Category: Matter of A-R-C-G-

PROFESSOR PHIL SCHRAG IN THE SEATTLE TIMES: FAMILY SEPARATION IS JUST PRELIMINARY TORTURE IN SESSIONS’S GULAG – THE NEXT STEP: DEPORTATION OF BROWN-SKINNED REFUGEE FAMILIES TO DEATH ZONES — “And so they will be deported back to the situations of rape, beating and slashing they fled.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-fate-worse-than-separation-awaits-central-american-families/

 

Professor Phil Schrag writes in theSeattle Times:

Under two court orders, the government is now reuniting migrant children with their mothers. Although the California court that ordered the reunification may permit continued detention of the families until their asylum claims can be decided, something worse than separation or detention awaits those mothers who are deported: rape and death.

Many of the mothers and children who previously could have won asylum will now be sent back to Central America, where they face horrific violence at the hands of the brutal gangs from which they fled.

That risk is now very great because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently changed policy that had allowed immigration judges to grant asylum to victims of domestic violence.

In 2016, I volunteered as a lawyer at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas. Every mother I met had fled to the United States to escape brutal domestic violence, threats of rape or death from gangs. Nearly all were found by asylum officers to have “credible fear of persecution,” enabling them to claim asylum in hearings before federal immigration judges.

Immigration advocates who work on the cases of mothers in the family detention centers in Texas estimate that more than 85 percent of them are at risk of serious bodily harm or death at the hands of violent men in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Federal statistics for family cases are unavailable, but until recently, many of the families fleeing from those countries eventually did win asylum from immigration judges. In the clinic that I codirect at Georgetown Law, and at other law-school clinics, students have won asylum for several of them. We also know from data collected by the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings that hundreds of other Central American families have obtained protection in immigration courts around the country. It had become well established that victims of domestic violence could win asylum. In some cases, asylum was also granted to families fleeing threats of violence in countries where the police are unable to prevent such violence.

But the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the Attorney General unilaterally to tell immigration judges how to interpret the law. Attorney General Sessions recently overruled the appellate case that supported asylum for domestic-violence victims.

Reversing that woman’s asylum grant, he wrote that her ex-husband “attacked her because of his pre-existing relationship with the victim” rather than because she was a member of a “group” of women who were violently attacked by husbands or gang members.

Our attorney general’s view of the law, apparently, is that domestic violence is a purely private affair, unrelated to social norms or patterns in countries in which such violence is endemic. By characterizing domestic violence as “private criminal activity,” even when the police can’t prevent or stop it, he also apparently intends to bar the victims from winning asylum.

Immigration judges don’t enjoy deporting genuine victims of violence. Perhaps some will find creative ways to grant relief to these families, rather than becoming cogs in the giant femicide machines of northern Central America. But many will feel bound to follow Sessions’ official guidance.

If the women fleeing for their lives have to prove that those who want to rape and kill them bear animus toward all women similarly situated, and not just their actual victims, they will be hard pressed to win asylum. And so they will be deported back to the situations of rape, beating and slashing they fled.

The public should not be distracted by the government’s reunification of families. The families now being released may stay together for a few months. But they remain in terrible peril because of the Trump administration’s lack of empathy and humanitarian concern for the parents and children who quite reasonably fear for their lives.

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

Phil is a good friend, and a practicing scholar who has actually been to the border. He knows that these most vulnerable individuals qualify as refugees under a correct application of legal standards and that they merit and deserve protection as human beings. He can also see how the system has been “gamed” by Sessions and how USCIS and EOIR are both complicit.

What’s being done by Sessions and his White Nationalist cabal is both illegal and immoral. Our shame as a nation will be enduring for 1) giving such a totally unqualified, corrupt, and evil individual a chance to take control of American immigration policy; and 2) not acting more quickly to stop him from implementing his racist agenda.

Meanwhile, his victims are likely to pay the price with their lives.

PWS

08-06-18

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“JUST SAY NO TO 1939: HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS” — My Remarks To The Americas Conference Of The International Association Of Refugee & Migration Judges, August 4, 2018

IMPLICIT BIAS IARMJ 08-03-18

JUST SAY NO TO 1939:  HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

 

By Paul Wickham Schmidt,

U.S. Immigration Judge, Retired

 

Americas Conference

International Association of Refugee & Migration Judges

 

Georgetown Law

August 4, 2018

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Good afternoon. I am pleased to be here. Some twenty years ago, along with then Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael J. Creppy, I helped found this Association, in Warsaw. I believe that I’m the only “survivor” of that illustrious group of “Original Charter Signers” present today. And, whoever now has possession of that sacred Charter can attest that my signature today remains exactly as it was then, boldly scrawling over those of my colleagues and the last paragraph of the document.

 

As the Americas’ Chapter Vice President, welcome and thank you for coming, supporting, and contributing to our organization and this great conference. I also welcome you to the beautiful campus of Georgetown Law where I am on the adjunct faculty.

 

I thank Dean Treanor; my long-time friend and colleague Professor Andy Schoenholtz, and all the other wonderful members of our Georgetown family; the IARMJ; Associate Director Jennifer Higgins, Dimple Dhabalia, and the rest of their team at USCIS; and, of course, our Americas President Justice Russell Zinn and the amazing Ross Patee from the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board who have been so supportive and worked so hard to make this conference a success.

 

I recognize that this is the coveted “immediately after lunch slot” when folks might rather be taking a nap. But, as the American country singer Toby Keith would say “It’s me, baby, with you wake up call!” In other words, I’m going to give you a glimpse into the “parallel universe” being operted in the United States.

 

In the past, at this point I would give my comprehensive disclaimer. Now that I’m retired, I can skip that part. But, I do want to “hold harmless” both the Association and Georgetown for my remarks. The views I express this afternoon are mine, and mine alone. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think. No “party line,” no “bureaucratic doublespeak,” so “sugar coating.” Just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

 

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we don’t have an implicit bias problem in the U.S. asylum adjudication system. The bad news: The bias is now, unfortunately, quite explicit.

 

Here’s a quote about refugees: “I guarantee you they are bad. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”

 

Here’s another one: “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”

 

Here’s another referencing the presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented residents of the U.S.: “Over the last 30 years, there have been many reasons for this failure. I’d like to talk about just one—the fraud and abuse in our asylum system.”

 

Here’s yet another: “We’ve had situations in which a person comes to the United States and says they are a victim of domestic violence, therefore they are entitled to enter the United States. Well, that’s obviously false but some judges have gone along with that.”

 

You might think that these anti-asylum, and in many cases anti-Latino, anti-female, anti-child, anti-asylum seeker, de-humanizing statements were made by members of some fringe, xenophobic group. But no, the first two are from our President; the second two are from our Attorney General.

 

These are the very officials who should be insuring that the life-saving humanitarian protection purposes of the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Convention Against Torture are fully carried out and that our country fully complies with the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which is binding on our country under the 1967 Protocol.

 

Let me read you a quote that I published yesterday on my blog, immigrationcourtside.com, from a young civil servant resigning their position with “EOIR,” otherwise known as our Immigration Court system, or, alternatively, as the sad little donkey from Winnie the Pooh.

 

I was born and raised in a country that bears an indelible and shameful scar—the birth and spreading of fascism. An ideology that, through its different permutations, almost brought the world as we know it to an end. Sadly, history has taught me that good countries do bad things—sometimes indescribably atrocious things. So, I have very little tolerance for authoritarianism, extremism, and unilateral and undemocratic usurpations of Constitutional rights. I believe that DOJ-EOIR’s plan to implement individual annual numerical performance measures—i.e., quotas—on Immigration Judges violates the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the DOJ’s own mission to “ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice.” This is not the job I signed up for. I strongly believe in the positive value of government, and that the legitimacy of our agency—and any other governmental institution for that matter—is given by “the People’s” belief in its integrity, fairness, and commitment to serve “the People.” But when the government, with its unparalleled might and coercive force, infringes on constitutionally enshrined rights, I only have two choices: (1) to become complicitous in what I believe is a flagrant constitutional violation, or (2) to resign and to hold the government accountable as a private citizen. I choose to resign because I cannot in good conscience continue serving my country within EOIR.

 

Strong words, my friends. But, words that are absolutely indicative of the travesty of justice unfolding daily in the U.S. Immigration Courts, particularly with respect to women, children, and other asylum seekers –- the most vulnerable among us. Indeed, the conspicuous absence from this conference of anyone currently serving as a judge in the U.S. Immigration Courts tells you all you really need to know about what’s happening in today’s U.S. justice system.

 

Today, as we meet to thoughtfully discuss how to save refugees, the reality is that U.S. Government officials are working feverishly at the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice on plans to end the U.S. refugee and asylum programs as we know them and to reduce U.S. legal immigration to about “zero.”

 

Sadly, the U.S. is not alone in these high-level attacks on the very foundations of our Convention and international protection. National leaders in Europe and other so-called “liberal democracies” — who appear to have erased the forces and circumstances that led to World War II and its aftermath from their collective memory banks — have made similar statements deriding the influence of immigrants and the arrival of desperate asylum seekers. In short, here and elsewhere our Convention and our entire international protection system are under attacks unprecedented during my career of more than four decades in the area of immigration and refugee protection.

 

As a result, judges and adjudicators throughout the world, like you, are under extreme pressure to narrow interpretations, expedite hearings, view asylum seekers in a negative manner, and produce more denials of protection.

 

So, how do we as adjudicators remain loyal to the principles of our Convention and retain our own integrity under such pressures? And, more to the point, what can I, as someone no longer involved in the day-to-day fray, contribute to you and this conference?

 

Of course, you could always do what I did — retire and fulfill a longtime dream of becoming an internet “gonzo journalist.” But, I recognize that not everyone is in a position to do that.

 

Moreover, if all the “good guys” who believe in our Convention, human rights, human dignity, and fair process leave the scene, who will be left to vindicate the rights of refugees and asylum seekers to protection? Certainly not the political folks who are nominally in charge of the protection system in the US and elsewhere.

 

So, this afternoon, I’m returning to that which brought this Association together two decades ago in Warsaw: our united commitment to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention; additionally, our commitment to fairness, education, international approaches, group problem solving, promoting best practices, and mutual support.

 

In the balance of my presentation, I’m going to tell you four things, taken from our Convention, that I hope will help you survive, prosper, and advance the aims of our Convention in an age of nationalist, anti-refugee, anti-asylum, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

 

 

 

 

BODY

 

Protect, Don’t Reject

 

First, “protect, don’t reject.” Our noble Convention was inspired by the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Many of you will have a chance to see this first hand at the Holocaust Museum.

 

Our Convention is a solemn commitment not to repeat disgraceful incidents such as the vessel St. Louis, which has also been memorialized in that Museum. For those of you who don’t know, in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of World War II a ship of German Jewish refugees unsuccessfully sought refuge in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, only to be rejected for some of the same spurious and racist reasons we now hear on a regular basis used to describe, deride, and de-humanize refugees. As a result, they were forced to return to Europe on the eve of World War II, where hundreds who should and could have been saved instead perished in the Holocaust that followed.

 

Since the beginning of our Convention, the UNHCR has urged signatory countries to implement and carry out “a generous asylum policy!” Beyond that, paragraphs 26 and 27 of the UN Handbookreiterate “Recommendation E” of the Convention delegates. This is the hope that Convention refugee protections will be extended to those in flight who might not fully satisfy all of the technical requirements of the “refugee” definition.

