United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) – Page 36

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Trump Looking For Ways To Skirt Constitution, Appointments Statute To Make Ineligible White Nationalist Racist “Cooch Cooch” Acting Head Of DHS!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dhs-secretary-job-loophole-trump_n_5db91056e4b066da5528c76a

Dominique Mosbergen reports for HuffPost:

The White House is reportedly exploring a legal loophole that would allow President Donald Trump to pick “whomever he wants” to fill the top job at the Department of Homeland Security, potentially paving the way for a hardliner who’s vigorously defended Trump’s immigration agenda to lead the department.

The president has been searching for someone to take the reins at DHS since the department’s Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan announced his resignation earlier this month after just six months on the job.

Though McAleenan — the fourth DHS chief since Trump took office — implemented some of the president’s more extreme immigration policies and saw a drop in border crossings during his tenure, the official’s relationship with the White House was reportedly rocky from the get-go.

An “isolated” McAleenan admitted to The Washington Post in a recent interview that he’d struggled to control the department, which he viewed as a neutral law enforcement agency, and prevent it from being used as a partisan tool.

With McAleenan out, Trump was expected to tap a replacement whose views were more aligned with his own. The New York Times first reported on Tuesday that the White House was mulling a legal loophole so the president could potentially do just that. The Wall Street Journal corroborated the news.

Trump’s two favored picks for the top DHS job are reportedly Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Both officials, who were nominated to their roles by Trump earlier this year, have publicly defended and championed the president’s hardline immigration agenda.

But according to earlier reports by the Wall Street Journal and Politico, Trump was recently informed by his staff that neither Cuccinelli nor Morgan would be eligible for the role under a federal statute that dictates who can fill cabinet-level positions.

Under the federal Vacancies Act, acting officials taking on cabinet-level jobs must either be next in the line of succession, be confirmed by the Senate or have served for at least 90 days in the past year under the last Senate-confirmed homeland security chief, who in this case is Kirstjen Nielsen.

Nielsen resigned in April.

Neither Cuccinelli, who Politico reported was a favorite of immigration hawks inside the administration, nor Morgan would fulfill the requirements of the statute, Sean Doocey, head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, reportedly told Trump.

It’s believed that both men would face a difficult path to Senate confirmation. Cuccinelli, for one, has made many enemies in the Senate, having repeatedly clashed with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other incumbent Republicans as president of the anti-establishment Senate Conservatives Fund.

McConnell has previously expressed his “lack of enthusiasm” at the prospect of Cuccinelli’s elevation to head the DHS.

According to the Times, however, the White House is considering a loophole that would allow Trump to bypass the Vacancies Act and potentially pick Cuccinelli or Morgan for the job anyway.

“Under this route, the White House would tap someone to be the assistant secretary of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, which is vacant, and then elevate that person to be the acting secretary of homeland security,” the Times said, citing an administration official familiar with the deliberations.

“The chief of that office is known as an ‘inferior officer,’ and under an exception in the laws governing appointments, such officials can be appointed to acting positions with the sole approval of the president,” the paper continued.

The Journal elaborated on how this plan would work.

Under a 2017 law, the DHS secretary has the authority to change the department’s line of succession beyond its top three positions, which all require Senate confirmation, the paper said. Those top three posts, however, have been vacant for months.

The White House has therefore considered asking McAleenan to change the line of succession by elevating the assistant secretary of the obscure CWMD office to the number four position, the Journal reported. Since Trump can appoint anyone to the CWMD role without the need of Senate approval, whoever is tapped for the job could then be next in the line of succession for the top DHS role.

“And then the Asst Sec for CWMD can serve … indefinitely as acting DHS Sec,” said Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford law professor who specializes in administrative law and federal bureaucracy, in a Tuesday night Twitter thread.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Dominique’s story of massive Administration corruption, dishonesty, and clear abuse of public funds (we’re paying Trump and his gang of scofflaw thugs to look for ways around our Constitution and the statutes enacted by Congress!) at the link.

- Remember, folks, these are the are the same corrupt officials who keep falsely referring to legitimate asylum and refugee laws as “loopholes.”
- So, given that Trump is thumbing his nose at Mitch McConnell, why doesn’t Congress step in and put an end to this illegal nonsense once and for all?
- Note that “Big Mac With Lies” is being asked to perform yet one final act of sleazy subservience to knowingly undermine the rule of law on his way out. Will he go down for Trump one final time? He claims he has “no plans to do so.” But, remember, “Big Mac” lies!
- The real problem here actually is the Supremes, who in the “Travel Ban Case” signaled that at they had no intention of requiring Trump to operate within the Constitution. Trump has taken this statement of judicial task avoidance to heart and used it to run over the rights of all Americans (not just migrants and asylum seekers).
- Think how things might be different if right off the bat the Supremes had unanimously applied the Constitution to stop Trump’s misdeeds and had also “just said no” to GOP gerrymandering which threatens our democracy. That’s what “profiles in judicial courage” might have looked like.

PWS

10-31-19

HOW TRUMP, COMPLICIT COURTS, FECKLESS CONGRESS, AND DHS ARE KILLING MORE CHILDREN AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER WHILE HELPING HUMAN SMUGGLERS STRIKE IT RICH – “Malicious Incompetence” Fueled By Judicial Dereliction Of Duty & Congressional Malpractice Is A Boon to The Bad Guys! – “Most of all, he sees no end to the ways he can make profits off the border crackdown. He makes a joke out of it.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-19/a-smuggler-describes-how-children-die-and-he-gets-rich-on-border

Nacha Cattan reports for Bloomberg News:

Children Die at Record Speed on U.S. Border While Coyotes Get Rich

Deaths of women and children trying to cross into U.S. set record in first nine months of the year, UN research project finds

By

Nacha Cattan

October 19, 2019, 8:00 AM EDT

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Roberto the coyote can see a stretch of border fence from his ranch in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, about a mile south of El Paso. Smuggling drugs and people to “el otro lado,” the other side, has been his life’s work.

There’s always a way, he says, no matter how hard U.S. President Donald Trump tries to stop the flow. But this year’s crackdown has made it a tougher proposition. A deadlier one, too—especially for women and children, who are increasingly dying in the attempt.

Not much surprises Roberto, who asks not to be identified by his surname because he engages in illegal activity. Sitting on a creaky metal chair, shaded by quince trees and speaking above the din from a gaggle of fighting roosters, the 65-year-old grabs a twig and scratches lines in the sand to show how he stays a step ahead of U.S. and Mexican security forces.

Here’s a gap in the fence that migrants can dash through—onto land owned by American ranchers in his pay. There’s a spot U.S. patrols often pass, so he’s hiring more people to keep watch and cover any footprints with leaf-blowers.

Coyote Roberto, on Aug. 28.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Roberto says he was taken aback in July this year, when he was approached for the first time by parents with young children. For coyotes, as the people-smugglers are known in Mexico, that wasn’t the typical customer profile. Roberto asked around among his peers. “They were also receiving a lot of families,” he says. “Many, many families are crossing over.”

That helps explain one of the grimmer statistics to emerge from all the turmoil on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Even more than usual, the 2,000-mile frontier has turned into a kind of tectonic fault line this year. Poverty and violence—and the pull of the world’s richest economy—are driving people north. At the border, they’re met by a new regime of tightened security and laws, imposed by Trump in tandem with his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO.

Some give up and go home; some wait and hope—and some try evermore dangerous ways to get through.

Nineteen children died during attempted crossings in the first nine months of 2019, by drowning, dehydration or illness, according to the UN’s “Missing Migrants” research project. That’s up from four reported through September 2018 and by far the most since the project began gathering data in 2014, when two died that entire year. Women are dying in greater numbers, too—44 in the year through September, versus 14 last year.

A 9 month-old baby sleeps inside El Buen Pastor migrant shelter, on Aug. 29. The baby had been in and out of hospitals due to respiratory illnesses during his shelter stay.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Many of those families are fleeing crime epidemics in Central America, as well as economic shocks. Prices of coffee—a key export—in the region plunged this year to the lowest in more than a decade, crushing farmers.

Making matters worse, climate change will produce more frequent crop failures for those growers that will, in turn, drive more migration, said Eleanor Paynter, a fellow at Ohio State University. “Asylum law does not currently recognize climate refugees,” she said, “but in the coming years we will see more and more.”

The demand side is equally fluid. When the Great Recession hit in 2007, a slumping U.S. economy led to a sharp drop in arrivals from Mexico and Central America. Today, the reverse is true: Record-low unemployment in the U.S. is attracting huge numbers from Central America.

Recession Factor

The U.S. economy’s slump a decade ago coincided with a sharp drop in migrant arrivals from Central America

Source: Estimates by Stephanie Leutert, director of Mexico Security Institute at University of Texas, based on model created for Lawfare blog

But none of those factors fully explains why so many families are now willing to take such great risks. To understand that, it’s necessary to go back to the birth of the “Remain in Mexico” policy in January, when new U.S. rules made it much harder to seek asylum on arrival—and its escalation in June, when Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican goods, and AMLO agreed to deploy 26,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The crackdown was aimed at Central Americans—mostly from such poor, violent countries as El Salvador and Honduras—who’d been entering the U.S. through Mexico in growing numbers. Many would cross the border, turn themselves in and apply for asylum, then wait in the U.S. for a court hearing. That route was especially favored by migrants with young children, who were likely to be released from detention faster.

Under the new policy, they were sent back to Mexico by the tens of thousands and required to wait in dangerous border towns for a court date. They might wait in shelters for months for their number to be called, with only 10 or 20 families being interviewed each day. Word was getting back that applications weren’t being approved, anyway.

A white cross marks the death of a person near the border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

That pushed thousands of families into making a tough decision. Juan Fierro, who runs the El Buen Pastor shelter for migrants in Ciudad Juarez, reckons that about 10% of the Central Americans who’ve stayed with him ended up going back home. In Tijuana, a border town hundreds of miles west, Jose Maria Garcia Lara—who also runs a shelter—says some 30% of families instead headed for the mountains outside the city on their way to the U.S. “They’re trying to cross,” he says, “in order to disappear.”

The family that approached Roberto in Ciudad Juarez wanted to take a less physically dangerous route: across the bridge into El Paso.

Roberto has infrastructure in place for both options. He says his people can run a pole across the Rio Grande when the river’s too high, and they have cameras on the bridge to spot when a guard’s back is turned. He has a sliding price scale, charging $7,500 for children and an extra $1,000 for Central Americans—fresh proof of studies that have shown smugglers’ prices rise with tighter border controls. “They pay a bundle to get their kids across,” he says. “Why don’t they just open a small grocery with that money?”

Typically, migrants don’t come from the very poorest communities in their home countries, where people struggle to cover such coyote costs, or from the middle class. Rather, they represent a range from $5,000 to $10,000 per capita in 2009 dollars, according to Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington. This happens to be the level that the economies of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have reached.

A mother and her 5-month-old baby has lived in a migrant shelter since July, waiting for their November court date, on Aug. 29.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez

For the family going across the bridge into El Paso, Roberto wanted to send the parents and children separately, to attract less attention. Ideally, the kids would be asleep, making the guards less likely to stop the car and ask questions. But that raised another problem. He resolved it by arranging for a woman on his team to visit the family and spend three days playing with the children. That way, they’d be used to her and wouldn’t cry out if they woke up while she was taking them across.

Roberto says the family made it safely into the U.S. with their false IDs, a claim that couldn’t be confirmed. He earned about $35,000 from the family, and soon after had another three children with their parents seek passage. “They want to cross, no matter what,” he says. “I don’t know where the idea comes from that you can stop this.”

