US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) – Page 21

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

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

Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post:

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

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

Anyway, I decided to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DUE PROCESS FOREVER, CORRUPT FORMER PUBLIC OFFICIALS NEVER!

PWS

10-24-19

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

https://apple.news/Aak3uZr8uS5GOKZLIhHEVHQ

By Michelle Hackman and Andrew Restuccia in the WSJ:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-22-19

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

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

Stephanie Schwartz @ Slate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexico where migrants are being kept.

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

Without non-refoulement, asylum is moot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-22-19

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

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

Anna-Catherine Brigida
Freelance Reporter

Mary Beth Sheridan and

report for the WashPost:

By

Mary Beth Sheridan and

Anna-Catherine Brigida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am always hoping,” Karen said.

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

But for one family, things were about to change.

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

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

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

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

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

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

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So why are disappearances back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A crusading attorney general promises answers

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

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

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

“Is it up here?” he asked.

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

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

It had been a man in jeans and work boots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a wallet. Inside was an ID card.

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

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

A discovery brings new hope, and fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The families waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-20-19

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

https://apple.news/ALbbeLJpzTOWr1LCa2mcLQg

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pair was detained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t want her sons to become criminals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They don’t listen,” she said.

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

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

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

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

His mother wasn’t so sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said.

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

Sabillon began to cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My sons’ future is here,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-20-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few have been allowed to enter the courts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Videoconferencing doesn’t facilitate a fair proceeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These courts are sending immigrants back to danger in Mexico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PWS

10-18-19

“BIG MAC’S” LEGACY IS A PREVIEW OF “COOCH COOCH’S” PLANS FOR FURTHER “WEAPONIZING” DHS AGAINST HUMANITY — Child Abuse, Illegal Actions, Contempt For Court Decrees Likely To Ramp Up Under Spectacularly Unqualified White Nationalist “Statue Of Liberty Denier!”

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2019-10-14/cbp-holds-migrants-longer-than-it-is-supposed-to-lawyer-claims?utm_source=SDUT+Essential+California&utm_campaign=516be9d215-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_15_12_56&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1cebf1c149-516be9d215-84889485

Gustavo Solis reports for the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Customs and Border Protection may be violating the law by holding asylum-seeking children longer than the agency is allowed to, according to lawyers who represent migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

By GUSTAVO SOLIS

OCT. 14, 2019

6:29 PM

Lawyers are accusing Customs and Border Protection in San Diego of breaking their own policies and potentially the law by holding migrant children in custody longer than the agency is allowed to.

Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal government generally cannot detain migrant children and their parents together for more than brief periods. The agreement states CBP should not hold children for more than 72 hours and Immigration and Customs Enforcement should not detain them for more than 20 days.

However, asylum-seeking children are routinely held for more than 72 hours in San Diego, according to Erika Pinheiro, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Al Otro Lado.

“We are seeing cases of prolonged detention every day,” she said. “There is no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes they are released the same day, sometimes it’s a week later. We’ve had cases of people in CBP custody for three weeks.”

Many of the people being held in CBP custody are part of the Remain in Mexico program, which forced asylum seekers to live in Mexico while waiting for their cases to be decided in immigration courts.

The latest example involves a 9-year-old asylum seeker and her mother who have been in CBP custody since Oct. 4, as first reported by KPBS.

The mother and family were released from CBP custody Monday afternoon, Pinheiro said.

That case is particularly disturbing because both the child and mother are reportedly sick — suffering from stomach pain and diarrhea — which could be a separate violation of the Flores Settlement Agreement, the lawyer added.

Apart from limiting the amount of time children can be in federal custody, the Flores Settlement Agreement also establishes basic standards of care that include access to medical care.

A CBP spokesman declined to answer specific questions about the 9-year-old’s case or more general questions about Pinheiro’s claims that the agency is violating the law.

The spokesman said that the agency treats those in its custody with, “dignity and respect,” while striving to, “process individuals as expeditiously as possible,” and noted that, “most individuals are in our facilities for 72 hours or less.”

President Trump has called the Flores Settlement Agreement a “loophole,” that allows immigrants to be released from immigration detention centers. In August, the Trump administration unveiled proposed regulations that would replace Flores.

Specifically, the new policies would abolish ICE’s 20-day limit on detaining families and establish new minimum standards of care for people held in detention centers.

According to CBP’s own policies, “detainees should generally not be held for longer than 72 hours in CBP facility and every effort must be made to hold detainees for the least amount of time required for their processing, transfer, release, or repatriation as appropriate and as operationally feasible.”

Immigration attorney Rose Thompson has seen multiple asylum seekers spend more than 72 hours in CBP custody, including a case of a mother and her adult daughter spending 12 days in CBP custody.

Another asylum seeker said the conditions inside CBP custody were so poor that she asked to be sent back to Mexico, Thompson said.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “It’s not an area that’s intended to detain people for longer than 48 or 72 hours because it’s not comfortable. I don’t know even if there are beds.”

An August 2019 report of conditions inside federal custody noted that the average length of detention for asylum seekers here in San Diego was 3.4 days and more than eight percent of migrants surveyed in the report were held in custody for five days or more.

That report, published by the U.S. Immigration Policy Center, noted that more than 10 percent of asylum seekers in custody reported experiencing medical issues in detention.

The Flores Settlement Agreement also requires the federal government to provide basic care for children in custody. It stipulates that minors most be treated with, “dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability.”

Similarly, CBP guidelines regarding medical treatment state that officers are required to report illnesses to a supervisor and document them in an electronic system of record while also seeking or providing medical care in a timely manner.

However, Pinheiro claims that CBP is also violating this aspect of both the Flores Agreement and the agency’s internal policies.

She points to the mother and daughter released from detention on Monday as just the latest example of migrants not receiving adequate care while in custody.

“I have never had a client say they saw a doctor while in CBP custody,” she said.

Conditions of migrants in CBP custody made headlines in June, when a group of lawyers in Texas asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and a contempt order calling for CBP to “immediately start processing children for release to parents or relatives,” and provide children with, “basic necessities including adequate food, clean water, medical care, and access to sleep.”

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

There is a fairly simple solution for the problem of a Government that disobeys the law. Federal Judges should start throwing “Cooch Cooch,” his subordinates, Barr, and the DOJ lawyers advancing untrue and unethical arguments in support of their “clients’” indefensible positions in jail for contempt of court. In the case of lawyers, like “Cooch Cooch,” Barr, and his subordinates they should also be referred to their respective state bars for disbarment proceedings.