 

Therefore, I call on each of you to be constantly looking for legitimate ways in which to extend, rather than restrict, the life-saving protections offered by our Convention.

 

Give The “Benefit Of The Doubt”

 

Second, “give the benefit of the doubt.” Throughout our Convention, there is a consistent theme of recognizing the difficult, often desperate, situation of refugees and asylum seekers and attendant difficulties in proof, recollection, and presentation of claims. Therefore, our Convention exhorts us in at least four separate paragraphs, to give the applicant “the benefit of the doubt” in assessing and adjudicating claims.

 

As a sitting judge, I found that this, along with the intentionally generous “well-founded fear” standard, enunciated in the “refugee” definition and reinforced in 1987 by the U.S. Supreme Court and early decisions of our Board of Immigration Appeals implementing the Supreme Court’s directive, often tipped the balance in favor of asylum seekers in “close cases.”

 

 

 

 

Don’t Blame The Victims

 

Third, “don’t blame the victims.” The purpose of our Convention is to protect victims of persecution, not to blame them for all societal ills, real and fabricated, that face a receiving signatory country. Too much of today’s heated rhetoric characterizes legitimate asylum seekers and their families as threats to the security, welfare, heath, and stability of some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, based on scant to non-existent evidence and xenophobic myths.

 

In my experience, nobody really wants to be a refugee. Almost everyone would prefer living a peaceful, productive stable life in their country of nationality. But, for reasons beyond the refugee’s control, that is not always possible.

 

Yes, there are some instances of asylum fraud. But, my experience has been that our DHS does an excellent job of ferreting out, prosecuting, and taking down the major fraud operations. And, they seldom, if ever, involve the types of claims we’re now seeing at our Southern Border.

 

I’m also aware that receiving significant numbers of refugee claimants over a relatively short period of time can place burdens on receiving countries. But, the answer certainly is not to blame the desperate individuals fleeing for their lives and their often pro bono advocates!

 

The answer set forth in our Convention is for signatory countries to work together and with the UNHCR to address the issues that are causing refugee flows and to cooperate in distributing refugee populations and in achieving generous uniform interpretations of the Convention to discourage “forum shopping.” Clearly, cranking up denials, using inhumane and unnecessary detention, stirring up xenophobic fervor, and limiting or blocking proper access to the refugee and asylum adjudication system are neither appropriate nor effective solutions under our Convention.

 

 

 

 

Give Detailed, Well-Reasoned, Individualized Decisions

 

Fourth, and finally, “give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.” These are the types of decisions encouraged by our Convention and to promote which our Association was formed. Avoid stereotypes and generalities based on national origin; avoid personal judgments on the decision to flee or seek asylum; avoid political statements; be able to explain your decision in legally sufficient, yet plainly understandable terms to the applicant, and where necessary, to the national government.

 

Most of all, treat refugee and asylum applicants with impartiality and the uniform respect, sensitivity, and fairness to which each is entitled, regardless of whether or not their claim under our Convention succeeds.

 

CONCLUSION

 

In conclusion, I fully recognize that times are tough in the “refugee world.” Indeed, as I tell my Georgetown students, each morning when I wake up, I’m thankful for two things: first, that I woke up, never a given at my age; second, that I’m not a refugee.

 

But, I submit that tough times are exactly when great, independent, and courageous judging and adjudication are necessary to protect both applicants from harm and governments from doing unwise and sometimes illegal and immoral things that they will later regret.

 

I have offered you four fairly straightforward ways in which adhering to the spirit of our Convention can help you, as judges and adjudicators, retain integrity while complying with the law: protect, don’t reject; give the benefit of the doubt; don’t blame the victims; and give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.

 

Hopefully, these suggestions will also insure that all of you will still be around and employed for our next conference.

 

Thanks for listening, have a great rest of our conference, and do great things! May Due Process and the spirit of our noble Convention and our great organization guide you every day in your work and in your personal life! Due Process forever!

 

 

(08-06-18)

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

PWS

08-06-18

 

 

 

 

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U.S. WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME PLANNING TO JOIN WORLD’S MOST REPRESSIVE AND SELFISH BANANA REPUBLICS BY TOTALLY ABANDONING REFUGEE COMMITMENT — “ZERO IMMIGRATION” APPEARS TO BE GOAL OF RACISTS MILLER, SESSIONS, & TRUMP!

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/02/trump-immigration-refugee-caps-759708?cid=apn

Nahal Toosi – Editorial – POLITICO staff, January 23, 2014. (M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO)
Thanks for looking! Don’t hesitate to like us! © Caffery Photo (www.cafferyphoto.com)

From Politico:

‘Miller is not deterred’: Top immigration aide pushing cuts in refugee numbers

The president suggested going as low as just 5,000, according to a former administration official.

President Donald Trump last year advocated dropping the refugee cap as low as 5,000 people, down from 50,000, according to a former administration official – a cut far more drastic than even his most hawkish adviser, Stephen Miller, proposed at the time.

Ultimately, the administration restricted to 45,000 the flow of refugees into the U.S. this fiscal year – the lowest since the program began in 1980, and less than half the target of 110,000 that President Barack Obama set in his last planning cycle.

But the discussion set the terms of the administration’s refugee policymaking. Now Miller and a group of like-minded aides are pressing to reduce drastically the number of people entering the U.S., both legally and illegally.

The immigration hawks are moving forward despite the blowback they got over their imposition of a “zero tolerance” prosecution policy at the southern border that resulted in the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration officials and outside White House advisers.

One Republican close to the White House and a former White House official familiar with the discussions predicted the cap could fall as low as 15,000 in 2019, continuing a contraction of overall immigration, both legal and illegal. A tiny group of key administration officials led by the National Security Council’s Mira Ricardel were planning to meet Friday to debate the coming year’s refugee cap. Late Thursday, however, a White House official said the meeting about refugees had been postponed. It is not yet determined when it will be rescheduled.

“Inside the Washington beltway, this is a numbers game that’s being carried out by people who don’t care about refugees and are orienting this to their base,” said Anne Richard, who was assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration in the Obama administration

Miller, a policy adviser to Trump since the campaign and, before that, an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, has made immigration his signature issue. White House officials are loath to cross him given his passion for the subject and his close relationship with the president, according to people familiar with dynamics inside the administration.

“Miller is not deterred,” said one Republican close to the White House. “He is an adamant believer in stopping any immigration, and the president thinks it plays well with his base.”

Miller declined to comment. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Behind the scenes, Miller, 32, has been contacting every relevant Cabinet secretary to convey his interpretation of the president’s thoughts on the refugee cap in an effort to sway the decision, said a former White House official familiar with the discussions.

The wild card is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. No one is quite sure where he stands on the matter – but his State Department is stocked with Miller allies, including deputy assistant secretary of state Andrew Veprek and John Zadrozny, who’s been named to Pompeo’s policy planning staff.

“Is Pompeo going to let his department be used by Miller as an arm of the Domestic Policy Council?” asked the former White House official. “Is he going to take his marching orders from a thirtysomething who’s orchestrated a hostile takeover? This is the moment for Pompeo to show that he is running his own show over there.”

When asked for comment, a State Department official said “each year the president makes an annual determination, after appropriate consultation with Congress, regarding the refugee admissions ceiling for the following fiscal year. That determination is expected to be made prior to the start of fiscal year 2019 on October 1, 2018.”

The refugee cap is just one of several hawkish policies that Miller and his like-minded allies throughout the federal agencies are pursuing on immigration. Through rule-making and executive authority, the Trump administration continues to explore ways to narrow asylum eligibility requirements; to detain together families who cross the border illegally; and to reduce the number of people who acquire legal immigration status through “cancellation of removal” – one of the few avenues left for certain undocumented immigrants.

Inside the country, the Miller cadre intends to make life more difficult for undocumented immigrants already living and working here. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said another Republican close to the White House, intends to continue with its increased focus on worksite enforcement.

This long laundry list of policies to reduce immigration comes on the heels of the “zero-tolerance” policy, which the administration effectively ended following outcry from conservative religious leaders, Republican lawmakers, and even many White House staffers. The administration is now under a federal court order to reunify the parents and children that it separated as a result of the policy.

Miller was distraught in the aftermath of the zero tolerance fiasco, said two Republicans close to the White House. He considered zero tolerance an essential component to his efforts to deter immigration. For his troubles, he got heckled at D.C. restaurants, prompting him in one instance angrily to pitch $80 worth of takeout sushi into a trash bin. Protesters showed up at his apartment complex chanting, “Stephen Miller/ You’re a villain/ Locking up/ innocent children.”

But Miller and other immigration hardliners quickly recovered, and have continued to hold under-the-radar meetings to pursue policies that already are altering the U.S.’s self-perception as a nation of immigrants. White House chief of staff John Kelly is broadly supportive of these efforts, and Miller has been careful to keep his plans fairly secret, speaking only infrequently in larger White House meetings, according to two Republicans close to the White House.

Despite signing an executive order that largely reversed the zero tolerance policy that Miller championed, Trump strongly supports Miller’s efforts because he views immigration as a winning political issue as he heads into the 2018 midterms–one that puts Democrats on the defensive.

“On the political side of things, the Democrats have put themselves now in more peril than ever,” a White House official told POLITICO in June during the height of the family separations. “Through their uninformed, highly inaccurate hysteria, they have elevated the issue of immigration and border security to the forefront of the mid-terms, and this is a much better issue for Republicans. So the reality is they are turning off a lot of swing voters, and they are also motivating a lot of Republican-leaning moderate and conservative voters to go out and vote.”

A recent Gallup poll found the share of Republicans who agreed that immigration was the country’s most important problem doubled at the height of the administration’s family separations policy. In July, 35 percent of Republicans called it a top issue, up from 17 percent in May.

The question remains whether the increased Republican interest in immigration represented support for or opposition to Trump’s family separations policy. A strong majority of Republican voters — 76 percent — approved of how Trump handled family separations at the border, according to a Quinnipiac University pollfrom early July. But the same poll found a similar percentage of Republicans — 70 percent — agreeing that the Trump administration must be held responsible for reunifying separated parents and children.

In Republican congressional primaries, candidates have adopted Trump’s tone on immigration, but no one knows how that will play in the general election, according to Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican strategist and Trump critic.

“It pleases Donald Trump, it pleases a certain portion of the base,” Wilson said. “But it’s not without its own downside risks.” Among these, he said, is alienating suburban women and Hispanic voters. “You’re holding onto a base you were going to hold onto anyway.”

Limiting refugee numbers may also upset religious groups that historically have handled resettlement for the government. If the Trump administration opts for a lower refugee ceiling, that may also scale back funding to the nine religious and charity agencies that facilitate the process nationwide.

The State Department’s refugee bureau signaled a possible spending drawdown in a March request for resettlement proposals, saying it “expects to fund a smaller number of recipient agencies” in fiscal year 2019.

Refugee organizations will lobby Pompeo, publicly and privately, to defend the program. The secretary praised “the strength, courage, and resilience of millions of refugees worldwide” during World Refugee Day in June, but also is considering the possible elimination of the department’s refugee office.

“The refugee resettlement program is about so much more than just saving lives,” said Melanie Nezer, senior vice president of public affairs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a resettlement agency. “It’s also a diplomatic tool, it’s a foreign policy tool, it stabilizes countries that are hosting the refugees.”