But people are being stopped and turned back, and the number of migrants caught crossing the U.S. border has plunged from its peak in May. That has allowed Trump to portray the new policy as a success. (Mexican officials tend to agree, though the Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Yet it’s not that simple. Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, said the flow northward initially surged because Trump threatened to close the border, setting off a wave of migrant caravans and smuggling activity. Arrests rose 90% through September from a year earlier, but they’re now at the same levels they were before the surge.

Enrique Garcia was one of those arrested. A 36-year-old from Suchitepequez in Guatemala, he was struggling to feed his three children on the $150 a month he earned as a janitor. So he pawned a $17,000 plot of land to a coyote in exchange for passage to the U.S. for him and his son.

They slipped into Mexico in August on a boarded-up cattle truck, with eight other adults and children, and drove the length of the country, to Juarez. The coyotes dropped them by car at the nearby crossing point called Palomas, where they literally ran for it.

After 45 minutes in the summer heat, Garcia was getting worried about his son, who was falling behind and calling out for water. But they made it past the Mexican National Guard and gave themselves up to a U.S. border patrol, pleading to be allowed to stay. Instead, they were sent back to Mexico and given a January court date.

Children play outside a migrant shelter while a women hand washes clothing in a sink.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

Garcia, who recounted the story from a bunk bed in a Juarez shelter, said he was devastated. He couldn’t figure out what to do for five months in Mexico, with no prospect of work. His coyotes had managed to reestablish contact with the group, and most of them—with children in tow—had decided to try again. This time, they wouldn’t be relying on the asylum process. They’d try to make it past the border patrols and vanish into the U.S.

But Garcia decided he’d already put his son’s life at risk once, and wouldn’t do it again. He scrounged $250 to take the boy home to Guatemala. Then, he said, he’d head back up to the border alone. He wouldn’t need to pay the coyotes again. They’d given him a special offer when he signed away his land rights—two crossing attempts for the price of one.

Researchers say there’s a more effective deterrent to such schemes: opening more lawful channels. Clemens, at the Center for Global Development, noted that illegal immigration from Mexico dropped in recent years after U.S. authorities increased the supply of H-2 visas for temporary work, almost all of them going to Mexicans—a trend that’s continued under Trump.

The current debate in Washington assumes that “hardcore enforcement and security assistance in Central America will be enough, without any kind of expansion of lawful channels,” Clemens said. “That flies in the face of the lessons of history.”

The Legal Route

Illegal crossings by Mexicans have plunged. They’re now much more likely to enter the U.S. with temporary H-2 work visas

Source: Calculations by Cato Institute’s David Bier based on DHS, State Dept data

A hard-security-only approach deters some migrants, while channeling others into riskier routes where they’re more likely to die. That’s what happened after Europe’s crackdown on migration from across the Mediterranean, according to Paynter at Ohio State, who’s studied data from the UN’s “Missing Migrants” project. In 2019, “even though the total number of attempted crossings is lower, the rate of death is three times what it was,” she said.

A child plays outside a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juarez.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

As for Roberto, he expresses sadness at the children who’ve died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. He claims he would’ve tried to help them, even if they couldn’t pay.

Most of all, he sees no end to the ways he can make profits off the border crackdown. He makes a joke out of it.

“I’m hearing Trump wants to throw crocodiles in the river,” he says. “Guess what will happen? We’ll eat them.” And then: “Their skin is expensive. We’ll start a whole new business. It’ll bring in money, because we’ll make boots, belts and wallets. We’ll look real handsome.”

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

The “Trump Immigration Kakistocracy” is as evil and immoral as it is stupid and incompetent.

But, that shouldn’t lessen the responsibility of complicit Article III Appellate Judges (including the Supremes) and a sleazy and immoral GOP Senate who are failing to stand up for our Constitution, the rule of law, and human rights. They should not be allowed to escape accountability for their gross derelictions of duty which are killing kids with regularity and unconscionably abusing vulnerable asylum seekers on a daily basis.

America can’t afford to be governed by idiots abetted by the spineless. Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight to save our country, our Constitution, and humanity from evil, incompetence, and disgusting complicity.

PWS

10-31-19

INSIDE TRUMP’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” THERE IS NEITHER DUE PROCESS NOR JUSTICE! – So, What Happened To The Legislative & Judicial Branches Who Are Supposed To Protect Against Such Outrageous Executive Overreach? — “Whatever we call them, America’s immigration prisons are antithetical to the free society we claim to be. We must do all we can to dismantle this system.”

https://apple.news/AsyQuZEMeR0mXWpvWd19-Mg

By Naureen Shah:

opinion

At detention facilities, legal rights ‘in name only’

Whether we call them ‘concentration camps’ or detention centers, the lack of justice for those seeking refuge must end.

7:42 pm EDT Oct. 25, 2019

As President Donald Trump prepares to pick a new secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is preparing to appear in a Brooklyn court. She is being sued for blocking a man on Twitter who criticized her for calling immigration detention sites “concentration camps.” Her opponents seized on the comment. One of their talking points: America’s hardworking immigration officers should not be equated with Nazis.

To some extent, I can understand their perspective.

I recently visited four Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention sites across the country. I met many of their workers. They carried clear plastic backpacks and lunchboxes as they filed through security in the morning, looking weary and bored. As I left each site, some asked me whether I had had a “nice visit” and wished me safe travels.

These workers don’t bring to mind cinematic villains. Yet they are part of a system that, no matter its appearances, is inflicting the horror of trapping people inside.

I saw it in the eyes of the people I interviewed in detention. A 28-year-old Cuban woman told me about spending five days sleeping on the ground in an outdoor cage run by Border Patrol, the “perrera” — a place for dogs. That was followed by 17 days in the “hielera,” a frigid room. She had been denied a shower the entire time.

She recounted this months later, when I met her at an ICE detention site in Adams County, Mississippi. She had not seen or talked to her husband for months, since U.S. authorities separated and detained them. She said that last summer, an asylum officer interviewed her and determined that her fear of persecution if she returned to Cuba was credible — the first step in an asylum case. But she said she had never seen a judge, had no court date, no lawyer, no ICE officer assigned to her. She was alone and trapped: She had no idea of what would happen to her next, how to move her asylum case forward and whether she would ever be released.

COLUMN: In the hands of police, facial recognition software risks violating civil liberties

Adams County is part of the immigration detention boom. Detention levels have skyrocketed to a record high of about 50,000 people a day, at an annual cost of more than $2 billion. Counties are grabbing at detention contracts that provide jobs, although many will be filled by out-of-town residents. New detention sites are opening in the Deep South — hours from urban areas with networks of pro bono or low-cost attorneys. Even in big cities, the number of people detained far outpaces the number of attorneys available to help them. The result is that these immigration jails are effectively legal black holes, where legal rights often exist in name only.

“You come to this place and you can never win,” another woman told me. She had spent three months in an ICE detention center near Miami, separated from her then 5-month-old baby. Her husband, a U.S. citizen, was driving her to Walmart when local police questioned them during a random traffic stop. She was not accused of a crime, and she was in the process of petitioning for residency based on her marriage to a citizen. But police took her to a local jail and held her for ICE.

COLUMN: After terrifying ICE raid, Mississippi is still fighting back

“I haven’t seen my baby in three months,” she said, and asked me what would happen to her.

Without a lawyer, she is likely to remain in detention for months or years — and ultimately be deported away from her husband and child. Just 3% of detained individuals without a lawyer succeeded in their cases, compared with 74% of nondetained and represented individuals who won in theirs, according to a study that focused on New York immigration cases. For asylum-seekers, the stakes are often life or death.

Yet immigrants have been denied the right to a government-appointed lawyer in their deportation proceedings. I met many who didn’t have enough money to make a phone call from prison, let alone pay a lawyer. Even those who could afford it struggled to find one, since they are stuck on the inside without access to Google, email or a cellphone.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Our immigration system is set up for them to fail, with Kafka-esque limits on their ability to apply for legal relief and appeal to federal courts. Navigating this complex and unforgiving set of legal rules is hard for lawyers, let alone for detained individuals. Some are offered release on bond, but in unaffordable amounts like $25,000.

Many people I met had never seen a judge, several months into their detention. They had no idea how or when they might ever be free. They were confused, scared and, in some cases, suicidal. A woman from Cameroon who fled its ongoing civil war after her father was murdered told me she prayed that God would provide her a way out.

We have an obligation to respond.

Local governments should end ICE detention contracts, if they exist, and prohibit new ones. Cities and states should robustly fund free legal service providers and bond funds. Major law firms should send their lawyers to the Deep South to work with local pro bono providers to address the drastic shortfalls in legal services. Community groups should lobby Congress to cut funding for detention and pass comprehensive reform legislation like the Dignity For Detained Immigrants Act.

Trump’s new Homeland Security secretary is likely to ramp up immigration detention to even higher levels, using the specter of prison to deter people from coming here and the reality of it to punish those who do. We cannot afford to be divided by semantics.

Whatever we call them, America’s immigration prisons are antithetical to the free society we claim to be. We must do all we can to dismantle this system.

Naureen Shah is the senior advocacy and policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, working on immigrant rights.

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7:42 pm EDT Oct. 25, 2019

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

DHS’s “New American Gulag” – the “brainchild” of Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon – is an affront to our Constitution, the rule of law, and human decency. Remember that the next time Trump’s “Gulag Enablers” like Kelly, Nielsen, Sessions, and Barr try to “reinvent themselves” as something other than the sleazy human rights violators they are and will always remain.

PWS

10-29-19

IN SUDDEN REVERSAL, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WILL NOW EXTEND TPS FOR SALVADORANS — Likely A “Payoff” For Corrupt “Safe Third Country” Agreement With El Salvador!

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-28/trump-administration-extends-tps-for-salvadorans-allowing-thousands-to-stay-in-u-s

Molly O’Toole & Tracy Wilkinson report for the LA Times:

The Trump administration on Monday extended Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Salvadorans in the United States, granting them reprieve from removal to El Salvador.

Administration officials had insisted for weeks that the continuance of TPS was not on the table in exchange for the resumption of aid to the small Central American country, or the signing of a recent agreement on asylum seekers. An estimated 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have TPS, making them the largest single group under the program. Many live in Los Angeles.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a millionaire millennial who has had warm words for President Trump and his officials, touted the move in a Twitter announcement on Monday morning as a victory for his newly elected administration.

“They said it was impossible,” Bukele said. “That the Salvadoran government couldn’t do anything. … But we knew that our allies would not abandon us.”

A U.S. District Court in Northern California last October blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating TPS for El Salvador and a handful of other countries. Administration officials have sought to dismantle the program as part of their wider efforts to reduce immigration. TPS offers recipients protection from removal and the right to work legally in the U.S.

The announcement also puts the U.S. in the difficult position of extending a program intended for people fleeing natural disasters or civil unrest, while at the same time effectively designating El Salvador a safe country for asylum seekers. The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Officials have offered little detail of the U.S. asylum agreement with El Salvador, which has yet to take effect. The deal was among several extensively negotiated with so-called Northern Triangle countries by outgoing acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who is due to step down this week.

Central America’s Northern Triangle is an impoverished and violence-ridden region that accounts for the majority of migrants now fleeing to the United States.

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

In addition to helping the 200,000 mostly productive long-term Salvadoran TPS residents of the U.S. who lack formal immigration status, the extension benefits both countries. The TPS Salvadorans and their families have been living in fear and uncertainty ever since the Trump Administration announced an intent to terminate Salvadoran TPS (which, naturally, irrationally contravened the advice of its own professional staff and almost all outside experts and appeared to be against the wishes fo the Salvadoran Government).