Until these thugs are held accountable, the child abuse and other human rights outrages will continue.

PWS

10-15-19

DESIGNED TO FAIL – PORT “COURTS” ARE A MOCKERY OF JUSTICE BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTATION – Congress & Feckless Article III Appellate Courts Are Enabling This Gross Denial Of Due Process & Human Rights!

Kim Hunter, Esquire
Lawyers for Good Government

John Bruning, Esquire
Lawyers for Good Government

https://apple.news/AC6USa7dsRTGNaJ54E8-T6w

From The Hill:

By Kim Hunter, Katharine Gordon and John Bruning, opinion contributors – 10/13/19 04:00 PM EDT

The immigration system is designed to fail

The Trump administration’s latest efforts to block as many asylum seekers as possible from entering the U.S. have expanded exponentially with the implementation of “port courts.”

Tens of thousands of refugees have been forced to remain in Mexico in order to request any protection from persecution, rather than be permitted to enter the U.S. to await their hearing dates. For their hearings, they enter port courts, which are literally in tents and trailers that have been hastily put up in southern border cities.

We are part of a group of attorney volunteers who recently returned from assisting asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. One of us accompanied two new clients to the port court in Brownsville, Texas. Neither the judges nor government attorneys are physically present, instead appearing by video and hidden from public view as press and observers are barred.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is solely responsible for this. The Department of Justice (DOJ), which employs the immigration judges, notes that the Justice Department will follow the regulation that requires hearings to be public. However, since DHS operates the port courts, DOJ has capitulated to the ad hoc rules which deny transparency.

At every step of the way, refugees and the handful of attorneys who represent them are reminded that this “system” is designed to fail. There are no marked entrances to the Brownsville court, which resembles a concentration camp in its design and layout.

Instead, attorneys must already know where the entrance is and ask to be let in by privately contracted guards who monitor it for DHS. Forms with client signatures are required to gain entry. Attorneys are escorted by guards from the front gate to client meetings, to attend court and even to access the restroom.

Attorneys are not allowed to bring electronics into the tent complex, which means they cannot access their calendars or legal research. Meanwhile, DHS lawyers maintain access to their technology as they sit off-screen. Only the immigration judge and interpreter are video streamed into the port courtroom.

In order to even schedule the next hearing, the attorney must request a recess so that they can leave the court complex, go to their car to access their calendar on their phone and go through the security process all over again to get back to their hearing.

Immigrants with hearings and their children are also subjected to security screening in order to enter. Their shoelaces are confiscated by DHS and not returned. Some refugees report being subjected to cavity searches just to attend court.

Unless the immigrant is represented, the families wait for a “group advisal” of their rights, which is interpreted only in Spanish. Many refugees speak indigenous languages and have no way to communicate that in the face of a video link via a Spanish interpreter. Yet, in order to secure a full hearing on their claim, they must submit applications and all supporting documents in English.

Individuals with attorneys do not have their full hearings interpreted. At most, procedural matters are translated at the very beginning and end. For a client to know what is happening, their attorney must translate for them while making legal arguments and responding to the DHS attorney and the immigration judge.

At the conclusion of one of our clients’ hearings, the contracted guard tried to force counsel from the courtroom without giving him an opportunity to explain the non-interpreted hearing that had just taken place.

The attorney had to involve the judge, who intervened and asserted some control over the courtroom to allow our client access to counsel. Meanwhile, DHS’s position is that attorneys have enough time to speak to their clients before the hearing, and can meet their client in Mexico later to explain what happened.

To meet with clients in Mexico, attorneys must violate the State Department’s travel advisories, which categorize Matamoros as a level 4 security risk, which is the category reserved for the most dangerous places on earth, including active war zones like Syria.

As volunteer attorneys we were allowed to cross the border exclusively in a group during daylight hours. We conducted our work within 100 yards of the border crossing point which makes client confidentiality impossible. In case of cartel violence, we were instructed to drop everything and sprint for the crossing on our group leader’s signal.

The harms refugees suffer due to our official U.S. government policy of rendering them homeless includes deaths by drowning in the Rio Grande (even while bathing), multiple documented instances of kidnappings within minutes or hours of being returned from the U.S. The toll of surviving on the streets of Mexico is amplified by the due process farce refugees face in post courts.

As tempting as it is, we cannot give in to our exhaustion and cynicism: We must hold this administration accountable for the ongoing illegality that is engulfing the border. It may take decades or longer to repair what we have lost under this administration and there is no time to waste.

Kim Hunter, Katharine Gordon and John Bruning are immigration attorneys working on behalf of Lawyers for Good Government.

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Lawyers, mostly working pro bono, are the only ones involved in a concerted effort to make our immigration system function. They deal daily with a system intentionally and maliciously stacked against them and their clients, a disinterested Congress, and spineless Federal Appellate Courts who mindlessly sign off on the results of these illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional atrocities.

These are crystal clear denials of the right to assistance of counsel of choice, guaranteed by statute and Due Process. So, what happened to Congress and to the reviewing courts? Look at the Ninth Circuit’s disgusting and cowardly performance in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan and the Supreme Court’s disgraceful decision in Barr v. East side Sanctuary Covenant. Derelection of duty costs lives! How do these guys get away with it? How do they sleep at night?

Human rights lawyers also suffer endless abuse by cowardly, dishonest officials of the Trump Administration carrying out an unconstitutional White Nationalist attack on America and its courageous defenders:

As tempting as it is, we cannot give in to our exhaustion and cynicism: We must hold this administration accountable for the ongoing illegality that is engulfing the border. It may take decades or longer to repair what we have lost under this administration and there is no time to waste.

The good news is that members of the “New Due Process Army” are in it for the long run!

DUE PROCESS FOREVER!

PWS

10-14-19

HUMANITY REVILED: THE HUMAN COSTS OF TRUMP’S INTENTIONALLY CRUEL & INHUMAN POLICIES CARRIED OUT BY DHS – Mica Rosenberg @ Reuters & Friends With Three Timely Reports!

I wanted to share our latest exclusive reporting that found some 16,000 children, nearly 500 of them infants under 1 year old, have been sent back to Mexico under the “Migrant Protection Protocols” to wait out their U.S. court hearings in often precarious living conditions. The government would not share a demographic breakdown of who was being sent back under the program so we sought the answers ourselves:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-babies-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-migrant-policy-sends-thousands-of-babies-and-toddlers-back-to-mexico-idUSKBN1WQ1H1

Separately, we just completed a multimedia project that took months of work and lots of cross-border collaboration to follow the diverging fates of several migrants who travelled with the caravans last year:

https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-IMMIGRATION-PROFILE/0100B2FK1NP/index.html

I am also following the developments in the U.S. refugee resettlement program:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-refugees/all-i-can-do-is-pray-a-family-in-limbo-as-us-slows-refugee-admissions-idUSKBN1WI0XV

Please read and share and stay in touch with more story ideas!

