US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) – Page 20

CHILD ABUSE: A TRUMP ADMINISTRATION “STRATEGY” – “[T]he backup also was a result of policy decisions that officials knew would ensnare unaccompanied minors in bureaucratic tangles and leave them in squalid conditions.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/a-trump-administration-strategy-led-to-the-child-migrant-backup-crisis-at-the-border/2019/11/12/85d4f18c-c9ae-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html

Neena Satija
Investigative Reporter
Washington Post

Karoun Demirjian
Congressional/
National Security Reporter
Washington Post

Abigail Hauslohner
National Immigration Reporter, Washington Post

Josh Dawsey
White House Reporter
Washington Post

From the WashPost:

By

Neena Satija,

Karoun Demirjian,

Abigail Hauslohner and

Josh Dawsey

November 12, 2019 at 12:13 p.m. EST

When thousands of migrant children ended up stranded in U.S. Border Patrol stations last spring, President Trump’s administration characterized the crisis as a spontaneous result of the record crush of migrants overwhelming the U.S. immigration system. But the backup also was a result of policy decisions that officials knew would ensnare unaccompanied minors in bureaucratic tangles and leave them in squalid conditions, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents viewed by The Washington Post.The policies, which administration officials began pursuing soon after Trump took office in January 2017, made it harder for adult relatives of unaccompanied minors to secure the children’s release from U.S. custody. Enhanced vetting of sponsors — including fingerprints and other paperwork — and the sharing of that information between child welfare and immigration authorities slowed down the release of children and exposed the sponsors to deportation.

The government knew the moves would strain child shelters, according to documents and current and former officials, but it was aimed at sending a message to Central American migrants: Coming to the United States illegally has consequences.

Administration officials said the policy was designed to protect children from potential abusers or criminals, but they also wanted to create a broad deterrent effect; they reasoned that undocumented migrants might hesitate to claim their children for fear of being deported. Authorities weighed deterrence — a central aspect of U.S. immigration policy under both President Barack Obama and Trump — against the possibility of children crowding into border stations. And they chose to push forward, knowing what would result.

“This will strain bed capacity,” authorities wrote in a discussion paper in February 2018.

The approach caused thousands of unaccompanied minors to be stranded in U.S. custody and exacerbated the appearance of a crisis on the southern border — a major element underlying the administration’s public request for billions of dollars in additional funding from Congress.

A boy sits in the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen, Tex., in August. Border facilities were overwhelmed this year as a record number of Central American migrant families crossed the southern border. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Lawyers were allowed to visit children in the border stations, and Democratic lawmakers were invited to tour the facilities when they were at their worst. They witnessed — and shared with the public — scenes of desperate children held in crowded cells without basic necessities.

According to current and former government officials, and emails and memos detailing the Trump administration’s strategy, it is clear they knew that without enough beds in government shelters, children would languish in Border Patrol stations not equipped to care for them, making the government a target of lawsuits and public criticism — both of which occurred.

One of the key figures in that strategizing, Chad Wolf, is set to take the helm at the Department of Homeland Security. Senators on Tuesday are expected to first vote on Wolf’s confirmation to his current job as undersecretary for strategy, policy and plans. Wolf is Trump’s favored pick to then take over as acting head of the agency, just as officials brace for what could be another increase in migrant crossings.

Top DHS officials have warned that the reprieve from the record influx of migrants in recent months is probably temporary. Acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan said last month that the number of people crossing the border is still higher than at the same time last year and remains a “crisis.” Migration also typically increases in the spring, and the U.S. government is preparing for another surge of families and unaccompanied minors.

Such a potential wave of children is what inspired the early discussions about policy changes within the Trump administration in 2017 — along with debate about the policy’s effects.

The Trump administration’s wildly contradictory statements on family separation

The Trump administration changed its story on immigrant family separation no fewer than 14 times in one week. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

‘Safety’ vs. ‘anguish’

Staff at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is in charge of caring for unaccompanied migrant children, argued against the policy in weekly memos during the summer of 2017. Jonathan White, then deputy director of the ORR’s children’s program, warned in a July 2017 memo that the administration’s plan to separate children from their families and to alter the process of handing children over to sponsors would “result in significant increases” in how long children would be held.

White wrote that children would spend an average of 95 days in federal custody and that the department would need at least 6,500 additional beds in just three months. White declined to comment for this story.

Documents reviewed by The Post show that officials also estimated that HHS would need an additional $686 million in funding — more than 50 percent above its planned budget — to accommodate the policy and create additional bed space.

But the administration did not formally request extra money for that purpose at the time, according to senior Democratic and Republican congressional aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Mark Weber, an HHS spokesman, did not dispute those details but maintained that the border backups resulted from a historic influx of unaccompanied children. In May alone, 9,000 children were referred to the government’s care, he said.

Migrants are gathered behind a fence at a makeshift detention center in El Paso on March 27, when U.S. authorities said the immigration system was at a breaking point. (Sergio Flores/For The Washington Post)

Administration officials also thought the backlog would be short-lived.

“At some point in FY19, the deterrent effect of the new policy should stop families and unscrupulous adult aliens from using the reunification process, normalizing and reversing the volume trend” of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border, authorities wrote in a discussion paper that the National Security Council shared with senior administration officials. The paper was shared with an interagency group that met regularly in the White House Situation Room to discuss immigration and border security.

Some senior officials acknowledged in interviews that they expected some children to remain in custody for longer periods of time, but they said the policy was developed with child safety in mind; they did not want children to be released to smugglers or criminals.

“My number one concern on this was making sure that kids were safe,” Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview. “I know it’s a tough decision. It was never easy. You have to weigh the operational concerns, and the humanitarian concerns, and how long they’re going to stay in detention. . . . Yeah, it was going to increase the bed stay, but it wouldn’t be like twofold, threefold, fourfold. We thought it was worth a try, and it if doesn’t work, we can always pedal back and change gears.”

Acting ICE director Matthew Albence said the policy was part of the “deterrent effect” the government was seeking: “The goal was to prevent these children from coming on this dangerous journey.”

Almairis Guillen and her son, Miguel de Jesus Oseguera, 4, sweep with a homemade broom where they and other members of a migrant caravan were resting in Juchitan, Mexico, in October 2018. Thousands of people were part of their caravan, which was heading north to the U.S. border. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)The shadows of minors awaiting processing darken the floor of the U.S. Border Patrol center in McAllen on Aug. 12. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Albence, Homan and other Trump administration officials say the backlog arose because of Washington politics, blaming Democrats in Congress for being too slow to authorize funding for more shelter beds at facilities designed to care for children.

“No one who values child welfare and safety would argue smuggled, exploited and unaccompanied children at the southern border should be handed over to illegal alien ‘sponsors’ without reliable identity confirmation and background checks,” said deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley. “The only ones responsible for crowded shelters are Democrats who want to preserve and expand loopholes used by child smugglers for purely political purposes.”

A few months after the policy was implemented, HHS officials determined that it was not improving child safety. They concluded that the added vetting was redundant and needlessly extended the time children remained in custody, according to internal documents that ORR Deputy Director Jallyn Sualog presented to Congress, and to testimony on Capitol Hill.

Advocates saw a darker motive in policies that they say were “intentionally developed to inflict maximum anguish on children,” said Heidi Altman, of the National Immigrant Justice Center. She said officials knew that their plans “would trigger a chain of events that left children hungry, abused and sick in overcrowded CBP facilities.”

Democrats likewise have argued that the White House set up the crisis. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), presiding over a House Oversight subcommittee hearing last month, noted that it had always been possible for the government to ease conditions but that officials chose not to.

“We did not have to have a backlog. We did not,” DeLauro said. “That was created.”

Wrapped in foil blankets, migrants try to stay warm while waiting to be processed and transported by the Border Patrol in El Paso in February. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Tightening the rules

The Department of Homeland Security did a test run of the policy in the summer of 2017, instructing border agents to interview young migrants about the relatives they wanted to live with in the United States. They then created “target folders” for those adults that could be used to take action against them, according to internal emails that the American Immigration Council obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and made available online.

