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

HERE’S WHAT’S BOGUS ABOUT NIELSEN’S LATEST RESTRICTIONIST SCHEME!

Ever the reliable sycophant and incompetent manager, Nielsen rolls out yet another cruel, ill-considered scheme for mistreating asylum seekers instead of doing her job the way it should be done. Like all the rest of these White Nationalist repressive measures, this one’s likely to fail. The only real questions are how and how soon?

HERE’S WHAT’S BOGUS ABOUT NIELSEN’S LATEST RESTRICTIONIST SCHEME!

  • There is no known evidence of any widespread “asylum fraud” at the Southern Border; most arriving asylum applicants either wait at a port of entry to be processed or turn themselves in to the Border Patrol immediately upon entry;
  • As pointed out by Judge Sullivan in Grace v. Whitaker, the law requires that a much lower standard be applied at the “credible fear” stage; naturally, that means that many individuals who pass credible fear will not ultimately be granted asylum;
  • Not being granted asylum by an Immigration Judge does not mean that the asylum application is frivolous or lacks merit; most individuals face actual danger or death upon return, but whether or not they get asylum depends on difficult, somewhat arcane legal determinations about “causation;”
  • Also, as pointed out by Judge Sullivan in Grace, the Immigration Courts under the Trump Administration have been applying unlawful and unduly restrictive standards to asylum seekers from Central America; these illegal actions undoubtedly have artificially suppressed the asylum grant rate;
  • Contrary to Nielsen, the Government’s own numbers as analyzed by TRAC show that 35% of asylum applications are granted by Immigration Judges following merits hearings; the merits asylum grant rates for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are 23%, 20%, & 18%, much higher than Nielsen’s bogus “nine in ten denied;”
  • Unquestionably, Immigration Courts grant rates have been suppressed by illegal interpretations by DOJ and, as widely reported, biased anti-asylum attitudes by some U.S. Immigration Judges;
  • Contrary to Nielsen’s claim, nearly 100% of asylum seekers who are given an opportunity to be represented by counsel appear for their hearings;
  • It’s highly unlikely that there actually are 786,000 “real” asylum cases in Immigration Court; that’s because court procedures require the filing of all possible applications at the earliest point in time even if they might not actually pursued at the merits hearing; in some cases, asylum is a “backup” application rather than the primary application for relief;
  • As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Pereira v. Sessions, many asylum seekers are now eligible for “cancellation of removal” based on time in the U.S. and close relatives and will likely pursue that form of relief instead;
  • The Immigration Court backlog is more the result of shifting priorities, poor enforcement strategies, chronic understaffing, and “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” by successive Administrations than it is because of any actions taken by asylum applicants to delay the process;
  • Sending more Immigration Judges to border locations to hear cases of those waiting in Mexico is likely to artificially increase the court backlog by diverting resources from cases pending in Immigration Courts in interior locations;
  • The Administration has yet to put forth a reasonable plan for reducing the Immigration Court backlog;
  • Given known dangerous conditions in Mexico, vulnerable asylum seekers are unlikely to receive effective protection from the Mexican Government while waiting in Mexico.

 

What if we had a Government actually committed to making the generous asylum system enacted by Congress and described by Judge Sullivan and Judge Tigar work to protect refugees, rather than working to make it fail to punish and “deter” some of the world’s most courageous, determined, and vulnerable individuals who actually could help our country if they were given a fair chance in a fair system?

 

PWS

12-20-18

Related posts:

  1. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  2. NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSER JEFF SESSIONS ALSO TARGETED REFUGEE WOMEN & GIRLS FOR DEATH, RAPE, TORTURE, & OTHER MAYHEM — HIS EVIL PLANS HIT A ROADBLOCK: THE LAW! — Read The Latest Commentary From Hon. Jeffrey S.Chase On Challenges To Sessions’s Effort To Pervert The Law — Matter of A-B- In Light Of Grace v. Whitaker!
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  4. WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? — 9th CIRCUIT JUDGES ASSIST REGIME’S AGENTS IN COMMITTING “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” MERE YARDS FROM THE BORDER! — NDPA Leader Jodi Goodwin, Esquire, Speaks Out: “I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me. I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.”

KAKISTOCRACY IN ACTION: “APPLY @ THE PORT OF ENTRY” IS A SCOFFLAW HOAX — Why Aren’t Nielsen & Other Administration Officials Being Held Personally Liable For Life-Threatening Dereliction Of Duty?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/19/us-mexico-border-migrants-claim-asylum-difficulties?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ana Adlerstein reports for The Guardian:

After the death of seven-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, the US Department of Homeland Security asked parents to “not put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally”. Instead they urged: “Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.”

But what the US authorities failed to acknowledge after the young girl’s death just after she was taken into US custody, was just how difficult it is to ask for asylum at any port of entry into the US along the sprawling border with Mexico.

Those seeking asylum – like Guatemalan migrants Jakelin and her father – face a difficult task in actually making a claim, something that often forces migrants to instead risk their lives in illegal treks across the desert. This is especially true at the more than 40 smaller border crossings, such as the one nearest to where the Maquins crossed.

Advocates say it has become increasingly and deliberately difficult to claim asylum at these remote spots. Migrants are often illegally turned away, despite a constant threat of violence from drug gangs, traffickers, smugglers and even the local police. They say that it is only when local activists try to exert pressure on border officials that asylum claims are logged. When no one is watching, it becomes almost impossible.

Just take Alberto’s example. If Alberto, who does not want his real name used out of a fear of retribution, had known the extent of cartel control in the small Mexican border town before he showed up there one month ago, he says he never would have come.

“I would have stayed in Mexico City and asked for asylum there,” he said. But by the time he was kidnapped, thrown out of a truck with a bag over his head, and told he would be killed if the men with guns ever saw him again, it was too late. Alberto had to seek asylum immediately.

Alberto spent a sleepless week at a northern Mexican shelter, trying to figure out how to present an asylum claim. He heard from a Nicaraguan man that the nearest US port of entry, Lukeville, was not accepting claims and that border agents had thrown out the man by his shirt collar. But Alberto tried anyway. On 28 November, he presented himself to make a claim with accompaniment from the shelter. He too was turned away, after officials told him Lukeville was not a 24-hour port of entry and despite his fears he could be killed for hanging around on the border.

A sign warns against illegal smuggling and immigration near Lukeville, Arizona.
Pinterest
A sign warns against illegal smuggling and immigration near Lukeville, Arizona. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Antelope Wells, the closest port of entry to where Jakelin and her father crossed, receives possibly the least amount of traffic of any port of entry across the US-Mexican border. “There is literally nothing there,” said Nia Rucker of the New Mexico American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Those who monitor the border describe just how hard making a claim there can be. Juan Ortiz, a University of Arizona PhD candidate, took the four-hour drive from Tucson on 17 December to see Antelope Wells for himself. The two border officers on duty that day told him they would discourage people from seeking asylum there at a port with such limited capacity.

Experts and advocates up and down the border share a similar skepticism of small border posts. Though US border officials say asylum seekers are being accepted at all border ports of entry, activists who have tested the system paint a similar picture of US officials unwilling or unable to accept asylum claims – no matter that the administration is asking migrants to present themselves there.

Francisco Lemus of the Aguilas del Desierto was told at Tecate, California, that claims could only be processed in San Ysidro or Calexico. Christina Patiño Houle of the Equal Voices Network said Progreso, Texas, had not been accepting claims, nor had Roma, Texas, last time she checked. Instead they were sending asylum seekers to Hidalgo, Texas, the border town to Reynosa, which has been dubbed “the migrant kidnapping capital” of Mexico.

At other small posts such as Sasabe, Arizona, and Del Rio, Texas, local advocates had not heard of any migrants recently seeking asylum.

Activists with legal not-for-profits simply do not have the resources to consistently monitor these remote outposts.

Mayor Ramón Rodríguez Prieto of Puerto Palomas, Chihuahua, has not yet even tried to pressure officials across the border in Columbus, New Mexico, to accept asylum claims. Three weeks ago three separate families showed up to his small municipal shelter reporting that they had been turned away.

Further south, in Piedras Negras, Catholic priest José Guadalupe Valdés Alvarado, or “Padre Pepe”, feels as if he himself is responsible for keeping the Eagle Pass, Texas, port of entry open. He runs the migrant shelter there and some days only one person is let in, others up to 10.

Border agents have told Valdés Alvarado that whether the port of entry accepts asylum seekers depends on whether he maintains order, that no one storms the wall or tries to cross the river. So the priest works hard, educating migrants on credible fears, pre-screening them before taking their names. The border agents’ word is not a guaranteed assurance, though: as an approaching caravan of migrants began to dominate headlines before the US midterm elections Eagle Pass stopped accepting asylum claims for the better part of a week.

Activists supporting the port of entry between Agua Prieta and Douglas, Arizona, also felt the impact of the caravan. The small, under-the-radar port had shuttled families with young children up to 10 at a time. But the number of asylum seekers received dropped substantially in mid-November. And when they began to bring a group of Central American transgender women to present themselves for asylum, the number of accepted claims lowered to just two per day.

Local attorney Perla Ramos said that all of a sudden, asylum seekers had to wait all night outside to enter the facility. Some women became ill, others got sick in the cold desert air.

Ramos isn’t afraid of Douglas closing its doors entirely. Groups on either side of the border have strong connections between churches, legal clinics and other solidarity organizations. They will try to keep a trickle of claims flowing.

But elsewhere on the border, Alberto has moved on. With outside support, Alberto was safely transported to a larger port of entry with legal teams, clergy, shelter coordinators and others ensuring that asylum claims there were being accepted. He was placed on a list, his number was called, and he is now awaiting an asylum hearing in detention.

He hopes it will work: “I mean, if I don’t get in now, I’m going to have to try again.” He admitted he feels that he has no other options. “If I didn’t die this time, I probably will next time. I don’t want that. It’s just really hard,” he said.

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

Where’s the accountability when the Government is the one breaking the law? Given the advance intelligence, the amount of attention on the border, and the obscene amounts of money wasted by this Administration on “publicity stunts” like “troops to the border,” pursuing frivolous litigation, abusive and useless prosecutions, child separation, unnecessary detention, and aimlessly placing cases of immigrants who aren’t going anywhere on already overloaded court dockets, (not to mention the bogus “Wall” a/k/a “Trump’s Folly”) the processing “problems” could be solved.

What’s it going to take to make this Administration obey the law?

