"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.
GW Law Immigration Clinic Director Professor Alberto Benítez & Co-Director Professor Paulina Vera — They have dedicated their professional careers to teaching skills and values that change lives and advance a vision of a better future America!
Professor Alberto Benítez reports to Courtside:
Victory is the only option!
A shout-out to our student-attorneys Julia Yang, Spoorthi Datla, Cornelia Waugh, and Kelly Zhang. Yesterday our client S-L, from China, Kelly, and Paulina Vera attended an interview at USCIS. The client is a survivor of domestic violence and we had filed several applications on her behalf, including one for naturalization. Today all the applications were granted. S-L’s oath ceremony will be scheduled.
Given the endemic delays at every level of the dysfunctional USG immigration bureaucracy, seeing a case through from the initial application to eventual naturalization is no mean feat!😎 THIS, NOT the total disgraceful BS emanating from Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, and the rest of the GOP xenophobes, is what the REAL “American Dream” is all about and what REALLY “Makes America Great” — NOT totally disingenuous slogans and “throwaway lines” from those afraid to embrace and celebrate the REAL America!🇺🇸
The future of American immigration advocacy looks promising, notwithstanding the incredibly dark visions being falsely promoted by GOP restrictionists and the disturbingly feeble response from the Biden Administration and Dems in Congress. The talent in the “New Generation” of the NDPA continues to grow thanks to the inspiration and tutelage of Professors Benitez and Vera and many others like them who have dedicated their lives to making things better for everyone!
As a result, there is a rapidly expanding talent gap between the NDPA and the sluggish, unresponsive, “go along to get along” USG immigration bureaucracy — right up to the White House where so-called “policy makers” fear standing up for the rule of law and American values! Getting the talent from the “outside” to the “inside” where they can solve problems and advance progressive, practical American values is the challenge that will determine the future of our democracy!
Robert Reich Former US Secretary of Labor Professor of Public Policy CAL Berkeley Creative Commons LicenseNaturalization Ceremony USG Official Photo Public Domain
On Saturday, Donald Trump conducted the second formal rally of his campaign — in Pickens, South Carolina, where an estimated 50,000 turned up under the scorching sun to hear him.
There, he advanced his version of patriotism based on White Christian Nationalism.
He began by celebrating the town’s namesake, Francis Pickens, who was governor of South Carolina when it was the first to secede from the Union on the eve of the Civil War. Trump assured the crowd he wouldn’t let “them” change the town’s name.
He commended the Supreme Court for rejecting affirmative action “so someone who has not worked as hard will not take your place.”
He saluted the court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade so “radical left Democrats will not kill babies.”
He promised to stop “men competing in women’s sports” and prevent classroom teachers from teaching the “wrong” lessons about sexuality or history.
He condemned foreign governments that “send” over the border “people in jails and insane asylums” and promised to deny entry to “all communists and Marxists.”
And he declared America’s most dangerous opponents not to be Russia, China, or North Korea but “enemies within” America.
Rubbish.
The true meaning of patriotism is the opposite of Trump’s exclusionary White Christian Nationalism.
America’s moral mission has been toward greater inclusion — providing equal rights to women, Black people, immigrants, Native Americans, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, and agnostic.
True patriots don’t fuel racist, religious, or ethnic divisions. Patriots aren’t homophobic or sexist.
Nor are patriots blind to social injustices — whether ongoing or embedded in American history. They don’t ban books or prevent teaching about the sins of the nation’s past.
True patriots are not uncritically devoted to America. They are devoted instead to the ideals of America — the rule of law, equal justice, voting rights and civil rights, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from fear, and democracy.
True patriots don’t have to express patriotism in symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag.
They express patriotism in taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going — sacrificing for the common good.
This means paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes or seeking tax loopholes or squirreling away money abroad.
It means refraining from making large political contributions that corrupt American democracy.
It means blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job.
And volunteering time and energy to improving one’s community and country.
Nor is patriotism found in baseless claims that millions of people vote fraudulently. Or in pushing for laws that make it harder for people to vote based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Patriotism lies instead in strengthening democracy — defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard.
Patriots understand that when they serve the public, their responsibility is to maintain and build public trust in the institutions of democracy.
They don’t put loyalty to their political party above their love of America. They don’t support an attempted coup.
They don’t try to hold onto power after voters have chosen not to reelect them. They don’t make money off their offices.
When serving on the Supreme Court, they recuse themselves from cases where they may appear to have a conflict of interest. They don’t disregard precedent to impose their own ideology.
America’s problem is not as described by Trump and his White Christian Nationalism — that the nation is losing its whiteness or dominant religion, that too many foreigners are crossing its borders, that men are competing in women’s sports or teachers are not celebrating the nation’s history.
America’s problem is that too many Americans — including its lawmakers — are failing to understand what patriotism requires.
Ron DeSantis Dave Grandlund PoliticalCartoons.com Republished under license Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are “campaigning” on an agenda of racism, hate, and White Supremacist grievance not seen since the late Gov. George Wallace. Yet, mainstream media has largely “normalized” that which would have been unacceptable and unthinkable only a few years ago!Jamelle Bouie Columnist NY Times
The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, based on similar language found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was a direct response to and a rebuke of [chief Justice] Taney’s reasoning [in Dred Scott]. Having won the argument on the battlefield, the United States would amend its Constitution to establish an inclusive and, in theory, egalitarian national citizenship.
The authors of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what they were doing. In a country that had already seen successive waves of mass immigration, they knew that birthright citizenship would extend beyond Black and white Americans to people of other hues and backgrounds. That was the point.
Asked by an opponent if the clause would “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country,” Senator Lyman Trumbull, who helped draft the language of birthright citizenship in the Civil Rights Act, replied “Undoubtedly.” Senator John Conness of California said outright that he was “ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”
In 1867, around the time Congress was debating and formulating the 14th Amendment, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Boston where he outlined his vision of a “composite nationality,” an America that stood as a beacon for all peoples, built on the foundation of an egalitarian republic. “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said. “The outspread wings of the American Eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”
If birthright citizenship is the constitutional provision that makes a multiracial democracy of equals possible, then it is no wonder that it now lies in the cross hairs of men who lead a movement devoted to unraveling that particular vision of the American republic.
Embedded in birthright citizenship, in other words, is the potential for a freer, more equal America. For Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, that appears to be the problem.