At the ORR, then-director Scott Lloyd was thinking about the administration’s “moral imperative” to protect children from smugglers and to ensure that gangs were not exploiting the child shelter system to enter the country.

“Our legal responsibilities are child welfare,” Lloyd said in an interview. “But even from a child welfare perspective, it’s desirable to deter people from taking that risk, putting their kids in that type of harm.”

Lloyd said he and his staff agreed that better communication between his agency and DHS was the best way to address those concerns.

“We needed to know if a kid had any gang ties or gang ties in their family — we needed to make sure that DHS had that information and that we had that information,” Lloyd said.

The partnership was formalized in an agreement that mandated significantly stricter fingerprinting and screening requirements for all adults who hoped to sponsor a migrant child or who lived in a house where a migrant child might stay.

“If this could get finalized and implemented soon, it would have a tremendous deterrent effect,” Gene Hamilton, counsel to then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, wrote in notes he sent by email in December 2017 to Wolf, the senior DHS official who is now in line to take over as acting secretary. The existence of the notes — but not the identity of the authors or the recipients — was first reported by NBC News.

Wolf declined to comment.

Alexei Woltornist, a Justice Department spokesman, said the agreement was just one of “numerous steps” to prevent the victimization of children: “Ending the trauma these children can face requires taking action against all parties who entrust criminals and cartels to transport their children across the border.”

HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — the two department heads tasked with carrying out the policy — voiced serious concerns, according to two officials familiar with the discussions. They worried that the agreement would be impossible to implement, could lead to longer detention times for children and would be viewed publicly as unnecessarily harsh, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations.

Caitlin Oakley, an HHS spokeswoman, did not dispute that account, but she said in a statement that Azar “supports the Trump administration’s goal of enforcing immigration laws and securing the border.”

“The backup at the border of minors witnessed this summer was the consequence of a broken immigration system,” Oakley added.

Nielsen declined to comment.

One HHS employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters recalled Lloyd telling staffers that the White House wanted them “to do everything you can to prevent backups into border stations. But it is better that there be a backup in a border station than that we not enforce immigration laws and that we not deter migration.”

Lloyd denied that account.

“I don’t ever recall holding, even temporarily, the idea that backups at border stations was a remotely acceptable scenario,” Lloyd said.

Migrants wait inside the fence of a makeshift detention center in El Paso in March. (Sergio Flores/For The Washington Post)

Internal memos show that for months before implementing the policy, government lawyers worried about lawsuits and discussed ways to claim that the policy would make children safer. In a January 2018 draft memo, viewed by The Post, Justice Department lawyers proposed defending the plan to conduct enhanced background checks and share them with enforcement agents as a means of protecting migrant children from witnessing the eventual deportation of their parents or relatives.

“We can argue that whether a proposed sponsor is subject to removal is a key factor in determining suitability, given the impact that immigration enforcement against, or detention of, a sponsor would have on the circumstances faced by” unaccompanied minors living with the sponsor, Justice Department lawyers wrote in January 2018 correspondence with DHS and HHS officials as part of an “analysis of litigation risk” associated with the agreement.

Federal judge blocks Trump administration from detaining migrant children for indefinite periods

The administration also developed and rolled out its family separation policy in the spring of 2018, part of its “zero tolerance” approach at the border. The months-long initiative, which separated thousands of children from their parents, compounded the need for shelter space. After a public outcry, the administration ended the policy.

By the fall of 2018, most of the families had been reunited, and the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border had fallen, but the population of children in the shelters continued to grow, according to HHS data. By October 2018, migrant children were spending an average of more than 90 days in federal custody — exactly as White had predicted — more than twice the length of stays two years earlier.

While some adult migrants were afraid to come forward to claim their children, the contractors tasked with carrying out the background checks and fingerprinting were overwhelmed, according to current and former HHS officials. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates filed lawsuits challenging the policy, arguing that parents waited months for fingerprinting results.

Migrant teens walk through a camp in Tornillo, Tex., in December 2018. The Trump administration announced in June 2018 that it would open a temporary shelter for up to 360 migrant children in this remote corner of the Texas desert. Six months later, the facility had expanded into a camp holding thousands of teenagers. (Andres Leighton/AP)

Time in custody grows

Kevin Dinnin, the head of the nonprofit that operated a shelter for migrant children in Tornillo, Tex., said the crush of minors became increasingly severe through late 2018, and he told the agency he could not continue. Images of teenagers behind chain-link fences shuffling single-file from tent to tent had drawn public outrage, and Dinnin could not understand why children continued arriving at the shelter even though migrant crossings had slowed and family separations had ended.

“The problem was, kids were coming and not being discharged,” Dinnin said. “The average length of stay just kept increasing.”

An HHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy decisions said the agency would never have opened the Tornillo shelter had it not been for the agreement with DHS.

“It was the increase in average length of care that created a need for thousands of beds,” the official said.

U.S. returns 100 migrant children to overcrowded border facility as HHS says it is out of space

HHS career staff members decided that the agency had no choice but to eliminate some aspects of the background checks to relieve the pressure on the system. To avoid roiling the White House, they slowly rolled back the policy through several “operational directives” over a period of months, according to current and former HHS officials.

The agency announced that it would stop fingerprinting all adult members of a sponsor’s household in December 2018, and the government then quickly released thousands of children from custody. The Tornillo shelter closed a few weeks later.

But with the agency still fingerprinting sponsors, some children continued to languish in custody for months, especially when migrant crossings surged again in the spring. Children apprehended at the border were left in Border Patrol stations as a result.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) addresses the media July 1 after touring the Clint, Tex., Border Patrol facility. Reports of inhumane conditions plagued the facility, where migrant children were being held. (Christ Chavez/Getty Images)Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), center, departs after a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on family separation and detention centers on July 12. She gave an impassioned speech, shedding tears while describing the conditions she witnessed along the border. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)

Democratic lawmakers, lawyers and advocates toured Border Patrol stations in late spring and early summer and delivered scathing descriptions of the suffering they witnessed. DHS and HHS officials pleaded with Congress for more money, saying they had been blindsided by the numbers. HHS canceled English classes, soccer and legal aid for migrant children, citing inadequate funds.

In June, Congress approved a $4.6 billion emergency border spending package, shortly after hearing the government’s pleas about what they described as a humanitarian crisis at the border.

Officials credited the subsequent release of hundreds more children to the aid package. But in court documents and congressional testimony, they acknowledged that moves to scale back the enhanced background checks had made the difference. Those included a final directive in June to stop fingerprinting aunts, uncles and grandparents seeking custody of migrant children, speeding up the release of more than 1,000 children in a matter of weeks and allowing the emergency shelter in Homestead, Fla., to close.

“I do support the four operational directives in order to expedite the release of children to properly vetted sponsors,” ORR Director Jonathan Hayes said at a congressional hearing in July. “I want to see the children back with their families.”

Officials have argued that shortening the time that children are held in federal custody will boost the incentive for migrant families to seek entry into the United States.

“The shorter the stay, the more likely they’re willing to take it on,” Homan said. “If I think I’ll be detained for a year, I might not come. But if I’ll be detained for a week and be released, that may convince me to make that trip.”

Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, Paul Kane and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.

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

The Trump Administration continues to intentionally misrepresent the conditions in the Northern Triangle that are sending families and children in flight to the U.S., notwithstanding their knowledge of the dangers and the overt cruelty and racism of the Trump Administration directed against them.

While the Trump Administration keeps on putting forth the knowingly false narrative that this “crisis” is caused by “loopholes” in U.S. law, that’s demonstrably untrue. Over 50% off the nearly 26 million refugees worldwide are children under the age of 18. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.

