinge on being outed, Paula Deen-style, by a tape of him using the word. Racism hardly ever does.
I’m not saying it would be okay for Trump to use any variation of the n-word — in jest, in anger, singing along to the lyrics of a song, with or without the hard “R.” But the feverish speculation about whether he ever deployed the term wrongly implies that a verdict on his racist character turns on its use. What matters more about Trump are the positions he’s taken and the policy choices he’s made that harm communities of color. In his first year as president, Trump evolved from mere interpersonal racist to racist enabler when he proclaimed there were “very fine people, on both sides” when white supremacists and anti-racist protesters converged in Charlottesville last year. Jeff Sessions, a senator from Alabama who, three decades ago, was denieda federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee over concerns that he was a racist, was installed by Trump as attorney general.
Since assuming that role, Sessions has worked to undermine consent decrees meant to restrain racially abusive police departments and explicitly articulated the administration’s intent to use family separation to deter immigration. The Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos, is dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Trump hired Manigault Newman as a liaison to black constituent groups based on their reality TV relationship and, according to him, her willingness to say “GREAT things” about him, despite almost universal criticism of her appointment and subsequent work by African American Republicans and Democrats.
Being a racist — which entails belief in a fixed racial hierarchy and the power to act upon that belief in commerce, government or social spaces — is not now, and never has been, about one word or one slip of the tongue. It is about the ability of those in power to use public and private resources to enforce a racial hierarchy, whether that means having black people arrested for sitting in Starbucks, refusing to hire or promote qualified black job applicants or staffing a presidential administration with people who tolerate or encourage white nationalists. Trump’s statements and his approach to governance suggest he believes in a set racial hierarchy, and the possible existence of a hyped tape doesn’t change that. So far, and as far as I know, no one’s produced audio of white nationalist participants in last Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington using the n-word. Presumably, by the logic of some Trump defenders, that would mean there’s no proof they’re racist, either.
If American public discourse on race continues to revolve around a game of “gotcha,” with sentiments and smoking guns, divorced from an acknowledgment of how racists use their power, we won’t make any progress, during this administration or any other.
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Johnson states a simple truth that some don’t want to acknowledge. But, racist anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Mexican American, xenophobic “dog whistles” were at the heart of Trump’s campaign and remain at the heart of his policies, particularly on immigration, refugees, and law enforcement.
Does that mean that the majority of Americans who don’t endorse racism don’t need to deal with the fact that Trump is President and that Sessions and Miller are exercising outsized control over our justice system? Or that today’s Trumpist GOP isn’t your grandparents’ GOP (in my case, my parents’ GOP) and, although they might occasionally mutter a few insincere “tisk, tisk’s,” are firmly committed to enabling Trump and his racist policies including, of course, voter disenfranchisement. Of course not. Just think of how African-Americans, Hispanics, and liberals had to deal in practical terms with Southern political power in the age of Jim Crow (which is basically the “Age of Jeff Sessions”).
But, it is essential for us to know and acknowledge who and what we are dealing with and not to let political expediency totally obscure the harsh truth. Trump is a racist. And, that sad but true fact will continue to influence all of his policies for as long as he remains in office. Indeed, “Exhibit 1,” is the failure of the GOP to achieve “no-brainer” Dreamer protection over the last two years and the stubborn insistence of Sessions and others in the GOP to keep tying up our courts with bogus attempts to terminate already limited protections for those who aren’t going anywhere in the first place.
The Atlantic: The early trump era has witnessed wave after wave of seismic policy making related to immigration—the Muslim ban initially undertaken in his very first week in office, the rescission of DACA, the separation of families at the border. Amid the frantic attention these shifts have generated, it’s easy to lose track of the smaller changes that have been taking place. But with them, the administration has devised a scheme intended to unnerve undocumented immigrants by creating an overall tone of inhospitality and menace.
TRAC: The push to prioritize prosecuting illegal border crossers has begun to impact the capacity of federal prosecutors to enforce other federal laws. In March 2018, immigration prosecutions dominated so that in the five federal districts along the southwest border only one in seven prosecutions (14%) were for any non-immigration crimes.
HuffPo: The National Association of Immigration Judges alleges that Trump administration officials transferred the case of an undocumented immigrant away from a Philadelphia-based immigration judge because the judge didn’t give them the outcome they wanted: a swift order of deportation when the immigrant didn’t show up in court for a hastily scheduled hearing.
Vanity Fair: For the past year, Miller has been quietly gutting the U.S. refugee program, slashing the number of people allowed into the country to the lowest level in decades. “His name hasn’t been on anything,” says a former U.S. official who worked on refugee issues. “He is working behind the scenes, he has planted all of his people in all of these positions, he is on the phone with them all of the time, and he is creating a side operation that will circumvent the normal, transparent policy process.” And he is succeeding.
Daily Show: Despite the Trump administration’s campaign promise to focus on illegal immigration, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is crafting a plan to limit legal immigrants’ access to citizenship and green cards, especially for those who have used public assistance.
NPR: The wait time for migrants seeking asylum at legal ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border has recently increased from hours to weeks, causing some families to camp out for days. We go to the border to meet some of the people waiting there and explain the asylum process in the United States.
The Hill: The Becerras legally adopted Angela through Peruvian court, and sought to bring her back to the U.S. after the adoption was finalized in 2017…The tourist visa that Angela was eventually granted is set to expire at the end of this month, but her immigration case was denied without explanation, according to the couple.
TX Observer: On July 18, a cargo van transporting eight Central American mothers separated from their children under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy crashed into a pickup truck in San Marcos. An ICE contractor was taking the women from a detention center near Austin to the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall to be reunited with their kids. Even though police said the van was too damaged to continue driving and the women reported injuries, ICE repeatedly denied the crash ever took place.
NBC: The surge has been caused by a new ICE tactic of arresting — without warrants — people who are driving or walking down the street and using large-scale “sweeps” of likely immigrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in June by immigration rights advocates in Chicago.
NPR: In the last 18 years, more than 2,800 migrant bodies have been found along the Arizona border with Mexico. About 1,000 of the bodies are unidentified. We speak with a woman trying to identify them.
Brooklyn DA: The District Attorney identified the defendant as Vadim Alekseev, 42, of Coney Island, Brooklyn. He was arraigned today before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun on a 21-count indictment in which he is charged with first-degree scheme to defraud, first-degree immigrant assistance services fraud, fourth-degree grand larceny, tampering with physical evidence and practicing or appearing as attorney-at-law without being admitted and registered. He was ordered held on $15,000 bail and to return to court on October 3, 2018. The defendant faces up to four years in prison if convicted on the top count.