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Read the rest of Jamelle’s outstanding article and get the real story about the 14th Amendment. It has nothing to do with the racist lies and distortions spewed forth by Trump, DeSantis, and their fellow GOP white supremacists!
As we know, Congress has failed to address the realities of immigration since the enactment of IRCA in 1986. That has inevitably led to a large, disenfranchised population of undocumented residents — essential members of our society, yet deprived of political power and the ability to reach their full potential by their “status.” Consequently, they aresubject to exploitation.
Nevertheless, this phenomenon would be much more serious without the “genius of the 14th Amendment.” Notwithstanding the failure of the political branches to address immigration in a realistic manner, the overwhelming number of the “next generation” of that underground population are now full U.S. citizens with the ability to participate in our political system and otherwise assert their full rights in our society.
Thus, because of the 14th Amendment we have avoided the highly problematic phenomenon of generations of disenfranchised Americans, essentially “stateless individuals,” forced into an underground existence. It’s not that these individuals born in the U.S., who have known no other country, would be going anywhere else, by force or voluntarily. Nor would it be in our best interests to degrade, dehumanize, and exclude generations of our younger fellow citizens as Trump, DeSantis, and the GOP far right extremist crazies advocate.
Additionally, in contradiction of traditional GOP dogma about limited government, the Trump/DeSantis charade would spawn a huge new and powerful “citizenship determining bureaucracy” that almost certainly would work against the poor, vulnerable, and individuals of color in deciding who “belongs” and who doesn’t and what documentation suffices. How many adult American citizens today who have deceased parents could readily produce definitive documentation of their parents’ citizenship?
So, notwithstanding GOP intransigence, their vile and baseless attacks on the 14th Amendment, and the lack of political will to solve and harness the realities and power of human immigration, the 14th Amendment is at work daily, solving much of the problem for us and making us a better nation, sometimes in spite of our Government’s actions or inactions. And, it performs this essential service in a manner that is relatively transparent and minimally bureaucratic for most.
Another giant in our professional forest has fallen. Among other things, Bob will be remembered for his mastery of the laws of citizenship by acquisition.
Here is a link to a 2010 interview with Bob, and here is a link to a biography by his family. A photo of Bob is here.
The encomiums are flooding my inbox. Angelo A. Paparelli said, “Bob was a warm-hearted giant, an encyclopedia of immigration law, a gentle and genial humanitarian. Every encounter I had with him helped me be a better immigration lawyer and person.”
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I remember from my private practice days that Bob was always ready for a free consult on a “citizenship stumper.”
R.I.P., my friend and colleague! Fairness, scholarship, timeliness, respect, and teamwork, you did it all and inspired younger generations to do likewise!
The immigration agency admonishing immigrants to pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems to have destroyed its own boots.
For three years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that processes visas, work permits and naturalizations — has lectured immigrants about how they should become more self-sufficient. It has alleged, without evidence, that too many immigrants are on the dole. (Actually, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and the foreign-born use fewer federal benefits than do their native-born counterparts.)
The agency implemented a broad, and likely illegal, rule allegedly designed to weed out immigrants who might ever be tempted to become a “public charge” and try to benefit from taxpayer largesse.
Well, now USCIS is broke — and is trying to become a “public charge” itself, by begging Congress for a bailout.
The agency is funded almost entirely by user fees, rather than congressional appropriations. But under President Trump’s leadership, it has mismanaged its finances so badly that it has sought an emergency $1.2 billion infusion from taxpayers.
Unless it get a bailout, the agency will furlough three-quarters of its workforce next month, Government Executive reported Thursday.
The agency claims it’s a novel coronavirus victim. No doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted operations. But USCIS was in financial trouble long before the virus’s outbreak.
[[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]]
It acknowledged as much in public documents last fall, when it proposed a massive increase in user fees because of large projected budget deficits.
It didn’t have to be this way. When Trump took office, USCIS inherited a budget surplus. Last year, the agency saw record highs in both revenue and revenue per user.
So what went wrong?
The administration has frittered away funds on phantom cases of immigration fraud — which, like the president’s allegations of voter fraud, it has struggled to prove is an actual widespread problem that’s been going undetected.
USCIS has siphoned resources to create a denaturalization task force, which strips citizenship from immigrants found to have lied or otherwise cheated on applications. Last year, the agency revealed intentions to double the size of its fraud detection unit.
The bigger drain on resources, though, is its deliberate creation of more busy work for immigrants and their lawyers — as well as thousands of USCIS employees. These changes are designed to make it harder for people to apply for, receive or retain lawful immigration status.
For instance, the agency has demanded more unnecessary documentation (“requests for evidence”) and more duplicative, mandatory in-person interviews. Previously, staffers had more discretion to determine whether these interviews were necessary.
Staffers have been directed to comb through applications looking for minor (frivolous) reasons to reject otherwise eligible applicants.
. . . .
The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council offer a few obvious suggestions, including eliminating some of the stupid processing requirements that raise costs for both applicants and USCIS without actually adding value. Other ways to reduce costs include holding virtual naturalization oath ceremonies and allowing electronic payments for everything.
Congress could also demand the agency raise more money on its own, without gouging, say, poor asylum seekers. For instance, it could expand the cash cow known as “premium processing” (faster processing, for a fee) to more types of its applications.
Finally, get rid of the “public charge” rule. It’s a perfect example of everything that got USCIS into this mess: an expensive-to-administer — and, again, likely illegal — solution in search of a problem, whose only purpose is to punish immigrants just trying to follow the law.
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Read the rest of Catherine’s article at the link.
Wow, what a terrific analysis! The “problems” were self-created by a regime with an irrational, White Nationalist, racist agenda. The solutions are actually quite obvious and readily available, as Catherine points out. But, they won’t happen until Trump is removed from office.
Catherine also raises a larger problem in America’s abject failure to insist on constitutionally-required social justice for everyone, regardless of color, status, or ethnicity. Stephen Miller’s racist changes in the public charge regulations never should have happened. It’s not rocket science. It’s Con Law 101, Administrative Law 101, with a dose of common sense and human decency thrown in.
The current racial crisis, failure to achieve Constitutionally-required equal justice for all, and perhaps worst of all pandering to obviously fabricated pretexts for the Trump regime’s racist agenda, particularly as it has targeted asylum seekers and migrants of color, can be laid to no small degree at the feet of five GOP-appointed Supreme Court Justices disgracefully led by our failed Chief Justice.