Obviously, the increasing number of child refugees is part of a tragic worldwide phenomenon having no causal relationship to U.S. laws or court decisions. It’s a result of conditions in the sending countries and won’t be stopped or prevented by unilateral actions on the part of receiving countries, even extreme cruelty. The phenomenon might, however, be increased by the overtly anti-refugee policies and statements of the Trump Administration and the actions of the Trump Administration in coddling dictators and tyrants, which actually produces more child refugees.

Also, what about the criminals over at HHS who have abandoned their Congressionally-assigned duty to protect and look out for the best interests of children for a White Nationalist, racist, nativist enforcement policy that targets kids. When folks like Alex Azar & company are sent packing from Government some day, remember for what they really stand!

We’re allowing shameless thugs to run our national immigration policies. There will be consequences!

PWS

11-13-19

“LET ‘EM DIE IN MEXICO” — U.S. ASYLUM OFFICER EXPOSES TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INTENTIONAL RACIST VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, ENABLED BY A COMPLICIT 9th CIRCUIT! — “The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/12/scathing-manifesto-an-asylum-officer-blasts-trumps-cruelty-migrants/

Greg Sargent writes in the WashPost:

November 12, 2019 at 3:47 p.m. EST

President Trump’s requirement that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while they await hearings in the United States is creating a new humanitarian crisis. Yet it isn’t generating nearly the outrage and media scrutiny that his horrific family separations did.

But now a deeply dismayed asylum officer has authored a remarkable manifesto that was obtained by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), as part of an investigation Merkley is conducting of Trump’s asylum policies.

The manifesto indicts the “Remain in Mexico” program from the inside in sweeping and scalding terms, describing it as illegal under U.S. law, a violation of the United States’ international human rights obligations and arbitrarily implemented to deliberately punish people for seeking asylum here.

The policy is “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States,” the asylum officer writes in the manifesto.

The asylum officer recently left their job, and in the missive, the officer says he or she could not continue to implement it “after careful consideration and moral contemplation.”

The officer’s condemnations of the policy are among the key revelations in a forthcoming assessment of Trump’s asylum policies by Merkley’s office.

Those policies include everything from ongoing efforts to send asylum seekers back to Honduras, which is “one of the most violent and unstable nations in the world,” to a new proposal to charge asylum applicants a $50 fee.

Merkley’s report, portions of which I’ve seen, will conclude that the administration has undertaken “systemic efforts” to “effectively rewrite U.S. asylum laws, rules and procedures,” with the overarching goal of “gutting the asylum system” but “without congressional approval or involvement.”

Merkley’s report will also conclude that Trump’s policies have “intentionally inflicted trauma” on asylum seeking families.

The Remain in Mexico policy — which is also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — requires migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico pending hearings in the United States, with the ostensible goal of preventing them from disappearing into the interior during that waiting period. About 50,000 migrants have been relocated there.

Numerous critics have said it’s deeply cruel to knowingly force migrants to wait in places where they’ll be subjected to serious risk, and journalistic exposés and studies alike have documented that the MPPs do does just that.

The officer, who has repeatedly been in touch with Merkley’s office as part of its investigation, will remain anonymous.

But the officer’s lawyer — Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project — confirmed to me the authenticity of the manifesto and confirmed that it accurately depicts the person’s circumstances.

“In addition to this whistleblower, we are representing several other Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers who have raised serious concerns about immigration-related abuses,” Gold said. “That Congress is taking these issues seriously is essential to promoting accountability and protecting ethical civil servants committed to upholding their oaths of office.”

Tensions have been rising between asylum officers and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the asylum system. And the union for asylum officers has already issued a legal brief condemning MPP amid litigation over the program.

But this asylum officer’s personal indictment of the policy goes much further.

For one thing, he or she accuses the administration of implementing the policy in an “arbitrary” manner:

The MPP both discriminates and penalizes. Implementation of the MPP is clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States. This is evident in the arbitrary nature of the order, in that it only applies to the southern border. It is also clear from the half-hazard implementation that appears to target populations from specific Central American countries even though a much broader range of international migrants cross the southern border.

For another, he or she alleges that internal processes are breaking down. Under MPP, if asylum seekers in U.S. territory declare in their initial interview a fear of being returned to Mexico, they’re supposed to get a second screening, conducted by a trained asylum officer who is supposed to determine whether that fear is credible.

But the asylum officer charges that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment — is mismanaging the system in a way that’s deliberately designed to be punitive and to make it harder for applicants to succeed:

The implementation is calculated to prevent individuals from receiving any type of protection or immigration benefits in the future. As such, it is a punitive measure intended to punish individuals who attempt to request protection in the United States. There is no clearly established policy and system for notifying applicants of changes to hearing dates and times, or for the applicants to provide change of addresses to the courts and Border Patrol. Without a highly functional notice system, the administration has ensured that a high number of applicants will miss their court dates.

And the asylum officer blasts the program as “ad hoc” and rigged against applicants:

The current process places on the applicants the highest burden of proof in civil proceedings in the lowest quality hearing available. This is a legal standard not previously implemented by the Asylum Office and reserved for an Immigration Judge in a full hearing. However, we are conducting the interviews telephonically, often with poor telephone connections, while at the same time denying applicants any time to rest, gather evidence, present witnesses, and, most egregious of all, denying them access to legal representation.

In a statement sent my way, Merkley vowed more revelations to come.

“This whistleblower reveals that in multiple ways, the Trump administration has asked them and other American asylum officers to take actions they believe break their oath of office and violate the law,” Merkley told me. “In the coming days, I will be releasing a report that details the full scope of this administration’s efforts to gut our legal asylum system.”

What this will confirm again is that for Trump, the goal is to make it as hard as possible for people to apply for asylum who actually would likely qualify for it — further eroding our commitment to the principle that desperate people have the right to appeal for refuge here and get a fair hearing without fear of being returned to face catastrophe.

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

So, why are those supposedly sworn to uphold the law, given the privilege of life-tenure, participating in overtly transparent human rights, legal, and constitutional violations?

Why do “ordinary civil servants” have more legal understanding and courage than the “robed ones in the ivory tower?”

Why are Federal Judges permitting a corrupt, biased, and racist Administration to cut off access to courts and punish individuals for exercising their legal rights under our laws?

Why is it OK to use the legal system as a “deterrent” to those seeking legal refuge under our laws?

Assuming that our republic survives, the question for the future is what can we do to insure appointment of Federal Judges, at all levels, with integrity who possess the courage to stand up for the most vulnerable among us in the face of unconstitutional racism and White Nationalism.

PWS

11-13-19

“BIG MAC” LEAVES A LEGACY OF LIES, “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” @ DHS — Employee Quits Over Un-American White Nationalist Agenda That Has Swallowed Agency’s Mission — He Could “no longer be party to an intimidating, mismanaged and unwelcoming administration that is openly rebellious to the values our government has espoused for centuries.”

https://apple.news/ABGwuGCUoQJKM6uzXamQGDQ

Chantal Da Silva reports for Newsweek:

A Homeland Security worker says he has resigned from his role after years of service because he can no longer align himself with President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

In a scathing account published by The Houston Chronicle Travis Olsen explains what led him to the decision that he could “no longer be party to an intimidating, mismanaged and unwelcoming administration that is openly rebellious to the values our government has espoused for centuries.”

“For nearly a decade I have been a frontline civilian with the Department of Homeland Security, never seeing my work as political or driven by partisanship. I have served with purpose, with duty and gratitude to the values of our country,” Olsen said, adding: “I agree with President George W. Bush’s definition of our nation, ‘America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.'”

Olsen said that while the U.S. has “always been a refuge for those fleeing persecution oppression and dictatorships,” under the Trump administration, “these ideals which have governed our country for centuries have been crushed under the weight of intolerance and public irresponsibility.”

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An example of that, he said, was the Trump administration’s recent decision to transfer Border Patrol agents from their already “unprecedented law enforcement workloads” to “conduct non-adversarial interviews of asylum seekers.”