A federal judge ordered a woman and her daughter to be returned to the U.S. and threatened to hold AG Jeff Sessions in contempt after learning that they were in the process of being removed while a court hearing appealing their deportations was underway. (Grace, et al., v. Sessions, 8/9/18) AILA Doc. No. 18081004
Politico: A woman whose son was killed on Mexican soil by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona can sue for damages, a federal court ruled Tuesday. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz is not entitled to qualified immunity, saying that the Fourth Amendment — which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures — applies in this case.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement in response to the court order in the D.C. District Court, ordering the restoration of the DACA program, stating, “The Department of Justice will take every lawful measure to vindicate the Department of Homeland Security’s lawful rescission of DACA.” AILA Doc. No. 18080635
A District Court judge certified a class of current and former civil immigration detainees who performed work for The Geo Group, Inc. at its Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA and were paid a $1 daily rate. (Nwauzor et al. v. The GEO Group Inc., 8/6/18) AILA Doc. No. 18080770
Following summary judgment briefing by both parties, the court ruled in Plaintiffs’ favor on July 26, 2018. The court ordered USCIS to follow the law and timely adjudicate initial EAD asylum applications. (Gonzalez Rosario v. USCIS, 7/26/18) AILA Doc. No. 15052630
In a lawsuit filed on behalf of minor migrant children who were forcible separated from their parents and have been, or will be, reunified with them pursuant to Ms. L. v. ICE, the judge transferred three claims to be considered by the judge in the Ms. L. v. ICElawsuit. AILA Doc. No. 18080730
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must fully restore the DACA program but delayed the order until 8/23/18 to allow the government to respond and appeal. (NAACP v. Trump, 8/3/18) AILA Doc. No. 17091933
BIA reaffirmed its prior decision denying the respondent’s application for cancellation of removal and dismissed his appeal, finding that exhibiting or sponsoring an animal in an animal fighting venture is a crime involving moral turpitude. Matter of Ortega-Lopez, 27 I&N Dec. 382 (BIA 2018) AILA Doc. No. 18080637
Unpublished BIA decision reverses finding that respondent was present without being admitted or paroled in light of his credible testimony that he last entered the country with a border crossing card. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of I-M-G-, 7/28/17) AILA Doc. No. 18080731
BIA found that the IJ properly determined that the respondent is ineligible for cancellation of removal following his violation of a protection order, because he has been convicted of an offense under INA §237(a)(2)(E)(ii). Matter of Medina-Jimenez, 27 I&N Dec. 399 (BIA 2018) AILA Doc. No. 18080736
Unpublished BIA decision holds that larceny from a person under Okla. Stat. tit. 21 § 1701 is not an aggravated felony theft offense because it encompasses takings that were fraudulently obtained with the consent of the owner. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Lopez-Hernandez, 7/14/17) AILA Doc. No. 18080937
Unpublished BIA decision rescinds in absentia order against respondent who arrived at 10:45 am for a 9:00 am hearing after his vehicle experienced a mechanical failure, finding that he did not fail to appear for his hearing. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Rivas-Diaz, 7/18/17) AILA Doc. No. 18081044
Unpublished BIA decision holds that grand larceny from the person under Va. Code Ann. 18.2-95 is not a particularly serious crime on its face, making it unnecessary to examine the underlying circumstances of the offense. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of J-J-V-, 7/18/17) AILA Doc. No. 18081300
Unpublished BIA decision holds that respondent was not subject to the aggravated felony bar in INA 212(h) because his reentry following a trip abroad did not qualify as an “admission” as an LPR. Special thanks to IRAC. (Matter of Reza, 7/18/16) AILA Doc. No. 18081303
ICE provides background information into the document and benefit fraud task forces, including the 28 locations around the United States. HSI has partnered with federal, state, and local counterparts to create these task forces. AILA Doc. No. 18080802
A 6/22/18 letter from DOS to Senator Van Hollen on the impact of Presidential Proclamation 9645 (Travel Ban 3.0) on the processing of U.S. visas. Letter includes information about the number of applicants from impacted countries who have applied for visas and those who have been cleared for waivers. AILA Doc. No. 18080900
The GAO reviewed DHS’s efforts to deploy barriers along the southwest border, and issued a report finding that CBP is evaluating designs and locations for border barriers but is proceeding without key information, such as an analysis of the costs based on location or segment, which can vary widely. AILA Doc. No. 18080903
Check out Elizabeth’s first item, Franklin Foer’s outstanding article in The Atlantic on how Trump, Sessions, & Miller have turned ICE into a modern “Mini-Gestapo” deporting individuals who actually are contributing mightily to the United States and its economy while sowing terror in the ethnic communities. Sure sounds familiar to those of us who recently toured the Holocaust Museum.
That’s why 19 of the real “pros’ at ICE, the agents of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), petitioned recently to escape from the toxic unproductive atmosphere of ICE and distance themselves from the tarnished “ICE brand” which actually greatly diminishes real law enforcement efforts.
Foer makes a compelling case for abolishing ICE and reconstituting its real law enforcement functions into a new agency with more professional and unbiased leadership. Not going to happen now. But, eventually there will be “regime change” in America (or America as we know it will cease to exist). When that happens, a meltdown of the current ICE and recasting it should be a top priority for Congress and the Executive.
Until then, the “New Due Process Army”(of which Elizabeth Gibson is a charter member) will be fighting ICE’s overkill (and, I might add, gross waste of taxpayer funds on counterproductive “enforcement”) every step of the way!
AS ONE strolls the stately streets of Washington, D.C., taking in the breathtaking scale and august architecture of the federal government’s multifarious departments, agencies and commissions — more than 430 of them, by some estimates — one can only stand in awe of the sheer size, resources and power of the . . . American Civil Liberties Union. That, in a nutshell, was the stance the Justice Department seemed to take in court last week. It argued that the ACLU, not the U.S. government, is capable of cleaning up the ongoing mess stemming from the Trump administration’s brief but incalculably damaging campaign to separate hundreds of migrant children from their parents.
As the government said in court filings, the ACLU, which represents the parents, should use its “considerable resources” and network of advocacy groups, lawyers and volunteers to reunify hundreds of families that remain sundered despite U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw’s order that they be reunified. The judge was having none of it. “This responsibility is 100 percent on the government,” he said.
Edging away from his characteristic understatement, Mr. Sabraw, a Republican appointee, went further. “The reality is that for every parent that is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” he said.
