Border Patrol – Page 21 – immigrationcourtside.com

Amín E. Fernández @ NY Law School: A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT FROM THE BORDER — “As I would inform families of the future that awaited them, I felt embarrassed of my country. I felt anger at the fact that we are telling folks who are fleeing cartel, gang and military violence to grab a number and wait in line for four to five weeks. That I had to help mothers and fathers write their information on their babies in case they were separated. It broke my heart to have to tell a mother that her pain and suffering just couldn’t be pigeon holed into ‘race, religion, nationality, political opinion or a particular social group.'”

Amín E. Fernández

            Prior to this year, I had never been on a college spring break trip. I had never experienced the stereotypical American “Cancun trip” full of debauchery, innocentfun and the fantasy MTV sold me in the early 2000s. Part of this was due to financial considerations, the other part was that I always had some kind of commitment whenever this season came upon me. This year, I finally got to go on a spring break trip with some of my law school peers. But the Mexico I saw was far from a carefree oasis for the inebriated and the carefree.

            This past March, I along with my Asylum clinic professor and four New York Law School classmates volunteered in Tijuana for a week at an organization called Al Otro Lado, Spanish for “On the Other Side.” Al Otro Lado (“or AOL”) is a not for profit organization run almost exclusively by volunteers. AOL provides free legal and medical services to migrants both in Tijuana and San Diego and is currently in the process of suing the U.S. government for its recently adopted border policies. AOL is composed of volunteers from all walks of life. Some are attorneys, others doctors or nurse practitioners. Most, though, are concerned U.S. citizens who wanted to see for themselves the humanitarian crisis occurring in our country. They come from all walks of life, ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds. But for that week, our collective problems and biases were set aside due to the more pressing concerns facing the people we were seeking to assist.

            During my week volunteering with AOL in Tijuana, my classmates and I utilized our studies in immigration and asylum law to educate asylum seekers as to the process that awaits them. I met with over a dozen migrants, one-on-one, and heard their stories of plight and fear. I didn’t tell them what to say, instead I explained to them that asylum is a narrowly applied form of relief. That in order to be granted asylum in the U.S. that they had to essentially prove 1. They have suffered a harm or credible fear of harm. 2. This fear or harm is based on an immutable trait (such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership to a particular social group) 3. They cannot relocate to another area of their country because their government either cannot or refuses to help them. 4. They tried to go to the police or couldn’t due to inefficacy or corruption. Many of the folks I spoke with had no idea what asylum was or what exactly were its requirements. At times, I would find out that the family I was speaking to was crossing that same day meaning that I had 5 minutes to explain to them what a “credible fear interview” was.

            My favorite part of my week though, was when I got to conduct the Charla slang for “a talk.” The Charla is a know your rights workshop where AOL explains the asylum procedure, the illegal “list” number system currently being conducted by the U.S. and Mexican government, and what possibilities await them after their credible fear interviews. Currently, if you arrive in Tijuana and want to plead for asylum in the U.S. you can’t just go and present yourself to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. The Mexican government has security keeping you from being able to speak to U.S. CBP. Mexican officials, though, do not want to take on this responsibility either, so the idea somehow came about of having the migrants themselves keep a list or a queue amongst themselves. The way it works is that every morning at El Chaparral, one of the ports of entry between Tijuana and San Diego, a table with a composition notebook is set up. In that notebook is a list usually somewhere in the several thousands. For each number, up to ten people can be listed and in order to sign up and receive a number you have to show some form of identification. Once you have a number, the average wait time is about 4-5 weeks. Sometimes families and people disappear as their persecutors come to Tijuana and seek them out. Every morning at El ChaparralI would see families lined up either to receive a number or to hopefully hear their number be called. Best of all, right next to the migrants who would be managing “the list” would be Grupo Betas, a Mexican “humanitarian” agency who aids in the siphoning of migrants to the U.S.

            If and when your number is called, you’re shuttled off to U.S. CBP officials who will likely put you inLa Hieleras or “The Iceboxes.” Migrants named them as such because they are purposely cold rooms where migrants are kept for days or weeks until their credible fear interviews. Here, families can be separated either due to gender or for no reason given at all. Migrants who had been to La Hieleras would tell me that they were given those aluminum-like, thermal blankets marathon runners often get. They state how they are stripped down to their layer of clothing closest to the skin and crammed into a jail like cell with no windows and lights perpetually on. After La Hieleras, a U.S. immigration official will conduct a credible fear interview. The purpose of this interview is for the U.S. to see if this permission has a credible asylum claim. If you fail this interview your chances of being granted asylum become slim to none. If you pass three possibilities await you. First, you might be released to someone in the U.S. who can sponsor you, so long as that person has legal status and can afford to pay for your transport. The second, and newest, is that you might be rereleased and told to wait for your court date in Tijuana. And the last is indefinite detention somewhere within the U.S.

            As I would inform families of the future that awaited them, I felt embarrassed of my country. I felt anger at the fact that we are telling folks who are fleeing cartel, gang and military violence to grab a number and wait in line for four to five weeks. That I had to help mothers and fathers write their information on their babies in case they were separated. It broke my heart to have to tell a mother that her pain and suffering just couldn’t be pigeon holed into “race, religion, nationality, political opinion or a particular social group.” Thank you, try again. I feel like after this trip I have more questions than answers. That the work volunteer work I was doing was more triage than anything else. That even if I graduate law school and become an attorney at most I would be putting a band aid on a gunshot wound and never really addressing the disease.

            It’s easy to feel defeated. It’s much more difficult to work towards a solution. I’m not an expert on any of these subjects. But I know that xenophobia and racism have no place in international police or immigration practices. I know that the folks I encountered during my time at the border were families fleeing not criminals scheming. I know that I may not have all the solutions but we should begin by instilling empathy, humanity and altruism into how we speak of asylum seekers and immigrants in general. That not much separates me, an American citizen, from the people I met in Tijuana. I may not have the answers to the turmoil I saw at the border but I’m determined to giving the rest of my life to figuring it out.

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

Thanks, Amín!

He is one of the students of NY Law School Clinical Professor Claire Thomas who went to the border to “fight for the New Due Process Army” following the Asylum and Immigration Law Conference at New York Law School. Putting knowledge into practice! Saving lives!

Two really important points to remember from Amín’s moving account. First, because of BIA and AG interpretations intentionally skewed against asylum seekers from Latin America, many of whom should fit squarely within the “refugee” definition if properly interpreted, many refugees from the Northern Triangle intentionally are “left out in the cold.” That, plus lack of representation and intentionally poor treatment by DHS meant to discourage or coerce individuals results in unrealistically “depressed” asylum grant rates. Many who have been to the border report that a majority of those arriving should fit within asylum law if fairly and properly interpreted.

Second, many of those who don’t fit the asylum definition are both highly credible and have a very legitimate fear of deadly harm upon return. They merely fail to fit one of the “legal pigeon holes” known as “nexus” in bureaucratic terms. The BIA and this Administration have gone to great lengths to pervert the normal laws of causation and the legal concept of “mixed motive” to use “nexus” as an often highly contrived means to deny asylum to those genuinely in danger. A better and more humane Administration might devise some type of prosecutorial discretion or temporary humanitarian relief as an alternative to knowingly and intentionally sending endangered individuals and their families back into “danger zones.”

What clearly is bogus is the disingenuous narrative from Kirstjen Nielsen and other Administration officials that these are “frivolous” applications. What is frivolous is our Government’s cavalier and often illegal and inhumane treatment of forced migrants who seek nothing more than a fair chance to save their lives and those of their loved ones.

Whether they “fit” our arcane and intentionally overly restrictive interpretations, they are not criminals and they are not threats to our security. They deserve fair and humane treatment in accordance with our laws on protection and Due Process under our Constitution. What they are finding is something quite different: a rich and powerful (even if diminishing before our eyes) country that mocks its own laws and bullies, dehumanizes, and mistreats those in need.

PWS

03-23-19

TRAC STATS EXPOSE ANOTHER TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LIE: “Newly Arrived Families Claiming Asylum” ARE NOT Causing The Immigration Court Backlog – That Backlog Was A Well-Established Product Of Gross Mismanagement & “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” Over The Last Three Administrations But Aggravated By This Administration’s “Malicious Incompetence” – Recently Arrived Families Are Only 4% Of The Pending Cases!

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEThe Immigration Court backlog continues to rise. As of February 28, 2019, the number of pending cases on the court’s active docket topped eight hundred and fifty-five thousand (855,807) cases. This is an increase of over three hundred thousand (313,396) pending cases over the backlog at the end of January 2017 when President Trump took office. This figure does not include the over three hundred thousand previously completed cases that EOIR placed back on the “pending” rolls that have not yet been put onto the active docket.

Recent family arrivals now represent just 4 percent of the current court’s backlog. Since September 2018 when tracking of family units began, about one out of every four newly initiated filings recorded by the Immigration Court have been designated by DHS as “family unit” cases. The actual number of families involved were less than half this since each parent and each child are counted as separate “court cases” even though many are likely to be heard together and resolved as one consolidated family unit.

There has been no systematic accounting of how many cases involving families arriving at the border will involve Immigration Court proceedings in their resolution. Families arriving at the border do not automatically have the right to file for asylum in Immigration Court. Thus far, the number of families apprehended by the Border Patrol or detained at ports of entry dwarf the actual number of these cases that have made their way to Immigration Court.

For further details, see the full report at:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/551

In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through February 2019. For an index to the full list of TRAC’s immigration tools go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

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

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

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:

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

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse

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Remember, folks, the next time you hear the Administration’s “professional liars” like Kirstjen Nielsen engage in bogus “hand wringing” and call for crackdowns on asylum applicants, their lawyers, and drastic changes to asylum law — she is covering up and shifting the blame for grossly incompetent management of the asylum program and the Immigration Courts by this Administration. “Victim blaming and shaming” — a staple of the Trump Kakistocracy — is about as low as it goes.