“This is a clear attempt to replace the humanitarian mission of our protection laws with an enforcement objective,” Olsen said.

And, he added, “it is part of a string of unnecessary and counter-productive policies such as sending children across the country from their parents and leaving asylum-seekers in Mexico in the hands of the cartels,” striking out at the Trump administration’s widely-condemned “Remain in Mexico” policy.

“Seeking greater security and vetting procedures does not require abandoning basic human rights or putting vulnerable people at even greater risk,” the resigned DHS worker said.

While Olsen did say that he believes the U.S. does need to modernize its “outdated immigration system,” the Trump administration has so far failed to do that.

In fact, he said, the current leadership has only succeeded in creating “more problems by pulling resources further from their purpose and thereby clogging an already overflowing system. This has not been to enforce our laws but simply to unilaterally implement the administration’s version of the law.”

“We need rational, sensible and thoughtful solutions. We can support our allies by raising refugee admissions back to standard numbers. We can eliminate push factors by reinstating targeted aid to neighboring countries. We can utilize effective alternatives to detention and not create humanitarian crises within our borders,” the resigned DHS worker said. “But none of this can happen when our government deliberately targets children, families and other vulnerable people. Basic humanity and decency must be restored.”

Hitting out at Congress members who have defended the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, Olsen wrote: “Some in Congress have either defended the false choice between security and humanity or simply sat silently as this Administration has trampled our national history.”

“We need leaders who will stand for American values in the face of political convenience. We need moral courage in our government. We are America. We can do better, be better,” he said.

It is unclear what Olsen’s role within the DHS was or how many years he worked with the department.

However, he said he has worked as an attorney, advocate and government officer representing and working with vulnerable populations.

Newsweek has contacted the DHS for comment for this article.

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

Yes, under “Trump Toadies” Kelly, Nielsen, and most recently “Big Mac With Lies,” the DHS has essentially abandoned it’s “national security” and “service to the public” functions in favor of a racist, White Nationalist restrictionist political agenda directed at immigrants and ultimately Americans of color, the overwhelming majority of whom pose no threat whatsoever to our national security. To the contrary, most of the misguided “civil enforcement” activities that DHS touts actually hurt our country and squander incredible amounts of public money, not to mention the public trust and confidence necessary to engage in real law enforcement.

A rational, professional immigration agency would concentrate its civil efforts on: 1) processing recent arrivals with an eye toward quickly identifying those eligible for asylum or other protection and approving their cases so that they can be integrated into our society; 2) humane removal of those who don’t qualify, perhaps working with other countries to find safe resettlement opportunities where necessary; 3) increasing overseas refugee processing to make it unnecessary for refugees to make the dangerous journey to our borders to apply; 4) removing individuals with serious criminal records or who are engaged in fraud, trafficking, etc., 5) facilitating some type of legal status and work authorization under our existing laws for as many long term, law-abiding undocumented residents as possible; 6) making the case to Congress for bipartisan reform that would legalize long-term undocumented residents while significantly increasing legal immigration opportunities, both temporary and permanent, across the board; 7) working with the Department of Labor on wage, hour, and working conditions enforcement to prevent exploitation of all workers, including migrants.

Making the legal immigration and adjudication systems work better would reduce the pressure for extralegal entries at the border and allow DHS to concentrate its enforcement on real threats to our national security like terrorists, human and drug smugglers, and fraudsters.

Given the fraud, waste, and abuse of the public treasury by the current DHS, rationalizing the system likely would cost no more than we are wasting on “designed to fail max enforcement gimmicks” (like Trump’s “stunt wall”) now. And the long term benefits to our country in assisting refugees and other migrants to integrate into our society, fully contribute, and pay taxes would be great.

PWS

11-09-19

RESTRICTIONIST ALERT: “White Nationalist Nation” Is At It Again, Flooding The System With Bogus Racist-Inspired Comments Approving USCIS’s Proposal To Screw Asylum Seekers On Essential Work Authorization – HERE’S HOW THE “NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY” CAN FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE FORCES OF EVIL AND IGNORANCE!

Hello,

I’m writing in the hopes that you will take five minutes to write a comment opposing USCIS’s proposal to eliminate the 30-day processing regulation for initial asylum EADs. The deadline is tomorrow, November 8. There are some convenient templates and links below which you can use.

Unfortunately the comments are being flooded by uninformed, irrelevant, blatantly anti-immigrant, pro-Trump comments on the proposed regulation, such as:

___

“Please stop illegals from coming into our country. And, deport everyone who’s already here illegally! Thank you Mr President!”

“Our President is the smartest President we have ever had in my lifetime. He has done more for our country than any other that I have ever known or read about.”

___

There are literally over a thousand of these comments that just came up over the last few days. Please consider commenting and forwarding to your networks.

By way of background, as a result of the Rosario litigation, USCIS is now adjudicating initial asylum EAD applications within 30 days. In response, USCIS has proposed to simply eliminate the 30-day deadline. This proposed rule will harm asylum seekers and their families, and USCIS even estimates it will lead to $100s of millions of lost tax revenue.

We urge you to submit comments opposing this rule. Students at the University of Washington Immigration Law Clinic created a quick and easy way to submit comments. Simply go to this link:

https://sites.google.com/view/letasylumseekerswork

And submit your comment today! Please take 5 minutes to help us fight this fight! Comments are due no later than November 8th.

Thank you!

-Scott

On behalf of the Rosario Litigation Team

Scott

Scott D. Pollock & Associates, P.C.

105 W. Madison, Suite 2200

Chicago, IL 60602

(312) 444-1940

Fax: (312) 444-1950

Email: spollock@lawfirm1.com

Web: www.lawfirm1.com

“Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/sdpollock

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sdpollock

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

Using this template, I submitted my opposition to this outrageous proposal which would actually destroy human lives as well as cost the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars. It took fewer than five minutes.

Obviously, the human and economic costs of xenophobic bias are astronomically high. But, that’s of no apparent concern to “White Nationalist Nation,” which is willing to pay anything to screw America and the most vulnerable among us!

PWS

11-08-19

9TH CIRCUIT’S CONTINUING SHAME: “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” Program Was Ruled “Illegal From The Git Go” By Courageous U.S. District Judge – Then, 9th Intervened To “Open The Killing Fields” – Empowered By Appellate Judicial Complicity, DHS Agents Now Simply Commit Fraud On Asylum Applicants & Their Lawyers By Returning Them To Mexico With Fake Hearing Dates!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1e0901c7-ba27-4d78-a71a-823c2481d392

Gustavo Solis reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:

By Gustavo Solis

Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to accept only migrants with future court dates scheduled.

Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.

However, records obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.

Those documents, unofficially known as tear sheets, are given to every migrant in the Migrant Protection Protocols program who is sent back to Mexico. The document tells the migrants where and when to appear at the border so that they can be transported to immigration court. What is different about the tear sheets that migrants with closed cases receive is that the future court date is not legitimate, according to multiple immigration lawyers whose clients have received these documents.

This has happened both to migrants who have been granted asylum and those who had their cases terminated — meaning a judge closed the case without making a formal decision, usually on procedural grounds. Additionally, at least one migrant was physically assaulted after being sent back to Mexico this way, according to her lawyer.

Bashir Ghazialam, a San Diego immigration lawyer who represents six people who received these fake future court dates, said he was shocked by the developments.

“This is fraud,” he said. “I don’t call everything fraud. This is the first time I’ve used the words, ‘U.S. government’ and ‘fraud’ in the same sentence. No one should be OK with this.”

The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests to comment about why they had engaged in the practice.

Ghazialam first noticed this in September, when three of his clients were sent back to Mexico after their cases were terminated on Sept. 17. After the judge made his decision, the family spent 10 days in Customs and Border Protection custody.

On Sept. 27, the family was given a document that read, in part, “At your last court appearance, an immigration judge ordered you to return to court for another hearing.” That piece of paper told them to return to court on Nov. 28.

