☠️⚰️✈️DEATH FLIGHTS: 🏴‍☠️ DHS RACISTS RAMP WRONGFUL REFUGEE REMOVALS, ILLEGALLY TARGETING BLACKS IN WANING DAYS OF KAKISTOCRACY!🤮 — “Christmas Death Spree” Among Final Acts Of Hypocrisy For Regime After Four Years Of Hate Mongering, Dehumanization, Lies, Illegality, & Disdain For Human Life! — “It’s a death plane. Even if there was a means to make that plane crash that day, we would’ve done it.”

Molly O’Toole & Andrea Castillo report for the LA Times:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-27/black-asylym-seekers-trump-officials-push-deportations

By MOLLY O’TOOLE, ANDREA CASTILLO

NOV. 27, 20204 AM

WASHINGTON — Owning a small business in Cameroon selling French products was enough to trap the young man between the English-speaking minority and French-speaking majority government in the warring West African nation.

In July 2019, he was kidnapped by armed rebels, who tortured him for months in the jungle, demanding $10,000 ransom from his family, he said. Then, shortly after they paid, government forces arrested and tortured him for another month — for “financing” the separatists.

But what shocked him most, he said, was that after he escaped through a dozen countries and claimed asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, American officials detained him for almost a year, then threatened and assaulted him and put him in solitary confinement before deporting him back to Cameroon in late October.

“At that point, it’s like the end of the world,” he said, requesting anonymity because he is in hiding. “It’s a death plane. Even if there was a means to make that plane crash that day, we would’ve done it.”

During President Trump’s last weeks in office, Black and African asylum seekers say, the administration is ramping up deportations using assault and coercion, forcing them back to countries where they face harm, according to interviews with the immigrants, lawyers, lawmakers, advocates and a review of legal complaints by The Times.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security headquarters did not respond to requests for comment.

The allegations have shed light on a group of immigrants that has been targeted by the president’s rhetoric and his policies to restrict asylum, but that is often overlooked. Relative to Mexicans and Central Americans, asylum seekers from Africa and the Caribbean make up a small but fast-growing proportion of the more than 16,000immigrants in detention today across the United States, particularly in the for-profit prison archipelago in the American South that has proliferated under Trump.

Despite Trump’s all-out assault on asylum, explicit bias against Black asylum seekers, and border closures under the pretext of the pandemic, some 20,000 Haitians and Africans have journeyed from South America, largely on foot, to claim protection at the U.S.-Mexico border during Trump’s time in office, according to Mexico’s migration statistics.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he will end the use of for-profit immigration detention, reverse many of Trump’s policies that restrict asylum, and reform the U.S. immigration system. But Trump has left his successor with decades-long private-prison contracts; more than 400 executive actions on immigration; a record immigration court backlog of more than 1.2 million cases; and record-high asylum denial rates, reaching around 70% last month.

Since October, lawyers have filed multiple complaints with the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Inspector General’s Office documenting the cases of at least 14 Cameroonian asylum seekers at four detention facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi who say ICE subjected them to coercion and physical abuse to force their deportations.

The complaints call for investigations and an immediate halt to the deportations, arguing that officials are violating U.S. and international law, including due process rights and the Convention Against Torture.

In that time, more than 100 asylum seekers also have reported ICE using or threatening force to put them on deportation flights, in particular to Haiti and West Africa, according to lawyers and calls received on a national immigration detention hotline run by the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants.

The Times has interviewed nine asylum seekers, most from Cameroon, others from Haiti or Ethiopia, many of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Five have been deported in the last month, and three remain detained after ICE attempted to remove them in recent weeks. One Cameroonian was released Monday after roughly 20 months in immigration detention.

They include teachers, law students, mothers, fathers, a 2-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, who have fled corrupt governments, political persecution, gang rape, torture by security forces, assassination attempts and arbitrary detention.

For many, deportation from the United States is a death sentence.

“I came to U.S. because I need to save my life because my life is in danger,” said a high school teacher who fled Ethiopia in 2017 after being jailed and beaten for supporting an opposition political party and student protests.

The teacher claimed asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on the California-Mexico border in 2018. But last month, while being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Facility, after he refused to sign deportation papers, six ICE officers assaulted and forcibly fingerprinted him, he said, then sent him to the medical clinic.

His asylum case had been denied but was pending an appeal. Two days after the assault, he said, officers told him he’d be transferred. Instead, they took him to Los Angeles International Airport and deported him to Ethiopia, where he was immediately rearrested and now awaits a court hearing.

“ICE is something like racist because they are doing excessive force,” the teacher said. “In [a free] country I don’t expect these things.”

Many asylum seekers are well aware of Trump’s disparagement of Black immigrants. And many believe that ICE officials and detention guards share his prejudices.

As Trump leaves office, the “pattern and practice of physical and verbal coercion” by ICE officers and guards to force Black asylum seekers to sign deportation papers is worsening, according to the complaints filed to Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Inspector General’s offices.

Beyond threats, the tactics include shackling the immigrants, stripping them naked, holding them down and choking them, resulting in injuries, according to the complaints. Officials often committed the assaults out of sight of facility cameras, and in several instances filmed the assaults themselves, the complaints state.

Immigration detention is civil, not criminal, and ICE has the discretion to release detainees at any time. Most of the asylum seekers have family in the United States, and all have exercised their right to seek protection under U.S. law — meaning that many are being detained for years even though they have U.S. sponsors and haven’t committed a crime.

Of the deportation flights to West Africa in October and November, at least a dozen on board had pending cases, according to lawyers.

In interviews with The Times, the asylum seekers said they sought protection in the United States because they believed it was the only place where they could be safe and free.

“We believe in freedom and in this country as a country that provides protection for people who are running for their lives — and instead upon arrival, for us to be imprisoned and caged?” said a Haitian mother detained with her husband and 2-year-old son at a Pennsylvania ICE facility.

Police officers in Haiti had targeted her and her husband for their involvement with the political opposition, beating and sexually assaulting her while she was pregnant, according to sworn legal statements. She miscarried before she fled.

Despite many countries shutting their borders amid the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE has recently increased the pace of deportations, including sending a flight to West Africa just days after the Nov. 3 election. In October, there were nearly 500 ICE Air Operations flights, a more than 10% increase since September, according to Witness at the Border. More than 1,300 Haitians were deported, said Guerline Jozef, president of the Haitian Bridge Alliance in California.

In recent years, Cameroonians have increasingly accounted for one of the largest groups of what U.S. officials call “extracontinental” migrants, as the conflict in Cameroon has widened.

One man, going by the initials K.S., said he fled because officials in Cameroon had asked him to work with them to capture Anglophone people. He refused; his wife and three children are from the English-speaking side.

He had been detained at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility east of San Diego for over two years when the final appeal on his asylum claim was denied — making him so depressed that he spent a week under medical observation.

He said the ICE officer assigned to his case advised him to sign paperwork agreeing to be deported. The officer said that if the Cameroonian government didn’t accept ICE’s request to take him back, as was likely, he would be released to his U.S. sponsor after 90 days.

On Oct. 6, after 97 days had passed, six guards stood by as K.S. was ordered to pack up his things to leave.

“I didn’t think about deportation,” he said. “It was the last thought on my mind. They lied to me.”

ICE officers put him on a flight to Louisiana that picked up other Cameroonian deportees and then dropped the group off at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas. On Oct. 13, K.S. said, he was cuffed and taken to the airport, where he boarded a flight with about 100 other African migrants.

He watched as ICE officers strapped in three men from their shoulders to their ankles to restrict their movement and covered their heads with bags, then laid them across rows of seats in the plane.

Just as the flight was about to take off, K.S. and three other men were removed and taken back to Prairieland, without explanation.

Three weeks later, on Nov. 11, K.S. was back on a deportation flight with 27 other men. One, who was known to have heart problems, began crying that his chest was burning, K.S. said, an account confirmed to The Times by another passenger.

ICE ultimately removed the man and put him in an ambulance.

In contrast to Central Americans largely fleeing a lethal combination of gang violence, corruption, poverty and climate change, many Haitians and Africans have more traditional asylum claims that, at least in theory, better fit the categories outlined by an outdated U.S. asylum system largely conceived in the post-World War II era: persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group.

Yet Black and African asylum seekers are less likely than other immigrants to be released on parole or bond, or to win their asylum cases — a racial disparity that has worsened under Trump, according to lawyers and government data.

From September 2019 to May 2020, comparing hundreds of release requests from detained Cubans, Venezuelans, Cameroonians and Eritreans, the non-Africans had grant rates roughly twice as high, said Mich Gonzalez, senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Fewer than 4% of Cameroonian parole requests were granted.

ICE is also increasingly blanket-denying Black immigrants’ release for clearly bogus reasons, said Anne Rios, a supervising attorney in San Diego with the nonprofit Al Otro Lado.

For example, ICE rejected one request by claiming an applicant’s identity hadn’t been established, when the agency had the applicant and his identification documents in its custody, according to parole applications and denials provided by Rios and reviewed by The Times.

U.S. officials have faced more impediments to deporting Haitian and African asylum seekers due to limited diplomatic relationships with their homelands and more complicated deportation logistics exacerbated by coronavirus closures abroad.

But that hasn’t stopped them. The Trump administration has at times put enforcement before its own stated foreign policy, contradicting the State Department and U.S. law barring officials from returning people to harm or death.

Take Cameroon. Last year, the U.S. pulled back some military assistance amid reports of atrocities committed by security forces trained and supplied by the U.S. military for counterterrorism. The State Department travel advisory for Cameroon warns of “crime,” “kidnapping,” “terrorism” and “armed conflict.”

Rather than obtaining valid Cameroonian passports, ICE officials have issued Cameroonian deportees “laissez-passer” travel documents that are invalid, or even signed by individuals in the United States purporting to be Cameroonian officials, according to the October complaint.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

I understand the incoming Biden-Harris Administration’s desire to avoid getting entangled in the muck of the overt corruption, racism, and countless crimes of the outgoing regime.