While laws can always be improved — for example an Article I U.S. Immigration Court, adding gender-based asylum to the “refugee” definition, supporting legal representation for arriving asylum seekers, and increasing the number and initial jurisdiction to grant asylum of the Asylum Officers should be “bipartisan no brainers” — the real problem here is not the law!

No, it’s the unwillingness of this Administration to follow laws protecting refugees, allow for robust “out of country processing” of refugees from Central America, and eliminate anti-asylum, anti-Latino, and anti-female bias from our asylum adjudication system that has created a “self-constructed crisis.”

Insist that this Administration take responsibility for their “designed to fail,” White Nationalist, restrictionist policies, improve performance, and administer refugee and asylum laws fairly, impartially, and in accordance with Due Process under our Constitution.

Under no circumstances should the already far too limited rights of asylum seekers and migrants to receive fair, honest, and humane treatment in accordance with constitutional Due Process be reduced as this Administration is always disingenuously seeking. And the money being illegally diverted and wasted on a semi-nonsensical “Wall” could and should much better be spent on improving our current asylum system and making it work — without any more illegal “gimmicks” such as attempting to rewrite the statutes by regulation, the bogus and ill-conceived “Migrant Protection Protocols,” and “slow walking” the applications of those who line up patiently to apply for asylum at legal ports of entry.

PWS

11-20-19

DORIS MEISSNER @ MPI: Administration’s Failed Border Enforcement Policies Anchored In Past & Distorted By Xenophobia — Most Of Today’s Arriving Migrants Seek & Deserve Safety & Protection Unavailable In “Failed States” Of Northern Triangle!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/14/real-border-problem-is-us-is-trying-stop-wrong-kind-migrants/

Doris writes in the Washington Post:

No matter what happens with Thursday’s vote on President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, the real root of the difficulties at the U.S.-Mexico border won’t be addressed.

The whole approach the U.S. government takes at the border is geared to yesterday’s problem: Our border security system was designed to keep single, young Mexican men from crossing into the United States to work. Every day, more evidence mounts that it’s not set up to deal with the families and unaccompanied children now arriving from Central America — in search not just of jobs, but also of refuge. The mismatch is creating intolerable humanitarian conditions and undermining the effectiveness of border enforcement.

From the 1960s to the early 2000s, the reality of illegal immigration at the southwest border was overwhelmingly economic migration from Mexico. The U.S. responded, especially once the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted tighter security everywhere, by building up a well-resourced, modernized, hardened border enforcement infrastructure, with more staff and more sophisticated strategies. Successive Congresses and administrations under the leadership of both Democrats and Republicans have supported major investments in border security as an urgent national priority. About $14 billion was allocated in fiscal year 2017 for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a steep rise from $9.5 billion a decade earlier.

From a peak of 1.6 million apprehensions in fiscal 2000 — with 98 percent of those apprehended Mexicans — border apprehensions have fallen by about three-quarters, to 397,000 last year. More Mexicans now return to Mexico annually than enter the United States. The turnaround has been dramatic and is due to the combined effects of economic growth, falling fertility rates and improved education and job prospects in Mexico; job losses in the United States surrounding the 2008-2009 recession; and significant border enforcement successes.

At the same time, an entirely different type of migration became more common. Beginning in 2012, the number of unaccompanied minorsfrom Central America — principally El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — crossing the border illegally jumped sharply. Modest numbers of such migrants had been arriving for many years. However, by 2014, the arrival of unaccompanied children spiked to more than 67,000 and, for the first time, the number of non-Mexican apprehensions exceeded those of Mexicans.

By 2016, the Central American flows became predominantly families with young children. Some were fleeing their countries in search of economic opportunity, but many were seeking safety and protection from widespread violence and gang activity that especially targets young people approaching or already in their teens.

Last year, 40 percent of border apprehensions were either of migrant families or unaccompanied minors, as compared to 10 percent in 2012. The proportion has risen to 60 percent in recent months, and just-released numbers show 66,450 apprehensions last month, the highest February total in a decade.

The important story, however, is not so much the numbers, which remain well below earlier peaks, as it is the change in the character of the flow. Today’s migrants include especially vulnerable populations, a large share of whom are seeking safety. As my organization reported recently, more than one in three border crossers today is an unaccompanied child or asylum seeker, up from approximately one in 100 a decade ago.

Yet the U.S. government’s posture has not been recalibrated, remaining pointed toward an illegal immigration pattern that has largely waned.

[Trump isn’t trying to solve border problems. He’s trying to make them look worse.]

Today, many people who cross the border illegally actively seek out and turn themselves in to enforcement officials so they can apply for asylum. Others have been presenting themselves at ports of entry, seeking protection. Ground sensors, camera towers and similar surveillance technology and infrastructure are less helpful as a result.

Border Patrol facilities are designed for holding people only for short periods because that used to be all they needed to do: Most Mexicans who are apprehended are processed and returned across the border within hours. The same is not the case for Central Americans and others from noncontiguous countries, increasing numbers of whom are arriving exhausted and in ill health after lengthy, arduous journeys. They can’t simply be driven back to Mexico, because they’re not from there in the first place.

Border Patrol stations are ill-suited for dealing with these vulnerable populations, as the tragedy of the two young children who died recently in Border Patrol custody sadly illustrates. The situation has been further taxed by the increasing numbers of what the Border Patrol refers to as large-group arrivals: In the first five months of this fiscal year, the Border Patrol encountered 70 groups of more than 100 migrants crossing illegally, up from 13 last year and two the year before.

Asylum officers and immigration judges, not Border Patrol and port-of-entry inspectors, make the decisions in asylum cases. The asylum and immigration court systems don’t have anywhere near the sustained funding spent on border enforcement programs. As larger shares of migrants have arrived claiming asylum, workloads have ballooned into huge backlogs as a result. And even in cases where resources have been provided, they are not always used: Congress has allocated funding for 534 immigration judges, and yet only 427 are serving. Children and families are vulnerable to physical and emotional health dangers that argue for minimal detention periods, but their cases can take months or years to decide. And policies that precipitated the separation of more than 2,700 children from their parents have only added to the trauma.

These and other factors point to the need for dramatically different border management policies and budget decisions from those made in the past, largely successfully, to deter illegal inflows from Mexico.

Testifying in Congress last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the situation at the border has reached a “breaking point.” There is a crisis, but it is a crisis of an asylum system that is severely overburdened by the major uptick in humanitarian protection claims.

The asylum system can only work effectively with timely, fair decisions about who is eligible for protection — and who is not, and therefore must be returned to their country of origin. More broadly, just as improved conditions in Mexico have been key to reducing illegal crossings of Mexicans, the best way to prevent Central Americans from fleeing their native countries must include attacking the violence, corruption and poverty driving them to leave home.

Yet the Trump administration has curtailed access to asylum and ended a program allowing some Central Americans to apply for protection from within the region to keep pressure off the border. Most recently, the administration rolled out a new policy that forces some asylum seekers to stay in Mexico in highly uncertain conditions to await asylum decisions, which they are told may take up to a year. Such measures seem only to be spurring on prospective migrants to journey to the U.S. before policies get even more restrictive.

This is not to say there are easy answers. Dealing with mixed flows is a challenge not only for the United States but for other major migrant destinations in Europe and beyond. Building systems that can sift through mixed flows to fairly and efficiently provide protection to those who truly qualify and identify and remove those who don’t is difficult.

[Trump is right: There is a crisis at the border. But he’s causing it.]

But course corrections are well past due.

Steps that could be taken now include devoting money and applying new strategies to the asylum and immigration court systems so they can effectively handle a burgeoning caseload, rather than greatly narrowing who can access them. Building suitable Border Patrol facilities for receiving children and families and training agents and other staff to spot and act upon medical and other emergencies would also be required. The government could foster networks of community-based monitoring and case management programs with legal representation that provide alternatives to detention so migrants are detained for minimal periods, at less overall expense and are treated more humanely, but still appear for their asylum interviews and deportation hearings.

Ramped-up anti-smuggling initiatives and intelligence cooperation with neighboring countries are a must. Affected communities on both sides of the border need support and new partnerships with government actors, especially in the face of caravans, a method of movement on the rise among Central Americans to gain safety in numbers but posing new logistical and political difficulties for governments. And U.S. policies must give greater priority to our geographic neighborhood in developing longer-term solutions with Mexico and Central America that are in our joint national interests.

Rather than unproductive political fights over walls and national emergency declarations, these steps would go a long way to restoring order at the border. It is past time for policymakers and the public to recognize there are no quick fixes but that, even with migrant arrivals on the rise, the border can be managed through an array of proven policy initiatives.

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It’s no surprise to me that an Administration committed to a racist, White Nationalist political agenda, rather than governing in the public interest, will consistently fail to solve problems and will govern incompetently.

Families who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol at the first opportunity to apply for asylum are by no stretch of the imagination “law enforcement issues” except to the extent that Trump’s inappropriate unwillingness to process them fairly at ports of entry and to establish a robust refugee program for the Northern Triangle has created a misdirection of law enforcement resources. To claim otherwise is totally disingenuous.

PWS

03-15-19

“DUE PROCESS FOREVER, XENOPHOBIA NEVER!” — Here’s An Inspirational Creation By The Courageous Students Of Professor Claire Thomas Of NY Law School, Stalwart Members Of The New Due Process Army!

This is derived from the closing lines of my speech to the 2019 FBA New York Asylum and Immigration Law Conference at NY Law School last Friday, March 8!

“Practicing what they preach,” Professor Claire Thomas of NY Law School and her courageous, smart, and dedicated students are now at the Southern Border saving lives and making a historical record of the cruel, ineffective, illegal, and bias-driven policies of the Trump Administration.

Thanks again to Professor Thomas, who was also one of the primary organizers of the “sold-out” Conference, and her inspiring students for all they are doing to preserve America and our system of justice against the attacks on the rule of law, our Constitution, and simple human decency by the scofflaw and incompetent Trump Administration.

Here’s the amazing Professor Thomas:

Due Process Forever, Xenophobia Never!