All the best,

Mica

………………………………………………….

Mica Rosenberg

Reuters News

National Immigration Reporter

www.reuters.com

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

Thanks Mica & team for the great in-depth reporting highlighting the human costs of the Trump Administration’s scofflaw policies.

It’s also what “Big Mac With Lies” actually stood for and went along with during his tenure at DHS. Things to remember when, somewhere down the line, Big Mac inevitably tries to “reinvent himself” as “the voice of reason” or an “internal resistor” to Trump’s grotesque anti-human rights campaign and his “political weaponization” of DHS.

DHS actually has a duty to insure that refugee laws are fairly and generously applied, as intended, to protect those fleeing persecution and torture. Not only did Big Mac fail to carry out that responsibility, but he actively undermined, mocked, and further endangered those needing protection under our laws. And, it was all part of a blatantly racist, White Nationalist, restrictionist Trump agenda that Big Mac fully understood and willfully advanced. He presided over a highly corrupt, unprofessional, politicized, weaponization of DHS. By this time, the damage appears to be irreparable.

PWS

10-13-19

COURT REPORT: A Great Day For America Is Another Bad Friday For Trump’s Ugly White Nationalist Agenda!

Nick Miroff reports for WashPost:

Federal judges in New York, Texas and California sided against two of the Trump administration’s key immigration initiatives Friday, the latest lower court ruling against the president’s push for new physical and administrative barriers to migrants.

In El Paso, the court ruled the Trump administration’s attempt to reprogram military funds for the construction of border fencing was a violation of appropriation laws, a decision that could freeze work on the barrier in that area.

And in separate rulings in New York, California and Washington state, judges partly blocked the implementation of the “public charge” rule that aimed to disqualify immigrants from receiving green cards if they use public benefits or the government considers them likely to do so.

The decisions were the latest setbacks to the administration’s broader attempt to tighten the legal immigration system at the same time the president is seeking to erect hundreds of miles of towering steel barriers along the Mexico border using billions of dollars diverted from military budgets.

[‘He always brings them up’: Trump tries to steer border wall deal to North Dakota firm]

In the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Judge David Briones sided with the plaintiffs — El Paso County and the Border Network for Human Rights — and gave them 10 days to file a proposal for a preliminary injunction. Briones, a Clinton appointee, denied the administration’s motion to dismiss the suit, which was filed in April.

The decision Friday is the first instance of a local jurisdiction successfully suing to block construction of Trump’s border barrier. El Paso County authorities argued it would inflict harm to the local community’s reputation by creating an impression that the city is dangerous and unwelcoming.

Trump visits U.S.-Mexico border wall

On Sept. 18, President Trump visited the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Otay Mesa, Calif. to examine the construction. (The Washington Post)

David Bookbinder, an attorney for the plaintiffs, called it a “nice, neat, small ruling” that avoided broader constitutional questions about the president’s authority. The ruling instead zeroed in on what the judge said were violations that exceeded the executive branch’s authority to divert money appropriated by Congress for a specific purpose.

Bookbinder said it would take his clients “a few days” to determine what government activity they will seek to halt. The injunction probably would extend beyond El Paso County into areas of New Mexico, he said.

“It’s going to be a question of geography,” he said. “We’re going to have to specifically describe the areas of the border where the president will not be able to construct the wall.”

Trump this year diverted $3.6 billion in military construction funds to pay for hundreds of miles of 30-foot-tall steel bollard fencing. The administration has built 71 miles of new barriers so far, but Trump has promised to complete nearly 500 miles by the end of next year.

El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal said the county commissioners took a potentially risky step in suing the president but said the action was necessary because his portrayal of the border as a dangerous area was damaging the economy and other important aspects of community life.

“You have the president of the United States declaring a national emergency, and we can look outside and see that there’s no national emergency,” Bernal said.

At a meeting last month led by White House adviser Jared Kushner, administration officials discussed a plan to reprogram another $3.6 billion in Pentagon money if lawmakers do not provide funds for the barriers through the appropriations process.

The Trump administration is expected to appeal the ruling. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In New York, Judge George B. Daniels blocked the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, calling it “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious.”

A 93-page ruling in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected the government’s arguments on similar grounds, but with a more geographically limited scope.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which was preparing to implement the public charge rule this month, suggested the government would appeal.

“An objective judiciary will see that this rule lies squarely within long-held existing law,” he said in a statement. “Long-standing federal law requires aliens to rely on their own capabilities and the resources of their families, sponsors, and private organizations in their communities to succeed. The public charge regulation defines this long-standing law to ensure those seeking to come or stay in the United States can support themselves financially and will not rely on public benefits.”

U.S. immigration laws have long held provisions allowing the government to bar immigrants who are considered at risk of becoming dependent on public support, but the Trump administration’s initiative would expand the types of benefits that could be taken into consideration, including Medicaid, food assistance and federal housing vouchers.

Immigrant advocates and officials in several jurisdictions have claimed the measures have had a chilling effect even before their implementation, discouraging families from seeking medical care, shelter and food.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the plaintiffs suing the government, celebrated the ruling. “Once again, the courts have thwarted the Trump administration’s attempts to enact rules that violate both our laws and our values, sending a loud and clear message that they cannot rewrite our story to meet their agenda,” she said in a statement.

Robert Moore in El Paso contributed to this report.

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

Who knows what will happen on appeal. The U.S.Courts of Appeals have sometimes “taken a dive” on Trump and sometimes stood up against his illegal actions.

But, at least for the moment it puts some monkey wrenches in Trump’s racist plans and his ongoing abuses of our legal system..

PWS

10-13-19

“BIG MAC WITH LIES” OUT AT DHS — Implementing White Nationalist Agenda & Parroting Anti-Immigrant False Narratives Failed To Win Him Favor With Trump, Miller, & Other Neo-Nazi Extremists Running Administration’s All-Out Attack On Due Process & Human Rights!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

immigrationcourtside.com

Oct. 11, 2019. Acting Homeland Secretary Kevin McAleenan’s resignation was announced by Trump this evening. It contained the minimal “faint praise” for his efforts and the standard disingenuous bureaucratic BS about wanting to spend more time with the family and pursuing interests in the private sector. At least Big Mac has a family left, unlike those asylum seekers who died seeking legal protection, illegally separated children, abused asylum applicants living on streets in Mexico, and mindlessly deported long-time residents who suffered under his corrupt, yet inept, leadership at DHS.

