"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach
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Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.
Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.
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“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.
A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.
“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.
Driven by Ideology
Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.
Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.
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The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.
In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.
Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.
To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.
Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.
In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.
The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.
Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.
“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.
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To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.
During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?
After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.
Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.
During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.
When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.
Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”
Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.
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President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
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The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.
More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.
Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.
“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.
As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.
Empty Spots
Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.
DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.
Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.
“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”
Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.
Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.
Correction:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.
Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)
Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.
Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, 54, is a lawyer living in Maryland and New York. She became the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund just after President Obama was sworn in for his second term. Below, she discusses our current political situation, what gives her hope and more.
On the Justice Department under the Trump administration: “During the Obama administration I was trying to push [Obama] further than whatever the administration was already doing in the civil rights space, because that’s kind of my job. But there’s no question that the Obama administration really worked in many instances as a partner. That is not the case now. Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has made clear that he has no intention of investigating police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. The Justice Department has essentially all but abandoned civil rights as a priority, and so they are no longer working as a partner with us.
That means that our work has increased. We have had to function as a kind of private DOJ, trying to take up the slack. The DOJ and the attorney general should be the chief enforcer of the nation’s civil rights law. But what we see with Attorney General Sessions is no attempt to prioritize civil rights. In fact, to the contrary, working against us, working against civil rights implementation, working against the progress of civil rights that we’ve achieved.”
On what she would say to President Trump if he invited her to the White House: “I cannot imagine what the circumstance of that invitation would be, so it’s an impossible question to answer. I don’t do ceremonial visits. I’m interested in substance. So there would be a lot I would have to know in advance about what was going to happen. The president has been so explicitly hostile to civil rights and racial justice that I would have to have a very clear understanding of what reversals he was prepared to make to his policies. And in the absence of those, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would attend such a meeting.”
On Trump’s comments that black Americans are doing better economically than ever before: ”He does state that, and I think the figures that he uses are convenient in terms of job numbers. But look more closely at wage stagnation and, in fact, wage decreases. Look at the ways in which the failure to invest in infrastructure has left African American communities stranded in terms of transportation. Look at the voter suppression that disempowers African Americans from being able to even control their own destiny in the places where they live. Look at the assault on education and the ways in which the Department of Education is prepared to leave students who are victims of for-profit colleges stranded. Look at the ways which they are seeking to fight and undercut affirmative action. All of these are also part of economic opportunity. And the president conveniently leaves that out of the narrative. Those are things that are necessary to give African Americans a chance.”
On her book about the legacy of lynchings in America, and what the country needs to heal: “What America does not need, in my view, is one national conversation. The book really makes the case for the importance of local communities engaging in truth and reconciliatory processes. The recognition that racial discrimination, and particularly acts of racial pogroms, which essentially is what happened in the period in which lynching was so prevalent in this country, that those local communities need to deal with that, grapple themselves with that history and themselves take on the responsibility for how you stitch back together a community that has been broken for decades, how you confront a painful truth.”
On what gives her hope: “I’m excited to see the continuous mass mobilization that people have engaged in, beginning with the Women’s March and continuing since then, in which people understand the need to come out of their homes to see one another and to say what they believe in. I’ve also really been encouraged by the ways in which the rule of law, for the most part, has held despite President Trump’s excesses. The crisis of this administration’s governance has compelled people to reimagine what it means to be a real citizen in this country. And that gives me optimism, because I think the other way was not sustainable. The benign citizenship performance that most Americans were engaged in was simply not sustainable. Now people understand that they are needed. Their voice is needed, every vote is needed, their engagement is needed.”
Undoubtedly, our Civil Rights Laws were passed to protect African-Americans and similarly situated individuals so that they could enjoy the same advantages and benefits once accorded only to Whites. But, Jeff Sessions believes that civil rights are just about protecting White Power & Privilege against African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and other “uppity” minorities.
Similarly, the Bill of Rights was adopted to protect individual rights against Government overreach. But, Jeff Sessions believes that the right of police to enforce the law using brutality and unnecessary and indiscriminate force is superior to the individual Constitutional rights of people of color.
The solution to restoring reason and the true rule of law (not the perverted “rule of Sessions”): regime change!
Over the past few months, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has faced fierce criticism for his role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. But while the White House continues to deal with the fallout from tearing kids away from their parents at the border, Sessions has been busy orchestrating another, much quieter attack on the country’s immigration system.
Tensions have been simmering for months between the attorney general and the hundreds of judges overseeing immigration courts, but they reached a new high in July. The flashpoint was the case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum, a Guatemalan man who was scheduled to appear in a Philadelphia immigration court, but had repeatedly failed to turn up. The judge, Steven Morley, wanted to determine whether Castro-Tum had received adequate notice, and rescheduled a hearing for late July. But instead of waiting for that appointment, the Justice Department sent a new judge from Virginia to take over the case. Judge Deepali Nadkarni subsequently ordered Castro-Tum deported.
The move sparked immediate outcry: The National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing about 350 immigration judges, filed a formal grievance, and 15 retired immigration judges released a public statement condemning the action. “Such interference with judicial independence is unacceptable,” they wrote.
This was just the latest of many accusations that Sessions and his Justice Department were interfering with judicial independence in immigration courts. Since the beginning of the year, the attorney general has severely limited judges’ ability to manage their cases, increased pressure on judges to close cases quickly, and dramatically reshaped how America determines who it will shelter. While Sessions isn’t the first attorney general to exercise these powers, immigration advocates say he’s using his authority in unprecedented ways and as a result severely limiting due process rights for migrants.
Unlike most courts, immigration courts are housed within the executive branch, meaning immigration judges are actually DOJ employees. Sessions is therefore ultimately in charge of hiring judges, evaluating their performance, and even firing them. He can also refer cases to himself and overrule previous judges’ decisions, setting precedents that effectively reshape immigration law.In a little more than six months, Sessions has issued four consequential decisions on immigration cases he referred to himself, in some instances overturning decades of legal precedent. Attorneys general under the Obama administration used that power only four times over eight years.
“We’re seeing Attorney General Sessions take advantage of the structural flaws of the immigration court system,” says Laura Lynch, the senior policy counsel at AILA, which has joined the judges’ union in asking Congress to make the immigration courts independent of the Justice Department.
Sessions’ changes have been “extremely demoralizing,” says Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “I’ve been in the field for 40 years, and I have never seen morale among immigration judges so low.”
Here are the biggest ways Sessions is attacking the immigration courts:
It’s now much more difficult to apply for asylum
In June, Sessions overturned a decision granting asylum to a Salvadoran woman, known in court documents as A-B-, who had escaped an abusive husband. He used the case as an opportunity to declare that migrants can’t generally be given asylum based on claims of domestic abuse or gang violence—a catastrophic blow to the tens of thousands of Central American migrants fleeing these dangers.
Sessions’ decision, though, doesn’t just affect how judges can rule. US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that helps process asylum cases, interpreted his decision to mean that survivors of domestic and gang violence usually won’t pass their initial “credible fear” interviews after they cross the border—a first step that determines whether asylum seekers are even allowed to make their case before a judge. As Mother Jones’ Noah Lanard has reported, immigration lawyers say they’ve seen “overwhelming” numbers of migrants denied at the credible fear interview stage since Sessions’ decision.
In a statement, a group of former immigration judges described this decision as “an affront to the rule of law,” pointing out that it challenges longstanding protections for survivors of gender-based violence. “Women and children will die as a result of these policies,” Michelle Brané, the director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, toldMother Jones when the decision was first announced.
A group of asylum seekers is now suing Sessions in federal court, arguing that this new policy violates due process rights and contradicts existing immigration law. They say that the policy’s sweeping generalizations ignore the requirement that each case be heard on its own merits.
Making matters even more complicated, in another decision earlier this year, Sessions vacated a 2014 precedent that guaranteed asylum applicants have the right to a full hearing before a judge can decide on their case. “The implications of [the new decision] are tremendous,” says Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of Law and one of the lawyers representing A-B- and the asylum seekers suing Sessions. “It’s basically saying that a judge can decide a case on the papers alone, and not allow an individual the right to present their case in front of that judge.”
Judges have less control over their case loads …
This summer wasn’t the first time Castro-Tum’s case drew national attention. Judge Morley had “administratively closed” the case back in 2016—a common step that judges have used to set aside thousands of cases, oftentimes when immigrants had no criminal background or had been in the US for many years and had family ties. Though the cases weren’t technically closed, they were put on hold and typically never re-opened, usually so judges could focus on higher-priority cases.
Earlier this year, Sessions re-opened Castro-Tum’s case by referring it to himself, and used it to severely restrict when judges could use administrative closure. That sent the case back to Morley, which is how the DOJ ended up replacing the judge and sparking widespread outrage.