PWS

03-11-19

THE ART OF SOCIAL JUSTICE — HON. POLLY WEBBER’S TRIPTYCH “REFUGEE DILEMMA” HITS THE ROAD!

a) “Fleeing From Persecution;” b) “Caught in the Covfefe;” c) “Safe Haven;”
The stories behold each rug by the artist, Hon. Polly Webber;
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase & Hon. Polly Webber admiring “Caught in the Covfefe” during a break at the 2019 FBA New York Asylum & Immigration Law Conference at NY Law School on March 8, 2019;
Closeup of “Caught in the Covfefe.”

Art powerfully expresses the overwhelming need to fight for social justice and human dignity in the age of Trump’s unabashed cruelty, racism, and White Nationalism.

It’s even more powerful when the artist is Retired U.S. Immigration Judge Polly Webber (a proud member of “Our Gang” of retired judges) who has spent her life promoting Due Process, fundamental fairness, justice, and the rule of law in American immigration. She has served as an immigration attorney, former President of AILA, U.S. Immigration Judge, and now amazing textile artist bringing her full and rich life and deeply held humane values to the forefront of her art.

Thanks, Polly, for using your many talents to inspire a new generation of the “New Due Process Army!”

I’m only sorry that my photos don’t do justice to Polly’s art. Hopefully, the “real deal” will come to a venue near you in the future!

PWS

03-10-19

TWO LA TIMES EDITORIALS “SPOT ON” IN CALLING OUT TRUMP’S FAILED BORDER POLICIES, BOGUS EMERGENCY, & ABUSE OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=d85e48a2-1a59-4182-854b-dfd9a146177c

TThe numbers are sobering. The federal government reported Tuesday that immigration agents apprehended 76,000 people — most of them families or unaccompanied minors — at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, twice the level of the previous year and the highest for February in 11 years. The increase continues a trend that began in the fall, and offers direct evidence that President Trump’s strategy of maximal enforcement at the border is not reducing the flow of migrants.

And no, the answer is not “a big, beautiful wall.” Most of those apprehended weren’t trying to sneak past border agents; instead, they sought out agents once they reached the border and turned themselves in, hoping to receive permission to stay.

Furthermore, the situation isn’t a national security emergency, as he has declared in an effort to spend more on his border wall than Congress provided. It’s a complex humanitarian crisis that appears to be worsening, and it’s going to take creative analytical minds to address.

For instance, the vast majority of the families flowing north in recent months come from poor regions of Guatemala, where food insecurity and local conflicts over land rights and environmental protections are pushing more people off their farms and into even deeper poverty, according to human rights observers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Just months earlier, gang violence in urbanized areas were pushing people north to the United States; increasingly now, it’s economics.

But Trump’s rhetoric may be playing a role too. The more he threatens draconian enforcement and cutbacks in legal immigration, the more people contemplating moving north are pushed to go sooner, before it gets even harder to reach the U.S. Similarly, more migrants are arriving at more treacherous and remote stretches of the border to avoid getting stuck in Tijuana or other border cities where the U.S. government has reduced the number of asylum seekers it will allow in, claiming an inability to process the requests.

The system is overwhelmed. But the solution isn’t to build a wall, incarcerate more people, separate children from their parents or deny people their legal right to seek asylum. The solution is to improve the efficiency and capacity of the system to deal with the changed migrant demographics. A decade ago, about 1 in 100 border crossers was an unaccompanied minor or asylum seeker; now about a third are.

More judges and support staffs are necessary for the immigration court system, as the Trump administration has sought from Congress. Yet the case backlog there has continued to grow — in part because the increase in enforcement actions, in part because the Justice Department ordered the courts to reopen cases that had been closed administratively without deportations, often because the migrant was in the process of obtaining a visa. A faster and fair process would give those deserving asylum the answer they need sooner, cutting back on the years they spend in limbo, while no longer incentivizing those unqualified for asylum to try anyway.

The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, has suggested one partial fix. Currently, migrants claiming asylum have a near-immediate initial “credible fear” hearing with an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who determines whether the migrant has a significant potential to make a successful asylum claim. Most migrants pass that low threshold and are then directed to the immigration courts to make the formal case, a more involved process that can take years. Keeping those cases within the citizenship and immigration branch for an administrative hearing instead of sending them to immigration court could lead to faster decisions for the deserving at a lower cost — a single asylum agent is cheaper than a court staff — while preserving legal rights by giving those denied asylum a chance to appeal to the immigration courts. That’s a process worth contemplating.

More fundamentally, the current system hasn’t worked for years, and under Trump’s enforcement strategy it has gotten worse. It’s a big ask, but Congress and the president need to work together to develop a more capable system that manages the many different aspects of immigration in the best interests of the nation while accommodating the rights of the persecuted to seek asylum.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1cbd9b3d-f2d0-4249-b602-37223ff3f407

The U.S. government is reportedly compiling dossiers on journalists, lawyers and activists at the border.

ASan Diego television station recently obtained some troubling documents that seem to show that the U.S. government, working with Mexican officials under a program called Operation Secure Line, has created and shared dossiers on journalists, immigrant rights lawyers and activists covering or involved with the so-called caravans of migrants moving from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Worse yet, the government then detained some of these people for questioning (one photojournalist was held for 13 hours), barred some of them from crossing the border and interfered with their legitimate efforts to do their jobs. NBC 7 also received a copy of a purported government dossier on lawyer Nicole Ramos, refugee program director for a migrant rights group, that included a description of her car, her mother’s name, and details on her work and travel history. That’s not border security, that’s an intelligence operation and, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, “an outrageous violation of the First Amendment.”

The ACLU noted correctly that it is impermissible for the government to use “the pretext of the border to target activists critical of its policies, lawyers providing legal representation, or journalists simply doing their jobs.”

It’s unclear when the intelligence gathering began, or how widespread it is, but the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in October that U.S. border agents, using the broad power the law gives them to question people entering the country, seemingly singled out journalists for in-depth examinations, including searching their phones, laptops and cameras — all without warrants, because they’re generally not required at the border. These are troubling developments deserving of close scrutiny by Congress and, if warranted, the courts.

The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for controlling the flow of people across U.S. borders and has broad and court-recognized authority to search for contraband. But the government should not use that authority as a pretext to try to gain information to which it would not otherwise be entitled. And it certainly doesn’t give it a framework for harassing or maintaining secret files on journalists, lawyers and activists who are covering, representing or working with activists.

Homeland Security defended the targeting by linking the intelligence operation to the agency’s investigation of efforts this winter by some Central American migrants to cross the wall near San Ysidro, Calif. It said also that all the people entered into the database had witnessed border violence. That sounds an awful lot like a criminal investigation, not a border security operation.

The name of the report leaked to NBC 7 was “Migrant Caravan FY-2019: Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators, and Media.” The only thing suspect here is the government’s actions.

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Unfortunately, the second editorial on the “enemies list” shows why the first one on solving the Central American forced migration issue in a sensible, legal, and humanitarian manner simply isn’t in the cards without “regime change.”

First, the Trump Administration simply lacks the competence, professionalism, and expertise to solve real problems. The absolutely stunning incompetence of Nielsen and the rest of the politicos who supposedly run immigration and national security policy these days was on full display this week. America’s “real” enemies must have been watching with glee at this public demonstration of lack of competence and concern for any of the actual national security issues facing our nation.

Career civil servants who have the knowledge, expertise, motivation, and ability to solve migration problems have been forced out, buried in make-work “hallwalker jobs” deep in the bowls of the bureaucracy, or simply silenced and ignored. The Administration has also declared war on facts, knowledge, human decency and scorns the humanitarian expertise available in the private and NGO sectors.

Second, there is zip motivation within the Trump Kakistocracy to solve to the problem. As long as neo-Nazi Stephen Miller is in charge of immigration policy, we’ll get nothing but White Nationalist, racist nonsense. Miller and the White Nationalist restrictionists (like Trump & Sessions) have no motivation to solve immigration problems in a practical, humane, legal manner.

No, the White Nationalist agenda is to use lies, intentionally false narratives, racial and ethnic stereotypes, bogus statistics, and outright attacks on our legal system to further an agenda of hate, intolerance, and division in America intended to enfranchise a largely White GOP kakistocracy while disenfranchising everyone else. It plays to a certain unhappy and ill-informed political “base” that has enabled a minority who cares not a whit about the common good to seize control of our country.

While the forces of evil, division, and Constitutional nihilism can be resisted in the courts, the press, and now the House of Representatives, the reign of “malicious incompetence” can only be ended at the ballot box. If it doesn’t happen in 2020, and there is certainly no guarantee that it will, it might well be too late for the future of our republic.

PWS

03-07-19

“RETURN TO MEXICO” GIVES DHS A CHANCE TO HARASS IMMIGRATION LAWYERS AND ACTIVISTS AT BORDER!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/u-s-officials-made-list-reporters-lawyers-activists-question-border-n980301

Julia Edwards Ainsley reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Customs and Border Protection has compiled a list of 59 mostly American reporters, attorneys and activists for border agents to stop for questioning when crossing the U.S-Mexican border at San Diego-area checkpoints, and agents have questioned or arrested at least 21 of them, according to documents obtained by NBC station KNSD-TV and interviews with people on the list.

Several people on the list confirmed to NBC News that they had been pulled aside at the border after the date the list was compiled and were told they were being questioned as part of a “national security investigation.”

CBP told NBC News the names on the list are people who were present during violence that broke out at the border with Tijuana in November and they were being questioned so that the agency could learn more about what started it.

The list, dated Jan. 9, 2019, is titled “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019 Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators, and Media” and includes pictures of the 59 individuals who are to be stopped. The people on the list were to be pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection agents for questioning when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to meet with or aid migrants from the Honduran caravan waiting on the Mexican side of the border.