Some news reports claim it was Big Mac’s decision. But, that seems unlikely, since he never was on the “Trump/Miller A Team.” It’s more likely that Big Mac actually was forced out by the White Nationalist Cabal lead by neo-Nazi Miller.

While cruel, corrupt, and complicit, Big Mac didn’t appear sufficiently ideologically committed to Miller’s racist restrictionist hate agenda. He certainly willingly abused human rights, but he didn’t do it with the obscene glee and delight in unnecessary human suffering consistently exhibited by Trump, Miller, and “Cooch Cooch.”

The DHS Secretary position has been a parade of horrors for the American Constitution, the Rule of Law, human rights, and human decency. McAleenan, like his predecessors General John Kelly and Kristjen Nielsen, came to the job with an undeserved reputation for professionalism and bipartisanship. In practice, he followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by performing like a typical political hack and Trump sycophant.

Illegal child separations, deaths in substandard detention conditions, misappropriation of funding for the Wall, totally absurd and dishonest “Safe Third Country” agreements with some of the most dangerous and “asylum free” countries in the world, abuse of legal asylum seekers under the “Let ‘em Die In Mexico” program, disrespect for and hindrance of attorney representation, bogus claims about failures to appear, expansion of the “New American Gulag,” illegal regulations aimed at indefinite detention of families and children, trashing the U.S. Refugee Program, illegal attempts to impose discriminatory “public change” requirements, illegal use of unreliable information to apprehend individuals, false imprisonment of U.S. citizens, mindless deportation of long-term residents who were actually benefitting America, tremendous backlogs of applications for legal stratus, overloading the Immigration Courts with improvidently commenced cases, schemes to discourage legal immigrants, insults to Federal Judges, lack of candor in dealing with Congress, and disrespect for Congressional Representatives are just some of the abominations that took place on Big Mac’s watch.

Indeed, in the past month lower Federal Courts have slammed as illegal at least five of the racist gimmicks that Big Mac and the DHS have tried to foist on the migrant community at the urging of Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” and the other White Nationalists. Some of Big Mac’s most egregious actions came in connection with the “in your face” regulations that DHS & DOJ presented to Judge Dolly Gee in the Flores litigation. Those regulations proposed unlimited abuses to be inflicted on detained children in unregulated facilities during indefinite detention, which was just the opposite of what Judge Gee had ordered. The DOJ’s unethical arguments in support of Big Mac’s indefensible position left Judge Gee incredulous.

Undoubtedly, he will be replaced by someone with a more overt ideology of racism and hate. Neo-Nazis like Ken “Cooch Cooch” Cuccinelli, now illegally serving as head of USCIS, or some of the DHS underlings who have been competing for Miller’s attention with public statements of cruelty, anti-immigrant sentiment, and disrespect for the law are strong possibilities. Trump has a penchant for finding and selecting the worst that humanity has to offer to serve him.

Indeed, it’s quite likely that Trump’s next choice will be so spectacularly unqualified and unpalatable, even to some in the GOP (see, “Cooch Cooch”), that “Moscow Mitch” might balk at pushing the nomination through. But, since Trump prefers to flaunt the Constitution and to operate with “acting toadies” anyway, that probably won’t make any difference.

The Trump Administration is a kakistocracy. So, expect the worst, but be prepared for something far more grotesque and absurd. In the meantime, Big Mac should be remembered for the laws he broke, his attacks on human rights and human decency, his intellectual dishonesty, his immorality, his cowardice in the face of tyranny, the cruel and unnecessary pain he inflicted on legal asylum seekers invoking our laws, and the many lives that he needlessly ruined in service to the worst and most unqualified President in U.S. history.

PWS

10-11-19

MAX BOOT @ WASHPOST: Trump’s Not the Only Grossly Corrupt Public Official – The “Sleazy Three,” Pence, Pompeo, & Barr, Have Also Betrayed Our Nation & Should Go Down!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/09/pence-pompeo-barr-deserve-be-impeached-too/

President Trump has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he is on the verge of being impeached. He recognizes no legal or moral limits on his “absolute right” to do whatever he pleases — including pressuring a foreign country to intervene in U.S. politics on his behalf. But his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.

Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.

Pence has been Trump’s most prominent proxy in his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cough up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election. Trump told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May so as to turn the screws on the Ukrainian president. When they finally met in Warsaw on Sept. 1, Pence again pressured Zelensky to take action on “corruption,” a code word for investigating Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter.

Pence has adopted the Sergeant Schultz defense: I know nothing! His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, given that the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, publicly proclaimed his desire to get dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine. Moreover, Pence’s national security adviser listened in on the now-infamous July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky that another participant described as “crazy” and “frightening.” Pence himself was given a readout of the call, yet he claims to have seen nothing wrong and is still sticking to the discredited cover story that Trump was pursuing a legitimate investigation of corruption. Pence will be saved from being remembered as the worst vice president in history only because Spiro Agnew had to resign after being charged with tax evasion and bribery.

Pompeo is now officially the worst secretary of state in history — wresting that uncoveted title from his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. As former secretary of state Colin Powell notes, “Our foreign policy is a shambles right now,” and Pompeo bears part of the blame for failing to stand up to Trump. He did not offer his resignation when the president proclaimed himself “in love” with the dictator of North Korea or when he abandoned the United States’ Kurdish allies. Pompeo subordinates the United States’ national interest to his own political interests; he is said to be interested in succeeding Trump.

Pompeo was fully aware of how unlawful Trump was acting — he was also on the July 25 call, though he pretended during interviews that he had no idea what had transpired. There is no evidence he did anything to stop Trump. Instead, he has endorsed the crazy conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election. Pompeo is now leading Trump’s coverup: He has refused to allow State Department employees to testify to Congress, denouncing Congress’s request as “an attempt to intimidate” and “bully” the career professionals. If anyone is bullying Foreign Service officers, it is Trump; witness the president’s firing of a respected ambassador in Ukraine because she wouldn’t help Giuliani frame Biden. Pompeo stood by as this happened.

No wonder State Department employees are so disgusted and demoralized. “The mood is low and getting lower,” Thomas Pickering, a distinguished former ambassador, told the New York Times.

But wait. If you think that’s bad, Barr says “hold my beer.” The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.