El Salvador avoids the potential problem of having to resettle several hundred thousand individuals whose homes, family ties, and futures are in the U.S. They also will be able to continue to benefit from the “remissions” that many of these individuals send to family in El Salvador, a significant factor in the Salvadoran economy.

At the same time, the “deal” costs Trump nothing, except for probably some “pushback” from his most ardent White Nationalist supporters.

First, the Administration already was enjoined from terminating the Salvadoran TPS program. Second, with a 1.3 million case largely self-created backlog in the Immigration Courts, the Administration wouldn’t have been able to remove most of the 200,000 individuals at any time in the near future. Third, TPS renewals will likely generate a profit for USCIS for the fees charged for extending work authorizations.

Fourth, and rather ironically, the Salvadorans, along with most of the other 10-11 million so-called undocumented residents of the U.S., are among the “drivers” of U.S. economic prosperity, which is about the only thing propping Trump up these days. Despite the Trump Administration’s string of shamelessly false narratives about the “damage” caused by undocumented workers, their mass removal would undoubtedly “tank” the U.S. economy, at least in the short run.

Of course the “losers” in this are the refugees who continue to pour out of El Salvador and the other essentially “failed states” of the Northern Triangle. They face not only truncation of their legal right to apply for asylum in the United States, but also potential death or mayhem upon forced return or deportation to El Salvador as the result of the bogus “Safe Third Agreement” and equally bogus new requirements that asylum seekers apply in the first country they reach. (El Salvador doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system and is anything but “safe.”)

Perhaps we’ll eventually find out that El Salvador also had to agree to investigate the Biden family as a price for the extension.

PWS

10-29-19

LET THE IMMIGRATION JUDGES SPEAK! — What Kind Of “Court System” Muzzles Judges, Shuns Educational Dialogue?

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/10/immigration-law-professors-let-immigration-judges-speak.html

Adjunct Professor Carrie L. Rosenbaum
Golden Gate Law

Professor Maureen Sweeney
U. of Maryland Law

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Immigration Law Professors: Let Immigration Judges Speak!

By Immigration Prof

Share

Four immigration law professors, Laila L. Hlass, Elora Mukherjee, Carrie L. Rosenbaum, and Maureen Sweeney on Slate criticize the Trump administration for barring immigration judges, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys, and asylum officers from talking to classes about immigration law and policy.Such guest lectures were common in the recent past. However,

“things have recently changed. When we’ve asked judges, ICE attorneys, and asylum officers to visit our classes, almost all have declined. They’ve told us they can’t speak with our classes even on their days off, even in their personal capacities, without prior clearance and approval from high-level supervisors—approval that is increasingly difficult to obtain. This silencing of line officers is a marked departure from past years. It is taking place across the country, and it is no coincidence. The administration has denied these civil servants permission to speak publicly. According to former immigration judge Jeffrey Chase, immigration judges `are not even allowed to speak at conferences or law schools, because the administration does not consider them qualified to speak on behalf of the agency or its policies.’”

KJ

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

Obviously, this is an “agency,” not a “court,” at war with the public it supposedly serves.

Somewhat “below the radar screen” in the Administration’s all-out White Nationalist attack on migrants is the assault on those who represent them. Studies show that represented individuals both show up for their hearings at an exceptionally high rate and succeed in their cases at a rate that is multiples of unrepresented individuals. Therefore, some type of “universal representation program” utilizing a combination of public and private sector funding, would be the “first logical step“ in solving the Due Process and operational crises in our Immigration Courts. And, it wouldn’t cost any more than the expensive, inhumane, often illegal, and frequently ineffective “enforcement only gimmicks” being employed against migrants, and often their attorneys, by this Administration.

PWS

10-28-19

FRESH CLAIMS OF CHILD ABUSE BY DHS IN YOUR “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” – Ever Wonder Why YOUR Tax Dollars Are Being Used To Fund What Medical Professionals Say Is An Inherently Abusive & Potentially Permanently Damaging “Kiddie Gulag?” – And, In Cases Like This, The Alleged Abuse Is Actually Individualized & Beyond the “Regular Damage” Intentionally Inflicted By The Trump DHS, Abetted By Complicit Courts!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/25/texas-immigration-detention-guard-assault-child-claims?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

A private prison guard physically assaulted a five-year-old boy at an immigration detention center in Texas, according to a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

She raised her niece like a daughter. Then the US government separated them at the border

Read more

Advocates for the boy and his mother expect the family to be deported on Friday and asked the US government to halt the deportation to investigate the alleged assault. The advocates also said the family, who are anonymous for safety reasons, face imminent harm or death in their home country of Honduras.

The alleged assault occurred in late September, when the boy was playing with a guard employed by the private prison company CoreCivic who had played with the boy before.

The five-year-old tried to give the guard a high-five, but accidentally hit him instead, angering the guard, according to a complaint seen by the Guardian. The guard then allegedly grabbed the boy’s wrist “very hard” and would not let go.

“The boy’s mother told the guard to let go and tried to pull her son’s hand away, but the guard kept holding on,” according to the complaint. “He finally released the boy and threatened to punish him if he hit him again.”

The complaint said the boy’s hand was swollen and bruised and he was treated with pain medication and ice at the South Texas family residential center in Dilley, in a remote part of the state about 100 miles from the US-Mexico border.

The Dilley detention center has been controversial since it opened in 2014. Dilley can hold 2,400 people, the most of any family detention center in the country, and in March 2019 held at least 15 babies under one year old.

“Since the assault, the boy is afraid of male officials at the jail, goes to the bathroom in his pants, bites his nails until they bleed, and does not want to play, sleep, eat, or bathe,” the complaint said.

The Guardian contacted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the homeland security agency which oversees immigration detention, and CoreCivic for comment, but they had not provided a response at the time of publication.

Katy Murdza, advocacy manager for the Dilley Pro Bono Project, which sends volunteers into the Dilley detention center to help families, met with the mother on Wednesday.

Murdza said the mother is fearful of her imminent deportation and is upset about what happened to her son because she had little power to protect him.

“She was unable to prevent someone from hurting her child and while she has tried to report it, she hasn’t received any information on what the results are, so she still does not have control of whether the detention center let that staff member back in,” Murdza said.

“When people are detained and it’s hidden from the public, these sorts of things happen and there are probably many other cases that we have never learned about that could be similar to this,” Murdza added.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said in March 2017 that no migrant child in the custody of their parent should ever be detained because the conditions could harm or retraumatize them.

The US government can release asylum-seeking families in the US while they wait for their cases to be heard in court, but Donald Trump’s administration favors expanding detention and has tried to extend how long children can be held in detention centers.

Katie Shepherd, national advocacy counsel with the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Justice Campaign, filed the complaint on Thursday with the DHS watchdog, the office of the inspector general, and with its office for civil rights and civil liberties.

“The government has a long history demonstrating it’s not capable of holding people in their custody responsibly and certainly not children who require special protections and safeguards,” Shepherd said. “They require a different environment, not one where guards are going to be physically abusing them.”

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

Ever wonder how things might be different if Article III Judges’ children and grandchildren were being treated this way?

Please think about situations like this the next time you hear sleazy folks like Kelly, Nielsen, or “Big Mac With Lies,”and other former “Trump toadies” tout their “high-level executive experience” and how “proud” they were of their law enforcement initiatives at DHS and other parts of the Trump kakistocracy! What’s the relationship between abusing children and real law enforcement or protecting our national security? None!

Outrageously, these former Trump human rights abusers not only have escaped legal and moral accountability for their knowing and intentional human rights abuses, but they have the audacity to publicly attempt to “leverage” their experience as abusers into “big bucks gigs” in the private sector. How disgusting can it get.

Here’s Professor (and ImmigrationProf Blog guru) Bill O. Hing’s “spot on” description of the “despicable John Kelly:”

Despicable John Kelly – Profits from Detention of Children

By Immigration Prof

Share

I was recently reminded of how John Kelly, former DHS Secretary and former White House Chief of Staff, is now on the board of Caliburn International: the conglomerate that runs detention facilities for migrant children. He is despicable. This was reported in May:

Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly can now count on a second line of income.

In addition to his attempt at scoring paid speaking gigs, Kelly has now joined the board of Caliburn International, the company has confirmed to CBS News. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates four massive for-profit shelters that have government contracts to house unaccompanied migrant children.

Kelly’s new job first became apparent when protesters gathered outside Comprehensive Health Services’ Homestead, Florida facility last month — it’s the biggest unaccompanied migrant child detention center in the country. They, along with a local TV station, spotted Kelly enter the facility, and CBS News later confirmed his affiliation. Read more..

When Kelly was DHS secretary, he began the implementation of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda in the early stages of the administration. Julianne Hing reported on Kelly’s record at DHS on the eve of becoming chief of staff for Trump.

Read here…

bh

October 20, 2019

Apparently, Kelly’s USG pension as a retired 4-star General wasn’t enough to support him in the style to which he aspired (perhaps after rubbing shoulders with the Trump family and its circle of grifters). So, he found it necessary to supplement his income off the misery of families and children in the “New American Gulag” he helped establish.

I had accurately predicted that Kelly wouldn’t leave his “service” to Trump with his reputation intact. Nobody does, except those with no reputation to start with.

Trump runs a kakistocracy. The private sector should treat the steady stream of spineless senior officials fleeing the Trump Circus accordingly.

Or compare the “achievements” of horrible frauds like these guys, who abused their time in the service of Trump by betraying our country’s most fundamental values, with that of a real American hero like the late Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) who was eulogized today. As President Obama said, “he was ‘honorable’ long before he was elected!”

PWS

10-25-19

TRAC: TRUMP DOJ’S “MALICIOUSLY INCOMPETENT POLICIES” SIGNIFICANTLY CONTRIBUTED TO ASTOUNDING 1,346,302 BACKLOG AND 4+ YEAR WAITS FOR HEARINGS — Don’t Let The Villains Blame The Victims & Their Lawyers For This Largely Self-Created Mess!

Crushing Immigration Judge Caseloads and Lengthening Hearing Wait Times

==========================================

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

==========================================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The current policies of the Trump Administration have been unsuccessful in stemming the rise in the Immigration Court’s backlog. Overcrowded dockets create lengthening wait times for hearings. At some locations, immigrants with pending cases now wait on average 1,450 days or more – over four years! – before their hearing is scheduled.

Despite promises to reduce the backlog, the latest case-by-case records show that the growth in the backlog has actually accelerated each year since President Trump assumed office. At the start of this administration, 542,411 cases were pending before immigration judges. By September 30, 2019, the backlog had grown to 1,023,767 “active” cases. This rises to 1,346,302 when cases that have not yet been calendared are added. Year-by-year the pace of increase has quickened. The active backlog grew 16.0 percent from January 2017 to the end of that fiscal year, climbed an additional 22.1 percent during FY 2018, and this past year jumped by a further 33.3 percent.

While many sources for this rise are outside the court’s control, policy decisions and practices by the Department of Justice which oversees the Immigration Court have significantly contributed to growing caseloads. For example, the decision to reopen previously closed cases has caused a much greater increase in the court’s backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum.

Despite accelerated hiring of new judges and the imposed production quotas implemented last year, the average caseload Immigration Court judges face has continued to grow. On average each judge currently has an active pending caseload of over two thousand cases (2,316) and over three thousand cases when the additional un-calendared cases are added (3,046). Even if the Immigration Court stopped accepting any new cases, it would still take an estimated 4.4 years to work through this accumulated backlog.

In the New York City Immigration Court which has the largest backlog in the country, hearings are currently being scheduled five years out – all the way into December of 2024. Four other courts are scheduling hearings as far out as December 2023. These include courts in Chicago, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Arlington, Virginia.