A sample of names and photos from the list. KNSD blurred the names and photos of individuals who haven’t given permission to publish their information.Obtained by KNSD

The list includes 10 journalists, seven of them U.S. citizens, a U.S.-based attorney and others labeled as organizers and “instigators,” 31 of whom are American. Symbols on the list show that by the time it was compiled 12 of the individuals had already been through additional questioning during border crossings and nine had been arrested.

Click here to read KNSD’s story about the list

In some cases, CBP had also compiled dossiers on the individuals with the help of intelligence from Mexican officials, according to the materials obtained by KNSD.

The cover of the list includes a seal with both the American and Mexican flags and was compiled shortly after the arrival of nearly 5,000 Honduran immigrants at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border, which is in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector.

On Nov. 25, unrest broke out as some immigrants attempted to run through border checkpoints or scale the barriers after growing frustrated with the long wait to enter the country. CBP officers responded with tear gas, bringing attention to the worsening tension between CBP and the frustrated migrants in Tijuana.

In response to a KNSD question about the list, a spokesman for CBP said it is protocol to “collect evidence that might be needed for future legal actions.”

“To determine if the event was orchestrated…CBP and our law enforcement partners evaluate these incidents, follow all leads garnered from information collected, conduct interviews and investigations, in preparation for, and often to prevent future incidents that could cause further harm to the public, our agents, and our economy,” the spokesman told KNSD.

FEARS CONFIRMED

The documents confirm what many people who report on immigration or provide humanitarian aid and legal counsel to asylum seekers at the southern border have reported anecdotally. They say that CBP is focused on them and increasingly pulling them aside for what is known as a “secondary screening.”

During that screening, journalists and lawyers describe being told that they are being interviewed as part of a national security investigation and that they must give officers access to their cell phones. Many do not know their rights as American citizens to refuse to answer such questions or request a lawyer.

One lawyer from the list who was recently stopped at a San Diego-area crossing, Nicole Ramos, refugee director for Al Otro Lado, a law center for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, learned from NBC News that CBP had compiled a dossier of information on her. The dossier included personal details such as her mother’s name, her social media pictures, the car she drives and her work and travel history.

“The document…appears to prove what we have assumed for some time, which is that we are on a law enforcement list designed to retaliate against human rights defenders who work with asylum seekers and who are critical of CBP practices that violate the rights of asylum seekers,” Ramos said.

Two other immigration lawyers who frequently travel to northern Mexico to help asylum seekers attempting to cross into the U.S. say the practice is starting to scare away would-be volunteers.

“It has a real chilling effect on people who might go down there. I was going to go this week, but I had to worry about whether I could get back in [to the U.S.],” one lawyer speaking on the condition of anonymity told NBC News.

Other immigration lawyers told NBC News they have been stopped and questioned in places far from San Diego. In Juarez, an attorney was stopped and accused of being a human smuggler. She was released only after the officers took her contacts and data from her phone. She was also asked what she was telling asylum seekers to say to U.S. authorities, according to another lawyer speaking on her behalf.

A former senior DHS official said it is against U.S. policy to target travelers based on their profession.

“It would be highly inappropriate and questionable from a legal perspective,” the former official said.

“While it is true that CBP has broad authority to interview and search anyone crossing the border, if there is no reasonable suspicion that you are involved in criminal activity, then they have no right to detain you,” the former official added.

Julia Ainsley

Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.

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

I was a guest lecturer at the University of District of Columbia David Clarke School of Law Immigration Clinic this week. One of the students asked what the Administration was doing to facilitate legal representation of those caught up in the “Return to Mexico” program.

I said to my knowledge, nothing. Quite the opposite, Nielsen actually came up with bogus reasons for not even allowing lawyers to be present during the credible fear process and there were “reliable reports” that lawyers trying to assist individuals waiting in Mexico were harassed and actively discouraged by DHS. Turns out that was “right on.”

This is a tragedy. Legal representation is probably the single most important and cost-effective thing that could be done to facilitate processing, insure fair decisions consistent with Due Process, prevent the mistakes that are prevalent in an overloaded and inherently biased system, and insure appearance at future hearings. For a fraction of the cost of the various “built to fail” and often illegal enforcement schemes this Administration crooks up, they could actually take a big step toward resolving the problem with universal representation.

Kakistocracy has its costs, both human and fiscal.

Join the New Due Process Army and fight the Trump Kakistocracy every day!

PWS

03-07-19

HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST: ADMINISTRATION’S LATEST IMMORAL GIMMICK — A “REGIONAL REPRESSION COMPACT” — FURTHERS PERSECUTION WITHOUT ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES OF REFUGEE FLOW FROM NORTHERN TRIANGLE!

February 21, 2019

Homeland Security Regional Compact Plan Won’t Address Root Causes of Refugee Crisis

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New York City—In response to today’s announcement that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is discussing the development of a regional compact plan with Central American countries in the northern triangle, Human Rights First’s Eleanor Acer issued the following statement:

The so-called compact announced today sounds like a short-sighted and heavy-handed attempt to stop people in desperate need of safety from finding it in the United States, rather than an actual commitment to address underlying human rights violations in the region. It is yet another move from an administration that has spent the past two years dismantling the systems put in place to protect the world’s most vulnerable people.

This announcement does not reflect any commitment to address the actual root causes pushing people to seek protection—political repression, gender-based persecution, brutal murders, and other human rights violations.

The Trump Administration is enlisting the very countries that people are fleeing to prevent the escape of individuals plagued by this persecution and violence. The United States should certainly work with countries in the region to counter and prosecute smugglers and traffickers who prey on migrants and asylum seekers. This plan, however, aims to stop asylum seekers who do not employ smugglers but travel with other people for safety through dangerous territories.

Human Rights First urges the Trump Administration to implement regional strategies that strengthen the rule of law and human rights conditions in Central America, strengthen refugee protection in Mexico and other countries, and stop its efforts to block refugees from asylum in the United States.

For more information or to speak with Acer contact Corinne Duffy at DuffyC@humanrightsfirst.org or 202-370-3319

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It’s “Kakistocracy in Action” — malicious incompetence institutionalized. Certainly, Nielsen has to be the worst excuse ever for a DHS Secretary. Indeed, those who actually might threaten our security must be “licking their chops” at her continuous display of idiotic Trump sycophancy and White Nationalist lies and obsessions with bedraggled families seeking refuge while smugglers, drug traffickers, cartels, and gangs reap profits from her failed policies and take delight in her inability and unwillingness to address the real security problems.

While real human rights crises are unfolding, and real human lives are in danger, the Trump Administration dawdles away time and resources on endless “designed to fail” White Nationalist gimmicks that appear intended to enable and encourage persecution rather than addressing the problems that cause forced migration.

The Obama Administration did a genuinely lousy job of addressing the refugee and human rights issues in the Northern Triangle. But, Trump, Nielsen, and McAleenan are making to Obama group look like humanitarian geniuses by comparison.

As the great Casey Stengel once said while attempting to manage the 1962 NY Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Sadly, in the case of the Trump Administration, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Bad things happen to countries that allow themselves to be run by malicious incompetents (that is, a Kakistocracy).

As I have said before, “We Are diminishing ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration.”

Join the New Due Process Army and help restore humanity, Due Process, competence, and good government to America before it’s too late!

PWS

03-07-19

FORGET THE SHAMELESS LIES, EVASIONS, & VICTIM BLAMING BY NIELSEN AND MCALEENAN BEFORE CONGRESS – Vox’s Dara Lind Tells You Everything You REALLY Need To Know About What’s Happening At The Southern Border In 500 Words!

https://apple.news/A3s8h4IozRDGHLo1SJ6rPtg

Dara Lind reports in Vox News

In February 2019, 66,450 migrants crossed the US/Mexico border between official border crossings and were apprehended by US Border Patrol agents, committing the misdemeanor of illegal entry.

It’s a sharp increase from January and marks an 11-year high. But the number reflects an ongoing trend: record numbers of families coming to the US without papers.

The Trump administration reported that 76,103 people tried to enter the US without valid papers in February. That number combines people who came to official border crossings and migrants who were caught by Border Patrol after crossing illegally.

The total has alarmed conservatives; President Donald Trump has taken it as validation of his decision to declare a national emergency and appropriate more funding to build “a wall” along the border. (Construction of the wall would take months or years.)

But while current apprehension levels are higher than they’ve been in the last decade, they’re still way below pre-recession levels.

What is truly unprecedented is who the migrants are.

Almost two-thirds of Border Patrol apprehensions are of parents and their children. While we don’t have complete historical data, it seems likely that more families are coming to the US without papers than ever before. Additionally, a large share of migrants (both families and single adults) are expressing a desire to seek asylum.

Both groups are overwhelmingly coming from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The US immigration enforcement system was designed to swiftly detain and deport migrants who attempted to sneak into the US illegally. Asylum-seekers and families don’t fit that mold.

Border Patrol agents aren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families who travel through Mexico by bus and then turn themselves in at the border. This has arguably contributed to the deaths of multiple children in Border Patrol custody in recent months, and spurred Customs and Border Protection to expand medical care.

There are strict limits on how long immigrant children and families can be held in immigration custody; in practice, officials release most families pending an immigration hearing. Asylum seekers can’t be deported without a screening interview, and those who pass (by meeting a deliberately generous standard) are often eligible for release from detention while their cases are resolved.

Some of those migrants, either intentionally or accidentally, do not complete the asylum process or lose their cases, and live in the US as unauthorized immigrants. For many Trump officials, this is the heart of the crisis. Officials have spent the last year working on regulations and pushing Congress to expand family detention and reduce asylum protections.

Trump critics continue to insist that migration isn’t at crisis levels. To them, the more urgent issue is the administration’s treatment of families, children, and asylum seekers. They are urging the administration to allow more asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry legally. They are calling attention to the conditions in which migrants are being held in custody.

Asylum seekers cannot be barred from entry. The question is whether they should be treated as vulnerable migrants who the US is obligated to treat with kindness, or as deportable migrants until (if at all) they win legal status.