However, the immigration judge ordered no further hearing. Ghazialam’s clients do not have a hearing scheduled on that or any other day.

To confirm Ghazialam’s claims, a reporter called a Department of Justice hotline that people with immigration court cases use to check their status and dates of future hearings. That hotline confirmed that the family’s case had been terminated on Sept. 17 and that “the system does not contain any information regarding a future hearing date on your case.”

“That date is completely made up and the Mexican authorities are not trained enough to know this is a fake court date,” Ghazialam said.

After being returned to Mexico, the mother was stabbed in the forearm while protecting her children from an attempted kidnapping. She still has stitches from the wound, Ghazialam said.

The mother presented herself at the border shortly after the stabbing. She told Customs and Border Protection agents that she was afraid to stay in Mexico. The agents gave her a fear of return interview and tried to send her back to Mexico.

But this time, Mexican immigration officials refused to let her and her children back into Mexico because they did not have a court date, Ghazialam said. She is currently with relatives in New York, waiting to figure out the future of her legal status in the United States while wearing an ankle monitor.

In most of these cases, immigration attorneys aren’t aware that their clients were sent back to Mexico until it’s too late.

In one case, a Cuban asylum seeker was returned to Mexico after an immigration judge in Brownsville, Texas, granted her asylum.

The woman’s lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, remembers hugging her client after the decision and arranging a place to meet after authorities released her later that day following processing.

Goodwin expected the process to take 45 minutes, so she went to a nearby Whataburger and ordered a chocolate milkshake. About 40 minutes later, she got a phone call from her client.

“She was hysterical and crying,” Goodwin said. “I’m like, ‘What happened?’ and she says, ‘I’m in Mexico.’ ”

Goodwin called U.S. and Mexican immigration authorities to try to find out what happened. She spent five hours at the border until 9 p.m. and then went home to draft a lawsuit. It wasn’t until she threatened to sue CBP that her client was paroled into the United States.

“It was total chaos for 24 hours to try to figure it out,” Goodwin said. “It shouldn’t be like that, especially when CBP is blatantly lying. They are creating documents that have false information.”

The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said it was worried about the practice.

“The idea that even though these vulnerable individuals are able to obtain an asylum grant from an immigration judge and CBP is sending them back to harm’s way in Mexico is really disturbing, especially under the guise that there’s a future hearing date,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the organization.

Mexico’s National Institute of Migration did not immediately respond to questions about this practice.

Although Ghazialam and Goodwin were able to eventually get their clients back into the United States, some people are still in Mexico.

That’s what happened to a Guatemalan woman and her two children after a judge terminated their case on Oct. 18. The same day the judge closed their case, a U.S. immigration official gave her a piece of paper with the false hearing date of Jan. 16.

“But this appointment does not exist,” said the woman’s New York City attorney, Rebecca Press. “If you check with the immigration court system, there is no January hearing date and the case has already been terminated.”

It’s unclear how widespread this practice is. Lawyers in San Diego; Laredo, Texas; and Brownsville confirmed they have seen it firsthand.

However, only about 1% of asylum seekers in the Migrant Protection Protocols program have lawyers. Therefore it’s difficult to track what happens to the overwhelming majority of the people in the program.

Lawyers said asylum seekers without legal representation who have been sent back in this manner probably have no way of advocating for themselves. It took Goodwin hours of calls to high-level officials in both U.S. and Mexican immigration agencies plus the threat of a lawsuit to get her client back into the United States.

“If you don’t have someone who’s willing to sit around and spend five hours on the phone and stay up all night drafting litigation to force their hand, you’re going to be stuck,” she said.

As news of these false hearing dates spread among the immigration attorney community, some lawyers are taking proactive steps to protect their clients from being returned to Mexico after their court cases are closed.

Siobhan Waldron, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote a letter to Mexican immigration officials explaining that her client had no future hearing date and outlined a step-by-step process Mexican officials could take to verify that her client’s case had been closed by using the Department of Justice hotline.

The letter worked at first.

When CBP officers tried to return Waldron’s client to Mexico on Nov. 1 with a false January hearing date, her client showed the note to Mexican officials, who refused to take her in. However, the next day, CBP officers sent Waldron’s client back to Mexico with another false court date and this time did not allow her to show Mexican officials her lawyer’s letter that she kept in a special folder, Waldron said.

“They didn’t let her take it out,” Waldron said. “They said, ‘You can’t present anything from that folder.’ ”

The lawyer plans to file “any complaint you can imagine” to CBP, the Department of Homeland Security and other regulatory agencies because “these agents need to be held accountable.”

Her client is still in Mexico, too afraid to walk outside because she has already been kidnapped and assaulted, Waldron said.

Solis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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

As my friend Laura Lynch points out, the individuals affected by this judicially-enabled outrage are not just “asylum applicants” – they include those who have been GRANTED ASYLUM as well as those whose removal proceedings were terminated because a U.S. Immigration Judge found that DHS ILLEGALLY SUBJECTED THEM to the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program.”

The 9^th Circuit’s horrible and incompetent handling of Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan will live in infamy as a monumental judicial abdication of duty that has actually harmed or killed innocent asylum seekers while inspiring DHS to new heights of illegal behavior and contempt for our entire legal system.

Why have a “Judicial Branch” that won’t stand up for individual legal rights in the face of Executive tyranny, overreach, and downright fraud? What are these robed folks doing to earn their lifetime paychecks? And, given the quality and philosophy of many of Trump”s judicial appointments, rammed through a corrupt GOP Senate by “Moscow Mitch,” these are questions the majority of Americans might be asking for decades to come!

PWS

11-08-19

ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO PILE UNPRECEDENTED CRUELTY ON ASYLUM SEEKERS! — Latest Target Is Work Authorization!

Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:

TRUMP ADMIN HAS A CRUEL NEW PLAN TO HURT ASYLUM-SEEKERS

Just when you thought it couldn’t get more evil, it rose to the occasion!

BY

BESS LEVIN

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

One of the regular themes of the Trump administration is the idea that there’s no way it will be able to continue outdoing itself when it comes to wildly evil policies. And yet, on a near-daily basis, it rises to the occasion! While its evilness does not discriminate—women, Democrats, the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims, pro athletes, the poor, and the media all get a taste—very often it relates to immigrants, with Team Trump finding new and inventive ways to demonize them and make their lives miserable. Recently that‘s involved deporting kids with cancer, and now it extends to refusing to allow asylum-seekers who work when they come to the U.S.

NBC News reports that the administration is working on a proposal to prevent asylum-seekers from applying for work permits for at least a year after they enter the country. Yes, the same administration under which visa denials for poor Mexicans have “skyrocketed”, and which announced in August that new factors that will count against green card applicants will include not having the money to cover “any reasonably foreseeable medical costs” related to a medical condition, having been approved to receive a public benefit, “financial liabilities,” and a low credit score, among other things. Obviously not being allowed to work for at least a year will no doubt contribute to the likelihood that people will be forced to turn to welfare, or force them to work in the shadow economy. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense for an administration that clearly prefers upwardly mobile immigrants, unless, of course, the point of the policy was to put such individuals between a rock and a group of assholes, and simply discourage them from coming to the country altogether.

The policy is expected to be discussed at a meeting Monday afternoon between Kevin McAleenan, the outgoing acting Homeland Security secretary, and heads of agencies for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to two of the officials. And it is meant to target Mexican families seeking asylum, a demographic that has recently risen while the number of Central Americans has decreased since May.

One of the DHS officials said proponents of the policy believe prolonging the period when Mexicans are not allowed to work while they wait for their claim will deter them from coming to the U.S. in the first place…DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

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

Of course, the intent here is to discourage individuals from making the asylum applications that U.S. law entitles them to, but that Trump, with help from complicit courts, has all but extinguished without any legislative changes from Congress.

So, first the Trump Administration artificially and intentionally inflates the Immigration Court backlog through “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” so that applications take much longer than they should in a fair and professionally administered system. Then they penalize the victims.