For full details, including the average wait times and pending cases at each hearing location, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/579/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

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TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

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The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University. If you know someone who would like to sign up to receive occasional email announcements and press releases, they may go to http://trac.syr.edu and click on the E-mail Alerts link at the bottom of the page. If you do not wish to receive future email announcements and wish to be removed from our list, please send an email to trac@syr.edu with REMOVE as the subject.

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Obviously, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), stripping Immigration Judges of all authority to manage their individual dockets, the war on Attorney representation, and the complete absence of the type of prosecutorial discretion that all other enforcement systems in America, save for the DHS, use to make reasonable use of the available judicial time are taking a big toll here! A court run by maliciously incompetent political clowns is inevitably going to become “Clown Court.”

Congress and the Article III Courts are heading for an existential crisis in our justice system if they don’t step in and force some Due Process, judicial independence, and normal professional unbiased judicial administration into this corrupt and intentionally broken system that spews out illegal and unconstitutional “removal orders” every day.

Whatever happened to accountability and the supposedly independent role of the Article III Federal Judiciary? Why is a national disgrace like the “Trumped-Up” Immigration Courts operating within the rogue DOJ allowed to continue its daily abuses?

History will judge these failing institutions and those who ignored their sworn duties harshly!

PWS

10-25-19

U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR EXPOSES MASSIVE DHS ILLEGALITY & FRAUD IN IMPLEMENTATION OF SO-CALLED MIGRANT PROTECTION PROTOCOLS (“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO”) – “Indeed, the vast majority of respondents subjected to the MPP program involve cases where DHS has compelled -without authorization of law – aliens who were present within the United States and were not arriving aliens to return to Mexico to await their removal proceeding. It appears that over 90 percent of the MPP cases involve aliens were not properly subject to INA § 235(b)(2)(C). The court finds that termination is the appropriate action.”

Here’s Judge O’Connor’s decision, dated 09-17-19:

9-17-19 IJ termination MPP

Here’s key language from Judge O’Connor’s decision:

Respondents appeared for a hearing on September 9, 2019, with counsel and were granted a continuance for attorney preparation. The court reset the case to September 17, 2019. Respondents moved to terminate removal proceedings on the ground that they are not arriving aliens and were therefore not properly subjected to the MPP program. The court concludes thatDHS has not proven its fundamental allegation that respondents are arriving aliens and that DHS has not acted properly in subjecting aliens who were apprehended within the United States to the MPP program. Indeed, the vast majority of respondents subjected to the MPP program involve cases where DHS has compelled -without authorization of law – aliens who were present within the United States and were not arriving aliens to return to Mexico to await their removal proceeding. It appears that over 90 percent of the MPP cases involve aliens were not properly subject to INA § 235(b)(2)(C). The court finds that termination is the appropriate action.

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

So this is the “legacy” of “Powerful Woman” Kirstjen Nielsen and her successor “Big Mac With Lies:” Massive violations of legal and human rights of asylum seekers!

And, don’t forget the complicit Article III Judges of the 9^th Circuit in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan whose mindless “green-lighting” of this abusive and clearly illegal program is responsible for daily mockeries of the very U.S. laws they were sworn to uphold as well as continuing human misery.

It also shows:

The great potential of an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court to stop DHS abuses in their tracks, at an early point in time (this would also save time and public money now being squandered on various illegal, ill-advised, and always inhumane “enforcement schemes and gimmicks”);
The potential of an independent Immigration Court with a true merit selection system for judges;
The value of effective representation of asylum seekers (which is either impeded or actively blocked by DHS and EOIR these days);
The corruption of leadership at DHS and DOJ and the lawyers representing them in court in defending the indefensible;
The dangers of abuses in a system run by a prejudiced Executive with no meaningful oversight and outside the public eye;
That while some Article III Judges have gone “belly up” in the face of massive illegality and abuses of our system, others like Judge O’Connor, even without the benefit of life tenure, have courageously continued to stand tall for Due Process and the legal rights of migrants to fair treatment under the law.

The current immigration system and those administering it in an unlawful and unconstitutional manner is a national disgrace! Something to remember when Kelly, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” and other senior officials of DHS and DOJ try to “reinvent” themselves in the private sector and disguise or disavow their truly disgusting record of subservience to Trump and the massive human rights violations for which they are morally responsible.

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” Never!

PWS

10-25-19

KIRSTJEN NIELSEN’S “REINVENTION” AS A “POWERFUL WOMAN” SHOWS THAT CRUELTY, INHUMANITY, & INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY AREN’T “JUST FOR MEN ONLY” – Ambitious, Amoral “Girl” Shows How To Penetrate The “Good Ol’ Boys’ Network” @ DHS, Destroy Lots Of Innocent Lives, Get On TV!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-the-point-of-a-most-powerful-women-summit-if-kirstjen-nielsen-is-one-of-them/2019/10/23/e3c5d80a-f5a6-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html

Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:

Oct. 23, 2019 at 4:58 p.m. EDT

Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit is the kind of event where you can’t walk 20 steps without being handed the business card of another Powerful Woman, who you know paid $13,500 to be there, because that is the membership fee you would have paid, too, if you were an attendee at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit.Hillary Clinton was supposed to be a featured speaker at the conference in Washington this week, but then she backed out, partly because former homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen, enforcer of the Trump administration’s loathsome child separation policy, was also speaking. Incidentally, so was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii Democrat whom Clinton had just called a “favorite of Russians” in the 2020 race, prompting Gabbard to accuse Clinton of being “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”

Anyway, I decided to go.

Held at the posh Mandarin Oriental hotel, Fortune’s conference is the kind of event where the seminars have titles like, “Co-Opetition: From Competition to Cooperation,” and where the hallways are lined with pressed-juice stands, and pop-up Dior counters providing mini-makeovers, and many, many advertisements for M.M. LaFleur, which is a clothing brand you never need know exists unless you reach a certain age and income level, at which point its logo will stalk you on Facebook. “M.M. LaFleur Live with Purpose. Dress with Ease.”

Wandering around on Monday and Tuesday (using a press pass, not my life savings), I caught sessions featuring congresswomen Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Old Navy CEO Sonia Syngal and feminist icon Anita Hill. The COO of Rothy’s shoes was there, talking about how to build a viral brand, and so were dozen of audience members wearing Rothy’s shoes — evidence that the COO knows of what she speaks — and I am not going to lie, I was wearing Rothy’s, too.

The summit is one of those why-the-hell-not events, is what I’m saying. As in, Icertainly wouldn’t pay for it, but if you want to, go ahead. It’s no weirder than many manly conferences with booths showcasing the latest golf club technology. It’s Goop, but with its feet rooted more on the ground.

Except then, abruptly, it wasn’t. Because Anita Hill finished her Q&A, and the audience members ate our fancy “Networking Lunch,” and then suddenly it was Kirstjen Nielsen on the brightly lit ballroom stage, determinedly dodging every question posed to her by “PBS NewsHour’s” Amna Nawaz.

“I don’t regret enforcing the law because I took an oath to do that,” she said, after Nawaz repeatedly pressed her on whether she regretted signing the memo that greenlighted removing children from their parents at the Mexican border.

Nielsen insisted that she “spoke truth to power from the very beginning” of her tenure, and resigned when it became clear that “saying no” wasn’t enough. But then when Nawaz pointed out that Nielsen had just accepted another position with the administration, on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, Nielsen defended the move: “Are you telling every CEO in here that they should never advise the government?” she asked incredulously.

Nielsen’s interview was over within 15 minutes, and then an event moderator appeared onstage and solemnly addressed the audience: “I know that was intense, and I just want to acknowledge that.”

And then I left the auditorium to get a mango-citrus juice and a perfume spritz and think about Powerful Women.

There’s no doubt that Nielsen is powerful; even before joining Homeland Security, she’d been one of the highest-ranking women in the White House. There’s no doubt that she’s a woman; in public appearances she plays up a traditionally womanly appearance with makeup and high heels.

Those were the basic qualifications for an invitation — but should they have been the only ones? When we talk about “Powerful Women,” should we applaud a woman who used her considerable power to make life difficult for the most powerless among us?

Fortune had titled Nielsen’s session “Hard Questions,” and the questions were appropriately pointed: Nobody tossed her softballs about how she balances work and home life, or how she shoehorns in “me” time. Nobody could have grilled Nielsen harder than Nawaz did, or tried to.

But her presence was so incongruous to the rest of the event — an innocuous, if privileged brand of go-get-’em corporate feminism — that it called into question why we were in that hotel at all.

What, in 2019, is the purpose and organizing principle of an event like the Most Powerful Women Summit? Is it like the Hall of Presidents at Disney World — a non-editorializing showcase of every boldfaced woman Fortune could rustle up to prove that many women are powerful?

Are we saying that Powerful Women are just like powerful men — some good and some bad? Which is true, of course, but then why do we need a separate event for them?

Are we just saying that women like green juice and Rothy’s?

Kirstjen Nielsen deserved to be questioned, hard, for her role in an immensely controversial administration policy. And maybe she accepted this particular engagement, her first since leaving the White House, because she thought she could expect a welcoming audience. One who would embrace her as one of their own because being a lady is rough, am I right? Toward the end of her interview, Nielsen wanly said she thought she was going to be asked more about cybersecurity.

But still, there was something off about it. Here she was, making her reputation-washing debut in a ballroom event celebrating aspirational women, smiling grittily as she informed us that, no, we’d all misremembered the whole past three years.

And most of us had paid $13,500 to be there.

Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.

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

Perhaps cruelty, nastiness, dishonesty, illegality, and inhumanity know no gender bounds. Certainly, Nielsen proved to be every bit as bad and every bit the sycophant as her male counterparts, Kelly & “Big Mac with Lies.” The relatives of the dead and those who have suffered unnecessarily and continue to suffer because of her lack of integrity are out there to reflect on the true nature and consequences of her “power” and “legacy.”

One of Nielsen’s most notable “achievements,” in addition to child separation and “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico,” was assisting Sessions & Barr in stripping battered, abused, and tortured women of their ability to gain protection under our asylum laws. Indeed, Nielsen went one better: she was a key player in Trump’s scheme to make women, children, and everybody else fleeing the Northern Triangle of Central America ineligible to apply for asylum at all, thus reversing decades of U.S. commitment to human rights and fundamental fairness. Wow, that’s like “Superwoman” stuff!

Monica Hesse is a well-known author and talented storyteller in addition to being a great journalist. I hope that one of her future projects will be to tell the stories of those whose lives were turned into living hell just because they had the audacity to seek protection under our laws in an attempt to save or better their lives and those of their families. Survival, asserting rights, evincing humanity, expecting kindness, fairness, and compassion: what greater “crimes” could there be in Trump’s America?

Sure, Nielsen might not have quite gotten down to the moral depravity of neo-Nazis like Miller and “Cooch Cooch,” the “custom designers” of Trump’s cowardly attacks on migrants, refugees, and human dignity. That’s a low bar to get under. But, that makes her neither a good person nor an appropriate role model for women (or men) seeking to possess power and engage in true leadership.

It’s incredible to me that with all the brave, courageous, talented, and powerful women involved in leadership positions in the field of immigration and human rights – legislators, journalists, jurists, lawyers, artists, professors, ministers, social workers, NGO executives and managers, teachers, medical professionals, etc., — Nielsen was the best “role model” they could find!

Next year, the folks over at Fortune Maggie should give me a ring. I could give them the names of dozens of brilliant, talented, committed women who are “leading by example” – putting themselves and their values “on the line” every day to save lives and tend to the most vulnerable among us. And, of course, in doing so they actually are saving all of us. Because, to paraphrase MLK, Jr., harm to the most vulnerable among is harm to all of us.