The ACLU says it is ready to help reunite families, but it’s preposterous that the government would try to outsource the job and shed its own responsibility. When considering the tragedy visited upon hundreds of families by the heedless, ham-handed cruelty of the Trump administration’s family-separation foray, the statistics may mask the depth of suffering inflicted on individual children, including toddlers and tweens, by President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
They devised the separation policy, specifically intending to deter future migrants. In the face of public outrage, Mr. Trump reversed the “zero tolerance” policy six weeks after it was proclaimed. But the damage is lasting. Despite Mr. Sabraw’s order that more than 2,500 children be returned to their parents by late July, more than 400 of them, whose parents were deported, remain in government shelters. Federal officials, who had no plan for reuniting families, also have no plan for locating parents, most of them in Guatemala and Honduras , who have already been removed.
A measure of the administration’s callous recklessness is that officials often failed to collect contact information for deported mothers and fathers — cellphone numbers, addresses — that could facilitate reunions with their children. In some cases, government forms list deportees’ addresses in Central America as “calle sin nombre” — street without a name. Very useful.
Mr. Sabraw ordered the administration to appoint an individual to oversee what will be the painstaking process of tracking down deported parents. In the meantime, administration lawyers might take a refresher course on the meaning of accountability and personal responsibility. Of course, ultimate responsibility lies with administration leaders who cared so little for the human beings who are now paying such a high price.
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Simply breathtaking lack of accountability, personal responsibility, morality, and human decency by the government officials responsible for this abuse. And, some stunning ethical lapses by the DOJ attorneys who presented this insulting, demonstrably untrue, nonsense in Federal Court. But, the key is that only the victims of the abuse suffer. The perpetrators walk free to strike again, emboldened by having gotten away with a mere slap on the hand for abusing children and insulting a Federal Judge and the opposing party.
WHEN ACCOUNTS of abuse emerged in June from a detention center for migrant minors in Virginia — children as young as 14 stripped naked, shackled, strapped to chairs, their heads encased in bags, left for days or longer in solitary confinement, and in some cases beaten and bruised — it sounded like a scene from the Soviet gulag. This institution, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, near Staunton, couldn’t possibly be in America. And if it was, it had to be an extreme outlier — a place that, while overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, simply could not typify the federal government’s handling of children, undocumented or not, who make their way into this country.
But abuses alleged at that jail in Virginia turn out to be no worse than those inflicted, on even younger children, at another facility under ORR’s purview in Texas. Last Monday, a federal judge, incensed that underage migrants at the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center, south of Houston, had been routinely administered psychotropic drugs without parental consent, denied water as a means of punishment and forbidden from making private phone calls, ordered undocumented minors there transferred elsewhere.
Not the Soviet gulag. These things are taking place in America.
Not just coincidentally, it is President Trump’s America. True, documented abuses at both facilities pre-date Mr. Trump’s administration; at Shiloh, in particular, there have been harrowing reports of mistreatment for years. Yet the president, who has referred to illegal immigrants as “animals” and “rapists” who “infest” the United States, is a serial, casual dehumanizer of immigrants, particularly Hispanic ones. The signals he sends, amplified by Twitter, are heard everywhere. If unauthorized immigrants are vermin, as the president implies, then it’s legitimate to treat them as such — to tie them up, lock them away solo, dehydrate and drug them.
The most recent findings, concerning Shiloh, run by a private contractor and overseen by ORR, are shocking. Staff members there admitted they had administered psychotropic medication to children without bothering to seek consent from parents, relatives or guardians. Officials said “extreme psychiatric symptoms” justified medicating the children on an emergency basis — a fine explanation, except that the drugs were administered routinely in the morning and at night. (And sometimes the children were told the drugs were “vitamins.”) The children’s testimony led U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee to reject the government’s arguments, wondering how “emergencies” could occur with such clocklike precision.
Some of the minors confined at Shiloh, which houses 44 children, three-quarters of them immigrants, described abjectly cruel treatment, prompting the judge to order officials at the facility to provide water as needed to those confined there and permit them private phone calls. That a necessity so basic as the provision of water is the subject of a judicial order is a measure of the official depravity that has gripped Shiloh.
2:58
Opinion | Trump’s anti-immigrant tactics are eerily familiar to some Japanese Americans
The tools that normalized Japanese American imprisonment during World War II are being deployed against asylum-seeking immigrants today.(Kate Woodsome, Gillian Brockell, Konrad Aderer/The Washington Post)
HHS officials make a point of sounding compassionate when they describe their concern for the thousands of migrant children under their supervision. Those fine words are belied by actual conditions in real-world facilities for which the department is responsible.
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There are plenty of villains here. But the primary culprits are Sessions, Trump, and Miller who have continued to push a racially motivated program of dehumanization of Hispanic migrants, and illegal, immoral, and damaging detention of children and families in the face of clear evidence of its impropriety and its ineffectiveness as a deterrent.
I’m not saying that other DHS and ORR officials don’t belong in jail. Obviously, the evil clown who went before Congress and compared “Kiddie Gulags” to summer camps belongs behind bars. Trump might well be unreachable except for impeachment. But, Sessions, Nielsen, Lloyd and others responsible for these grotesque abuses enjoy no such protections.
Yes, this is ORR. But the Department of Justice is responsible for taking affirmative action to end these abuses by the Government. Instead, Sessions has been second only to Trump in promoting racism, false narratives, child abuse, xenophobia, and disregard of the legal rights and human rights of migrants, particularly the most vulnerable — children, women, LGBTQ, the mentally ill, etc. In the case before Judge Gee, he unethically ordered his DOJ lawyers to “defend the indefensible.”
What kind of nation refuses to hold blatant, unrepentant, public child abusers accountable for their crimes?
JUST SAY NO TO 1939: HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS
By Paul Wickham Schmidt,
U.S. Immigration Judge, Retired
Americas Conference
International Association of Refugee & Migration Judges
Georgetown Law
August 4, 2018
INTRODUCTION
Good afternoon. I am pleased to be here. Some twenty years ago, along with then Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael J. Creppy, I helped found this Association, in Warsaw. I believe that I’m the only “survivor” of that illustrious group of “Original Charter Signers” present today. And, whoever now has possession of that sacred Charter can attest that my signature today remains exactly as it was then, boldly scrawling over those of my colleagues and the last paragraph of the document.
As the Americas’ Chapter Vice President, welcome and thank you for coming, supporting, and contributing to our organization and this great conference. I also welcome you to the beautiful campus of Georgetown Law where I am on the adjunct faculty.