Meanwhile, the Article III Courts, who should have put an end to this unconstitutional nonsense long before now, continue to compound the problem by allowing a biased, xenophobic Administration to run a major court system as a branch of DHS enforcement.

Also, it’s important to remember that these outrages are happening on the watch of “Big Mac With Lies.” Those who care about honest public service and American justice should make a point not to allow “Big Mac” to “reinvent” himself to profit from his wrongdoing and the pain and suffering he has unnecessarily inflicted on asylum seekers and others entitled to justice in America but finding none during “Big Mac’s” tenure as “Trump’s Acting Toady.”

Of course, things are going to continue to get worse for humanity when Trump’s new “Acting Toady of Homeland Security,” Chad Wolf takes over.

PWS

11-06-19

PROFILES IN WHITE NATIONALIST COWARDICE: At Time Of World’s Greatest Need, Trump Administration Resettled Zero (0) Refugees In October – “There couldn’t be a worse time for it. The UN estimates there are around 26 million refugees worldwide, many of whom are victims of torture or women and girls fleeing persecution or violence.”

https://apple.news/A9iGP0BvrTqCp47JtaKz2Wg

Natasha Frost reports for Quartz:

ACCESS DENIED

Not a single refugee was resettled in the US last month

The nosedive is the result of a State Department freeze on admissions, according to a World Relief press release, resulting in hundreds of canceled flights and yet more uncertainty for the thousands of refugees hoping to resettle in the US. The department has issued an admissions ceiling of 18,000 for the financial year 2020—the lowest in almost 30 years, and well below the number of displaced people already in the pipeline to be resettled in the US. (Ceilings for 2018 and 2019 were 45,000 and 30,000, respectively.)

There couldn’t be a worse time for it. The UN estimates there are around 26 million refugees worldwide, many of whom are victims of torture or women and girls fleeing persecution or violence. Others may be victims of the war in Syria, where the withdrawal of US troops has generated chaos and further devastation. Barely half a percent of the 26 million will be resettled at all, and even then only after a process of intensive screening from admitting states, noted Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement released yesterday. “At a time of record forced displacement in the world, lower admissions constrain UNHCR’s ability to deliver on its refugee protection mandate and diminish our humanitarian negotiating power at the global level,” he added.

While states are barred from expelling asylum seekers or returning them “to any country in which they would face persecution,” they are under no legal obligation to accept any number of refugees. In the mid-1960s, the early years of modern refugee programs, according to the Center for Migration Studies, the US representative to the UN described the proper, legal treatment of refugees and asylum seekers as a “credit” to the US, rather than “a burden.” In recent years, however, the US government has come to see these obligations as a humanitarian headache—one that places an undue toll on US taxpayers.

In 1980, when records began, the US admitted more than 200,000 refugees to a country of around 270 million people. Nearly 30 years on, the US population has risen more than 40%, while the number of refugees resettled is down by more than 80%.

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

There is simply no end to the Trump Administration’s sleazy, selfish, cowardly, cruelty. Under Trump, the U.S. has gone from a humanitarian beacon to the leader of the “race to the bottom.”

PWS

11-05-19

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: “CONFIRMING THE AMERICAN DREAM” –Debunking Another Trump White Nationalist False Narrative: Even The Poorest Immigrants Quickly Adapt & Become Self-Sufficient! — “The adult children of immigrants, almost universally, show more upward economic mobility than their peers whose parents were born in the United States.”

https://apple.news/A54Jcss-aTZ21cr6npgpyDA

Nicole Narea reports at Vox News:

A new study shows that even the poorest immigrants lift themselves up within a generation

It appears that the idea of the “American Dream” has some truth.

By Nicole Narea @nicolenarea Nov 1, 2019, 2:20pm EDT

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Carmen del Thalia Mallol holds her daughter Lia, 4, after becoming a new US citizen during a naturalization ceremony inside the National September 11 Memorial Museum on July 2, 2019, in New York City. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The adult children of immigrants, almost universally, show more upward economic mobility than their peers whose parents were born in the United States. Indeed, a new working paper by Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky; Princeton University’s Leah Platt Boustan and Elisa Jácome; and the University of California Davis’ Santiago Pérez finds that this is especially true for the lowest-income immigrants and remains true for the most recent cohorts for which data is available.

Drawing from census data, publicly available administrative data, and federal income tax data, they traced the income levels of millions of fathers and sons over time dating back to 1880. The children of immigrants climbed higher in the income rankings than those born to US natives across history and in 44 of the 47 sending countries they studied.

The paper contradicts President Donald Trump’s rhetoric suggesting that immigrants drain the social safety net rather than pulling themselves up and that immigrants from a select few countries are more desirable than others. On that basis, the president has pursued numerous policies aimed at preventing low-income immigrants, particularly those from what he has referred to as “shithole countries,” from entering and settling in the US.

Even poor immigrants’ kids achieve success

Prior research has shown that immigrants who start out earning less than their US-born peers are unlikely to catch up in their lifetimes. And among more recent immigrants, that initial income gap is growing bigger and harder to close.

But the new study shows that, even if immigrants start out with low income levels, most are not only catching up eventually but surpassing their US-born peers — even if it takes a generation.

Even children of the poorest immigrants from most countries have higher levels of economic mobility than their peers born to American parents. https://economics.princeton.edu/2019/10/25/immigrant-mobility-abramitzky-boustan/

The typical explanation offered for this kind of immigrant achievement is some inherent quality resulting from cultural differences, such as a strong work ethic or placing a value on education. But the working paper offers a more tangible explanation for the mobility gap: Immigrants tend to settle where there is more economic opportunity and take jobs that are below their true skill level.

“We don’t even have to reach for these cultural explanations,” Boustan said in an interview. “A lot of it has to do with immigrants being willing to move anywhere and choosing locations where there are growing industries and a good set of job opportunities for their kids. Those are choices that immigrants are making that are different from the US-born and that could be a feature of immigrant success.”

It makes sense why immigrants choose to move to areas of higher economic opportunity as compared to the US-born. Without social and professional networks anchoring them to one place, they are more “footloose” and flexible in where they ultimately settle, Abramitzky said. Historically, that has meant that foreign-born populations tend to cluster in urban areas.

The first generation arriving in the US, however, might also have difficulty finding work at income levels that reflect their true talents and abilities due to a variety of factors: limited English skills, lack of an established professional network in the US, and discrimination, Boustan said.

A classic scenario might be a Russian scientist who comes to the US and works as a cab driver. In that case, the second generation might be able to move up more quickly than their father’s income ranking would suggest.

“What might matter for the kids is what their father’s true talents and abilities were, rather than where he gets placed in the labor market,” Boustan said.

The economic mobility gap, the paper finds, is particularly stark when examining the children of those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder, ranked below the 25th percentile. In that category, the children of immigrants climb three to six percentile rank points higher than the children of natives.

The gap narrows, however, when examining families from the top income levels. And it even reverses slightly when comparing children growing up in the same geographic area.

The paper, while expansive, has some limitations: It relies on federal income tax records that likely do not capture unauthorized immigrants, the primary target of the president’s ire as he attempts to make the southern border all but impenetrable to migrants from Central America attempting to cross illegally.

But it’s reasonable to speculate that unauthorized immigrants would also settle in areas of economic opportunity and take jobs below their skill level, potentially resulting in similar rates of economic mobility as compared to other immigrants, the researchers said. The only caveat could be that unauthorized immigrants and their children experience more discrimination in the US, limiting their access to higher-paying jobs.

All kinds of immigrants move up the ladder

Boustan said the paper pushes back on the idea of “model minorities”: that minorities from certain ethnic or racial backgrounds tend to find more socioeconomic success than others. It’s typically been used to describe Asians in contrast to Hispanics and African Americans. But regardless of race or ethnicity, children of immigrants from the overwhelming majority of the countries they studied performed better than the US-born.