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

It’s really a question of whether we honor our legal and international obligations by fairly processing refugees, or choose to dehumanize and further victimize them. The totally disingenuous performance by Administration officials testifying before Congress on Tuesday tells you all you really need to know. This Administration has shown a slavish devotion to failed policies, dumb gimmicks, and just downright cruelty in a vain attempt to stop people from fleeing danger zones. Not surprisingly, their “built to fail” policies, scofflaw behavior, and malicious incompetence has made things worse rather than better.

What if we had an honest Administration that admitted that this is a refugee flow that we had a significant role in creating? What if we used the existing law and legal mechanisms to take as many refugees as we could and worked with the UNHCR and the international community to help the others find viable resettlement alternatives? Wow, that would be making government work for the common good. something that’s just not in the “White Nationalist playbook.”

PWS

03-07-19

REFUGEES ARRIVE IN INCREASING NUMBERS AS TRUMP’S UNILATERAL “ENFORCEMENT ONLY” POLICIES FAIL: “Deterrents” Don’t Work, But DHS Officials Request More Authority To Abuse Refugees — With An Administration That Refuses To Recognize The Reality Of The Situation In The “Failed States” Of The Northern Triangle & To Work Cooperatively With Refugee NGOs, The International Human Rights Community, & Lawyers, No Solution On Horizon!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/03/04/feature/after-cold-busy-month-at-border-illegal-crossings-expected-to-surge-again/

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

In a dusty lot along the U.S.-Mexico border fence, a single Border Patrol agent was stuck with few options and falling temperatures.

A group of 64 parents and children had waded through a shallow bend in the Rio Grande to turn themselves in to the agent on the U.S. side. He radioed for a van driver, but there were none available. By 2 a.m., the temperature was 44 degrees.

The agent handed out plastic space blankets. The group would have to wait.

Mothers and fathers swaddled their families in the silvery, crinkling sheets and clustered with them on the ground, shushing the children. They shivered in the cold wind, and the sound of crying carried on, like a broken alarm.

Groups like this arrived again and again in February, one of the coldest and busiest months along the southern border in years. U.S. authorities detained more than 70,000 migrants last month, according to preliminary figures, up from 58,000 in January. The majority were Central American parents with children who arrived, again, in unprecedented numbers.

During a month when the border debate was dominated by the fight over President Trump’s push for a wall, unauthorized migration in fiscal 2019 is on pace to reach its highest level in a decade. Department of Homeland Security officials say they expect the influx to swell in March and April, months that historically see large increases in illegal crossings as U.S. seasonal labor demand rises.

Migrant families wait for a Border Patrol van to take them to a holding facility in El Paso on Feb. 22. It was cold and windy that night, so a border agent distributed plastic blankets to the group.

The number of migrants taken into custody last year jumped 39 percent from February to March, and a similar increase this month would push levels to 100,000 detentions or more.

It was a surge in the border numbers in March 2018 that infuriatedPresident Trump and launched his administration’s attempt to deter families by separating children from their parents. Trump stopped the separations six weeks later to quell public outrage. But the controversy the policy generated — and its widely publicized reversal — is now viewed by U.S. agents as the moment that opened the floodgates of family migration even wider, worsening the problem it was meant to fix.

While arrests along the border fell in recent years to their lowest levels in half a century, they are now returning to levels not seen since the George W. Bush administration, driven by the record surge in the arrival of Central American families.

For U.S. border agents, the strain has grown more acute, as they struggle to care for children using an enforcement infrastructure made in an era when the vast majority of migrants were Mexican adults who could be quickly booked and deported. The Central American families — called “give-ups” because they surrender instead of trying to sneak in — have left frustrated U.S. agents viewing their own role as little more than the facilitators for the last stage of the migrants’ journey. They are rescuing families with small children from river currents, irrigation canals, medical emergencies and freezing winter temperatures.

“We’re so cold,” said Marlen Moya, who had left Guatemala with her sons six weeks earlier and crossed the Rio Grande with the group of 64.

Moya’s son Gael, 6, was sick with a fever and moaning, his face streaked with tears. “In Juarez, we were shoved and yelled at,” she said, looking back across the river to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. “We slept on the street.”

Asked why she didn’t cross during the day, when temperatures were mild, Moya said she worried that Mexican police would stop them. “We’ve already come this far,” she said.

Marlen Moya, who had left Guatemala with her sons six weeks earlier, holds Gael, 6, as they wait along with Anderson, 8. Moya said she fled Guatemala City after being threatened and robbed at gunpoint at her beauty salon.

Much of the attention last fall was focused on caravan groups, mostly from Honduras, as they reached Tijuana, Mexico, not far from San Diego. Then concern shifted to Arizona and New Mexico, where groups of rural Guatemalan families began showing up at remote border outposts. Two Guatemalan children died in December after being taken into U.S. custody, as Homeland Security officials declared a humanitarian and national security crisis.

The border deal Trump and Democrats reached last month includes $415 million to improve detention conditions for migrant families, including funds to potentially open a new processing center in El Paso. But in the meantime, families continue to arrive in groups large and small, in faraway rural areas and right in downtown El Paso.

“The numbers are staggering, and we’re incredibly worried that we will see another huge increase in March,” said a Homeland Security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unpublished figures.

The group by the river had landed on the no man’s land between the Rio Grande and the tall, steel American fencing. They were on U.S. soil, a place that already has a border wall.

The lone U.S. agent with the group was the only one available along that span. Drug smugglers have been using the groups as a diversion, so the agent couldn’t leave the riverbank.

No vans or buses arrived to pick up the families. Other agents were busy at the nearby processing center because so many groups had arrived in El Paso that night, and still others were at the hospital, where they were helping parents and children receive treatment for severe flu symptoms.

Homeland Security officials have been urging lawmakers to grant them broader powers to detain and quickly deport families in a search for deterrent measures. Their attempts to crack down using executive actions have been blocked repeatedly in federal court.

The migrants travel by van to a holding facility in El Paso.

The Trump administration has begun sending some asylum-seeking Central Americans back to Mexico to wait while their claims are processed, but so far that experiment has been limited to California’s San Ysidro port of entry.

About 150 migrants were sent back across the border in February, according to Mexican authorities, but that is a small fraction of the more than 2,000 unauthorized migrants coming into U.S. custody on an average day.

Homeland Security officials said Friday that the pilot program, which they call Migrant Protection Protocols, will expand to El Paso and potentially other locations in coming weeks, predicting that the number of Central Americans sent back would grow “exponentially.” Some of the cities where they will wait are among the most dangerous in Mexico.

Mexican officials are cooperating by providing general assistance and job placement for those sent back to wait, but privately they have warned the Americans that their capacity to take parents with children is extremely limited, especially families that need welfare assistance and enrollment in already-crowded public schools.

Migrants at the border hold tight to the blankets and move about the area to stay warm while they wait for the van.

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the above link.

As long as the Trump Administration insists on dealing unilaterally with a humanitarian refugee situation as a fake law enforcement problem, there will be no resolution; just more pain, needless suffering, and scofflaw gimmicks by an inhumane and incompetent Administration.

PWS

03-04-19

NOLAN ASKS: “Is rigid partisanship the real reason for rejecting Trump’s border crisis claim?”

Is rigid partisanship the real reason for rejecting Trump’s border crisis claim?

By Nolan Rappaport

© Getty

Gallup scientist, Frank Newport, says that President Donald Trump’s wall has become an “RPPI” — a Rigidly Partisan Policy Issue. Opinions “are highly entrenched and largely based on underlying partisan identity.”

Pew Research Center’s recent poll found that 82 percent of Republicans favor expanding the border wall, compared to only 6 percent of Democrats. Pew analysts noted that “partisan differences [on the wall] are now wider than they have ever been.”

And the RPPI is even stronger in congress.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) introduced a joint resolution, which, with favorable action in the Senate would terminate the national emergency declaration that Trump is using to obtain funding for his wall. Castro refers to it as “Trump’s fake emergency declaration.”

The resolution was cosponsored by 232 Democrats and one Republican. It passed on a roll call vote of 245 yeas and 182 nays. All of the nay votes were from Republicans.

Situation is worse than Trump is indicating

The failure to secure the border has resulted in a population of undocumented aliens so large that effective immigration enforcement in the interior of the country is no longer possible.

According to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations Report for fiscal 2018, the number of aliens deported from the interior of the country rose from 65,332 in fiscal 2016, to 95,360 in fiscal 2018.

A study by MIT and Yale professors, however, indicates that the number of undocumented aliens in the United States could actually be as high as 22.1 million. If interior removals continue at the fiscal 2018 rate, it would take more than 200 years to remove them all.

Read more at https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/432159-is-rigid-partisanship-the-real-reason-for-rejecting-trumps-border-crisis

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

Go on over to The Hill for Nolan’s complete article. I appreciate his “nifty summaries!”

No matter how one views the numbers, removal of everyone here in undocumented status is impossible, not to mention unnecessary. Serious immigration enforcement and control would start with a recognition of the fact that our system has been out of whack for decades and that removing folks who are overwhelmingly contributing members of our society is counterproductive and a waste of time and resources that could be directed elsewhere, at real law enforcement issues.

If anything, we should be asking why our system wasn’t designed to let these folks immigrate legally in the first place.

Additionally, treating asylum applicants who apply at the border or turn themselves in immediately after entering as a “law enforcement issue” is a misnomer. People who voluntarily submit themselves for screening and apply for legal status are not law enforcement issues.

Those individuals who, in fact, are coming solely for jobs can be “screened out” during the “credible fear” process, and summarily removed without placing them in the Immigration Courts for full “removal hearings.” The never get into the “interior.”

The idea that recent arrivals who are applying for asylum won’t show up for their hearings is clearly bogus — most hearings would be months, if not years in the future, so we don’t actually know at this point! If the Government ran a rational system working with NGOs and private bar groups to find placements and pro bono lawyers for asylum seekers, experience and past studies show that the vast majority would show up for hearings. A fairer, more generous, and more realistic interpretation of asylum law would also help.