I also have lots of suggestions as to where Fortune could donate the proceeds of the “Most Powerful Women Summit” to actually promote the responsible use of power for women and men: to actually make the world a better place, not just to “jack up” resumes or collect impressive, but largely meaningless, titles and accolades.

DUE PROCESS FOREVER, CORRUPT FORMER PUBLIC OFFICIALS NEVER!

PWS

10-24-19

TRUMP’S CHUMPS @ DHS UNQUALIFIED, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE: White Nationalist Restrictionists “Cooch Cooch” and Morgan Aren’t Legally Eligible For “Acting” Appointments – Will That Actually Stop the Scofflaw-in-Chief?

https://apple.news/Aak3uZr8uS5GOKZLIhHEVHQ

By Michelle Hackman and Andrew Restuccia in the WSJ:

WASHINGTON—The White House personnel office chief has told President Trump that his top two picks to fill the Homeland Security secretary job aren’t eligible under a federal law dictating who can fill the role without Senate confirmation, people familiar with the matter said.

During a meeting Friday at the White House, Sean Doocey, head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, informed the president that neither Ken Cuccinelli nor Mark Morgan, who head two prominent immigration agencies at the Department of Homeland Security, were legally eligible to lead the department on an acting basis.

Mr. Trump and many of his top immigration advisers favored Messrs. Cuccinelli and Morgan, who have worked at DHS for only the past few months but are ardent defenders of the president’s immigration policies on television. The previous acting secretary, Kevin McAleenan, submitted his resignation this month but will remain on the job through the end of the month.

The two men were installed in the spring after the White House pushed out several officials, including former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom they felt were standing in the way of tougher immigration enforcement.

Mr. Cuccinelli heads the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency overseeing legal immigration and asylum applications, while Mr. Morgan leads Customs and Border Protection. Both men are serving on an acting basis, and neither has been nominated by Mr. Trump for permanent roles, which would require Senate confirmation.

Although he is popular with conservative immigration activists, Mr. Cuccinelli in particular isn’t a likely candidate to lead the department on a permanent basis. He made powerful enemies in the Senate, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), when he ran the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group that challenged incumbent Republicans. Mr. McConnell has said his nomination would inspire a “lack of enthusiasm.”

The federal statute that governs vacancies states that acting officials in cabinet-level positions must either be next in line for a position or hold a Senate-confirmed position.

Under a third option, the official being elevated must have served for at least 90 days in the past year under the previous secretary.

During the meeting Friday, Mr. Doocey briefed Mr. Trump on an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the past secretary was Ms. Nielsen, not Mr. McAleenan, the people familiar with the matter said. Under that interpretation, Messrs. Cuccinelli and Morgan wouldn’t qualify, as they joined the agency after Ms. Nielsen departed.

The meeting with Mr. Trump on Friday included Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the president, and Emma Doyle, deputy chief of staff, the people said.

An administration official said the president hopes to announce his next acting DHS secretary in the next few days. Another White House official said the administration doesn’t intend for that person to serve for as long as Mr. McAleenan did.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

White House officials are instead considering Chad Wolf, Ms. Nielsen’s former chief of staff, as acting secretary, administration officials said, a move supported by Mr. Miller. In February, Mr. Wolf was nominated to serve as the department’s undersecretary for policy.

The White House is also considering David Pekoske, the Transportation Security Administration head who is serving as acting deputy DHS secretary, and Chris Krebs, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to administration officials. Mr. Pekoske has already indicated to DHS colleagues that he doesn’t want the top job, though, and would prefer to return to the TSA full-time, according to a person familiar with the matter.

As Mr. Wolf’s possible appointment began to circulate on Monday, it drew public criticism from outside groups pushing a more restrictive immigration policy.

RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, pointed to Mr. Wolf’s past work for the National Association of Software and Services Companies, which lobbies for the U.S. government to issue more green cards to foreign workers each year. Advocates also said Mr. Wolf’s close relationship with Ms. Nielsen meant he likely wouldn’t steer the department in a more hard-line direction.

The legal ineligibility of Messrs. Morgan and Cuccinelli for the acting DHS post isn’t likely to have a big impact on Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. The two men will continue at their respective agencies, where they have been given wide latitude to set policy and shape the administration’s immigration messaging—sometimes to the chagrin of Mr. McAleenan, the department’s top official.

A White House official said that if the next secretary formally nominated to lead the department doesn’t have a strong immigration background, the president may revive an idea to appoint a “border czar” to oversee the Department’s immigration policy and enforcement. That position wouldn’t require Senate confirmation.

Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com and Andrew Restuccia at Andrew.Restuccia@wsj.com

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

Not hard to see the corruption here. DHS is actually supposed to protect our national security and fairly administer our immigration laws, which includes insuring that applicants for various benefits including asylum and legal immigration are promptly approved when eligible. It’s not supposed to be a repository for White Nationalist, racist, restrictionist, xenophobes and their extralegal policies. Enforcement is supposed to be professional, humane, even-handed, nonpartisan, and include reasonable exercises of prosecutorial discretion.

But, given the DHS’s well-deserved reputation as the least trusted and most despised agency of the Federal Government, I’m sure that whomever gets the next “acting” role will serve up a steady diet of cruel, illegal, and counterproductive xenophobia.

PWS

10-22-19

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Trump’s Cowardly, Racist War On The Most Vulnerable Humans Could Collapse International Refugee Protection System, Putting Millions Of Lives In Jeopardy!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/refugees-trump-third-country-refoulement.html

Stephanie Schwartz @ Slate:

Last month, the Trump administration announced the latest in a trio of bilateral agreements effectively barring refugees coming through Central America from seeking asylum in the United Sates. These agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and now Honduras, known as “safe third country” agreements, allow the U.S. to send back asylum-seekers who pass these countries on their way to the U.S. but do not apply for asylum there first. At first glance, this may seem like just one more way that the Trump administration is trying to keep refugees out—a diplomatic version of the president’s tactical snake fantasy. Nor do the agreements seem that different from how the EU tries to prevent refugees from seeking asylum. Indeed, a year ago I wrote about how Donald Trump sending troops to the Southern broader was consistent with a broader global trend of hollowing out asylum norms.

But this is different. These new agreements flout global asylum norms in a way others have not dared: They send refugees directly back into the danger they were fleeing in the first place.

A safe third country agreement is meant to be just that: safe. It provides a way for states to send refugees to an alternative (third) destination without sending them home, a practice that is prohibited under international law. While they have yet to be implemented, in the past three months, the United States has strong-armed Central America’s Northern Triangle countries into signing third-country agreements. Under the terms of these agreements asylum-seekers who pass through Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras on their way to the U.S. (which anyone traveling by land has to do) could be sent back from the U.S. border to one of those countries, so long as they are not a citizen of that country. So, while Honduran asylum-seekers would not be sent back to Honduras, they could be sent to Guatemala or El Salvador. Mexico has refused to sign a similar agreement, however the Trump administration has already begun implementing a new set of rules with regard to Mexico called the Migrant Protection Protocols. One of the stipulations of the MPP requires asylum-seekers who make it to the U.S. Southern border to stay in Mexico while they wait for the U.S. to process their claims.

On the surface, these policies look rather similar to the EU’s approach to asylum. Like the agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the EU’s Dublin Regulation requires that all asylum-seekers entering the EU apply for asylum in the first country they reach in the union. The 2016 EU-Turkey deal also has a “safe third country” component, such that certain migrants passing through Turkey on their way to Greece can be sent back (though migrants are still allowed to apply for asylum when they reach the EU). Similar to the MPP, the EU has also said it is going to explore the use of “regional disembarkation platforms” such that refugees would have to wait in another country while their claims for asylum in Europe are evaluated.

The Trump approach, however, is much worse. First, the Dublin Regulation dictates which countries in the EU will provide asylum to those with valid claims; the new arrangements between the U.S. and the Northern Triangle countries dictate that U.S. will not provide asylum to certain individuals with valid claims. Put another way, in many ways the EU’s Schengen zone operates as a single governing body—there are common laws, a single currency, and freedom of mobility across states. Once you cross the border into one Schengen zone country, you are free to travel to the others without showing a passport. The Dublin Regulation, then, lets asylum-seekers into the European Union, but it cuts people off from arriving in one member state, for example Greece, and continuing on to apply for asylum in another, say Germany.

But there is no North American Union. The U.S. cedes its sovereignty to no one. And the administration is not saying refugees can enter the U.S., but they must stay in Arizona rather than go to New York. Instead, the agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras allow the U.S. to say that it will not provide asylum to certain people. If you can’t afford a plane ticket and show up at the Southern border, the United States does not have to hear your case. This is in direct contravention to the 1951 convention on refugees that requires states to provide asylum to those who qualify without discrimination. Refugee rights activists claim that the third safe country agreement between the U.S. and Canada is in breach of international asylum law for the same reason. The difference, though, is that asylum-seekers enjoy equally safe haven in the U.S. as the do in Canada (though some in Canada are questioning how safe the U.S. really is).

This brings us to the second, and most important issue, with the Trump administration’s policies.

Both the MPP and the agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala send asylum-seekers to places where their lives remain in danger. In some cases, it is precisely the same danger they were trying to flee. The violence from which people in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are fleeing stems from transnational criminal organizations, like MS-13 and MS-18. Per the United States’ own 2018 human rights report on Honduras, these transnational gangs “committed killings, extortion, kidnappings, human trafficking, and intimidation of police, prosecutors, journalists, women, and human rights defenders.” These organizations are not limited by borders. They operate throughout the Northern Triangle region. Gangs targeting someone in Honduras could easily get to that person if they were sent to Guatemala. Therefore, sending someone fleeing violence in Honduras to apply for asylum in Guatemala or El Salvador keeps them in harm’s way—the same harm.

While the MPP, which forces migrants to remain in Mexico, might not keep asylum-seekers from the Northern Triangle directly in the grasp of gangs like MS-13 and MS-18 that operate in the Northern Triangle, it does place them into a highly dangerous context. As has been extensively reported, gangs local to Mexico are targeting asylum-seekers with kidnapping, extortion, and violence. The U.S. knows how unsafe these places are, having issued its highest level of security warnings against travel to some of the cities in

Mexico where migrants are being kept.

Sending refugees back into the line of fire attacks the foundation of the international asylum regime: the norm of non-refoulement. Non-refoulement is the prohibition against states sending individuals to any territory in which there is threat of persecution or torture—country of origin or otherwise. Per the 1951 Refugee Convention, non-refoulement prohibits states from expelling or returning a refugee “in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The 1984 Convention Against Torture also prohibits refoulement, in some ways expanding its strength and application, stating that states cannot “expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Such grounds include a “consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.”

Without non-refoulement, asylum is moot.

There are any number of things wrong with the Dublin Regulation and the EU-Turkey agreement, but the one line neither of these arrangements cross directly is defying non-refoulement. Requiring refugees to apply for asylum in Greece rather than proceeding on to Germany impinges on the spirit of refugee law and endangers refugees, but it doesn’t refoule them. With the EU-Turkey agreement, many observers have challenged the designation of Turkey as a safe third country given that the Turkish government has been accused of imprisoning migrants and sending refugees back to Syria. Turkey has outright stated that one of the goals of its military incursion into Syria is to send refugees back to recaptured territory. The veil of non-refoulement in this case is whisper thin. But at least in sending refugees to Turkey, the EU is not forcing Syrian refugees directly back into the line of fire from which they originally fled. Neither Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces nor the myriad rebel groups active in Syria are equally active in Turkey.