PWS

12-19-18

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  2. SCOFFLAWS OUTED AGAIN: U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP’S ILLEGAL ATTACK ON ASYLUM LAW: ORDERS PROCESSING OF ALL WHO APPLY TO RESUME! — “Whatever the scope of the president’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden!”
  3. SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!
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FORMER BORDER AGENT DECRIES “CULTURE OF DEHUMANIZATION” — “What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy. “

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=260e391c-8096-4f5b-8c8a-51ca0171aa2d

Former USBP Agent Francisco Cantu writes in the LA Times:

Ever since the U.S. Border Patrol admitted that Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl seeking asylum with her father, had died in their custody, government officials have been trying to deflect blame for her death.

What is clear so far, according to news reports, is that Jakelin and her father turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents on Dec. 7 along with 163 other migrants in the New Mexico desert. According to a Department of Homeland Security incident report, they were screened at a remote substation and found to be in good condition. DHS cannot confirm whether Jakelin consumed food or water at the facility, but eight hours later, she became “feverish and vomiting” on a transport bus headed for the Lordsburg Border Patrol station. She was met by Border Patrol emergency medical technicians who twice revived her, recorded her temperature at 105.9 degrees and called for a helicopter to El Paso’s Providence Children’s Hospital, where she died about 27 hours later.

The U.S. government claims Jakelin had journeyed for days through the desert without food and water and was beyond help before she was taken into custody. However, her father says he saw to it that she was eating and drinking. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics says her death was without doubt preventable. But Department of Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen blames the victim in this “heartwrenching” story: “This family,” she said on Friday, “chose to cross illegally.”

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman insisted to the Washington Post that “Border Patrol agents took every possible step to save the child’s life under the most trying of circumstances.” That may well be technically true. But even if individual Lordsburg agents rushed to save Jakelin’s life, it won’t erase another truth: The institutional culture of the Border Patrol regularly dismisses even the most basic needs of detained migrants.

In early 2009, when I arrived at my first Border Patrol duty station in Arizona, I was assigned to a training unit and placed under the supervision of senior agents selected to coach newcomers like me. When I read about Jakelin’s death, I couldn’t help but recall the night our training unit first apprehended a group of migrants.

My memories from this night are not precise. I remember the group of migrants was small, maybe eight to 10 people, all of them adult males. We picked them up in the open desert not far from the area’s lone highway, and I can no longer recall how long they had been walking or how many days they might have been without food or water.

What I do remember with certainty is what happened at the processing center. The men had noticed that I spoke fluent Spanish and asked me for water. I went to a nearby storeroom, grabbed a case of bottled water, and was about to walk through the door to the processing room when one of my training agents blocked the way.

What are you doing? she asked me. I told her I was bringing water to the group we brought in. They’ll be fine, she said, come join us in the computer room. But they asked for water, I said, gesturing at the door. It wouldn’t have taken more than a second for me to drop off the water.

Her face and tone changed. Leave it, she ordered, “They’ll live.”

As strange as it may sound, I don’t remember if I obeyed her or what I ended up doing with the water, but I never forgot the message I was given that night: Don’t dare be soft.

Senior agents like her lamented the end of the “old patrol” when migrants weren’t so “coddled” and agents could get away with “tuning up” detainees who got out of line. Callousness toward migrants is evident even in the language agents use to refer to them: “aliens,” “illegals,” “bodies” or “toncs” (a term with disputed origins, which some say means “temporarily out of native country,” though others say it alludes to the sound of a Maglite hitting a migrant’s skull).

As agents-in-training, we were taught to carry ourselves as hardened law enforcers and to treat migrants as lawbreakers. We were told to regard migrant requests with suspicion — if they asked for something or complained, they were likely trying to take advantage of us. We were meant to offer our captives the bare minimum and pass them on like a hot potato — field agents passed migrants to transport agents, who passed them to processing agents, who passed them to bus contractors, who passed them to sector headquarters, where they would be immediately deported or thrust into the immigration detention system.

After more than a year of working as a field agent, I signed up for emergency medical technician training. When I was called to help, agents usually described a migrant’s situation with dismissal and annoyance: This one keeps complaining about blisters, this one claims she needs medication, this one won’t shut up about seeing a doctor. Migrants, the thinking went, always bore responsibility for their own misfortune — an attitude echoed in Nielsen’s insistence last week that Jakelin’s family “chose to cross illegally.”

There will be an investigation into Jakelin’s death, but in broad terms its causes are clear enough: heedlessness, a lack of compassion, poor accountability at the border. Since January 2010, San Diego’s Southern Border Communities Coalition has cataloged at least 81 deaths at the hands of U.S. border agents, and since 2000, more than 6,000 have died as a result of “deterrence” policies that force migrants to cross in remote and dangerous areas, like the one Jakelin and her father passed through.

What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy. It will not be enough to conduct an audit of the Lordsburg Border Patrol station and shuffle its hierarchy, or to increase the ranks of Border Patrol EMTs and give them pediatric training. We must demand, instead, that the entire culture of cruelty that underlies our border enforcement system be remade.

Francisco Cantú was as an agent for the U.S. Border Patrol from 2008-12. He is the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.”

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

I represented the Border Patrol for a number of years at the “Legacy INS” when I was the Deputy General Counsel and Acting General Counsel. Among other things, I taught Search and Seizure Law at the Border Patrol Academy and visited a number of Border Patrol Stations. I rode along on patrol, flew in helicopters, walked the border at night, even went off the tower on a zip line during one basic training session at Ft. Polk.

Overall, I enjoyed working with the agents. I thought they were dedicated and hard-working, doing a largely thankless job for which they received insufficient salary and credit, and overall doing it well. I learned from hearing their stories and questions based on “law in action.”

One of the things that the late INS General Counsel “Iron Mike” Inman and I achieved was starting a “Sector Counsel” program in some of the busier sectors so that the agents could get some “on site” legal advice and assistance dealing with U.S. Attorneys and Federal Courts.

That’s not to say that there were no “bad moments.”  I did notice an overall “lost battalion” mentality, particularly among some of the older supervisors.  Their attitude toward me and my colleagues in the Legal Program probably fluctuated with how much trouble they were in and how much they needed our help to bail them out.

I remember one particularly tense moment visiting a station where some of the officers were under investigation for Civil Rights violations. I accepted their offer of a cup of coffee. When the agent left the room to get it, my friend and then Western Regional Counsel the late Bill Odencrantz whispered: “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you, Schmidt.”

I also recognized that patterns of behavior were probably different when “visitors from headquarters” were there. Undoubtedly, we saw and heard what they wanted us to see and hear when we were riding in the patrol cars, flying in helicopters, or looking through surplus Vietnam era “infrared night scopes” at the folks crossing the border.  And, I do remember hearing the second of the two definitions offered by Cantu for the term “toncs.” I think it actually came up in connection with one of the internal investigations in which I was involved.

As I judge, I tended to view the Forms I-213, “Reports of Deportable Alien,” from CBP with “healthy skepticism,” knowing the pressures and conditions under which they were prepared. I also observed over time that many of them said the same things in the same words, much like the “canned paragraphs” that my colleague the late Judge Lauri Steven Filppu used to rail against during my time at the BIA.

As with ICE, in the future there needs to be better professional leadership and training at CBP, as well as a more focused mission. “Culture change” is critical to an effective, cost-efficient, humane, and professional immigration enforcement strategy.  However, my experience is that such “culture change,” while not impossible, is a “hard nut to crack,” even under the best of circumstances.

It won’t be achieved simply by “messages from on high.” And, it certainly isn’t going to come under a leader who constantly sends racially charged xenophobic messages and encourages false narratives, dehumanization, and White Nationalism.

PWS

12-18-18

 

 

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DHS & SOME OTHERS ANXIOUS TO BLAME FATHER FOR 7-YR.-OLD GIRL’S TRAGIC DEATH AT BORDER — Brianna Rennix & Nathan Robinson Are Having None Of It!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/17/dont-blame-jakelin-caals-death-father-us-policies?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Brianna Rennix & Nathan Robinson write in The Guardian:

There are still unknown facts about the death of Jakelin Caal, the seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died in the custody of US border patrol. Jakelin became seriously ill while being bussed to a detention center located about 90 miles from the New Mexican desert where she and her father were picked up. US officials have blamed Jakelin’s father, insisting that Jakelin had not had food or water for days when she arrived and that Jakelin’s father signed a form asserting she was healthy when she arrived.

Jakelin’s father has insisted that this is false – that his daughter had been eating and drinking, that they hadn’t undertaken the kind of long desert crossing portrayed in the press, and that the form the US cites was in English, a language he does not speak.

We do know that Jakelin did not receive treatment for 90 minutes after she began showing symptoms. In the coming days, more information about Jakelin’s death may emerge that will allow us to determine what US officials knew, whether they reacted quickly or not, and whether the medical care she received was adequate.

But these questions are almost secondary, because US responsibility for the suffering of migrant children is already very clear. When asked about Jakelin, a White House spokesman replied: “Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country? No.” This attempt to shift blame on to desperate parents ignores critical facts.

First, border patrol, aware that the desert is more difficult to monitor, deliberately seeks to make the desert crossing more deadly for migrants. They have been repeatedly caught destroying stashes of water left in the desert by humanitarian groups, and an investigation by No More Deaths concluded that this was “not the deviant behavior of a few rogue border patrol agents, [but] a systemic feature of enforcement practices in the borderlands”.

An ex-border patrol agent has written about how he once gave water to a four-year-old boy after he found a family lost in the desert. A fellow officer arriving on the scene then kicked the jug out of the child’s hands, saying, “There’s no amnesty here.”

Second, it’s impossible to look at migration without its context. Caal was an indigenous Mayan who came from severe poverty in the village of Raxruhá. It’s worth remembering that the United States has been a direct cause of the conditions of indigenous Guatemalans over the last half century. Many Americans have forgotten the 1954 coup in which the US overthrew the country’s reformist government, leading to decades of US-backed authoritarian rule. They have also forgotten this country’s role in providing financial and military support for a genocidal government that massacred Guatemala’s indigenous population by the tens of thousands during that country’s civil war. Contemporary conditions in Guatemala are in significant part our responsibility.

The United States has actually made it more likely that immigrants will choose to brave the desert, by closing down other options. During the overland journey from Central America to Mexico, many people are beaten, robbed, kidnapped and sexually assaulted on the journey, by everyone from cartel members to Mexican immigration police. It is, indeed, a dangerous journey to bring a child on, but there are often few other options even for those who wish to legally seek asylum.

The US has imposed massive carrier fees on airlines who allow people to board without visas, even if they are doing so for the purpose of entering the asylum process. And the Trump administration, for all that it performatively wrings its hands over the welfare of children, has also systematically cancelled the few existing programs that allowed a small number of endangered minors to come to the United States to seek asylum without needing to make the perilous trip through Mexico.

Men crossing with their children, as Jakelin’s father did, face a particularly difficult set of options. There are not dedicated facilities to detain dads together with their kids, and separations of fathers from children happened under both Obama and Trump. Last year, a father hanged himself in his cell after his child was ripped from his arms.