The judges union has said that administrative closure is an important and necessary tool for judges to manage their caseloads, and removing it would result in an “enormous increase” in a court backlog that’s already piling up with almost 750,000 cases. Sessions’ decision also noted that cases which had previously been administratively closed, such as Castro-Tum’s, could now be re-opened, potentially adding thousands more cases to the backlog and creating further uncertainty for the defendants.
… and will have to move through them more quickly
In a somewhat related move, in April, Sessions and the Justice Department announced new performance metrics for judges. According to a DOJ memo, judges would now need to complete at least 700 cases a year, as well as close cases within a certain time period, in order to receive a satisfactory performance review. If they fail to receive satisfactory marks, judges could potentially lose their jobs or be relocated. According to the memo, judges currently complete on average 678 cases a year. The new measures will go into effect October 1.
The judges’ union, legal scholars, and other associations have strongly criticized the move, noting that case quotas would place enormous pressure on judges to quickly complete cases and affect their ability to fully hear cases—likely leading to more deportations.
“A tough asylum case takes about three to four hours to complete, but they’re pushing judges to schedule three or four cases a day, which is probably twice as many as most judges could do and do a good job on…It’s basically inviting people to cut corners,” says Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration. “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”
It’s harder for them to reschedule cases
On August 16, Sessions limited the ability for judges to issue continuances, which they did to postpone or reschedule removal cases, often when a defendant was waiting for a visa or another kind of immigration benefit and needed time to resolve their pending applications. Sessions has determined judges can now only issue continuances under a “good cause” standard, such as when an immigrant is likely to succeed in their attempt to stay in the US, either by winning an asylum hearing or receiving a visa.
Several retired immigration judges sent a letter to Sessions the next day, calling his decision on continuances a “blow to judicial independence.” They noted that some judges may receive from 10 to 15 requests for continuances a day—and would now need to spend time writing decisions on them, in addition to hearing their cases. “Immigration Judges should be treated as judges, and should be afforded the independent judgment that their position requires, including the basic power to control and prioritize their own case dockets,” the retired judges wrote. Advocates have also expressed concerns that immigrants could now be deported while waiting for another immigration benefit that would have given them legal status.
And as more judges retire, Sessions gets to staff up
Marks, of the judges union, notes there’s been a “tsunami” of retirements over the past two years. “Members of the association are telling us [that] they are leaving at the earliest possible opportunity or choosing to leave now because of the actions of the current administration,” she says. “They do not feel supported. They do not feel that they are free to make the decisions they need to make.”
Given the retirements, Sessions will have the ability to reshape the courts even further: Since January 2017, the DOJ has sworn in 82new immigration judges, and plans to hire at least 75 more this fall. Sessions has also worked to cut down the time it takes to hire judges.
What’s more, the Justice Department has faced allegations of politicized hiring. In April, House Democrats sent a letter to Sessions expressing concern that the DOJ had blocked several judges’ appointments for ideological reasons. The DOJ said in a statement to CNN that it “does not discriminate potential hires on the basis of political affiliation.”
Finally, while the DOJ has a long history of hiring judges with immigration enforcement backgrounds, the judges union has expressed concern that the DOJ may now be “over-emphasizing litigation experience” in its hiring practices, and “created even more skewed appointment practices that largely have favored individuals with law enforcement experience over individuals with more varied and diverse backgrounds.” As of last year, a little over 40 percent of immigration judges previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security.
Schmidt, the retired immigration judge, says he’s worried that even more new judges will come from prosecutorial backgrounds. “Who would really want to work for Sessions, given his record, his public statements?” he asks.
Under Sessions, he says, the immigration court “has become a deportation railway.”
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Great article, bringing together “all of the threads” of Sessions’s White Nationalist destruction of the U.S. Immigration Courts and his vicious racially-motivated attack on refugees from the Northern Triangle, particularly abused women and children.
For many years, “Gonzo Apocalypto” was a GOP “back bencher” in the Senate. His White Nationalist, restrictionist agenda was too much even for his GOP colleagues. His views were quite properly marginalized.
Suddenly, Trump runs for President on an overtly racist, White Nationalist, xenophobic platform. That’s music to Gonzo’s ears and he becomes the earliest Senate supporter.
Wonder of wonders, Trump wins, makes Sessions clone Stephen Miller his top immigration adviser, and appoints Gonzo as AG. His eyes light up. Suddenly, he’s free to dismember the entire Immigration Court, sack it’s Due Process vision, and attack migrants and refugees of color, particularly women, children, and families in ways that are both life threatening and permanently damaging.
He also gets a chance to dismantle civil rights protections, promote homophobia, disenfranchise minority voters, favor far right Evangelical Christianity, fill up prisons with the poor, black, and Hispanic, encourage police brutality against minorities, screw criminal defendants, disregard facts, harm refugees, and, icing on the cake, protect and promote hate speech. It’s a “dream come true” for a 21st century racist demagogue.
That Trump has mindlessly attacked his most faithfully effective racist, White Nationalist Cabinet Member says more about Trump than it does Sessions. Sessions is going to continue socking it to immigrants and minorities for just as long as he can. The further back into the era of Jim Crow that he can push America, the happier he’ll be when he goes on to his next position as a legal analyst for Breitbart or Fox.
Until then, there will be much more unnecessary pain, suffering, degradation, and even death on tap for migrants and their families.
Join the New Due Process Army — stand up against Session’s White Nationalist Agenda!
Dan De Luce and Julia Edwards Ainsley report for NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugeesdid not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News.
Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.
At a meeting in September 2017 with senior officials discussing refugee admissions, a representative from the National Counterterrorism Center came ready to present a report that analyzed the possible risks presented by refugees entering the country.
But before he could discuss the report, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand dismissed the report, saying her boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would not be guided by its findings.
“We read that. The attorney general doesn’t agree with the conclusions of that report,” she said, according to two officials familiar with the meeting, including one who was in the room at the time.
Brand’s blunt veto of the intelligence assessment shocked career civil servants at the interagency meeting, which seemed to expose a bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda. Her response also amounted to a rejection of her own department’s view, as the FBI, part of the Justice Department, had contributed to the assessment.
“She just dismissed them,” said the former official who attended the meeting.
The intelligence assessment was “inappropriately discredited as a result of that exchange,” said the ex-official. The episode made clear that “you weren’t able to have an honest conversation about the risk.”
A current DHS official defended the administration’s response to the intelligence assessment, saying immigration policy in the Trump administration does not rely solely on “historical data about terrorism trends,” but rather “is an all-of-the-above approach that looks at every single pathway that we think it is possible for a terrorist to come into the United States.”
A spokeswoman for DHS said, “If we only look at what terrorists have done in the past, we will never be able to prevent future attacks … We cannot let dangerous individuals slip through the cracks and exploit our refugee program, which is why we have implemented security enhancements that would prevent such violent individuals from reaching our shores, while still upholding our humanitarian ideals.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Following the dismissal of the assessment, anti-immigration hard-liners in the administration clashed with civil servants about how to portray the possible threat from refugees in documents drafted for inter-agency discussions, former officials said. In the end, the president’s decision last year to lower the ceiling for refugee admissions to 45,000 did not refer to security threats, but cited staffing shortages at DHS as the rationale. But once the decision was issued, the White House released a public statement that suggested the president’s decision was driven mainly by security concerns and said “some refugees” admitted into the country had posed a threat to public safety.
An Afghan refugee sleeps on the ground while another looks out a window in an abandoned warehouse where they and other migrants took refuge in Belgrade, Serbia, on Feb. 1, 2017.Muhammed Muheisen / AP file
“President Donald J. Trump is taking the responsible approach to promote the safety of the American people,” said the Sept. 29 statement.
Political appointees in the Trump administration then wrote a new report a few months later that seemed to contradict the view of the country’s spy agencies.
In a press release at the time, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the report showed the need for tougher screening of travelers entering the country and served as “a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists.”
But the report is being challenged in court by several former officials and rights groups who say it inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S. Two lawsuits filed in Massachusetts and California allege the report improperly excludes incidents committed by domestic terrorists, like white supremacists, and wrongfully includes a significant number of naturalized U.S. citizens and foreigners who committed crimes overseas and were brought to the United States for the purpose of standing trial.
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand speaks during the opening of the summit on Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking at Department of Justice in Washington, on Feb. 2, 2018.Jose Luis Magana / AP file
Mary McCord, former assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which prosecutes terrorism charges, said the January 2018 report is “unfortunately both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.”
“The result is a report that presents an inaccurate picture of the threat of terrorism in the United States,” McCord said.
When the report was released in January 2018, Trump tweeted that it showed the need to move away from “random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit based” because it showed that “the nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born.”