Use of TPS to both register individuals and keep them out of Immigration Court for the time being would also be a good option for an Administration truly interested in addressing the humanitarian issues.

Rather than a “law enforcement emergency,” these folks present administrative processing, humanitarian relief, and foreign policy issues that this Administration has shown little or no interest in resolving in a constructive manner by using mechanisms available under current law and spending money prudently rather than wasting it on a wall that will take years, if not decades, to build and won’t address today’s concerns.

PWS

03-05-19

PARENTS VICTIMIZED BY SESSIONS’S CHILD ABUSE RETURN TO BORDER SEEKING THEIR CHILDREN, JUSTICE, & MERCY FROM A SYSTEM RUN BY THOSE WHO MOCK THE CONCEPTS! — Abusers Escape Accountability While Victims Continue To Suffer!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/29-parents-separated-from-their-children-and-deported-last-year-arrive-at-us-border-to-request-asylum/2019/03/02/38eaba7a-2e48-11e9-8781-763619f12cb4_story.html

Kevin Sieff and Sarah Kinosian report for the Washington Post:

Twenty-nine parents from across Central America who were separated from their children by U.S. immigration agents last year crossed the U.S. border on Saturday, demanding asylum hearings that might allow them to reunite with their children.

The group of parents quietly traveled north over the past month, assisted by a team of immigration lawyers who hatched a high-stakes plan to reunify families divided by the Trump administration’s family separation policy last year. The 29 parents were among those deported without their children, who remain in the United States in shelters, in foster homes or with relatives.

At about 5 p.m. local time, the families were taken to the U.S. side of the border by immigration agents, where their asylum claims will be assessed.

Although the Trump administration’s family separation policy has prompted congressional hearings, lawsuits and national protests, the parents have for nearly a year suffered out of the spotlight at their homes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. They celebrated birthdays and Christmas on video calls, trying to determine whether their children were safe.

Now, they will pose a significant test to the embattled American asylum system, arguing that they deserve another chance at refuge in the United States, something rarely offered to deportees.

Before the Trump administration, families had never been systematically separated at the border. And before Saturday, those families had never returned to the border en masse.

More than 2,700 children were separated from their families along the border last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. About 430 of the parents were deported without their children, and at least 200 of them remain separated today. Some waited in the hope that U.S. courts would allow them to return to the United States. Others paid smugglers to get them back to the border. Then came Saturday’s confrontation.

The group of parents walked toward the border here, flanked by local religious officials, and then waited at the entrance to the United States as the lawyers negotiated with U.S. officials. The parents sat on wooden benches, surrounded by their luggage, while officials decided how many of the parents to allow into the country.

Over the past three weeks, the parents stayed in a Tijuana hotel, sharing rooms and preparing for asylum hearings. They showed one another documents that their children had sent them: photos of foster families and report cards from Southwest Key, a company that runs shelters for migrant children.

A woman explained through tears how her daughter had tried to kill herself while in government custody. A man spoke about trying to communicate with his daughter, who is deaf, over a shelter’s telephone. Others carried bags full of belated Christmas gifts for their children.

José Ottoniel, 28, from Guatemala, at the Hotel Salazar in Tijuana, Mexico. Ottoniel was separated from his 10-year-old son, Ervin, and deported. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Many of the parents, like José Ottoniel, from the tiny town of San Rafael Las Flores, Guatemala, said they had been pressured into signing deportation papers after being separated from their children, before they could begin their asylum claims. When he returned home after being deported in June, Ottoniel was told that his 10-year-old son, Ervin, was still in the United States at a shelter.

Ottoniel and Ervin are seen in a picture taken on Sept. 15, 2017, Guatemala’s independence day. (Daniele Volpe/for The Washington Post)

The family chose to keep Ervin in the United States with an uncle, rather than forcing him to return to the violence and poverty of their home village. It was a wrenching decision that Ottoniel’s wife, Elvia, who had remained in Guatemala when Ottoniel had tried to cross the border, eventually decided she couldn’t live with. In January, she paid a smuggler $8,000 to travel to the United States to reunite with Ervin in Arkansas, applying for asylum in South Texas.

[These migrants were separated from their children — and aren’t sure they should be reunited]

A few days later, Ottoniel received a call from an American immigration lawyer with the Los Angeles-based legal advocacy group Al Otro Lado, which means “to the other side.” The attorney asked him if he was willing to travel the 2,500 miles from his village to the U.S.-
Mexico border to deliver himself once again to immigration agents.

Al Otro Lado had received more than a million dollars in financial assistance from organizations such as Families Belong Together and Together Rising, which mounted fundraising campaigns in the midst of the government’s separation policy. The lawyer told Ottoniel that the organization would pay for his buses, flights and hotels.

“At that point, we were already seeing some of these parents paying smugglers to bring them back to the U.S.,” said Erika Pinheiro, litigation and policy director for Al Otro Lado, which had interviewed deported parents from across Central America who feared for their lives because of violence in their home countries. “We needed to provide them with another option.”

For Ottoniel, who referred to his family as “disintegrated,” it seemed his best shot at a reunion.

“It was a chance to see my son again. How could I say no?” he said.

Ottoniel and other parents converged at a three-story hotel in Tijuana,where lawyers told them to remain quiet about their plans. They rehearsed how they would address U.S. immigration officials. They watched telenovelas. At night, they called their children across the border.

There was Luisa Hidalgo, 31, from El Salvador, whose daughter, Katherinne, 14, is in the Bronx with a foster family. The girl texted her mother the same words over and over: “Fight for me.”

Luisa Hidalgo, 31, from El Salvador, displays a jewelry box she purchased to give her daughter when they reunite. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Hidalgo sits for a portrait Feb. 14 in Hotel Salazar. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

There was Antolina Marcos, 28, who said she fled Guatemala after gangs began killing members of her family. She was separated from her 14-year-old daughter, Geidy, in May. “How can I live when she’s so far away?” Marcos said.

There was Santos Canelas, 44, who said he fled Honduras with his 16-year-old daughter, Merin, in May after gang members threatened to sexually assault her. She is living in New Orleans with a cousin. “Without my daughter, I’m dead inside,” he said.

In most of the 2,700 cases from when the Trump administration separated families at the border last year, both the parents and children remained in the United States, sometimes held in shelters and detention centers thousands of miles apart. Almost all of those families have now been reunified and are in the process of pursuing their asylum claims.

But the cases of about 430 parents deported without their children were particularly difficult. Often, the government lost track of which child belonged to which parent, and it did not link their immigration cases, sending parents back to Central America without telling them where their children were.

In some of those cases, parents later made the painful decision to leave their children in the United States, typically with relatives, rather than bringing them back to the violence and poverty from which the families fled. In other cases, the U.S. government determined that the parents were unfit to receive their children, often based on their criminal records.

Pablo Mejia Mancia, 53, from Honduras, was separated from his 10-year-old daughter, Monica, when they crossed the border in Reynosa, Mexico. Monica was detained for 3½ months. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Santos Canelas, 45, from Honduras, was separated from his daughter Merin, 16, who was detained for five months. Back home, gang members had threatened to rape his daughter. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

After Trump signed an executive order officially ending the family separation policy on June 20, lawyers launched a legal battle to reunify many of the deported parents and their children in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit demanding that the government allow 52 parents back into the United States to pursue their asylum claims, which the lawyers argued had been stymied after the parents were separated from their children at the border.

But the government has not responded to that appeal and later said it needed more information about the parents from the ACLU. It remains unclear when, or if, the U.S. government will invite those parents back to the United States to launch new asylum claims.

“The government has resisted bringing anyone back who was separated and deported without their kids,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “We hope the government will take a fresh look at these cases.”

[ACLU asks judge to order Trump administration to determine how many children were separated from their parents at border]

But as the government declined to articulate any plan to reunify the families, Pinheiro decided waiting much longer would put the parents at risk. Some had relocated to a safe house in Guatemala City to escape threats in El Salvador and Honduras. Some had already been without their children for more than a year, and those separations were taking a psychological toll.

“We gave them the option — you can wait for the court process, or you can do it this way,” Pinheiro said. Al Otro Lado worked with the ACLU to identify the separated parents in Central America, but the ACLU was not involved in bringing the 29 parents back to the border.

With few other options, Pinheiro said, almost every parent she approached accepted her offer. The parents first gathered in the Guatemalan city of Tecun Uman before crossing into Mexico with humanitarian visas that Al Otro Lado helped arrange. They flew to Mexico City and then to Tijuana, eventually taking a bus to Mexicali.

“We’re traveling back to the border where we lost our children in the first place,” said Pablo Mejia Mancia, 53, of Honduras, who was separated from his daughter, who is now 9 years old, when they crossed the border into Texas in May.

Antolina Marcos said she fled Guatemala after gangs began killing members of her family. She was separated from her 14-year-old daughter, Geidy, in May. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

It’s likely that some of the parents could be detained for months if the government decides to process their asylum claims. The U.S. policy of forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico has not yet been put into practice in Mexicali.

“They’re standing right at the border, preparing to reenter a system that traumatized their families months earlier,” Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, who counseled the parents in Tijuana, said before the parents crossed into the United States. “It says a lot about what they’re fleeing, and what they lost.”

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

Folks, we don’t have to look much further than Michael Cohen’s testimony (even if every word isn’t absolute truth), the House Judiciary GOP’s disgusting “head in the sand” performance, and Trump’s totally deranged two-hour litany of lies, distortions, fabrications, and White Nationalist myths before a deliriously giddy audience at CPAC this weekend to see that our country is in deep trouble.

Four out of ten voters and a major party just don’t care if we’re “led” by a congenital liar, racist, and suck-up to the world’s worst dictators, who lacks any trace of human empathy, an essential ingredient for governing for the common good.

