ANALYSIS: Trump Lays Another Egg On Immigration — Everybody Loses, But It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse

By Paul Wickham Schmidt for immigrationcourtside.com

Alexandria, VA, June 9, 2019. After a week of petulance, threats, and self-created drama, Trump produced a resounding trade and immigration dud. Faced with advisors telling him that he was endangering the economy, the only thing propping up his sagging popularity, a potential rebellion among GOP legislators, and an unexpectedly tough and resolute Mexico, Trump backed off of his insane and blatantly illegal plan to ignore U.S. asylum obligations and thereby rocket the U.S. to the upper echelons of international scofflaws and human rights violators.

The latter scheme, known as “safe third country,” would have mis-designated Mexico and, incredibly, Guatemala, two clearly “unsafe” countries to do the U.S.’s job by processing tens of thousands of asylum applications from those fleeing the Northern Triangle. Neither of the two countries has a viable, fair, and effective asylum adjudication system and both have major safety and human rights issues.

Instead, Trump accepted a vague compact by which Mexico and the U.S. basically agreed to do what they had already been doing without taking any decisive or effective action to address the actual humanitarian crisis in the Northern Triangle that Trump and his flunkies have consistently mischaracterized as a “law enforcement emergency.” Indeed, the New York Times reported that most of Mexico’s “unprecedented steps” had already been worked out in secret with deposed DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen months ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/us/politics/trump-mexico-deal-tariffs.html. Those interested can read the summary of the agreement prepared by Trump’s own State Department here. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-us-mexico-tariffs-declaration-20190607-story.html.

To be sure, desperate and vulnerable asylum seekers, particularly women and children, will continue to abused, raped, beaten, extorted, obscenely tortured, and killed with impunity and little if any recourse as a result of this week’s actions. But, at least for now, the U.S. and Mexico are maintaining much of the basic framework of domestic and international protection laws.

Contrary to the lies and false narratives spread by Trump and his DHS cronies, U.S. law is not filled with “loopholes.” Rather, it is a fairly straightforward implementation of the international protection regime and treaties that have been in effect since World War II to prevent another holocaust from occurring on our watch.

If anything, since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has watered down its asylum commitment somewhat by adding a legally tenuous “credible fear” process to “pre-screen” arriving asylum applicants in mass migration situations. However, to date, the DHS under Trump has been too incompetent, misdirected, and frankly downright stupid to utilize this streamlined screening process fairly and efficiently.

By treating a somewhat predictable humanitarian refugee flow as a bogus “law enforcement problem” and mindlessly shoving cases into a “captive” court system that they already had abused, mismanaged, and destroyed, the Administration lost effective control. In panic, they have tried to blame the refugees, Democrats, Mexico, Obama, judges, the media, and even the truly hapless failed states of the Northern Triangle for their largely self-created human and operational disaster.

The first of the “unprecedented steps,” involves Mexico sending approximately 6,000 National Guard troops to the Guatemalan border to control illegal crossings. Never mind that the Mexican National Guard is a recent creation that exists largely on paper. Also, forget that Mexico has a questionable record of controlling corruption and systematic human rights abuses among its existing police and military forces.

The U.S., a much larger, better organized, and more prosperous country than Mexico, has resorted to militarizing the border, mass incarceration, family concentration camps, kids in cages, malicious criminal prosecutions, family separations, walls, fences, overt political interference in the asylum adjudication system, and violating international protection norms. These “gonzo” enforcement efforts not only failed to stem the tide, but have actually aided smugglers and traffickers and increased the flow of migrants.

Will newly minted, untrained Mexican troops succeed where the might of the U.S. has failed miserably? Don’t count on it.

Also, the last time I checked, it appeared that most of the Mexican coast and some parts of the U.S. are reasonably accessible by boat from the Northern Triangle. So, assuming that the Mexicans could “shut down” their land border with Guatemala, why wouldn’t smugglers “take to the sea?” How’s that Mexican Navy?

The second “unprecedented step,” is a continuation and expansion of the existing “Remain in Mexico Program.” This toxic gimmick punishes those who have been legally determined to have a “credible fear” of persecution by making them remain in some of the most dangerous locations in the world where they are intentionally and illegally impeded in many ways from pursuing their U.S. asylum claims from Mexico. To date, this program has only been implemented in a few locations, like San Diego where it has been an unmitigated failure according to a report from Kate Morrissey of the San Diego Union-Tribune. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/06/06/cruel-yet-really-stupid-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy-denies-due-process-while-creating-court-chaos-enfeebled-judges-fume-as-aimless-docket-reshufflin/.

The results of this ill-advised effort by Trump to circumvent U.S. asylum laws reads like a “legal toxicology report:” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” mass confusion, lack of information, insufficient and deficient hearing notices, massive violations of the statutory right to be represented by counsel, no opportunity to fairly prepare, document, and present asylum claims, interference with the attorney-client relationship by DHS, and few actual case completions to name just a few of the many abuses. And, how will an already dysfunctional EOIR deal with yet another round of “new priorities” and more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling?”

A Federal District Judge actually enjoined this circus before it could get rolling. But, a “tone-deaf panel” of the Ninth Circuit allowed Trump’s assault on the rule of law to go forward, at least for now.

Nevertheless, the case remains pending with the Ninth Circuit. As EOIR’s rushed and sloppy work product starts to accumulate on their docket and the bodies and horror stories start to pile up in Mexico, more responsible Circuit Judges might actually force the Administration to comply with the law and the Constitution, not to mention simple human decency.

Mexico has pledged to “accept and protect” those sentenced to remain there. But, the Mexican border locations to which individuals are forced to return are dangerous for a reason. Presumably, if Mexican can’t maintain safety and order for its own citizens, it won’t do any better for vulnerable asylum seekers.

Finally, in third “unprecedented step,” Mexico and the U.S. agreed to promote the “Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the government of Mexico in concert with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” to create “prosperity, good governance and security in Central America.” This part of the agreement makes the most sense. But “promoting” in this case appears limited to using development funds that were “already in the pipeline” in both countries. In other words, nothing really new here.

This was a golden opportunity for the U.S. to show real leadership by dramatically increasing its investment in bringing stability and prosperity to Mexico and Central America. Additionally, we could have created incentives (rather than threats) and benchmarks for Mexico to improve its asylum adjudication system and human rights performance. Partnering with non-governmental-organizations and legal assistance groups on both sides of the border also would bring much needed expertise in resolving asylum issues to the table.