Nevertheless, I doubt that institutional racism can be eliminated, equal justice under law achieved, and racial harmony realized without dealing in some way with the many crimes against humanity committed in the name of racism, hate, and “Dred Scottification” by the regime and their cronies, toadies, and enablers at DHS, DOJ, DOS, and elsewhere in government.

Also, to state the obvious, the types of cases described by Molly and Andrea could have been rapidly granted at the Asylum Office level in a functioning system. That’s a critical first step in eliminating the largely self-created backlog in the Immigration Courts, ending counterproductive litigation by the Government, and largely “zeroing out” the unnecessary and wasteful “New American Gulag” (“NAG”) of bogus “civil” detention largely abusively applied for illegal punishment and deterrence.

Fair and rational application of immigration laws and sane policies also make for efficient, fiscally responsible government. Compare that with the current kakistocracy which has run up record deficits, created endless backlogs, and left behind far, far more problems than they solved. Indeed, never has a gang of empowered malicious incompetents showed so little ability to recognize, promote, or govern in the common good.

Due Process Forever! Complicity in Crimes Against Humanity, Never!

PWS

11-29-20

🗽⚖️🇺🇸YAEL SCHACHER @ REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL FILES AMICUS BRIEF ON WHY “REMAIN IN MEXICO” IS A “CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY” — “When I wasn’t visiting border, I was trying to understand how the U.S. government could put in place a policy that seemed the very antithesis of what seeking asylum was supposed to be, as articulated in Refugee Act of 1980.”

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.refugeesinternational.org/reports/2020/11/25/le4a9nihwqnhgcn0q2l5fufa8fah6v&source=gmail-imap&ust=1606928318000000&usg=AOvVaw0Fc_OTkc3MFgBm5dijso0i

. . . .

When I wasn’t visiting border, I was trying to understand how the U.S. government could put in place a policy that seemed the very antithesis of what seeking asylum was supposed to be, as articulated in Refugee Act of 1980. I had spent my time before coming to Refugees International researching the writing and passage of that law and the development of the contemporary asylum system since 1980. The Remain in Mexico policy is unprecedented. The U.S. government claims the authority for it lies in a provision of the 1996 immigration law that allows for the return of certain applicants for admission to contiguous territory to await processing. I began researching this provision and it became clear that it was not intended to apply to asylum seekers.

In support of a challenge to the Remain in Mexico program in California federal court, Refugees International and I, with attorneys from Sidley Austin LLP, submitted this brief describing why the Refugee Act forbids the program, a reality that the 1996 law does not change. The argument of the brief is that, when the 1980 Refugee Act was enacted, it was intended to establish a uniform process for consideration of asylum claims that would preclude this return to Mexico approach. A lynchpin in the argument is that there were two versions of the asylum provision of the Refugee Act—one proposed by Congresswoman Holtzman and one by Senator Edward Kennedy. Only the House version provided that asylum seekers at a land border be accorded the same ability to seek asylum as those already in the country. When, in conference, Holtzman’s version was accepted, Congress made a conscious choice in pursuit of uniformity in consideration of asylum requests: that the United States would treat asylum seekers at the border the same as it would all others. And the language mandating uniform treatment of asylum seekers in the 1980 Refugee Act was reiterated in the 1996 immigration law.

. . . .

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

The case is Immigrant Defenders Law Center v. Wolf, USDC, C.D. CA.

Read Yael’s intro, her outstanding brief prepared by Sidley Austin LLP, and the “Holtzman Papers” at the above link. Notably, Sidley Austin is one of the great firms that have helped our Round Table with amicus briefs! It’s what happens when you connect the dots among history, research, social justice, and the law. It’s why the Liberal Arts are the wave of a better future and a better Federal Judiciary! It’s all about perspective and problem solving!

Thanks Yael for all that you, Refugees International, and great pro bono lawyers like Sidley Austin do for justice and humanity.

The real problem here: A disgraceful Supremes’ majority 🏴‍☠️ that improperly “greenlighted” this totally illegal, racist-inspired, “crime against humanity,” cooked up by neo-Nazi hate monger Stephen Miller ☠️🤮, after it had properly and timely been enjoined by lower Federal courts. And, a complicit EOIR that consistently fails to provide due process and justice to asylum seekers is a huge part of the problem.

Unlike the Supremes, the EOIR Clown Show 🤡 can be removed and justice at all levels improved just by a putting the right experts from the NDPA in charge right off the bat.

Democratic Administrations, particularly the Obama Administration, have a history of not getting the job done when it comes to achievable immigration reforms within the bureaucracy. If you don’t want four more years of needless death, disorder, demeaning of humanity, and deterioration of the most important “retail level” of our justice system, let the incoming Biden Administration know: Throw out the EOIR Clown Show and bring in the experts from the NDPA to turn the Immigration Courts into real, independent courts of equal justice and humanity that will be a source of pride, not a deadly and dangerous national embarrassment!

Contrary to all the mindless “woe is me” suggestions that it will take decades to undo Stephen Miller’s (is he really that much smarter than any Democrat politico?) racist nonsense, EOIR is totally fixable — BUT ONLY WITH THE RIGHT FOLKS FROM THE NDPA IN CHARGE!

It’s only “mission impossible” if the Biden-Harris Administration approaches EOIR with the same indifference, lack of urgency, and disregard for expertise and leadership at the DOJ that has plagued past Dem Administrations on immigration, human rights, and social justice.

It won’t take decades, nor will it take zillions of taxpayer dollars! With the right folks in leadership positions at EOIR, support for independent problem solving (not mindless micromanagement) from the AG & DOJ, and a completely new BIA selected from the ranks of the NDPA, we will see drastic improvements in the delivery of justice at EOIR by this time next year. And, that will just be the beginning!

No more clueless politicos, go along to get along bureaucrats, toadies, and restrictionist holdovers calling the shots at EOIR, America’s most important, least understood, and “most fixable” court system! No more abuse of migrants and their representatives! No more ridiculous, “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” generating self-created backlogs! No more vile and stupid White Nationalist enforcement gimmicks being passed off as “policies!” No more “Amateur Night at The Bijou” when it comes to administration of the immigrant justice system at the DOJ under Dems!

Get mad! Get angry! Stop the nonsense! Tell every Democrat in Congress and the Biden Administration to bring in the NDPA experts to fix EOIR! Now! Before more lives are lost and futures ruined! It won’t get done if we don’t speak out and demand to be heard!

This is our time! Don’t let it pass with the wrong people being put in charge — yet again! Don’t be “left at the station” as the train of immigrant justice at Justice pulls out with the best engineers left standing on the platform and the wrong folks at the controls! Some “train wrecks” aren’t survivable! 🚂☠️⚰️

Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-28-20

🇺🇸🗽⚖️MAYORKAS APPOINTMENT @ DHS SIGNALS MOVE AWAY FROM RACISM, WHITE NATIONALISM, STUPID NATIVISM AS “POLICIES” – If Confirmed, Can He Finally Bring Sanity, Humanity, Fiscal Responsibility, & Focus On Legitimate Law Enforcement & “National Security” (Rather Than A String Of Fabricated Anti-Immigration Actions Motivated By Overt Racism, Political Opportunism, & Invidious Religious Discrimination) To A Politicized Agency Gone Bezerk? — “This is it. The change we needed, hallelujah,” Says GOP Pundit Al Cardenas!

Suzanne Suzanne Gamboa, Political Editor, NBCLatino, NBC NewsDate: October 21, 2013
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS
Creative Commons License

Al Cardenas
Last of A Dying GOP Breed?
Al Cardenas speaking at CPAC FL in Orlando, Florida.
Gage Skidmore, Photo
Creative Commons

Alejandro Mayorkas
DHS Secretry – Designate
Official DHS Photo
Public Domain

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/first-latino-tapped-head-dhs-signals-shift-trump-s-hard-n1248716

From Suzanne Gamboa @ NBC News:

Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latino chosen for President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet, will head a Department of Homeland Security that is expected to drastically overhaul President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, as well as put Mayorkas at the forefront of the new administration’s anti-terrorism strategy.

Mayorkas will be the first Latino and first immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security, if confirmed by the Senate. The highest-ranking Cuban American in the Obama administration, Mayorkas was deputy secretary of DHS under then-Secretary Jeh Johnson, and before that was the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, a part of DHS that oversees granting citizenship and other immigration benefits.

Mayorkas, if confirmed, will take over the nation’s third-largest agency in terms of employees, one that was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that oversees several smaller agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security, the Coast Guard and the Secret Service.

President-elect Biden names Alejandro Mayorkas for Homeland Security Chief

NOV. 23, 202003:15

The Trump administration has drastically transformed the nation’s immigration system with over 400 executive actions — including refusing entry to asylum-seekers, taking children from parents at the border and restricting travel to the U.S. by Muslims.

There will be pressure on the Biden administration to act quickly on immigration and uphold pledges he made on the campaign trail, such as ending travel bans and protecting young immigrants, known as Dreamers, and to take such actions in the first 100 days of his administration.

Much of Trump’s immigration policy was the work of his adviser Stephen Miller, who cited and promoted white nationalist beliefs in emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center last year.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Suzanne’s report at the link.

Al Cardenas has been one of very few Republicans to appear on “Meet the Press” over the past four years who has 1) dealt with facts, and 2) said something worthwhile. The normal GOP guest on MTP is either a Trump toady or a disingenuous apologist for the worst and most corrupt Administration in U.S. history.

I do suggest that Al needs to sit down and have a “heart to heart” with his Senate buddies Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as lots of Cuban-Americans in Florida about the future of America. They don’t seem to be on the same page, or indeed even in the same universe, as Al and the substantial majority of American voters.