In the meantime, your tax dollars are being spent on misguided, wasteful, and counterproductive “immigration enforcement” and a failed Immigration Court system that no longer prioritizes Due Process and fundamental fairness. Never forget that the damage already done to these families and children might well be irreparable and that we are responsible as a nation for the atrocities, deceptions, and mindless cruelty carried out by Trump and his minions in our name. Yes, as these pictures by Carolyn Van Houten show, there are real human beings out there, decent people much more like us than we might choose to believe, who are suffering because of what our Government has become.

It could be a long uphill fight to save our republic. But, that’s what the New Due Process Army is fighting to do every day!

PWS

03-03-19

TRUMP’S DUMB & UNLAWFUL POLICIES INCREASE ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSINGS & UNNECESSARILY ENDANGER REFUGEES — The DHS Lies By Calling Them “Illegitimate Asylum Seekers” & Dishonestly Implying That Their Claims Aren’t Legitimate — In Fact, Asylum Seekers Have A Right To Apply At The Border That Trump Is Unlawfully Denying — They Also Have A Legal Right To Apply Regardless Of How They Enter!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-restricted-flow-border-more-migrants-trying-sneak-through-undetected-n976356

Julia Edwards Ainsley reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Undocumented immigrants are increasingly choosing to cross the U.S. border illegally rather than waiting in line to claim asylum at legal ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data obtained by NBC News.

Immigration lawyers and rights advocates say asylum seekers are opting for illegal crossing because they are growing frustrated with waiting lines caused by Trump administration policies. Advocates say immigrants who might otherwise have presented themselves at legal ports are now going between entry points where, if caught, they can remain in the country while awaiting an asylum hearing.

In recent months, CBP has restricted the number of immigrants who can be processed for asylum at ports of entry and has begun turning back asylum seekers, who must now wait in Mexico while their cases are decided.

CBP data shows that at the same time, the proportion of immigrants caught crossing illegally rather than through legal ports of entry has been rising.

It climbed from 73 percent of border crossings between October 2017 and January to 2018 to 83 percent for the same period ending this January 31. The percentage reporting to legal ports of entry, meanwhile, dropped from 27 percent to 17 percent, even as the overall number of border crossings rose sharply, according to the data.

An official from the Department of Homeland Security, of which CBP is a part, said those abandoning legal entry points may not have legitimate asylum claims.

“The fact that illegitimate asylum seekers may be abandoning efforts at our [ports of entry] means that legitimate asylum seekers at the [ports of entry] can receive protections far more quickly — which has been our goal from the start,” said the DHS official. The department declined to comment on the record.

WAITING IN TIJUANA

In January, U.S. officials finalized a deal with Mexico that forces asylum seekers who present themselves at the legal port of entry in San Diego back across the border to Tijuana. There they must wait months or years, often in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, while an American immigration judge determines whether asylum can be granted. The policy, known as Remain in Mexico, may soon spread to other ports of entry if Mexico agrees to shelter the immigrants at other locations.

Illegal crossers, meanwhile, do not have to wait in Mexico, even if they are caught. Two DHS officials told NBC News that there are no plans to send asylum seekers back across the border if they are caught crossing illegally, primarily because the Mexican government lacks the infrastructure to shelter them at what are often remote points.

If they are caught and do not claim asylum or pass the initial asylum screening, procedure requires that they are flown back to their home countries. Most current border crossers are not from Mexico but from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Immigration advocates and lawyers say immigrants are being warned about the conditions in cities like Tijuana and are increasingly choosing to risk apprehension by the Border Patrol while crossing into the U.S. illegally instead of waiting in Mexico.

Michelle Brané, director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, said 9 out of 10 immigrants she spoke to in CBP custody would tell her and her staff they made the choice to cross illegally after other migrants told them the line to enter legally would mean a long wait in a dangerous place.

Life at the border: How a wall could impact this Arizona town

FEB. 17, 201904:50

“They would say, ‘There was a line and they told me I would get turned away,’ or, ‘People told me it’s too dangerous and you can’t get in that way,'” Brané said.

The most notorious line is in Tijuana, where thousands of immigrants have waited in shelters and tent camps since last fall, hoping to claim asylum to enter San Diego.

The government of Mexico closed a large migrant shelter there in December due to unsanitary conditions and another was shut down last month, forcing families to disperse and often to live on the streets. Also in December, two migrant boys were lured out of their shelter and murdered.

Immigrants in Tijuana keep what is known as “la lista,” or the list, to decide who can approach the U.S. border each day to claim asylum, according to affidavits by immigration lawyers. Due to a U.S. policy known as metering, only about 40 to 100 immigrants per day are permitted to enter. CBP is only permitting a maximum of 20 migrants per day to cross into Eagle Pass, Texas, where another group of about 1,800 immigrants has recently arrived.

DHS says metering is a result of only being able to process so many asylum seekers per day, due to limited resources. However, the Trump administration has not increased its manpower for processing asylum claims at the border, though it has increased border enforcement officers and numbers of military troops.

A CALCULATED RISK

The number of undocumented immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico is not near levels seen in the early 2000s. But the overall number of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border has risen since a year ago. From October 2017 to January 2018, according to CBP figures, 150,346 crossed the border, a number that surged to 242,667 in the same four-month period ending in January 2019.

The biggest surge has come in the numbers who are crossing illegally. CBP apprehended more than 200,000 crossing illegally between October 2018 and this January, compared to 109,543 a year earlier — nearly doubling the total of illegal crossings.

Working with asylum seekers in Tijuana in December, Kennji Kizuka, senior researcher and policy analyst at Human Rights First, said he saw some immigrants grow frustrated with the wait and try their luck at crossing illegally.

Lawmakers call for investigation after deaths of migrant children

DEC. 27, 201802:04

“People were leaving and saying they were about to cross. They had just given up on waiting their turn to get on the list after finding out how long it was and how many months they would be there and how horrible the conditions were,” Kizuka said.

But crossing between legal ports of entry also comes with dangers.

Late last year, two children who crossed with their parents died in CBP custody after being picked up in remote areas after making long journeys, where access to water and other basic needs are severely limited.

Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost told Congress on Tuesday that for the first time in U.S. history, families and unaccompanied children make up 60 percent of those arrested between ports of entry. Also, Provost said border patrol is noticing that families and unaccompanied children are traveling in larger numbers: Nearly 68 groups ranging from 100-350 so far in 2019, compared to 13 last year and two the year prior.

Immigration advocates say the large groups are due in part to a “safety in numbers” strategy as families and children are being warned about the dangers not only on the journey but as they await entry to the U.S. in northern Mexico.

Julia Ainsley

Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.

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

They AREN’T “illegitimate” asylum seekers! They are individuals seeking to exercise their legal rights under U.S. and international law to be granted protection as refugees. They are entitled to fair and humane treatment.

What IS “ILLEGITIMATE” is the scofflaw Trump Administration’s failure to recognize these legal rights and their intentional mistreatment of those seeking asylum. What is also “illegitimate” is having Government employees lie about asylum seekers. The folks putting out these bogus and pejorative statements about asylum seekers should be fired!

In enacting the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress recognized, as had the international community in the Refugee Convention, that manner of entry into a signatory country has little if anything do with whether or not one qualifies under the “refugee.” Desperate people do desperate things. And refugees are the very definition of “desperate people.”

The claim that this Administration is fairly processing asylum seekers is absurd. As this article points out: 1) conditions in Mexico are known to be dangerous for asylum seekers; and 2) although willing to spend money on bogus “stunts” like “the Wall,” unnecessary troops, and cruel and mindless detention, this Administration has totally failed to do the obvious things to facilitate asylum processing: work with the private bar and NGOs to get lawyers involved for the applicants; increase the numbers of Asylum Officers, Immigration Judges, Port of Entry Inspectors; use sensible “prosecutorial discretion” to clear the hundreds of thousands of “low priority cases” that should be administratively closed off the Immigration Court docket so that judges can deal fairly and efficiently with newly arrived asylum seekers in accordance with the constitutional requirement of Due Process; and perhaps most important, revoke incorrect and misguided precedents so that asylum law can be applied and interpreted in the generous manner originally intended by the Refugee Act and reinforced by the Supreme Court in Cardoza-Fonseca.

If that were done, many of these individuals could be granted asylum, receive legal status, and commence working, paying taxes, and contributing the full measure of their skills to the common good of our country. We’d actually be generating revenue rather than wasting it on misplaced and dishonest “enforcement initiatives” aimed at individuals who mean us no harm and could do us much good if we would let them.

Actually, this Administration’s toxic border policy operates much like Sessions’s program to destroy the U.S. Immigration Courts to promote extreme nativist “solutions.” Rather than working diligently to process asylum seekers fairly under the law, the Administration chooses to “break” the system and then declare a bogus “emergency” that supposedly justifies draconian (yet actually unnecessary and counterproductive) enforcement actions.

Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that the Mexican Government is carrying out the Trump Administration’s “dirty work” by blocking asylum seekers from approaching the U.S. Border. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/world/americas/mexico-migration-trump.htm

I predict that the Administration’s lawless and mindless approach to border enforcement and asylum adjudication will eventually convince asylum applicants (and the professional smugglers that the Trump Administration promotes, enriches, and enables) to simply avoid the border all together. There are lots of ways of getting folks into the interior without having them turn themselves in at ports of entry or to the nearest Border Patrol Agents, particularly when legitimate law enforcement has been diverted by Trump to concentrating (and promoting with false narratives and scenarios) on a “crisis that isn’t.”

Trump’s diversion of resources and attention should also be a boon for real criminal activity crossing the border. In other words, the Trump Administration has been great for the business of cartels, druggies, human trafffickers, and other “bad guys” taking advantage of incompetent leadership and lack of concern for protecting America from real crime.

Sure it will cost more, probably kill some more asylum applicants, and make enforcement and administration of our immigration laws more difficult and less effective. But, that’s pretty much what Trump’s “dumb” White Nationalist agenda is about anyway. Doubling down on failed policies to stoke racism, hate, and “fake” rule of law arguments for the benefit of those either too biased or ill-informed to grasp the realities of human migration and basic human rights.