But, that would have taken a President with vision, empathy, compassion, courage, competency, intelligence, and creative problem solving ability. Trump is the exact antithesis of all of these qualities.

Consequently, sooner or later we can expect Trump’s “latest egg” to fail, like all of his other gimmicks and maliciously incompetent schemes on immigration. Our “child president” will undoubtedly then embark on a new barrage of lies, false narratives, idiotic tweets, idle threats, blame shifting, insults, racist dog whistles, and general nonsense aimed at diverting attention from his own failures as a leader and more critically, as a human being.

Innocent people will be harmed and die, America and Mexico will be embarrassed and diminished, and the world will be a worse place. But, until America figures out how to use its democratic institutions to remove the kakistocracy, the disaster will continue. That it could have been worse, is only small consolation.

Why not strive to be the “best that we can be,” rather than just “not as bad as we might have been?”

ABUSE OF POWER: Eleanor Acer Of Human Rights First Blasts Administration’s Latest Scheme Promoting A Massive Hemispheric Violation Of Human Rights!

https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/press-release/mexico-border-deal-avoid-tariffs-would-endanger-lives

June 06, 2019

Mexico Border Deal to Avoid Tariffs Would Endanger Lives

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Refugee Protection

New York City—In response to reports that the Mexican government is planning to make a deal with the United States to avoid tariffs threatened by President Trump, Human Rights First’s Eleanor Acer issued the following statement:

President Trump is trying to bully another country into endangering the lives of vulnerable men, women, and children, who want nothing more than to live in freedom and safety. Mexico and Guatemala are not—in a legal or practical sense—safe countries for many refugees. In Mexico too many refugees face kidnapping, assault, and murder.

People seeking refuge are not required to seek asylum in the first country they set foot in. In fact, many face grave dangers in neighboring countries, as well as serious risks that they will be returned to their country of persecution.

Such a plan would not only makes a mockery of U.S. law and treaty commitments, but would also return refugees to places where their lives are in danger. It is yet another abdication of leadership, setting an abysmal example for other countries around the world.

Instead of more attempts to block and punish people seeking refuge, the United States needs real solutions that restore order and uphold America’s refugee laws and treaty commitments, including:

Tackle the root causes pushing people to flee the Northern Triangle countries through a targeted strategy that leverages both diplomacy and aid, focusing on effective programs that reduce violence, combat corruption, strengthen rule of law, protect vulnerable populations and promote sustainable economic development.

Launch a major initiative to enhance the capacity of Mexico and other countries—which are already hosting growing numbers of refugees—to provide asylum, host, protect, and integrate refugees, along with a robust regional resettlement initiative that provides orderly routes to the United States and other countries while safeguarding asylum.

Immediately end the dysfunction at the border, and instead launch a public-private humanitarian initiative and a long overdue case management system to actually manage asylum cases.

Fix the asylum and immigration court adjudication systems to provide fair, non-politicized and timely decisions.

For more information see Human Rights First’s blueprint: The Real Solution: Regional Response Rather than Border Closures, Mass Incarceration, and Refugee Returns. To speak with Acer contact Corinne Duffy atDuffyC@humanrightsfirst.org or 202-370-3319.

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As usual, Trump’s outrageously illegal and immoral proposal relies on:

Bullying weaker countries;
A gullible public;
A cowardly GOP Congress;
Complicit courts.

A simple perusal of the country condition materials publicly available on the EOIR and Department of State websites shows that the idea that either Mexico or Guatemala are “safe” countries where refugees “would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” as required by U.S. law, is preposterous.

Mexico’s asylum adjudication system is plagued by bribery, corruption, and incompetence. It adjudicated only about 10, 000 cases in the last reported period, denying the overwhelming majority. Moreover, gangs and cartels operate freely throughout the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico. Our State Department Report acknowledges that the same organized gangs who force people to leave the Northern Triangle can also harm them in Mexico.

Guatemala is a highly corrupt country basically without a functioning asylum adjudication system. It is a major sender of asylum applicants to other countries. The Guatemalan Government is unable to maintain order and protect its own citizens, let alone refugees from nearby countries.

Also, we are encouraging Mexico and Guatemala to use troops and military force against asylum seekers — something our own laws do not permit.

Essentially, the Trump Administration seeks to “get away with murder.” In two years they have turned the U.S. from a leading defender of human rights to a major international human rights violator. So, why are we allowing our Government to get away with such dishonest, morally bankrupt, and illegal proposals?

Even if these corrupt proposals go into effect, it seems doubtful that they will stem the follow of refugees in the long run. While there might be a short term downturn, eventually smugglers will adjust to the new policies and desperate individuals will find different routes to the United States. They will be more dangerous, so more will die.

Perhaps we will see “Central American Boat People” and more deaths at sea. Maybe there will be more “Golden Ventures.” More deaths at the border will be inevitable as smugglers seek to evade the Border Patrol and get to the interior. Perhaps the human smuggling action will switch to the even longer U.S. Canada border. How about a “Northern Wall” from the Atlantic to the Pacific?

As long as the U.S. stubbornly refuses to acknowledge and address the causes of migration it will continue, in extralegal channels as necessary and as the market “push pull factors” determine. More focus on barring refugees means less focus on drug smugglers and others who present a real threat to our safety and security.

Also, smugglers will be able to change a premium — so those who are willing to take the risk and outsmart the new system will reap even higher profits than the increased ones Trump has already conferred upon them with his maliciously incompetent policies to date. Finally, walls, jails, cages, abuses, family separations, prosecutions, racist rhetoric, armed violence, tariffs, exploitation, massive violations of our Constitution and international laws, or whatever won’t stop desperate refugees from coming. But we will eventually convince refugees to give up on the U.S. legal system and just find ways to get beyond the border and lose themselves in the interior. No enforcement system, no matter how cruel, repressive, expensive, and lawless will be able to get rid of more than a fraction of those who don’t want to be found after reaching the interior.

Moreover, if Trump’s actions succeed in destabilizing Mexico, then Mexican migration, which has actually been a negative flow recently, will resume in large numbers, also adding to the pressure on our borders. The worse things get in Mexico, the less likely that the Mexican Government will stop their citizens from heading north. So, there is every reason to believe that Trump’s “malicious incompetence” will make things even worse for everyone — but particularly for those who are most vulnerable — desperate asylum seekers!