By waging war on the dedicated professionals in his own department at the behest of a law-breaking president, Barr is ensuring that he will be remembered as the worst attorney general ever. He has even eclipsed in awfulness his immediate predecessor, acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, a political hack who was previously a hawker of toilets for “well-endowed” men.

Impeaching Pence, Pompeo and Barr would be an unneeded distraction from the necessary impeachment of their boss but, on the merits, all three richly deserve to join Trump in the dock. They have betrayed the country and their oaths of office. They have even failed Trump by not acting to save the worst person ever to occupy the White House from his worst instincts.

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Yup. Public service doesn’t get any worse than this, although “Big Mac” could easily be included (and Stephen Miller, but he’d be part of the “Trump package.”) Unlikely to happen, of course. But, it should!

PWS

10-09-19

DIALOGUE? – Shot In The Head In Guatemala, He Sought Legal Refuge In the U.S. – What He Found At DHS Was Something Quite Different — “Some days, Rolando would bleed out of his eyes, ears and nose. Other days, he’d lie on the floor, dizzy or barely conscious.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/08/us-immigration-ice-asylum-seeker-detention-rolando?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sam Levin reports for The Guardian:

This asylum seeker was shot in the head. Ice jailed him and gave him ibuprofen

US immigration

Rolando, an indigenous man who survived a shooting and torture in Guatemala, was suffering blinding headaches when he arrived in the US

Sam Levin in San Diego

@SamTLevin

Email

Wed 9 Oct 2019 01.00 EDT

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Some days, Rolando would bleed out of his eyes, ears and nose. Other days, he’d lie on the floor, dizzy or barely conscious.

But every time the jailed Guatemalan asylum seeker sought help from a doctor, staff at his US immigration detention center offered the same treatment: ibuprofen.

The 27-year-old migrant survived a gunshot wound to the head in Guatemala and was suffering from excruciating headaches and possible brain hemorrhaging when he presented himself at the San Ysidro port of entry earlier this year. US authorities responded by isolating him in solitary confinement and jailing him for months at the Otay Mesa detention center in San Diego, giving him sporadic access to medical staff and medicine, his records show.

“I feared I was going to die,” Rolando, who asked not to use his full name due to threats against his life, told the Guardian. “I thought in this country, there is really good medical care … but I wasn’t getting any treatment.”

Rolando made it out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention alive, but his battle isn’t over. He’s still fighting to get asylum, based on the physical torture and persecution he fled as an indigenous Guatemalan. Every step of his journey has collided with the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks and expanding restrictions on migrants and refugees.

Now, the White House is moving to block Central Americans like Rolando from presenting their cases at the border, a move that experts agree will have devastating and fatal consequences.

“I came to the United States because I’d like to at least make it to 30,” Rolando said.

An orphan who escaped death: ‘I don’t have anyone left’

When he met the Guardian on a recent morning, Rolando carried the charger for his ankle monitor, which asylum seekers awaiting hearings are frequently forced to wear. He’s often worried about it running out of battery.

Seated inside the small legal services office of Al Otro Lado, above a pizza shop in San Diego, Rolando looked down and wove a bracelet with his hands as he talked, a practice he developed inside detention to pass the time and distract from his health problems. His native Mayan language is Qʼeqchiʼ, but he talks to his attorney in Spanish, which he was forced to speak in jail.

Rolando was born into chaos in 1992 in the Petén region of northern Guatemala. His father had been a member of the armed forces but resigned and became a supporter of the pro-indigenous movement. He was killed as a result, just after Rolando’s birth, and his mother died soon after “from the trauma”, he said.

He was an orphan at age one: “My brothers and sisters couldn’t take care of me … and they gave me to neighbors.”

Rolando became homeless and later a frequent target of violence by the people who he believes killed his father. Police tortured him when he sought help. According to his asylum application, that included placing nails in his hand and foot and burning his arms with hot knives.

In 2016, while at a soccer game, assailants shot Rolando in the head and left him with a written death threat that referenced his father’s murder. He survived, was forced into hiding and was unable to get medical attention. He said he had to remove the bullet himself. Police later refused to help and assaulted him, according to his file.

“I don’t have anyone left,” he said, adding that fleeing to the US was his only option: “Giving me an opportunity to be here is giving me an opportunity to stay alive.”

He escaped to Mexico and joined a caravan last year, eventually making it to Tijuana. Then the waiting began.

As part of a vast crackdown on migration, border patrol under Trump has instituted a policy known as “metering”, which limits the number of people who can apply for asylum each day. In Tijuana, this has led to a waitlist that has more than 10,000 people, with a few dozen allowed to cross daily, creating a wait time of roughly six to nine months, lawyers estimate.

Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy has also resulted in nearly 50,000 migrants from Central America being returned to Mexico while their cases move forward. That has translated to overcrowded shelters, tent encampments and a struggle to access medical and legal services.

It also leaves migrants like Rolando vulnerable to the same violence they were escaping in their home countries. Rolando said he was beaten in Tijuana, suffering injuries to both his arms and forcing him to wear a cast.

In February, he was finally able to enter the US through the San Ysidro port of entry. In his initial processing, authorities took his injured arms – and placed him in handcuffs.

In detention, in agony and without treatment

The latest major Trump resignations and firings

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Once he was in custody, Rolando’s health problems worsened. More than 150 pages of Ice’s medical records paint a picture of repeated health crises and his persistent struggle to get help.

Rolando regularly was bleeding from his eyes, ears and nose – the cause of which was unclear to doctors but might have been related to his gunshot wound. Rolando said he was bleeding soon after he was taken into custody and that as a result, he was placed in isolation: “They said, ‘We don’t know what’s wrong with you.’”

It’s unclear how many days he spent in solitary, but he said he had difficulty getting any treatment while isolated, and that he would spend all day in a small cell with no window to the outside. Staff would pass him meals through a small slat.

“I didn’t even know what was night and what was day,” he recalled. “I was sick already, but I was starting to get worse … Nobody was coming to see me.”

Once in the general population of Otay Mesa, Rolando continued to suffer periodic bleeding, and at times his head pain was so severe, he would lose consciousness, or he would lie on the ground so that he would not injure himself if he passed out.

Rolando would frequently sign up for “sick call” to visit medical staff, but he said the appointments did little to help. Records show that on one visit, a nurse told him to drink more water and “wash hair/head thoroughly”.

Eating the facility’s meats also started to make him sick, but he often struggled to get alternative food options, even though the medical staff said he needed to change his diet. Sometimes he made bracelets and sold them to other detainees so he could buy instant soup, he recalled.