The Trump administration’s new policies, on the other hand, outright deny that non-refoulement is a rule the U.S. needs to follow—at least for a particular class of people. There is no pretending that Mexico is safe when migrants are being attacked left and right. By flouting non-refoulement, the U.S. threatens the principle on which the entire asylum system rests.

And the world is watching. If the United States can send asylum-seekers back into danger, why can’t other countries do the same? While the Trump administration’s policies are likely illegal, and are currently being challenged in court, there is reason to fear the administration will be allowed to proceed unchecked. A recent order from the U.S. Supreme Court allows the administration to continue implementing these policies until a final decision on their legality is reached. In the meantime, many asylum-seekers are living in danger.

Finding a way to deal with displacement crises requires political leadership. For once, the U.S. is taking on this leadership role, setting a road map for how countries can respond to asylum claims. It just so happens that the proposal is to pull the one thread that could unravel the asylum system as we know it.

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

Someday, Trump and his toadies will be classified as the notorious human rights violators that they are. And, his racist, fascist reign will be remembered as one of the low-points in U.S. history.

But, we shouldn’t forget that “MPP” a/k/a “Remain in Mexico,” a/k/a “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” is only in force because of a complicit Ninth Circuit. See Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan (incoherent order vacating proper injunction against statutory and Constitutional abuses of “Remain in Mexico” policy). The judges responsible for this travesty and for continuing to “sit on” this clear case of illegal and unconstitutional policies should also be considered human rights violators.

PWS

10-22-19

“BIG MAC” SAYS EL SALVADOR IS A “SAFE” COUNTRY – HE LIES! — Mounting “Disappearances” & Government Acquiescence Show Why “Big Mac,” Pompeo, Pence, Trump & Other Corrupt Architects Of Unlawful Policies Designed To Kill Asylum Seekers (For “Deterrence”) Should Be Charged With “Crimes Against Humanity!” – “The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/disappeared-in-el-salvador-amid-a-cold-war-nightmares-return-a-tale-of-one-body-and-three-grieving-families/2019/10/19/d806d19a-e09d-11e9-be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html

Anna-Catherine Brigida
Freelance Reporter

Mary Beth Sheridan and

report for the WashPost:

By

Mary Beth Sheridan and

Anna-Catherine Brigida

Oct. 19, 2019 at 2:58 p.m. EDT

LAS ANIMAS, El Salvador — For Daisy Flores, Day 135 began like so many others. She soaked corn in a bucket on the dirt floor for tortillas. She washed the kids’ clothes in a blue plastic bin. And she thought, again, about that afternoon in May when her 18-year-old son Edwin rode off on his brother’s motorcycle.He still hasn’t come home.

Twenty miles away, in a working-class neighborhood in San Salvador, Karen was plodding through Day 297. She coped by writing notes to her absent husband and taping them to the bedroom wall.

“I send you a little kiss,” she’d scrawled to the man who had disappeared last year while delivering electricity bills. And: “I can’t take it anymore.”

Not far from her, a third family endured another Monday without their loved one. The middle-aged man had gone missing on his way home from his plumbing job. Was it already Day 192? They’d searched everywhere. Nothing.

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Three decades after a brutal civil war characterized by never-explained, never-resolved disappearances, Salvadorans are again vanishing.

The phenomenon is resurrecting one of the most chilling elements of Cold War Latin America. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people disappeared as right-wing governments — many supported by the United States — fought to extinguish leftist insurgencies.

These days, countries such as Mexico, Brazil and El Salvador are battered by criminal wars. The governments aren’t fighting Marxist guerrillas, but gangs and drug cartels instead.

In Mexico, more than 3,000 clandestine gravesites have been unearthed as families search for the 40,000 missing. In El Salvador, few of the burial sites have been found.

Which is why, when the government discovered one outside the capital last month, TV reporters rushed to the scene — and dozens of families began to wonder if their mystery would finally end.

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“I know he’s here,” said the mother of a 14-year-old.

“I am always hoping,” Karen said.

“They haven’t told me anything,” Flores said.

But for one family, things were about to change.

Mexican government says more than 3,000 hidden graves found in the search for the disappeared

A soldier guards a farm in El Limon, where investigators found a clandestine grave with human remains. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

No one knows exactly how many people in El Salvador have gone missing. National police say at least 2,457 people were reported disappeared in 2018, the most in a dozen years. The attorney general’s office puts the figure at 3,437 — more than the total of homicides. Both numbers are widely seen as undercounts.

For Flores, her son’s disappearance was a new version of an old nightmare. Her two uncles were among the at least 8,000 people who vanished during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

That was another era — of death squads, the Reagan Doctrine against communism, guerrillas wielding red banners and AK-47s. El Salvador today is a democracy, with free elections and onetime Marxists in congress.

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So why are disappearances back?

One reason is they make it easier for killers to avoid investigation. That goes both for gang members killing their rivals and for cops secretly executing suspects.

“If there is no body, there’s no evidence,” said Marvin Reyes, who spent 20 years in the national police.

But the disappearances also reflect a political strategy. That became evident when El Salvador’s top two gangs reached a government-backed truce in 2012. The homicide rate — among the highest in the hemisphere — plunged. But disappearances rose.

“If violence needed to be carried out [by gangs], it needed to be invisible, to avoid attention from state authorities,” said Angélica Durán Martínez, who studies Latin American violence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Analysts suspect the gangs and the government hide corpses to keep the homicide rate down.

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It’s so dangerous to police MS-13 in El Salvador that officers are fleeing the country

Karen looks through the window of her bedroom. Her husband went missing in San Salvador last November. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Trump administration reaches deal to send asylum seekers to El Salvador in an effort to deter migrants from entering the United States

For victims’ families, the uncertainty is cruel: There’s no resolution, no body to bury, no hope of closure. “We have so much stress,” said Karen, a 39-year-old mother of three.

She and her kids try to keep their minds on work and school, but their bodies betray them: Karen’s insomnia, her son’s overeating, her daughter’s wildly oscillating periods.

She believes her husband was abducted because he refused to hide a gang’s weapons in the family’s home. She is so frightened of retaliation that she spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.

Daisy Flores, 47, also suspects her son was hauled away by gang members.

Edwin was perhaps the most affectionate of her seven kids. The kind of boy who would sneak up behind her at the stove and grab her in a bear hug. Who wasn’t embarrassed to accompany his mama to the market.

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She doesn’t think he was a gang member. But: “I can’t tell you what kind of friends he had.” Everyone knew that MS-13 dominated their hamlet, a woodsy patch of small, concrete homes surrounded by fields where campesinos grew corn and raised cows and chickens. Nearby villages were ruled by the rival gang Barrio 18 .

Edwin’s absence is a constant torment. One of his brothers was so terrified that he considered migrating to the United States, like tens of thousands of Salvadorans in recent years.

Whenever Daisy thought of her missing son, she’d lose her appetite.

“I can’t live like this, learning nothing,” she said.

But in recent months, there was a new reason for hope.

Nayib Bukele, the charismatic young mayor of San Salvador, was elected president in February on promises of change.

“They say the president, now, he’s helping people,” Daisy said. “And that if you go to the attorney general, he’s helping to find the disappeared.”

A crusading attorney general promises answers

El Salvador Attorney General Raúl Melara and investigators arrive at the clandestine gravesite, under heavy guard, in Barrio 18 territory. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

U.S. officials said aid to El Salvador helped slow migration. Now Trump is canceling it.

Attorney General Raúl Melara hopped out of an SUV and strode toward the yellow police tape.

“Is it up here?” he asked.

At 47, Melara was part of El Salvador’s tiny business elite, with a doctorate in law and years of leading the National Association of Private Enterprise. He had swept-back dark hair and wire-framed glasses and favored starched white shirts. But on this afternoon, he had donned jeans, a gray polo shirt and a windbreaker to visit the village outside San Salvador known as El Limon — notorious territory of Barrio 18.

Melara scrambled up a nearly vertical dirt path alongside a dying cornfield, trampling vines and brushing through shoulder-high grass. A quarter-mile up lay a clearing, with mounds of freshly dug dirt and a body.

It had been a man in jeans and work boots.

More bodies would probably be dug up in the coming weeks, Melara told journalists. The new government, he said, was committed to finding the disappeared and punishing the culprits.

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“This is a phenomenon that, in past years, was hidden. They didn’t want it to be visible,” he told the TV cameras. “But we’re all seeing it.”

In just a few months, Melara had made some aggressive moves. He’d formed a team of prosecutors to focus on the disappeared. He’d promoted tougher penalties for those involved in the crime. He was working with the police to produce more accurate numbers.

Reform and revival: Gang members find Christianity in El Salvador prisons

Some were skeptical. It wasn’t until 2017 — a quarter-century after the civil war’s end — that the government finally created a commission to search for the disappeared from that conflict. And locating the more recent victims could be politically unpalatable in a country obsessed with the murder rate.

“Finding and identifying these bodies will inevitably imply a rise in the homicide index,” said Celia Medrano of the human-rights group Cristosal .

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Arnau Baulenas, legal coordinator of the Human Rights Institute at the José Simeón Cañas University of Central America, said Melara’s initiatives were positive but insufficient.

“The attorney general has a very small team,” he noted. There are so few forensic criminologists that one of them — Israel Ticas — has become a celebrity for helping mothers find the remains of their children.

Melara knows he lacks money, equipment and expertise. It sometimes seems the only thing that’s not in short supply is fear.

“In Mexico, the families of the victims are visible,” he told The Washington Post. “They’ve generated social pressure.”

El Salvador is different. Indeed, at El Limon, as the investigators shoveled dirt, a mother in blue flip-flops approached. Her son vanished a year ago, at age 14.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, weeping, in a TV interview. “Even if he’s not alive, and it’s just to bury him.”

But she begged the cameraman not to identify her. He filmed her feet.

There was no sign of her son. On Day 2 of the dig, though, investigators discovered a tantalizing clue near the body.

It was a wallet. Inside was an ID card.

During Pompeo’s visit, El Salvador’s new president says migrant problem ‘starts with us’

The site where investigators found the remains of a man. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)This pick belongs to Israel Ticas, El Salvador’s most prominent forensic criminologist. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)As does this shovel. Ticas uses both implements to dig up clandestine graves. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

A discovery brings new hope, and fear

The call came that day. It had been six months since the middle-aged plumbing worker vanished. Now his family was being summoned to the Justice Ministry.

Maybe, at last, they’d have an answer. But they couldn’t even grieve in peace. They begged reporters not to release his identity.

“We don’t want to make a lot of noise,” said one of the man’s relatives. “The neighborhood is really dangerous.”

Another relative was more blunt: “Saying the wrong thing could get you killed.”

The legacy of fear in El Salvador is profound. Three decades after the war, there are people who are only now revealing the disappearance of a relative in that conflict. Back then the scourge was death squads. Now it’s gangs and rogue police.

“There’s silence — exactly like during the armed conflict,” said Eduardo García, who heads Pro-Búsqueda, a group searching for war victims.

Ten days after the discovery at El Limon, investigators still were trying to match the corpse with the DNA submitted by the plumbing worker’s relatives.

The families waited.

For Karen, the news had generated a brief flicker of possibility. Then authorities told her the corpse wasn’t her husband. “I am not going to stop calling the attorney general’s office,” she said. Maybe they’d discover some sign of him, somewhere.

Daisy hasn’t given up, either. In her son’s bedroom, she unlatched a suitcase stuffed with neatly folded shirts and slacks.

“Here are his clothes,” she said. “I’m keeping them here so they don’t get all dusty.”