They have failed to achieve and enforce equal justice for all because they don’t believe in what our Constitution requires. Millions of individuals who are neither lawyers nor judges know exactly what our Constitution requires and what morality and simple human decency mandates. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump stands for.
But, a Supremes’ majority that neither believes in Constitutional due process and equal justice for all nor possesses the guts and human decency to stand up to an overtly racist President and his toadies will continue to be part of the problem, rather than the solution to the blatant injustices that currently plague our society.
I’m certainly not the only former judge to recognize the intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption at the heart of today’s failed Supremes!
America needs and deserves better Justices who believe in and stand up for equal justice. Our Supremes’ institutional failure isn’t an exercise in legal academics or legitimate intellectual differences of opinion, like the majority often pretends.
No, bad judging injures, maims, and kills people every day. It undermines the health and safety of America every day. It allows baby jails and star chambers to flourish in our midst. It allows the illegal return of refugees to the dangerous countries they fled without any process at all, let alone “due” process. In enables corrupt Government officials to propose an outrageously unlawful, malicious, bogus, misogynist, and evil “administrative repeal” of asylum accompanied by a battery of racist-inspired lies because they know there is no legal accountability for their reprehensible conduct so long as the J.R. Five is there to protect their misdeeds. It allows police officers to act believing they won’t be held accountable for killing George Floyd.
It’s no wonder that democracy is crumbling before our eyes when the majority of Justices charged with protecting it place loyalty to a political party and its immoral, unqualified leader, perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and the rule of law in our history, above the common good.
Due Process Forever. Complicit, Racism-Enabling Courts, Never!
Federal immigration agency to furlough employees unless Congress provides funding
6:05 PM EDT May 26, 2020
US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency responsible for visa and asylum processing, is expected to furlough part of its workforce this summer if Congress doesn’t provide emergency funding to sustain operations during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Unfortunately, as of now, without congressional intervention, the agency will need to administratively furlough a portion of our employees on approximately July 20,” USCIS Deputy Director for Policy Joseph Edlow wrote in a letter sent to the workforce on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, the agency — which has 19,000 government employees and contractors working at more than 200 offices — requested $1.2 billion from Congress due to its budget shortfall.
Communications from the agency to Congress have grown more urgent as the threat of potential rolling furloughs could number in the thousands, according to one source familiar with the discussions.
The goal would be to attach the needed funds to the next coronavirus relief bill, which lawmakers plan to negotiate next. Still, with both parties far apart on any resolution, there is currently no clear pathway for lawmakers to fulfill the emergency request.
The immigration agency is primarily fee-funded and typically continues most operations during lapses in funding, such as last year’s government shutdown. However, during the pandemic the agency suspended its in-person services, including all interviews and naturalization ceremonies.
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, USCIS has seen a dramatic decrease in revenue and is seeking a one-time emergency request for funding to ensure we can carry out our mission of administering our nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity, and protecting the American people,” said a USCIS spokesperson.
The agency proposed a 10% surcharge on USCIS application fees to reimburse taxpayers at a later time. USCIS previously estimated that application and petition receipts will drop by approximately 61% through the end of fiscal year 2020, exhausting funding this summer, according to the agency.
Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst for the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told CNN earlier this month that USCIS’ depleted funds are the “inevitable result” of the administration’s policies, which decreased the number of petitions — and thus fees — received by the agency.
“Between the end of fiscal years 2017 and 2019, USCIS received nearly 900,000 fewer petitions. This decrease was largely driven by the administration’s own decisions, such as ending Temporary Protected Status for nationals of several countries or drastically decreasing the number of refugees admitted to the United States,” she said.
. . . .
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Sarah Pierce of MPI is totally right! This self-created “emergency” has to do mostly with the Trump regime’s ill-advised decision to turn what was supposed to be an agency providing impartial, expert, professional services to the public, and specifically the immigrant community, into a “junior branch of DHS enforcement.”
The need for a bailout or huge fee increases appears specious. How about giving USCIS the money that the regime illegally reprogrammed for Trump’s unneeded wall or the money used to maintain unfilled detention spaces and unneeded detention programs?
Right now, USCIS is engaged in improperly “slow walking” naturalization applications to prevent new citizens from being able to vote in the Fall 2020 elections. As a minimum requirement for further bailout, Congress should require that the “Naturalization Program” be removed from USCIS and returned to the supervision of the Article III Federal Courts.
I actually was once a “big fan” of “administrative naturalization,” believing that it could bedone most efficiently and with the best public service by adjudicators serving within the Examinations Branch of the “Legacy INS” which eventually “morphed” into USCIS. I supported the concept and helped lay the groundwork for it during my time at the “Legacy INS.”
The Trump kakistocrats have proved me wrong. The function is too important, too politicized, and too tied into the White Nationalist anti-immigrant agenda to remain within the Executive Branch. It also requires competent, professional, apolitical leadership which does not exist within today’s “DHS mass of disastrous politicized incompetence.”
The Center for Migration Studies Releases New Report on the Benefits of Citizenship and the Barriers to Naturalization
The well-being and contributions of immigrants increase as they advance toward citizenship, but new impediments to permanent residence and naturalization deny access to citizenship.
New York, NY — The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) today released a report finding that the well-being of immigrants and their contributions to the United States increase as they advance to more permanent and secure immigration statuses, culminating in naturalization. The report finds that naturalized citizens match or exceed the native-born by key metrics, including: college degrees (35% vs. 29%); percent employed (96% vs. 95%); and average personal income ($45,600 vs. $40,600).
The report – authored by CMS Executive Director Donald Kerwin and CMS Senior Visiting Fellow Robert Warren – argues that the administration’s “America first” ideology obscures a far-reaching set of policies that significantly impede the ability of immigrants to “move forward” on the path to naturalization, to their own detriment and the detriment of their families and communities.
“The report finds that policy makers should encourage naturalization rather than making it unnecessarily difficult,” said Warren. “Another important finding is that the US legal immigration system currently produces the same percentage of high skilled workers as the native-born population.”
The report documents the Trump administration’s policies that seek to prevent undocumented persons from gaining status, divest documented persons of status, cut legal admissions and immigration by decree, create new barriers to permanent residence and naturalization, and make citizenship a less valuable and less secure status.