I thank Dean Treanor; my long-time friend and colleague Professor Andy Schoenholtz, and all the other wonderful members of our Georgetown family; the IARMJ; Associate Director Jennifer Higgins, Dimple Dhabalia, and the rest of their team at USCIS; and, of course, our Americas President Justice Russell Zinn and the amazing Ross Patee from the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board who have been so supportive and worked so hard to make this conference a success.
I recognize that this is the coveted “immediately after lunch slot” when folks might rather be taking a nap. But, as the American country singer Toby Keith would say “It’s me, baby, with you wake up call!” In other words, I’m going to give you a glimpse into the “parallel universe” being operted in the United States.
In the past, at this point I would give my comprehensive disclaimer. Now that I’m retired, I can skip that part. But, I do want to “hold harmless” both the Association and Georgetown for my remarks. The views I express this afternoon are mine, and mine alone. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think. No “party line,” no “bureaucratic doublespeak,” so “sugar coating.” Just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we don’t have an implicit bias problem in the U.S. asylum adjudication system. The bad news: The bias is now, unfortunately, quite explicit.
Here’s a quote about refugees: “I guarantee you they are bad. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”
Here’s another one: “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”
Here’s another referencing the presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented residents of the U.S.: “Over the last 30 years, there have been many reasons for this failure. I’d like to talk about just one—the fraud and abuse in our asylum system.”
Here’s yet another: “We’ve had situations in which a person comes to the United States and says they are a victim of domestic violence, therefore they are entitled to enter the United States. Well, that’s obviously false but some judges have gone along with that.”
You might think that these anti-asylum, and in many cases anti-Latino, anti-female, anti-child, anti-asylum seeker, de-humanizing statements were made by members of some fringe, xenophobic group. But no, the first two are from our President; the second two are from our Attorney General.
These are the very officials who should be insuring that the life-saving humanitarian protection purposes of the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Convention Against Torture are fully carried out and that our country fully complies with the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which is binding on our country under the 1967 Protocol.
Let me read you a quote that I published yesterday on my blog, immigrationcourtside.com, from a young civil servant resigning their position with “EOIR,” otherwise known as our Immigration Court system, or, alternatively, as the sad little donkey from Winnie the Pooh.
I was born and raised in a country that bears an indelible and shameful scar—the birth and spreading of fascism. An ideology that, through its different permutations, almost brought the world as we know it to an end. Sadly, history has taught me that good countries do bad things—sometimes indescribably atrocious things. So, I have very little tolerance for authoritarianism, extremism, and unilateral and undemocratic usurpations of Constitutional rights. I believe that DOJ-EOIR’s plan to implement individual annual numerical performance measures—i.e., quotas—on Immigration Judges violates the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the DOJ’s own mission to “ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice.” This is not the job I signed up for. I strongly believe in the positive value of government, and that the legitimacy of our agency—and any other governmental institution for that matter—is given by “the People’s” belief in its integrity, fairness, and commitment to serve “the People.” But when the government, with its unparalleled might and coercive force, infringes on constitutionally enshrined rights, I only have two choices: (1) to become complicitous in what I believe is a flagrant constitutional violation, or (2) to resign and to hold the government accountable as a private citizen. I choose to resign because I cannot in good conscience continue serving my country within EOIR.
Strong words, my friends. But, words that are absolutely indicative of the travesty of justice unfolding daily in the U.S. Immigration Courts, particularly with respect to women, children, and other asylum seekers –- the most vulnerable among us. Indeed, the conspicuous absence from this conference of anyone currently serving as a judge in the U.S. Immigration Courts tells you all you really need to know about what’s happening in today’s U.S. justice system.
Today, as we meet to thoughtfully discuss how to save refugees, the reality is that U.S. Government officials are working feverishly at the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice on plans to end the U.S. refugee and asylum programs as we know them and to reduce U.S. legal immigration to about “zero.”
Sadly, the U.S. is not alone in these high-level attacks on the very foundations of our Convention and international protection. National leaders in Europe and other so-called “liberal democracies” — who appear to have erased the forces and circumstances that led to World War II and its aftermath from their collective memory banks — have made similar statements deriding the influence of immigrants and the arrival of desperate asylum seekers. In short, here and elsewhere our Convention and our entire international protection system are under attacks unprecedented during my career of more than four decades in the area of immigration and refugee protection.
As a result, judges and adjudicators throughout the world, like you, are under extreme pressure to narrow interpretations, expedite hearings, view asylum seekers in a negative manner, and produce more denials of protection.
So, how do we as adjudicators remain loyal to the principles of our Convention and retain our own integrity under such pressures? And, more to the point, what can I, as someone no longer involved in the day-to-day fray, contribute to you and this conference?
Of course, you could always do what I did — retire and fulfill a longtime dream of becoming an internet “gonzo journalist.” But, I recognize that not everyone is in a position to do that.
Moreover, if all the “good guys” who believe in our Convention, human rights, human dignity, and fair process leave the scene, who will be left to vindicate the rights of refugees and asylum seekers to protection? Certainly not the political folks who are nominally in charge of the protection system in the US and elsewhere.
So, this afternoon, I’m returning to that which brought this Association together two decades ago in Warsaw: our united commitment to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention; additionally, our commitment to fairness, education, international approaches, group problem solving, promoting best practices, and mutual support.
In the balance of my presentation, I’m going to tell you four things, taken from our Convention, that I hope will help you survive, prosper, and advance the aims of our Convention in an age of nationalist, anti-refugee, anti-asylum, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
BODY
Protect, Don’t Reject
First, “protect, don’t reject.” Our noble Convention was inspired by the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Many of you will have a chance to see this first hand at the Holocaust Museum.
Our Convention is a solemn commitment not to repeat disgraceful incidents such as the vessel St. Louis, which has also been memorialized in that Museum. For those of you who don’t know, in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of World War II a ship of German Jewish refugees unsuccessfully sought refuge in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, only to be rejected for some of the same spurious and racist reasons we now hear on a regular basis used to describe, deride, and de-humanize refugees. As a result, they were forced to return to Europe on the eve of World War II, where hundreds who should and could have been saved instead perished in the Holocaust that followed.
Since the beginning of our Convention, the UNHCR has urged signatory countries to implement and carry out “a generous asylum policy!” Beyond that, paragraphs 26 and 27 of the UN Handbookreiterate “Recommendation E” of the Convention delegates. This is the hope that Convention refugee protections will be extended to those in flight who might not fully satisfy all of the technical requirements of the “refugee” definition.