Another future possibility to ponder: Tired of being publicly bullied, humiliated, and dealing with a dishonest unreliable idiot and his incompetent sycophants, Mexico and Canada will “wise up” and cut a trade deal with China that really gives them leverage and puts the squeeze on the U.S. And, why wouldn’t China love a chance to establish factories just across our Northern and Southern borders that could also serve as “listening posts” and repositories for hijacked U.S. technology? Maybe the EU and India could also be cut into the deal.

We are diminishing ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!

PWS

06-07-19

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION INTENDS TO PUNISH MIGRANT KIDS! No Education, Recreation, Legal Help For Those in Kiddie Gulag! — How’s That Likely To Work Out For America?

https://apple.news/AcqynTMA8TqGuaYtxnsPw6g

Angelina Chapin reports for HuffPost:

POLITICS

06/05/2019 09:24 PM EDT

Trump Administration To Deprive Migrant Kids In Shelters Of English Lessons, Legal Aid

Immigrant advocates say the government is using child welfare rights as a political lever to secure more funding.

Unaccompanied immigrant children in government detention centers across the U.S. will no longer have English classes, recreational programs or legal aid, according to Department of Health and Human Services emails first obtained by The Washington Post.

The shelters will “begin scaling back or discontinuing” the funding for “activities that are not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation” due to an influx of unaccompanied children crossing the border and a lack of funding, Evelyn Stauffer, a spokesperson for HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, told HuffPost.

The move could be illegal ― immigrant kids in custody must be taught English five days a week and have at least one hour of recreation time per day, under the terms of the 1997 Flores court settlement. But immigrant rights advocates fear the Trump administration is using child welfare rights as a political bargaining chip to secure funds from Congress. The administration has urged Congress to approve billions more in funding for the U.S.-Mexico border, including emergency funds that would increase shelter capacity and pay for part of President Donald Trump’s wall.

“It’s beyond the pale to threaten to take away the most basic protections [for children],” said Neha Desai, director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law. “Once again this administration is using children as pawns for their broader political goals.”

And while the administration is blaming a border crisis and lack of government funds for these program cuts, immigrant rights experts said the government has itself to blame.

The number of unaccompanied immigrant children coming to the border and being placed in government custody reached a record high of 11,000 in May, and the number of kids in shelters has increased by 57% since last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

There’s no doubt these numbers are stretching government resources, and HHS likely needs more funding to deal with this growing population. But immigrant youth advocates told HuffPost that the government has responded by enacting inhumane policies that exacerbate the system’s problems, such as family separation and sharing information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“This is a management crisis,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “These policies create chaotic and dangerous situations and harm children.”

Rather than tackling the root issues that are spurring immigrants to flee their home countries, the Trump administration has responded with draconian policies to deal with border apprehensions that do not work as deterrents, said Cory Smith, vice president of policy, advocacy and communications at Kids In Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation to unaccompanied kids.

“I think there’s a lot of the policies that have manufactured a crisis and are self-inflicted wounds,” Smith said.

Desai said that if shelters maintained by HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement ran efficiently and released kids promptly ― as they are required to do by the Flores settlement ― it would free up money for the kinds of programs the department is now cutting. Instead, kids are spending an average of roughly 66 days in detention, according to an HHS official, which is close to double the average length of stay before Trump took office.

The amount of time children spend in detention began increasing last May after the government began separating families, sending 3,000 more kids into unaccompanied children’s shelters.

And though the zero tolerance policy ended last June, the government is still separating families on a smaller level, which is unnecessarily adding to the volume in detention centers. “A lot of children in ORR custody should not be there in the first place,” Brané said. “We have a disturbing numbers of family separations [still] occurring.”

Last May, the government further prolonged shelter stays by requiring that everyone in a sponsor’s household be fingerprinted before they could be released. The Trump administration has since rescinded this requirement, but it still shares sponsor information with ICE, which immigration advocates say has made undocumented sponsors afraid to come forward for fear of being arrested and deported.

In February 2018, HHS reopened a temporary unlicensed shelter in Homestead, Florida, to handle an influx of kids crossing the border, which costs more than $1.2 million a day. In a recent court filing, some children described being held in Homestead for more than six months due to major inefficiencies with the case management process, such as having their sponsors rejected without explanation and having their cases passed to multiple managers.

Smith said depriving children of legal aid could also keep them in shelters for longer, since they won’t have reminders of when to show up to their court dates, or guidance about how to navigate difficult decisions.

Peter Schey, one of the lead attorneys representing detained children as part of an ongoing lawsuit, has contacted the government about how nixing educational, recreational and legal programs violates child welfare standards. He said that if the policy is not promptly withdrawn, his team will ask a U.S. District Court to block its implementation.

“I think these policy changes are heartless and unnecessarily cruel,” he said. “They plainly violate both federal laws and the Flores settlement.”

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

More Trump sleaziness. The Trump Administration appears to be pretty creative when out comes to finding money for building useless and unauthorized “walls.” Not so much when it comes to the welfare of children.

Idle hands, unoccupied minds, pent up energy, time on their hands: sounds like another “Trump generated recruiting opportunity” for gangs and bullies!

How low we have fallen as a nation to accept this kind of conduct from our “government.”

PWS

06-06-19

BLOWN OPPORTUNITY: THE GLOBAL COMPACT FOR SAFE, ORDERLY & REGULAR MIGRATION WAS AMERICA’S BEST CHANCE TO LEAD ON A GLOBAL PHENOMENON THAT ISN’T GOING AWAY — Trump’s Mindless White Nationalism Made The U.S. Walk Away From A Deal We Probably Need More Than Any Other Country!

http://www.afsa.org/immigration-debate

Former U.S. diplomat David Robinson writes in The Foreign Service Journal:

Closing the distance between legal requirements and humanitarian instincts is a global, rather than national, enterprise.

BY DAVID ROBINSON

Thirty-two years of diplomatic service taught me a number of things. One is that wherever politics and society seem irredeemably dysfunctional, it is not an accident. It is, at some level, intentional. Someone has a vested interest in continuing the chaos. Someone is getting rich, or powerful, or both; and even the most zealous reform efforts will likely fail unless those interests are mollified or neutralized.