It finds that at least 5.2 million current US citizens – 4.5 million children and 730,000 adults – who are living with at least one undocumented parent, obtained US citizenship by birth. It concludes that current immigration enforcement priorities effectively deny the full rights and benefits of citizenship to the US citizen children of undocumented parents, and it warns that eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents would create a permanent underclass of US-born denizens.
“US citizenship represents the principle marker of full membership and equality under the law in our constitutional democracy,” said Kerwin. “Yet this administration has adopted policies to make naturalization far less accessible and to make citizenship a less secure and valuable status for some disfavored citizens.”
Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.
The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.
To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.
Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.
Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.
Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.
Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.
Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. Thiswould have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.
Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.
But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.
Take asylum law.
“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.
But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.
Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.
This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”
“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.
A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.
The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?
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Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?
It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.
Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!
A Homeland Security worker says he has resigned from his role after years of service because he can no longer align himself with President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
In a scathing account published by The Houston Chronicle Travis Olsen explains what led him to the decision that he could “no longer be party to an intimidating, mismanaged and unwelcoming administration that is openly rebellious to the values our government has espoused for centuries.”
“For nearly a decade I have been a frontline civilian with the Department of Homeland Security, never seeing my work as political or driven by partisanship. I have served with purpose, with duty and gratitude to the values of our country,” Olsen said, adding: “I agree with President George W. Bush’s definition of our nation, ‘America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.'”
Olsen said that while the U.S. has “always been a refuge for those fleeing persecution oppression and dictatorships,” under the Trump administration, “these ideals which have governed our country for centuries have been crushed under the weight of intolerance and public irresponsibility.”
An example of that, he said, was the Trump administration’s recent decision to transfer Border Patrol agents from their already “unprecedented law enforcement workloads” to “conduct non-adversarial interviews of asylum seekers.”
“This is a clear attempt to replace the humanitarian mission of our protection laws with an enforcement objective,” Olsen said.
And, he added, “it is part of a string of unnecessary and counter-productive policies such as sending children across the country from their parents and leaving asylum-seekers in Mexico in the hands of the cartels,” striking out at the Trump administration’s widely-condemned “Remain in Mexico” policy.
“Seeking greater security and vetting procedures does not require abandoning basic human rights or putting vulnerable people at even greater risk,” the resigned DHS worker said.
While Olsen did say that he believes the U.S. does need to modernize its “outdated immigration system,” the Trump administration has so far failed to do that.
In fact, he said, the current leadership has only succeeded in creating “more problems by pulling resources further from their purpose and thereby clogging an already overflowing system. This has not been to enforce our laws but simply to unilaterally implement the administration’s version of the law.”
“We need rational, sensible and thoughtful solutions. We can support our allies by raising refugee admissions back to standard numbers. We can eliminate push factors by reinstating targeted aid to neighboring countries. We can utilize effective alternatives to detention and not create humanitarian crises within our borders,” the resigned DHS worker said. “But none of this can happen when our government deliberately targets children, families and other vulnerable people. Basic humanity and decency must be restored.”
Hitting out at Congress members who have defended the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, Olsen wrote: “Some in Congress have either defended the false choice between security and humanity or simply sat silently as this Administration has trampled our national history.”
“We need leaders who will stand for American values in the face of political convenience. We need moral courage in our government. We are America. We can do better, be better,” he said.
It is unclear what Olsen’s role within the DHS was or how many years he worked with the department.
However, he said he has worked as an attorney, advocate and government officer representing and working with vulnerable populations.
Newsweek has contacted the DHS for comment for this article.
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Yes, under “Trump Toadies” Kelly, Nielsen, and most recently “Big Mac With Lies,” the DHS has essentially abandoned it’s “national security” and “service to the public” functions in favor of a racist, White Nationalist restrictionist political agenda directed at immigrants and ultimately Americans of color, the overwhelming majority of whom pose no threat whatsoever to our national security. To the contrary, most of the misguided “civil enforcement” activities that DHS touts actually hurt our country and squander incredible amounts of public money, not to mention the public trust and confidence necessary to engage in real law enforcement.
A rational, professional immigration agency would concentrate its civil efforts on: 1) processing recent arrivals with an eye toward quickly identifying those eligible for asylum or other protection and approving their cases so that they can be integrated into our society; 2) humane removal of those who don’t qualify, perhaps working with other countries to find safe resettlement opportunities where necessary; 3) increasing overseas refugee processing to make it unnecessary for refugees to make the dangerous journey to our borders to apply; 4) removing individuals with serious criminal records or who are engaged in fraud, trafficking, etc., 5) facilitating some type of legal status and work authorization under our existing laws for as many long term, law-abiding undocumented residents as possible; 6) making the case to Congress for bipartisan reform that would legalize long-term undocumented residents while significantly increasing legal immigration opportunities, both temporary and permanent, across the board; 7) working with the Department of Labor on wage, hour, and working conditions enforcement to prevent exploitation of all workers, including migrants.
Making the legal immigration and adjudication systems work better would reduce the pressure for extralegal entries at the border and allow DHS to concentrate its enforcement on real threats to our national security like terrorists, human and drug smugglers, and fraudsters.
Given the fraud, waste, and abuse of the public treasury by the current DHS, rationalizing the system likely would cost no more than we are wasting on “designed to fail max enforcement gimmicks” (like Trump’s “stunt wall”) now. And the long term benefits to our country in assisting refugees and other migrants to integrate into our society, fully contribute, and pay taxes would be great.
This paper critiques US immigration and asylum policies from perspective of the author’s 46 years as a public servant. It also offers a taxonomy of the US immigration system by positing different categories of membership: full members of the “club” (US citizens); “associate members” (lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees); “friends” (non-immigrants and holders of temporary status); and, persons outside the club (the undocumented). It describes the legal framework that applies to these distinct populations, as well as recent developments in federal law and policy that relate to them. It also identifies a series of cross-cutting issues that affect these populations, including immigrant detention, immigration court backlogs, state and local immigration policies, and Constitutional rights that extend to non-citizens. It makes the following asylum reform proposals, relying (mostly) on existing laws designed to address situations of larger-scale migration:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, in particular, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should send far more Asylum Officers to conduct credible fear interviews at the border.
Law firms, pro bono attorneys, and charitable legal agencies should attempt to represent all arriving migrants before both the Asylum Office and the Immigration Courts.
USCIS Asylum Officers should be permitted to grant temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) to applicants likely to face torture if returned to their countries of origin.