Therefore, I call on each of you to be constantly looking for legitimate ways in which to extend, rather than restrict, the life-saving protections offered by our Convention.
Give The “Benefit Of The Doubt”
Second, “give the benefit of the doubt.” Throughout our Convention, there is a consistent theme of recognizing the difficult, often desperate, situation of refugees and asylum seekers and attendant difficulties in proof, recollection, and presentation of claims. Therefore, our Convention exhorts us in at least four separate paragraphs, to give the applicant “the benefit of the doubt” in assessing and adjudicating claims.
As a sitting judge, I found that this, along with the intentionally generous “well-founded fear” standard, enunciated in the “refugee” definition and reinforced in 1987 by the U.S. Supreme Court and early decisions of our Board of Immigration Appeals implementing the Supreme Court’s directive, often tipped the balance in favor of asylum seekers in “close cases.”
Don’t Blame The Victims
Third, “don’t blame the victims.” The purpose of our Convention is to protect victims of persecution, not to blame them for all societal ills, real and fabricated, that face a receiving signatory country. Too much of today’s heated rhetoric characterizes legitimate asylum seekers and their families as threats to the security, welfare, heath, and stability of some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, based on scant to non-existent evidence and xenophobic myths.
In my experience, nobody really wants to be a refugee. Almost everyone would prefer living a peaceful, productive stable life in their country of nationality. But, for reasons beyond the refugee’s control, that is not always possible.
Yes, there are some instances of asylum fraud. But, my experience has been that our DHS does an excellent job of ferreting out, prosecuting, and taking down the major fraud operations. And, they seldom, if ever, involve the types of claims we’re now seeing at our Southern Border.
I’m also aware that receiving significant numbers of refugee claimants over a relatively short period of time can place burdens on receiving countries. But, the answer certainly is not to blame the desperate individuals fleeing for their lives and their often pro bono advocates!
The answer set forth in our Convention is for signatory countries to work together and with the UNHCR to address the issues that are causing refugee flows and to cooperate in distributing refugee populations and in achieving generous uniform interpretations of the Convention to discourage “forum shopping.” Clearly, cranking up denials, using inhumane and unnecessary detention, stirring up xenophobic fervor, and limiting or blocking proper access to the refugee and asylum adjudication system are neither appropriate nor effective solutions under our Convention.
Give Detailed, Well-Reasoned, Individualized Decisions
Fourth, and finally, “give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.” These are the types of decisions encouraged by our Convention and to promote which our Association was formed. Avoid stereotypes and generalities based on national origin; avoid personal judgments on the decision to flee or seek asylum; avoid political statements; be able to explain your decision in legally sufficient, yet plainly understandable terms to the applicant, and where necessary, to the national government.
Most of all, treat refugee and asylum applicants with impartiality and the uniform respect, sensitivity, and fairness to which each is entitled, regardless of whether or not their claim under our Convention succeeds.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I fully recognize that times are tough in the “refugee world.” Indeed, as I tell my Georgetown students, each morning when I wake up, I’m thankful for two things: first, that I woke up, never a given at my age; second, that I’m not a refugee.
But, I submit that tough times are exactly when great, independent, and courageous judging and adjudication are necessary to protect both applicants from harm and governments from doing unwise and sometimes illegal and immoral things that they will later regret.
I have offered you four fairly straightforward ways in which adhering to the spirit of our Convention can help you, as judges and adjudicators, retain integrity while complying with the law: protect, don’t reject; give the benefit of the doubt; don’t blame the victims; and give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.
Hopefully, these suggestions will also insure that all of you will still be around and employed for our next conference.
Thanks for listening, have a great rest of our conference, and do great things! May Due Process and the spirit of our noble Convention and our great organization guide you every day in your work and in your personal life! Due Process forever!
Judge slams Trump admin for suggesting ACLU, others should find deported parents
By Tal Kopan, CNN
A federal judge called the Trump administration’s slowness to track down migrant parents it had separated from their children and then deported “unacceptable,” saying the responsibility is “100%” on the government.
The stern admonishment from District Judge Dana Sabraw came a day after the administration argued that immigrant advocacy groups — not the government — should be responsible for tracking down the more than 500 parents it had separated from their children at the border and deported without them.
Sabraw said during a Friday phone hearing that if the government doesn’t track down the parents, it will have “permanently orphaned” their children.
“The reality is there are still close to 500 parents that have not been located, many of these parents were removed from the country without their child, all of this is the result of the government’s separation and then inability and failure to track and reunite,” Sabraw said.
“And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100% the responsibility of the administration,” he added.
Sabraw instructed the administration to name one or two officials to be a single point of command in the reunification effort, and to submit a detailed plan for how they will reunify children with parents either deported or, in a smaller number of cases, released into the US.
“In reviewing the status report it appears that only 12 or 13 of close to 500 parents have been located, which is just unacceptable at this point,” Sabraw said.
A federal judge on Friday again said the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program should be fully restored.
Judge John Bates said the Trump administration still has failed to justify its proposal to end DACA, the Obama-era program that has protected nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation.
Bates agreed to delay his ruling for 20 days to give the administration time to respond and appeal, if it chooses.
Basically the Administration is “flicking the middle finger” at Judge Sabraw and his family reunification order. And, they are also doing the same thing to Judge Bates by nonchalantly screwing 800,000 young people, American’s future, without providing any legal rationale.
As a former judge, I actually understand why these judges are letting this “roll off their backs” and focusing on making the Administration solve the problems they created. Judges have to be the “adults in the room” even in an Administration of infantile minds.
But, at some point, a lawyer like Sessions who thumbs his nose at judicial orders and fails to provide any legal support for a litigating position that affects 800,000 American residents should face disciplinary proceedings. Not only has the Administration’s response been unacceptable, but so has the professional and ethical performance of Sessions and his DOJ lawyers. What about “Bivens liability” for Sessions and other Administration officials who knowingly and intentionally violated Constitutional rights in the child separation program, had their attorneys lie to the court about the very existence of the policy, and refused to take responsibility for fixing it.
Perhaps when this is over. But, then again, maybe not.
The Trump administration on Thursday informed a federal judge that it isn’t responsible for locating deported parents separated forcibly from their children at the southern border.
DOJ said in a court filing that the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit over family separations, should instead take the lead in reunifying deported parents with their children.
“Plaintiffs’ counsel should use their considerable resources and their network of law firms, NGOs, volunteers, and others, together with the information that defendants have provided (or will soon provide), to establish contact with possible class members in foreign countries,” DOJ said.