This also illustrates the vital importance to DHS reform of a strong, due process, human rights, efficiency oriented, “best practices” EOIR with expert judges from the NDPA in leadership positions and on the BIA (and eventually the Immigration Courts). In the past, true reform at DHS has often been inhibited by refusal of supervisors and line officials to follow “policies sent out from Washington” specifically designed to enhance individual justice, insert reality, and promote docket and litigation responsibility and efficiency. In other words, the type of practical, reasonable, humane, experience-based prosecutorial discretion policies that every other law enforcement agency in the U.S., save DHS, routinely follows.

DHS reforms won’t be fully effective unless preceded by an EOIR under new leadership with an expert, courageous, independent due process committed BIA unswervingly dedicated to protecting the rights of asylum seekers and other migrants and effectively requiring DHS to operate within the law and conform to rational, practical, non-discriminatory policies. The talent is out there, just waiting be tapped!

A friend recently asked me what I expected to happen when the U.S. asylum system is reinstituted as President-Elect Biden and Vice President Harris have pledged. Here’s my answer:

[The Biden Administration] will get them [asylum applications] adjudicated in a timely and professional manner; more will qualify for protection, thereby allowing more of the work to be shifted to the Asylum Office; the refugee program will expand; America will prosper!

I hope I’m right. But, it won’t happen without a “new awakening and some new faces” at EOIR. Remember, it’s not rocket science!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-25-20

CORRUPT, CHILD ABUSING, RACIST IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻 MUST BE REPLACED WITH PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE COMMITTED TO DUE PROCESS, RULE OF LAW, HUMAN DIGNITY! — “CRUELTY TO migrant children, a trademark of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, did not cease when officials reversed course in the face of public outrage two years ago and stopped wrenching toddlers, tweens and teens from their parents — with no plan or process to reunite them. It has continued apace under cover of the pandemic . . . .”

Trump Dumping Asylum Seekers in Hondiras — Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras
Artist: Monte Wolverton
Reproduced under license

Sheltering in Cages by John Darkow — “Sheltering in Cages” by John Darkow
Reproduced under license

Sessions in a cage — Jeff Sessions’ Cage by J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group/AL.com
Republished under license

From WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-federal-judge-halts-another-inhumane-trump-administration-practice-at-the-border/2020/11/22/d5795686-2b4d-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html

Opinion by the Editorial Board

November 22 at 12:59 PM ET

CRUELTY TO migrant children, a trademark of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, did not cease when officials reversed course in the face of public outrage two years ago and stopped wrenching toddlers, tweens and teens from their parents — with no plan or process to reunite them. It has continued apace under cover of the pandemic, which the White House has used as an all-purpose pretext for ignoring child-protection laws and diplomatic agreements governing asylum, and, without even a nod to due process, expelling unaccompanied children who cross the border seeking refuge.

A federal judge has now halted that practice even as he acknowledged the administration’s far-reaching powers in the midst of a public health emergency. Those powers are broad, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled, but do not enable the government to send minors packing without affording them a chance to have their asylum claims heard.

At least 13,000 children have been detained by Border Patrol officers and swiftly thrown out of the country under an emergency decree that has effectively sealed off the southern border to most migrants since the spring. Administration officials justified the measure in the name of protecting the country from a potential influx of migrants carrying the coronavirus — but performed no testing, and provided no data, to substantiate their stance.

Given infection rates in Mexico and Central America, it may be reasonable to assume that some migrants, including unaccompanied minors, might have contracted covid-19. It may also be the case, however, as the ACLU argued in court, that the practice of expelling young migrants actually exposes U.S. border authorities to more risk — in the course of holding them while flights are arranged to their home countries in Central America or elsewhere — than they would otherwise face if the migrants were placed in shelters that have the capacity to adopt social distancing and other precautions. Judge Sullivan, for his part, said the government had asserted its “scientific and technical expertise” to justify its policy of evicting young migrants — but provided none by way of actual evidence.

As it happens, it occurred to at least some administration officials, early on in the pandemic, that migrant children deserved some special consideration. When the policy of suspending asylum was first rolled out, children who crossed the border were exempted. That was quickly reversed, however, with a spokesman saying that minors would be returned to their countries of origin on a “case by case basis.” In the ensuing months, however, virtually all have been expelled.

Anti-trafficking and other laws provide for protections for unaccompanied minors who arrive in this country. The administration has seized on the pandemic to disregard those, along with other long-standing measures and practices that set procedures for migrants seeking refuge here. A more humane approach, in line with American traditions and values, would have established a process for testing and quarantining, at least for migrant children, as they pursued asylum claims. But humane policy is anathema to the Trump administration, and the result is thousands of children who have been subjected to unwarranted hardship and risk.

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

Remembers, the victims are largely dead, deported, or still suffering! The “perps” — including the “Perp in Chief,” “Gruppenfuhrer Miller,” Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, “Wolfman the Illegal,” and “Billy the Bigot” remain at large, even profiting from and bragging about their “crimes against humanity.” This is a “functioning democracy?” No way!

We’ve all been subjected to the disingenuous writings of pundits babbling on about the resilience of American democracy in the face of a fascist president and his corrupt anti-democracy party of cowards and enablers. Hogwash!

Make no mistake about it, American democracy is on the ropes! Basically, we’re watching a corrupt President who lost the election by over 6 million votes and 74 electoral votes engage in systematic frivolous, abusive, baseless litigation intended to destroy our nation, undermine our national security, and disenfranchise voters. It’s a disgusting, overtly racist, dishonest performance that would have any other individual in America and his motley band of unethical lawyers in jail for contempt and conspiracy to obstruct justice! But, Trump and his cronies continue to operate outside the law!

We owe our existence as a nation less to any “structural integrity” and much more to a relatively few courageous, smart, highly motivated members of the resistance: immigration, human rights, and civil rights lawyers; African American women; non-right-wing journalists; Democratic legislators; scientists and medical professionals; a limited number of Federal Judges, mostly at the District Court and Immigration Court levels (and specifically excluding any current BIA Member, EOIR “Manager,” or Supreme Court Justice not named Sotomayor, Kagan, and (sort of) Breyer); courageous DACA kids; and some Federal Career Civil servants not working at ICE or CBP.

The “resilience of American institutions” view is largely that of a privileged minority who haven’t been deported to possible torture or death without any process at all (let alone “due” process), haven’t been illegally separated from beloved family members, aren’t rotting in private prisons (the “New American Gulag”) for the “crime” of seeking justice, aren’t struggling with unemployment or difficulty putting food on the table while Moscow Mitch and his elites focus on confirming unqualified Federal Judges, haven’t had family members shot by the police, haven’t had family members unnecessarily suffer and die because of the worst President in U.S. history’s maliciously incompetent failure to provide leadership and any systematic strategy for controlling a pandemic, and haven’t had to put their lives and professional reputations on the line in a failing Justice system that has enabled grotesque abuses by the likes of Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Billy the Bigot Barr, Noel Francisco, and the rest of their band of unethical Government lawyers.

The Biden Administration must do a thorough housecleaning of the corrupt DHS and DOJ bureaucracies that carried out the illegal, immoral, racist, White Nationalist agenda developed by neo-Nazi Stephen Miller and his cowardly gang of brownshirts!

And, as a nation, we need to think carefully about the implications of a life-tenured Supreme Court majority that, since their initial feckless performance on the “Muslim Ban” cases, time and time again failed to forcefully and unanimously stand up for our democracy, human decency, and those defending them in the face of overt, racism and hate driven, Executive tyranny! A Supremes’ majority that has disgracefully and spinelessly embraced the “Dred Scottification” of “the other” (mostly immigrants and those of color). It’s not rocket science! And some of our “elite law schools” seemed to have forgotten to teach “Con Law 101” and “Basic Ethics” to aspiring right wing judges!

It’s less about institutions than it is about the courageous individuals who uphold them! And, our future depends on the Biden-Harris Administration putting these folks “in the game” to insure that an unmitigated disaster like the Trump regime, it’s rampant illegality and inhumanity, and its “malicious incompetence” can never, ever, happen again! And, we must at least start the process of developing a better and more courageous Federal Judiciary for the future!

Due Process Forever! Complicity in the face of tyranny, never!

PWS

11-23-20

“TORTURE” UNDER U.N. DEFINITION! ☠️— “GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED CHILD ABUSE!” — WHAT HAVE WE BECOME AS A PEOPLE & A NATION? — AMERICA HAS PUT NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSERS AND SHAMELESS “PERPS” OF “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN CHARGE — We Now Have A Chance To Throw Them Out & Start The Return To Human Decency As An Overriding National Value! 🗽

Here’s an array of reports on how America under the Trump regime has joined the ranks of dictatorships, torturers, child abusers, persecutors, and human rights criminals!

Eugene Robinson
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post
Source: WashPost Website

Eugene Robinson @ WashPost:

What kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show “toughness” by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has come to? Or are we better than that?

This election demands we answer those questions. The choice between President Trump and Joe Biden is not just political. It is also moral. And perhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision than the Trump administration’s policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump’s warped vision of American strength.

We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.

These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1,500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.

Please think about that. The shocking scenes we saw two years ago did not result from a sudden spasm of presidential anger. They didn’t stem from a Fox News segment Trump might have seen one evening. Rather, the administration rehearsed this form of cruelty.

What the administration did not plan for was how to reunite the children taken in 2017 with their families. Many of the parents were deported, and their children were placed in shelters around the country, then ostensibly released to parents or guardians, placements that the ACLU is still trying to confirm.

[Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term]

The ACLU and other organizations have sent investigators to towns and villages in Central America in an attempt to find the kidnapped children’s families — an effort complicated not just by time and distance, but also by the covid-19 pandemic. Parents of 545 children have not been found, the ACLU reported this week.