The immigration debate follows that lesson. It is shrill, jumbled, disjointed, often illogical—and largely irrelevant to the reality it claims to address. A big, beautiful wall across our southern border may do little to stem the flow of drugs, criminals, terrorists and even unauthorized migrants into the United States—but its promise is pure gold. Like all the other sharp notes in this performance—including the travel ban, chain migration and anchor babies—the cacophony surrounding the wall helps both supporters and opponents puff out their chests and strut their virtue.

The only losers are those who have more than a partisan or emotional interest in resolving the conflict, including actual immigrants and the communities that receive them. They should not expect a resolution to their real and pressing concerns anytime soon.

Yet the scope of irregular migration today—with upward of 65 million people on the move—is such that it cannot be pushed aside. At the same time, no single country can respond adequately on its own. Diplomacy in the interest of fashioning international agreements to manage the problem is the only viable approach.

Legal Requirements vs. Humanitarian Instincts

Public talk about immigration reminds me of every discussion I ever heard in a Bosnian coffee shop during my 2014-2015 tenure as principal deputy high representative, and earlier as a refugee officer. It invariably begins and ends with an impassioned reference to some horrific event that obscures rather than illuminates the issue at hand. Both sides illustrate strongly held opinions with graphic examples excoriating the other point of view. Anti-immigrant zealots demonize immigrants as rapists and murderers; the other extreme sanctifies them as innocent victims of circumstance or malice. Both points of view are dehumanizing. They rely on stirring but distorted images to carry their arguments rather than on real people with complex motives and histories. Their aim is to capture the moral high ground, not to solve the problem.

Focusing on national immigration reform as a response to that wave is neither comprehensive nor realistic.

But manipulating imagery does not change the facts. Immigration has no inherent moral value, and immigrants are neither more nor less virtuous than anyone else. They were pushed or pulled from their homes by a host of different reasons from personal ambition to cataclysmic disaster. Some are victims, some are opportunists; some should be welcomed, some rejected. What separates migrants and non-citizen immigrants from their citizen neighbors is vulnerability. Regardless of wealth, stature or origin, immigrants are at the mercy of authorities and systems over which they have little or no influence. Their voices and images may be emotionally affecting, but their future is beyond their control.

That dependency drives the conflict about immigration reform, setting the rule of law against humanitarian impulse. It also opens the door to diplomacy. National laws deciding who may and may not enter a country always produce inequities; they always leave on the outside someone who has a legitimate need for entry but lacks the appropriate legal category or political timing to gain it. Visa classifications, refugee protocols and asylum guidelines cannot keep pace with global trends—from criminal violence and global warming to new definitions of marriage and family composition. Immigration liberalizers point to the law’s deficiencies and appeal to values over statutes, while build-the-wall advocates tout the law as the final, unyielding authority. The debate has turned into a name-calling melee as the number of migrants and intending immigrants continues to grow.

My own views on migration evolved in two parts. As a junior consular officer in the Dominican Republic, I scrupulously followed the rules and kept away from America’s shores the “wretched refuse” desperate enough to believe our own mythology. Years later, as a refugee officer, I met humanity’s outcasts in the makeshift places they sought shelter. The memory of a refugee child from Kosovo haunts me still. Who had the right to confine a 10-year-old boy behind a chain link fence? Legally, the government of Macedonia, whose border he had crossed; morally, nobody. It is shocking to me that I may now encounter that same scenario in the United States: legally permitted, morally repugnant.

Unproductive Approaches to Irregular Migration

Erasing that image and closing the distance between legal requirements and humanitarian instincts is a global, rather than national, enterprise. No single country has the political or social bandwidth to respond adequately to the growing demands and pressures of irregular migration. Sixty-five million people on the move do not fit into existing categories, either legal or humanitarian. Neither will they be deterred by piecemeal border controls. Focusing on national immigration reform as a response to that wave is neither comprehensive nor realistic. It is akin to promoting air conditioners as the answer to climate change. The problem will just continue to grow until it overwhelms efforts to avoid it.

Equally unproductive is treating irregular migration as principally a development challenge. Initiatives to reduce poverty or end conflict may have merit in their own right, but they are a long-term gamble, at best, and seldom include migrants in their plans and programs. The Dadaab complex in Kenya, a “temporary” shelter to hundreds of thousands of refugees for three decades, is a case in point. By any rational measure, Dadaab is a development challenge rather than a humanitarian crisis, but that transition never happened. In the meantime, its occupants remain in limbo, deprived of relatively normal and productive lives. Those who are able will continue to migrate and seek their futures elsewhere, including in the United States.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, though nonbinding, marks the first comprehensive effort to address human mobility at the global level.

Sidestepping the challenge of irregular migration leads nowhere. The only realistic starting point for effective, palatable reform is to accept shared responsibility for managing migration in the first place. We cannot eliminate the reasons large numbers of people move unexpectedly, nor can we isolate ourselves from their impact. We can, however, build agreements and networks across borders that establish the norms and rules for their treatment and that address the concerns of the communities that encounter them. We can, through diplomatic agreements, impose a semblance of order on what has become chaos.

There is precedent for this approach. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the subsequent regional agreements it prompted have created a durable framework for the protection of people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum in other countries. They make refugee protection a duty under international law and prohibit forcible return home. The agreements also establish common criteria for adjudicating refugee claims. The regime is imperfect and under stress, but it works. It measures progress, clarifies disputes and assigns responsibility. It is also the basis for a web of public and private, national and international agencies working to implement and improve it. Until recently, the United States was its most generous and reliable supporter.

A Necessary First Step

Extending the principles of protection and due process beyond refugees to all vulnerable migrants seemed within reach as recently as the United Nations General Assembly in 2016. All 193 member-states approved the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that, among other actions, called for a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The compact was approved in December 2018. Although nonbinding, it marks the first comprehensive effort to address human mobility at the global level. It extends human rights norms and development goals to previously disregarded people while reaffirming the prerogative of every country to enforce its own laws. While not a permanent solution to runaway migration, the compact is a necessary first step toward diplomatic problem-solving. It is a meeting place, not a traffic cop, and shifts the needle away from blame toward shared responsibility.

Predictably, however, storm clouds gathered early. The United States was the first to jump ship, citing the paper-thin excuse that the compact interfered with sovereign law enforcement even though it explicitly reaffirms state sovereignty on all immigration decisions. A transparently flimsy excuse made even before the document had been fully drafted, it nevertheless emboldened others to follow. By the time the compact came to a vote, 29 countries had abandoned the effort, leaving 164 to endorse it.