It’s difficult for migrants to obtain reliable information about their options, because the government, for political reasons, publicly denies that it continues to “catch and release” migrants at the border, or that it is continuing to separate families. (In reality, both practices are happening regularly.) Migrants rely on word-of-mouth intelligence, or the questionable say-so of coyotes, to understand what will happen to them when they cross the border. A dad who wanted to avoid any chance of being separated from his child might be advised to cross at a remote location where border patrol was less likely to catch them.

Finally, while Jakelin Caal fell ill on a bus and not in a DHS holding facility, it’s worth mentioning that conditions in DHS custody are truly terrible. A child died earlier this year shortly after leaving the South Texas Family Residential Center, where hundreds of women and children – including pregnant women and people with serious health conditions – are confined in close quarters, more than an hour’s drive from any hospital that can provide specialist care. At border holding cells, adults and children are regularly forced to sleep on hard concrete floors, drink contaminated water, sit in their own filth, and endure physical and psychological abuse from border guards. The very facility where Jakelin was held had previously been cited for contaminated water.

Jakelin Caal’s case shows the disturbing human reality of Central American migration. But far beyond her tragic death, US policies and practices continue to contribute to the pain and misery of tens of thousands of desperate families.

  • Brianna Rennix is an immigration lawyer and an editor at Current Affairs. Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs

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Worth thinking about.

PWS

12-17-18

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JRUBE @WASHPOST: “Horrifying indifference to children’s lives”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/16/horrifying-indifference-childrens-lives/

Rubin writes:

The Post reported this week:

A 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Thursday. . . .

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m. Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in.

More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s statement in response to reports of the child’s death was a moral and legal disgrace:

Traveling north through Mexico illegally in an attempt to reach the United States, is extremely dangerous. Drug cartels, human smugglers and the elements pose deadly risks to anyone who seeks to cross our border illegally. Border Patrol always takes care of individuals in their custody and does everything in their power to keep people safe. Every year the Border Patrol saves hundreds of people who are overcome by the elements between our ports of entry. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts and the best efforts of the medical team treating the child, we were unable to stop this tragedy from occurring.

“Once again, we are begging parents to not put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally. Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.”

For starters, the federal government is responsible for the health and welfare of anyone it detains — whether it is a criminal in a prison, a child in its foster-care system or families detained at the border. Regardless of what the children’s parents did or did not do, the United States has an obligation to the children the moment it detains them. Not to give food and water, or to check the health of those it has in custody, is inexcusable. Blaming the parents as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did (“This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally”) reflects her legal and moral obtuseness. In our care, the child’s welfare became our responsibility.

“This tragedy represents the worst possible outcome when people, including children, are held in inhumane conditions,” the ACLU’s Border Rights Center said in a statement. “Lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP have exacerbated policies that lead to migrant deaths.” The ACLU continued, “In 2017, migrant deaths increased even as the number of border crossings dramatically decreased. When the Trump administration pushes for the militarization of the border, including more border wall construction, they are driving people fleeing violence into the deadliest desert regions.” The statement pointed out that the incident wasn’t reported for a week. “We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” the statement concluded.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a progressive pro-immigration group, also responded. Sharry pointed out that a “tragic and preventable death of an innocent seven-year old girl should not be seen as a mistake made in an otherwise humane system, but rather a deliberately cruel and dehumanizing system that has produced yet another death.” His statement asserted that CBP’s holding facilities are characterized by “freezing temperatures, no beds, lights left on, no showers, not enough toilets or toilet paper, filthy conditions, horrible smell, inedible food and not enough clean water to drink, and [are] run by insulting and abusive agents.” The system the administration has set up is seemingly designed to inflict the maximum amount of suffering in a failed attempt to deter migrants:

[The] strategy has many components: tell those who want asylum to request it at ports of entry while making it nearly impossible to request asylum at ports of entry; prosecute those who present themselves to Border Patrol agents between ports of entry for “illegal entry;” separate families in numbers large (now halted by a federal judge) and small (under the flimsy pretext of protecting children from “criminal family members”); detain as long as possible those who seek asylum; lock up minors who arrive unaccompanied minors and scare away their U.S.-residing parents and relatives who want to sponsor them by threatening to arrest and detain those who come forward; and gut asylum standards by unilaterally changing the bases for deciding cases, pressuring trained Asylum Officers to reduce their high rates of deeming Central Americans as having a credible fear of return, and bullying Immigration Judges to deny cases when finally adjudicated.

Now if a pregnant migrant asserts her right to seek an abortion, this administration will go to any lengths to protect the life of the unborn child; for the already-born minors (and adults) in its custody, however, the administration cannot be bothered to ensure humane and safe conditions.

Under the Republican-majority House and Senate, rigorous oversight of the Department of Homeland Security and legislation to try to ameliorate these conditions were all but impossible. With a Democratic-majority House, this will no longer be the case. The House Judiciary Committee will be headed by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) in the new Congress. He left no doubt as to his intention to get to the bottom of the tragedy and the conditions that allowed this to occur:

On Friday, Nadler and Democrats who will head House Judiciary subcommittees sent a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security requesting the IG “initiate an investigation into this incident, as well as CBP policies or practices that may have contributed to the child’s death [and] CBP’s failure to timely notify Congress of this incident.” The letter told the IG, “It is hard to overstate our frustration with the fact that we learned of this incident through media reports one week after the incident occurred. It is clear that CBP failed to follow the reporting requirements laid out in last year’s omnibus appropriations bill until after the news of this death was already public.”

With adequate border security and staffing, a sufficient number of immigration judges deployed to handle the caseload, reversal of the administration’s deliberately cruel policies, and effective diplomacy with and provision of assistance to the countries from which these people are fleeing for their lives, the current, intolerable situation should improve.

It’s a cruel irony that Trump has portrayed refugees as a threat to Americans. In fact, the reverse is true.

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Rubin is right.  Part of this Administration’s cruel scheme here is to deflect attention from the real threat to our national security and Constitution presented by Trump and his corrupt, scofflaw gang. And, in the long disgraceful tradition of cowards, bullies, and authoritarians, he does so by attacking the most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves, playing on racism and nationalist jingoism.

That’s why the New Due Process Army is such an important force for protecting the human and legal rights of migrants, and by so doing, protecting the rights of all Americans against Executive abuse!

PWS

12-17=18

 

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. AMEN: A PRAYER IN THE TIME OF KAKISTOCRACY!

NATION’S SHAME: ADMINISTRATION’S POLICY OF CRUELTY TOWARD CHILDREN WILL HAUNT US FOR MANY YEARS: “What the Trump administration does is force Americans to fight for things that should be uncontroversial, common-sense humanitarian principles; we now spend so much time reacting to a new set of atrocities that there is no energy left for anything else.”

https://apple.news/A9OIp3x0DQLqC27X2vxP05A

Jay Willis writes in GQ:

This fall, after national outrage over the Trump White House’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy forced it to begrudgingly wind down the practice of separating families at the border, administration officials began looking for a new method of implementing xenophobia as official government policy. They found it, apparently, by recruiting volunteers to serve as temporary guardians of unaccompanied minors—and then, if volunteers’ background checks indicated that they were undocumented, detaining those people and preparing them for deportation.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 170 individuals who offered to open up their homes—again, to children, many of whom were in federal custody because of the aforementioned separation policy, and who were otherwise forced to live in tent camps and converted warehouses until their immigration status could be resolved—have been arrested over the past few months for their displays of kindness. Of that group, 109 had no criminal record whatsoever.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported the death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who, along with her father and a larger group of immigrants, turned herself in to Border Patrol agents in a remote area of New Mexico last week. More than eight hours later, she began having seizures; first responders found that she had a fever of 105.7 degrees and hadn’t had food or water in days. She went into cardiac arrest and died of shock and dehydration shortly thereafter.

The agency’s response, which is laden with all the meaningless corporate bromides typically deployed to convey the appearance of sincerity, is more or less “tough shit”:

I suppose the events of this year should have dispelled the notion that when it comes to immigration, anyone associated with this regime would be inclined to momentarily suspend their prejudices to do a kind and decent thing. Yet somehow, the disgracefulness of DHS’s sting operation is still astonishing. The purpose of releasing kids to “qualified adults” is to make life better for innocent children, victims of a broken system in which they have no voice; literally the only relevant question is Will this person provide a safe place for them to live? But the administration cannot stop itself, this time preying on the basic human instinct to care for children, all in the service of rounding up a few more brown people.

The Chronicle notes that the number of children in custody has increased over the past few months—a trend observers blame on the spike in these background-check arrests. This means that despite the official end of the family-separation policy, more kids are being held in overcrowded jails, because their captors have cut off the power of otherwise willing caretakers to do anything about it. If you are lucky and don’t die in Border Patrol custody, a different set of government policies ensures that you’re still going to languish there for the foreseeable future.

There are bills on Capitol Hill that would bar DHS from doing this sort of thing. In the Senate, nine Democrats have signed on to the Families Not Facilities Act, first introduced in November, while in the House, 39 Democrats and two Republicans—both of whom just lost their re-election bids—are co-sponsors of an analogue. “Right now, unaccompanied children are being held in detention facilities or living in tent cities due in part to potential sponsors’ fear of retribution from ICE,” said California senator Kamala Harris in November. “This is an unacceptable obstacle to getting these children into a safe home, and we must fix it.”

The power of bigotry lies in the persistence of those who implement it—in their willingness to commit to it at all times, no matter the circumstances, no matter how dangerous or unconscionable, so as to never invite uncomfortable questions about why bigotry is acceptable in the first place. Death becomes just a risk that prisoners choose to assume, and volunteer caregivers open themselves up to the possibility of becoming prisoners as well.

What the Trump administration does is force Americans to fight for things that should be uncontroversial, common-sense humanitarian principles; we now spend so much time reacting to a new set of atrocities that there is no energy left for anything else. It is a policymaking war of attrition, and its goal is less to change people’s minds than it is to wear them out.

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Yup. Well said!

There is only one “right side of history” on this one. Sure it’s exhausting and frustrating to spend energy that should be spent on improving the system for everyone instead resisting gross violations of legal, Constitutional, and human rights engineered by a White Nationalist regime. But, that’s what the New Due Process Army, “Our Gang,” and many others on the right side of history are all about!