Disturbingly, the Department of Homeland Security suggested that some of the parents declined to get their children back so they could remain in the United States. Keep in mind that most of these families were seeking asylum from deadly violence in their home countries. The Trump administration changed immigration guidelines to make it unlikely that the families would ultimately be allowed to stay in the United States, but federal law gives them the right to apply for asylum and to have their cases heard. They did nothing wrong. They should never have been asked to choose between parenting their children and getting them to safety — not by their home countries, and not by the United States.

Trump’s racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks of his presidency from the beginning, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he would preside over such an outrage. But he didn’t do this by himself. He had plenty of help.

Former attorney general Jeff Sessions seized an opportunity to make his rabid antipathy toward Hispanic immigration into policy. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide in the Senate, was the architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2018 that the children taken would be “taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.” Former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last year that she regretted that “information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place” — but not the separations themselves.

. . . .

Read the rest of Eugene’s article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-we-tolerate-the-kidnapping-of-children-this-election-is-our-chance-to-answer/2020/10/22/0f60d17c-1496-11eb-ad6f-36c93e6e94fb

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

Elise Foley
Deputy Enterprise Editor
HuffPost
Photo Source: HuffPost.com

Elise Foley @ HuffPost:

President Donald Trump’s administration started and carried out a policy that took more than 4,000 children from their parents, at least 545 of whom are still split apart years later. But at Thursday’s debate, the president insisted that he did nothing wrong at all ― blaming his Democratic predecessors and even insisting the kids are doing fine.

“They are so well taken care of,” Trump said of the children taken from their parents by his administration. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

Trump’s first term was marked by a full-out assault on immigration, both legal and unauthorized. The most dramatic was his “zero tolerance” policy on unauthorized border-crossing, used in a 2017 pilot program and expanded more broadly in 2018, that led to criminal prosecution of parents and locking up their kids separately. Splitting up families was intentional and calculated, according to multiple reports.

Thanks to mass public outrage and a court order, Trump was forced to stop his family separation policy. Most families were reunited, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which was part of the lawsuit against the government that stopped the policy, said this week that at least 545 kids are still away from their parents.

“Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said during the debate. “And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Elise’s article here:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-debate-family-separation_n_5f924368c5b62333b2439d2b

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

Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus, moderates a panel discussion about chronic poverty with Education Secretary John B. King and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, during the National Association of Counties at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. U.S. Department of Agriculture photo by Lance Cheung.

Ruth Marcus @ WashPost:

545.

That is the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is unimaginable and irreparable.

545.

Even one would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.

545.

That number represents an indelible stain on President Trump and every individual in his administration who implemented this policy, flawed at the conception and typically, gruesomely incompetent in the execution. It is, perhaps in the technical sense but surely in the broader one, a crime against humanity. It is torture.

545.

That number — I will stop repeating it, yet it cannot be repeated enough — represents a moral challenge and responsibility for the next administration. If Joe Biden is elected president, he must devote the maximum resources of the federal government to fixing this disaster. The United States broke these families; it must do whatever it takes to help them heal.

Nothing like that would happen in a second Trump term, because Trump himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t grasp the horror that he oversaw. He doesn’t comprehend the policy, and he is incapable of feeling the pain it inflicted.

Those truths could not have been clearer cut than during Thursday night’s debate.

Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News asked the president a simple question: “How will these families ever be reunited?”

First, Trump misstated the situation: “Their children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country.”

No. These are children separated from their families, not separated from smugglers. They are children brought by their parents in desperate search of a better life, desperate enough that they would take the risk of the dangerous journey.

Then Trump pivoted to the irrelevant: “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.”

Welker persisted: “But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”

Trump responded by pointing his finger at his predecessor: “Let me just tell you, they built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages, and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said look at these cages, President Trump built them, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”

This is typical Trumpian deflection, bluster undergirded by ignorance. The “cages” are ugly but irrelevant to the topic at hand: the deliberately cruel plan to deter border-crossing by separating children from parents. That was a Trump administration special, implemented with callous sloppiness and so extreme that even the Trump administration abandoned it.

Welker, for the third time: “Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?”

At which point Trump made clear that he did not: “We’re trying very hard, but a lot of these kids come out without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.” The children, he added later, “are so well taken care of, they’re in facilities that were so clean.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Ruth’s op-ed here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/545-children-are-still-separated-from-their-families-what-if-one-of-them-were-yours/2020/10/23/63d3be04-154f-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html

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

Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

Bess Levin @ Vanity Fair:

The third and final presidential debate gave Donald Trump and Joe Biden the opportunity to make their final pitch to the American people before the 2020 election. For the Democratic nominee, that meant driving home the point that he believes in science, that he’ll take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, that climate change is real, and that systemic racism must be dealt with. For Trump, it meant making it clear that in addition to being a science-denying, QAnon-promoting dimwit, he’s also an actual monster who thinks separating small children from their parents, in some cases permanently, is absolutely fine.

Asked by moderated Kristen Welker about the news that parents of 545 children separated at the border—60 of whom are under the age of five—cannot be located, Trump defended the policy and gave no explanation for how the government plans to find these people and reunite their families. “Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump said, which is objectively false, as they are brought here by their parents, which is why it’s called the family separation policy. “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers and we let people in but they have to come in legally.”

Noting that Trump hadn’t answered the question, Welker pressed: “But how will you unite these kids with their families?”

“They built cages, they used to say I built cages…that was him,” Trump said, pointing to Biden and referring to the fact that the Obama administration did build temporary enclosures but failing, naturally, to mention that his predecessor did not separate families.

“Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their parents?” Welker asked a third time. Again, Trump responded by claiming that the children “come without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.”

At this point, Joe Biden was given a chance to weigh in and used his time to describe the policy implemented by Trump as the horror show all non-sociopaths know it to be. “Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and they were separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

Then Trump interjected with what he apparently believed was an important point that would cast his administration in a much more favorable light and perhaps might even win it some awards or sainthood by the Catholic church. “Kristen, I will say this,” he told the moderator, of the children stolen from their parents. “They’re so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that are so clean.

With regard to that claim, NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff weighed in on that after the debate, telling Rachel Maddow: “I was one of the reporters I guess the president mentioned, they invited me to go to the epicenter of this policy…what I saw was little children sitting on concrete floors, covered by mylar blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower, it makes me sick every time I recall it. And Physicians for Human Rights…called this torture…the American Academy of Pediatrics called this state-sanctioned child abuse, and the president of the United States I guess interprets that as children being well taken care of.”

Read the rest of The Levin Report here:

https://mailchi.mp/c4319dce073e/levin-report-trumps-heart-bursting-with-sympathy-for-his-buddy-bob-kraft-2882762?e=adce5e3390

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

Jacob Soboroff
NBC Correspondent
Jacob Soboroff at the ABC News Democratic Debate
National Constitution Center. Philadelphia, PA.
Creative Commons License

Here’s a video from NBC New’s Jacob Soboroff, who has actually been inside “Trump’s Kiddie Gulag.” Surprise spoiler: It’s not “nice.” More like “torture” and “child abuse.”

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/soboroff-the-conditions-of-migrant-children-trump-described-as-well-taken-care-of-made-me-sick-94450757764

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

And, here’s another video from NBC News’s always incisive and articulate Julia Edwards Ainsley:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/10/21/lawyers-cant-find-parents-of-545-migrant-children-separated-by-the-trump-administration.html

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There is neither moral nor legal justification for what the Trump regime has done to asylum seekers and other migrants over the past four years as part of their racist, White Nationalist, nativist agenda. But, we can show that we’re a better country than his horrible vision by voting him and all of his enablers out of office! Vote ‘Em out, vote ‘Em out!

PWS

10-25-20

SCOFFLAWS 🏴‍☠️ STUFFED AGAIN: Split 9th Agrees That Trump’s “Stunt Wall” Illegal — Sierra Club v. Trump!

Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/posts/ca9-on-use-of-military-for-border-wall

Daniel M. Kowalski

12 Oct 2020

wall

border

CA9 on Use of Military $ for Border Wall

Sierra Club v. Trump

“This appeal presents the question of whether the emergency military construction authority provided by 10 U.S.C. § 2808 (“Section 2808”) authorized eleven border wall construction projects on the southern border of the United States. We conclude that it did not. We also consider whether the district court properly granted the Organizational Plaintiffs a permanent injunction and whether the district court improperly denied the State Plaintiffs’ request for a separate permanent injunction. We affirm the decision of the district court on both counts. … We hold that the States and Sierra Club both have Article III standing and a cause of action to challenge the Federal Defendants’ border wall construction projects, that Section 2808 did not authorize the challenged construction, and that the district court did not abuse its discretion in either granting a permanent injunction to Sierra Club or in denying a separate permanent injunction to the States.”

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

PANEL: THOMAS, Chief Judge, and WARDLAW and COLLINS, Circuit Judges

Opinion by Chief Judge Sidney R. Thomas; Dissent by Judge Collins

The only real question here is whether the Supremes will bail out the regime’s scofflaws once again.

PWS

10-13-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, “PERPS” ON THE LOOSE! — DOJ Internal Report Shows How “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, Rosenstein, Hamilton Conspired To Separate Migrant Kids In Violation Of 5th Amendment — When Will These Criminals Be Charged & Prosecuted Under 18 USC 242? — NY Times Reports!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separation-border-immigration-jeff-sessions-rod-rosenstein.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20201007&instance_id=22889&nl=the-morning&regi_id=119096355&section_index=2&section_name=the_latest_news&segment_id=40077&te=1&user_id=70724c8ee3c2ebb50a6ef32ab050a46b

‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said

Top department officials were “a driving force” behind President Trump’s child separation policy, a draft investigation report said.

By Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt

Oct. 6, 2020

505

WASHINGTON — The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Bash had declined the cases, but Mr. Rosenstein “instructed that, per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”

The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.

The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration. But the fierce backlash when the administration struggled to reunite the children turned it into one of the biggest policy debacles of the president’s term.

Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote.