Immigration Judges should put the asylum claims of those granted CAT withholding on the “back burner” — thus keeping these cases from clogging the Immigration Courts — while working with the UNHCR and other counties in the Hemisphere on more durable solutions for those fleeing the Northern Triangle states of Central America.
Individuals found to have a “credible fear” should be released on minimal bonds and be allowed to move to locations where they will be represented by pro bono lawyers.
Asylum Officers should be vested with the authority to grant asylum in the first instance, thus keeping more asylum cases out of Immigration Court.
If the Administration wants to prioritize the cases of recent arrivals, it should do so without creating more docket reshuffling, inefficiencies, and longer backlogs
My long-time friend Don Kerwin, Executive Director of CMS, has been a “Lt. General of the New Due Process Army” since long before there even was a “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”). Talk about someone who has spent his entire career increasing human understanding and making the world a better place! Don is a great role model and example for newer members of the NDPA, proving that one can make a difference, as well as a living, in our world by doing great things and good works! Not surprisingly, Don’s career achievements and contributions bear great resemblance to those of our mutual friend, the late Juan Osuna.
So, when Don asked me to consider turning some of my past speeches about our immigration system and how it should work into an article to honor Juan, I couldn’t say no. But, I never would have gotten it “across the finish line” without Don’s inspiration, encouragement, editing, and significant substantive suggestions for improvement, as well as that of the talented peer reviewers and editorial staff of JMHS. Like most achievements in life, it truly was a “team effort” for which I thank all involved.
Those of you who might have attended my Boynton Society Lecture last Saturday, August 10, at the beautiful and inspiring Bjorklunden Campus of Lawrence University on the shores of Lake Michigan at Bailey’s Harbor, WI, will see that portions of this article were “reconverted” and incorporated into that speech.
Also, those who might have taken the class “American Immigration, a Cultural, Legal, and Anthropological Approach” at the Bjorklunden Seminar Series the previous week, co-taught by my friend Professor Jenn Esperanza of The Beloit College Anthropology Department, and me had the then-unpublished manuscript in their course materials, and will no doubt recognize many of the themes that Jenn and I stressed during that week.
Perhaps the only “comment that really mattered” was passed on to me by Don shortly after this article was released. It was from Juan’s wife, the also amazing and inspiring Wendy Young, President of Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”):“Juan would be truly honored.”
Donald M. Kerwin Executive Director Center for Migration StudiesJuan P. Osuna (1963-2017) Judge, Executive, Scholar, Teacher, Defender of Due ProcessWendy Young President, Kids In Need of Defense (“KIND”)Me
On Friday, the New York Times reported that former Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli will be tapped for a role in the Trump administration. He will be put in charge of the country’s legal immigration system, as head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). While it had been earlier rumored that Cuccinelli would be placed in a new job as “immigration czar,” both the Times and the Washington Post noted that he now seems set for the top spot at USCIS.
No matter what job Cuccinelli ends up in, he is neither deserving nor qualified to play any role in shaping immigration policy. He is an immigration hardliner with views that are at odds with American values. He has a history of xenophobic, homophobic, and sexist comments. Ironically, one nice thing that can be said about Cuccinelli is that he fosters bipartisanship — he has generated opposition from both sides of the aisle.
Given that Cuccinelli could soon be presiding over USCIS, his comments on immigration are worthy of review. In 2018, he told Breitbart News Daily that states should use “war powers” to turn back migrants: “You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it,” he said. In 2015, appearing on a conservative radio station, he claimed that President Obama was encouraging an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants. In 2012, he compared immigration policy to pest control. He’s called the infamous Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) “one of my very favorite congressman.” So Cuccinelli is hardly someone who can be trusted to run USCIS in keeping with the agency’s core values, which include “respect” and “integrity.”
Most importantly, Cuccinelli has no significant experience in immigration policy, notwithstanding his failed attempt to end birthright citizenship as a state senator. He is not from a border state, nor has he been a credible voice in the immigration debate. His background is in law enforcement, not immigration law.
Cuccinelli’s prime qualification for his new job seems to be that he has been a tireless defender of the president on cable news. That could almost be seen as laughable if the stakes were not so high. Consider that as head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would wield tremendous power over immigrants like refugees, domestic abuse victims, and asylum-seekers. Or that our legal immigration system is byzantine and complicated, attracting the largest number of immigrants in the world. In FY 2017, the U.S. granted Legal Permanent Resident status to about 1.1 million people, including 120,000 refugees and 25,000 asylum-seekers.
Cuccinelli’s anti-LGBTQ record is especially troubling. As attorney general, he was against policies banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public colleges and universities. As a state senator, he unsuccessfully fought to criminalize sodomy, calling “homosexual acts… intrinsically wrong.” In 2008, he declared that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” The extreme views matter because LGBTQ people are among our most vulnerable immigrants. The Human Rights Campaign, for example, has documented “the precarious position of transgender immigrants and asylum seekers.” Sadly, it seems unlikely that Cuccinelli would respect their human rights, let alone treat LGBTQ immigrants with kindness and compassion.
There are myriad ways in which Cuccinelli has demonstrated that he is far out of the mainstream, so much so that handing him a huge job would be dangerous. The man who worried about getting his newborn son a social security number because he was concerned about the government tracking his family is probably not the ideal person to put in charge of E-Verify, the federal database that checks employment eligibility.
True, the president can choose whomever he likes for high-level positions. But Cuccinelli isn’t even a smart political pick. In addition to being unpopular with Democrats, he doesn’t have the full support of Republican lawmakers either. According to the website Vox, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not want to confirm Cuccinelli (the ill will stems from the fact that Cuccinelli headed up a political action committee that supported primary challenges to incumbent Republicans in 2014). Besides, on immigration most Americans are moving away from Trump. This January, the Pew Center found that 62 percent of Americans believe that immigrants strengthen our country. A restrictionist like Cuccinelli is not what the public wants or needs.
As head of USCIS, Cuccinelli would bring little to the job except a track record as a Trump loyalist. With his outdated and narrow views, he would be a disaster overseeing our legal immigration system.
Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, he is also a contributor to NBCNews.com and CNN Opinion. You can follow him on Twitter at @RaulAReyes, Instagram: raulareyes1.