The United Nations refugee agency has identified 1.4 million refugees worldwide in need of resettlement, of whom only a small number are placed each year. In 2017, for instance, the U.N. sent just 75,000 refugees to receiving nations for resettlement, according to an annual report.

Kay Bellor, a vice president with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said refugees could be stranded in host countries such as Turkey and Lebanon if the U.S. doesn’t open its doors.

“They’re languishing in refugee camps, their kids are not getting educated, they’re not contributing economically. It’s a pretty horrible situation,” she said. “You’re going to warehouse people who otherwise would be able to move on with their lives.”

Bellor added that it would send a “terrible signal” to host countries. “It’s hard to imagine how this might impact their response,” she said.

The Trump administration argued last year that refugee resources should be shifted to reduce the backlog of asylum seekers in the U.S., which stood at more than 300,000 cases in January.

Nezer doesn’t accept that rationale. “There’s no credible evidence that getting rid of the program serves any purpose other than to keep people out,” she said.

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

Will the asylum system, which is created by statute, and the withholding of removal system, which is guaranteed by statute enforcing an international treaty obligation, be “the last stand of America” as country that respects human rights and the rule of law?

Perhaps asylum will continue; but, not if Jeff Sessions has anything to say about it. He’s actively in the process of “deconstructing” U.S. asylum law and reducing it to nothing.

This Congress won’t stop him. Will the Article III Courts? While they have been critical of many aspects of the BIA’s performance and Sessions’s border policies, they have been avoiding the real issue: How can you have Due Process of law in a system run by an overt White Nationalist xenophobic racist with no respect for the Constitution, human dignity, or the rule of law and who publicly favors one party, the DHS.  Not much respect for the Article IIIs either as shown by the flippant, disrespectful, disingenuous “in your face judge” response to Judge Sabraw by Sessions’s DOJ lawyers in the “child separation” case. (Judge not amused; more on that later.)

If the Article IIIs, including the spineless Supremes, don’t have the courage to stand up to this authoritarian scofflaw Administration on the immigration charade that is unfolding right now, they might find themselves swallowed up  by the Trump Swamp themselves. And, I don’t know who will be “willing or able” to throw them a lifeline.

PWS

08-02-18

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

LA TIMES: SESSIONS IS “DECONSTRUCTING” OUR ASYLUM SYSTEM, AND IT’S A NATIONAL OUTRAGE THAT CONGRESS SHAMEFULLY REFUSES TO FIX – “Many more people with legitimate claims are likely being sent home to perilous conditions despite federal and international laws recognizing the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries. That is unconscionable.”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=8434794c-eb73-4a2e-a2cd-3dafee637733

By the LA Times Editorial Board:

A shameful retreat on asylum

Here’s the disheartening reality about the Trump administration’s policies toward those arriving at the borders seeking asylum: Many more people with legitimate claims are likely being sent home to perilous conditions despite federal and international laws recognizing the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries. That is unconscionable.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University reports that immigration judges — who work for the Justice Department, not the federal courts — are granting asylum seekers’ appeals half as often as they did a year ago. Through June, courts revived less than 15% of the asylum claims that had been rejected by immigration agents, who make the initial determination whether an asylum seeker had a credible fear of persecution if returned home.

What changed from the first half of 2017? The reduction of successful appeals coincided with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions’ comments that the asylum system “is being gamed” (there’s little evidence of that), his demands that immigration courts handle appeals more quickly, and the roll-out of performance quotas to force immigration judges to clear cases faster. That’s what changed.

The TRAC analysis further found that rate of successful appeals varies wildly by geographic region and even among judges within the same regional court — a systemic inconsistency that predates the Trump administration. That justice is so fickle is neither fair nor meets our moral and legal obligations to those fleeing persecution.

We can rail against the Justice Department’s failings, but the responsibility rests with Congress. It granted the department wide latitude in handling asylum requests from people facing persecution based on race, religion, race, political beliefs, nationality or membership in a social group.

That last, ill-defined category gave the government flexibility as times and needs warranted, but it also has led to uncertainty and politicization. Sessions, for instance, recently overturned an Obama-era immigration court definition that made asylum available to women who faced domestic violence in countries where police failed to protect them. So a political change in the attorney general’s office can weigh more heavily than precedents set by immigration judges.

This is fixable if we ever get a Congress willing to compromise and craft comprehensive immigration reforms framed within a humanitarian context and informed by the nation’s best interests — in terms of diversity and economic growth — and not one that panders to the current mood in the capital of nationalistic antipathy for the foreign-born. In the meantime, we must insist that people who are deserving of sanctuary receive it, and not get turned away to satisfy the current political whims.

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

What’s happening to our U.S. Immigration Courts and to our asylum system is indeed a national outrage that requires Congressional action. That corrective action, at a minimum, must 1) establish an independent, Article I Immigration Court outside the Executive Branch; and 2) specify that persecution based upon gender constitutes persecution on account of a “particular social group.”

Not going to happen under this Congress! That’s why regime change is so critical. And, getting out the vote this November and thereafter is key to the majority no longer being subject to the whims of a toxic minority Government that has abandoned our Constitution,  human rights, human decency, common sense, and the common good.

PWS

08-02-18

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”
  3. TRAC: THE SESSIONS EFFECT — DENIALS OF DAY IN COURT FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS SPIKE — Country Conditions Remain Horrible & Asylum Statute Hasn’t Changed, But Many More Asylum Applicants Now Denied Access To Immigration Court Hearings — Huge Individual Discrepancies Among Judges On “Credible Fear” Findings!
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

GONZO’S WORLD: HOW BAD WAS SESSIONS’S DECISION IN MATTER OF A-B-, GRATUITOUSLY REWRITING U.S. ASYLUM LAW TO STRIP WOMEN, VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, & GANG VIOLENCE OF ESSENTIAL ASYLUM PROTECTION? – So Bad, That House GOP-Controlled Appropriations Committee Unanimously Approved A Provision That Would Reverse Matter of A-B-!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gop-led-house-committee-rebuffs-trump-administration-on-immigrant-asylum-claim-policy/2018/07/26/3c52ed52-911a-11e8-9b0d-749fb254bc3d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e5e5bb03b491

Seung Min Kim reports for the Washington Post:

A GOP-led House committee delivered a rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration policies this week — an unusual bipartisan move that may ultimately spell trouble for must-pass spending measures later this year.

The powerful House Appropriations Committee passed a measure that would essentially reverse Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s guidanceearlier this year that immigrants will not generally be allowed to use claims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum. The provision was adopted as part of a larger spending bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security, an already contentious measure because of disputes over funding for President Trump’s border wall.

But one influential Senate Republican and ally of the White House warned that keeping the asylum provision could sink the must-pass funding bill, and other conservatives who support a tougher line on immigration began denouncing it Thursday.

“Why is @HouseAppropsGOP voting to undermine AG Sessions’s asylum reforms & throw open our borders to fraud & crime?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), who often has Trump’s ear on key issues. “The amendment they adopted [Wednesday] is the kind of thing that will kill the DHS spending bill.”

The amendment, written by Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), would bar funding from government efforts to carry out Sessions’s asylum directive. It passed the committee unanimously.

Sessions laid out guidance last month that said victims of domestic abuse and gang violence that is “perpetrated by non-governmental actors” will generally not be allowed to obtain asylum in the United States, an effort he said was meant to cut down on fraud.

[Sessions: Victims of domestic abuse and gang violence generally won’t qualify for asylum]

But Democrats and immigrant rights advocates have criticized Sessions’s move, warning that it would disqualify tens of thousands of immigrants fleeing violence in their home countries. His decision came as the administration was implementing a “zero-tolerance” policy that subjected everyone who crossed the border illegally to criminal prosecution, causing migrant parents to be separated from their children.

One senior Republican official said it was unlikely that the provision would stay intact once the House and Senate merge their spending measures, adding that “not every vote taken is to make law, but to move the process forward.”

With their respective bills for DHS funding, the two chambers are already headed for a clash over border wall spending, with the House allocating about $5 billion for it, while the Senate sets aside $1.6 billion.

Still, both advocates and opponents of more generous immigration policies were surprised at the committee’s move to approve the asylum measure unanimously.

“I think there was a general impression that things like that, that would undermine what the administration’s policies are, would be partisan fights and partisan battles,” said Josh Breisblatt, a senior policy analyst for the American Immigration Council.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), who leads the panel overseeing DHS funding, spoke in favor of the Democratic-sponsored provision, saying: “As a son of a social worker, I have great compassion for those victims of domestic violence anywhere, especially as it concerns those nations that turn a blind eye to crimes of domestic violence.”

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that Yoder flew on Air Force One just this week and that Trump had already singled out Yoder for praise on Twitter, thanking him for securing the $5 billion in wall money in the DHS spending measure.

“He got the funding for the wall in there, and the president endorsed him, and he approved this amendment and spoke in favor of it,” Krikorian said. “That basically makes the wall not all that useful, at least for immigration purposes.”

Seung Min KimSeung Min Kim is a White House reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Trump administration through the lens of Capitol Hill. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, she spent more than eight years at Politico, primarily covering the Senate and immigration policy.

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

Well, at least Sessions’s scofflaw actions are creating some bipartisanship in the House of all places (even though, as the article suggests, there is almost no chance of this actually becoming law).

You know folks are doing the smart and right thing when leading restrictionist zanies like Sen. Tom Cotton and Mark Krikorian go bonkers!

PWS

07-27-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. MORE ARTICLES FEATURE “GANG OF RETIRED JUDGES’ STATEMENT” RE: SESSIONS’S OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK ON SETTLED PRINCIPLES OF PROTECTION LAW! — Media Exposing Corrupt, Inherently Unfair, Biased “Court” System Where The Prejudiced Prosecutor “Cooks” The Results to His Liking! — Jeff Sessions Degrades The American Legal System & Our National Values Each Day He Remains In Office!
  3. COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“
  4. CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!

1ST CIR. EXPOSES BIA’S FLAWED ANALYSIS, HOSTILITY TO ASYLUM SEEKERS — BIA COMMITTED “MULTIPLE ERRORS” IN REVERSING ASYLUM GRANT – ROSALES JUSTO V. SESSIONS – Sessions’s Bias, Push to Truncate Already Flawed EOIR Process & Deny Asylum En Masse Could Lead To Absolute Disaster In Circuit Courts & Breakdown Of Entire System!

1stCirUnable17-1457P-01A

Rosales Justo v. Sessions, 1st Cir., 07-16-18, published

PANEL: Torruella, Lipez, and Kayatt Circuit Judges

OPINION BY: Judge Lipez

KEY QUOTE:

In sum, the BIA’s justifications for its holding that it was clearly erroneous for the IJ to find that the Mexican government is unable to protect Rosales reflect multiple errors. The BIA failed to consider evidence of the Mexican government’s inability to protect Rosales and his nuclear family, as distinct from evidence of the willingness of the police to investigate the murder of Rosales’s son. That error in conflating unwillingness

page28image3089706608page28image3089706880page28image3089707152page28image3089707424page28image3089707968page28image3089708240page28image3089708512

– 28 –

and inability was compounded when the BIA discounted country condition reports which, when combined with Rosales’s testimony about the particular circumstances of his case, were sufficient to support the IJ’s finding that the police in Guerrero would be unable to protect Rosales from persecution by organized crime.