The records show that the main form of treatment Rolando received was prescriptions for ibuprofen – in increasingly high doses as his pain worsened. Sometimes, he said, he ran out of ibuprofen and had difficulty getting a refill. He also received an ointment for his eyes.

Anne Rios, his attorney with Al Otro Lado, said she was stunned when she was finally able to get a copy of his medical records: “It seems unbelievable, almost too absurd to be true, but it’s not only documented, it’s the government’s own records.”

By August, Ice had twice refused to release him while his asylum case was pending even after dozens of medical visits, including multiple to the emergency room. One ER doctor had written that he was a “serious patient that presents with significant complexity of risk”, adding that he might have some kind of brain hemorrhage.

He had no criminal history or immigration violations.

Rolando grew increasingly desperate. At one point, he considered giving up and deporting himself back to Guatemala – a certain death, Rios said, recalling him telling her on one visit: “‘I’m gonna die here or in Guatemala, so I would at least rather go to my home country … I just can’t take it any more.’”

After a third request by Rolando’s attorneys, a judge ruled that he could be released – but only if he paid a $5,000 bond.

“For many, $5,000 might as well be $5m,” said Rios. “They come here with nothing, no resources, no family members, absolutely no way to pay for that.”

Rolando was only able to get out when Al Otro Lado found a way to cover the amount through its bond fund.

Ice declined to comment on Rolando’s case, citing his privacy. A spokeswoman said “everyone in our custody receives timely access to medical services and treatment”, including a full health assessment with two weeks of custody, daily sick calls and 24-hour emergency care. A dietician ensures detainees’ “unique health (included allergies), dietary, and religious needs are met” for each meal, and all food “must be visually appealing, palatable, and taste good”.

A final plea: ‘I followed the rules and I am telling the truth’

Rolando struggles to understand why the US has treated him like a criminal: “I followed all the rules and I asked for admission.”

Trump, however, is working to make the asylum process much more restrictive than what Rolando has experienced. His administration passed a policy in July banning migrants from seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border if they came from another country, saying they must first seek protections elsewhere.

Rolando was released in September and is awaiting an asylum hearing scheduled for next week. He said he wanted to speak out because he was particularly upset about the treatment he saw other detainees face at Otay Mesa. Some were disabled and unable to walk to the cafeteria to get food, he said, noting that he got reprimanded when he tried to bring them food.

“They abuse their power with us,” he said.

Otay Mesa has repeatedly faced accusations of severe medical neglect. Last week, a detainee died in custody.

Rolando said he wanted the government to understand that people seek asylum because they have no other option – and that officials should believe him: “When you’re asking for asylum, you’re swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I am telling the truth.”

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

Following the rules and telling the truth seems to make little difference these days in an America where the Administration pointedly does neither, and the institutions that are supposed to enforce the rule of law and insure at least a modicum of accountability from the Executive Branch have largely gone “belly cup.”

A prerequisite to any true “dialogue” would be an end to MPP (“Let ‘Em Die in Mexico”), cancellation of the bogus “first country” regs and the illegal “Safe Third Country Agreements” with the failed states of the Northern Triangle, and an end to inhumane and intentionally coercive detention. At that point, there could be at least the beginnings a “true dialogue” on how to work within existing law to solve Southern Border issues, rather than intentionally aggravating them! And that could eventually lead to the necessary legislative changes to make our immigration laws more sensible, generous, due-process-oriented, and in the real national interest (rather than the exclusive interests of a White Nationalist minority).

PWS

10-09-19

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Twofer” — Trump Combines Assault On Healthcare With Attack On Legal Immigrants!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-found-a-way-to-simultaneously-sabotage-our-health-care-and-immigration-systems/2019/10/07/6fb734dc-e943-11e9-9306-47cb0324fd44_story.html

President Trump sabotaged the health-care system. Separately, he’s sabotaged the immigration system.

And now, in a presidential twofer, on Friday night the administration found a way to sabotage both simultaneously.

Unable to repeal Obamacare, the Trump administration has worked to make it less functional and more expensive. It has done this by zeroing out the individual mandate, expanding the availability of cheap but worthless junk insurance and curtailing the annual open-enrollment period, among other actions.

The cumulative effect of these policies has been to reduce the share of people who have (real, non-junk) insurance; those still motivated to seek comprehensive insurance tend to be sicker and more expensive to cover. The predictable result? Premiums hundreds of dollars higher than they would otherwise be, according to estimates from health-care analyst Charles Gaba.

And, unsurprisingly, those who don’t qualify for the subsidies that shield enrollees from these price hikes are dropping out of the individual market altogether because they can’t afford the insurance.

But no worries. For years, administration officials and fellow Republican lawmakers have argued this is merely an expansion of a fundamental American freedom — the freedom to go uninsured.

Simultaneously, of course, the administration has also been undermining our legal immigration system. Emphasis on “legal” here: For all of Trump’s vitriol for undocumented immigrants, he’s also been targeting people who are trying to come to this country lawfully.

Among the creative, non-legislative ways the administration has sabotaged the legal immigration system: huge and arbitrary delays in visa and citizenship application processing; cruel and inhumane treatment of families seeking asylum; reductions in the refugee admissions cap to its lowest level on record; and, of course, the travel ban placed on several majority-Muslim countries.

And then there are all of the policies intended to penalize legal immigrants whom the Trump administration claims are a financial burden.

To be clear: Immigrants are in fact a net fiscal boon to the United States, according to a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and their children are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population.” But Trump and his aides are convinced that immigrants are, and will forever be, a drain on society.

Or, as Trump’s acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli put it: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”

Cuccinelli was talking about a new administration rule — currently being challenged in eight lawsuits — that makes it harder for immigrants to receive green cards if they have ever used or might someday need safety-net benefits such as food stamps or Medicaid. But it’s actually one of several policies the administration has devised to drive down immigration numbers under the guise of fiscal prudence.

The latest such development was rolled out Friday night. This new policy, issued via presidential proclamation, bars issuance of visas to immigrants unless they can prove they will obtain health insurance within 30 days of their arrival in the United States, or otherwise demonstrate that they can pay medical expenses out of pocket.

That’s right, the Trump administration has brought back the individual mandate, but for immigrants only — the GOP’s supposed commitment to “freedom” notwithstanding. The Migration Policy Institute estimates the change could end up excluding about two-thirds of future immigrants.

The new policy is vague about how would-be immigrants would even be able to prove they meet the new requirement. Maybe they’d need to somehow buy insurance before they leave their home countries, while still waiting in that interminable visa queue; maybe not.