But the report only focuses on international terrorism, which is defined as a crime committed on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization. The document excludes domestic terrorism committed by groups such as white supremacists or anti-government militias, which are more likely to be supported by those born in the U.S.
Because of the way the terrorism statute is written, those who support domestic organizations like anti-government or white supremacists groups cannot be charged with terrorism, even if the groups they support have committed crimes. Only supporters of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the State Department can be charged with “material support” of terrorism.
Still, Trump has repeatedly stated that the overwhelming majority of terrorists in the United States came from overseas, even before the 2018 report.
In his first speech to Congress in February 2017, Trump said that the “vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our own country.”
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, MSNBC legal analyst and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, took issue with that statement and sued the Justice Department to provide documents that backed up the president’s claim. But the Department was unable to locate any records.
“There are a lot of domestic terrorism cases, and they are generally not committed by people born abroad. To the extent that those cases were excluded — white supremacist violence, anti-abortion terrorism and militia violence — the inquiry is grossly biased,” Wittes wrote on Lawfare.
Wittes said that almost 100, or about a quarter, of the 402 individuals listed as foreign-born terrorists committed their crimes overseas and were brought to the U.S. to face trial.
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller at roundtable discussion on California immigration policy at the White House on May 16.Evan Vucci / AP file
During her time in government as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Barbara Strack said her staff worked diligently to thoroughly vet refugees for any possible terrorist links. But she said there was no information she came across that indicated refugees posed a significant security threat.
“I did not see evidence that refugees presented an elevated national security risk compared to other categories of travelers to the United States,” she told NBC News.
The administration must decide by the end of the month how many refugees to allow in the country in the next fiscal year. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, known for his hawkish stance on immigration, has been pushing for a drastic reduction in the ceiling.
The cap was set at 45,000 last year, but the number of refugees allowed in the country has fallen far below that ceiling, with only about 20,000 resettled in the United States since October 2017. Rights advocates and former officials accuse the White House of intentionally slowing down the bureaucratic process to keep the numbers down, overloading the FBI and other government agencies with duplicative procedures.
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This level of total intellectual dishonesty, overt racism, and policy driven solely by a White Nationalist philosophy and political agenda by an Attorney General is unprecedented in my experience at the DOJ.
If you remember, Brand escaped to a “soft landing” in the private sector earlier this year. One of my theories is that she was trying to protect herself and her reputation for a future Federal Judgeship. If and when that happens, I hope that those serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee will remember her completely sleazy role in carrying Sessions’s racist-polluted water on this one. Someone with no respect for facts, the law, humanity, or professional expertise definitely does not deserve to be on the Federal Bench!
And for Pete’s sake don’t credit Sessions with any integrity whatsoever in not resigning under pressure from our “Mussolini Wannabe.” He’s not “protecting” the Mueller investigation or anything else worthy in the DOJ. In fact, he has wholly politicized the DOJ and taken it down into the gutter. The reason he “hangs on” is not because he respects the Constitution or rule of law. Clearly, he doesn’t! No, it’s because he wants to do as much damage to civil rights and people of color as he can during his toxic tenure.
Make no mistake, that damage he has done, as has been reported elsewhere, is very substantial. It has set the goals that Dr. Martin Luther King and others fought for and even gave their lives for back by decades. Despicable!
Sessions’s White-Nationalist driven lies and false narratives about refugees are described above. For the truth about refugees and immigrants and all of the great things they have done and continue to do for our country, see my recent post at https://wp.me/p8eeJm-313.
The failure of the U.S. government to reverse the kidnapping of migrant children from their parents has been chalked up to incompetence. People want to believe that this act of extraordinary cruelty — and the Trump administration’s inability to fix it — stems from our leaders’ lack of experience or common sense.
But this too is a failure — of our collective imagination. Although the government claimed it met the Thursday deadline to reunite families, it admitted that hundreds of parents had been deported without their children. The separation policy was designed to inflict harm. And the resolution process is chaotic by design.
How else can we explain what has happened to these families? Some 14 million checked bags are managed by the Transportation Security Administration — and that’s just during Thanksgiving weekend. Even high school students can manage a coat check for an evening without losing everyone’s coats. They match each coat and owner with corresponding tickets, and do not store the coats outside the building, or even thousands of miles away from the event.
This administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies.
The administration did not take even these basic measures when it began to separate children — not coats! — from their parents. It did not use corresponding numbers for the files of parents and children, or take photos of families together, or hand out hospital-style bracelets. It did not house families near one another, choosing instead to hold mothers in California and daughters in Chicago, fathers in Texas and sons in New York City.
In fact, the administration seems to have taken a comprehensive inventory of confiscated items — sneakers, toothpaste, rosaries — everything except which child belongs to which parent.
These are the actions of a government that intended to separate families but did not intend to reunite them. It meant to inflict so much suffering that other families wouldn’t make the dangerous trek. No matter how bad the violence might be in Central America, surely these families would choose to stay united rather than come and be separated.
In fact, through all the blather, the Trump administration has admitted as much.
“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America,” White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2017. Even separate children from their parents, asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer? “Yes.”
“We expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect,” Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Steven Wagner told reporters in June.
“Hopefully people will get the message,” Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said casually on Fox News in June.
But according to the Department of Homeland Security, no one has been deterred. The number of families stopped at the border actually increased by 64% in the months after the administration began to separate families. So even if you could stomach traumatizing toddlers, this policy did not accomplish Sessions’ objective of sending a warning across the desert.
Still, cruelty has its uses. Across the country, Republicans have made the Trump administration’s immigration stance their rallying cry for reelection, running more than 14,000 campaign ads this year bragging about their efforts to “stop illegals.” And last month, Sessions spelled out the administration’s plan to use all the bad press for good.
“We do not want to separate parents from their children,” he clarified. “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”
In other words, this administration will harm children in order to force Congress to agree to its absurd immigration policies. But let’s be clear: No lawmaker of any party should ever accede to a legislative demand in response to the intentional infliction of harm.
The American people must also speak up. Our government has kidnapped children from their parents. It forces these lost boys and girls to say the Pledge of Allegiance while they are held captive in building wings named for U.S. presidents. (It is not hard to believe that President Reagan would be aghast.)
This is not who we are, we want to say, but that isn’t quite true. This policy reveals a darker side of America that has dehumanized black and brown people since our nation’s founding. Americans have stolen and enslaved black people, killed indigenous peoples and imprisoned Japanese Americans. The reason why this administration has pumped out racist rhetoric casting people as fish to be caught, infestations to be eradicated, and animals to be caged is because it has worked before.
Will it work again? That’s up to us.
Brian Schatz representsHawaii in the U.S. Senate.
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Senator Schatz provides a clear, succinct, powerful statement as to why we need regime change if American is to remain a great, diverse nation that uses the full abilities and respects the lives, dignity, potential, and rights of all of those who reside here now and may do so in the future.
“MAGA” has always been a not-so-thinly veiled exhortation to “Keep America As White As Possible For As Long As Possible No Matter How Much Damage We Inflict.”
Yeah, I remember that after his confirmation, I was willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt” and hope that he meant his sworn testimony that he would rise above his past as a partisan Senator and represent the rights and dignity of all Americans (which, of course, would include those Americans residing here and protected by our Constitution regardless of “status”).
However, it didn’t take long to see that it was just more of the perjury and lies that roll so effortlessly off Sessions’s tongue. What he actually intended all along was to use his good fortune in being somewhat unexpectedly elevated to the Attorney Generalship to carry out a heinous, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, restrictionist, extreme right program directed against people of color, women, children, and other vulnerable minorities. This is the type of horrible program that had always driven him, but that had been able to inflict little actual damage on America due to Sessions’s “outlier” position, even among his fellow GOP Senators.
To be fair, that’s precisely what Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Corey Booker, and the Black Caucus tried to tell the Senate and the rest of American during the confirmation process. But, they were silenced or ignored. Now, innocent kids, families, abused women, and the international reputation of our entire nation are all “paying the price” for Sessions as AG.
Vote for “regime change” this November. Vote for accountability, decency, the real “rule of law,” and to rein in and ideally remove Jeff Sessions from office before he can do further damage to humanity and to our country!
Amid the political turmoil of the past few years, there have been faint rustlings of a democratic revival. States have begun to take steps to empower citizens by making voting easier and more inclusive. Since 2015, 12 states have adopted automatic voter registration; voters in Florida will decide in November on a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to felons; in New York and Virginia, Democratic governors have done so (in the case of New York extending these rights to parolees); and the District of Columbia may lower its voting age to 16.
These bright spots in an otherwise bleak political landscape hint at a path forward for American democracy. Seldom, if ever, have Democrats had so much to gain by increasing turnout. At the same time, the generational tide has turned decisively in the Democratic Party’s favor, with millennials poised to push the electorate steadily to the left. As these two trends converge over the next decade, major election reforms long written off as unrealistic will suddenly become politically viable.