The draft report, citing more than 45 interviews with key officials, emails and other documents, provides the most complete look at the discussions inside the Justice Department as the family separation policy was developed, pushed and ultimately carried out with little concern for children.

This article is based on a review of the 86-page draft report and interviews with three government officials who read it in recent months and described its conclusions and many of the details in it. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it publicly, cautioned that the final report could change.

Before publishing the findings of its investigations, the inspector general’s office typically provides draft copies to Justice Department leaders and others mentioned in the reports to ensure that they are accurate.

Mr. Horowitz had been preparing to release his report since late summer, according to a person familiar with the investigation, though the process allowing for responses from current and former department officials whose conduct is under scrutiny is likely to delay its release until after the presidential election.

Mr. Sessions refused to be interviewed, the report noted. Mr. Rosenstein, who is now a lawyer in private practice, defended himself in his interview with investigators in response to questioning about his role, according to two of the officials. Mr. Rosenstein’s former office submitted a 64-page response to the report.

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw concluded that intentional separation of families was unconstitutional — a clear violation of Fifth Amendment due process. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/us/politics/family-separations-congress-states.html

The Government did not seriously question the correctness of this finding!

Intentionally violating Constitutional rights (not to mention lying and attempting to cover it up) is clearly a violation of 18 USC 242.

Here’s the text of that section from the DOJ’s own website:

TITLE 18, U.S.C., SECTION 242

Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-law

Sure looks like an”open and shut” case for prosecution.

The irony: Families and their kids have been traumatized for life, perhaps even killed or disabled by the actions of these criminal conspirators; however, the “perps” remain at large.

Hamilton is on the public dole continuing to wreak-havoc on the Constitution, the rule of law, the Immigration Courts, and human decency at the corrupt Barr DOJ; Rosenstein works for a “fat cat” law firm hauling down a six figure salary while he avoids justice and accountability for his misdeeds; “Gonzo” had the absolute audacity to try to reinsert himself onto the public dole by running for the Senate from Alabama (thankfully, unsuccessfully, even though he previously held the seat for years and misused it as a public forum to spread his racist ideas, xenophobic venom, lies, false narratives, and unrelenting cruelty).

Where’s the “justice” in a system that punishes victims while letting “perps” prosper and go free?

Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-07-20

CRIME WATCH: NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: Trump Regime Illegally Orbits Nearly 9,000 Kids To Potential Doom Without Due Process!

Second Wave
Artist: John Darrow
Reproduced under license

https://apple.news/AA4Yv2KHFSS6YVKxlnKiD0A

Catherine E. Shoichet, reports for CNN:

A court declaration Friday from US Border Patrol Deputy Chief Raul Ortiz revealed the number, which previously hadn’t been released to the public.

Since the Trump administration invoked a public health law to implement new restrictions at the border on March 20, the agency has expelled more than 159,000 people, according to Ortiz. That figure, Ortiz says, included 8,800 children who were traveling alone and 7,600 family members.

The Border Patrol official’s filing, first reported by CBS News, reveals new details about who has been kicked out of the US under the sweeping public health restrictions, which largely bar migrants from entering the country.

The declaration was filed as part of the government’s appeal of a recent court ruling over a controversial aspect of the coronavirus restrictions: the increasing use of hotels to detain migrant kids rather than licensed and monitored facilities.

Immigrant and civil rights advocates have warned that the secretive system is putting kids in danger. They have criticized the administration for using public health claims as a pretext to impose harsh immigration restrictions.

Last week, US District Judge Dolly M. Gee ruled that detaining migrant children in hotels wasn’t safe and did not “adequately account for the vulnerability of unaccompanied minors in detention.” She has ordered the government to stop the practice by September 15.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Catherine’s report at the link.

The cowardly and dishonest performance of the U.S. legal system, failure to live up to our Constitutional responsibilities, and welching on our international agreements will haunt us for generations. Eventually, history will document the full extent of the legal and human rights abuses carried out by the Trump regime while the political and judicial branches of Government stood by and watched.

History has not been kind to the Dred Scott decision, Jim Crow politicians, and the many citizens who empowered Jim Crow and institutionalized racism. Likewise, the modern day Jim Crows of the GOP, their supporters, and Federal Judges who help carry out “Dred Scottification” of the other, child abuse, and tormenting the most vulnerable among us in their hour of greatest need will also face an historical reckoning. Their smug, arrogant, immoral, and fundamentally cowardly abandonment of justice and human decency for those seeking legal protection will “live in infamy.”

This Fall, vote like your life and the future of humanity depend on it. Because they do!

PWS

09-15-20

“POPPYCOCK!” — Conservative U.S. District Judge Richard Leon “Zeroes In” On Racist, Disingenuous, BS Presented In Court By Trump Regime To Justify “Crimes Against Humanity” Committed Against Asylum Seekers By USG! — Contrasts With Disingenuous Enabling Of Racist Immigration Agenda By Supremes’ Majority! — As Reported By “Legal Clairvoyant” 🔮 Jacqueline Thomsen @ NLJ!

“POPPYCOCK!” — U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s Characterization Of Trump Regime’s Defense Of Asylum Seeker Abuse By DHS & Barr’s Unethical & Frivolous Arguments!

Jacqueline Thomsen
Courts Reporter
National Law Journal & Legal Clairvoyant

https://link.law.com/click/21370303.6876//5162eb9334b9b0a8048a6907C27093cdb

Due Process “Legal Eagle” Jacqueline Thompsen reports for the National Law Journal’:

. . . .

The federal immigration law requires that officers who conduct the interviews—in which migrants must show they face at least a 10% chance of persecution due to certain factors in order to be eligible for asylum—receive significant training on handling the applications

In responding to the administration’s claims that the border patrol agents received similar training as asylum officers, Leon wrote, “Poppycock! The training requirements cited in the government’s declaration do not come close to being ‘comparable’ to the training requirements of full asylum officers.”

“To make matters worse, the January MOA precludes any individual CBP agent from conducting credible fear interviews for longer than 180 days, meaning that CBP agents cannot gain the experience necessary to appropriately apply the complex asylum laws and regulations,” the judge added. “These procedures plainly violate Congress’s requirements.”

The Trump administration has administered a widespread crackdown on asylum proceedings, adopting a slew of policies that make it more difficult for migrants fleeing persecution in other countries to obtain protections in the United States.

The ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by attorneys with Tahirih Justice Center and the Constitutional Accountability Center, on behalf of four mothers and their seven children from Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico seeking asylum in the U.S. All of the migrants failed to pass the credible fear assessment conducted by CBP agents, which were upheld by immigration judges.

Leon also found in Monday’s ruling that it “would certainly seem unlikely” that CBP agent interviews of migrants could be considered to be “nonadversarial proceedings with a neutral decision-maker,” as required under federal regulations and guidelines. He noted that border patrol agents are considered law enforcement, and said federal authorities’ statements on measures they have taken to minimize the possibility of the interviews becoming adversarial “hardly seems sufficient.”

Leon wrote the training requirements for those conducting the credible fear assessments “are essential for a functioning asylum process, which is why Congress required them,” describing the legal framework surrounding U.S. immigration, asylum, and other similar processes as “complex, to say the least.”

“After all, an asylum officer who is not adequately trained in the applicable legal requirements is less likely to ask the right questions of an asylum seeker, or for that matter, to gather the facts necessary to make an accurate determination of whether an asylum seeker has a credible fear of persecution,” he continued. “Indeed, the record here contains several examples of the effects of inadequate training: one CBP agent failed to follow up with questions about an asylum-seeking plaintiff’s sexual abuse, and another failed to inquire into another asylum-seeking plaintiffs husband’s murder investigation.”

Leon also found the immigrants in the case would face irreparable harm, if he did not issue a preliminary injunction to block their removal from the U.S.

***********

Why isn’t it an ethical and professional problem for “Billy the Bigot’s” DOJ to make nonsense arguments to a Federal Judge in support of unlawful actions? Private members of the bar arguing “poppycock” in a civil case could well find themselves referred for disciplinary action. Why are Cabinet Officials and their attorneys exempt from normal professional and ethical considerations?

You can read Judge Leon’s clearly written and cogently reasoned 22-page decision in A.B.-B. v. Morgan here: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.216698/gov.uscourts.dcd.216698.32.0.pdf.

If only more judges at all levels could write with such clarity and in plain English!

The rejection at the “credible fear” stage of the bona fide asylum claims described by Judge Leon is beyond appalling! These are essentially totally and intentionally unqualified and biased U.S. Government employees committing “crimes against humanity” and getting away with it! These aren’t “legal errors.” It’s systemic malfeasance, otherwise known as “malicious incompetence” with a heavy dose of racism and misogyny thrown in for a good measure!

If substantiated during the immigration hearing process that should have taken place, all these applicants should have been “slam dunk” grants of asylum, withholding of removal, and/or relief under the Convention Against Torture in a properly functioning justice system. Instead, but for the efforts of pro bono counsel, they would have been illegally returned to harm, torture, and/or death with no legitimate process at all!

No wonder “Billy the Bigot’s” Immigration Courts are out of control and the borders are a deadly mess when individuals who with proper screening and access to competent counsel should have been quickly legally admitted to the U.S. under protection laws are instead being “rejected” by biased and unqualified Border Patrol Agents impersonating Asylum Officers!

Here’s my favorite quote (among many) from Judge Leon’s decision:

Of course, the Government has a strong interest in the “prompt execution of removal orders.” Nken,556 U.S. at 436. However, the Government and public can have little interest in executing removal orders that are based on statutory violations, League of Women Voters of U.S. v. I,{ewby,838 F.3d l,12 (D.C. Cir. 2016) (“There is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of unlawful agency action.”), especially where those statutory violations may compromise the accuracy of such removal orders. R.I.L.-R. v Johnson, 80 F. Supp. 3d 164, 191 (D.D.C. 2015); Grace, 344 F. Supp. 3d at 14144 Indeed, the public has an interest “in preventing aliens from being wrongfully removed, particularly to countries where they are likely to face substantial harm.” Nken,556 U.S. at 436. As such, the balance of interests here weighs in favor of preliminary injunctive relief.