The administration suggested that the ACLU find out whether the deported parents wish to be reconnected with their children, or whether they waive that option.
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has statedrepeatedly that no parents were deported without first being given the option to take their children with them. But a Trump administration official told POLITICO on July 25 that an estimated three-quarters of the parents who left the country alone left no record behind that they ever consented to leave their children in the U.S. “We don’t see it in the documentation,” the official said.
At a Senate hearing earlier this week, Matthew Albence, executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, repeatedly dodged questions about whether DHS could document that it secured deportee parents’ consent to leave their children behind.
In Thursday’s court filing, the ACLU disputed the Trump administration’s claim that it isn’t responsible for deportees, saying it “must bear the ultimate burden of finding the parents.”
The ACLU said that Trump’s “unconstitutional separation practice” precipitated the crisis and that the federal government possessed far more resources than non-governmental organizations to find the parents.
In addition, the plaintiffs contended that many addresses that the administration provided won’t aid reunification. Some simply said “in DHS custody” or “failed to provide,” according to the ACLU.
The organization estimated that records for 120 parents outside the U.S. — more than one quarter the total deported without their kids — may lack viable addresses.
According to the court filing, some records simply say “calle sin nombre” (street without a name) or list the name of a city.
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Yeah, as I was saying about lack of accountability in my previous posting. Seems like it’s time for the U.S. District Judge to start issuing some contempt citations for Government officials and lawyers. Perhaps a few days in jail for Secretary Nielsen would light a fire under her to correct the Constitutional abuses undertaken under her authority. And it seems to me that the disingenuous court filings from DOJ in behalf of DHS are more than enough to file disciplinary actions against the DOJ Attorneys and to haul Sessions into court for possible contempt proceedings.
As I’ve said before, if any private lawyer conducted themselves before the District Court the way the Trump Administration did in this case, he or she would be in danger of losing both freedom and license to practice law. But, the laws don’t seem to apply to this Administration the way they do to the rest of us.
Dear Paul,I hope you saw the new “Frontline” episode, Separated: Children at the Border, last night on PBS. The episode provides an in-depth, factual look at the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and the treatment of families seeking safety at the border.
I was interviewed about the work of the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) on behalf of women and children seeking asylum and what I witnessed on a recent monitoring visit to a processing center at the border.
We want you to know that WRC is unyielding in our commitment to hold the Trump administration accountable for its cruel policies — we will not stop until families seeking safety at the U.S. border are treated humanely and have their human rights respected.
The Trump Administration specializes in avoiding accountability. The masters of the lie always blame the courts, the victims, the Democrats, the press, lawyers, everybody but them. That was on display this week during Senate oversight hearings where nobody took responsibility for the child separation policy that everyone agreed was a bad idea. Of course, missing from the hearing lineup was the unapologetic and disingenuous “mastermind” of the “zero tolerance policy” Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions.
The video also shows how badly the Obama Administration screwed up the treatment of arriving asylum applicants with counterproductive policies like the abominable “family detention.” Not much acceptance of responsibility there either. Indeed, this is when the policy of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by the DOJ and White House politicos went into high gear sending the Immigration Court backlog careening out of control.
A top health official told lawmakers Tuesday that the Trump administration was warned about instituting “any policy” resulting in family separations because of the effects such separations could have on the wellbeing of immigrant children.
The official’s response came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked every federal immigration official at Tuesday’s hearing over family separations to answer a particular question: “Did anyone on this panel say, maybe [separating families] wasn’t such a good idea?”
After a pause, Blumenthal directed his question first to Commander Jonathan White of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who said he and the Office of Refugee Resettlement raised a number of concerns in the previous year about “any policy which would result in family separation due to concerns we had about the best interest of the child as well about whether that would be operationally supportable with the bed capacity we had.”
The Democratic senator asked the commander to further explain his response in layman’s terms, asking if he told the administration that children would “suffer” as a result of its “zero tolerance” policy.
“Separation of children from their parents entails significant harm to children,” White said in response. “There’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” he added, shortly after.
White also said that the administration’s response was that family separation was not a policy. As stated before, there is no current law that mandates the separation of migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.
The Trump administration implemented its “zero-tolerance” policy this spring. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in June to halt the separations.
In recent weeks, lawsuits filed against the separation policy have produced testimonies from lawyers and the separated families they represent, alleging that the government’s actions resulted in trauma to their children.
In one personal declaration presented earlier this month in court, one mother said her son “is not the same since we were reunited.”
“I thought that, because he is so young he would not be traumatized by this experience, but he does not separate from me. He cries when he does not see me,” Olivia Caceres said of her 1-year-old son. “That behavior is not normal. In El Salvador he would stay with his dad or my sister and not cry. Now he cries for fear of being alone,” she wrote.
Here are several other key moments from Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Read the entire article at the link.
The lack of accountability and acceptance of responsibility by the Administration is astounding, as was Sen. Cornyn’s tone deaf comment. The reason why other laws aren’t being enforced is because of the cruel, wasteful, unconstitutional “zero tolerance” policy instituted by Sessions. Stop blaming the victims, Senator!
And why isn’t Sessions being held accountable for the mess he “masterminded?”
If you have children, imagine how you would feel seeing them taken away like that. Hug your kids. Imagine not knowing where they are or whether you’ll ever get to hug them again.
Now imagine the terror and despair those 711 “ineligible” children must feel. It is monstrous to gratuitously inflict such pain. It is, in a word, torture.
In 120 cases, according to the government, a parent “waived” reunification with the child. This claim cannot be taken at face value, however, since immigration advocates cite widespread reports of parents being coerced or fooled into signing documents they did not understand.
Human nature binds parents with their children. It shocks and depresses me to have to write this, but I wonder whether Trump and his minions see these Central Americans — brown-skinned, with indigenous features — as fully human.
In 431 cases involving children between 5 and 17, officials reported, the parents have been deported. Where are they now? How could the government let this happen? If these parents were going to be denied permission to stay in the United States, what was the big hurry to kick them out? Why couldn’t the administration wait until their children could be brought back from wherever they were being kept?
Even more incredibly, in 79 cases, the children’s parents have been released into the United States. In other words, the parents have some legal status — but the government has their children.
And in 94 cases, according to Trump administration officials, the parents cannot be located. What are the odds, do you think, that these men and women will ever be found? Where do parents go to begin the process of tracking down their children? How do you tell a 5-year-old that she may never see her mother and father again?