PWS

12-16-18

Related posts:

  1. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  2. SPRINT TO THE BOTTOM: Trump Administration Trashes Refugees & Human Rights In A Despicable Return To “1939-Style Fascism Lite!” — America’s Rancid Conduct & Negative Leadership Presages Another Worldwide Refugee Tragedy — This Time The Blood Will Be Directly On Our Hands!
  3. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CLYDE W. FORD @ LA TIMES: “Opinion: The immigration crisis and the racism driving it have roots in Hitler’s ‘bible’”
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

TRUMP THROWS TEMPER TANTRUM – THREATENS PARTIAL SHUTDOWN OF USG & ILLEGAL ACTIONS IF CONGRESS WON’T WASTE $5BILLION ON USELESS “WALL STUNT” – WILL ANOTHER OVAL OFFICE MELTDOWN FORESHADOW A “TRUMP SHUTDOWN?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-border-wall-government-shutdown.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

 

Julie Hirshfield Davis and Michael Tackett report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday vowed to block full funding for the government if Democrats refuse to embrace his demand for a border wall, saying he was “proud to shut down the government for border security” in an extraordinarily public altercation with Democratic congressional leaders at the White House.

“If we don’t have border security, we’ll shut down the government — this country needs border security,” Mr. Trump declared in the Oval Office, engaging in a testy back-and-forth with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, even as they repeatedly asked him to keep their negotiating disputes private.

“It’s not bad, Nancy; it’s called transparency,” Mr. Trump snapped after one such interjection by Ms. Pelosi, who appeared to trigger the president’s temper when she raised the prospect of a “Trump shutdown” over what she characterized as an ineffective and wasteful wall.

“The American people recognize that we must keep government open, that a shutdown is not worth anything, and that we should not have a Trump shutdown,” Ms. Pelosi said.

. . . .

Mr. Trump had begun the day appearing to soften his stance somewhat on the wall. In a series of morning tweets, he falsely stated that substantial sections of the “Great Wall” on the southwestern border that he has long championed have already been completed, and he suggested that his administration could continue construction whether Democrats fund it or not.

That would be illegal, but it suggested that he was looking for a way to keep the government funded past Dec. 21, even if Democrats balk at wall funding.

. . . .

“People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built,” Mr. Trump wrote in one of the messages. “If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!”

. . . .

It was not clear what Mr. Trump was referring to. American troops he dispatched to the border on the eve of midterm congressional elections as part of what the president called an effort to head off a migrant “invasion” have put up concertina wire along existing fences and barriers, but the administration has yet to spend much of the $1.3 billion Congress approved for border security last year. Under restrictions put in place by Congress, none of that money could be used to construct a new, concrete wall of the sort the president has said is vital.

The president does not have the legal authority to spend money appropriated for one purpose on another task, such as wall-building.

In a joint statement on Monday night, Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi warned that the country could not afford a “Trump Shutdown.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Julie’s and Mike’s report at the above link.

“Duh,” walls as an effective means of national security went out of vogue about the beginning of the fifth century CE. But, of course, you would have to understand something about history to know how useless walls currently are as a defensive mechanism (as opposed to one for keeping subjugated people “in” like the Berlin Wall). Ironically, some of the same folks who cheered the destruction of the Berlin Wall idiotically cheer for “Trump’s Folly.”

While a wall might kill some more migrants and force smugglers to change routes and raise fees accordingly, in terms of border security it’s a classic case of “good money after bad.” Indeed, the Government would do well to stop treating refugees and other would be migrants as “criminals” to instead concentrate on stopping drug smugglers, human traffickers, terrorists, and fraudsters who actually mean to do our country harm, rather than coming in to pick our crops, make our food, build our houses, care for our sick, elderly, and children etc.

Totally contrary to Trump’s false narrative, most of those arriving at our Southern Border by “caravan” these days are not threats to the U.S. At worst, some are desperate individuals who probably face some real dangers in their home countries but don’t fit our rather arcane, restrictive, and unduly legalistic applications of refugee and asylum laws. The ones who belong should be screened, let in, and assimilated. The ones who don’t, after having a fair opportunity to present their claims for refuge, should be returned in a humane and respectful manner.

Yes, there appears to be a very small number of “bad guys” who have “infiltrated” the caravans, probably as much to prey on the vulnerable migrants as to reach the U.S. The current system appears more than adequate to identify these individuals and block their entry or promptly remove them. And, the system could and would work even better if the Administration separated border security functions from asylum adjudication functions. But, that might not provide “red meat” to a political base.

So, perhaps we can look forward to a “Trump Shutdown” over “Trump’s Folly!”

PWS

 

Related posts:

  1. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  2. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  3. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  4. TRUMP’S MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE IS THE REAL “SOUTHERN BORDER CRISIS” — AND, A GENUINE HUMAN TRAGEDY — The Legal Tools To Address The Crisis In The Northern Triangle Causing A Refugee Flow Exist; This Administration Stubbornly Refuses To Use Them!

“Bottomless Pinocchios” — A Catalog Of The Liar-in-Chief’s Most Repeated Lies — Not Surprisingly, A Number Of Them Involve Immigration!

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/the-false-claims-that-trump-keeps-repeating/2018/12/09/c2859d36-fc0c-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html

Glenn Kessler and Joe Fox report for the Washington Post:

The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we’re calling “Bottomless Pinocchios” – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.

The Trump tax cut was the biggest in history

Trump repeated some version of this claim 123 times

Even before President Trump’s tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of GDP, making it the eighth largest tax cut in 100 years. This continues to be an all-purpose applause line in the president’s rallies. Read more

No, President Trump’s tax cut isn’t the ‘largest ever’

Overstating the size of U.S. trade deficits

Trump repeated some version of this claim 117 times

President Trump frequently overstates the size of trade deficits. But he tips into Four-Pinocchio territory with his repeated use of the word “lost” to describe a trade deficit. (Alternatively, he sometimes says China “made” or “took out” $500 billion.) Countries do not “lose” money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as currencies, economic growth, and savings and investment rates. Read more

Fact-checking Trump’s tough trade talk

The U.S. economy has never been stronger

Trump repeated some version of this claim 99 times

In June 2018, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant. Read more

Is this the ‘best economy ever’?

Inflating our NATO spending

Trump repeated some version of this claim 87 times

During the presidential election, Trump consistently inflated the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Once he became president, his inaccuracy has persisted, but with a twist. He often claims that “billions and billions” of dollars have come into NATO because of his complaints. All that is happening is that members have increased defense spending as a share of their economies — a process that was started before Trump even announced his candidacy. Read more

President Trump’s ongoing misunderstanding of NATO funding

The U.S. has started building the wall

Trump repeated some version of this claim 86 times

President Trump has sought $25 billion to fund his long-promised wall along the southern border. But Congress has not given it to him. There was nearly $1.6 billion included in the appropriations bill he signed early in 2018 for border protection, but the legislative language was specific: None of the funds could be used for Trump’s border wall prototypes. Instead the money was restricted to fencing, and it was generally used for replacement fencing. He also frequently overstates the amount of money he has obtained for the nonexistent wall. Read more

Has construction of Trump’s border wall started?

The U.S. has the loosest immigration laws in the world — thanks to Democrats

Trump repeated some version of this claim 52 times

Trump repeatedly claims that the United States has the loosest immigration laws, but that’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive laws, placing it 25th among developing nations in welcoming immigrants, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The president frequently blames Democrats for the current legal system but that’s wrong, too — much of current immigration policy was decided either under a Republican president or through court cases. Read more

Is there a law that requires families to be separated at the border?

Democrats colluded with Russia during the campaign

Trump repeated some version of this claim 42 times

Throughout the special counsel’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Trump has sought to deflect attention by asserting that the Democrats colluded with Russia. But he has little evidence to make his case, which largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties at the same time was working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court. In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies found that Russian entities hacked Democratic leaders’ email during the campaign. Read more

Did Hillary Clinton collude with the Russians to get ‘dirt’ on Trump to feed it to the FBI?

The border wall will stop drug trafficking

Trump repeated some version of this claim 40 times

In demanding a wall on the southern border, Trump has asserted that it would stop the flow of drugs. But the Drug Enforcement Administration says that most illicit drugs enter the United States through legal ports of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor-trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China. Read more

Will a border wall stop drugs from ‘pouring in?’

U.S. Steel is building many new plants

Trump repeated some version of this claim 37 times

This is one of Trump’s strangest claims. Since he imposed tariffs on steel, the president has repeatedly claimed that U.S. Steel was building new steel plants. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois — one in March and the other in October, for a total of 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs. Read more

The U.S. has spent $6 trillion (or more) on Middle East wars

Trump repeated some version of this claim 36 times

Trump started making a version of this claim shortly after taking office, first claiming $6 trillion but then quickly elevating it to $7 trillion. Trump acts as if the money has been spent, but he is referring to a study that included estimates of future obligations through 2056 for veterans’ care. The study combines data for both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq (2003) and the war in Afghanistan (2001), which is in Central/South Asia, not the Middle East. The cost of the combined wars will probably surpass $7 trillion by 2056, when interest on the debt is considered, almost four decades from now. Read more

Has the U.S. spent $7 trillion in the Middle East?

Thousands of MS-13 members have been removed from the country

Trump repeated some version of this claim 33 times

Within six months of becoming president, the president began claiming that his administration had deported thousands of members of the violent MS-13 gang. There had been a crackdown, but the count is in the hundreds. Then, he expanded the claim to say thousands had been deported or imprisoned. But there is nothing that supports these claims. For most of the country, MS-13 is not a threat; the estimated 10,000 members are concentrated in a few Hispanic communities, primarily around Long Island, Los Angeles and the Washington area. Read more

McCain’s vote was the only thing that blocked repeal of the Affordable Care Act

Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) dramatically refused to advance in the Senate a limited repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has repeatedly used that vote as his all-purpose excuse for the failure to eliminate the health-care law. This oversimplifies the precarious state of Obamacare repeal at the time. The Senate version of full repeal had failed, with nine “no” votes from Republicans. Even if McCain had supported the “skinny” repeal, lawmakers still would have had to negotiate a compromise agreement and passage was not assured. Read more

Robert S. Mueller III is biased because of conflicts of interest

Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times

Trump has often misleadingly claimed the “witch hunt” is tainted because of conflicts of interest, such as an unverified (and denied) dispute over golf fees when Mueller was a member of a Trump golf club. Eleven out of 16 attorneys on Mueller’s team have contributed to Democrats, including Clinton and Obama; 13 are registered Democrats. Under federal law, Mueller is not allowed to consider the political leanings of his staff when hiring them, but he took action against a former team member when texts expressing anti-Trump sentiments were discovered. Read more

Fact Check: Do the political preferences of Mueller’s team risk its independence?

Inflating gains from a 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia

Trump repeated some version of this claim 23 times

Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to the CIA, Mohammed ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The administration, with double-counting, could only document $270 billion in tentative agreements. Separately, Trump inflated the jobs said to be created from the purported investments. Many are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans. Read more

Fact Check: The Trump administration’s tally of $350 billion-plus in deals with Saudi Arabia

About this story

Source: Washington Post reporting. Reporting by Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly, Salvador Rizzo, Michelle Ye Hee Leeand Nicole Lewis. Meg Kelly also contributed to this story.