The last point, “the public has an interest ‘in preventing aliens from being wrongfully removed, particularly to countries where they are likely to face substantial harm,’” Nken,556 U.S. at 436, has basically been ignored by the Supremes’ majority recently in sending refugees to their death or into harm’s way without any semblance of due process, based on various lies, distortions, and racist schemes by the Trump regime intentionally mischaracterizing “national security” and “national emergency.” As Judge Leon would say: “Poppycock!”

Perversely, the Trump regime and the Supremes’ have made execution of illegal removal orders, resulting from racist White Nationalist schemes, a “national priority.” Truly, this is a system broken from the top down in need of immediate repair and injections of intellectually honesty, moral courage, and ethics — something that seems “out of vogue” in all three branches of our failing democracy these days

I recently had a conversation with Jacqueline in which she basically predicted this decision based on her study of the arguments and trends among U.S. District Judges, regardless of philosophy or appointing party, in DC. Nice going Jacqueline! Congrats on your clairvoyance!

Those with NLJ access (anyone can get “three free” per month by registering) can read the complete article at the link.

Judge Leon’s linear, straightforward, and “no BS” treatment of the regime’s absurdist, unethical, and scofflaw legal “defense” of essentially “crimes against humanity” contrasts sharply with the disingenuous and essentially “brain dead” treatment of similar BS by the “JR Five” on the Supremes. There, the patently unconstitutional and illegal (not to mention immoral) agenda of neo-Nazi racist Stephen Miller and the unethical maneuvers of SG Noel Francisco are often wrongfully rewarded. By contrast, the the Supremes’ majority routinely trashes the legal and constitutional rights of vulnerable people of color, particularly asylum seekers, migrants, and voters beneath an avalanche of bogus “Dred Scottification” jurisprudence.

Additionally, Judge Leon is “onto something” that has been swept under the carpet by the Supremes and the Circuit Courts when he questions “whether CBP agents could ever lawfully be given authority to conduct asylum interviews and adjudicate asylum claims, see Compl. ‘]Tfl 108-09, it would certainly seem unlikely under these circumstances. After all, law enforcement officers typically “function as adversaries” whose role is “to investigate criminal activity, to locate and arrest those who violate our laws, and to facilitate the charging and bringing of such persons to trial.” New Jersey v T.L.O.,469 U.S. 325,349 (1985) (Powell, J., concurring).”

Similarly, many of us have argued that Immigration “Judges” who work for uber-enforcer and Trump shill “Billy the Bigot” and have been “repurposed” and “weaponized” into DHS enforcement support staff can not possibly be the “fair and impartial” quasi-judicial adjudicators required by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment!

Better Justices and better Federal Judges for a better America, particularly for people of color and other minorities. It’s actually quite simple and straightforward. It starts with throwing Trump and the GOP out of every political office this Fall.

Then, we need some real Justices and Federal Judges who will stand against systemic racism and enforce equal justice in America! Not, rocket science! Just knowledge of the Constitution, awareness of human rights and immigrants’ rights, a focus on racial justice, courage to speak truth to power, and a demonstrated commitment to human dignity and human decency. One could easily wonder why those haven’t been the minimal requirements for Federal judicial service in the past.

Past is past, particularly for life-tenured judges. But, America can’t afford any more disastrous judicial appointments, at any level, who lack the guts and human decency to stand up to scofflaw, neo-fascist racists like Trump, Miller, and their cronies.

The top to bottom overall failure of the American judiciary to put an end to unconstitutional and unfair racism and “Dred Scottification” of “the other” in our society is aiding and abetting the dark, lawless forces aligned with the regime destabilizing our country and ripping it apart! No more!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-31-20

🇺🇸😎⚖️🗽👍REFUGEE, ASYLUM, IMMIGRATION, & BORDER REFORM – Plenty Of Good Ideas — Shortage Of Political Will To Fix Broken System!

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The following three papers have been prepared as part of a process, organized jointly by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School, to identify ways to strengthen the US immigration and refugee protection systems through administrative action. Additional papers in this collection will be forthcoming, as well as a distinct set of policy recommendations from the directors of CMS and the Zolberg Institute.

Rebuilding the US Refugee Resettlement Program

By Susan Martin (Georgetown University)

This paper offers an historic review of the US refugee resettlement program. It spans the colonial era, to the establishment of the first distinct US admissions policies for persons fleeing persecution in 1917, to the creation of the formal US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) in 1980, and to the Trump administrations’ denigration of and attempts to eviscerate the program. It proposes ways that a new administration can rebuild this crucially important program and put it on more secure footing. In particular, it recommends that a new administration:

Reframe the discourse on refugee resettlement to emphasize its central importance to the nation’s identity and the way it serves the national interest.

Rebuild the capacity of the federal government to administer the program and the badly depleted community-based resettlement infrastructure that is central to the program’s success.

Hold emergency consultations with Congress to increase refugee admissions in Fiscal Year (FY) 2021, and consult soon after the inauguration with international, state and local, and non-governmental partners to plan FY 2022 resettlement goals, including a robust admissions ceiling and budget.

Reform and reinvigorate federal consultations with states and localities to ensure their receptivity, capacity and support for refugees, and eliminate the current veto power of states and municipalities over resettlement in their jurisdictions.

Explore legislative fixes to the refugee admissions process and attempt to depoliticize the process by setting a “normal flow level” that does not require an annual Presidential determination.

Join the Global Compact on Refugees, which seeks to expand the availability of durable solutions for refugees, and encourage other nations to follow the US example of resettling larger numbers of refugees.

READ MORE

Border Enforcement Developments Since 1993 and How to Change CBP

By Daniel E. Martínez (The University of Arizona), Josiah Heyman (The University of Texas at El Paso), and Jeremy Slack (The University of Texas at El Paso)

Enforcement along the US-Mexico border has intensified significantly since the early 1990s. Social scientists have documented several consequences of border militarization, including increased border-crosser deaths, the killing of more than 110 people by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents over the past decade, and expanded ethno-racial profiling in southwestern communities by immigration authorities. Less attention has been paid to the pervasive and routine mistreatment migrants experience on a daily basis in CBP custody.

This paper traces major developments in border enforcement to three notable initiatives: the “prevention-through-deterrence” strategy, the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Consequence Delivery System, initiated in 2011. Despite the massive buildup in enforcement, CBP has operated with little transparency and accountability to the detriment of migrants. The paper provides an overview of the findings of nongovernmental organizations and social scientists regarding migrant mistreatment while in CBP custody. It then highlights important shifts in migration patterns over the past decade, as well as changes in border enforcement efforts during the Trump administration. It discusses how these transformations affect migrants’ everyday encounters with CBP officials.

The paper concludes by providing specific recommendations for improving CBP conduct. Its core theme is the need to emphasize and inculcate lessons of appropriate police behavior, civil rights, and civil liberties in training and recruiting agents and in setting responsibilities of supervisors and administrators. It offers recommendations regarding important but underrecognized issues, including ending the use of CBP agents/officers as Asylum Officers, as well as better-known issues such as militarization and the border wall.

READ MORE

Strengthening the US Immigration System through Legal Orientation, Screening and Representation: Recommendations for a New Administration

By Donald Kerwin (Center for Migration Studies)

This paper highlights the importance of legal orientation, screening, and representation to the US immigration system. It proposes that a new administration facilitate legal representation in order to establish a fairer and more efficient removal adjudication system and to place more immigrants on a path to permanent residence and citizenship. As is well-documented, legal assistance can:

Improve the ability of immigrants to identify and articulate their claims in removal proceedings and produce better-informed case outcomes.

Increase the efficiency and contribute to the integrity of the removal adjudication system.

Lead to better-prepared applications for immigration benefits, and thus a more just and efficient legal immigration system.

Place more non-citizens on a path to permanent residence and naturalization by identifying their potential eligibility for immigration benefits or relief, and, in some cases, their existing US citizenship.

Legal representation and expertise can also contribute to resolving some of the substantial problems that afflict the US immigration system, such as lengthy court and asylum backlogs. In addition, it can identify and help to correct legal and factual errors by immigration adjudicators, and abuses by enforcement officers and private contractors.

The paper’s first section describes federal legal orientation and assistance programs for non-citizens in removal proceedings. The second section discusses the need for large-scale legal screening and representation of US undocumented residents, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) beneficiaries. Its third section examines the proliferation of universal representation programs—supported by states, localities, and private funders—for non-citizens in removal proceedings before an immigration judge, and in summary removal processes administered by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The paper concludes with a series of administrative measures that a new administration could take in its first year to strengthen and expand legal representation. It also outlines longer-term policy recommendations that would require legislation.

READ MORE

The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) is a New York-based educational institute devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. For more information, please visit www.cmsny.org.

Copyright © 2020 Center for Migration Studies, New York, All rights reserved.

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It’s possible that Biden could win and still end up hamstrung by a Senate controlled by “Moscow Mitch” and his “American Nihilist Party.” That’s why all elections are critically important this November!