The paper’s findings also challenge Trump’s ideas about who should be allowed to immigrate to the US.

In January 2018, he reportedly derided immigrants from what he considers “shithole countries,” including El Salvador and African nations, while simultaneously calling for “more people from Norway.” And he infamously maligned Mexican immigrants when launching his campaign for president in 2015.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us.”

In fact, immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and African nations such as Nigeria are all performing better than the US-born. And in past waves of immigration, immigrants from Norway actually performed worse than the US-born.

“We take it as a warning against taking a nostalgic view of immigration,” Abramitzky said.

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

Trump’s (and his fellow White Nationalists’) racist-inspired false narratives are harming America and preventing us from becoming even greater. Obviously, a smarter, more decent Administration would cut the xenophobic nonsense, legalize the law-abiding migrants already here, and propose ways to expand legal immigration across the board.

Those actions, not expensive, mean-spirited, and ultimately futile “enforcement only” gimmicks, would address the “immigration issue” in a fair, humane, and mutually beneficial manner. Also, by reducing the “unnecessarily undocumented population” and providing more realistic opportunities for future legal immigration and integration into our society, immigration enforcement would become far more focused, efficient, and effective.

Instead of treating needed workers and legitimate refugees like “bank robbers” (often actually ignoring the real criminals), the DHS could concentrate on a smaller number of individuals attempting to evade a more reasonable and realistic system. Additionally, with real lines for legal immigration, rather than imaginary ones the Trump crowd often disingenuously references, being sent “to the back of the line” would be more of a deterrent than it is now.

Although, as Nicole points out, the study didn’t specifically cover undocumented individuals, the findings of this study certainly match my “real life” experiences in Immigration Court. The overwhelming majority of those coming before me on the non-detained docket were basically decent, law abiding folks performing productive functions in our communities. For a short time at the end of the Obama Administration, ICE actually recognized the futility of removing such individuals and exercised “prosecutorial discretion” (“PD”) through “administrative closing” in many cases where removal would actually diminish our nation while wasting limited court time.

Those very few individuals who ”flunked out” of the “PD program by getting in trouble were returned to court, usually on the detained docket, and in most cases removed. The others formed a “natural core” for a future legislative legalization program that a smarter, kinder, braver Administration would have proposed.

Naturally, one of the first things the Trump White Nationalists tried to do was end two of the most successful programs ever instituted within DHS: DACA and PD. The results of these mean-spirited and short sighted actions have been highly problematic for the individuals involved as well as our country.

PWS

11-02-19

HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/doj-changed-hiring-promote-restrictive-immigration-judges?fbclid=IwAR2VfI3AKcttNoXlc_MX0sa-6X94bsOWF4btxb7tWDBz7Es4bvqB63oZA-0

Tanvi Misra reports for Roll Call:

DOJ changed hiring to promote restrictive immigration judges

New practice permanently placed judges on powerful appellate board, documents show

Posted Oct 29, 2019 2:51 PM

Tanvi Misra

@Tanvim

More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border DHS advances plan to get DNA samples from immigrant detainees White House plans to cut refugee admittance to all-time low

Error! Filename not specified.

James McHenry, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, testifies before a Senate panel in 2018. Memos from McHenry detail changes in hiring practices for six restrictive judges placed permanently on the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Department of Justice has quietly changed hiring procedures to permanently place immigration judges repeatedly accused of bias to a powerful appellate board, adding to growing worries about the politicization of the immigration court system.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests describe how an already opaque hiring procedure was tweaked for the six newest hires to the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals. All six board members, added in August, were immigration judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates. Some also had the highest number of decisions in 2017 that the same appellate body sent back to them for reconsideration. All six members were immediately appointed to the board without a yearslong probationary period.

[More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border]

“They’re high-level deniers who’ve done some pretty outrageous things [in the courtroom] that would make you believe they’re anti-immigrant,” said Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge and past senior legal adviser at the board. “It’s a terrifying prospect … They have power over thousands of lives.”

Among the hiring documents are four recommendation memos to the Attorney General’s office from James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration court system.

DOCUMENT

PAGES

TEXT

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Page 1 of 4

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The memos, dated July 18, recommend immigration judges William A. Cassidy, V. Stuart Couch, Earle B. Wilson, and Keith E. Hunsucker to positions on the appellate board. McHenry’s memos note new hiring procedures had been established on March 8, to vet “multiple candidates” expressing interest in the open board positions.

A footnote in the memos states that applicants who are immigration judges would be hired through a special procedure: Instead of going through the typical two-year probationary period, they would be appointed to the board on a permanent basis, immediately. This was because a position on the appellate board “requires the same or similar skills” as that of an immigration judge, according to the memo.

Appellate board members, traditionally hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, are tasked with reviewing judicial decisions appealed by the government or plaintiff. Their decisions, made as part of a three-member panel, can set binding precedents that adjudicators and immigration judges rely on for future cases related to asylum, stays of deportation, protections for unaccompanied minors and other areas.

McHenry, appointed in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concludes his recommendation memos by noting that the judge’s “current federal service was vetted and no negative information that would preclude his appointment” was reported. He does not mention any past or pending grievances, although public complaints have been filed against at least three of the judges.

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These documents, obtained through FOIA via Muckrock, a nonprofit, collaborative that pushes for government transparency, and shared with CQ Roll Call, reflect “the secrecy with which these rules are changing,” said Matthew Hoppock, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney. “It’s very hard to remove or discipline a judge that’s permanent than when it’s probationary, so this has long term implications.”

‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have left’: Migrant laments ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Volume 90%

The Department of Justice declined to answer a series of questions asked by CQ Roll Call regarding the new hiring practices, why exemptions were made in the case of these immigration judges and whether complaints against any of the judges were considered.

“Board members, like immigration judges, are selected through an open, competitive, and merit-based process involving an initial review by the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent, multiple levels of review by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ official wrote via email. “This process includes review by several career officials. The elevation of trial judges to appellate bodies is common in almost every judicial system, and EOIR is no different.”

Homestead: On the front lines of the migrant children debate

Volume 90%

Opaque hiring process

When the department posted the six board vacancies in March, the openings reflected the first time that board members would be allowed to serve from immigration courts throughout the country. Previously, the entire appellate board worked out of its suburban Virginia headquarters.

In addition, the job posts suggested that new hires would be acting in a dual capacity: They may be asked to adjudicate cases at the trial court level and then also review the court decisions appealed to the board. Previously, board members stuck to reviewing appeals cases, a process that could take more than a year.

Ultimately, all six hires were immigration judges, although past board candidates have come from government service, private sector, academia and nonprofits.

“This was stunning,” MaryBeth Keller, chief immigration judge until she stepped down this summer, said in a recent interview with The Asylumist, a blog about asylum issues. “I can’t imagine that the pool of applicants was such that only [immigration judges] would be hired, including two from the same city.”

Keller said immigration judges are “generally eminently qualified to be board members, but to bring in all six from the immigration court? I’d like to think that the pool of applicants was more diverse than that.”

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who headed the board under President Bill Clinton, said the panel always had arbitrary hiring procedures that changed with each administration and suffered from “quality control” issues. But the Trump administration has “pushed the envelope the furthest,” he said.

“This administration has weaponized the process,” he told CQ Roll Call. “They have taken a system that has some notable weaknesses in it and exploited those weaknesses for their own ends.”

The reputation and track record of the newest immigration judges has also raised eyebrows.

According to an analysis of EOIR data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, each of these newest six judges had an asylum denial rate over 80 percent, with Couch, Cassidy, and Wilson at 92, 96, and 98 percent, respectively. Nationally, the denial rate for asylum cases is around 57 percent. Previous to their work as immigration judges, all six had worked on behalf of government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the military.

“It mirrors a lot of the concerns at the trial level,” said Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). She said several new hires at the trial level have been Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys.