While it is tempting to view elections as being decided in the moment, much of the groundwork is set in place decades earlier. Looking at survey data from the 1950s, political scientists observed that voters who came of age during the Great Depression identified as Democrats at much higher rates than prior and subsequent generations. The Great Depression and the remaking of American government during the New Deal left a lasting imprint on a generation of voters. A 2014 study by Andrew Gelman and Yair Ghitza demonstrates that the “political events of a voter’s teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these long-term partisan preferences.”
. . . .
Carrying out practical and proven policies to increase voter turnout will swell Democratic majorities, strengthen the party’s mandate to govern and shore up support for progressive policies. Medicare for All would be a much easier sell if 18-year-olds turned out like 80-year-olds.
So would policies intended to combat economic inequality. Among advanced democracies, turnout in national elections is a strong predictor of income inequality. The United States has both the lowest turnout and highest share of income going to the top 1 percent. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. There are good theoretical reasons to believe the two are related.
More Inequality, Lower Turnout
The United States is an outlier among these industrialized nations, where people vote in much higher proportion and where income is more evenly distributed.
This makes democracy an issue to campaign on. The Democratic base understands that it is waging a battle for the future of the country. Many Democrats are rightly concerned about the state of our democracy. They are also painfully aware that our electoral system is biased against them. A rallying cry to put democracy back on the offensive will get the base to sit up and pay attention. Delivering on the promise will get them to the polls.
What the party needs now are leaders willing to champion electoral reforms. To any potential 2020 presidential contenders out there, know this: If you make comprehensive electoral reforms the centerpiece of your administration’s first 100 days, you will have all but guaranteed your re-election and the congressional majorities needed to push forward on the rest of your policy agenda.
Fixing our democracy is perhaps our best shot at getting Congress back to work on solving the serious problems facing the nation. Generational change is coming and with it an opportunity to fundamentally transform American government and who it serves, so long as Democrats insist on making voters mirror the population and do everything in their power to make it happen.
This is not about weaponizing electoral institutions for partisan gain; it is about delivering on the promise of American democracy. The nation is at its best when democracy is on the rise. Many of our most celebrated figures — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez — fought to enfranchise the disenfranchised and left a more inclusive republic as their legacy. Let’s finish what they started.
Adam Bonica (@adam_bonica) is a political scientist at Stanford.
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Read the rest of Bonica’s excellent article (with charts and graphs) at the above link!
Democrats need to get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote if we want to get “regime change” and avoid more years of toxic, anti-democracy minority government dedicated to further enriching and empowering the already rich and powerful and disadvantaging and disenfranchising the rest of us!
And, you can bet that with “voter suppression pros” like Kris Kobach, Mike Pence, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and the like out there, the White Nationalist GOP isn’t going quietly into the night! Indeed, they are going to pull out all the stops in a formidable effort to disable American Democracy and reverse demographics before they catch up with their “bring back the bad old days of a ‘Whites Only America'” program.
After Mr. Ross’s explanation for the citizenship question’s origin shifted, Judge Furman said it appeared that the Commerce Department had acted in “bad faith” in deciding to add the question.
Mr. Ross said in a statement on March 26 that the Justice Department, which oversees enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, had asked that the question be placed on census forms. But late last month he reversed course, stating in a memo that he actually had been discussing the citizenship question “with other government officials” since shortly after taking office in February 2017 — and that the Justice Department had made its request only after he or his aides asked it to.
Judge Furman called Mr. Ross’s March explanation of his decision both “potentially untrue” and improbable because, he said, the Justice Department “has shown little interest in enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”
In an emailed response to questions, a Commerce Department spokeswoman, Rebecca Glover, said there was no inconsistency between the two statements. “Characterizations of the secretary’s prior public statements as somehow misleading are false,” she wrote. Whatever the run-up to the Justice Department’s request, she said, it remained the trigger that led to Mr. Ross’s “thorough and transparent assessment” of the need for a citizenship question.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional expert on the census who is a private consultant to groups seeking an accurate 2020 count, called Mr. Ross’s revised timeline “disappointing and deeply troubling.”
“This seems to confirm that the Justice Department request for the citizenship question was a pretense to achieve a political goal through the census,” she said. “The pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together, going back to when President Trump took office.”
In their lawsuit, which is led by the New York attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, the plaintiffs imply that enforcing the Voting Rights Act was a pretext for another goal: ensuring that the nation’s 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants are not counted for the purpose of drawing congressional and other political districts, which are required to have equal populations.
The practical impact would be to reduce the number of congressional districts, and therefore Electoral College votes, in states with large numbers of noncitizens — often, though not always, Democratic strongholds.
Mr. Ross has not named the administration officials with whom he discussed the citizenship question after taking office. But other lawsuit documents released last month show that Mr. Ross received an email in July 2017 from Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has taken a strong position against illegal immigration. Mr. Kobach urged Mr. Ross to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census because undocumented immigrants “do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States” but are counted for reapportionment purposes.
Mr. Kobach noted in the email that he had recently reached out to Mr. Ross “on the direction of Steve Bannon,” who was then the White House chief strategist. Documenting the extent of outsiders’ role in the citizenship decision will be a priority when the plaintiffs’ search for new evidence begins, experts said.
“That suggests very strongly that the directive here was ultimately a directive that came from the White House,” said Thomas Wolf, counsel at the democracy program of the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law.
The census tally, which includes everyone living in the United States regardless of immigration status, is used to reapportion political boundaries every 10 years to account for population changes. But a growing movement on the far right seeks to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted during reapportionment; Alabama’s Republican secretary of state filed a lawsuit in May seeking to do exactly that.
If only citizens were counted for reapportionment, “California would give up several congressional seats to states that actually honor our Constitution and federal law,” one leader of the anti-immigrant movement, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, said in February.
That is, for now, a distant prospect. But some experts say they believe asking about citizenship could accomplish the same goal by discouraging undocumented immigrants, even legal ones, from being counted.
“Their actions can produce a census that leaves out many of the people they don’t want counted for political representation,” Ms. Lowenthal said. “And there will be consequences, perhaps, well beyond what immigration hard-liners believe will only be reduced numbers in selected states.”
Tyler Blint-Welsh contributed reporting from New York.
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Read the complete article at the link.
These guys are totally disgusting. Sessions’s “we’ve gotta enforce the law” blather has always been totally bogo. Sessions is interested in enforcing only those laws that happen to support his racist, White Nationalist agenda. Even then, he lies, twists the meaning, and intentionally misuses statistics to support his perverted Jim Crow outlook.
My question is why the DOJ attorneys presenting these obviously untrue and dishonest positions in Federal Court haven’t been referred to their state bars for disciplinary proceedings and possible revocation of their law licenses? And, why isn’t our biased “chief lawyer” Jeff Sessions the subject of ethics and disciplinary procedures given his clear record of bias against people of color and his pushing of unlawful political/racial agendas based on lies before the Federal Courts?
Private attorneys who conducted themselves the way Sessions and his DOJ crew do before Federal Courts would be in deep trouble by now? Why are they getting away with it?
Progressives, states and civil rights advocates are preparing a flurry of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the next census, saying the move will penalize immigrants and threaten civil rights.
The late Monday move from the Commerce Department, which it said came in response a request by the Justice Department, would restore a question about citizenship that has not appeared on the census since the 1950s. The administration said the data was necessary to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The state of California immediately challenged the plan in federal court.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla trashed the move as anti-immigrant.
“The citizenship question is the latest attempt by President Trump to stoke the fires of anti-immigrant hostility,” Padilla said in a statement. “Now, in one fell swoop, the US Commerce Department has ignored its own protocols and years of preparation in a concerted effort to suppress a fair and accurate census count from our diverse communities. The administration’s claim that it is simply seeking to protect voting rights is not only laughable, but contemptible.”
Former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder also blasted the move and said his organization, which focuses on voting enfranchisement and redistricting, would also pursue litigation against what he called an “irresponsible decision.”
Holder said contrary to the rationale presented by the Justice Department, Holder said he and other modern-era attorneys general were “perfectly” able to handle those legal matters without such a question on the Census.
“The addition of a citizenship question to the census questionnaire is a direct attack on our representative democracy,” Holder said in a statement. “Make no mistake — this decision is motivated purely by politics. In deciding to add this question without even testing its effects, the administration is departing from decades of census policy and ignoring the warnings of census experts.”
Critics of the move say that including such a question on a government survey will scare non-citizens and vulnerable immigrant communities into under-reporting. By undercounting these populations, they argue, there will be a major impact that follows on voting and federal funds.