The BIA committed further error by concluding that the IJ’s finding that Rosales did not report threats by organized crime to the police refuted the IJ’s ultimate finding of inability. The BIA both ignored our precedent stating that a failure to report a crime does not undermine an assertion of inability if a report would have been futile, and failed to consider evidence in the record that would support a finding of futility, thereby misapplying the clear error standard. Moreover, in another misapplication of the clear error standard, the BIA incorrectly concluded that the IJ’s inability finding was clearly erroneous because the Mexican government’s failure to protect Rosales was indistinguishable from the struggles of any government to combat crime, when the record before the IJ supported a finding that it was distinguishable.

Because of these errors, we grant Rosales’s petition and remand to the BIA for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. See I.N.S. v. Ventura, 537 U.S. 12, 16-17 (2002) (per curiam) (holding that remand to the BIA is generally the appropriate remedy when the BIA commits a legal error).

So ordered.

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

  • Nice to see a Circuit Court, particularly a fairly conservative one like the First Circuit, take strong stand against the nonsense and mockery of Due Process and justice going on at EOIR under Sessions;
  • Expect more of these in the future as the “Just Find A Way To Deny & Deport” initiative by the xenophobic, scofflaw AG goes into high gear at EOIR;
  • Quite contrary to everything Sessions has been saying, which completely ignores the lessons of the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Cardoza Fonseca, asylum law is supposed to be interpreted and applied generously in favor of those seeking life saving protection;
  • This case illustrates the importance of dissent at the BIA, as the First Circuit basically adopted the correct interpretation of the law and facts set forth by a dissenting (female) BIA Appellate Immigration Judge;
  • This also shows the importance of full three-judge review by the BIA on asylum cases, rather than single judge panels or summary denials;
  • The number of fundamental errors committed by the BIA panel majority in reversing this asylum grant and the persistence of the DOJ in advancing untenable legal positions before the Court of Appeals is simply appalling, even if consistent with Session’s own lack of scholarship and total disrespect for fundamental fairness to respondents in Immigration Court;
  • This case also highlights a chronic problem in EOIR asylum adjudication: conflating “willingness to protect” with “ability to protect.”  Too many Immigration Judges and BIA Appellate Judges seize on ineffective efforts by local police, cosmetic improvements by governments, and failure to seek (largely useless and perhaps actually harmful) police assistance to find that there has been “no failure of state protection;”
  • That’s exactly what Sessions himself did in his fundamentally flawed opinion in Matter of A-B-. He encouraged judges to conflate ineffective efforts to protect with actual ability to protect. And, his comparison of how domestic violence is policed and prosecuted in the United States with El Salvador’s pathetic efforts in behalf of domestic violence victims was simply preposterous;
  • This decision also addresses another chronic problem at EOIR: judges “cherry picking” the record and particularly Department of State Country Reports for the information supporting a denial, even though the record taken as a whole  lends support to the respondent’s claim;
  • Once again, how would any unrepresented applicant make the kind of potentially winning asylum case presented by this respondent with the assistance of counsel? When are Courts of Appeals finally going to state the obvious: proceeding to adjudicate an asylum claim by an unrepresented respondent is a per se denial of Due Process!
  • This case should be taken as a message that Immigration Judges and BIA panels following the misguided Sessions’ dicta on “unwilling or unable to protect,” rather than applying the correct standards set forth by most Circuits are going to be getting lots of “do overs” from the Circuit Courts;
  • How could anybody justify “speeding up” a system with this many fundamental (and life-threatening) flaws to begin with? Under Sessions, EOIR is on track to becomes veritable “reversible error factory” — as well as a “Death Railroad!”

PWS

07-20-18

Related posts:

  1. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. HERE’S WHY NIELSEN’S LATEST ATTACK ON REFUGEES AND THE RULE OF LAW COULD BACKFIRE! – ALSO, AN ADDENDUM: “MY MESSAGE TO THE NDPA”
  4. COMPLICITY HAS COSTS:  Article III Judges’ Association Apparently Worries That Trump, Barr, GOP Toadies Starting To “Treat Them Like Immigration Judges” — Do They Fear Descent To Status Of Mere Refugees, Immigrants, “Dreamers,” Unaccompanied Children, Or Others Treated As “Less Than Persons” By Trump, 5th Cir., 11th Cir., 9th Cir., & The Supremes’ “J.R. Five?” 

GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!

Here’s Emily Kassie’s short documentary containing actual descriptions from victims and their abusers. Also starring refugee advocates Michele Brane of the Women Refugee Commisson, Barbara Hines, Esq., and others who “blow the whistle” on Sessions’s depraved policies and the unnecessary pain and suffering they are causing!

I Just Simply Did What He Wanted’: Sexual Abuse Inside Immigrant Detention Facilities – Video – NYTimes.com

By Emily Kassie

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005559121/sexual-abuse-inside-ice-detention-facilities.html

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So, get this! Gonzo, for no particular reason, reverses a well-established, working precedent — agreed upon by all parties, sponsored by DHS, and the product of 15 years of painstaking work by attorneys on both sides — that protected abused women under our refugee laws. This precedent, Matter of A-R-C-G-, actually saved lives and helped some of the most deserving and long-suffering refugees I dealt with in my decades long career enter and contribute to U.S. society. It was a perfect example of how asylum law could and should work to protect the most vulnerable! A “win – win” for the refugees and for our country!

Then, Sessions intentionally creates a system where these already abused refugees are detained and further abused and persecuted in the United States. Then, he returns them (without fair consideration of their claims for protection) to the countries in which they were persecuted to face further abuse, torture, or death.

The problems faced by women in detention were well-known in the Obama Administration. In fact, the Trump Administration immediately abolished the office within DHS that had been established to deal with allegations of sexual abuse. So, this isn’t “mere negligence.” It’s knowing and intentional misconduct! Usually, that results in criminal prosecution or civil liability!

How perverse is Sessions? I’ll go back to Eugene Robinson’s question from a recent blog posted on “courtside:” Why aren’t kidnappers, child abusers, and promoters of sexual abuse like Sessions and his White Nationalist cronies in jail rather than holding high office? https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2O8

WE ARE DIMINISHING OURSELVES AS A NATION, BUT, THAT WON’T STOP HUMAN MIGRATION!

PWS

07-17-18

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!
  2. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  3. GONZO’S WORLD: THIS IS WHY HE STAYS: UNDERNEATH ALL THE “TRUMP NOISE” SESSIONS IS METHODICALLY ERADICATING DUE PROCESS, PERVERTING THE LAW, & TURNING ONE OF THE LARGEST FEDERAL COURT SYSTEMS INTO A “KILLING FLOOR” TARGETING OUR MOST VULNERABLE & DESERVING REFUGEES! — “[Sessions] is dumbing down the judges and treating them like assembly-line workers whose only job is to stamp out final orders of removal.”
  4. NYT: NO, THIS ISN’T OUT OF A CHARLES DICKENS NOVEL – IT’S ABOUT HOW KIDS ARE TREATED IN JEFF SESSIONS’S “AMERICAN KIDDIE GULAG” – “[T]he environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.”

INSIDE SESSIONS’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” – DESPERATE PLEAS FOR HELP FROM REFUGEE PARENTS IN THE GULAG! – “We feel like there is no way out of this nightmare because the asylum officials and the judges are against us. Please help us and bring justice to Texas!”

http://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/separated-parents-open-letter-to-us/index.html

CNN REPORTS:

‘Each day is more painful than the last’: Parents separated from kids beg US public for help

A section of the letter to the US people from parents at the Port Isabel Service Detention Center.

A section of the letter to the US people from parents at the Port Isabel Service Detention Center.

(CNN)In an act of sheer desperation, dozens of migrant parents separated from their children wrote an open letter to the US public, hoping someone — anyone — can help get them out of this “nightmare.”

The joint letter, from 54 detainees at the Port Isabel Service Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, said the parents came to save the lives of their children. That their children don’t recognize their voices anymore. That they never expected the trauma they’re enduring.
Here’s the text of the parents’ letter, translated from Spanish:
July 15, 2018
To the United States public:
Please help us. We are desperate parents.
We are not criminals, but we need your help.
We came to this country to save our lives and the lives of our children. We were not prepared for the nightmare that we faced here. The United States government, kidnapped our children with tricks and didn’t give us the opportunity to say goodbye.
It’s been more than a month and we haven’t been told much about our children. They are living in places with strangers. We’ve been told that some children are living with new families. Each day is more painful that the last.
Many of us have only spoken with our children once when we have the opportunity to speak with them (which is very difficult because the social worker never answers.) The children cry, they don’t recognize our voices and they feel abandoned and unloved. This makes us feel dead in life. Even with all this trauma, nightmares, anguish and pain that this government is imposing on us and our children, we still have to fight for our asylum cases. But the government doesn’t give us the opportunity to fight our cases and the judges don’t give us the opportunity to speak up.
The asylum official is denying nearly all cases and so are the judges. They don’t give us an opportunity to explain why we came here. We also feel pressured to sign for our deportation as a quick means to reunite with our children.
We feel like there is no way out of this nightmare because the asylum officials and the judges are against us.
Please help us and bring justice to Texas!

Letter translated by CNN’s Rosa Flores.

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Each day, Jeff Sessions mocks our legal system, degrades America as a country, and each of us as human beings! As those he persecutes appear more human, we are dehumanized by allowing Sessions to continue his program of child abuse!

PWS

07-16-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!
  3. EOIR TARGETS UNACCOMPANIED KIDS FOR DEPORATION RAILROAD!
  4. HOW “AMERICA’S KILLER COURTS” PROMOTE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” — HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: TRUMP & HIS WHITE NATIONALIST SYCOPHANTS & TOADIES TOUT LAWLESS POLICIES THAT VIOLATE LEGAL OBLIGATIONS & HELP KILL, RAPE, TORTURE THOSE RETURNED TO EL SALVADOR — Supremes & Article III Judiciary Complicit In Gross Human Rights Violations! 

NEWS FROM JUST OUTSIDE SESSIONS’S “AMERICAN KIDDIE GULAG” – MOTHER & SON “CAMP OUT” NEARBY IN SEARCH OF TRUTH ABOUT OUR NATION’S OFFICIAL PROGRAM OF CHILD ABUSE! — “These children are victims of state-sanctioned violence — they are essentially experiencing child abuse — and the organizations claiming to serve children are wholly complicit in this abuse.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mom-camping-tender-age-shelter_us_5b476891e4b0e7c958f8cbd8

Ashley Casale writesin HuffPost:

In June, once school let out in rural Dutchess County, New York, I packed up my 7-year-old son and drove 2,054 miles to the Texas-Mexico border. I needed to see with my own eyes what is happening to migrant children separated from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s escalated “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

I told my son we were going, in person, to demand the reunion of children and parents. Gabe was up for the trip, no questions asked, as he always is when I tell him there is activism to be done. After two nights of sleeping in our car, three days of driving, and 1,764 inquiries of “are we there yet,” we arrived in Texas.

We visited six shelters in the border towns of Raymondville, Combes and Brownsville, and asked for tours. We were denied. Next, we asked to speak with representatives from BCFS or Southwest Key Programs, the organizations that operate these shelters. We were denied again. We were given business cards with the names of public relations officials to call, and repeatedly directed back to the Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families.

None of these contacts promptly returned my calls. So we pitched a tent outside Casa El Presidente, the “tender age” shelter operated by Southwest Key Programs in Brownsville, where children from the ages of 0 to 12 are being held, and we hunkered down for the night. Two weeks later, we are still here.

Our message is this: Reunite these small children with their detained parents now.