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Let’s remember that fired hardliner L. Francis Cissna was the man who “took the ‘Services’ out of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.” His dismal anti-immigrant polices and undermining of public service have brought unprecedented backlogs to USCIS adjudications that are now under Congressional investigation. He also reportedly “tanked” employee morale at USCIS. Nevertheless, he wasn’t quite nasty enough for Trump and his neo-Nazi White Nationalist advisor Stephen MIller.
As a Virginia resident who suffered through “Cooch Cooch’s” disastrous tenure as Attorney General and his thankfully unsuccessful bid to become our Governor, I can testify that he is indeed without any redeeming social values. In other words, a perfect fit for the “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy.” But, “Cooch Cooch” has some powerful enemies in the GOP Senate. He pissed off Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and powerful Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) can’t be too pleased with Trump’s treatment of his former staffer Cissna.
In the meantime, it’s “chaos as usual” in the DHS/USCIS kakistocracy.
Under Trump, the rare act of denaturalizing U.S. citizens on the rise
New citizens during a naturalization ceremony at the L.A. Convention Center. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Working a Saturday shift in the stuffy Immigration and Naturalization Service office in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s, Carl Shusterman came across a rap sheet.
A man recently sworn in as a United States citizen had failed to disclose on his naturalization application that he had been arrested, but not convicted, in California on rape and theft charges.
Shusterman, then a naturalization attorney, embarked on a months-long effort to do something that rarely happened: strip someone of their American citizenship.
“We had to look it up to find out how to do this,” he said. “We’d never even heard of it.”
Forty years later, denaturalization — a complex process once primarily reserved for Nazi war criminals and human rights violators — is on the rise under the Trump administration.
A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles has been reviewing more than 2,500 naturalization files for possible denaturalization, focusing on identity fraud and willful misrepresentation. More than 100 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for possible action.
“We’re receiving cases where [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] believes there is fraud, where our systems have identified that individuals used more than one identity, sometimes more than two or three identities,” said Dan Renaud, the associate director for field operations at the citizenship agency. “Those are the cases we’re pursuing.”
The move comes at a time when Trump and top advisors have made it clear that they want to dramatically reduce immigration, both illegal and legal.
The administration granted fewer visas and accepted fewer refugees in 2017 than in previous years.
Recently, the federal government moved to block victims of gang violence and domestic abuse from claiming asylum. White House senior advisor Stephen Miller — an immigration hawk — is pushing a policy that could make it more difficult for those who have received public benefits, including Obamacare, to become citizens or green card holders, according to multiple news outlets.
Shusterman, now a private immigration attorney in L.A., said he’s concerned denaturalization could be used as another tool to achieve the president’s goals.
“I think they’ll … find people with very minor transgressions,” he said, “and they’ll take away their citizenship.”
Dozens of U.S. mayors, including L.A.’s Eric Garcetti, signed a letter sent to the citizenship agency’s director in late July, criticizing a backlog in naturalization applications and the agency’s commitment of resources to “stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.”
“The new measure to investigate thousands of cases from almost 30 years ago, under the pretext of the incredibly minimal problem of fraud in citizenship applications, instead of managing resources in a manner that processes the backlogs before them, suggests that the agency is more interested in following an aggressive political agenda rather than its own mission,” the letter stated.
Attorney Carl Shusterman in his Los Angeles office. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls, said “denaturalization, like deportation, is an essential tool to use against those who break the rules.”
“It’s for people who are fraudsters, liars,” he said. “We’ve been lax about this for a long time, and this unit that’s been developed is really just a question of taking the law seriously.”
From 2009 to 2016, an average of 16 civil denaturalization cases were filed each year, Department of Justice data show. Last year, more than 25 cases were filed. Through mid-July of this year, the Justice Department has filed 20 more.
Separately, ICE has a pending budget request for $207.6 million to hire 300 agents to help root out citizenship fraud, as well as to “complement work site enforcement, visa overstay investigations, forensic document examination, outreach programs and other activities,” according to the agency.
The stage for increasing cases of denaturalization was set during the waning days of the Obama administration.
In September 2016, a report released by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security showed that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who either had criminal convictions or deportation orders against them had not been uploaded into a database used to check identities.
It turned out that because of incomplete fingerprint records, citizenship had been granted to at least 858 people who had been ordered deported or removed under another identity. USCIS began looking into cases.
John Sandweg, who headed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama, said that when it came to denaturalization, officers considered it on a case-by-case basis, “looking at the seriousness of the offense and then deciding if it made sense to dedicate the resources.”
“It was looked at more in that context — let’s look for serious felons who may have duped the system because we didn’t digitize fingerprints yet. Not so much … let’s just find people where there’s eligibilities to denaturalize because we want to try to reduce the ranks of naturalized U.S. citizens.”
Even during the communist scare of McCarthy era, citizenship revocation was so rare that often the cases made the news.
“The constant surveillance of communists in this country is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year job,” President Eisenhower declared in 1954, according to a Los Angeles Times article headlined: “Eisenhower cites U.S. war on reds.”
The government in 1981 took citizenship away from Feodor Fedorenko, who had worked as a guard at a Poland death camp, fled to the U.S. and illegally obtained citizenship by omitting references to his Nazi service. After he was denaturalized, he was deported to the Soviet Union and executed as a war criminal.
“It’s always taken expertise and finesse to bring those cases to court and successfully finish,” said Bruce J. Einhorn, former litigation chief for Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. “I think an office like this, in theory, could do a great deal of good, depending also on their exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”
Citizenship and Immigration Services began training officers last year on how to review cases and on the burden of proof necessary to revoke a person’s citizenship. About a dozen people are in the L.A. unit — a number expected to rise to about 85 with the addition of support, analyst and administrative staff.
The case of Baljinder Singh, of India, is among those the agency referred to Justice officials.
Nearly three decades ago, Singh arrived in San Francisco from India without any travel documents or proof of identity, claiming his name was Davinder Singh. He was placed in exclusion proceedings but failed to show up for an immigration court hearing and was ordered deported.
He later filed an asylum application under his true name but withdrew it after he married a U.S. citizen who filed a visa petition on his behalf, according to the Justice Department. He became a citizen on July 28, 2006.
In January, a federal district judge revoked Singh’s citizenship.
“I think that if individuals saw these cases and really took time to understand the length to which some of these individuals went to fraudulently obtain immigration status, they too would want us to pursue these cases,” Renaud said.
Einhorn said that what many view as the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda makes it hard to see denaturalization and the citizenship agency’s role in it in a neutral way.