Washington’s position on almost any significant issue signals either permission or caution; and at best, when directed skillfully, it compels action.

This backtracking is significant because it reflects pernicious nationalism as much as supposed flaws in the compact itself— such as signaling climate change as a trigger for migration and encouraging the use of detention only as a last resort. Politically manipulated fear of migrants from “shithole countries” (as our president has called them) and Muslim refugees from war zones had advanced a narrative that facts, no matter how twisted, simply did not support. Yet while the threat may be fake news, proclaiming it worked to the advantage of politicians and pundits who trade on isolationism, supremacy and ignorance.

It may not be unusual for countries to walk away from nonbinding agreements, and often their absence goes unnoticed. The United States is an exception to that rule; its absence is always felt and its presence is almost always required for meaningful international agreements to take root. An ambassador from a Middle Eastern country sitting next to me in Geneva in December 2011 groaned and shook his head when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared to the packed audience that gay rights are human rights. I asked him why he had come, knowing the direction of the speech in advance. He smiled, shrugged and said: “The American Secretary of State. Of course I’m here. But I don’t like it.” He didn’t have to like it, but he did have to deal with it—as long as the United States and its allies continued to press the point.

Diplomatic Leadership

While a Secretary of State’s moral and diplomatic authority may be less compelling today than it was then, it still matters. Influence is not optional for the United States. Washington’s position on almost any significant issue signals either permission or caution; and at best, when directed skillfully, it compels action. Not supporting the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is a missed opportunity to set a global agenda that is too complex and ambitious to thrive without U.S. diplomatic and financial support. There are signs of hope, mainly in Africa, in countries that have embraced the compact and are building the legal and humanitarian framework it promotes. They may have some regional success; but globally their influence is no match for the challenge they face.

So the question remains: Where will the global leadership come from? Humanitarian imperatives and rule of law requirements are still on a collision course. The administration apparently hopes the problem will go away if we hide behind a wall. It will not. The rational choice is to join ranks with those seeking a coordinated response to the challenge. That is the direction American diplomacy should take and American diplomats should endorse.

David Robinson retired as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service in 2017, after a 32-year career. In addition to serving as ambassador to Guyana from 2006 to 2008, he served as assistant secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization from 2016 to 2017. Ambassador Robinson was also a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration from 2009 to 2013, and special coordinator for Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2008 to 2009. He previously served as principal deputy high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement; as assistant chief of mission in Kabul; and as deputy chief of mission in La Paz and Asunción. Currently he is associated with the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

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The total failure of Trump’s arrogantly ignorant White Nationalist immigration policy is a great illustration of the truth of what Robinson says. Without “regime change” and a smarter, more courageous, leader willing to cooperate with other nations in addressing migration in a humane, realistic, and mutually beneficial manner, our immigration and refugee policies will continue to founder and fail.

PWS

06-05-19

TRUMP UNINTERESTED IN SOLVING CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRATION ISSUES: While Mexico & Others Propose Regional Effort To Improve Conditions, Trump Responds With Racist Rants & “Guaranteed To Fail” Enforcement!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/31/trumps-mexico-tariffs-show-he-has-no-interest-solving-immigration-crisis/

Leon Krauze writers in the Washington Post:

Even by President Trump’s pyrotechnic standards, his announcement on Thursday that he will impose a sweeping 5 percent tariff on all Mexican goods coming into the United States unless Mexico stops the flow of illegal immigration is unprecedented. The threat is unjustifiably heavy-handed and will further erode cooperation in bilateral relations as the contentious debate over immigration spills into areas that had been successfully compartmentalized.

Above all, Trump’s threat illustrates his absolute disinterest in reaching a sensible understanding.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has shown unparalleled compliance with the White House’s punitive demands. It has increased the number of agents at its southern border, agreed to hold asylum seekersand dramatically increased deportations of potential asylum seekers.

Late on Thursday, López Obrador answered Washington with a long letter that included a lecture on American history, a brief declaration of discrepancy with Trump’s methods and a mellifluous plea for productive and urgent dialogue. Good luck with that.

Trump’s latest salvo also illustrates the profound rift in the different approaches to solve the humanitarian crisis that first began in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Early last week in Mexico City, Alicia Bárcena, head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, revealed an ambitious development project for Mexico’s southeast and the troubled Northern Triangle.

“Why do people choose to leave?” Bárcena asked. “The lack of a basic source of income and economic opportunity is one of the main reasons.” She went on to explain how inequality, violence and global warming have also fueled the emergency. Bárcena then suggested what she called an “innovative” solution to the problem: Rather than focus on punishing measures to deter immigration, the region should instead emphasize growth through cooperation. López Obrador, sitting a few feet away, nodded. “This plan is important because it goes to the heart of the matter,” López Obrador later added. “People emigrate out of necessity. There’s no other way but to cooperate in search of development.”

But López Obrador’s words belied his own government’s actions.

Contrary to Trump’s unfounded complaints, Mexico has actually implemented myriad other, more bruising ways to try to stem the flow of immigrants toward the United States. In a somewhat schizophrenic policy, it has simultaneously slashed funding for the agencies assigned to handle refugees within the country while executing some of the most punitive schemes put in place by the Trump administration. Not exactly development-oriented actions.

Still, López Obrador insists that the only long-term solution to the current immigration crisis lies in opening new areas of opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who decide to migrate. All three Northern Triangle countries seem to agree: Diplomats for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador surrounded López Obrador for Bárcena’s presentation in Mexico City.

The problem, of course, is the one country missing from this seemingly unanimous show of goodwill: the United States.

For six months now, López Obrador has tried to persuade the Trump administration to invest billions in Central America rather than just focus on enforcement. Just a few days after Bárcena’s impassioned announcement, López Obrador dispatched Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to sell Trump’s team on regional development. Ebrard didn’t go far. While he did meet with acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin K. McAleenan and Jared Kushner, he was snubbed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who canceled a previously scheduled meeting with his Mexican counterpart. Ebrard flew back empty-handed.

Is Mexico being naive? Clearly. To acquiesce to an investment project for Central America would require a complete about-face in Trump’s hostility toward the region. Before Trump announced that he will suspend all aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as punishment for their supposed inaction to prevent the migrant exodus, the United States had assigned slightly more than $180 million in funding for the three countries combined in 2019, less than 2 percent of the amount Mexico would like to see the United States provide the area through aid and investment in the coming years.