Every morning between 9 and 9:45 we can hear the sounds of children playing not far from our encampment. To get close enough to the opaque playground fence outside the shelter, we have to trespass in front of an abandoned building on the adjacent lot. From there, we can see the shapes of children running around — their little feet under the fence, the balls they are playing with flying up in the air. But we must make our glimpses stealthy and quick: Within 15 minutes, without fail, a police car arrives and circles the abandoned lot. Someone inside Southwest Key Programs has called the authorities because we have come too close to seeing the detained children.

A photo Gabe took of kids playing in the back of Casa El Presidente. In the bottom left corner are freelancers for The N

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
A photo Gabe took of kids playing in the back of Casa El Presidente. In the bottom left corner are freelancers for The New York Times.

We have become buddies with news crews who are covering what is happening at Casa El Presidente, exchanging Gatorade and bags of ice and tidbits of news as they wait patiently, sometimes all day, for an official rumored to be visiting the shelter to finally appear. On the Thursday of our first week here, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen supposedly visited, but this was not confirmed until long after her convoy of vehicles left. The members of the media here know as little about what’s going on as we do.

Last Saturday, we met a mother, Lesvia, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala with her son, Yudem, almost two months ago. She was taken into custody 56 days ago and finally released from the T. Don Hutto immigration detention center in Taylor, Texas, on Thursday. She was driven to Brownsville by representatives of the Austin-based organization Grassroots Leadership, who had advocated for her release, to have a one-hour visit with 10-year-old Yudem, who is being held at Casa El Presidente. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over a month. She sobbed as she was led away from our tent while CNN’s news cameras surrounded her.

She deserved to leave with him, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Trump administration has created so much red tape for parents trying to get their children back that she left alone. Lesvia was told that although she showed documents proving her relationship to Yudem, she needed to be fingerprinted and submit to a background check, and may not see her son’s release for another 20 days. I hugged her, kissed her forehead and told her “I’m so sorry” and “We love you.” The Grassroots Leadership representatives translated my words, but they were just words. Her tears wouldn’t stop. There is no comfort. There is no consolation.

I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.

While the Trump administration is flagrantly ignoring court-imposed deadlines and heartlessly taking its time reuniting children with their parents, each day that passes is agonizing and traumatic for the tender age children at Casa El Presidente.

I’m camping here because I’m a mom of a tender age child. If it were my child being held captive, it would not be OK, so as far as I am concerned, it is not OK for any other mother or any other child.

Every morning, Gabe reminds me that it’s time to walk a few yards over to the guards and ask for a tour. I get tired of hearing “No ma’am, we cannot let you inside” and “No ma’am, we cannot release that information” when I ask an employee about what is happening in the shelter.

But every day we still ask for a tour, and every day we call the PR spokesperson for Southwest Key Programs asking for answers.

And, without fail, each day we do not get a tour and we do not get any answers.

So we wait.

Beside our tent we paint signs that read “Complicit,” “All we’re asking for is a tour,” “Try transparency,” “We will go home when the children are reunited” and “How many separated kids do you have?” My son made a sign, not in the neatest handwriting, that simply says “Free The Kids.”

Gabe doesn’t understand why one sign says “Give Yudem to Lesvia.” Don’t we want all kids reunited? he asks. I explain that sometimes telling the story of just one family can be more powerful. I tell him it can humanize what is happening more than a sign that reads “Reunite Every Child” might.

We spent the first few days here chasing after our signs, until we finally got smart about the Texas wind and bought some twining.

The author holds a sign reading "Give Yudem To Lesvia." The photo was taken by Norma Herrera from Grassroots Leadership

NORMA HERRERA
The author holds a sign reading “Give Yudem To Lesvia.” The photo was taken by Norma Herrera from Grassroots Leadership through her car window as she was driving Lesvia away from Casa El Presidente.

Southwest Key Programs, though nominally a nonprofit, is explicitly benefiting from the separation of children and parents through hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts. The employees, security guards and constables I have met in the last two weeks are not just “doing their job” ― they’re complicit in a national atrocity.

But it’s unclear to me if they know that. One security guard, referring to a sign we’ve made that originally read “14 days is running out” and now reads “14 days is up,” asked me, “Ma’am, what does 14 days mean?”

How could he be standing out here for a 12-hour shift and not know about the now come-and-gone court-imposed deadline that required children ages 5 and under to be reunited with their parents within 14 days?

The Trump administration claimed on Thursday that all children 5 and under would be reunited by that morning “if they are eligible.” But who decides eligibility? The administration has said, rather vaguely, that factors like a criminal record, having already been deported, or being “otherwise unfit” would make parents trying to reunite with their children 5 and under ineligible. It was then decided that only 57 children were eligible for reunification, and 46 were not. When, if ever, will those 46 children under 5 be reunited? And what about the thousands of children over the age of 5 who are currently in shelters? When will they see their families again?

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I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them — even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes.

The U.S. government has created a dehumanizing frenzy surrounding the notion of “illegal immigration,” and convinced the president’s supporters that we need more hostility, more arrests, more detention centers, more Border Patrol agents, more border wall. What we really need now is an army of moms and dads patrolling the border, demanding the reunion of these children with their parents.

Finding myself unexpectedly unemployed several months ago, I had the time, freedom and privilege to personally start this patrol. The idea of taking a 9-to-5 desk job and putting my son in day care all summer while children are in detention at the border and activists and lawyers are clamoring to get them released did not feel right, so I put my job search on hold. I needed to be on the ground, adding what I could to the work being done.

On the drive down, I briefed my son on what is happening at the border, and he talked about how he hoped to make friends with the kids in the shelters. We haven’t been able to get anywhere close to that. But at the very least, I hope he’s learning about the importance and power of direct action. This mother is fighting for other mothers. This mother is demanding answers. I want my son to see that when there is injustice and we aren’t given answers, we can literally refuse to leave until we get them ― even if it means pitching a tent and preparing to stay as long as it takes. When our tent is removed (this happened last week, while it was unattended for an hour), we get a new tent, move it even closer to the entrance and make our signs even bolder. We have it all set up before sunrise.

I also want my son to see that direct action works. When Lesvia arrived for her next one-hour visit with her son this past Thursday, one thing had changed: She had brought a tent with her. She planned to camp out with me and Gabe until Yudem was released, and she made this clear to Southwest Key Programs. Her story had gained press attention, and there were members of the media waiting outside while she visited with her son. Yudem was released to her shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, and she never had to pitch her tent.

Seeing Yudem come out of Casa El Presidente and tearfully walk over to our tent as Grassroots Leadership members translated our signs for him was magical. Seeing his face when he saw his name on a sign, as he realized complete strangers had been advocating for his release, was magical. And when Yudem cried as his mother kissed him, it was hard for anyone there ― including the reporters ― not to weep themselves. Still, as beautiful as this moment was, we cannot forget there remain dozens of tender age children just like Yudem inside Casa El Presidente waiting to be released.

Lesvia kisses her son Yudem just moments after he was released from the Casa El Presidente shelter.

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
Lesvia kisses her son Yudem just moments after he was released from the Casa El Presidente shelter.

I finally spoke with Cindy Casares, a spokeswoman for Southwest Key Programs, after countless calls and a barrage of tweets from my handle, @BorderPatrolMom (and perhaps also after reports from inside Casa El Presidente that two people were camping outside). She wouldn’t confirm that where we’re camping is a tender age facility, although press has already confirmed this. She wouldn’t confirm how many children are inside. She wouldn’t discuss reunification plans.

The evasiveness and secrecy is all supposedly in the name of protecting confidentiality, but I believe this is about covering up the lies of the Trump administration and the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents. I believe Southwest Key Programs fully realizes that the American people would be outraged to know the truth about the suffering of the children inside, so everything is being kept under wraps. Rather than agitating for swifter reunions, they choose to play innocent and present themselves as a benevolent nonprofit simply complying with government orders. They could do more. They could do better. But it’s a good time to be in the business of immigration detention.

So, with no answers and very little having changed, we prepare for another night outside Casa El Presidente. I wouldn’t want my environmentalist friends back home to know I’m using bug spray with DEET, but we need it to ward off the Texas mosquitoes ― “little hummingbirds,” as my son calls them. We brush our teeth crouched by the front tire of our Prius, spitting toothpaste on the ground. We wash our hair using jugs of water left to heat up in the tent and shampoo ourselves in the middle of the street. It’s not exactly a glamorous life.

But every day, I’m reminded of our privilege. Every day I’m reminded that for my son, this is like a camping trip, an exciting adventure. We’re sleeping in a tent, eating food out of a cooler, tossing around a baseball with our gloves while we wait. He’ll assemble complicated Lego structures while I’m journaling or making phone calls or typing on my laptop: This is not all that different from being home.  Every day I’m reminded that though it may be 100 degrees here and I may resort to dumping melted ice from the cooler over my head to cool down a bit, I have my son sitting out here with me, cuddling with me in the tent when the sun sets and waking me up when it rises. These parents and these children deserve the same.

Gabe sitting on our cooler.

COURTESY OF ASHLEY CASALE
Gabe sitting on our cooler.

Still, there’s more to think about, beyond and after the reunions finally happen. While most discussions about what is taking place at the border have centered on the need to reunite separated children with their parents, we should also be discussing the trauma that has been inflicted upon these tender age children, which includes having a conversation about reparations. Who will pay for the therapy they will need to begin to heal from this terrifying experience? These children are victims of state-sanctioned violence — they are essentially experiencing child abuse — and the organizations claiming to serve children are wholly complicit in this abuse.

My son and I want Southwest Key Programs to reveal the number of children inside Casa El Presidente. We want to know the ages of the children being held here. We want to know how the people running this shelter, and all the other shelters like it, plan to reunite these tender age children with their families. We want to know the timeline for making this happen. In the meantime, you can find us at our campsite, demanding answers and refusing to leave until we get them.

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

As Ashley makes clear, the idea that anyone in the Trump Administration is acting for the welfare or in the best interests of these children is beyond preposterous!

Sessions plans to return all brown-skinned refugees to countries where they will be “sitting ducks” for gangs and domestic abusers and the governments will either join in or willfully ignore what’s happening. In other words, he intends to sentence them to lives of abuse or perhaps death without even fairly considering their claims for refuge. He just doesn’t care, because they aren’t white.

We all should be ashamed of what America has become under Trump & Sessions.

PWS

07-16-18

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!
  2. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  3. NYT: NO, THIS ISN’T OUT OF A CHARLES DICKENS NOVEL – IT’S ABOUT HOW KIDS ARE TREATED IN JEFF SESSIONS’S “AMERICAN KIDDIE GULAG” – “[T]he environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.”
  4. CHILD ABUSE: COWARDLY ADMINISTRATION USES FALSE NARRATIVES & DISTORTED FACTS TO ATTACK PROTECTIONS FOR REFUGEE CHILDREN — Our National Morality & Human Decency In Free-fall Under Trump! — “It has been national law and policy that as adults we look out for children …. No longer.”

WILL WEISSERT & EMILY SCHMALL @ AP (AUSTIN, TX) EXPOSE HOW DUE PROCESS HAS GONE “BELLY UP” @ EOIR UNDER SESISONS – “Credible Fear Reviews” Are Nothing But “Rubber Stamps” By “Wholly Owned Judges” Working For Openly Xenophobic AG!`

https://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/Credible-fear-for-US-asylum-harder-to-prove-13078667.php

Will & Emily report for AP:

LOS FRESNOS, Texas (AP) — Patricia Aragon told the U.S. asylum officer at her recent case assessment that she was fleeing her native Honduras because she had been robbed and raped by a gang member who threatened to kill her and her 9-year-old daughter if she went to the police.