She has vivid dreams of her son. In one, he was trapped in a room. “I couldn’t get him out,” she said. One day she heard her 3-year-old grandson shouting outside the house. “Edwin is coming,” he yelled, pointing at the dirt path. No one was there.

By Day 145, Daisy was thinking of paying another visit to the attorney general’s office.

“God willing, they’ll have some news soon.”

Daisy Flores touches a favorite shirt of her son, Edwin, at her home. (Fred Ramos/FTWP)

Fred Ramos in San Salvador and Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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Through their lies about conditions in the Northern Triangle and extralegal programs directed against legitimate asylum seekers, folks like “Big Mac with Lies,” “Cooch Cooch,” Pompeo, Miller, and Trump are literally “getting away with murder.” Why?

It’s critically important not to let guys like “Big Mac” attempt to “rehabilitate” their images in the private sector by touting their “management experience” and claiming the “Nazi defense” of “just carrying out my duties” or the totally disingenuous “just carrying out the law.” No other Administration, GOP or Democrat, has even hinted that the dangerous and corrupt countries of the Northern Triangle without functioning asylum systems would be considered “Safe Third Countries” or that our overseas refugee program would essentially be ended at the time of the world’s greatest need (even as we are complicit in genocide and creating more refugees in Syria).

In this respect, it is heartening to see the “pushback” against the disingenuous attempt of former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to “repackage” herself as a “leading female executive.” No, she was a Trump sycophant and a major human rights violator who is lucky not to be in jail. And, the same goes for many of the other current and former “Senior Executives” at DHS.

PWS

10-20-19

ARBITRARY & CAPRICIOUS: In An Asylum System Designed To Abuse & Discourage Legitimate Asylum Seekers, U.S. Immigration Judge Robert Hough’s Persistence Saves Two Lives, At Least For Now

https://apple.news/ALbbeLJpzTOWr1LCa2mcLQg

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

Identical twins. Identical asylum claims. Very different luck at the border

The system gives enormous power to U.S. customs officers, Border Patrol agents and asylum officers, whose whims and judgment calls decide the fate of many migrants.

The 12-year-old identical twins entered Texas from Mexico days apart in the foothills of Mt. Cristo Rey. One came with their father. The other arrived with their mother.

It was June. The family’s plan was to get caught by Border Patrol agents as quickly as possible, then claim asylum so they could stay in the U.S. legally while awaiting immigration court hearings.

The parents had hoped that crossing the border separately, each with one son, would improve the chance that they all would be allowed into the country legally.

But that’s not what U.S. immigration officials decided. They released Nostier Leiva Sabillon and his father in Texas, and sent Anthony Leiva Sabillon and his mother back to Mexico.

The difference in treatment shows how arbitrary the U.S. immigration system has become as the Trump administration tries to stem the flow of migrants from Central America.

More than 54,000 migrants have been subjected to the controversial policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which took effect this year and requires most asylum seekers who are not from Mexico to wait there while the U.S. weighs their cases.

Homeland Security Department leaders credit the program — along with a new requirement that migrants apply for asylum first in the countries they travel through before reaching the U.S. — with dramatically reducing apprehensions at the southern border.

Migrant advocates say the new policies give enormous power to U.S. customs officers, Border Patrol agents and asylum officers, whose whims and judgment calls decide the fate of many migrants.

Things looked grim for Nostier and his 39-year-old father, Carlos Leiva Membreño, when they were picked up by the Border Patrol.

“The good news is that you are already in the United States,” an agent told them, according to Leiva. “The bad news is that you are going back to Juarez.”

The pair was detained.

But days later their luck changed. With minimal questioning, they were released with instructions to appear in immigration court in Maryland, where they planned to join relatives.

The decision remains a mystery to them. Leiva described it as a miracle.

“God had his angels protect me and my son,” he said.

They appeared in court in Baltimore, then moved in with Nostier’s great aunt in Houston and had their case transferred there this fall. They are not scheduled to appear in court until Aug. 21, 2020, giving them at least a year of freedom.

Through relatives, Leiva found a construction job in Idaho and left Nostier in Houston.

After some trouble getting vaccinated — parental consent is usually required — his aunt managed to register him for school.

He had been the chubbier twin, outgoing and older by a minute, with dreams of becoming a military commander to protect his family.

Having never been without his brother, he grew shy, quiet and brooding.

Anthony and their mother were 740 miles away in the Mexican city of Juarez.

Dilcia Sabillon Aceituno, 40, told immigration officials that the family had fled Naco, Honduras, because members of the 18th Street gang — an organization that she said had killed two of her cousins — were pressuring her to put her twins to work for them dealing drugs.

She didn’t want her sons to become criminals.

Border Patrol agents listened, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sent back to Mexico, she and Anthony moved into a migrant shelter in the dangerous Anapra neighborhood to await an Aug. 15 court appearance in El Paso.

They and four other migrants shared a room without electricity or a lock on the door. There was a school next door, but Anthony’s mother couldn’t afford to send him.

On the dirt streets, boys bullied him, and men shouted threats, beat his mother and cursed her for being Honduran.

Hiding in their room, Anthony, who wanted to be a doctor, helped his mother with daily blood tests and insulin for her diabetes. She noticed he was losing weight, growing pale and depressed.

“I tell him not to be sad, he will be with his twin soon,” she said as they sat in their room at the shelter last month.

She filled out an asylum application in English with the help of an American immigration lawyer from Minnesota who visited the shelter to provide free legal assistance. It was a lucky break: Most migrants in the Remain in Mexico program have no lawyers.

At the August court hearing, Sabillon told the judge she was afraid of returning to Mexico. Anthony said he wanted to be with his brother.

The judge sent them to be interviewed by an asylum officer by phone, a common arrangement over the last year as the government has struggled to keep up with the flood of new cases.

The officer rejected their claim, returning them to Mexico days later.

“They don’t listen,” she said.

There was nothing to do but wait a month for their next immigration hearing.

Anthony traded daily audio messages with his brother in Houston. Nostier was enjoying school, where he made friends who spoke Spanish and began learning English. An older cousin helped him with his homework.

He had also started playing soccer with other Honduran boys at his great aunt’s apartment complex.

“Don’t worry,” he told Anthony. “You will be playing with us here soon.”

His mother wasn’t so sure.

The lawyer who had helped them was moving to Washington and could no longer represent them. Sabillon would have to represent herself.

On Sept. 26, Sabillon woke her son at 3:30 a.m. so they could dress by flashlight at the shelter, gather their paperwork and board a shelter van to the bridge. She slipped a wooden rosary around her neck.

“We’re going to our destiny,” she said as she hugged fellow asylum seekers goodbye.

After she and Anthony crossed the border bridge, U.S. officials collected their belongings to place in storage, then drove the pair and 23 other asylum seekers to their 8:30 a.m. hearing.

They were among the last to appear before the judge at 12:45 p.m. When he asked for their asylum application, Sabillon said she didn’t have it: It was in a bag Border Patrol agents had taken.

“Do you want more time to fill out an application?” Judge Robert Hough asked through a court interpreter.

“No,” she said.

“You understand if you don’t submit an application, you can be removed to Honduras. Is that what you want?” the judge said.

Sabillon began to cry.

“No, I have it over there, I just need to find someone to help me,” she said in Spanish between sobs as Anthony looked on. “Please, for his twin!”

The court interpreter said he couldn’t understand her. The judge referred her to be interviewed by an asylum officer, just like she was after her last hearing, and reset her case for Dec. 12. Mother and son were led from court looking stunned. It appeared they would be returned to Mexico.

But their luck was about to change. This time, the asylum officer who interviewed Sabillon by phone was sympathetic.

She told her story, the same one she had already been over with other immigration officials. But this time the officer decided to release her and Anthony until their asylum case was decided.

They spent a week in detention before being freed on Oct. 4. They arrived in Houston by bus the next day.

The twins have been inseparable since, clambering around the yard of the apartment complex where they’re staying and making TikTok videos with their cousins.

By last week, Nostier had grown talkative, preparing his brother to attend school next week. Anthony showed off Band-Aids to his cousins where he had received the required vaccinations.

He has also gained weight — along with a taste for spicy chicken wings. His mother predicted his cheeks would fill out soon and make the twins look identical again.

Neither had learned the details of why their family fled Honduras, and Sabillon was proud of that.

“They’re still innocent,” she said as she watched them roughhouse.

Sabillon wasn’t sure how to change her next court appearance from El Paso to Houston. She wondered if she should ask the court to combine her case with that of her husband, who was due to return from Idaho this weekend.

She was determined to find a lawyer. Without one, she figured their immigration case would be left to chance. She didn’t want to get sent back to Mexico again.

“My sons’ future is here,” she said.

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

The key to this outcome was Judge Hough’s asking questions and sending the case back to the Asylum Office for a second look. Unfortunately, many Immigration Judges, pushed to crank out numbers, not justice, and falsely told by their “superiors” that all asylum claims are fraudulent anyway, would merely have ordered deportation.

The problem of arbitrary and capricious decision making in “life or death” asylum cases is hardly a new one. Indeed, it was well documented and publicly exposed by my colleagues Professors Andy Schoenholtz, Phil Schrag, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales in their seminal 2007 book Refugee Roulette.

Despite some stabs at addressing the problem in subsequent years, it has remained a persistent feature of a broken system and is worse now that ever. That’s because this Administration actually views cruel, arbitrary, and capricious adjudication as both a demonstration of absolute Executive Power and a way of punishing and discouraging legal asylum seekers.

Some favorable precedents correctly applying asylum law, particularly in the area of domestic violence and family-based “particular social groups,” were moving the system slowly toward “consensus grants” on a significant number of clearly deserving Central American cases. They could eventually have been used to act favorably on perhaps one-third of the Northern Triangle Asylum cases without resorting to the Immigration Court system. These precedents could also have formed a basis for establishing a robust refugee program in the Northern Triangle itself, thus eliminating the need for the dangerous overland journey to the U.S. and reducing the influence of smugglers.

Instead of building on these modest, yet important, human rights successes, unethical Trump Administration politicos, including Sessions and Barr, illegally and maliciously removed them and replaced them with the idea, again unethically communicated to adjudicators, that denial should be the “preferred result” in every case.

The corrupt system now encourages arbitrary and capricious decision-making on asylum cases and elimination or manipulation of judicial review as as a tool for discouraging those who should get our protection from daring to use our legal system.

Perhaps worse yet, with very transparent evidence of what is going on (the Administration largely admits that they are using the asylum system as a “deterrent” to asylum seekers) the Article III Courts, starting with the Supremes, have failed in their duty to require an asylum adjudication system that meets both the Due Process and Equal Protection requirements of our Constitution.

Every life saved is a life saved. That’s why the “little things” like Judge Hough is doing matter. With lawyers and a chance to document and present their asylum cases, and to seek review before the Article III Courts, Dilcia and Anthony at least have a fighting chance to gain protection.

(Unfortunately, neither the El Paso nor Houston Immigration Courts nor the Fifth Circuit have reputations for fair and impartial treatment of asylum seekers. Indeed, some of the most grotesque and legally unjustifiable abuses of Due Process and fundamental fairness have taken place right under the noises of 5th Circuit judges. That probably explains the unusual eagerness of DHS and DOJ to locate many branches of the “New American Gulag,” and their embedded “Kangaroo Courts” including absurdly unjust “Tent Courts” within the Fifth Circuit. How else would you explain places like Jena, Louisiana and many other obscure locations within that state where counsel is often unavailable and access to clients is often illegally restricted or cut off. Indeed, complicity breeds contempt for human life and the legal system, something that smug Article III Judges refusing to do their Constitutional duties might live to regret. Without “regime change” in 2020, the reprieve for this family might be only temporary.)