That’s the reported situation for children 5 and older. The government is also still holding 46 children younger than 5 whom officials cannot or will not give back to their parents. Think of the trauma being inflicted on 2-year-olds — to make a political point.
All of this is happening because Trump has no respect for law or due process and no sense of empathy. He was reportedly upset this spring by a rise in border crossings by asylum-seekers, who by law had to be allowed to stay pending resolution of their claims. He and Sessions seized upon the pretext — for which they have not provided evidence — that children were being “trafficked” into the country for some reason.
“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said in May. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.”
Think, for a moment, of the millions of Irish, Italian, Eastern European and other immigrants who “smuggled” children into the United States — families such as Trump’s own. The only difference is that those earlier immigrants, though sometimes rejected at first, came to be seen as white.
Brown immigrants need not apply. Not if they want to see their kids again.
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Read Robinson’s complete op-ed at the above link.
“Right on” Eugene! We need “regime change,” sooner rather than later. And, we still don’t have an answer to Eugene’s earlier question: When, if ever, will Sessions and other Trump Administration officials be held accountable for their intentionally lawless and unconstitutional behavior?
The failure of the U.S. government to reverse the kidnapping of migrant children from their parents has been chalked up to incompetence. People want to believe that this act of extraordinary cruelty — and the Trump administration’s inability to fix it — stems from our leaders’ lack of experience or common sense.
But this too is a failure — of our collective imagination. Although the government claimed it met the Thursday deadline to reunite families, it admitted that hundreds of parents had been deported without their children. The separation policy was designed to inflict harm. And the resolution process is chaotic by design.
How else can we explain what has happened to these families? Some 14 million checked bags are managed by the Transportation Security Administration — and that’s just during Thanksgiving weekend. Even high school students can manage a coat check for an evening without losing everyone’s coats. They match each coat and owner with corresponding tickets, and do not store the coats outside the building, or even thousands of miles away from the event.
This administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies.
The administration did not take even these basic measures when it began to separate children — not coats! — from their parents. It did not use corresponding numbers for the files of parents and children, or take photos of families together, or hand out hospital-style bracelets. It did not house families near one another, choosing instead to hold mothers in California and daughters in Chicago, fathers in Texas and sons in New York City.
In fact, the administration seems to have taken a comprehensive inventory of confiscated items — sneakers, toothpaste, rosaries — everything except which child belongs to which parent.
These are the actions of a government that intended to separate families but did not intend to reunite them. It meant to inflict so much suffering that other families wouldn’t make the dangerous trek. No matter how bad the violence might be in Central America, surely these families would choose to stay united rather than come and be separated.
In fact, through all the blather, the Trump administration has admitted as much.
“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America,” White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2017. Even separate children from their parents, asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer? “Yes.”
“We expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect,” Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Steven Wagner told reporters in June.
“Hopefully people will get the message,” Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said casually on Fox News in June.
But according to the Department of Homeland Security, no one has been deterred. The number of families stopped at the border actually increased by 64% in the months after the administration began to separate families. So even if you could stomach traumatizing toddlers, this policy did not accomplish Sessions’ objective of sending a warning across the desert.
Still, cruelty has its uses. Across the country, Republicans have made the Trump administration’s immigration stance their rallying cry for reelection, running more than 14,000 campaign ads this year bragging about their efforts to “stop illegals.” And last month, Sessions spelled out the administration’s plan to use all the bad press for good.
“We do not want to separate parents from their children,” he clarified. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”
In other words, this administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies. But let’s be clear: No lawmaker of any party should ever accede to a legislative demand in response to the intentional infliction of harm.
The American people must also speak up. Our government has kidnapped children from their parents. It forces these lost boys and girls to say the Pledge of Allegiance while they are held captive in building wings named for U.S. presidents. (It is not hard to believe that President Reagan would be aghast.)
This is not who we are, we want to say, but that isn’t quite true. This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.
Will it work again? That’s up to us.
Brian Schatz representsHawaii in the U.S. Senate.
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Senator Schatz provides a clear, succinct, powerful statement as to why we need regime change if American is to remain a great, diverse nation that uses the full abilities and respects the lives, dignity, potential, and rights of all of those who reside here now and may do so in the future.
“MAGA” has always been a not-so-thinly veiled exhortation to “Keep America As White As Possible For As Long As Possible No Matter How Much Damage We Inflict.”
Yeah, I remember that after his confirmation, I was willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt” and hope that he meant his sworn testimony that he would rise above his past as a partisan Senator and represent the rights and dignity of all Americans (which, of course, would include those Americans residing here and protected by our Constitution regardless of “status”).
However, it didn’t take long to see that it was just more of the perjury and lies that roll so effortlessly off Sessions’s tongue. What he actually intended all along was to use his good fortune in being somewhat unexpectedly elevated to the Attorney Generalship to carry out a heinous, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, restrictionist, extreme right program directed against people of color, women, children, and other vulnerable minorities. This is the type of horrible program that had always driven him, but that had been able to inflict little actual damage on America due to Sessions’s “outlier” position, even among his fellow GOP Senators.
To be fair, that’s precisely what Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Corey Booker, and the Black Caucus tried to tell the Senate and the rest of American during the confirmation process. But, they were silenced or ignored. Now, innocent kids, families, abused women, and the international reputation of our entire nation are all “paying the price” for Sessions as AG.
Vote for “regime change” this November. Vote for accountability, decency, the real “rule of law,” and to rein in and ideally remove Jeff Sessions from office before he can do further damage to humanity and to our country!
“They know that with this, their relationship with their child will be forever changed. And you can clearly see them going through every consequence in their head,” said Kostes, an immigration attorney with legal assistance foundation Florence Project.
Thursday marks a court-ordered deadline for the government to reunite families it separated at the border. Of the nearly 2,600 children the government identified as separated from their parents, more than 460 have parents who are likely to already have been deported without them, something the government says was done with the parents’ consent.
Of the ones still in the US, 900 are facing final orders of removal that could result in them being deported as soon as the federal judge in the reunions lawsuit lifts a temporary hold he put on deporting separated families.
Even before the Trump administration deployed a policy that separated those thousands of immigrant families at the US border, immigration attorneys have at times had to inform clients that their children may have stronger claims to stay in the US than they do as a family. For some families, leaving the child behind is the only way they see to save that child’s life.
Under normal circumstances, that’s a difficult decision. So the American Civil Liberties Union is asking the judge to give parents seven days after reunification to make the decision, given the added trauma and confusion caused by the separation in the first place, as a part of the lawsuit it brought over the separations.