Until recently, the 41-year-old seamstress from San Pedro Sula would have had a good chance of clearing that first hurdle in the asylum process due to a “credible fear” for her safety, but she didn’t. The officer said the Honduran government wasn’t to blame for what happened to Aragon and recommended that she not get asylum, meaning she’ll likely be sent home.

“The U.S. has always been characterized as a humanitarian country,” Aragon said through tears at Port Isabel, a remote immigration detention center tucked among livestock and grapefruit groves near Los Fresnos, a town about 15 miles (25kilometers) from the Mexico border. “My experience has been very difficult.”

As part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently tightened the restrictions on the types of cases that can qualify someone for asylum, making it harder for Central Americans who say they’re fleeing the threat of gangs, drug smugglers or domestic violence to pass even the first hurdle for securing U.S. protection.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has overturned protections for asylum seekers in a decision that could affect thousands. Sessions ruled that a 2014 Board of Immigration Appeals decision that protected domestic violence victims from Central America was wrongly decided. Under the new ruling, “the applicant must show that the government condoned the private actions or demonstrated an inability to protect the victims,” in order to qualify for asylum protection. Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems, even all serious problems, that people face every day all over the world. I will be issuing a decision that restores sound principles of asylum and long-standing principles of immigration law.

Immigration lawyers say that’s meant more asylum seekers failing interviews with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to establish credible fear of harm in their home countries. They also say that immigration judges, who work for the Justice Department, are overwhelmingly signing off on those recommendations during appeals, effectively ending what could have been a yearslong asylum process almost before it’s begun.

“This is a direct, manipulated attack on the asylum process,” said Sofia Casini of the Austin nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, which has been working with immigrant women held at the nearby T. Don Hutto detention center who were separated from their kids under a widely condemned policy that President Donald Trump ended on June 20.

Casini said that of the roughly 35 separated mothers her group worked with, more than a third failed their credible fear interviews, which she said is about twice the failure rate of before the new restrictions took effect. Nationally, more than 2,000 immigrant children and parents have yet to be reunited, including Aragon and her daughter, who is being held at a New York children’s shelter and whose future is as unclear as her mother’s.

In order to qualify for asylum, seekers must demonstrate that they have a well-founded fear they’ll be persecuted back home based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinions. The interviews with USCIS asylum officers, which typically last 30 to 60 minutes, are sometimes done by phone. Any evidence asylum seekers present to support their claims must be translated into English, and they often don’t have lawyers present.

. . . .

“The asylum officer conducting credible fear (interviews) has been instructed to apply A.B., so when the person says, ‘My boyfriend or my husband beat me’ it’s, ‘So what, you lose,'” said Paul W. Schmidt, a former immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia, who retired in 2016. “It then goes to the immigration judge, who has just been ordered to follow Sessions’ precedent — and most of them want to keep their jobs and they just rubber stamp it, and there’s no meaningful appeal.”

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the link.

The now long forgotten “EOIR Vision” developed by our Executive Group in the late 1990s was “To be the world’s best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”

Under Sessions, the U.S. Immigration Courts have been converted into kangaroo courts that are a parody of Due Process and fairness. Since the Immigration Courts are one of the foundations upon which the U.S. Justice System rests, that doesn’t bode well for justice or the future of our country as a Constitutional democratic republic.

PWS

07-16-18

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSER JEFF SESSIONS ALSO TARGETED REFUGEE WOMEN & GIRLS FOR DEATH, RAPE, TORTURE, & OTHER MAYHEM — HIS EVIL PLANS HIT A ROADBLOCK: THE LAW! — Read The Latest Commentary From Hon. Jeffrey S.Chase On Challenges To Sessions’s Effort To Pervert The Law — Matter of A-B- In Light Of Grace v. Whitaker!
  3. CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: Trump & His GOP’s Cowardly “War On Children” Should Outrage Every American! — Join The “New Due Process Army” & Fight To Save Humanity!
  4. REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

COURTS: TIMEOUT ON THE KILLING FLOOR! – JUDGE SABRAW TEMPORARILY HALTS DUE-PROCESS-LESS DEPORTATIONS OF REUNITED FAMILIES TO HARM’S WAY – Will Hear Arguments From Both Parties, As He Tries To Figure Out Just What Nefarious Plan Sessions Has Up His Sleeve Now!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/family-separations-border-reunification/index.html

Tal Kopan and Laura Jarrett report for CNN:

(CNN)A federal judge on Monday ordered the US government to temporarily pause deportations of reunited families to allow attorneys time to debate whether he should more permanently extend that order.

San Diego-based US District Court Judge Dana Sabraw addressed the issue at the top of a status hearing in a continuing family separations case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Sabraw ordered the pause to allow for a full written argument on the ACLU’s request to pause deportations of parents for a week after reunification.
The ACLU argued that the week would be necessary for parents to have time to fully consider the decision whether to have their children deported along with them.
The ACLU’s filing was made earlier Monday morning, and Sabraw gave the Department of Justice a week to respond.
But in the meantime, he ordered a “stay” of deportations until that issue can be litigated.

Fact-checking Trump's claim on family separation

Lawyers for the ACLU said their motion was due to “the persistent and increasing rumors — which Defendants have refused to deny — that mass deportations may be carried out imminently and immediately upon reunification.” They argue this issue is “directly related to effectuating the Court’s ruling that parents make an informed, non-coerced decision if they are going to leave their children behind.”

“A one-week stay is a reasonable and appropriate remedy to ensure that the unimaginable trauma these families have suffered does not turn even worse because parents made an uninformed decision about the fate of their child,” the ACLU’s lawyers added.
**************************************
Sounds like in the end, the “No-Due-Process Deportation Machine” will be allowed to resume. But, at least this gives the Judge a little time to pin the Government down on exactly what they are doing and to see for himself how Due Process is being compromised on a large-scale basis. In the end, permanently halting the “Deportation Railroad” might be beyond the scope of this particular suit.  Stay tuned for the result. However it comes out, it’s always good to make a complete record of the Government’s misconduct and revolting disrespect for laws, human life, fundamental fairness, and human dignity for the history books and future generations.
And, many thanks to Tal & Laura for being “on top” of his breaking story.
PWS
07-16-18

Related posts:

  1. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  2. GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!
  3. JOURNAL ON MIGRATION & HUMAN SOCIETY (“JMHS”) PUBLISHES MY TRIBUTE TO JUAN OSUNA (1963-2017): “An Overview and Critique of US Immigration and Asylum Policies in the Trump Era”
  4. EXPOSING SESSIONS’S DEADLY DUE PROCESS SCAM: JUDGE SULLIVAN BLOCKS ANOTHER POTENTIAL DEPORTATION TO DEATH AS SESSIONS-LED DOJ ARGUES THAT THE KILLING LINE NOT SUBJECT TO REVIEW — Pro Bono Counsel Jones Day Saves The Day, At Least For Now — “To be blunt, if she’s killed, there’s no remedy, your honor.” She added: “No remedy at all.”

TAL @ CNN: UNDER SESSIONS’S “DUE PROCESS FREE REGIME” ASYLUM APPLICANTS RETURNED TO DANGER IN HOME COUNTRIES WITHOUT FAIR CONSIDERATION OF CLAIMS — US IMMIGRATION JUDGES PARTICIPATE IN “DEPORTATION RAILWAY!”

Impact of Sessions’ asylum move already felt at border

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

Immigrants are already being turned away at the border under Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent reinterpretation of asylum law. And advocates for them fear there may be no end to it anytime soon.

In fact, immigration attorneys fear tens of thousands of migrants could be sent home to life-threatening situations before the courts are able to catch up.

Signs have already popped up across the border that their fears are being realized.

Over just a few days in immigration court early this month near Harlingen, Texas, CNN witnessed multiple judges upholding denials of claims of credible fear of return home, explicitly saying that gang violence and such fears do not qualify.

Immigration Judge Robert Powell at Port Isabel Detention Center, for example, upheld two denials of credible fear for immigrants, one man and one woman, paving the way for their immediate deportation.

Tightly clutching a rosary, the woman, Marcella Martinez, begged the judge to reverse the decision. With tears in her eyes, Martinez asked to provide testimony to the court.

“I can’t go back to Honduras” she said. “I was threatened over the phone, and need to stay here for the opportunity.”

The judge found, nevertheless, that Martinez didn’t enter anything into evidence that would qualify as going beyond the burden of proof required for her initial fear assessment. He informed her that the decision of denial was affirmed.

She exited the courtroom sobbing.

In another courtroom, Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi heard the case of Sergio Gavidia Canas, who had an attorney. But the judge said that because of the scope of proceedings, the attorney could not advocate on Canas’ behalf.

Canas, an El Salvador native, said he feared for his life back home, as he had been threatened and beaten by three gang members in front of his currently detained minor daughter.

He said he was a proud owner of a bus company in his native country, and that a gang had come to him demanding the transport of weapons and drugs. When he refused, he was severely beaten in front of his child.

He added that his initial asylum interview took place when he was distraught and worried about his daughter, which is why he didn’t provide this additional information at the time.

The judge indicated that “gang threats don’t fall under the law for asylum” and upheld his denial.

Much more:

http://www.cnn.com/2018/07/14/politics/sessions-asylum-impact-border/index.html

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

Important to remember:

  • These asylum applicants are being returned, without appeal, under Matter of A-B- which has never been “tested,” let alone upheld, by any real Article III Court;
  • These unrepresented individuals have no idea what Matter of A-B- says;
  • Outrageously, and in violation of both common sense and and common courtesy, Sergio Gavidia Canas actually had a lawyer, but Judge Morris Onyewuchi  wouldn’t let the lawyer participate in the hearing (by contrast, I never, ever, prevented a lawyer from participating in a credible fear review — in fact, if the person were represented and the lawyer were not present, I continued the hearing so the lawyer could appear, as required by Due Process and fairness);
  • Even though Matter of A-B– left open the possibility of some valid individual claims involving domestic violence or gang violence, these Immigration Judges appear to be making no such inquiry (the, apparently intentional, misapplication of Matter of A-B- by Asylum Officers and EOIR was mentioned in a previous blog by Judge Jeffrey Chase (https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2Ob));
  • These Immigration Judges also do not appear to be exploring the possibility of asylum claims based on other grounds;
  • These Immigration Judges do not appear to be making an inquiry into whether these individuals might also have a reasonable fear of torture;
  • In other words, this is a system specifically designed and operated to reject, rather than protect under our laws!

 

PWS

07-16-18

 

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST AG MAKES VICIOUS UNFOUNDED ATTACK ON REFUGEES & THEIR ATTORNEYS THE CENTERPIECE OF HIS SPEECH TO LARGEST CLASS OF INCOMING U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES — “Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests.”
  2. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  3. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  4. NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSER JEFF SESSIONS ALSO TARGETED REFUGEE WOMEN & GIRLS FOR DEATH, RAPE, TORTURE, & OTHER MAYHEM — HIS EVIL PLANS HIT A ROADBLOCK: THE LAW! — Read The Latest Commentary From Hon. Jeffrey S.Chase On Challenges To Sessions’s Effort To Pervert The Law — Matter of A-B- In Light Of Grace v. Whitaker!