But the fact that there are pockets of fairness, caring, and impartiality in a clearly unconstitutional system merely demonstrates the arbitrary and capricious way in which this system deals with life or death decisions and the complicity of both Congress and the Article IIIs in allowing this disgraceful, outrageous mockery of justice to continue!

Those who have weaponized the asylum system against the most deserving and vulnerable among us and the life-tenured judges who are unethically allowing this to happen on their watch should not escape accountability.

PWS

10-20-19

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: As Life Threatening Due Process & Statutory Violations Predictably Mount Under The Ninth Circuit’s “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program, Congressional Dems Demand IG Investigation Of “Tent Courts,” A/K/A Kangaroo Courts!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20920000/house-democrats-investigation-tent-courts-border-port

House Democrats are calling for investigations into two temporary immigration courts that opened along the southern border last month where migrants who have been waiting in Mexico are fighting to obtain asylum in the US, according to a letter sent Thursday.

The courts — located in tent complexes near US Customs and Border Protection ports in Laredo and Brownsville, Texas — were built to hear cases from migrants who have been sent back to Mexico under President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Unveiled in January, the policy has affected over 50,000 migrants found to have credible asylum claims, including those who present themselves at ports of entry on the southern border and those who are apprehended while trying to cross the border without authorization.

The tent courts, which opened in early September with no advance notice to the public, have the capacity to hold as many as 420 hearings per day in Laredo and 720 in Brownsville conducted exclusively by video. Immigrants and their attorneys video conference with judges and DHS attorneys appearing virtually, streamed from brick-and-mortar immigration courts hundreds of miles away.

Democratic leaders, led by Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro, raised concerns Thursday that the tent facilities have led to violations of migrants’ due process rights by restricting their access to attorneys and relying on teleconferencing. They also expressed alarm that asylum seekers processed in the facilities are being returned to Mexico even though they are in danger there and that the public has largely been barred from entering the tent facilities, shrouding their operations in secrecy.

“Given the lack of access to counsel and the limitations of

, we are concerned these tent courts do not provide full and fair consideration of their asylum claims, as required by law,” the lawmakers wrote, urging the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice’s inspectors general to investigate. “The opening and operations of these secretive tent courts are extremely problematic.”

Few have been allowed to enter the courts

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan had assured that members of the public and the press would be permitted to access to the facilities so long as they do not “disrupt proceedings or individuals’ privacy.”

In practice, however, that’s not how they have operated, and as House Democrats pointed out Thursday, preventing the public from viewing immigration court proceedings violates federal regulations.

“We are concerned that the administration has intentionally built these tent court at Customs and Border Protection ports of entry to justify limited public access to these facilities, and that this lack of transparency may allow DHS to hid abuse and due process violations that may occur in the tents,” their letter said.

Laura Lynch and Leidy Perez-Davis, attorneys with the American Immigration Lawyers Association who visited the port courts shortly after they opened in September, said they and other lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center, Amnesty International, and the Women’s Refugee Commission were barred from observing proceedings in the courts absent a document showing that they were representing one of the migrants on site.

The few attorneys that had such agreements were allowed to enter the facility a little more than an hour before their clients’ hearings to help them prepare — insufficient time given that, for many, it is their first opportunity to meet in person, Perez-Davis said.

In the first few days that the courts were open, the only people allowed in the hearing rooms were immigrants and their attorneys — but critically, not their translators, Lynch said. There were few attorneys representing asylum seekers in proceedings at the port courts, and even fewer spoke fluent Spanish and could have conversations with their clients.

Officials have since allowed translators into the hearing rooms, Lynch said, but neither DHS nor the DOJ have issued any formal clarification of their policy.

Attorneys are also not allowed to attend “non-refoulement interviews” at the tent facilities, in which an asylum officer determines, usually over the phone, whether a migrant should be sent back to Mexico or qualifies for an exemption allowing them to go to a detention facility in the US.

Limiting access to the port courts also inhibits legal aid groups’ ability to conduct presentations for migrants informing them of their rights in immigration proceedings, as they typically do in immigration courts.

Perez-Davis said that she observed one hearing from San Antonio — where some of the remote immigration judges handling cases in the ports courts are based — in which a young migrant woman was confused about what “asylum” means. That kind of knowledge would have previously been provided in presentations by legal aid groups.

Videoconferencing doesn’t facilitate a fair proceeding

The use of video conferencing in immigration court proceedings has long been a subject of controversy. In theory, teleconferencing would seem to make proceedings more efficient and increase access to justice, allowing attorneys and judges to partake even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

But in practice, advocates argue that teleconferencing has inhibited full and fair proceedings, with some even filing a lawsuit in New York federal court in January claiming that it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights.

Immigrants who appear in court via teleconference are more likely to be unrepresented and be deported, a 2015 Northwestern Law Review study found. Reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Executive Office of Immigration Review have also raised concerns about how technical difficulties, remote translation services, and the inability to read nonverbal communication over teleconference may adversely affect outcomes for immigrants.

Yet despite such research, the immigration courts have increasingly used video as a stand-in for in-person interaction.

In the port courts in Laredo and Brownsville, video substitutes for that kind of interaction entirely — but it has not been without hiccups so far.

Lynch, Perez-Davis, and Yael Schacher, a senior US advocate at Refugees International, said they all observed connectivity issues. For migrants who must recount some of the most traumatic experiences of their lives to support their asylum claims, video conferencing makes their task harder, Perez-Davis said.

“I have been asking myself what happens if you’re in the middle of the worst story you’ve ever had to tell, and the video cuts out?” she said.

These courts are sending immigrants back to danger in Mexico

Migrants are required to travel in the dark and show up for processing before their hearings at the port courts early as 4:30 in the morning.

That puts them at increased risk, with recent reports of violence and kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo, which is directly across the border from Laredo, and Matamoros, which is adjacent to Brownsville. The State Department has consequently issued a level four “Do Not Travel”warning in both Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

Lynch and Perez-Davis said that attorneys are also increasingly afraid of crossing the border into Mexico in light of those safety concerns. Where they used to cross over the border to deliver presentations informing migrants of their rights and the US legal process in Mexican shelters, that is no longer happening to the same degree.

“It has chilled any sort of ability to provide legal representation,” Perez-Davis said.

DHS purports to exempt “vulnerable populations” from the Remain in Mexico policy and allow them to remain in the US, but in practice, few migrants have been able to obtain such exemptions in non-refoulement interviews.

The advocacy group Human Rights First issued a report earlier this month documenting dozens of cases in which inherently vulnerable immigrants — including those with serious health issues and pregnant women — and immigrants who were already victims of kidnapping, rape and assault in Mexico were sent back under MPP after their interviews.

With attorneys barred from advocating for migrants in these interviews, migrants will likely continue to be sent back to Mexico even if they should qualify for an exemption under DHS’s own guidelines.

“These interviews are a basic human rights protection to ensure that no one is returned to a country where they would face inhumane treatment, persecution or other harm,” Democrats wrote Thursday. “We are concerned that DHS is returning asylum seekers to harm in Mexico.”

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

This situation persists as a direct and predictable consequence of the Ninth Circuit’s atrocious decision staying the District Court’s properly issued injunction in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan!

As I told the US District Court, District of Rhode Island, 2019 District Conference on “Independence & the Courts” today:

Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make the guys in the ivory tower “own” the deaths, human rights abuses, unrelenting human misery, and mockeries of justice that their intransigence and failure to carry out their oaths to faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the U.S. is causing to the most needy and vulnerable among us — that is, to those who have the audacity to assert their legal rights under our laws.

What good are “independent” courts who won’t stand up for our individual rights under the Constitution? “Independence” does not entitle judges to use their privileged positions to be complicit or complacent in the face of great tyranny and the human misery and irreparable harm it causes!

And, thanks to Nicole for “keeping on” this horrifying chronicle of calculated and premeditated human rights abuses by an Executive Branch “gone rogue,” and the disastrous real life human consequences of ivory tower appellate judges failing to perform their Constitutional duties. They will not escape the judgment of history for their unwillingness to stand up to the abuses of a White Nationalist regime carrying out a predetermined agenda totally unrelated to governing in the public interest or complying with the rule of law.

Also, many thanks too Laura and Leidy for having the courage and dedication to put themselves “on the line” to let us know exactly what’s happening as a result of the massive failure of all three branches of our Government.

Join the New Due Process Army and take the fight to preserve our American values and our Constitution to all three branches of Government until they do their duties and stop the illegal and unconstitutional abuses of asylum seekers!

PWS

10-18-19

SUPREMES TO DECIDE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF “EXPEDITED REMOVAL” IN ASYLUM CONTEXT

Ariane de Vogue
Supreme Court Reporter
CNN

https://apple.news/AYpmeq0mPTTm9sB1mjbDRyg

Ariane de Vogue and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN:

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to take up a major immigration case concerning the rights of undocumented immigrants seeking asylum to challenge their expedited removal proceedings.

The Trump administration had asked the court to review an opinion of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that would allow those who have been denied asylum the opportunity to make their claims in federal courts.

If the opinion is ultimately upheld, it could open the doors to more asylum seekers at a time when the administration has attempted to dramatically limit who’s eligible for asylum in the US.

The case centers on Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, a native citizen of Sri Lanka who’s a member of an ethnic minority group. He was arrested 25 yards north of the US-Mexico border and placed in expedited removal proceedings. That fast-track deportation procedure allows immigration authorities to remove an individual without a hearing before an immigration judge.

Thuraissigiam applied for asylum, citing fear of persecution in Sri Lanka, and an asylum officer determined he had not established a credible fear of persecution. A supervising officer and an immigration judge affirmed the decision. Under the law, after the denial, Thuraissigiam was ineligible to challenge the finding.

Thuraissigiam went to federal district court, arguing that the expedited removal violated his constitutional rights. A district court said the law did not authorize the court to hear his claims. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, but said the law violates the Suspension Clause, which, the court held, requires Thuraissigiam, even as a noncitizen, to have a “meaningful opportunity” to demonstrate that he is being held against the law.

The Trump administration argued in briefs that the law — which sharply limits judicial review to final orders of removal — was passed so that the asylum system would not be abused. The law offers some exceptions, but they were not met by Thuraissigiam.

“The Ninth Circuit held that the Suspension Clause provides respondent with a constitutional right to additional review of his application for admission, beyond the review Congress has established,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in court briefs. He said Thuraissigiam “failed to satisfy even the threshold screening standard.”

A Congressional Research Service report notes that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held” that the government may exclude immigrants “without affording them the due process protections that traditionally apply to persons physically present in the United States.”

Expedited removal has been a point of contention in recent months, as the Trump administration has moved to expand the procedure and cast a wider net over undocumented immigrants subject to it. A federal judge blocked the move in a separate case last month.

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

The answer is actually simple. As a person applying for asylum in the U.S., the respondent is entitled to Due Process. Since the Asylum Officer and the Immigration Judge both work for the Executive, the respondent never had access to the “fair and impartial” decision maker to which he is entitled under our Constitution.

Not only does the Suspension Clause give him a right to access to the Article III courts, Due Process under the Fifth Amendment also requires it. Therefore, the statute is unconstitutional.

But don’t count on the Supremes to do the right and legal thing here. As the Congressional Research Service notes, the Supremes have a history of manipulating the law to avoid the straightforward and correct answers when it comes to foreign nationals seeking to invoke the protections to which they are entitled under our laws.

“Dred Scottification” predated the Trump Administration. But, the Trump Administration intends to build on making foreign nationals “non-persons” under our Constitution to “de-humanize” as many classes of persons in America as the Article III Courts let it get away with. Who knows, you might be next on the list!

PWS

10-18-19

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