Gotta work with what you‘ve got. So, in a “second worst case scenario” Biden might have to go the Administrative route. Three major problems:

He’ll have to do much better on the administrative agenda than Obama – that means jettisoning some of his past and getting and empowering more progressive advisors, folks like Kerwin, Susan Martin, Martinez, Hyman, Slack, Michelle Mendez, Karen Musalo, Marielena Hincapie, Heidi Altman, Debbie Anker, Hon. Ilyce Shugall, Michele Pistone, Denise Gilman, Kristina Campbell, Lindsay Harris, David Baluarte, Phil Schrag, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Andy Schoenholtz, Eleanor Acer, Alice Farmer, Hon. Bob Weisel, Hon. Lory Rosenberg, Hon. Carol King, Lenni Benson, Michelle Brane, Hon. Amiena Khan, Cori Alonso-Yoder, Dree Collopy, Blaine Bookey, Tess Hellgren, Hon. Paul Gussendorf, Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, Tanishka Cruz, Lauren Wyatt, Laura Lynch, Claudia Valenzuela, Aaron Richlin-Melnick, Katie Tobin, Lindsay Jenkins, Hon. Ashley Tabaddor, Jason “The Asylumist” Dzubow, Kevin Johnson, Kit Johnson, Dan Kowalski, Margaret Stock, Ben Winograd, Hon. Rebecca Jamil, Claudia Cubas, Wendy Young, Laura Tuell, Jayesh Rathod, Shoba Wadhia, Hon. Jeffrey Chase, Elizabeth “The Report” Gibson, and a host of others too numerous to list. No shortage of real talent out there to replace the regime’s “maliciously incompetent kakistocracy.”
Without an independent Article I Immigration Court and a drastic “upgrade” in the human rights, immigration, and equal justice credentials of newly appointed Article III Judges, administrative reforms are likely to be less than optimally effective.
“The Lesson of Trump” – Anything the “good guys” can do administratively can be undone by the “bad guys” overnight. And, building can be long and difficult; demolition quick and easy.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

08-26-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️🆘AMERICA’S SHAME — NATIONAL DISGRACE – SYSTEMIC INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: From Supremes Who Abandoned Their Key Precedent In Cardoza-Fonseca, To A 5th Cir. Court Of Appeals That Shirked Its Duty To Protect Refugees, To A “Don’t Rock The Boat” BIA That Failed To Enforce Uniformity, To Unqualified & Biased Immigration “Judges” Who Created Illegal, “Asylum-Free Zones,” The U.S. Asylum System Was In Deep Trouble Even Before Trump – Under Trump, It Has Become A “Killing Floor” Programmed To Intentionally Deny & Deport Deserving Refugees To Death, Torture, Or Grotesque Mistreatment, As Indolent, Cloistered Article IIIs, Unwilling To Dig In & Stop The Slaughter Look On!

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2020-08-23/who-gets-asylum-even-before-trump-system-was-riddled-with-bias-and-disparities

An asylum seeker’s chances at protection hinge on numerous factors that often seem arbitrary — from location to nationality to individual judge assigned — according to a Union-Tribune analysis of immigration court records
By KATE MORRISSEY,
LAURYN SCHROEDER
AUG. 23, 2020
5 AM
For the world’s most vulnerable, protection in the United States has all but disappeared.
Wait times for asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border that already seemed indefinite now seem impossible. Families struggle to find food and shelter to outlast a pandemic order with no end date.
Those who cross north are sent back to Mexico in a matter of hours — or even put onto planes back to the countries from which they fled — without any opportunity to explain why they came.
In its response to COVID-19, the Trump administration achieved what it long sought, a shutdown of the U.S. asylum system. And with new regulations introduced this summer, the administration has moved to squeeze out any real chance at refuge in case the pandemic order is lifted.
But even before the current president began his campaign against asylum in the United States, people often struggled to win protection — no matter how strong their cases appeared to be.
In its 40-year history, the system has chronically fallen short of its promise of safety.
RETURNED: PART II
The second in an occasional series in which the Union-Tribune explores the asylum system through the eyes of people who experience it firsthand, with drastically different outcomes.
The Trump administration has used statistics about grant rates to justify closing off access to asylum, saying that those who lose their cases are illegitimate asylum seekers.
The facts show a different story: Thousands of people turned away based not on the merits of their cases, but on the capriciousness of a system so riven with inequity that many outcomes seem little more than arbitrary.
A San Diego Union-Tribune analysis of 10 years of court outcomes uncovered many symptoms of the system’s biases — shortcomings that date to the system’s creation.
. . . .

***************************
Read the rest of this eye-opening (for those not familiar with this broken, biased, and beyond dysfunctional system) article at the above link.

There can be no excuse for the “horror chamber” that this already broken, battered, and unfair system has devolved into. It will take genuine changes in expertise, attitude, courage, and intellectual integrity across all three branches of Government to get this system functioning in a fair, legal, and constitutional manner consistent with due process and our international obligations.
It also will require much better, more educated, more courageous, more practical, and more intellectually honest judges from the Immigration Courts (which must become independent from the Executive) all the way up to and including the Supremes.

Better judges for a better America! Life tenure means it won’t happen overnight. But, the process needs to begin now for our nation to survive and prosper!

We can’t achieve equal justice for all with so many judges who don’t believe in it, don’t have expertise in and a commitment to human rights, and don’t have the guts to stand up for the legal, constitutional, and human rights of all individuals coming before our justice system. That specifically includes the “most vulnerable among us” – asylum seekers and other of our fellow humans whose humanity and right to live seem to fall below the “radar screen” of the current Supremes’ majority!

Due Process Forever! “Dred Scottification” and complicity, never!

PWS
08-24-20

JULIA AINSLEY & JACOB SOBOROFF @ NBC NEWS REPORT ON WHITE NATIONALIST WHITE HOUSE: Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller & Cabinet Racists Voted To Abuse Brown Children: “If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” Said The New American Gruppenfuhrer!” — “Any moral argument regarding immigration ‘fell on deaf ears’ inside the White House, said one of the officials.”

Julia Edwards Ainsley
NBC News Correspondent

https://apple.news/AZFgY4X7BQsaKSITqteCbIg

Trump cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, say officials present at a White House meeting.

by Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff | NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, led the meeting and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of zero tolerance said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct, but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

While “zero tolerance” ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated an additional 25,000, including those who legally presented themselves at a port of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.

That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions’ announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Miller, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like this, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument regarding immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, said one of the officials.

“Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems,” said one of the officials. “It was just, ‘Let’s move forward and staff will figure this out.'”

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and then demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward, he asked?

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with then-CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan inside her office at the Ronald Reagan Building, and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the report, detailing the full extent of this outrageous, illegal, and immoral conduct by corrupt high-level officials of our Government, at the link. This is what your tax dollars have been used for, while legitimate needs like coronavirus testing, disaster relief (see, Iowa), mail delivery, naturalization services, unemployment relief, etc., go unmet!

So, separated families and children continue to suffer, much of the harm and trauma irreparable and life-defining. This “policy” was so clearly illegal and unconstitutional that DOJ attorneys conceded its unconstitutionality in Federal Court.

However, in an ethics-free DOJ, those same lawyers falsely claimed that there was no such policy. Rudimentary “due diligence” on their part, required by professional ethics, would have revealed that their representations on behalf of corrupt institutional “clients” were false.

The article also confirms the complicity of Kevin “Big Mac With Lies” McAleenan in gross, intentional human rights violations. Courtside exposed “Big Mac” long ago!

While the victims continue to suffer, Miller, Sessions, Nielsen, Big Mac, and other cowards who planned and carried out these “crimes against humanity,” directed at some of the most vulnerable humans in the world, remain at large. Some, like Miller, actually remain on the “public dole.” Likely, so do the DOJ lawyers who unprofessionally defended and helped obscure this misconduct in Federal Court.

It’s also worth examining the role of U.S. Magistrate Judges and U.S. District Judges along the southern border, most of whom turned a blind eye to the transparent racial and political motives, not to mention the grotesque misallocation of public resources, driving Sessions’s “zero tolerance” misdirection of scarce prosecutorial resources from serious felonies to minor immigration prosecutions.

As I’ve been saying, “Better Federal Judges for a better America!” And, better Federal Judges start with removal of the Trump regime as well as the ousting of “Moscow Mitch” and the GOP from Senate control.

Will there ever be accountability? Our national soul and future might depend on the answer!

Had enough wanton cruelty, neo-Nazism, corruption, illegality, immorality, cowardice, lies, false narratives, racism, stupidity, and squandering of tax dollars on nativist schemes and gimmicks? Get motivated and take action to get our nation back on track to being that “City upon a Hill” that the rest of the world used to admire and respect!

This November, vote like your life and the very future of humanity depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

08-21-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️DEADLY GULAG: CMS Reports Continue To Document What We Already Know: The Trump Regime’s “New American Gulag” Needlessly Kills Migrants While Endangering Public Health & Wasting Lots Of Taxpayer Funding!

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last few months, the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) has been trying to err on the side of pushing out work in progress, rather than waiting to publish polished and complete work. Some of our work in progress can be found on our web-page devoted to migration-related,

COVID-19 issues.https://cmsny.org/cms-initiatives/migration-covid/. We have also been regularly updating a “compendium” of US detention developments. The latest and final version of that working “report” can be found here:

https://cmsny.org/publications/immigrant-detention-covid/ . The short report is about how the well-documented problems in the US immigrant detention system, combined with the callous, politically-driven policies of the Trump administration, have predictably facilitated the spread of COVID-19 inside and beyond the US immigrant detention system. Since we finished this version of the report on August 3, at least two more detainees have died from COVID-19-related “complications” and, no doubt, more will follow and ICE will continue to promise full, agency-wide investigation of these deaths:

https://www.aila.org/infonet/deaths-at-adult-detention-centers. We will be broadly disseminating this report and an upcoming exhaustive report on immigrant essential workers. However, please help us to distribute this detention report to others. We hope it will be a useful resource.

Best wishes and thanks,

Don Kerwin

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

Thanks, Don!

Get the CMS reports at the above links!

They should be helpful evidence in litigating to put an end to this disgracefully unconstitutional and inhuman system. To paraphrase my friend and colleague Professor Phil Schrag of Georgetown Law, author of Baby Jails, in America we treat refugee children worse than convicted felons!

To once again state the obvious, the outrageous amount of money we waste on unnecessary and illegal DHS “civil” detention in the Gulag could be “repurposed” to more constructive uses like funding legal representation, resettling asylees, and transitioning to an independent Article I Immigration Court. America’s health and welfare, as well as our national moral standing, would be vastly improved.