Because the once-a-decade census is used to determine congressional and political districts and to dole out federal resources, an undercount in heavily immigrant areas could substantially impact certain states and major cities and potentially their representation at the federal level.
The question has not been on the full census since the 1950s, but does appear on the yearly American Community Survey administered by the Census Bureau to give a fuller picture of life in America and the population.
The Commerce Department said the decision came after a “thorough review” of the request from the Justice Department. The priority, Commerce said, was “obtaining complete and accurate data.”
“Having citizenship data at the census block level will permit more effective enforcement of the VRA, and Secretary Ross determined that obtaining complete and accurate information to meet this legitimate government purpose outweighed the limited potential adverse impacts,” the statement said.
Becerra and his state have been central to virtually every legal challenge of the Trump administration on issues ranging from immigration, to the environment, to health care. The Justice Department has also sued California over its so-called sanctuary policies to protect immigrants.
More challenges could soon follow.
Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, a nonprofit that works on issues of justice and civil rights, said the question had no place in the Census.
“Our Constitution requires a complete and accurate count of everyone living in the country, no matter her or his citizenship status. The administration’s decision to add a citizenship question is at best a dramatic misstep, and at worst a politically-motivated move that will undermine a fair and accurate census,” Weiser said. “This question is a dangerous move that could lead to a serious skewing of the final census results, which would have a deleterious effect on our system of representative democracy. We urge the administration to reconsider.”
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The idea that the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions wants this information to enforce the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) is preposterous on its face! So far, the only interest that Sessions and his crew at the DOJ have shown in the VRA is to insure that White GOP voters are enfranchised and that African-Americans and other minorities are disenfranchised.
Because all individuals in a congressional district are entitled to representation, regardless of citizenship status or other legal status, promoting an undercount (which is what the Administration obviously intends) will work to the disadvantage of those districts with large populations of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.
Stay tuned. There probably are many more similar suits to come, and “Tal is on the ball” to keep us completely informed.
“In the decade or so before Donald Trump became president, America’s approach to criminal justice was changing fast — reckoning with decades of destructive and ineffective policies that had ballooned the prison population and destroyed countless lives. Red and blue states were putting in place smart, sensible reforms like reducing harsh sentencing laws, slashing prison populations and crime rates, and providing more resources for the thousands of people who are released every week.
President Obama’s record on the issue was far from perfect, but he and his first attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., took several key steps: weakening racially discriminatory sentencing laws, shortening thousands of absurdly long drug sentences, and pulling back on the prosecution of low-level drug offenders and of federal marijuana offenses in states that have legalized it. This approach reflected state-level efforts and sent a message of encouragement to those still leery of reform.
Within minutes of taking office, Mr. Trump turned back the dial, warning darkly in his Inaugural Address of “American carnage,” of cities and towns gutted by crime — even though crime rates are at their lowest in decades. Things only got worse with the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, along with Mr. Trump, appears to be stuck in the 1980s, when politicians exploited the public’s fear of rising crime to sell absurdly harsh laws and win themselves re-election. Perhaps that’s why both men seem happy to distort, if not outright lie about, crime statistics that no longer support their narrative.
Last February, Mr. Trump claimed that “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” Wrong: The national rate remains at an all-time low. It’s true that the 10.8 percent increase in murders between 2014 and 2015 was the largest one-year rise in more than four decades, but the total number of murders is still far below what it was in the early 1990s.
For his part, Mr. Sessions has repeatedly hawked a nationwide crime wave that doesn’t exist, and he has called crime spikes in certain areas a “dangerous, permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk” — despite the lack of any evidence that recent upticks will last. To the contrary, in 2017 the crime rate in the nation’s 30 biggest cities actually went down.
As bad as the dishonesty is the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions have managed to engineer their backward worldview largely under the public’s radar, as a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice documents. Last May, Mr. Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to charge as aggressively as possible in every case — reversing a policy of Mr. Holder’s that had eased up on nonviolent drug offenders and others who fill the nation’s federal prisons. In January, Mr. Sessions rescinded another Obama-era policy that discouraged federal marijuana prosecutions in states where its sale and use are legal. (Mr. Sessions has long insisted, contrary to all available evidence, that marijuana is “a dangerous drug” and “only slightly less awful” than heroin.)
These sorts of moves don’t get much attention, but as the report notes, they could end up increasing the federal prison population, which began to fall for the first time in decades under Mr. Obama.
The reversal of sensible criminal justice reform doesn’t stop there. Under Mr. Trump, the Justice Department has pulled back from his predecessor’s investigations of police abuse and misconduct; resumed the use of private, for-profit prisons; and stopped granting commutations to low-level drug offenders who have spent years or decades behind bars.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sessions, who as a senator was one of the most reliable roadblocks to long-overdue federal sentencing reform, is still throwing wrenches into the works as Congress inches toward a bipartisan deal. Mr. Sessions called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, a sweeping bill that would reduce some mandatory-minimum sentences, and that cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a “grave error.” That earned him a rebuke from the committee’s chairman, Senator Charles Grassley, who pointed out that the attorney general is tasked with enforcing the laws, not writing them. “If General Sessions wanted to be involved in marking up this legislation, maybe he should have quit his job and run for the Republican Senate seat in Alabama,” Mr. Grassley said.
Mr. Grassley is no one’s idea of a justice reformer, but he supports the bill because, he said, it “strikes the right balance of improving public safety and ensuring fairness in the criminal justice system.”
So what has this administration done right? The list is short and uninspiring. In October, Mr. Trump declared the epidemic of opioid abuse a national emergency, which could be a good step toward addressing it — but he’s since done almost nothing to combat a crisis that killed more than 64,000 Americans in 2016.
In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. Trump promised to “embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance.” It’s great if he really means that, but it’s hard to square his assurance with his own attorney general’s opposition to a bill that includes recidivism-reduction programs intended to achieve precisely this goal.
Perhaps the most insidious part of the Trump administration’s approach to criminal justice lies in its efforts to link crime to its broader crackdown on immigration. In a speech last month, Mr. Sessions said undocumented immigrants are far more likely than American citizens to commit crimes, a claim he found in a paper by John Lott, the disreputable economist best known for misusing statistics to suit his own ideological ends. In this case, it appears Mr. Lott misread his own data, which came from Arizona and in fact showed the opposite of what he claimed: Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens, as the vast majority of research on the topic has found.
But no matter; Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions don’t need facts to run their anti-immigrant agenda, which has already resulted in more than double the number of arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions as in 2016, as the Brennan Center report noted. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials. A federal judge blocked the order in November for violating the Constitution.
The rhetoric from the White House and the Justice Department has emboldened some state and local officials to talk tougher, even if just as ignorantly, about crime. The good news is that it’s not working as well anymore. In Virginia’s race for governor last fall, the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, attacked his opponent, Ralph Northam, with ads blaming him for violence by the MS-13 gang.
It was a despicable stunt, its fearmongering recalling the racist but effective Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush ran on in his successful 1988 presidential campaign. Thankfully, Virginia’s voters overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Gillespie, another sign that criminal justice reform is an issue with strong support across the political spectrum. In the era of Donald Trump, candidates of both parties should be proud to run as reformers — but particularly Democrats, who can cast the issue not only as a central component of a broader progressive agenda, but as yet another example of just how out of touch with the country Mr. Trump and his administration are.”
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I know it’s quoted above, but two paragraphs of this article deserve re-emphasis:
Perhaps the most insidious part of the Trump administration’s approach to criminal justice lies in its efforts to link crime to its broader crackdown on immigration. In a speech last month, Mr. Sessions said undocumented immigrants are far more likely than American citizens to commit crimes, a claim he found in a paper by John Lott, the disreputable economist best known for misusing statistics to suit his own ideological ends. In this case, it appears Mr. Lott misread his own data, which came from Arizona and in fact showed the opposite of what he claimed: Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens, as the vast majority of research on the topic has found.
But no matter; Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions don’t need facts to run their anti-immigrant agenda, which has already resulted in more than double the number of arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions as in 2016, as the Brennan Center report noted. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials. A federal judge blocked the order in November for violating the Constitution.
Gonzo consistently uses bogus statistics, fear-mongering, racial innuendo, and outright slurs of immigrants, including Dreamers, and their advocates to advance his White Nationalist agenda at Justice.
At the same time, he largely ignores or proposes laughably inadequate steps to address the real justice problems in America: Russian interference, the opioid crisis, uncontrolled gun violence (much of it involving mass shootings by disgruntled White Guys with assault-type weapons), overcrowded prisons, lack of an effective Federal community-based anti-gang effort in major cities, hate crimes committed by White Supremacists, grotesquely substandard conditions in civil immigration detention, and the uncontrolled backlogs and glaring denials of Due Process and fairness to migrants in our U.S. Immigration Court System.