Getting Trump to invest seems like a long shot. Just how long? The White House isn’t exactly masking his invective.

Aside from the drastic imposition of tariffs, the Trump administration is also apparently considering limiting the ability of potential migrants to request asylum in the United States if they have traveled by land through Mexico, a radical change that could create an unmanageable bottleneck and humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions for Mexico’s unprepared and underfunded government agencies.

As if that weren’t enough, consider McAleenan’s visit to Central America this week. McAleenan did indeed carry with him a message of collaboration, but certainly not in the areas Ebrard and Bárcena might have hoped for.

On Wednesday, McAleenan met with the Guatemalan Ministry of Government to sign a formal memorandum of cooperation that focuses almost exclusively on enforcement. “Both countries have agreed to take concrete actions necessary to combat the scourge of human trafficking and smuggling, interdict illicit drug trafficking, and target illegal trade and financial flows,” the Department of Homeland Security explained in a statement. “This will include law enforcement training and collaboration to improve criminal investigations.”

The region’s long-term development merited only the vaguest of mentions. In theory, DHS said, the agreement will “improve the ability of both countries to identify and better understand” the root causes of immigration. That’s a long way from the kind of commitment needed to rebuild an impoverished, violent and drought-stricken region.

On Wednesday, I asked a spokesman for Mexico’s foreign ministry about the development plan’s outlook if the Trump administration ultimately declines to join. “Their support is important,” he told me. “But we don’t need the United States. This is our plan.”

This bravado is misguided. The United States is not just another actor in the current drama. Without it — or worse, with the Trump administration as rabid antagonist — a regional bet on Central America’s future will face impossible odds.

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

The issue can’t be solved without addressing the forces that are sending migrants north;
The U.S. bears considerable responsibility for Central America’s current problems;
Therefore, U.S. acceptance of responsibility and meaningful participation in the solution is essential;
Any solution will require the U.S. to accept a robust number of those forced to flee the Northern Triangle;
A solution will take time; the longer the Trump Administration dawdles, the more the problems leading to forced migration will fester and grow;
Unilateral law enforcement, gimmicks, and threats can’t solve the problem and are in fact proving to be counterproductive;
The Trump Administration’s current approach is not only spectacularly unsuccessful, but will sow regional resentment against the U.S. for decades to come.

PWS

06-03-19

O’ROURKE’S IMMIGRATION PLAN FEATURES INDEPENDENT ARTICLE I IMMIGRATION COURT — Every Serious Democratic Candidate Needs To Include This “Must Do” Priority!

Beto_O_Rourke_Immigration_Plan

IN OUR OWN IMAGE
Beto O’Rourke’s Plan for Rebuilding Our Immigration and Naturalization System To Make It Work Better for Our Families, Our Communities, and Our Economy
Above all else, immigration is about people – not just those who have recently arrived or those yet to come, but the kind of people we choose to be. Since the Founding, the compact we made as a nation was to welcome the oppressed, the persecuted, and the hopeful from all over the world because we recognize that immigrants enrich every aspect of our society with their determination and genius. Each successive generation of Americans has included immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, strengthening this nation that we share.
The current administration has chosen to defy this American aspiration, drafted into our Declaration of Independence, welded into the welcome of our Statue of Liberty, and secured by the sacrifices of countless generations. Instead, the current administration is pursuing cruel and cynical policies that aim to sow needless chaos and confusion at our borders. It is manufacturing crises in our communities. And it is seeking to turn us against each other. When this is done in our name, with our tax dollars, and to our neighbors, we not only undermine our laws, hold back our economy, and damage our security – we risk losing ourselves.
But at this moment of peril, we have a chance not only to reverse course but to advance a new vision of immigration that more fully reflects our values. As a fourth-generation El Pasoan, Beto uniquely recognizes the urgency of fixing our broken immigration and naturalization system. Rooted in his experience serving the largest binational community in the Western Hemisphere – one that draws its strength and prosperity from its rich heritage of welcoming immigrants – Beto is proposing a new path forward to ensure we honor our laws, live up to our values, and once again harness the power of a new generation of immigration toward our shared prosperity.
Beto’s plan, which would represent the most sweeping rewrite of our nation’s immigration and naturalization laws in a generation, is built on three key pillars:
1. On day one of his presidency, Beto will use executive authority to stop the inhumane treatment of children, reunite families that have been separated, reform our asylum system, rescind the travel bans, and remove the fear of deportation for Dreamers and beneficiaries of programs like TPS.
2. Beto will also immediately engage with Congress to enact legislation – focused on the key role families and communities play – that will allow America to fully harness the power of economic growth and opportunity that both immigration and naturalization will bring to our country’s future.
3. Finally, Beto’s plan would strengthen our partnership with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. We need to refocus on supporting democracy and human rights and invest in reducing violence because the only path to regional security runs through a more democratic and prosperous Latin America.
I. ENDING THE CRUEL AND CYNICAL POLICIES THAT CREATE CHAOS AT OUR BORDERS AND IN OUR COMMUNITIES ON DAY ONE

The current administration’s cruel and cynical policies are sowing needless chaos and confusion at our borders and in our communities. On day one of his presidency, Beto will take immediate executive action to end these practices and replace them with policies that conform to our laws and values, restore order and process to our asylum and immigration systems, and refocus our tax dollars on smart security. Those executive actions will:
● Reform the asylum system and reunite families. The current asylum system is ineffective, inefficient, illegal, and immoral. Those traveling vast distances to escape extreme violence and crushing poverty are being met by a militarized cruelty and manufactured chaos that separates families, detains children, and deliberately extends the backlog of those who require processing. We must change both the culture and processes for handling asylum claims.
An O’Rourke administration will ensure lawful and humane conditions at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, including access to medical treatment, mental health care, social workers, and translators, and restore orderly and prompt processing of people seeking refuge under our nation’s asylum laws. As president, Beto will:
o Rescind the current administration’s executive orders that seek to maximize detention and deportation, including former Attorney General Sessions’ radical re- interpretation of asylum law that seeks to deny protection to women and children fleeing domestic violence and escaping from deadly gangs.
o Mandate an end to family separations at the border and illegal policies like “metering” and “Remain in Mexico.”
o Issue an executive order to require detention only for those with criminal backgrounds representing a danger to our communities and eliminate all funding for private, for-profit prison operators whose incentive is profit, not security.
o Ensure that people have the tools to navigate our immigration court system by scaling up community-based programs and family case management, which is nearly one-tenth the cost of detention and ensures that people attend their courts hearing and that they know what is expected of them.
o ReinstatetheCentralAmericanMinorsprogram–allowingchildrenwithparents in the U.S. to apply for refugee status from their home countries – and other regional refugee resettlement efforts, working with the international community to process cases in the region and commit to resettling in partner countries.
o Take immediate steps to upgrade and increase staffing in the asylum system, streamline how cases move through the process, and provide timely and fair asylum decisions, while laying the foundation for a more fundamental reform to the immigration court system that restores due process and ensures equal access to justice, including by:

▪ Increasing court staff, clerks, interpreters, and judges;
▪ Making the courts independent under Article I, rather than administered
by the U.S. Department of Justice;
▪ Ending policies that prevent judges from managing their dockets in the
most effective way;
▪ Expanding the Legal Orientation Program (LOP) to ensure that everyone
knows how to navigate our immigration system;
▪ Deploying up to 2,000 lawyers to the border and funding a robust right to
counsel; and
▪ Developing approaches to resolve asylum cases outside of the court system,
such as by allowing USCIS Asylum Officers to fully adjudicate cases when conducting Credible Fear Interviews to prevent referring more cases into the backlogged courts.
o Personally lead a public-private initiative to bring humanitarian resources to the border.
● Rescind the discriminatory travel bans, which defy our nation’s Constitution and values.
● Immediately remove the fear of deportation for Dreamers and their parents and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) beneficiaries, and begin work towards a permanent legislative solution.
● Refocus on smart security. The current administration is distracting CBP and other law enforcement personnel from focusing on actual threats and undermining their efficacy by pulling resources away from them – all in pursuit of a wall that we do not need, does not work, and will not make us safer. As President, Beto will:
o Immediatelyhaltworkontheborderwall–andhisfirstbudget,andeverybudget, will include zero dollars for this unnecessary wall;
o Immediatelybooststaffingtoexpandinspections,reducewaittimes,andincrease our capacity to detect illicit drugs – for instance by pursuing a targeted two-prong strategy that focuses on fentanyl shipments coming through our ports and our mail system – and other contraband, as well as modernizing our ports; and
o Immediately prioritize cracking down on smugglers and traffickers who exploit children and families by working with our regional partners.

IN OUR OWN IMAGE
The following are first-hand testimonials from immigrants in El Paso and across America
Daisy, Dreamer
El Paso, TX
“I came to this country when I was under two years old and have been here for 21 years. I have two younger brothers – one is a United States citizen and one is DACA, like me. I’ve been here longer than I can remember, but because of my status I couldn’t qualify for federal loans to help pay for community college. So I worked two jobs – one full-time job and one part- time job at the same time as taking classes year-round to get my associate’s degree, and now I’m enrolled in the University of Texas, El Paso, where I’m studying computer science and want to go into cybersecurity. After I graduate, I’m thinking about maybe trying to support the US military in cybersecurity or networking – but I can’t work on a base if I don’t have legal immigration status.
“All my friends and memories are here in America. Everything I’ve worked for and contributed to is here and I want to continue building my life and career in the only place I’ve known to be home.”
David, Dreamer
El Paso, TX
“I arrived in the United States when I was 13 years old with my mother after we lost our home during Hurricane Wilma. Since I’ve come here, I’ve always pushed myself to be the best I can be. I’ve worked hard in school, pursued my passion in math and science, and now I’m studying computer science at UTEP while also working at a solar company. When I graduate, I want to use my degree to better this country and society.
Some of modern society’s most important inventions are the result of immigrants – such as Google and Tesla. This innovation only happened because people came to this country and were given a chance. America should embrace the investments, benefits and diversity that immigrants bring, because we can help this country reach its greatest potential.”
II. STRENGTHENING OUR FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, AND ECONOMY BY REWRITING OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS IN OUR OWN IMAGE
As President, Beto will push to rewrite our nation’s immigration and naturalization laws in our own image. These laws have not been meaningfully modernized in decades, despite the efforts of multiple administrations. But we have the chance to chart a new course that more fully vindicates the promise of this nation of immigrants. Beto will work with Congress to achieve that vision. He will reunite families and ensure they have a chance to contribute more to our economy and our communities – and pursue the American Dream. He will put workers and employers on a level playing field to, together, tap into the opportunity immigration presents for our economic growth and shared prosperity. And he will do that while boosting the security and functionality of our borders.
This is not just right but also essential to our shared prosperity. Immigrants from every corner of the world – those who came here on student visas and those seeking refuge from persecution – have been a key driver of our economic growth. They have been responsible for nearly one-third of all new small business, one-fifth of all Fortune 500 companies. And achieving immigration reform will be critical to unlocking our future success – creating at least 3 million jobs over the next decade, adding $2 billion to state and local tax revenues each year, and cutting the deficit by at least $1 trillion over the next 20 years.
Naturalization, too, promises economic gains. A recent study of 21 U.S. cities found that if all eligible immigrant residents were to naturalize, incomes would increase by $5.7 billion,

homeownership would rise by over 45,000, and tax revenues would grow $2 billion. The same study showed GDP would grow by $37 to 52 billion per year if half of those eligible nationwide naturalized.
In his first hundred days, Beto will put the full weight of the presidency behind passing legislation that:
● Creates an earned pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people that is more efficient than previous proposals and includes an immediate path for Dreamers and beneficiaries of programs like the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) programs.
● Strengthens our families, communities, and economy by prioritizing family unity – a hallmark of our best traditions – through provisions that:
o Reuniteimmigrantfamiliesseparatedbylengthyvisabacklogs;
o Revisepreferencecategoriesandcapstoprioritizefamilyunity;and o Removebarstore-entryandstatusadjustmenttosupportfamilies.
● Establishes a new, first-of-its-kind community-based visa category. Beto’s proposal will create a brand new category whereby communities and congregations can welcome refugees through community sponsorship of visas. This program will supplement the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which will be rebuilt and restored to align with America’s tradition of welcoming vulnerable refugees from around the world.
● Increase the visa caps so that we match our economic opportunities and needs – for work, education, investment, and innovation – to the number of people we allow into this country. This also means legislation that will:
o Ensure that industries that depend on immigrant labor have access to a program that allows workers to legally come here and legally return to their home country with appropriate labor and mobility protections;
o Address the green-card backlog and provide opportunities for those awaiting resolution to work and contribute, while immediately recapturing the over 300,000 green cards that have gone unused due to bureaucratic delays to support our high-growth industries of the future;
o Promote STEM education by granting foreign-born students more flexibility to stay in the U.S. and gain employment after graduating; and
o Allowforeign-bornentrepreneursandU.S.patentholdersthechancetostayinthe United States to grow their business, create jobs and raise families that will go on to enrich our country.