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

More bogus border narratives are unfolding as I’m writing this. Disingenuous CBP officials are manipulating data to tell the Senate that the border is out of control.

What is really happening is that kids and other asylum seekers are basically turning themselves in to be processed and get the hearings to which they are entitled.  Why? Because the Trump Administration has purposely slowed down the process at legal Ports of Entry.

Clearly, instead of wasting money on troops and unneeded detention, the Administration should be sending Asylum Officers to the border to complete the screening. Once screened, those with “credible fear” can be matched with lawyers. Represented asylum applicants show up for hearings nearly 100% of the time, thus making prolonged detention unnecessary.

Also, since it now appears that the bulk of the “artificial backlog” in Immigration Court actually was “illegally commenced” though defective notices, those cases could simply be removed from the docket. That would free up U.S. Immmigration Judges to hear asylum cases within a reasonable (6-18 month) time frame.

Where there is a will, there’s a way. Additionally, as I often point out, doing things the right, legal way would likely cost far less than the “publicity stunts” now being conducted by the Administration at the border. But, doing the right thing and making the laws work just isn’t something that Trump and his minions are interested in, as the “Bottomless Pinocchios” related above show!

PWS

12-11-18

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Related posts:

  1. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. INCONVENIENT TRUTH: HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS @ TIME TELLS WHAT TRUMP, MILLER, COTTON, SESSIONS, & THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST GANG DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: Human Migration Is A Powerful Force As Old As Human History; It’s A Plus For Receiving Nations; It Won’t Be Stopped By Walls, Jails, Racist Laws, Or Any Other Restrictionist Nonsense; But, It Can Be Intelligently Controlled, Channeled, Harnessed, & Used For The Benefit Of The U.S. & The Good Of The Migrants! — “But to maximize that future good, governments must act rationally to establish humane policies and adequately fund an immigration system equipped to handle an influx of newcomers.”
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE ON WHY JUDGE BYBEE’S 65-PAGE EVISCERATION OF TRUMP’S LAWLESS ASYLUM ORDER IS SO IMPORTANT: “The next time Trump floats a flagrantly lawless idea, then, it’s worth remembering that nativist bluster cannot transmogrify an illegitimate command into a permissible executive order. Just because the president considers ending citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants, for instance, does not mean he can actually get away with it. Like the INA, the Constitution grants certain rights that the president cannot unilaterally rescind—including birthright citizenship. Bybee felt no compunction to pretend that Trump’s illicit scheme has any legitimacy. Neither should the rest of us.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/bush-judge-rejects-trump-asylum-plan.html

Stern writes:

If there were any lingering doubt that Donald Trump’s latest plan to curb asylum is flatly unlawful, Judge Jay Bybee quashed it on Friday.

In a meticulous 65-page opinion, Bybee—a conservative George W. Bush appointee—explained that the president cannot rewrite a federal statute to deny asylum to immigrants who enter the country without authorization. His decision for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a twofold rebuke to Trump, halting the president’s legal assault on asylum-seekers and undermining his claim that any judge who blocked the order is a Democratic hack. The reality is that anyone who understands the English language should recognize that Trump’s new rule is illegal. Like so many of Trump’s attention-grabbing proposals, this doomed policy should never have been treated as legitimate in the first place.

Friday’s ruling involves a proclamation that Trump signed on Nov. 9, ostensibly to address the “continuing and threatened mass migration of aliens with no basis for admission into the United States through our southern border.” The order alluded darkly to the caravan of asylum-seekers then approaching the border, which Trump tried and failed to exploit as a campaign issue. To remedy this “crisis” and protect “the integrity of our borders,” he directed the federal government to deny asylum to any immigrant who enters the United States unlawfully.

Ten days later, U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar halted the new rule, holding that it likely exceeded the president’s authority. Trump responded by dismissing Tigar, a Barack Obama appointee, as an “Obama judge.” The comment led to a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who told the AP: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

As Trump escalated his feud with Roberts, his Department of Justice appealed Tigar’s ruling to the 9th Circuit. It faced a seemingly propitious panel: Bybee, Judge Edward Leavy, and Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz. Bybee is a very conservative jurist who authored the original “torture memo,” justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation of detainees. Leavy is a staunchly conservative Reagan appointee; only Hurwitz, an Obama appointee, leans to the left. Under Trump’s partisan vision of the judiciary, the DOJ would seem to have a good shot at reviving the asylum rule.

But Bybee didn’t bite. In a crisp and rigorous opinion for the court, he wrote that Tigar was correct to conclude that the policy almost certainly violates the law. The problem, Bybee explained, is that Congress expressly provided asylum-seekers with the right that Trump now seeks to revoke: an ability to apply for asylum regardless of how they came into the country. The Immigration and Nationality Act states that “[a]ny alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival …), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section.” This provision implements the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which the United States has ratified. It directs signatories not to “impose penalties [on refugees] on account of their illegal entry or presence.”

The plain text of the law couldn’t be clearer: Immigrants in the U.S. are eligible for asylum whether they arrived legally (through a “designated port of arrival”) or illegally. If the president wants to change that fact, he’ll have to convince Congress to break its treaty obligations and alter the law.

In light of the proclamation’s fundamental illegality, Bybee, joined by Hurwitz, affirmed Tigar’s nationwide restraining order. Leavy dissented in a curious five-page opinion insisting that the INA grants the executive branch power “to bring safety and fairness to the conditions at the southern border.” His anemic analysis is no match for Bybee’s thorough demolition of the DOJ’s illogical position. It seems quite likely that a lopsided majority of the Supreme Court will eventually agree with Bybee’s majority opinion.

It is satisfying to see a “Bush judge” (in Trumpian parlance) hand the president such a stinging legal defeat. Roberts overstated the case in totally dismissing the role of partisanship in the judiciary; of course some judges are political. But for now, a majority of the federal judiciary remains willing to stand up to the president, at least when he issues blatantly illegal orders. Judges like Roberts and Bybee may let Trump manipulate ambiguous laws to do some very bad things to immigrants. But they are not willing to let the president ignore a clear and constitutional directive from Congress.

The next time Trump floats a flagrantly lawless idea, then, it’s worth remembering that nativist bluster cannot transmogrify an illegitimate command into a permissible executive order. Just because the president considers ending citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants, for instance, does not mean he can actually get away with it. Like the INA, the Constitution grants certain rights that the president cannot unilaterally rescind—including birthright citizenship. Bybee felt no compunction to pretend that Trump’s illicit scheme has any legitimacy. Neither should the rest of us.

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

Stern points out that contrary to Trump’s belief that he can bully, co-opt, and control the judicial system, in the way that other authoritarian fascists have done in the past, even so-called “conservative” judges have lines beyond which they won’t be pushed.   And, lifetime tenure protects them from retaliation by Trump and his corrupt White Nationalist cronies.

Few things can be more important than having judges across the board, regardless of judicial philosophy, stand up to Trump and his lawless abuses of Executive Power as well as “pushing back” on a Department of Justice that has, with a few exceptions, lost its professionalism, moral compass, and courage, along with any semblance of independence.

PWS

12-10-18

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

THE GIBSON REPORT – 12-03-18 – Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group – Learn About Trump’s Self-Created “Bogus Border Crisis!”

THE GIBSON REPORT – 12-03-18 – Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group – Learn About Trump’s Self-Created “Bogus Border Crisis!”

 

TOP UPDATES

Trump designates Dec. 5 as National Day of Mourning for President George H.W. Bush, federal offices to close

It’s unclear what this means for EOIR and USCIS at this time with mixed reports.

The US has made migrants at the border wait months to apply for asylum. Now the dam is breaking.

Vox: Before 2016, and in some cases as recently as six months ago, they would have had no problem and no delay. But for the last several months, the Trump administration has made a practice of limiting the number of asylum seekers allowed to enter the US each day — a policy it calls “metering.”

 

Incoming Mexican president faces immediate border test

Politico: The new Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will press the United States to invest least $20 billion in Central America and, reportedly, faster asylum processing in exchange for allowing migrants to remain in Mexico while they seek refugee status in the U.S.

Caravan women launch hunger strike, putting pressure on U.S. and Mexico

Politico: A group of migrant women in the caravan announced Thursday that it would begin a hunger strike to protest the slow pace at which the women are being allowed to apply for asylum, as officials from the United States and Mexico are set to meet this weekend to negotiate a plan to process their claims.

 

U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Total Dips to Lowest Level in a Decade

Pew: The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on 2016 government data. The decline is due almost entirely to a sharp decrease in the number of Mexicans entering the country without authorization.

 

The key reason why Central Americans don’t want asylum in Mexico

Quartz: Mexican immigration authorities are even less prepared than the US to process them. The Mexican agency charged with helping refugees, COMAR by its Spanish acronym, only has four offices, and none near the border. Earlier this year, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission warned of the “possible collapse” of the country’s refugee protection system as COMAR’s backlog grew to 60% of applications. It also identified “situations of risk of torture and abuse” in immigrant detention centers, which it found had no adequate living conditions or access to medical attention.

 

ICE Threatens ‘Likely Increase’ of Immigration Raids in New Jersey

NBC: The federal agency’s threat came a day after the New Jersey attorney general announced new restrictions on local law enforcement cooperation with ICE.

Successes at One Year and Expanding the Movement for Universal Representation

Vera: The Vera Institute of Justice is excited to announce that we are expanding our Safety and Fairness for Everyone (SAFE) Network –  currently a diverse group of a dozen cities and counties across America dedicated to providing publicly funded universal representation for people facing deportation.

 

Senate panel delays vote on Trump pick to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement

WaPo: A key Senate committee postponed a vote Wednesday on President Trump’s pick to lead the main agency handling immigration enforcement as a coalition of unions raised “serious concern” about Ronald D. Vitiello’s ability to effectively oversee the agency.

 

Immigrant rights groups find Trump is their best fundraiser

CBS: The American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed more than 50 immigrants’ rights lawsuits against the Trump administration, recorded its most successful #GivingTuesday in years. That wasn’t just the case just for the ACLU. This year’s day for charitable giving was the biggest ever, raking in nearly $400 million in donations online in the U.S. alone, according to the 92nd Street Y.

 

Campaign is under way to close Alabama facility routinely identified by advocates and detainees as one of the worst in US

Guardian: Housed in the Gadsden county jail since the late 1990s, the gray slab of concrete that is the Etowah Detention Center, is routinely identified by lawyers, advocates and detainees as one of the worst Ice facilities in the United States. It has one of the longest detention times of all Ice facilities.