NYT: NO, THIS ISN’T OUT OF A CHARLES DICKENS NOVEL – IT’S ABOUT HOW KIDS ARE TREATED IN JEFF SESSIONS’S “AMERICAN KIDDIE GULAG” – “[T]he environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/us/migrant-children-shelters.html?emc=edit_nn_20180715&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=7921388620180715&te=1

Do not misbehave. Do not sit on the floor. Do not share your food. Do not use nicknames. Also, it is best not to cry. Doing so might hurt your case.

Lights out by 9 p.m. and lights on at dawn, after which make your bed according to the step-by-step instructions posted on the wall. Wash and mop the bathroom, scrubbing the sinks and toilets. Then it is time to form a line for the walk to breakfast.

“You had to get in line for everything,” recalled Leticia, a girl from Guatemala.

Small, slight and with long black hair, Leticia was separated from her mother after they illegally crossed the border in late May. She was sent to a shelter in South Texas — one of more than 100 government-contracted detention facilities for migrant children around the country that are a rough blend of boarding school, day care center and medium security lockup. They are reserved for the likes of Leticia, 12, and her brother, Walter, 10.

The facility’s list of no-no’s also included this: Do not touch another child, even if that child is your hermanito or hermanita — your little brother or sister.

Leticia had hoped to give her little brother a reassuring hug. But “they told me I couldn’t touch him,” she recalled.

In response to an international outcry, President Trump recently issued an executive order to end his administration’s practice, first widely put into effect in May, of forcibly removing children from migrant parents who had entered the country illegally. Under that “zero-tolerance” policy for border enforcement, thousands of children were sent to holding facilities, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from where their parents were being held for criminal prosecution.

Last week, in trying to comply with a court order, the government returned slightly more than half of the 103 children under the age of 5 to their migrant parents.

But more than 2,800 children — some of them separated from their parents, some of them classified at the border as “unaccompanied minors” — remain in these facilities, where the environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.

Depending on several variables, including happenstance, a child might be sent to a 33-acre youth shelter in Yonkers that features picnic tables, sports fields and even an outdoor pool. “Like summer camp,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, a Democrat of New York who recently visited the campus.

Or that child could wind up at a converted motel along a tired Tucson strip of discount stores, gas stations and budget motels. Recreation takes place in a grassless compound, and the old motel’s damaged swimming pool is covered up.

Image
Migrant children in a recreation area at a shelter in Brownsville, Tex.CreditLoren Elliott/Reuters

Still, some elements of these detention centers seem universally shared, whether they are in northern Illinois or South Texas. The multiple rules. The wake-up calls and the lights-out calls. The several hours of schooling every day, which might include a civics class in American history and laws, though not necessarily the ones that led to their incarceration.

Most of all, these facilities are united by a collective sense of aching uncertainty — scores of children gathered under a roof who have no idea when they will see their parents again.

Leticia wrote letters from the shelter in South Texas to her mother, who was being held in Arizona, to tell her how much she missed her. She would quickly write these notes after she had finished her math worksheets, she said, so as not to violate yet another rule: No writing in your dorm room. No mail.

She kept the letters safe in a folder for the day when she and her mother would be reunited, though that still hasn’t happened. “I have a stack of them,” she said.

Another child asked her lawyer to post a letter to her detained mother, since she had not heard from her in the three weeks since they had been separated.

“Mommy, I love you and adore you and miss you so much,” the girl wrote in curvy block letters. And then she implored: “Please, Mom, communicate. Please, Mom. I hope that you’re OK and remember, you are the best thing in my life.”

The complicated matters of immigration reform and border enforcement have vexed American presidents for at least two generations. The Trump administration entered the White House in 2017 with a pledge to end the problems, and for several months, it chose one of the harshest deterrents ever employed by a modern president: the separation of migrant children from their parents.

This is what a few of those children will remember.

No Touching, No Running

Diego Magalhães, a Brazilian boy with a mop of curly brown hair, spent 43 days in a Chicago facility after being separated from his mother, Sirley Paixao, when they crossed the border in late May. He did not cry, just as he had promised her when they parted. He was proud of this. He is 10.

He spent the first night on the floor of a processing center with other children, then boarded an airplane the next day. “I thought they were taking me to see my mother,” he said. He was wrong.

Once in Chicago, he was handed new clothes that he likened to a uniform: shirts, two pairs of shorts, a sweatsuit, boxers and some items for hygiene. He was then assigned to a room with three other boys, including Diogo, 9, and Leonardo, 10, both from Brazil.

The three became fast friends, going to class together, playing lots of soccer and earning “big brother” status for being good role models for younger children. They were rewarded the privilege of playing video games.

There were rules. You couldn’t touch others. You couldn’t run. You had to wake up at 6:30 on weekdays, with the staff making banging noises until you got out of bed.

“You had to clean the bathroom,” Diego said. “I scrubbed the bathroom. We had to remove the trash bag full of dirty toilet paper. Everyone had to do it.”

Diego and the 15 other boys in their unit ate together. They had rice and beans, salami, some vegetables, the occasional pizza, and sometimes cake and ice cream. The burritos, he said, were bad.

Apart from worrying about when he would see his mother again, Diego said that he was not afraid, because he always behaved. He knew to watch for a staff member “who was not a good guy.” He had seen what happened to Adonias, a small boy from Guatemala who had fits and threw things around.

“They applied injections because he was very agitated,” Diego said. “He would destroy things.”

A person he described as “the doctor” injected Adonias in the middle of a class, Diego said. “He would fall asleep.”

Diego managed to stay calm, in part because he had promised his mother he would. Last week, a federal judge in Chicago ordered that Diego be reunited with his family. Before he left, he made time to say goodbye to Leonardo.

“We said ‘Ciao, good luck,” Diego recalled. “Have a good life.”

But because of the rules, the two boys did not hug.

. . . .

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Read the full story at the link.

This is America in the age of Trump & Sessions. A few of these kids might get to stay in the U.S. Most will be returned (with little or no Due Process) to countries will they will be targeted, harassed, brutalized, extorted, impressed, and/or perhaps killed by gangs that operate more or less with impunity from weak and corrupt police and governments. Indeed, contrary to the false blathering of Sessions & co., gangs and cartels are the “de facto government” in some areas of the Norther Triangle. Those kids that survive to adulthood will have these memories of the United States and how we treated them at their time of most need.

PWS

07-15-18

Related posts:

  1. GONZO’S WORLD: AS SESSIONS RAMPS UP THE “NEW AMERICAN GULAG,” RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSE OF FEMALE DETAINEES CERTAIN TO INCREASE! – AG’S Child Abuse Also Makes Him Complicit In Sexual Abuse! – See The Short Video By Emily Kassie Here!
  2. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  3. AMERICA’S “MASS ATROCITY” — Professor Kate Cronin-Furman Says Don’t Kid Yourself About What The Trump Administration Is Doing In Your Name & How “Ordinary Civil Servants” Carry Out The Unthinkable & Unacceptable!
  4. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

THE HONORABLE JEFFREY CHASE: HOW THE PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE OF JEFF SESSIONS IS STANGLING THE US ASYLUM SYSTEM AND ITS “GO ALONG TO GET ALONG” ADJUDICATORS AND “JUDGES” — “Matter of A-B- Being Misapplied by EOIR, DHS”

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/7/13/matter-of-a-b-being-misapplied-by-eoir-dhs

Matter of A-B- Being Misapplied by EOIR, DHS

One month after Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued his cruel, misguided decision in Matter of A-B-, we are seeing the first signs of how the decision is being implemented by the BIA, USCIS, and ICE.

There is no question that Sessions’ intent was to eliminate domestic violence and gang violence as bases for asylum.  How can I be so certain of this?  While Matter of A-B- was pending before him, Sessions told a Phoenix radio station in March: “We’ve had situations in which a person comes to the United States and says they are a victim of domestic violence, therefore they are entitled to enter the United States.  Well, that’s obviously false but some judges have gone along with that.”   (here’s the link: https://ktar.com/story/2054280/ag-jeff-sessions-says-closing-loopholes-can-fight-illegal-immigration/).

However, Sessions chose to attempt to achieve this goal by issuing a precedent decision.  A decision is not a fiat.  It must be analyzed in the same manner as any other legal decision and applied to the facts accordingly.

Asylum experts and advocacy groups analyzing the decision have reached the following conclusions.  The main impact of Sessions’ decision is to vacate the Board’s 2014 precedent decision, Matter of A-R-C-G-, holding that a victim of domestic violence was eligible for asylum as a member of a particular social group.  Therefore, asylum applicants can no longer rely on that decision.

However, Sessions’ decision otherwise cobbled together already existing case law (which was taken into consideration in deciding Matter of A-R-C-G-), and added non-binding dicta, i.e. his statement that “generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence…will not qualify for asylum.”  (Note the use of the pejorative “aliens” to describe individuals applying for asylum.)

Furthermore, most of the items covered by Sessions involved questions of fact (which are specifically dependent on the evidence in the individual case, and which the BIA and AG have very limited ability to reverse on appeal) as opposed to questions of law, which can be considered de novo on appeal and have more general applicability.  The questions of fact raised by Sessions include whether the persecutor was aware of the existence of the group and was motivated to harm the victim on account of such membership; whether the society in question recognizes the social group with sufficient distinction; whether the authorities in the home country are unable or unwilling to protect the victim, and whether the victim could reasonably relocate to another part of the country to avoid the feared harm.

So in summary, Sessions felt that the Board’s decision in Matter of A-R-C-G- did not provide a sufficiently detailed legal analysis, therefore vacated it, and laid out all of the legal analysis that future decisions must address.  Domestic violence and gang violence claims still remain very much grantable, provided that all of the requirements laid out by the Attorney General are satisfied.  Hearings on these cases may now take much longer, as testimony will need to be more detailed, additional social groups will need to be proposed and ruled on, more experts must be called, and more documents considered.  But nothing in A-B- prevents these cases from continuing to be granted.

Therefore, how discouraging that the first decision of the BIA to apply this criteria failed to do what is now required of them.  A single Board Member’s unpublished decision issued shortly after A-B-’s publication did not engage in the detailed legal analysis that is now warranted in domestic violence cases.  Instead, the decision noted that the case involved a social group “akin to the group defined in Matter of A-R-C-G-.”  The Board then found that the AG’s decision in A-B- “has foreclosed the respondent’s arguments,” because “the Attorney General overruled Matter of A-R-C-G- and held that it was wrongly decided.”

What is particularly dispiriting is that the decision was authored by Board Member Linda Wendtland.  A former OIL attorney whose views are more conservative than my own, I have always respected her scholarly approach and her intellectual honesty.  At the BIA, staff attorneys draft the decisions which the Board Members then edit.  Judge Wendtland always took the time to write her edits as academic lessons from which I always learned something.  She recently authored the lone dissenting opinion in a case involving a determination of whether a women was barred from relief for having provided material support to terrorists; Judge Wendtland correctly determined that the cooking and cleaning that the woman was forced to perform after having been kidnapped by rebels did not constitute “material support.”  It is therefore perplexing why she would sign the post-A-B- decision that so sorely lacked her usual degree of analysis.