How long can America go without a real Attorney General who acknowledges the rights of all people in America? How will we ever recover from the damage that Gonzo does every day he remains in the office for which he is so supremely unqualified?
From “John Kelly’s Washington” in the Washington Post:
Stuck on a shelf or locked in a safe, D.C.’s ‘Lost Laws’ still packed a punch
Before the Supreme Court upheld the District’s “Lost Laws” in 1953, activists such as Mary Church Terrell (center) picketed in front of segregated restaurants.
Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
He could have added: “eventually, and after plenty of detours.”
In 1872 and 1873, two laws were passed in Washington that forbade racial discrimination in the city’s restaurants. Then, somehow, the laws vanished.
Just imagine the reaction when they were “rediscovered” in the 1940s. It must have been as if someone had opened a vault sealed when Ulysses Grant was president and found an airplane inside, a television, penicillin … .
Could Washingtonians from 70 years ago really have been so advanced? What had happened to those people?
What amazed me when I looked into the events of the 1870s and 1880s was how similar things were to the Jim Crow era. Restaurateurs used some of the same excuses for refusing to serve African Americans: Black customers were “boisterous,” white patrons would stay away, the government shouldn’t meddle.
To fight discrimination, black activists used methods that are familiar to us now. Lawyer E.M. Hewlett deliberately visited restaurants to see if he would be served. Hewlett looked to see if owners had posted price lists, as required by law to prevent black customers from being gouged. When he spotted a violation, he took the establishment to court.
“During Reconstruction, D.C. was really on the leading edge of racial change in America,” said Chris Myers Asch, co-author, with George Derek Musgrove, of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”
Said Asch: “D.C. was a very progressive city. You had remarkable progress being made toward racial equality in a very brief space of time. Black men in D.C. were the first black men in the country to be granted the right to vote after the Civil War.”
Such efforts, Asch said, were a priority for radical Republicans in Congress.
“The backlash from white conservatives is really substantial,” Asch said. “First you eliminate self government all together in 1874. Then you slowly roll back those Reconstruction-era gains. This is part of a regionwide effort to enforce white supremacy. By 1901, when city commissioners decide to compile the D.C. Code, they simply don’t include those Reconstruction-era statutes.”
They didn’t include them, but they didn’t repeal them. The Lost Laws were not dead. They were like a long-dormant seed, ready to spring to life after a refreshing rain.
I don’t know who found them. Asch thinks it was A. Mercer Daniel, who oversaw the library at Howard University’s law school. They gained fame in 1948 with the publication of “Segregation in Washington,” a scathing report that mentioned the laws.
Civil rights activists wondered: Could the laws be used to fight segregation?
Annie Stein, a white woman from Southwest D.C. who was a member of the Progressive Party, invited Mary Church Terrell to chair the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws of 1872 and 1873. When Terrell, the octogenarian co-founder of the NAACP, was denied service at a downtown cafeteria called Thompson’s in 1950, it set the stage for a test case.
District of Columbia vs. John R. Thompson Co. went first to the old Municipal Court, where Judge Frank Myers ruled that the Lost Laws had “been repealed by implication” and, thus, could no longer be enforced.
Terrell and company appealed. In May of 1951, the Municipal Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that the anti-bias laws were still valid. Among the points raised by Judge Nathan Cayton was that another so-called lost law had been enforced in 1908, even though it, too, had been omitted from the 1901 D.C. Code.
It was an animal cruelty law. Animals, it seemed, had more rights than black Washingtonians.
The game of legal ping-pong continued. The next stop was the U.S. Court of Appeals. In a 5-to-4 decision, it ruled that the laws of 1872 and 1873 could not be enforced.
One judge, Barrett Prettyman, wrote the statutes were “neither mentioned again nor enforced for a period of 75 years.” Thus the laws “must be deemed by the courts to have been abandoned.”
If you’ve been reading my columns this week, you know that wasn’t true. African Americans did mention them and did try to get them enforced.
In April of 1953, the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Chester H. Gray of the District’s corporation counsel’s office asked the court not to blame his staff. They hadn’t known of the laws until someone found them in the corporation counsel’s safe.
“You mean you have to go to a locked safe to find laws of the District of Columbia?” Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson joked.
In June, the court ruled unanimously that the laws were still in effect. Laws passed by long-dead Washingtonians had helped their descendants.
Five days after the Supreme Court ruling, Terrell went to eat at Thompson’s with the mixed-race group who had been denied a meal three years earlier. They were treated, Terrell said, with courtesy.”
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Sound all too familiar? It should! The claptrap coming from yesterday’s racists is pretty much the same as the garbage coming out of the mouths of some GOP pols these days. Here’s my “rewrite” of a paragraph of Kelly’s account in “today’s context.”
The backlash from Sessions, Bannon, Kobach, Miller and their White Nationalist pals to the diversification of America and growing political power of African-Americans, Hispanics and other non-Whites was substantial. First, they used gerrymandering and intentional mis-constructions of Civil Rights and Voting Rights statutes intended to protect minorities to instead suppress and minimize the minority vote. This is part to a nationwide effort by the far right to restore White Supremacy and prevent African-Americans and Hispanics from eventually obtaining political power commensurate with their demographics and overwhelming contributions to America. Then, when supposedly in charge of administering the laws equally, they simply refuse to recognize the rights of African-Americans to be free from police violence and the rights of Hispanics and asylum seekers in the United States to be treated with respect and dignity and to be given full Due Process under our Constitution. They even invent false narratives, bogus statistics, and demonize hard-working law-abiding citizens, residents, and great and deserving young people known as “Dreamers” in a desperate effort to restore exclusive White (preferably “pseudo-Christian”) power. To add insult to injury, they carry out this anti-American, anti-Constitutional campaign under the boldly false rubric of “Restoring the Rule of Law.”
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Now let’s move over to the Post’s Sports Section. Here’s an account of what happened to courageous African-American athletes who stood up for their rights and the rights of others during the “glory days” of White Supremacy that Trump, Sessions, & Co. so cherish and honor.
Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand
Two black demonstrators killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the ground at the edge of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 8, 1968. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Robert Lee Davis found himself lying in blood next to his teammate Sam Hammond. At least one bullet had struck Davis in the back. Another went in Hammond’s neck.
Davis recalled in an oral history that Hammond, a running back at South Carolina State, asked him, “Do you think I’m going to live?” Davis, a linebacker, said he answered, “Sam, you are going to be all right, buddy.”
Hammond was the first of three young black men to die that night 50 years ago in Orangeburg, S.C. Davis was one of several football players at historically black South Carolina State to survive a hail of police fire with injuries.
What brought them together that Feb. 8, 1968, evening was not a team meeting or the training table. Instead, it was a call to confront a wrong, an affront, an act of overt racial discrimination in Orangeburg at a bowling alley that refused would-be black bowlers just like the state was denying black citizens their human rights.
As a result, Davis and Hammond became athlete-activists long before we created the suddenly ubiquitous, if not trite, alliterative phrase these days to describe football and basketball players, almost all of color, who have, by comparison, merely sported sloganeering T-shirts, or employed histrionics, to demonstrate against racial injustice.
It is a noble and laudable effort, of course. But what we’ve come to champion of athletes today pales juxtaposed to what so many did in the cauldron of the late ’60s civil rights movement. Davis and Hammond, for example, dared to physically confront the very embodiment of the South’s recalcitrant racists — scores of carbine rifle-toting, all-white state troopers — for which Hammond forfeited not just his career but his life.
They were among at least 30 victims of what became known as the Orangeburg massacre.
I was reminded of it three years ago as a presenter at the annual Media and Civil Rights symposium at the University of South Carolina. It included a mesmerizing panel featuring a demonstrator that night, civil rights icon and scholar Cleveland Sellers, and a reporter who became legendary for his fearless coverage of the massacre and other civil rights movement era violence, Jack Bass. With Jack Nelson, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the civil rights movement, Bass authored “The Orangeburg Massacre” in 1970.
And I took note that the panelists, particularly Oliver Francis, a one-time baseball player at Voorhees, another historically black South Carolina college, pointed out that black male athletes in particular stepped to the fore in Orangeburg’s deadly confrontation with white supremacy, and in others. Francis wound up convicted and sentenced to prison for 18 to 24 months as an organizer in an armed black student takeover in 1969 of the Voorhees administration building.
It all reminded that black athletes played not just pivotal roles in the civil rights movement, like the muscle North Carolina A&T football players provided for their classmates engaged in sit-ins to desegregate the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter. Or in Rock Hill, S.C., where 10 black Friendship College students were detained by police for trying to desegregate a town lunch counter in 1961 but became known as the Rock Hill Nine after one among them wasn’t booked so he could maintain his athletic scholarship. Chicago Bears running back Willie Galimore was the test black registrant at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla., that became a flash point for desegregation fights in 1964.