 

USCIS FY 2019 budget

In what appears to be a new development, Page 71 of the USCIS FY 2019 budget indicates that USCIS wants to transfer “$207.6 million in Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA) fees to ICE to support immigration investigation and enforcement.”

 

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

Deportation may be worse than jail, a court just ruled. Why that’s a big deal.

WaPo: New York’s highest court boldly ruled Tuesday that deportation may be a more severe consequence than even a few months behind bars. The divided decision created a situation in which two individuals charged with the same low-level offense have vastly different trial rights — a noncitizen is entitled to a jury trial, while a U.S. citizen is not. [Note: This is obviously being appealed.]

Baltimore sues Trump administration over legal immigrants’ access to public benefits

WaPo: The lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration’s expanded definition of “public charges” has had a chilling effect on the city’s immigrant community, which Baltimore officials see as key to its revival. Legal immigrants have stopped using school programs, food subsidies, housing vouchers and health clinics for which they are eligible, the lawsuit says, hurting the city’s mission to welcome immigrants and creating long-term expenses as Baltimore deals with a sicker and less-educated community.

 

US sued for $60 million after infant in detention later died

AP: Juarez’s lawyers said Mariee developed a respiratory illness while she and her mother were detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. They accused U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of releasing the pair while Mariee was still sick.

The National Vetting Center Privacy, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Working Group Releases Its Charter

Approved National Vetting Center Privacy, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Working Group Charter, established pursuant to National Security Presidential Memorandum-9, “Optimizing the Use of Federal Government Information in Support of the National Vetting Enterprise,” dated February 6, 2018. AILA Doc. No. 18112870

CBP Commissioner Issues Statement on Closing of San Ysidro Port Due to Caravan

CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan conducted a call with media and released his opening remarks, “We will continue to monitor the situation closely. And while we seek to maintain lawful trade and travel to the maximum extent, we will be prepared to close San Ysidro again if….”AILA Doc. No. 18112762

 

DHS Issues Statement on San Ysidro Port of Entry Closure

DHS Secretary Nielsen issued a statement after CBP closed the San Ysidro port of entry on 11/25/18, stating “As I have continually stated, DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness and will not hesitate to shut down ports of entry for security and public safety reasons.” AILA Doc. No. 18112734

 

Deaths at Adult Detention Centers

Continually updated list of press releases issued by ICE announcing deaths in adult immigration detention. AILA Doc. No. 16050900

 

CBP Describes Logistics of Operation Secure Line

CBP released information on the role that the American military troops plays with CBP along the United States/Mexico border. AILA Doc. No. 18112831

 

USCIS Provides Q&As from Teleconference on Continued Expansion of NTA Policy Guidance

USCIS provided Q&As from a 11/15/18 teleconference on the continued expansion of the implementation process of the 6/28/18 NTA memorandum. AILA Doc. No. 18110836

 

RESOURCES

 

EVENTS

 

ImmProf

 

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Friday, November 30, 2018

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Monday, November 26, 2018

 

AILA NEWS UPDATE

http://www.aila.org/advo-media/news/clips

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

I draw your attention to Elizabeth’s “Item 2” which is a lengthy, outstanding article by Dara Lind of Vox News on the fake, self-created “Trump Border Crisis.”

The only quibble I have with Dara’s article is the suggestion that there might be a need for more detention space. I say BS! Unquestionably, by working together with the UNHCR, the Mexican Government, and NGOs such as the ACLU, KIND, and the ABA, the DHS could find suitable placements for individuals waiting for credible fear interviews once they had passed a basic screening and background check.

Indeed, one of the key findings of a recent TRAC Report on Immigration Court Asylum Decisions is that 98.6% of asylum seekers appear in court for their decisions, win or lose! http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/539/ This stands in sharp contrast to the false claims by the Administration and its “bureaucratic mouthpieces” that asylum seekers “bolt” once they get into the country.

When given access to competent legal assistance and a chance to understand both the system and their obligations, almost all appear. Clearly, the Administration should be working with the private sector to get asylum seekers represented rather than undertaking cruel and overall futile and wasteful efforts to detain, deter, and punish them.

And how about some truthful narratives, rather than the bogus ones taken right out of the right-wing restrictionist playbook? Again, it’s past time for some Congressional oversight and accountability for the many falsehoods about immigration purveyed not only by the Trump politicos (like Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, et al.) but also by career officials who should know better. Indeed, in many cases, such as TPS and the Travel Ban, the Administration’s bogus narratives directly and demonstrably contradict the Government’s own information and recommendations by career officials with expertise in the areas. This shameful abuse of our civil service system and its expertise by biased, prejudiced, and unqualified politicos must stop.

And, as always, thanks Elizabeth for all you do for the New Due Process Army!

PWS

12-03-18

 

Related posts:

  1. THE GIBSON REPORT — 04-09-19 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Project — Why Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan Should End Up In Jail If He Follows Trump’s Unlawful & Unconstitutional Plans!
  2. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  3. THE GIBSON REPORT — 05-13-19 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group
  4. BIA SEEKS TO REPEAL CAT BY MISINTERPRETATION; MUSALO’S FACT FINDING MISSION TO EL SALVADOR SHOWS MALICIOUS ABSURDITY OF REGIME’S BOGUS “SAFE THIRD COUNTRY” ASSAULT ON HUMAN RIGHTS; 9th & 11th CIRCUITS CONTINUE TO TANK ON THE RULE OF LAW; & OTHER LEGAL NEWS ABOUT THE WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME & THE RESISTANCE — The Gibson Report — 12-10-19 — Compiled By Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION “POLICIES” ARE BASED ON RACISM, CRUELTY, LIES, & KNOWINGLY FALSE NARRATIVES — THE GOP HAS SOMETIMES ENCOURAGED, & OTHER TIMES ENABLED, THESE OUTRAGES AGAINST HUMANITY & THE RULE OF LAW — Now Some Accountability For These Despicable Actions Are On the Horizon!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/11/28/the-true-depths-of-trumps-cruelty-are-about-to-be-exposed/

Greg Sargent writes for the WashPost:

The House GOP’s near-total abdication of any oversight role has done more than just shield President Trump on matters involving his finances and Russian collusion. It has also resulted in almost no serious scrutiny of the true depths of cruelty, inhumanity and bad-faith rationalization driving important aspects of Trump’s policyagenda — in particular, on his signature issue of immigration.

That’s about to change.

In an interview with me, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee vowed that when Democrats take over in January, they will undertake thorough and wide-ranging scrutiny of the justifications behind — and executions of — the top items in Trump’s immigration agenda, from the family separations, to the thinly veiled Muslim ban, to the handling of the current turmoil involving migrants at the border.

“We will visit the border,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is expected to chair the committee, which has jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security, told me. “We will hold hearings in committee on any and all aspects of DHS. … We will not back off of this issue.”

This oversight — which could result in calling for testimony from Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — will include scrutiny of the administration’s justifications for its policies. Importantly, Thompson tells me Democrats will seek to grill officials on what went into Trump’s public statements on various aspects of the issue, many of which are falsehoods.

On asylum seekers, for instance, Trump’s public rationale for his various efforts to restrict their ability to apply (which is their legal right), is based on lies about the criminal threat they supposedly pose and absurd exaggerations about the rates at which they don’t show up for hearings.

Migrant caravan crisis escalates with tear gas at border fence

U.S. authorities fired tear gas at members of a Central American migrant caravan who had rushed the fencing along the U.S. border with Mexico on Nov. 25. (Video: Drea Cornejo , Blair Guild/Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters/The Washington Post)

To be clear, Trump has used these rationales to justify actual policies with real-world impact, such as the effort to cruelly restrict asylum-applications to only official points of entry. Trump has also threatened a total border shutdown. Hearings could reveal that the justifications are nonsense, and spotlight their true arbitrary and cruel nature (putting aside for now that their real motive is ethno-nationalism).

“All this innuendo we hear about criminals coming in the caravan, we just want to know, how did you validate this?” Thompson told me, adding that DHS officials would be called on in hearings to account for Trump’s claims. “Policy has to be backed up with evidence. So we will do rigorous oversight.”

This will also include a look at the recent tear-gassing of migrants, and the administration’s public statements about it and justifications, Thompson said. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has defended the fact that tear gas appears to have impacted children by claiming they were used as “human shields.”

The use of the military as a prop

Thompson said such scrutiny could dovetail with an examination of Trump’s use of the military at the border as campaign propaganda, though that might involve the House Armed Services Committee. “We have to get full disclosure in a public setting or a classified setting,” Thompson said. “Under no circumstances will we not get information.”

By the way: Even if you take some of Trump’s complaints about asylum seeking seriously — there are serious issues with backlogs that have real consequences — you should want this oversight. If done well, it could shed light on actual problems, such as the role of the administration’s deliberate delays in processing asylum seekers in creating the current border mess, to the real need to reorganize the bureaucracy to relieve backlogs and to pursue regional solutions to the root causes of migration surges.

The overall goal, Thompson said, will be this: “As a nation of immigrants ourselves, we want to make sure that our process of immigration that includes asylum-seekers is constitutional and represents American values.”

Family separations and the travel ban

Thompson told me the committee would also look at the process leading up to the travel ban, which proceeded despite the fact that two internal Homeland Security analyses undercut its national security rationale.

Democrats can demand that DHS officials justify that policy. “What did you use to come up with this travel ban? How did you select these countries?” Thompson said, previewing the inquiry and vowing subpoenas if necessary. “We will ask for any written documentation that went towards putting the ban in place, what individuals were consulted, and what the process consisted of.”

Thompson also said the run-up to the implementation of the family separation policy and its rationale would receive similar scrutiny, as well as at the conditions under which children have been held, such as the reported Texas “tent city.” “Somebody is going to have to come in and tell us, ‘Is this the most efficient way to manage the situation?’” Thompson said. But also: “How did we get here in the first place?”

What can Democrats do?

One big question: What will House Democrats do legislatively against such policies? Thompson told me the goal is to secure cooperation with DHS, but in cases where the agency continues policies that Democrats deem terribly misguided or serious abuses, they can try to legislate against them. That would run headlong into Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate, at which point one could see discussion of targeted defunding of certain policies, though whether that will happen or what that might look like remains to be seen.

“As far as I’m concerned, no option is off the table,” Thompson said. Some more moderate House Democrats who won tougher districts might balk at such a stance, but Thompson said: “Every committee has responsibilities, and we have to carry them out.”

The big story here is that Trump has relied on the outright dismissal of his own administration’s factual determinations to justify many policies, not just on immigration, but also with his drive to weaken efforts to combat global warming despite the big report warning of the dire threats it poses.

The administration will strenuously resist Democratic oversight, and I don’t want to overstate what it can accomplish. But House Democrats must at least try to get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever possible. And when it comes to the humanitarian crises Trump has wrought on immigration, this is particularly urgent.