“The immigration law and the civil rights community are understandably going to be very suspicious of an office like this in the age of Trump,” he said. “The question will be: Is this office simply trying to apply the law in a bad way or in an unsound way just to effectuate the extremist views of the president? Or is it in fact going to be a professional group of people who are going after serious offenders of the naturalization law?”
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I’ll admit to being a skeptic on this one. Since 1908, the policy of the USDOJ has been not to revoke citizenship based on fraud or illegality unless “substantial results are to be achieved thereby in the way of betterment of the citizenship of the country.” Indeed that venerable legal policy statement is one of the earliest rebuttals to Jeff Sessions’s bogus claimed — never back up by any cogent legal reasoning — that programs of “de-prioritizing” certain types of cases, like DACA, are “illegal.”
Until now, that sensible and prudent policy of erring on the side of the naturalized citizen in denaturalization has served the country well. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that this Administration is capable of discerning the “betterment of the citizenship” in any non-racially-discriminatory manner. Their disingenuous approach to prosecutorial discretion generally leads me to believe that this initiative also will be abused. To me, it looks like just another step in turning USCIS from the service agency it was supposed to be into another branch of ICE.
Sources: Stephen Miller pushing policy to make it harder for immigrants who received benefits to earn citizenship
By Tal Kopan, CNN
White House adviser Stephen Miller is pushing to expedite a policy that could penalize legal immigrants whose families receive public benefits and make it more difficult to get citizenship, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.
The White House has been reviewing the proposal since March at the Office of Management and Budget, which is the last stop for regulations before they are final. But concerns over potential lawsuits have delayed the final rule, and the draft has undergone numerous revisions, multiple sources say.
The crux of the proposal would penalize legal immigrants if they or their family members have used government benefits — defined widely in previous drafts of the policy.
The law has long allowed authorities to reject immigrants if they are likely to become a “public charge” — or dependent on government. But the draft rule in its recent forms would include programs as expansive as health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, as well as some forms of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The rule would not explicitly prohibit immigrants or their families from accepting benefits. Rather, it authorizes the officers who evaluate their applications for things like green cards and residency visas to count the use of these programs against applicants and gives them authority to deny visas on these grounds — even if the program was used by a family member.
Two non-administration sources close to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would publish and enforce the proposal, say that Miller has been unhappy by the delay and has pushed the agency to finish it quickly. The sources say Miller even instructed the agency to prioritize finalizing the rule over other efforts a few weeks ago.
Miller is an immigration hardliner within the administration, a veteran of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate office who has been at President Donald Trump’s side since the early stages of his presidential campaign.
But two other administration sources downplayed the idea of any instructions to defer other policies until it’s done, though they acknowledged Miller is keenly interested in the rule.
The White House and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Tal also highlights the continuing bias and political interference with the U.S. Immigration Courts under Sessions, spotlighting the continuing vocal public opposition of “Our Gang” of retired U.S. Judges, led in this case by Judge Jeffrey Chase, to the wanton destruction of Due Process in our Immigration Courts as well as the NAIJ, representing current Immigraton Judges (I am a member):
Immigrant ordered deported after Justice Department replaces judge
By Tal Kopan, CNN
Judge Steven Morley has overseen the immigration case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum for years. But last month when Castro-Tum was officially ordered deported, it wasn’t Morley at the bench.
Instead, the Justice Department sent an assistant chief immigration judge from Washington to replace Morley for exactly one hearing: the one that ended Castro-Tum’s bid to stay in the US.
The unusual use of a chief immigration judge from headquarters has raised concerns from retired immigration judges, lawyers and the union for active immigration judges. They say the move seems to jeopardize the right to a fair process in immigration courts.
It also highlights the unique structure of the immigration courts, which are entirely run by the Justice Department, and the ways that Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who serves as a one-man Supreme Court in these cases — has sought to test the limits of his authority over them.
The saga of Castro-Tum starts in 2014, when he crossed the border illegally as a 17-year-old. The Guatemalan teen was apprehended by the Border Patrol, which referred him to custody with the Health and Human Services Department as an unaccompanied minor. He was released to his brother-in-law a few months later and registered his brother-in-law’s address with the government. Multiple notices of court hearings were sent to that address, the government said.
But after the fifth time Castro-Tum failed to appear in court, immigration Judge Morley closed the case until the government provided him with evidence that Castro-Tum had ever lived at the address they were sending the notices to. The Board of Immigration Appeals sent the case back to Morley to reconsider with instructions to proceed even if Castro-Tum failed to show again. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Earlier this year, Sessions referred the case to himself and ruled that immigration judges across the board could no longer close immigration cases as they saw fit. The attorney general said immigration judges lack the authority to make such “administrative closures” of cases.
Sessions gave Morley 14 days to issue a new hearing notice to Castro-Tum. The Philadelphia-based immigration attorney Matthew Archambeault, who had begun following the case, appeared in court and volunteered to represent Castro-Tum, as well as to track him down. He asked the judge to postpone the case a bit longer to give him time to do that, which Morley granted.
Thanks, again, Tal, for your reporting and for all you do to expose the Administration’s daily scofflaw performances in mal-administering our immigration laws.
Folks, we are in a battle for the “hearts and minds of America.” Will we fulfill our destiny as a vibrant, diverse, creative “nation of immigrants?” Or, will be become a “shell of a nation” controlled by emotionally stunted, scared, White Nationalist bigots pursuing a philosophy of White racial favoritism, discrimination, persecution, and “beggar thy neighbor” economics.
The next election will be the test. Statistically, Trump’s White Nationalist Nation, pushing a platform of overt xenophobia and bigotry, does not represent the majority of Americans. But, they (with the help of their “fellow travelers” in the GOP) have seized effective control of our Government on many levels. Unless we dislodge them at the ballot box and take back America for the majority of us who neither are nor sympathize with White Nationalism, our nation may well be doomed to a gloomy future.
Get out the vote! Just say no to Trump, Sessions, Miller and their White Nationalist cronies!