What’s more, if they get subsidized insurance through the individual exchanges, Trump’s proclamation says it won’t count. This is yet another way the administration is sabotaging Obamacare, which explicitly allows immigrants to purchase subsidized exchange insurance. It also places low- and moderate-income immigrants in an impossible position, since they’re now stuck buying insurance at the sticker prices that the Trump administration has helped jack up through its earlier rounds of Obamacare sabotage.

Under the proclamation, immigrants could instead buy junk insurance. But, as the administration also surely knows, these Trumpcare plans cover almost nothing. So forcing immigrants to buy such policies seems unlikely to shield taxpayers (or hospitals) from immigrants’ emergency medical costs — which is allegedly the goal here.

Of course there is also a fundamental tension between arguing that uninsured immigrants impose huge costs on the country but uninsured native-born Americans don’t cost anyone anything. But no one said consistency was this administration’s strong suit — aside from its consistent desire to find new ways to destroy as many institutions as possible.

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

Yup! Catherine nails the GOP’s disingenuous approach to almost everything. But, perhaps there are unifying principles of the GOP: hate, dehumanization, cruelty, selfishness, intolerance, intellectual dishonesty, and short-sightedness.

Of course the requirements of the new “policy” are “vague.” That’s because the intent is not to have immigrants get insurance coverage before they come. The real intent is to keep them from coming at all even though they meet all of the legal requirements. It’s just another aspect of the Trump GOP’s racist, extralegal assault on all migrants, legal and undocumented. The next time you hear one of his GOP or bureaucratic sycophants disingenuously claim that they are “in favor of legal immigration, just not unlawful migration” call out “BS” at the top of your voice!

Catherine’s column “connecting the dots” supports my own observation that the Trump GOP’s attack on migrants is just a “placeholder” for attacks on the majority of Americans who don’t fit the GOP’s toxic White Nationalist agenda.

PWS

10-09-19

BIG MAC SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO PRESENT HIS LITANY OF LIES & TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS INVITATION TO “DIALOGUE” (ABOUT THE ENFORCEMENT PROGRAMS IMPLEMENTED BY DHS WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC “DIALOGUE” WHATSOEVER & AGAINST THE OVERWHELMING ADVICE OF PROFESSIONALS & EXPERTS, EVEN AT DHS) — Then, He Should Have Been Questioned About His Knowingly False Restrictionist Narratives & Human Rights Abuses! – Here’s What He REALLY Stands For, & It’s Got Nothing To Do with “Dialogue!” — “This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,”. . . . People are living in squalor.”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=d5727889-43e3-4481-bedb-dd0055e280af&v=sdk

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times from the Southern Border:

. . . .

In addition to the asylum seekers returned to Mexico to await their hearings, more than 26,000 are on waiting lists to enter U.S. border crossings and claim asylum, according to Human Rights Watch. Many on the lists are from Central America, but in recent weeks, large groups have been arriving from rural areas of Mexico’s interior, fleeing drug cartel violence.

The camp at the foot of the bridge in Matamoros has grown to hold more than a thousand migrants, most camped in scores of tents. Many have children and babies, and meals and water are sporadic, provided by volunteers.

“This Remain in Mexico program is a complete disaster,” Castro said after touring the camp next to the Rio Grande, where he saw migrants bathing near half a dozen crosses honoring those who drowned this summer while trying to make the dangerous crossing. “People should not be living like this.”

As Castro left the river, migrants standing in the reeds called to him in Spanish:

“Our children are sick!” said one man.

“We’ve been here for months!” said another.

“Our next court date isn’t until January!” said a woman.

“I’m sorry,” Castro replied in Spanish. “I know you’re suffering.”

Castro, who served as Housing and Urban Development secretary and San Antonio mayor, isn’t the first candidate to join asylum seekers at the border. In late June, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas met with migrants returned to Mexico at a shelter in Juarez. Days later, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker accompanied five pregnant women in the Remain in Mexico program across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.

Castro called on the Trump administration to end the Remain in Mexico policy, noting that he had met several vulnerable migrants who should not have been returned, including a woman who was seven months pregnant.

“This president has helped create a humanitarian crisis,” he said. “People are living in squalor.”

By 5 p.m., all 12 asylum seekers who had crossed with Castro had been returned to Mexico.

“I feel so defeated,” said Rey, a 35-year-old Cuban who had joined the group only to find himself back in Matamoros by evening.

Dany was upset when she was returned to the camp at dusk. As migrants gathered, she told them that the U.S. official who had interviewed her by phone had been unsympathetic.

“I told him I was in danger in Matamoros. That didn’t matter to him,” she said. “There’s no asylum for anyone … the system is designed to end with us leaving.

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

Read Molly’s complete report at the link.

LGBTQ, sick, disabled, pregnant, the cruelty of the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico” program touted by Big Mac and his flunkies knows no bounds.

One can only hope that someday, somewhere, in this world or the next, “Big Mac” and his fellow toadies carrying out the Trump/Miller unprecedented program of intentional human right abuses against the most vulnerable individuals (and actions directed against the pro bono lawyers and NGOs courageously trying to help them) will have to answer for their “crimes against humanity.”

How do you have a “dialogue” with someone like “Big Mac” whose insulting, condescending, false, and “in your face” prepared remarks, that he never got to give at Georgetown, in fact invited no such thing.

You can read Big Mac’s prepared compendium of lies that he never got to deliver here:

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2019/10/07/statement-department-homeland-security-following-acting-secretary-s-appearance

Here was my immediate reaction:

He falsely minimizes the powerful push factors, maximizes the pull factors (which his “maliciously incompetent” enforcement has contributed to), blames the legal system (the Constitution and refugee protection statutes that implement international treaties) and Congress (that is, Democrats, who have stood up for human rights), lies about failures to appear (this should be particularly galling to the many members of the Georgetown Community who have taken part in pro bono activities and know that pro bono representation actually solves that problem), ignores all reasonable solutions, and engages in mindless (and expensive) enforcement that maximizes the ability of oppressors while dehumanizing and killing some of the victims and virtually guaranteeing that there never will be a humane outcome. Seems like the “All-American solution” to me.

That being said, I wish folks had heard him out and asked him questions about his misstatements and lies during the Q&A. I actually would have liked to hear his answer when confronted by the studies that show that almost everyone who has a chance to be represented shows up for the hearings and why he is blocking, rather than facilitating, one of the key solutions — pro bono representation? Why it’s OK to negotiate Safe Third Country agreements with countries that essentially are war zones and have no functioning asylum systems? Why he claimed that detention conditions were improving and more detention was necessary when his own Inspector General said just the opposite? Why he took a contemptuous position before Judge Dolly Gee that indefinite detention of families addressed her requirements, when it clearly didn’t? Why he blamed Judges and laws for problems he has either caused or aggravated? There wouldn’t have been enough time, I suppose.