And as was evidenced in Orangeburg, black athletes sometimes were even in the vanguard of protests. Samuel Freedman underscored as much in recounting the Orangeburg massacre in his 2014 book, “Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”
Freedman wrote: “Shortly after the 1967 football season ended, many of the politically engaged members of the South Carolina State team joined in protests against a segregated bowling alley near the campus in Orangeburg.” On Feb. 6, 1968, Freedman reported, Davis and several of his teammates went on their own to the bowling alley and not only were denied admittance but were threatened with arrest by city police for disturbing the peace. Other students eventually joined the football players, objected to the police threats and wound up defending themselves from swinging billy clubs.
Two nights later, Freedman stated, “an all-white force of state troopers opened fire on the student demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight. Among the dead was one football player . . . Hammond. Several other players were injured by gunfire, one of them temporarily paralyzed.”
Davis was that temporarily paralyzed victim.
The student survivors of the massacre refused, however, to be deterred and allow the killings of Hammond, fellow student Henry Smith and high school football player Delano Middleton to be in vain. They organized a march from campus to the state capital 42 miles away to demand justice. Athletes decided to lead the march by running the distance.
“The four young men who approached me about the run were all track and field distance runners,” Willis Ham, a South Carolina State baseball player at the time, told the (Orangeburg, S.C.) Times and Democrat five years ago. “Three of the young men were not of American descent, and they simply wanted to express their disgust for the way Americans ‘treat their own,’ with the one tool that they had to their credit [the ability to run].
“We wanted our fellow students to know how deeply we felt about their determination to go to Columbia [S.C.], and express to state officials how they really felt about the lack of support in the days leading to the massacre.”
“It gave us a chance to say that our spirits and drive for freedom from depression would never be destroyed,” Ham explained.
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The white troopers who fired on the students were exonerated in a trial a year later. The lone conviction from the incident was of Sellers for incitement. He spent seven months in prison. He was pardoned in 1993.
But what Hammond, the football player, first fell for is forever remembered on South Carolina State’s campus. Its basketball arena that opened that fateful day, Feb. 8, 1968, was renamed the Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center.
Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Post.”
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We should all be appalled that in the 21st Century, folks like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, and others who think that it’s “OK” and “permissible” to whip up false anti-Hispanic fervor with bogus narratives about rampant crime, imaginary “stolen” jobs, and phantom “adverse effects” of legal immigration have weaseled their way into positions of national power and prominence.
They seek to take America backwards to a bygone era of racial injustice and manufactured hate. Don’t let them get away with it! Ballot boxes were made to “retire” the Trumps, Sessions, and Cottons of the world and send them off to try to make an honest living.
“WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.
Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said.
She will be leaving the Justice Department in the coming weeks to take a position with Walmart as the company’s executive vice president of global governance and corporate secretary, a job change that had been in the works for some time, the sources said.
Sources: Brand left DOJ over fear of overseeing Russia probe 3:40
As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent, Senate-confirmed officials.
Four of the 13 divisions overseen by the associate attorney general remain unfilled, including the civil rights division and the civil division, over one year into the Trump administration.
While Brand has largely stayed out of the spotlight, public criticism of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by President Donald Trump worried Brand that Rosenstein’s job could be in danger.
Should Rosenstein be fired, Brand would be next in line to oversee Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, thrusting her into a political spotlight that Brand told friends she did not want to enter.
The Justice Department pushed back on NBC’s report.
“It is clear these anonymous sources have never met Rachel Brand let alone know her thinking. All of this is false and frankly ridiculous,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Flores.
Brand has had a long legal career that has spanned several administrations, including under Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush.
In announcing her departure, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described Brand as “a lawyer’s lawyer,” noting that she graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court.
In the same statement, Brand said, “I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish over my time here.”
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Undoubtedly, the DOJ under Trump and Sessions has made some great strides in attacking the rule of law, undermining social justice, mal-administering the Immigration Courts, eroding the credibility of DOJ attorneys in court, and generally diminishing the quality and fairness of the justice system in the United States.
While those might give Rachel “bragging rights” over at Wal-Mart or in right-wing legal circles, I don’t see that they are anything to “write home about.” Hopefully, at some point in the future, having served as a politico in the Trump/Sessions DOJ will become a “career killer” for any future Government appointments.
But, in today’s topsy-turvy legal-political climate, it’s still a shrewd “self-preservation” move on Brand’s part. And, she’s somewhat less likely to be stomping on anyone’s civil rights over at Wal-Mart (although you never know when an opportunity to dump on the civil rights of the LGBTQ community, African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, women, the poor, or to promote religious intelerance might present itself in a corporate setting).
Looking forward to more DOJ reporting from the super-talented Julia! I’ve missed her on the “immigration beat!”
“In a surprise move, Rachel Brand is stepping down as the No. 3 official at the Department of Justice, the New York Timesreported on Friday. Brand was next in line to oversee the special counsel’s Russia inquiry after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Brand’s departure could have enormous consequences for Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and President Donald Trump.
The New York Times has reported that Trump considered firing Rosenstein and Mueller over the summer, a situation that would have been reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and the firing of Watergate investigator Archibald Cox. Trump will now get to hand-pick a replacement for Brand, who would step in to take over the investigation should he or she be confirmed by the Senate and should Rosenstein go. It’s also been noted that Rosenstein may ultimately have to recuse himself from the investigation; in that case, he wouldn’t even have to be fired for the Trump selection to take control of the investigation into Trump.
Last March, Trump issued an executive order modifying the line of succession for an acting attorney general, the person who would be in control of Mueller’s inquiry since Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. According to that order, under normal procedures, a potential replacement for either Brand or Rosenstein to oversee the Russia inquiry would need Senate confirmation.
Fordham Law professor and occasional Slate contributor Jed Shugerman has laid out the potential orders of succession at the current moment. According to the vacancy statutes, Solicitor General Noel Francisco would be designated by Jeff Sessions as acting attorney general if Rosenstein were to depart, and he’d be followed by the assistant attorneys general. The next in line after that would typically be the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, a position which is being vacated by Dana Boente. Since Boente is leaving that job, it would go to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Robert J. Higdon Jr.
It’s worth noting that the executive order says Trump “retains discretion, to the extent permitted by law” to go around this line of succession to select an acting attorney general on his own. But doing so in an effort to squelch an investigation into himself, his allies, and his family would conceivably be such a transparent effort to subvert the rule of law as to be a political liability even within the Republican Party.
Rosenstein has been personally attacked by Trump. He has come under additional fire recentlyfrom critics of the Russia investigation, who have been using a concocted and false narrative from a recently declassified talking points memo to go after the FBI, Mueller, and Rosenstein. When Trump was asked by reporters if he still had confidence in Rosenstein last week, he responded “you figure that one out.”
Brand is reportedly leaving to become the head of global corporate governance at Walmart. The move feels possibly odd for someone who has served in three presidential administrations, cultivated a reputation as a devoted public servant, and who has only been in her current job less than one year.
Politico’s Eliana Johnson reported that someone close to Brand and the administration said she was leaving “because she is very smart, accomplished, and talented, and wants to protect her career.”
Brand worked in the George W. Bush administration and has been considered a rising conservative legal star for more than a decade. It seems very possible that staying in that DOJ position might have ultimately left her facing a very difficult situation career-wise. In a world where Rosenstein was fired and Brand was placed in charge of the Mueller probe, she might have to choose between obeying a Trump order that might upend the rule of law and being fired by Trump. As congressional and mainstream Republicans have moved closer towards Trump’s apparent anti-Mueller, anti-rule of law position, such martyrdom does not sound like it would help her future in the GOP.
Either decision might have done long-term damage to Brand’s future career prospects in any branch of government.
Brand’s move, however, preemptively abdicates that possible decision, quite possibly leaving it to a Trump-approved successor. As Elie Mystal, the executive editor at Above the Law, wrotefollowing the news, it seems as though we might be rolling towards a “slow moving Saturday Night Massacre.”
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Gee, Jeremy, I’m only a retired Immigration Judge (and 35 year vet of the DOJ), but I don’t view this a much of a “surprise.”
Brand has a reputation as as a smart lawyer, perhaps the smartest of the “Sessions crew.” As opposed to someone like the buffoonish racist White Nationalist xenophobe Stevie Miller or the often incoherently bias spewing Sessions himself, Brand was a low-key “doer.” She actually did a “bang up job” of implementing the Sessions alt right, anti-civil rights, anti-due process, anti-minority, anti-civil-liberties, anti-diversity, homophobic agenda at the DOJ.