Back to Julia’s article, I’ve always enjoyed her timely and very clear reporting. It’s also great to see her on NBC TV more these days. Her previous stint on the “immigration beat” at Reuters its a perfect “tie-in” to her current national security beat.

PWS

03-02-19

BIPARTISAN GROUP OF 58 NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERTS “CALLS B.S.” ON TRUMP’S BOGUS NATIONAL EMERGENCY!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/former-senior-national-security-officials-to-issue-declaration-on-national-emergency/2019/02/24/3e4908c6-3859-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html

Ellen Nakashima writes in the Washington Post:

A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Monday saying that “there is no factual basis” for President Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The joint statement, whose signatories include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, comes a day before the House is expected to vote on a resolution to block Trump’s Feb. 15 declaration.

[Read the letter: Former national security officials dispute Trump’s emergency declaration]

The former officials’ statement, which will be entered into the Congressional Record, is intended to support lawsuitsand other actions challenging the national emergency proclamation and to force the administration to set forth the legal and factual basis for it.

“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border,” the group said.

Albright served under President Bill Clinton, and Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, served under President Barack Obama.

Lawmakers argue over Trump’s national emergency declaration

Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he supported President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build the wall Feb. 17. (Reuters)

Also signing were Eliot A. Cohen, State Department counselor under President George W. Bush; Thomas R. Pickering, President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations; John F. Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state; Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser; Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary; as well as former intelligence and security officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations.

[Trump declares national emergency on southern border in bid to build wall]

Trump’s national emergency declaration followed a 35-day partial government shutdown, which came after Congress did not approve the $5.7 billion he sought to build a wall.

In announcing his declaration, Trump predicted lawsuits and “possibly . . . a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling” before winning at the Supreme Court.

Trump’s actions are also drawing criticism from at least two dozen former Republican congressmen, who have signed an open letter urging passage of a joint resolution to terminate the emergency declaration. The letter argues that Trump is circumventing congressional authority.

A secondary border wall is under construction in Otay Mesa, Calif. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

The former security officials’ 11-page declaration sets out their argument disputing the factual basis for the president’s emergency.

Among other things, they said, illegal border crossings are at nearly 40-year lows. Undetected unlawful entries at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased from 851,000 to nearly 62,000 between 2006 and 2016, they said, citing Department of Homeland Security statistics.

Contrary to the president’s assertion, there is no documented emergency at the southern border related to terrorism or violent crime, they said, citing administration reports and independent think tank analyses.

[When Trump declared national emergency, most detained immigrants were not criminals]

Similarly, they state that there is no drug trafficking emergency that can be addressed by a wall along the southern border, noting that “the overwhelming majority of opioids” that enter the United States are brought in through legal ports of entry, citing the Justice Department.

They also argue that redirecting money pursuant to the national emergency declaration “will undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.” And, they assert, “a wall is unnecessary to support the use of the armed forces,” as the administration has said.

Some of the same former officials wrote a joint declaration disputing the factual basis for the president’s order shortly after he took office in January 2017 barring entry to foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The former officials asserted that the order was not based on a bona fide national security assessment but on “a deliberate political decision to discriminate against a religious minority.”

Their views were filed as a joint declaration and later as a friend-of-the court brief in lawsuits challenging the original order and subsequent revisions, and it was cited by almost every federal judge who enjoined the ban. By the time the challenges reached the Supreme Court, the administration had significantly narrowed the ban, which the high court upheld on a 5-to-4 vote.

With respect to the declared national emergency, plaintiffs have filed two cases in the District of Columbia, two in California and one in Texas.

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

It definitely will be worth noting for posterity those in the GOP who vote to sell out America by failing to stand up to Trump’s bogus national emergency ploy.

We also shouldn’t forget that if the GOP weren’t willing to sell out America because of fear of the “Off-base Trump Base” the vote to overturn his national emergency would be overwhelming and thereby “veto-proof.” A body that won’t stand up for its own Constitutional prerogatives, isn’t likely to strand up for the rights of anyone else.

PWS

02-26-19

INSIDE THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG:” Conditions Are Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading, & Life-Threatening — Why Are We Funding The Perpetrators, Rather Holding Them Accountable & Demanding An End To Human Rights Abuses In America?

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-saadi-immigration-health-care-detention-facilities-2019025-story.html

Altaf Saadi, M.D., writes in the LA Times:

This week, a 45-year-old immigrant in the U.S. illegally died in Border Patrol custody. His death follows the December deaths of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal and 8-year-old Felipe Alonzo-Gomez in United States immigration custody, both of which prompted demands for improving healthcare for immigrants in detention.

As a physician who has evaluated dozens of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for legal groups and human rights organizations, I know that high-profile deaths are only one small piece of the story of severely substandard healthcare in America’s immigration detention system.

For example, in one detention center I met and reviewed the medical records of a man who had been thriving and holding steady employment for years while on schizophrenia medications. Then he was picked up and detained by ICE. In detention, he told me, ICE personnel abruptly stopped his medications. After a nearly two-week delay, an alternative medication was prescribed, but it was not as effective. His mental health deteriorated, and he experienced worsening auditory hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. He attempted suicide four times.

Media reports of high-profile deaths capture only a sliver of the human rights violations occurring in detention.

Share quote & link

Another individual I met with and whose medical records I reviewed had longstanding hypothyroidism, but ICE failed to provide her with thyroid medication in detention. When she was first hospitalized for worsening mental health, her thyroid hormone level was 60 times higher than normal. Despite the hospital medical team’s explicit instructions, ICE still failed to provide her thyroid medication when she returned to detention. It was not until a second hospitalization, again with a critically abnormal thyroid hormone level, that she finally received her medication.

I also met with a man who had developed a stomach ulcer and vomited blood after ICE medical personnel gave him ibuprofen repeatedly for back pain — even though he had reported symptoms of severe heartburn. Any physician applying the proper standard of care would know to minimize prescribing ibuprofen to an individual with severe heartburn.

The kinds of problems I saw are in keeping with the type repeatedly documented by immigrant advocates, filed in litigation and contained in the government’s own reports. According to Freedom for Immigrants, a national advocacy group seeking to end immigration detention, the top complaint they hear from detained immigrants is medical neglect.

In addition, multiple Department of Homeland Security inspector general reports have concluded that detention facilities repeatedly fail to comply with federal standards, including those requiring adequate healthcare. In 2017, a report noted delays in the provision of healthcare and a lack of adequate documentation. And the problems extend beyond healthcare. A report in January 2019 cited more than 14,000 deficiencies found during inspections of 106 immigrant detention facilities nationwide between October 2015 and June 30, 2018.

Substandard conditions can significantly harm an individual’s health. Many of the individuals I met with said they experienced sleep deprivation from lights being kept on 24 hours a day. Some said they had to wear dirty prison uniforms that caused urinary and vaginal infections. Others complained of being served rotten or inadequate food, a violation of standards that has been repeatedly documented in inspection reports.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute »

Some detainees also reported verbal and physical abuse by guards, which can significantly worsen the mental health of immigrant detainees. For example, during one of his acute mental health crises, the schizophrenic man I interviewed recalled banging his body against a wall as he wrestled with voices telling him to kill himself. He said a guard referred to his distress as a “tantrum” and told him to “get over it.”

Other detainees told me that staff used frequent racial epithets and also referred to them as “crazies,” or “Loony Tunes,” or “trash.” As one detainee put it: “They see us not like human but as animals here.”

Media reports of high-profile deaths capture only a sliver of the human rights violations occurring in detention. None of the patients I interviewed died from the dangerous neglect they experienced, and so their experiences didn’t garner headlines. But their experiences were dangerous — and not uncommon. We need to hold the U.S. government accountable not just for the deaths that occur of immigrants in their custody, but also for the neglect and abuse that can lead to or exacerbate serious health problems.

Altaf Saadi is a neurologist, clinical instructor of medicine, and fellow at the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCLA. She has performed numerous evaluations for the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network.

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

I continue to think that the bipartisan Goverment funding bill was not the right place to deal with the “New American Gulag.” But, Democrats should “keep hammering” on this important “below the radar screen” issue. Making an oversight record of the many abuses, false narratives, cover-ups, and lies underlying the Gulag should be a high priority.

What meaningful civil immigration detention reform could look like:

A “hard cap” probably in the area of 10,000 to 15,000 detention slots;
An end to private detention;
Enactment of strict standards governing the conditions of civil immigration detention;
A specific requirement for proper health and psychiatric care for those detained;
A bar on detention being used for “deterrence” or “punishment;”
Change in the law to permit all individuals in civil immigration detention to seek release on bond in U.S. Immigration Court (obviously, the Immigration Judges would retain the discretion to deny bond on the merits where warranted by the facts) with review by an Article III Court;
Periodic bond hearings every six months for those in “long-term detention;”
A requirement that access to counsel be a primary consideration in establishing immigration detention sites, and that pro bono groups and NGOs be consulted and given an opportunity to comment before any new immigration detention centers are established;
An end to the regulatory practice of allowing ICE Counsel to unilaterally block the order of a U.S. Immigration Judge pending appeal of a decision to release on bond (the Immigration Judge and the BIA would retain discretion to grant stays pending appeal, where appropriate, on application by ICE);
A statutory presumption in favor of ankle monitoring and other “alternatives to detention,” with physical detention being a disfavored, “last resort:”
Accountability for how detention dollars are spent and consequences for those in DHS and DOJ, including political officials, who violate or evade the law, including intentional falsification or misrepresentation of statistics, or who fail to implement the mandated reforms in a timely and reasonable manner.

Remember folks, these aren’t “beds,” or other “pieces of furniture;” these are fellow human beings, most of whose “offenses” consist largely of seeking to exercise their legal rights to fair treatment and Due Process under our laws and our Constitution!

PWS

02-25-19

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WAITING IN TIJUANA

A CALCULATED RISK

They AREN’T “illegitimate” asylum seekers! They are individuals seeking to exercise their legal rights under U.S. and international law to be granted protection as refugees. They are entitled to fair and humane treatment.

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