Audio obtained exclusively by CNN of mothers appearing in immigration court while separated from their children gives voice to the anguish they face. “I cannot continue with this anymore. What I want is to be with my son,” one woman pleads with the judge as he tries to conduct a hearing on whether she can pursue asylum in the US.
Those mothers were ordered deported by the judge but remain in the country, CNN confirmed. They have since been reunited with their children.
But for the parents facing deportation, in that moment, they are “thinking, ‘What does this mean? What does this mean for me, what does this mean for my child, what is the best decision?’ ” Kostes said. “It’s a silence of processing and working through every possibility.”
Separations lead to complicated court cases
When the administration began separating migrant families who had crossed the border without permission as part of its “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, it split their immigration cases as well. Parents remained in detention near the border for the most part, moving rapidly through court dockets historically unfriendly to immigrants’ claims that found hundreds of them eligible for deportation. That process was only compounded by a reinterpretation of asylum law by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that made it nearly impossible for victims of gang and domestic violence to qualify for asylum in the US. Experts say that reversal has especially affected the Central American migrants who try to cross the southern border, thousands of whom cross each month.
The separated children were put into Health and Human Services custody and given their own court proceedings. Court settlements and anti-human-trafficking laws in the US also give children a different set of protections than families and adults have in the immigration system, generally meaning their court cases proceed much more slowly than their parents’ and giving them a better chance of qualifying for protections in the US.
Once the parent is given an order of deportation, they are presented with a form by the government, offering them to either be deported with their child or without.
The separation process is difficult for lawyers as well.
The ACLU has also argued that the separation has made offering legal advice to those families more complicated. Asylum claims require detailed evidence and testimony, and in some cases, the parent or child may have access to evidence the other does not. Parents are under extreme emotional distress during the separation, their attorneys say. Children, meanwhile, are given caseworkers, who may have worked with the child to determine possible claims they have in the US.
When they are reunited, there are other barriers to giving adequate legal advice. In a Wednesday court filing, the ACLU included an affidavit from Manoj Govindaiah of the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. He described reunited families being inseparable and deeply suspicious of anyone, even those purporting to help.
“In one case, we had been discussing the complicated procedural posture of the father’s and his son’s cases, that he had received a negative expedited removal order and was facing deportation, while his son could still apply for asylum. When he asked for clarification of what that meant, I explained that it could result in his son remaining in the United States without him. We could not complete our meeting because his crying prevented us from effectively discussing his legal case,” Govindaiah wrote.
Kostes said she and her colleagues will often have to counsel the parents over multiple visits regarding their options. The weight of the decision is often too much for one meeting, she said.
With separated parents in particular, she said, many have been asked to make this decision before they have seen their child and with little communication — at best.
“What we are seeing is the parents accept that for the child it’s best for them to stay here, but we’re hearing things like, ‘If they deport me, I just want to say goodbye to my child. I’ll accept deportation but I just want a chance to say goodbye,’ and that’s just really heartbreaking,” Kostes said.
A harrowing choice
Many thus far have opted to be deported alone.
Trump administration officials have portrayed the decision as an easy one. Asked by reporters about the potentially hundreds of parents deported without their children over the course of the zero tolerance policy, officials reiterated the parents had consented.
“Those individuals, as has always been our policy, were provided the opportunity to take their child with them pursuant to their removal. Those individuals declined to do so,” said Matthew Albence, chief of Enforcement and Removal Operations at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They are not going to generally take that child back with them after they’ve accomplished their smuggling.”
“Why we’ve seen many of these parents who have been removed decline to take their child is because they completed the smuggling act,” he said in a different call. “That was the intended goal of their illegal entry in the first place.”
The parents for the most part have been charged only with misdemeanor illegal entry to the US, if anything, and not with smuggling.
Attorneys like Kostes, who works with the nonprofit immigrant assistance program the Florence Project, say the reality for these parents is much starker and more difficult.
For many Central Americans, the journey north is spurred by gang threats, according to experts and immigration advocates. In one example, Lenni Benson, a New York Law School professor who’s executive director of the legal assistance program Safe Passage Project, had a recent client on the border who was facing deportation and had to decide whether to take her 17-year-old daughter with her. CNN has agreed to withhold her identity for safety considerations.
The Central American migrant ran a small business back home with her daughter. As the business grew, the blocked-number calls started.
The gangs began to threaten and try to extort her. She changed her number. They found her again and kept calling. Then the gangs began telling the mom, a survivor of assault herself, what her daughter looked like and what time the girl would leave home in the morning.
The mother told Benson the gangs “said that ‘she would pay the price. And I know what they do to people,’ ” Benson recounted the woman telling her.
The mother did not tell her daughter about the threats, but they packed up and sneaked into the US. The two were held together in family detention, but Benson had to tell the mother that if she failed to convince the government to re-hear her plea for asylum, her daughter may have an independent claim because of the nature of the threats.
“It was horrible to say, as a lawyer, as a law professor, as a mother, as a human being,” Benson said. “I said to myself, ‘What would I do?’ I would do what parents have always done and said, ‘My child comes first.’ “
Most of the children whose parents opt to leave them in the US are older, usually 11 and up, Kostes said. They are also likely to have family in the US who can care for them.
CNN spoke with one woman, Jennifer, who was in detention awaiting reunification with her 6-year-old daughter. She has not yet been ordered deported, but said that if she had to make the choice, she would take her child. CNN agreed to identify her only by her first name.
“It was a really hard decision to make. I was going to decide to take my child because I didn’t know what else to do,” Jennifer said of her decision to flee to the US, as translated by CNN. “Of course I would take her (if deported). I can’t leave her. … Thank God I didn’t have to make the decision.”
But Jennifer says she cannot go home to Honduras, where the gangs are threatening her family even after she tried to move to the mountains away from them. “The gangs are everywhere,” she added.
“For those who were going to leave their kids behind … they would do it for a better future for the child,” Jennifer said. “In Honduras, for real, there’s nothing there for them.”
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Lenni Benson is a professor at New York Law School.
CNN’s Nick Valencia and Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.
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And, as stories elsewhere have shown, these cruel, unnecessary, and downright idiotic policies are far from promoting effective law enforcement. In fact, Sessions has actually abused his power by making the border and the country less safe in almost every conceivable way!
I go back to Eugene Robinson’s key question: why are the wrong individuals in jail here? Why aren’t those in this Administration, like Sessions, who knowingly and intentionally created this mess being held accountable?