She obviously sees “Armageddon” coming to the realm of “Gonzo Apocalypto” and wants to get out before she is left in the “lose-lose” position (that both Trump & Sessions have a penchant for creating) of having to become “Trump’s patsy” in the Russia investigation or maintaining her integrity, getting fired, and getting on Trump’s “S-list.”
This way, she can get out of the way of the “train wreck,” make some real money, and preserve her reputation in both right-wing legal circles and with Trump. That sets her up as a possible Cabinet appointee in a future, somewhat saner GOP Administration, or even to be a Trump nominee for a Federal Judgeship.
“President Trump’s proposal to cut legal immigration rates would delay the date that white Americans become a minority of the population byas few as one or as many as five additional years, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
The plan, released by the White House last month, would scale back a program that allows people residing in the United States to sponsor family members living abroad for green cards, and would eliminate the “diversity visa program” that benefits immigrants in countries with historically low levels of migration to the United States. Together, the changes would disproportionately affect immigrants from Latin America and Africa.
The Census Bureau projects that minority groups will outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the United States in 2044. The Post’s analysis projects that, were Trump’s plan to be carried out, the date would be between 2045 and 2049, depending on how parts of it are implemented.
(The Post’s methodology for estimating the annual impact of Trump’s proposed cuts is explained in more detail at the bottom of this story. Projecting this far into the future entails certain assumptions that could alter the range, but demographic experts said The Post’s approach was reasonable.)
All told, the proposal could cut off entry for more than 20 million legal immigrants over the next four decades. The change could have profound effects on the size of the U.S. population and its composition, altering projections for economic growth and the age of the nation’s workforce, as well as shaping its politics and culture, demographers and immigration experts say.
“By greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants entering America, this proposal would reshape the future United States. Decades ahead, manyfewer of us would be nonwhite or have nonwhite people in our families,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a think tank that has been critical of the proposal. “Selectively blocking immigrant groups changes who America is. This is the biggest attempt in a century to do that.”
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Read the complete article, along with supporting “wonkie” stats, at the above link.
Yup! It is, and probably always has been, about White Nationalism and racism! Trump and his gang have just made it “fashionable” to be overtly racist again.
And, make no mistake about it, the REAL targets here are African American and Latino American citizens — immigrants are just a subterfuge. After all, if African Americans and Latinos were “good for America” why wouldn’t we want more of them and their families?
No, as Trumpie let on in his White House debacle, it’s all about trying (futilely) to make America “more White like Norway.” “Making America Great Again” is not so subtile “code language” for “Making America White Again.” Trump and his restrictionist cronies and misguided followers are not good for the future of America, or for the world.
“Even as President Donald Trump has led the most prolonged and public attack on the Justice Department in history, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has broken a long tradition of those in his position of protecting the institution from such interference by remaining largely silent, The New York Times reported Monday.
“What is unusual is the FBI and the Justice Department being attacked, the president leading the charge and the attorney general missing in action,” said Harvard Law Prof. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Geoerge W. Bush. “Why isn’t he sticking up for the department?”
Many prosecutors say Sessions’ tepid response is deflating morale among department employees and has increased fears prosecutors cannot depend on protection from political interference.
“Attorneys general swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not the president,” said Matthew Axelrod, a former Justice Department official who is a partner at Linklaters. “Institutions like the DOJ rely on their leaders to be a voice that defends them. It’s critically important to this institution that its leadership have its back.”
Although the Business Insider reported Sessions did praise his second-in-command Rod Rosenstein hours before the disputed Devin Nunes memo was released Friday by saying he represents “the kind of quality and leadership we want in the department” and he had “great confidence in the men and women of this department,” many commentators said that backing was quite meager when he added, “But no department is perfect.”
One such previous example often cited of far more courageous and strong backing is when ailing attorney general John Ashcroft from his hospital bed allowed his acting replacement, James Comey, to defy the Bush administration over a surveillance program that Justice Department lawyers had called unconstitutional.
Sessions, who has been heavily and publicly criticized by Trump in the past year, declined to comment to the Times.
“Sessions’ silence is evidence that Trump’s public neutering of anyone close to this investigation is working,” said Paul Pelletier, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia who was a long-time federal prosecutor. “It is deleterious to the whole criminal justice process.”
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The law enforcement community might have thought that they were getting a strong defender/advocate in the right-winger Sessions. After all, he’s out to bust those recreational legalized marijuana users and hard-working maids and janitors who have been in the U.S. without documents for decades waiting for the immigration reform that never came because he helped block it in the Senate.
But, what they actually got was a disingenuous “Gonzo Apocalypto” White Nationalist interested primarily in advancing his racially inspired agenda at the expense of the U.S. justice system and anyone who might stand in the way. Oh yeah, and a guy who is also very interested in “covering his own tail.” That’s why he didn’t hesitate to hire DC Lawyer Chuck Cooper to defend him once his continuing “memory lapses” came to light in the Russia investigation and things started “hitting the fan.”
A guy with no time for the rights of African-Americans Latinos, Immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, women, or apparently his subordinates and employees at the DOJ seems to have an excellent sense of his own rights and self-preservation. And, he isn’t so silent when it comes to an opportunity for slandering and diminishing the achievements of DACA recipients, Immigrants, sanctuary cities, asylum seekers, or people of color who are supposed to be entitled to justice and protection from his more or less “Whites only” DOJ.
“In his State of the Union address this week, President Trump congratulated his administration for having “taken historic actions to protect religious liberty.”
CIS frequently manipulates its findings to achieve results that further its anti-immigrant agenda. Last fall, for instance, CIS staffer Jessica Vaughn published a report exaggerating how many people would enter America via a process that CIS calls “chain migration” — the hate group’s preferred phrase to stigmatize the idea of immigrant families reuniting.
The phrase “chain migration” appeared twice in this week’s State of the Union, alongside dangerous and hateful misinformation about immigrants taken directly from CIS talking points.
Given the State of the Union’s author, that should be no surprise.
Senior adviser Stephen Miller, who took the lead writing the speech, served for years as an aide to Jeff Sessions, who has himself endorsed CIS’ work, spoken on a CIS panel, and taken whispered counsel from a former CIS staffer during immigration debates on the Senate floor.
When Sessions hired Miller fresh from Duke University, he did so at the recommendation of anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz. Now in the White House, Miller has been claimed and praised by extremists for advocating policy on hate group wish lists and pushing anti-immigrant narratives like the one we heard in the State of the Union.
“For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans,” Trump said Tuesday, reading Miller’s text off a teleprompter.
But studies consistently show that immigrants help — not hurt — the U.S. economy.
“Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives,” Trump said Tuesday — despite study after study finding immigrants commit crime at rates lowerthan native-born Americans, not higher.
Hate groups should not have a seat at the table on matters of national policy or influence what talking points to highlight in the State of the Union.
But thanks to Stephen Miller, they have exactly that.
The Editors
P.S. Here are some other pieces we think are valuable this week:
Yup. Sadly, Trump and his cohorts Sessions & Miller are out to divide, not unify America (except in the sense that they are unifying all decent Americans against their White Nationalist, racist agenda). For years, the GOP right-wing has “talked around” the racism and White Nationalism inherent in many of their programs and actions, using euphemisms like “reform,” “streamlining,” “right to work,” “combatting voter fraud,” etc. And, while occasionally it earns them a mild “tisk, tisk” from so-called “moderate” or “mainstream” Republicans, for the most part the spineless leadership of the GOP has given racism, White Nationalism, and xenophobia a “free Pass.”
Just look at the “hero of the GOP moderates,” Mitt Romney. “The Mittster” appears poised to reenter politics as the Junior Senator from Utah, replacing the retiring Orrin Hatch.
While carefully steering a moderate line on immigration during his governorship of “Blue State” Massachusetts, once nominated for the Presidency, Romney hired the notorious racist/White Nationalist/vote suppressor Kris Kobach as his “Immigration Advisor.” He then proceeded to largely adopt the White Nationalist line in immigration, including the famous Kobach initiative that sought to make life so miserable for hardworking, law-abiding undocumented residents (known in White Nationalist lingo as “illegals”) that they would “self-deport.”
Who is the real Mitt Romney? Nobody knows. But, my guess is that he’ll stand with the White Nationalists on immigration.
Although he has been sharply critical of Trump at times, it’s likely that when push comes to shove, he’ll line up behind the Trump-far right agenda just like other so-called “critics” such as Sen. “Bobby the Cork” Corker, Sen. Jeff Flake, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Susan Collins, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski when it came to “sticking it to America” with the GOP Tax ripoff. After all, remember how quick Mitt was to “pretzel himself up” and grovel before Trump on the off-chance that he would be allowed to serve the Great Con-Master as Secretary of State!