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

Finally, some much-needed, long-overdue accountability, fact-finding, and truth about Trump’s intentionally cruel and usually lawless immigration policies and those sycophants and toadies who implement them and egg him on. No, it won’t necessarily change things overnight. But, having some “pushback” and setting the factual record straight for further action is an important first step. And, I hope that the absolutely avoidable politically created mess in the U.S. Immigration Courts, and their disgraceful abandonment of Due Process as their sole focus, is high on the oversight list!

 

PWS

12-02-18

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

THE HILL: Here’s Nolan’s Somewhat Different Take On The Effect Of Trump’s Executive Order!

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/418364-trumps-proclamation-still-bars-the-entry-of-asylum-seekers-who-cross

 

Family Pictures

Nolan writes:

. . . .

Judge Tigar acknowledged the stipulation and concluded that the case therefore did not present the question of whether section 212(f) authorized Trump to directly limit asylum eligibility by proclamation.

I believe – based on my own experience – the situation is a Catch 22.

The proclamation does not render illegal crossers ineligible for asylum. It bars their entry into the United States.

It’s the not being able to enter that keeps them from getting asylum.

The temporary restraining order prevents Trump from taking any action to continue or to implement the rule, but it leaves his proclamation untouched.

Accordingly, while the injunction is in effect, immigration judges won’t be able to find illegal crossers “ineligible” for asylum for violating the proclamation. But neither will they be able to grant asylum to them. They are barred by the proclamation from entering the United States, and they can’t be asylees if they aren’t allowed into the country.

. . . .

The immigration organizations almost certainly will file another motion for a preliminary injunction that will request a restraining order to prevent the implementation of the proclamation too.

That will be more challenging in view of the Supreme Court’s holding in the Travel Ban case that section 212(f) “exudes deference to the President in every clause. It entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions.”

It would be better if the asylum seekers just would comply with our laws by requesting asylum at one of the 48 ports of entry on the Mexican border instead of crossing illegally.

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

Please click the above link to read Nolan’s complete article in The Hill.

It actually appears that most members of the “Migrant Caravan” are doing just what Nolan suggests: waiting at ports of entry to be screened for asylum. The real problem here is that the Trump Administration is purposely not processing individuals in a reasonable or timely manner. To the extent that there is a “crisis,” it is entirely self-created by the Administration.

Very recent studies show, there is no “immigration crisis” in the U.S. today. https://apple.news/AZ5i84P0YQRiJSItfS1fgtQ

The number of undocumented individuals has leveled off and even declined. Two thirds of them have been there more than a decade and have basically integrated into our society. Fewer than 20% actually arrived within the past five years, and the majority of the “recent arrivals” appear to be non-immigrant “overstays” rather than irregular border crossers. With a better and wiser Administration, current laws can actually accommodate and fairly process those arriving from the Northern Triangle and claiming asylum.

Indeed, the “numbers” suggest, as I have said many times, that a “rational” approach to immigration would be to remove the many cases of those with no serious crimes from the Immigration Court dockets pending the passage of legalization legislation (favored by a majority of voters). That would free up adequate time for those courts to timely hear cases of recently arriving asylum applicants, those with serious criminal convictions, and other more recent arrivals. And, it would cost the taxpayers less than the bone-headed fake immigration crises and bogus responses being orchestrated by the Administration is support of their racist, White Nationalist agenda.

In any event, the “border crisis” is just another self-created scam, fairly typical of Trump and his corrupt and incompetent Administration.

PWS

11-29-18

Related posts:

  1. CONTINUING JUDICIAL EDUCATION FOR ARTICLE III JUDGES: “Kids In Cages” Ought To Be Displayed Outside Every Federal Courthouse & The Supremes So That “Robed Enablers” Can See The Results Of Their Abdication Of Constitutional Duties!
  2. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  3. TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SCOFFLAWS’ LATEST PLOT AGINST ASYLUM SEEKERS SURE TO CAUSE INTERNATIONAL CHAOS & DRAW NEW LEGAL CHALLENGES – No Wonder These Immoral Cowards Have Such Fear Of Truly Independent Judges (Not To Be Confused With EOIR’s “Captive Judges”)
  4. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!

GENDER-BASED PERSECUTION IN THE FORM OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE KILLED 87,000 WOMEN LAST YEAR, & UNDOUBTEDLY MAIMED, DISABLED, TORTURED, & DISFIGURED MANY MORE – Jeff Sessions Misrepresented Facts & Manipulated Law To Deny Protection To Victims & Potential Vctims In Matter of A-B- — Dead Women Can’t “Get In (The Non-Existent) Line,” Gonzo! – It’s A “Pandemic” Aided, Abetted, & Encouraged By Corrupt Officials Like Sessions

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/domestic-violence-most-common-killer-of-women-united-nations_us_5bfbf61ee4b0eb6d931142ac

Alanna Vagianos reports for HuffPost:

The most dangerous place for women is in their own homes, a new report from the United Nations concludes.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released the “Global Study on Homicide: Gender-related Killing of Women and Girls” on Sunday to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The report analyzed the violence perpetrated against women worldwide in 2017, looking at intimate partner violence and family-related killings such as dowry- and honor-related murders.

Last year, 87,000 women were murdered around the world, and more than half (50,000 or 58 percent) were killed by partners or family members. Over a third (30,000) of those intentionally killed last year were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. This means that, globally, six women are killed every hour by someone they know.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described violence against women as a “global pandemic” in a Sunday statement marking the international day of recognition.

“It is a moral affront to all women and girls, a mark of shame on all our societies and a major obstacle to inclusive, equitable and sustainable development,” he said. “At its core, violence against women and girls is the manifestation of a profound lack of respect ― a failure by men to recognize the inherent equality and dignity of women. It is an issue of fundamental human rights.”

The U.N. report also highlighted that women are much more likely to die from domestic violence than men are. According to the study, 82 percent of intimate partner homicide victims are women and 18 percent are men.

“While the vast majority of homicide victims are men, women continue to pay the highest price as a result of gender inequality, discrimination and negative stereotypes. They are also the most likely to be killed by intimate partners and family,” UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov said.

The study suggested that violence against women has increased in the last five years, drawing on data from 2012 in which 48,000 (47 percent) of female homicides were perpetrated by intimate partners or family members.

Geographically, Asia had the most female homicides (20,000) perpetrated by intimate partners or family members in 2017, followed by Africa (19,000), North and South America (8,000), Europe (3,000) and Oceania (300). The U.N. does point out that because the intimate partner and family-related homicide rate is 3.1 per 10,000 female population, Africa is actually the continent where women are at the greatest risk of being murdered by a partner or family member.

Head over to the U.N. study to read more. 

HuffPost’s “Her Stories” newsletter brings you even more reporting from around the world on the important issues affecting women. Sign up for it here.

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Sessions is already America’s most notorious unpunished child abuser! Now, he can add “aiding and abetting domestic violence” and “voluntary manslaughter” to the many human rights and civil rights violations and transgressions of the teachings of Jesus Christ for which he will someday have to answer to his Maker (even if he has the undeserved good fortune to escape “earthly accountability” for his actions).

Meanwhile, advocates should be using the factual information in this report and other expert opinions on the “pandemic” to overcome the fabricated factual and legal basis for Matter of A-B- and the bogus arguments manufactured by restrictionists..

The real “particular social group” staring everyone in the face is “women in X country.” It’s largely immutable and certainly “fundamental to identity,” particularized, and socially distinct. It clearly has a strong nexus to the grotesque forms of harm inflicted on women throughout our world. And, there is an ever-growing body of expert information publicly available to establish that, totally contrary to Sessions’s bad-faith distortion of the record in A-B-, many countries of the world are unwilling, unable, or both unwilling and unable to offer a reasonable level of protection to women facing gender-based persecution in the form of DV. 

Sessions has unwittingly set the wheels of positive change in motion! It’s time to force judges at all levels, legislators, and government officials to recognize the reality of gender-based persecution in today’s world and that it is one of the major forms of persecution clearly covered by the U.N. Convention.

Forget about the bogus “floodgates” argument.  The U.N. Convention came directly out of World War II and was intended to insure that the Holocaust and the “Red Terror” did not happen again.  The definition would clearly have covered most of the pre-War European Jewish population and tens of millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of individuals stuck behind the Iron Curtin. If the numbers are large, then it’s up to the signatory countries to come together, pool resources, and think of constructive ways of addressing the problems that generate refugee flows, not just inventing creative ways of avoiding their legal and moral responsibilities.

Don’t repeat 1939! Due Process Forever! Join the “New Due Process Army” and fight for human rights, human values, and human decency against the selfish forces of darkness and dishonesty who have gained control of too many countries in the Western World (including, sadly, our own)!

PWS

11-27-18

 

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

THE HILL: Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) Points Finger @ Trump For Bogus Border Crisis!

https://apple.news/AJe1kxmmyRdi0l-QX8e70xQ

By Brett Samuels in The Hill:

Dem Senator: Trump administration’s policies ‘caused anxiety at the border’

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) on Monday blamed the Trump administration for causing “anxiety” at the southern border a day after border agents fired tear gas in response to migrants attempting to breach the border.

“There’s a better way to handle this. The United States, the Trump policies has caused anxiety at the border,” Cardin said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“There’s an orderly process that should have been used,” he added. “Should we fix our immigration system? Absolutely. But this administration has made no effort to fix our immigration system.”

President Trump has repeatedly blamed Congress and Democrats, in particular, for failing to pass legislation hardening the country’s immigration laws. The White House and lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement on a host of immigration issues, though Congress has provided some funding for border security.

Cardin said Monday that the Trump administration has enacted policies that have exacerbated the problem at the border with the so-called caravan of Central American migrants, citing the White House’s move to curb immigrants’ ability to claim asylum and the previous policy of separating families who illegally cross the border.

“So they’re making the circumstances worse, and here we look at children being subject to tear-gassing,” Cardin said. “That’s the United States causing that. That’s outrageous.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Sunday shut down the busy San Ysidro port of entry near San Diego as hundreds of migrants approached. Tensions flared further when dozens of migrants broke away from a larger group to try and breach the border.

CBP said in a statement that officers fired tear gas into the crowd after attempted illegal crossings and after some migrants threw rocks at border agents.

Trump on Monday morning called on Mexico to deport the migrants back to their home countries and threatened to permanently close the southern border. The president has for weeks painted the group of migrants as an imminent security threat, prompting fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

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“There’s an orderly process that should have been used.” Yup! But, Trump refuses to use it and make it work! And, it could have been done for less money and fewer resources than the estimated $200 million military boondoggle at the border.