In addition to the BIA, on July 11, both USCIS and ICE issued guidance on applying A-B- to asylum adjudications.  Much like the BIA decision, the USCIS guidelines to its asylum officers, which serve as guidance not only in adjudicating asylum applications, but also for making credible fear determinations, seem to apply the personal opinion of Sessions rather than the actual legal holdings of his decision.  USCIS decided to print in boldface Sessions’ nonbinding dicta that such cases will generally not establish eligibility for asylum, refugee status, or credible or reasonable fear of persecution.

Credible fear interviews are conducted right after an asylum seeker arrives in this country, while they are detained, scared, often unrepresented by counsel, before having a chance to understand the law or gather documents or witnesses.  The interviewer is supposed to find credible fear if there is a significant possibility that the applicant will be able to establish eligibility for relief at a future hearing before an immigration judge.  It is likely that, at such future hearing, the applicant will have an attorney who will make the proper legal arguments, call expert witnesses, formulate the particular social group according to the requirements of case law, submit other supporting evidence, etc.  But now asylum officers are being instructed to ignore all of that and deny individuals the chance to even have the opportunity to apply for asylum before an immigration judge essentially because Jeff Sessions doesn’t believe these are worthy cases.

ICE (through its Office of the Public Legal Advisor) has issued guidance that, while probably reflecting internal conflict within the bureau, is nevertheless somewhat more reasonable than the interpretations of either USCIS or the Board.  The ICE guidance does ask its attorneys to hold asylum applicants to some exacting legal standards, to look for flaws in supporting evidence, and to question asylum applicants in great detail.  It also asks its attorneys not to opine on whether gender alone may constitute a PSG until further guidance is offered (again, probably reflecting internal conflict within the bureau on the issue).  But the guidance does not simply conclude that all domestic violence and gang violence cases should be denied.  It even encourages attorneys to employ a “collaborative approach” by pointing out flawed social groups offered by pro se applicants in the hope that the IJ might help the applicant remedy the situation early on.

However, let’s remember that ICE stipulated to grants of asylum for victims of domestic violence in both Matter of R-A- (during the Bush administration, and to the consternation of then Attorney General John Ashcroft), and in Matter of A-R-C-G-.  ICE argued in its brief to Sessions in Matter of A-B- that Matter of A-R-C-G- was good law and should not be vacated.  So then shouldn’t ICE be applying these same principles to its guidance to attorneys?

It should also be noted that ICE and USCIS could see a way to granting worthy cases in spite of Sessions’ decision.  In the early 1990s, then INS General Counsel Grover Joseph Rees III took exception with the BIA’s precedent decision holding that forcible abortions and sterilization under China’s family planning policies did not constitute persecution on account of a protected ground.  Rees instructed his attorneys to seek to remand cases involving such claim to the INS Asylum Office, where per his instructions, such claims were granted affirmatively by asylum officers.  There is no reason that a similar practice could not be employed now, particularly as both ICE and USCIS are not part of the Department of Justice and therefore are not controlled by Sessions.  The only thing lacking is the political will to take such a stand.  In the early 1990s, Rees’s stance involving abortion played to the Bush Administration’s political base.  Today, ICE and USCIS would have to take action contrary to the wishes of that same base because doing so is the just and humane thing to do.  Unfortunately, based on the tone of their recent advisals, doing the right thing is not enough of a motive in the present political climate.

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase.  All rights reserved.

 

 

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Jeffrey S. Chase is an immigration lawyer in New York City.  Jeffrey is a former Immigration Judge, senior legal advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, and volunteer staff attorney at Human Rights First.  He is a past recipient of AILA’s annual Pro Bono Award, and previously chaired AILA’s Asylum Reform Task Force.

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Jeffrey amplifies and provides a more scholarly perspective on the preliminary comments I had made after seeing the USCIS and ICE “interpretations” of Matter of A-B-. I hadn’t been aware of the unpublished BIA decision until Jeffrey brought it to may attention. But, given that Sessions “owns” the BIA (along with the Immigration Courts), blasted them in Matter of A-B-, and that the BIA has been cultivated since 2000 as a “go along to get along — your job is on the line every time you exercise truly independent judgment” organization, it’s not too surprising to us “Board Watchers” that at this point they would be rushing to “out-Sessions Sessions!”

I also share Jeffrey’s views on Judge Wentland: I’ve always admired her scholarship and her independent thinking. I thought of her as the “intellectual powerpack” of OIL during her tenure there. It is indeed sad to see that nobody seems willing to stand up for Due Process and the rights of asylum seekers on a body whose mission was supposed to “be the world’s best administrative tribunal guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all.” How far away from that we have come in the perverted age of Sessions and Trump.

I also find it remarkable that having expressed his clear bias against asylum seekers and particularly those who are victims of domestic violence, in a non-judicial forum, Jeff Sessions is allowed to intervene in a (totally bogus) “quasi-judicial capacity” in the Immigration Court system. Obviously any individual Immigration Judge or BIA Appellate Immigration Judge who made such an outrageous public statement would be subject not only to disqualification from asylum cases, but also severe disciplinary action. Just another example of why the US Immigration Court system under Sessions is a farce and why we need an independent Article I Immigration Court! And, why Jeff Sessions was supremely unqualified for the position of Attorney General in the first place!

A grim time for America, refugees, Due Process, intellectual honesty, and human decency. History will record, however, who stood up to Trump, Sessions, and their racist/White Nationalist cabal and who “went along to get along.”

PWS

07-14-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”
  3. HON. JEFFREY CHASE: Speaking Out Against The “Notable Minority” Of U.S. Immigration Judges Who Demonstrated Bias Against Women & Asylum Seekers – “Think about that: some federally appointed immigration judges cheered the fact that women who had been violently raped and beaten in their country can no longer find refuge here, and will be sent back to face more violence, and possibly death. Will there be any consequences for their actions? Were the many outstanding immigration judges who have been proud to grant such cases in the past, who were saddened and sickened by this decision, able to openly jeer or weep or curse this decision? Or would that have been viewed as dangerous?”
  4. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!

EUGENE ROBINSON @WASHPOST ASKS THE QUESTION ALL DECENT AMERICANS SHOULD BE ASKING: WhyAren’t Child Abuser/Kidnapper Jeff Sessions & His Equally Vile & Dishonest Cohorts In Jail? — “Kidnapping children. Failing even to account for them. Sending families home to be killed. Give us your huddled masses, this administration seems to say, and let us kick them in their little faces.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-kidnapped-children-someone-should-go-to-jail/2018/07/12/2128c51c-8605-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html?utm_term=.d64b5c997413

The Trump administration kidnapped children. Someone should go to jail.

by Eugene Robinson

The Trump administration’s kidnapping — that’s the proper word — of the children of would-be migrants should be seen as an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Somebody ought to go to jail.

Under a federal court order, all 103 children under the age of 5 who were taken from their families at the border were supposed to be returned by Tuesday. The government missed that deadline, and I wish U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, who issued the order, had held somebody in contempt. One candidate would be Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who on Tuesday had the gall to describe the administration’s treatment of immigrant children as “one of the great acts of American generosity and charity.”

On Thursday, officials announced with fanfare that 57 of the kids — some still in diapers — had been returned to their parents. But 46 others were deemed “ineligible,” meaning they remain in government custody.

The reasons for failing to comply fully with Sabraw’s order sound reasonable, unless you take into account the bad faith with which the administration has conducted this whole sordid exercise. In 22 cases, officials had “safety concerns posed by the adults in question,” presumably the parents; in 12 cases, parents have already been deported; in 11 cases, parents are in federal or state custody; and in one case, an adult believed to be the child’s parent cannot be found.

In a joint statement, Azar, along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, took credit for working “tirelessly” to reunite the children with their families — which is rich, given that the Trump administration deliberately and cynically created this crisis in the first place.

“Our message has been clear all along: Do not risk your own life or the life of your child by attempting to enter the United States illegally,” the statement said. Translation: Don’t come to the border seeking asylum because, when others did, we took away their kids.

Given that the intention from the beginning was clearly to frighten and intimidate would-be migrants from Central America, why should anyone believe that the administration is acting or speaking in good faith now? Why should we accept at face value that exactly 103 children under 5 were seized? How can we be sure there is only one case in which officials can’t find or identify the parents? Given that it has taken weeks to return just 57 children, what is the likelihood the government kept adequate records?

This is an administration, after all, that conducts immigration court proceedings, or travesties, in which children too young to know their ABCs are expected to represent themselves without the benefit of legal counsel. Imagine your 3-year-old child or grandchild in that situation. Now tell me how adopting child abuse as a policy is supposed to Make America Great Again.

And what about the children older than 5 who were taken from their families? Sabraw ordered that they be returned to their parents by July 26, but don’t hold your breath. We don’t even know how many there are, because the government doesn’t seem to know. Officials first gave the number as about 2,300, but the latest estimate is nearly 3,000. Why can’t they settle on a precise figure? What reason could there be for such vagueness, other than ignorance?

I don’t think they know how many kids they ripped away from their families, and I believe it is inevitable some children will never again see their parents. The fact that my government would commit such a crime weighs on my conscience as an American. President Trump and his accomplices, from all appearances, couldn’t be prouder.

“Judges run the system and illegals and traffickers know how it works. They are just using children!” Trump tweeted Wednesday. As usual, he was ascribing his own base motives to others: He is the one who is “just using children.”

Remember what this is really about. The main flow of undocumented migrants consists of Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans seeking to escape rampant, deadly gang violence that their home governments cannot or will not check. The Trump administration issued new instructions on Wednesday to officers who interview asylum seekers at the border, telling them that fear of gang violence, no matter how well-founded, is no longer grounds for asylum. The same new guidance applies to immigration judges, who take their orders from Sessions.

Kidnapping children. Failing even to account for them. Sending families home to be killed. Give us your huddled masses, this administration seems to say, and let us kick them in their little faces.

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Yup.  Sessions and his group of fellow racists know very well that their actions violate the Constitution and the laws of our country governing both conditions for detention and reasons for detention. Yet, they walk free and smugly give press conferences at which they continue to lie about their actions. Their victims, on the other hand, largely languish in substandard prisons or are being removed to the dangerous situations they fled in their home countries without any pretense of Due Process or fundamental fairness.

PWS

07-14-18

Related posts:

  1. TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!
  2. NY TIMES: Trump Mocks & Dehumanizes Vulnerable Refugees & His Administration Claims It’s OK To Return Them to Honduras; BUT The Facts Say The Opposite: Honduras Is An Armed Conflict Zone Where Gangs Exercise Quasi-Governmental Control & Those Who Resist Are Severely Punished, Often Maimed, Tortured Or Killed!
  3. MORE ARTICLES FEATURE “GANG OF RETIRED JUDGES’ STATEMENT” RE: SESSIONS’S OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK ON SETTLED PRINCIPLES OF PROTECTION LAW! — Media Exposing Corrupt, Inherently Unfair, Biased “Court” System Where The Prejudiced Prosecutor “Cooks” The Results to His Liking! — Jeff Sessions Degrades The American Legal System & Our National Values Each Day He Remains In Office!
  4. HON. JEFFREY CHASE: Speaking Out Against The “Notable Minority” Of U.S. Immigration Judges Who Demonstrated Bias Against Women & Asylum Seekers – “Think about that: some federally appointed immigration judges cheered the fact that women who had been violently raped and beaten in their country can no longer find refuge here, and will be sent back to face more violence, and possibly death. Will there be any consequences for their actions? Were the many outstanding immigration judges who have been proud to grant such cases in the past, who were saddened and sickened by this decision, able to openly jeer or weep or curse this decision? Or would that have been viewed as dangerous?”