“Every day across the country, people’s lives hang in the balance waiting for immigration judges to decide their fate,” she said. “Asylum grant rates for immigration court cases vary widely depending on the judge, suggesting that outcomes may turn on which judge is deciding the case rather than established principles and rules of law.”

Immigration experts note that denial rates depend on a variety of factors, including the number and types of cases that appear on a judge’s docket. Perhaps a better measure of an immigration judge’s decision-making may be the rate that rulings get returned by the appeals board.

For 2017, the last full year for which data is available, Couch and Wilson had the third and fourth highest number of board-remanded cases — at 50 and 47 respectively, according to federal documents obtained by Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer. The total number of cases on their dockets that year were 176 and 416, respectively.

Some of the behavior by the newer judges also have earned them a reputation. In 2018, AILA obtained 11 complaints against Cassidy that alleged prejudice against immigrant respondents. In a public letter the Southern Poverty Law Center sent last year to McHenry, the group complained that Cassidy bullied migrants in his court. He also asked questions that “exceeded his judicial authority,” Center lawyers wrote.

Another letter, sent in 2017 by SPLC lawyers and an Emory University law professor whose students observed Cassidy’s court proceedings, noted the judge “analogized an immigrant to ‘a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood’ and asked the attorney if he would let that person in.”

SPLC also has documented issues with Wilson, noting how he “routinely leaned back in his chair, placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes” during one hearing. “He held this position for more than 20 minutes as a woman seeking asylum described the murders of her parents and siblings.”

Couch’s behavior and his cases have made news. According to Mother Jones, he once lost his temper with a 2-year-old Guatemalan child, threatening to unleash a dog on the boy if he didn’t stop making noise. But he is perhaps better known as the judge who denied asylum to “Ms. A.B.,” a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor, even after the appellate board asked him to reconsider. Sessions, the attorney general at the time, ultimately intervened and made the final precedent-setting ruling in the case.

Couch has a pattern of denying asylum to women who have fled domestic violence, “despite clear instructions to the contrary” from the appellate board, according to Johnson, the immigration lawyer who said Couch “has been prejudging all claims that have a history of domestic violence, and quite literally copying and pasting language he used to deny other domestic violence victims asylum.”

Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte-based immigration lawyer and second vice president at AILA, went to law school with Couch and called him “complex.” While he was reluctant to characterize the judge as “anti-immigrant,” he acknowledged “concerning” stories about the Couch’s court demeanor.

“In our conversations, he’s held the view that asylum is not the right vehicle for some individuals to immigrate to the U.S. — it’s one I disagree with,” McKinney said. “But I feel quite certain that that’s exactly why he was hired.”

Politicizing court system

Increasingly, political appointees are “micromanaging” the dockets of immigration judges, said Ashley Tabaddor, head of the union National Association of Immigration Judges. Appointees also are making moves that jeopardize their judicial independence, she said. Among them: requiring judges to meet a quota of 700 completed cases per year; referring cases even if they are still in the midst of adjudication to political leadership, including the Attorney General, for the final decision; and seeking to decertify the immigration judges’ union.

These are “symptoms of a bigger problem,” said Tabaddor. “If you have a court that’s situated in the law enforcement agency … that is the fundamental flaw that needs to be corrected.”

In March, the American Bar Association echoed calls by congressional Democrats to investigate DOJ hiring practices in a report that warned the department’s “current approach will elevate speed over substance, exacerbate the lack of diversity on the bench, and eliminate safeguards that could lead to a resurgence of politicized hiring.”

“Moreover, until the allegations of politically motivated hiring can be resolved, doubt will remain about the perceived and perhaps actual fairness of immigration proceedings,” the organization wrote. “The most direct route to resolving these reasonable and important concerns would be for DOJ to publicize its hiring criteria, and for the inspector general to conduct an investigation into recent hiring practices.”

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

One of the most disgusting developments, that the media sometimes misses, is that having skewed and biased the system specifically against Central American asylum seekers, particularly women and children, the Administration uses their “cooked” and “bogus” statistics to make a totally disingenuous case that the high denial rates show the system is being abused by asylum seekers and their lawyers. That, along with the “fiction of the asylum no show” been one of “Big Mac’s” most egregious and oft repeated lies! There certainly is systemic abuse taking place here — but it is by the Trump Administration, not asylum seekers and their courageous lawyers.

This system is a national disgrace operating under the auspices of a feckless Congress and complicit Article III courts whose life-tenured judges are failing in their collective duty to put an end to this blatantly unconstitutional system: one that also violates statutory provisions intended to give migrants access to counsel, an opportunity to fully present and document their cases to an unbiased decision maker, and a fair opportunity to seek asylum regardless of status or manner of entry. Basically, judges at all levels who are complicit in this mockery of justice are “robed killers.”

Just a few years ago, asylum seekers were winning the majority of individual rulings on asylum in Immigration Court. Others were getting lesser forms of protection, so that more than 60 percent of asylum applicants who got final decisions in Immigration Court were receiving much-needed, life-saving protection. That’s exactly what one would expect given the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in 1987 about the generous standards applicable to asylum seekers in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca.

Today, conditions have not improved materially in most “refugee sending countries.” Indeed, this Administration’s bogus designation of the Northern Triangle “failed states” as “Safe Third Countries” is absurd and shows their outright contempt for the system and their steadfast belief that the Federal Judiciary will “tank” on their responsibility to hold this Executive accountable.

As a result of this reprehensible conduct, the favorable trend in asylum adjudication has been sharply reversed. Now, approximately two-thirds of asylum cases are being denied, many based on specious “adverse credibility” findings, illegal “nexus” findings that intentionally violate the doctrine of “mixed motives”enshrined in the statute, absurdly unethical and illegal rewriting of asylum precedents by Sessions and Barr, intentional denial of the statutory right to counsel, and overt coercion through misuse of DHS detention authority to improperly “punish” and “deter” legal asylum seekers.

Right under the noses of complicit Article III Judges and Congress, the Trump Administration has “weaponized” the Immigration “Courts” and made them an intentionally hostile environment for asylum seekers and their, often pro bono or low bono, lawyers. How is this acceptable in 21^st Century America?

That’s why it’s important for members of the “New Due Process Army” to remember my “5 Cs Formula” – Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change. Make these folks with “no skin the game” feel the pain and be morally accountable for those human lives they are destroying by inaction in the face of Executive illegality and tyranny from their “ivory tower perches.”

We’re in a war for the survival of our democracy and the future of humanity. There is only one “right side” in this battle. History will remember who stood tall and who went small when individual rights, particularly the rights to Due Process and fair treatment for the most vulnerable among us, were under attack by the lawless forces of White Nationalism and their enablers!

PWS

10-31-19

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

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

Dominique Mosbergen reports for HuffPost:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nielsen resigned in April.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Journal elaborated on how this plan would work.

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

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

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

. . . .

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

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

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

PWS

10-31-19

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

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

Nacha Cattan reports for Bloomberg News:

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

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

By

Nacha Cattan

October 19, 2019, 8:00 AM EDT

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

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

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

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

Coyote Roberto, on Aug. 28.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

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

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

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

Recession Factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

The Legal Route

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

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

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

A child plays outside a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juarez.

Photographer: Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-31-19

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

https://apple.news/AsyQuZEMeR0mXWpvWd19-Mg

By Naureen Shah:

opinion

At detention facilities, legal rights ‘in name only’

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

7:42 pm EDT Oct. 25, 2019

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

To some extent, I can understand their perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have an obligation to respond.

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

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

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

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

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7:42 pm EDT Oct. 25, 2019

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

PWS

10-29-19

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

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

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despicable John Kelly – Profits from Detention of Children

By Immigration Prof

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

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

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

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

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

Read here…

bh

October 20, 2019

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-25-19

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

Crushing Immigration Judge Caseloads and Lengthening Hearing Wait Times

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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-25-19

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

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

9-17-19 IJ termination MPP

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

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

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

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

It also shows:

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

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

Due Process Forever; “Malicious Incompetence” Never!

PWS

10-25-19

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