I also hope Sen. Cardin will urge Rep. Cummings (D-MD) and his colleagues in the House to exercise some “oversight” involving the senior Border Patrol officials who publicly proclaimed that most of those arriving at the border, who have been neither interviewed nor screened because of intentional delays by the US Government, are “economic refugees” not “real refugees.”

I tend to doubt that these loud-mouthed law enforcement officials, who have allowed themselves to become political puppets of the Trump White House, have any idea of what makes someone a “real refugee” under the law. Fact is, that in some Immigration Courts away from the Southern Border, the Immigration Judges continue to be fair and knowledgeable (NOT places like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Stewart). Those Immigration Judges take the necessary hours to fairly and impartially hear asylum cases (apparently largely disregarding artificial “quotas”). And, as a result, some properly documented domestic violence, family based, religious based, and political opposition to gang cases continue to be granted to applicants. Shows what happens when rather than prejudging cases like Trump, Sessions, DHS Senior Officials, and, sadly, some Immigration Judges, have done, asylum applicants from the Northern Triangle aren’t hustled through the “assembly line” and are given a fair chance to be represented and to gather the documentation necessary to overcome Sessions’s badly warped misconstruction of country conditions and intentionally misleading dicta in Matter of A-B-.

So, how can these Border Patrol folks tell by “eyeballing” thousands of individuals from the other side of the border whether their claims are “bona fide” or not? That, even after Trump’s and Sessions’s best efforts to “game” the system, the majority of arrivals from Central America still manage to pass “credible fear” examinations from the USCIS Asylum Office suggests that these Border Patrol officials are blowing (dangerous) “hot air” into an already volatile situation. That’s totally irresponsible  Time for some accountability all up and down the line for those carrying out Trump’s misguided immigration policies with no visible resistance to actions that at best strain, and quite possibly violate, our established asylum laws and procedures!

PWS

11-26-18

Related posts:

  1. 18 YEARS AFTER 09-11, THE “BAD GUYS” ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO DESTROY AMERICAN JUSTICE & SPLIT THE COUNTRY! — Here’s The Disturbing Proof Of What Passes For “Justice” In America Today!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM COURTSIDE! — I Take A Look Forward @ 2019’s Big Immigration Stories
  4. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”

BUZZFEED NEWS: Two Years Of Trump’s Bad Immigration Policies Predictably Culminate In Border Gassings!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/trump-blame-crisis-border-asylum

Adolfo Flores, Hamed Aleaziz, & Karla Zabludovsky for BuzzFeed News:

TIJUANA, Mexico — For Trump administration officials, an unprecedented confrontation at the US-Mexico border on Sunday invited an assessment that their policies have only exacerbated the problems of an overwhelmed immigration system whose court backlog has grown larger since Trump’s inauguration 22 months ago.

León Rodriguez, who headed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency from 2014 to 2016, didn’t want to comment on the events on the ground, but said what happened at the border seemed to be “a foreseeable result of the US policy of placing every conceivable obstacle in the way of orderly legal migration and of not having a policy that [recognizes] the desperate circumstances driving migration.”

Mexican officials shared that negative assessment. Héctor Gandini, who will take over as spokesperson for Mexico’s Interior Ministry when Mexico swears in a new president on Saturday, said that the US use of tear gas on migrants attempting to cross illegally into the country was “not correct. We don’t want them to hound migrants.”

“You have to respect migrants’ human rights,” Gandini added.

For Josué Rosales, one of the migrants who took part in the ill-fated march to the border, what began as a journey of hope had turned into one of despair, one that promised weeks of more nights inside the tent he’s now sharing with his girlfriend on the grounds of the Benito Juarez stadium, where the caravan has been camped for days. He said he’s not ready to give up.

“I’m waiting to see if Trump comes to some type of agreement that allows us to cross,” Rosales said. “If he says no we’ll figure out another way to cross.”

The Trump administration faces a situation its best efforts have failed to control.

Administration officials have imposed a number of policies to discourage migrants from seeking to enter the United States. Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions personally rewrote key immigration court decisions to eliminate domestic violence and fear of gang violence as reasons for asylum to be granted. The administration imposed a controversial family separation policy that was intended to discourage parents from crossing the border with their children. Trump dispatched 5,800 US active-duty soldiers to the border in a show of force that many critics also claim was a blatant political ploy ahead of the midterm elections earlier this month.

Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuter

And yet border apprehensions are at the highest level yet of the Trump administration (though still at historically low levels), family detentions are at record levels, and the number of people granted asylum actually rose in the fiscal year that just ended, to the highest level in two decades.

In Tijuana, where the number of would-be asylum seekers is growing by the day, immigration attorneys and advocates describe a bottleneck system that makes asylum seekers wait weeks before they can seek to enter the US for refuge. That’s created an enormous backlog.

And the situation promises only to get worse as more people seeking to reach the US arrive in Baja California, the Mexican state that abuts California. Mexico’s interior ministry said there are 8,247 people now in Mexico who are traveling as part of so-called caravans from Central America. The vast majority of migrants — 7,417 — are in the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana. The other 424 are in a Mexico City shelter, 253 are in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and another 153 are making their way north on their own. It’s unclear how many of them will ask for asylum.

Caring for the migrants is costing about $27,000 daily — money Tijuana’s mayor says the city does not have.

Sunday’s march to the border was intended to be peaceful, but it devolved into a frantic rush toward the border fence after the group, which numbered about 500, according to the Mexican interior ministry, was blocked from reaching the San Ysidro port of entry by a line of Mexican federal police.

Then after being blocked on the street in front of the Chaparral border crossing by metal barriers and another line of federal police with shields, a group walked to a train border crossing a few minutes away.

Several members of the group told BuzzFeed News they wanted to negotiate some type of agreement with the Trump administration that would let them enter the United States. Others said they hoped to be able to cross into the US as a group.

Instead, US border officers met them with tear gas and pepper balls, according to a statement from Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for border law enforcement.

CBP said its officers deployed the tear gas and pepper balls after some members of the group threw objects, including rocks, at agents while others tried to enter the United States illegally, some through a gap in the metal barrier along the railroad tracks.

Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters

But not all immigration officers were willing to defend the US actions. One US asylum officer, who could not talk about policy publicly, said the confrontation likely was the result of the US’s inability or unwillingness to process asylum claims at the border daily. The officer said USCIS recently had told staff to be on standby to be sent to San Diego to help hear asylum claims.

“I’m just glad nothing worse happened,” the officer said. “I think it’s illegal that they closed the border. We cannot decide when we can close the border if there’s no state of emergency. For a couple dozen asylum seekers? That was not an emergency that should justify closing the border. I’m just relieved it wasn’t worse.”

Another government official, who works on the issue but does not make policy, blamed the Trump administration for the tensions at the border.

“Trump has broken the law by not having people at the border processed for months and months and creating a bottleneck there,” the official said. “Tear gassing children because maybe they’ll get into the US? Heaven forbid.”

Mexican authorities late Sunday were contemplating what to do next. In a press release, the interior ministry said Mexican police had retaken control of the area leading to the San Ysidro port of entry and that Mexican troops would not be deployed “despite the magnitude of the situation.”

A government official who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to reporters told BuzzFeed News that 30 migrants had breached the border and were promptly detained by CBP. The National Migration Institute said that it planned to deport as many as 500 others who attempted to cross into the US illegally but were unsuccessful. Since the first caravan entered Mexico on October 19, 11,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have been deported.

The escalation at the border comes at a complicated time — the country’s embattled president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will conclude his mandate in less than a week.

BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month that the Trump administration was attempting to broker a deal that would force people to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were processed. The Washington Post reported that incoming Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s transition team had agreed to this plan, but that report was disputed by the same officials it cited; they pointed out that López Obrador’s government would not take office for several more days. “There is no agreement of any sort between the future government of Mexico and the US government,” said a press release from López Obrador’s transition team.

Immigration promises to be a major challenge for López Obrador, who has pledged to give work permits and offer jobs to Central American migrants in Mexico. Detentions and deportations of migrants have increased steadily since 2014, when the government launched the Southern Border Program, shortly after a large wave of unaccompanied minors surged across the US-Mexico border.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Sunday’s events were much different from the results of a spring caravan that arrived in Tijuana in late April with hundreds of asylum seekers. The group camped out on the grounds of the Chaparral border crossing for days after being turned away by CBP agents because the port of entry was at capacity. Over several days, small groups of asylum seekers were allowed into the US to make their claim, 93% of whom passed what’s known as a credible fear interview, a crucial first step in the asylum application process.

But that caravan was much smaller, at most 1,500 at its start in southern Mexico, than the thousands now waiting in Tijuana, and its members had been vetted by the NGO that led it, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, to weed out those whose asylum claims were likely to be found without merit by the time it reached the border. In the end, only 228 people sought asylum in a process that took just five days. Separately, other members of the caravan asked for asylum before and after those five days, putting the total number of asylum seekers at 401.

This time around, asylum seekers have been told they would likely have to wait weeks in Tijuana before they could ask the US for refuge because of a backlog at the border. The current expected wait to begin the process is now up to six weeks.

Delay at the border for requesting asylum is nothing new, but it’s been getting worse under Trump. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found recently that US immigration authorities’ inability to handle the number of people seeking asylum at ports of entry had forced migrants to cross illegally. But there’s little sign that US officials are planning to take steps to improve the wait times.

And the likelihood is great that those who must wait in Tijuana will find only that their frustration will grow in the coming months.

“It’s difficult because we came as one peaceful caravan and now we’re just waiting here without any results,” Rosales, the march participant, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re sitting in the sun, thirsty, hungry, with no resolution to our situation.”

************************************************
The Trump Administration created this artificial mess. The solution is hardly “rocket science:”
  • More USCIS Asylum Officers;
  • More pro bono private attorneys;
  • More U.S. Immigration Judges and staff;
  • Restoring authority to Immigration Judges to work with both parties before their courts to close and remove hundreds of thousands of “low priority” cases from the courts’ dockets, thus freeing up judicial time to work on asylum cases of more recent arrivals;
  • Restoring precedents that would allow refugees with documented cases of persecution on the basis for domestic violence and family relationships to be expeditiously granted, thus freeing up docket space for other types of cases.

No chance that the Trump Administration will do this voluntarily. But, there might be an opening for House Democrats to condition further immigration enforcement funding on improvements in the foregoing areas and an end to the Trump-created “border backups.”

PWS

11-26-18

 

Related posts:

  1. IMMIGRATION COURTS: “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE ON STEROIDS” — With Court System Reeling & Asylum Applicants Suffering, Administration Plans Another Round Of Massive “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), Reports Hamed Aleaziz @ BuzzFeed News!
  2. BUZZFEED NEWS: “Our Gang” Leader Judge Jeffrey Chase Blasts Nielsen’s Latest Disingenuous Attack On Legal Asylum Seekers — “Outrageous Move”
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”