Talking about free speech, it’s not like the Trump Administration engages in any type of dialogue with the public or professional experts before unilaterally changing policies. And, it’s not like they provide any forum for opposing views. Indeed, even U.S. Legislators, Judges, State Officials, and their own Asylum Officers who speak out against the Administration’s biased and wrong-headed views are routinely attacked, threatened, slandered, mocked, and denigrated.

Yesterday, I did a Skype training session for D.C. Affordable Law. There, I actually had a “dialogue” with those attorneys courageously and selflessly trying to help asylum applicants through the unnecessarily complicated and intentionally hostile environment in Immigration Court and at the BIA that Big Mac and his propaganda machine along with scofflaws Sessions, Barr, and McHenry have created. There are many “winnable” asylum cases out there, even after the law has intentionally been misconstrued and manipulated by the Trump Administration in a racist attempt to disqualify all asylum seekers from Central America.

One thing we all agreed upon was that nobody, and I mean nobody, without competent representation and a chance to gather necessary documentation would have any chance of getting asylum under the current hostile environment. That means that when “Big Mac” and others tout “immediate decisions at the border” (sometimes by untrained Border Patrol Agents, no less, rather than professional Asylum Officers) what they REALLY are doing is insuring that few individuals have access to the necessary pro bono counsel and legal resources necessary to actually win an asylum case under today’s conditions. That’s an intentional denial of Constitutional, statutory, and human rights by Big Mac!

Then, Big Mac has the audacity and intellectual dishonesty to use bogus statistics generated by a system he and others have intentionally manipulated so as to reject or not even hear very legitimate asylum claims as “proof” that most of those claims are “without merit.” While I’m afraid it’s too late for those killed, tortured, or suffering because of Big Mac’s wrongdoing, I certainly hope that someday, someone does an assessment of all the improperly rejected, denied, and blocked asylum, withholding, CAT, SIJS, T, and U claims that should have been granted under an honest interpretation of asylum law and a fair adjudication and hearing process.

A real dialogue on solving the Southern Border would start with how we can get the necessary professional adjudicators and universal representation of asylum seekers working to make the system function fairly and efficiently. And that probably would mean at least 20% to 25% “quick grants” of strong cases that would keep them out of the Immigration Court and Courts of Appeals systems without stomping on anyone’s rights. It would also enable asylees to quickly obtain work authorization and start making progress toward eventual citizenship and full integration so that they could maximize their great potential contributions to our society.

For the money we are now wasting on cruel, inhuman, and ultimately ineffective enforcement gimmicks being promoted by “Big Mac,” we could actually get a decent universal representation program for asylum seekers up and running. Under a fair system, rejections would also be fair and as expeditious as due process allows, making for quicker and more certain returns of those who are not qualified and perhaps even sending a more understandable and acceptable “message” as to who actually qualifies under our refugee and asylum systems.

It’s highly unlikely that there will ever be any real dialogue on immigration and human rights as long as Trump and neo-Nazi Stephen Miller are “driving the train” and “Big Mac with Lies” and other like him are serving as their “conductors” on the “Death Express.” Trump and his policies have intentionally “poisoned the well” so that debate and constructive solutions are impossible. As long as we start, as Big Mac does, with a litany of lies and fabrications, and reject all truth and knowledge, there is no starting point for a debate.

PWS

10-08-19

Category: US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”)

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

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

Disappearances bring back a Cold War nightmare

A crusading attorney general promises answers

A discovery brings new hope, and fear

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

“BIG MAC’S” LEGACY IS A PREVIEW OF “COOCH COOCH’S” PLANS FOR FURTHER “WEAPONIZING” DHS AGAINST HUMANITY — Child Abuse, Illegal Actions, Contempt For Court Decrees Likely To Ramp Up Under Spectacularly Unqualified White Nationalist “Statue Of Liberty Denier!”

Customs and Border Protection may be violating the law by holding asylum-seeking children longer than the agency is allowed to, according to lawyers who represent migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

DESIGNED TO FAIL – PORT “COURTS” ARE A MOCKERY OF JUSTICE BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTATION – Congress & Feckless Article III Appellate Courts Are Enabling This Gross Denial Of Due Process & Human Rights!

The good news is that members of the “New Due Process Army” are in it for the long run!

DUE PROCESS FOREVER!

HUMANITY REVILED: THE HUMAN COSTS OF TRUMP’S INTENTIONALLY CRUEL & INHUMAN POLICIES CARRIED OUT BY DHS – Mica Rosenberg @ Reuters & Friends With Three Timely Reports!

COURT REPORT: A Great Day For America Is Another Bad Friday For Trump’s Ugly White Nationalist Agenda!

“BIG MAC WITH LIES” OUT AT DHS — Implementing White Nationalist Agenda & Parroting Anti-Immigrant False Narratives Failed To Win Him Favor With Trump, Miller, & Other Neo-Nazi Extremists Running Administration’s All-Out Attack On Due Process & Human Rights!

“BIG MAC WITH LIES” OUT AT DHS — Implementing White Nationalist Agenda & Parroting Anti-Immigrant False Narratives Failed To Win Him Favor With Trump, Miller, & Other Neo-Nazi Extremists Running Administration’s All-Out Attack On Due Process & Human Rights!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

immigrationcourtside.com

MAX BOOT @ WASHPOST: Trump’s Not the Only Grossly Corrupt Public Official – The “Sleazy Three,” Pence, Pompeo, & Barr, Have Also Betrayed Our Nation & Should Go Down!

DIALOGUE? – Shot In The Head In Guatemala, He Sought Legal Refuge In the U.S. – What He Found At DHS Was Something Quite Different — “Some days, Rolando would bleed out of his eyes, ears and nose. Other days, he’d lie on the floor, dizzy or barely conscious.”

This asylum seeker was shot in the head. Ice jailed him and gave him ibuprofen

An orphan who escaped death: ‘I don’t have anyone left’

In detention, in agony and without treatment

The latest major Trump resignations and firings

A final plea: ‘I followed the rules and I am telling the truth’

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Twofer” — Trump Combines Assault On Healthcare With Attack On Legal Immigrants!

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Customs and Border Protection may be violating the law by holding asylum-seeking children longer than the agency is allowed to, according to lawyers who represent migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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