PWS

08-13-20

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️👎🏻🤮END OF REFUGEE PROGRAMS SIGNALS DEMISE OF AMERICA! — “Our nation has an ethical and legal responsibility to protect those who seek refuge here. Instead, we have expended vast resources on preventing people from entering the country and deporting people who are already here!”

🏴‍☠️☠️🏴‍☠️☠️🏴‍☠️☠️🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/refugees-united-states-abandon/2020/08/07/6085e81c-d751-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html

U.S. Asylum Officer Jason Marks writes in the WashPost Outlook Section:

. . . .

Collectively, we were told to implement restrictive new policies, expressly designed to deter people from seeking refuge. The Migrant Protection Protocols, for example, resulted in more than 60,000 asylum seekers being sent to Mexico in 2019, after fleeing the extreme brutality of MS-13 and the 18th Street gang in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Left to live in squalor without any protection, they are preyed upon by cartels and gangs as they wait, sometimes months, for an elusive court date before an immigration judge.

[I became an asylum officer to help people. Now I put them back in harm’s way.]

The pandemic put refugees and asylum seekers in even more desperate straits, as the United States paused refugee resettlement. Many already interviewed and accepted for resettlement in the U.S. now live stateless at the margins of cities, towns and villages where they have no rights or legal status, or in overcrowded refugee camps. Around the world, in places including Jordan, Kenya and Bangladesh, refugee camps are bursting at the seams. People there are unable to practice social distancing, and soap and water are limited.

Meanwhile, at our borders, Customs and Border Protection has turned away thousands of vulnerable people since March, without due process. Some applicants showing symptoms of the coronavirus were deported with no regard for safety measures (such as testing), causing outbreaks in the countries from which they had fled. Others languish in crowded detention facilities, even though many of them pose no security threat and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the discretion to release them. By law, children must be let out after 20 days of incarceration. But rather than release them with their parents, our government has presented these families with an agonizing choice: Either have their children released, indefinitely separated from their parents — or remain locked up together in these facilities, many of which have already witnessed coronavirus outbreaks.

Amid all this, in June, the administration proposed 161 pages of sweeping regulations that would gut asylum and refugee law. Certain provisions, for example, drastically narrow the definitions of persecution and torture; others raise certain burdens of proof to nearly unreachable standards and redefine what constitutes the protected grounds of political opinion and membership in a particular social group. Still others could disqualify applicants if they made a mistake on their tax filings, or took two or more layover flights on their way here. In July, the administration proposed yet another new policy, allowing the United States to deny asylum to applicants if they come from any country with an outbreak of a highly contagious disease. (Public health experts have said this would serve no legitimate public health purpose.) It’s difficult to see how anyone could qualify for protection under this tangle of new rules, once they’re implemented.

Years of tightening restrictions have made it harder to obtain a wide range of legal immigration benefits, causing applications to plummet and, with them, the user fees that fund U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services operations. Now, the pandemic has placed our agency on the brink of bankruptcy, and 70 percent of our workforce faces an indefinite furlough unless Congress intervenes. Without emergency funding, only a skeleton crew will remain to administer America’s immigration services system — resulting in even greater backlogs in the processing of applications for benefits including asylum, green cards, work permits and citizenship.

Our nation has an ethical and legal responsibility to protect those who seek refuge here. Instead, we have expended vast resources on preventing people from entering the country and deporting people who are already here. If the current administration’s policies continue unchecked, there will no longer be a pathway for refugees to have a new beginning in the United States. Even if a different presidential administration tried to change course, I fear that it would take many years to reverse the damage and rebuild our capacity to protect refugees. Many people will lose their lives before then.

In the closing words of his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan described our country as a “shining city upon a hill”: “If there had to be city walls,” he said in 1989, “the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” That is still something most Americans believe in.

[Read more from Outlook:]

[Coronavirus can’t be an excuse to continue President Trump’s assault on asylum seekers]

[Americans are the dangerous, disease-carrying foreigners now]

[During the covid-19 pandemic, immigrant farmworkers are heroes]

[Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.]

Jason Marks, an asylum training officer with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), writes here as a shop steward for Local 1924, American Federation of Government Employees, which represents employees of the USCIS Asylum and Refugee Officer Corps.

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

Read the rest of Jason’s article at the above link.

It’s not rocket science! Misusing, misinterpreting, and misapplying refugee and asylum laws to “reject not protect” is clearly illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral to boot! It’s also, not surprisingly, toxic public policy because it squanders and misdirects resources on efforts to that actually hurt our economy, society, and reputation. In other words, fraud, waste, and abuse on a grand and deadly scale!

So, a career Asylum Officer has more legal knowledge, guts, and human decency than the life-tenured, yet removed from both reality and humanity, Supremes’ majority! What’s wrong with this picture!

75 years after the end of World War II, America has installed a racist, neo-Nazi White Supremacist Government. Go figure!

To make this happen, Trump and his cronies needed both a feckless Congress and Supremes committed to empowering authoritarian racism in the name of Executive authority. He got both!

We have an opportunity, perhaps our last as a nation, to return to a nobler vision of America. But it will require ousting not only the morally corrupt and maliciously incompetent Trump regime but also the equally immoral GOP Senators who have enabled and enthusiastically hastened our national demise. That will give us a start on the longer-term project of better Justices and Federal Judges for a better America.

There is no excuse whatsoever for the cowardly, disingenuous, and immoral failure of the Roberts Court to stand against Trump. Instead, they have embraced the “Dred Scottification” — that is, dehumanization — of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and persons of color. Why is this judicially-enabled retrogression to the “Hay-day of Jim Crow” acceptable in 21st Century America?

This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation and the world depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

08-09-20

🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻⚰️”PERP NATION” — Cowardly Regime Uses COVID-19 As Pretext For Grotesque Abuses Of Migrant Children, As Congress, Federal Courts Spinelessly Allow It To Happen! — “Crimes Against Humanity” Have Consequences For “Perp Nations!”

Lomi Kriel
Immigration Reporter
Texas Tribune & Pro Publica

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/04/border-migrant-children-hotels/

Federal agents are expelling asylum seekers as young as 8 months from the border, citing COVID-19 risks

Thousands of migrant children have been expelled by the Trump administration since March. Some have been held in hotels without access to lawyers or family. Advocates say many are now “virtually impossible” to find.

BY LOMI KRIEL, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA AUG. 4, 20208 HOURS AGO

A teenage girl carrying her baby arrived at the U.S. border this summer and begged for help. She told federal agents that she feared returning to Guatemala. The man who raped her she said had threatened to make her “disappear.”

Then, advocates say, the child briefly vanished — into the custody of the U.S. government, which held her and her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal officers summarily expelled them from the country.

Similar actions have played out along the border for months under an emergency health order the Trump administration issued in March. Citing the threat of COVID-19, it granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months. Children are typically entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.

Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.

It is instead expelling them — without a judge’s ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family, while in U.S. custody. The children are not even granted the primary registration number by which the Department of Homeland Security tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible” to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration arguing that the practice is illegal.

Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.

. . . .

A sense of deja vu

Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl fleeing a civil war in her homeland was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed private security guards. Jenny Flores’ case forced the most significant overhaul yet of how U.S. authorities can detain migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal settlement is named for her.

Carlos Holguín, who began litigating that case in 1985, said there is now a sense of “deja vu … but the degree of lawlessness is even beyond what was going on then.”

Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to end the Flores Settlement, arguing that it and a 2008 trafficking law work as “loopholes” encouraging families to send children here alone. The government has attempted to undo the settlement through regulations and requested Congress curtail the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires certain safeguards for children arriving alone at the border.

So far, both efforts have failed.

The administration tried separating parents and children at the border, but a federal judge largely ruled against the practice in 2018, allowing it only in narrow circumstances such as if the adult poses a danger.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who is in charge of the Flores Settlement, has determined the administration must quickly release children locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently citing the risk of coronavirus spreading.

“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote in a June 26 order.

The government is now arguing it can force detained parents to choose between freeing their children or staying indefinitely imprisoned with them.

But none of the administration’s attempts to undo either the settlement or the law have been as effective as the expulsion order, which is “eviscerating every single protection mechanism outlined by Congress and the courts with one sweeping gesture,” said Podkul of KIND.

Late last month, the ACLU sued to allow its lawyers access to children detained in the McAllen Hampton Inn after a video went viral showing a Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer forcibly pushed away.

“The children are in imminent danger of unlawful removal,” the attorneys wrote.

Facing a public relations scandal, Hilton quickly announced that all three hotels had canceled reservations with MVM.

“We expect all Hilton properties to reject business that would use a hotel in this way,” a Hilton spokesperson said.

Government attorneys agreed to pause the expulsion of the migrants who they said remained in the McAllen hotel on the date of the lawsuit — once again, ACLU attorneys said, mooting litigation on the broader policy. A separate suit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran girl who was expelled this summer is still pending in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

By the time the administration stopped the removal of the migrants detained at the Hampton Inn, most who had been held there had already been expelled or transferred elsewhere — some, advocates said, just before the ACLU filed its lawsuit. Only 17 family members, including one unaccompanied child, remained in that hotel.

What happened to the rest? No one would say.

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

It might be “below the radar screen” during COVID-19. After all, that’s what criminals like the Trump kakistocracy and their DHS accomplices count on — a diversion so that they can abuse children and violate human rights and human dignity to the content of their evil, White Nationalist hearts.

But, eventually, the truth about the “crimes against humanity” by the regime’s cowards as well as the complicity of legislators, the Roberts Court, and a host of others will come out.

How will we explain to future generations what we have done to our fellow humans, particularly the most vulnerable who have sought our legal protection and found only cruelty, racism, and lawlessness? How will we justify racist-driven institutionalized child abuse and “Dred Scottification” of “the other” on our watch? We have become “Perp Nation!”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-05-20

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