Ruth Ellen Wasem The University of Texas at Austin
6 Journal on Migration and Human Security 97 (2018)
KEY QUOTE:
Even with fragmented governance and strained resources, the US immigration system has enjoyed successes. Each year, approximately one million foreign nationals legally become permanent residents in the United States. In FY 2015 and FY 2016, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued over 10 million visas each year to foreign nationals coming to the United States as nonimmigrants (i.e., for a temporary purpose and a temporary period of time) and over half a million visas to LPRs (Bureau of Consular Affairs 2017). CBP admitted almost 77 million foreign nationals as nonimmigrant admissions to the United States in FY 2015 (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). That year, DOL processed 711,820 employer applications for 1,580,778 positions for temporary and permanent labor certifications Immigration Governance for the Twenty-First Century 117 (Office of Foreign Labor Certification 2016). In FY 2015, there were 730,259 LPRs who became US citizens. That same year, the United States admitted 69,920 refugees, and USCIS approved 26,124 asylees. DHS apprehended 462,388 foreign nationals and deported 444,431 foreign nationals in FY 2015. Another 253,509 foreign nationals were denied entry, and 129,122 foreign nationals returned home without a formal order of removal (Office of Immigration Statistics 2016). In FY 2016, EOIR judges received 328,122 cases and completed 273,390, including those of 8,726 foreign nationals who were granted asylum (EOIR 2017). Considerable credit is due to the people carrying out immigration-related responsibilities across the federal government.
Immigration is not a program to be administered; rather, it is a phenomenon to be managed. While there are limits to how much one government can control migration, the building blocks in Figure 3 offer a reasonable set of priorities. Effective immigration governance, coupled with laws and policies that incorporate the national interests, is key to maintaining a robust sovereign nation.
Get the entire article, which I highly recommend, at this link:
Words of wisdom, to be sure. If only our policy makers had the same degree of understanding.
Today, we operate on an illusion that a few folks sitting in Washington, D.C. can “pull all the strings” to seal borders, override market forces, ignore international conditions and agreements, change behavior in foreign countries, and dominate forces of human migration that have been at work since before all of us were born and will continue long after we’re all gone. It’s a toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance that will leave immigration and refugee policy in tatters for years to come.
I can only hope that there are those out there in the upcoming generations who will bring to the immigration phenomenon practical scholarship, reason, humanity, fairness, and better ideas on management of our laws for the benefit of our country and humanity as a whole.
“US Citizenship and Immigration Services isn’t for immigrants anymore.
That’s not an exaggeration. USCIS, the federal agency responsible for issuing visas and green cards and for naturalizing immigrants as US citizens, has unveiled a new mission statement that strips out all references to immigrants themselves — including taking out a line that called the US a “nation of immigrants.” And in an email to agency staff Thursday, as first reported by the Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, director L. Francis Cissna bragged about the change — saying that USCIS wasn’t supposed to help immigrants and the US citizens seeking to sponsor them, but rather “the American people.”
The new mission statement, and Cissna’s justification, downplays the agency’s commitment to helping immigrants become American citizens and plays up the idea that US citizens attempting to bring their family members to the US don’t count as real Americans whose interests deserve to be protected.
USCIS’s new mission statement doesn’t just reflect the Trump administration’s hawkishness toward legal as well as unauthorized immigration. It encourages the notion that Americanness is a matter of blood and soil, of birth and descent, rather than an idea that anyone can be proud of regardless of where they were born.
Taking “citizenship” out of the mission of Citizenship and Immigration Services
The changes to the USCIS mission statement don’t change the work the agency actually does. But they make a symbolic statement that the Trump administration sees that work differently not just from how the Obama administration did, but from our traditional understanding of what Americanness means.
It’s not just the removal of the “nation of immigrants” line. The new mission statement removes all references to citizenship — instead of “immigration and citizenship benefits,” USCIS now just provides “immigration benefits,” and “promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship” is kicked out of the mission entirely.
At the same time as the agency is deemphasizing the part of its job that involves turning immigrants into citizens, its new mission implies that the two groups — immigrants and Americans — are naturally in conflict:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.
Cissna’s email also told USCIS staff that they’re not supposed to call applicants “customers” anymore because their real customers aren’t immigrants — they’re the American people:
Referring to applicants and petitioners for immigration benefits, and the beneficiaries of such applications and petitions, as ‘customers’ promotes an institutional culture that emphasizes the ultimate satisfaction of applicants and petitioners, rather than the correct adjudication of such applications and petitions according to the law. […] Use of the term leads to the erroneous belief that applicants and petitioners, rather than the American people, are whom we ultimately serve.” [emphasis added]
It’s an odd statement to make. For one thing, USCIS is the rare federal agency that isn’t primarily funded through taxes — most of the money to run the agency comes from application fees. Immigrants applying for visas, green cards, and citizenship — and the US citizens and companies that have to sponsor some of those applications — are paying USCIS for the services they provide. By a commonsense definition, that’s what a customer is.
But what’s even more jarring than the redefinition of “customer” is the definition of “American.” Cissna’s statement strongly implies that “applicants and petitioners” don’t count as part of the “American people.” That might make sense if he were talking just about people newly coming to the US, or even if he were distinguishing “Americans” from noncitizens. But he’s not.
The “applicants” Cissna refers to include immigrants who are applying for US citizenship — the part of USCIS’s function that got stripped out of the mission statement. Not only does the new mission statement suggest that helping immigrants become Americans is no longer part of USCIS’ job, but by distinguishing “applicants” from “the American people,” it suggests that they can’t.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of petitioners for immigrants are US citizens petitioning for family members (or American businesses petitioning for employees). Those citizens may have been born abroad, but they’ve naturalized. They are as American as anyone else.
Does the Trump administration believe immigrants can integrate?
USCIS tends to be the most obscure of the Department of Homeland Security’s three immigration agencies, precisely because it’s the one that doesn’t deal with immigration enforcement (Customs and Border Protection addresses border enforcement; Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes care of interior enforcement). But immigrant rights advocates have been worried about the agency.
Cissna worked for Senate Judiciary Committee Chair (and immigration hawk) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) before being appointed to USCIS. The agency’s ombudsman office, which is supposed to provide transparency to the people who used to be called “customers,” is headed by Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform — a group whose mission includes reducing legal immigration to the US.
There are already indications that the new leadership is encouraging applications to be processed more slowly and with more scrutiny. In winding down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, they were more aggressive than Trump’s statements implied. At the same time, there’s been an apparent slowdown in the processing of naturalization applications and of work permits for some categories of immigrants.
By overhauling the mission statement, it’s clear that the new leadership wants to be noticed.”
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The White Nationalist attack on America continues. At least they don’t make any secret about their xenophobia and disdain for immigrants, their rights, and their advocates.
It’s “war.” That’s why we need the “New Due Process Army!”