● Make naturalization easier for the nearly 9 million immigrants who are currently eligible for citizenship. If we are to reestablish our reputation as a nation that welcomes immigrants, we must make it easier for those already here to become full-fledged citizens. This means pursuing legislation that:
o Makesnaturalizationfreeforallwhomeetthelegalrequirementsforcitizenship;
o Eliminatesapplicationbacklogs;
o Reforms the application process so that individuals are mailed a pre-filled application form as soon as they meet the legal requirements for citizenship;
o Increaseslegalservicesfundingforthosewhoneedit;and
o Establishesequaltreatmentofallcitizens–naturalizedandnative-born–rejecting the current administration’s effort to create new barriers to naturalization and stoke fears around de-naturalization.
● Bolster security and functionality of the border where trade and travel occur. Beto will draw on his lived experience at the border to push for legislation that actually supports our law enforcement and our border communities in advancing the nation’s security and protection from all threats. This includes three steps:
o Increasing Personnel: Immediately stop the smuggling of drugs and prevent human trafficking across the border by hiring, training, and assigning additional CBP personnel at land border crossings;
o Strengthening Infrastructure: Investing in smart, long-term border security by improving existing ports of entry and constructing new ones, investing in evidence-based, cost-effective technology, and supporting federal grant programs that provide resources to both state and local law enforcement and our border communities; and
o AddressingFailures:Ensuringthatweremainanationoflawsbyaddressingvisa overstays through better tracking of and notification to visa holders and fully harmonizing our entry-exit systems with Mexico and Canada.
● Ensure transparency and accountability in law enforcement, including ICE and CBP. Beto will also continue to champion and build upon his previous proposals to:
o CreateanindependentBorderOversightCommission,anOmbudsman,andBorder Community Liaison office;
o Create a uniform process for tracking and preventing migrant deaths along the border; and

o Increase accountability from ICE and CBP personnel through improved training and continued education courses.
IN OUR OWN IMAGE
The following are first-hand testimonials from immigrants in El Paso and across America
Jose Ochoa, business owner
Santa Teresa, NM
“I was born and raised in Mexico and studied engineering. In 2003, I moved to Juarez and worked for multiple global companies in their engineering and packaging operations, but after three years, I knew I wanted to start my own company. One of my colleagues and I teamed up and we opened our own businesses – one in Juarez and one in El Paso – embracing the binational relationship and trade partnership between the United States and Mexico. Today, that company employs nine people in El Paso, and I recently started my third business in America: a consumer electronics corporation established in New Mexico with an e- commerce presence and a physical store in Texas.
“In 2017, our El Paso business, Global Containers & Custom Packaging, was named Exporter of the Year by the El Paso Small Business Administration. Small businesses are the top generators of our economy – we want to generate value, impact our communities and keep employing more people. And if I can help other entrepreneurs and immigrants to be successful here in America – that’s what makes me happy.”
Jose David Burgos, MD, doctor and business owner
El Paso, TX
“I was born in Venezuela as the son of Colombian immigrants. I studied medicine in Venezuela, but because of the political climate there, I came to the United States in 2005, enrolled in school and started preparing for my medical boards while doing research at the University of South Florida. I then had the chance to do my residency at Texas Tech, where I also worked as a professor of internal medicine and after that I started working at the University Medical Center in El Paso. Now, I serve as Medical Director at UMC and have opened two medical clinics in the area, including an urgent care facility. My family also recently opened a restaurant in El Paso.
“Both my wife and I are immigrants and we both had the opportunity to become American citizens. It was a lengthy and painful process, but I am grateful that we have been able to make a positive impact in our community and bring positive change to the area. I am living proof the American Dream is alive, and now I am able to support and encourage other hardworking physicians who are looking for the same chance.”
III. RESTORING OUR STANDING AND ENSURING REGIONAL SECURITY BY BEING A PARTNER FOR PROSPERITY AND SECURITY IN LATIN AMERICA
Consistent with this broad vision, Beto’s plan strengthens our partnership with our neighbors throughout the Western Hemisphere and will be implemented alongside partners in the Northern Triangle and across the region. His foreign policy will increase our engagement within the hemisphere, elevate the importance of Latin America, refocus on supporting democracy and human rights, end our failed war on drugs, and invest in reducing violence and combating climate change, because the only path to regional security runs through a more democratic and prosperous Latin America.
● Join with the people of the Northern Triangle to fight violence and poverty and bolster our shared security and prosperity. Beto will bring a whole of government approach to our investment in the Northern Triangle, recognizing that what we have done in the past is not enough. We must convene our regional partners to do more, faster, if we are serious about reversing the instability that drives forced migration. This means:

o ConveninganewandimprovedPartnershipforProsperityandSecuritybycalling upon our allies and friends across the Americas to form a regional alliance dedicated to creating stability and economic prosperity across the continent, beginning in the most precarious countries;
o Investing $5 billion in the region primarily through non-governmental organizations, community groups (such as Municipal Crime Prevention Committees) and congregations, and public-private partnerships, while galvanizing new financial support from Canada, Mexico, and other international partners, and transforming the development approach that these resources advance, by
▪ Supporting community-based violence prevention strategies and encouraging an end to militarized public security and the global war on drugs – which has become a war on people and fails to recognize the real threat of addiction;
▪ Promoting democratic infrastructure, labor rights, civil rights, and human rights;
▪ Supporting the growth of small-scale farming and access to markets;
▪ Providing agricultural technical support to increase adaptation to climate
change and improve the use of natural resources;
▪ Elevating job, training, and educational opportunities for youth;
▪ Strengthening strategies to address the specific needs of women and girls;
▪ Improving access to health care, clean air, and clean water; and
▪ Supporting adoption of crop insurance and catastrophic insurance, especially as a powerful tool in the face of a changing climate.
● Address systematic impunity, corruption, and weak institutions. Beto will also be firm with the economic and governing elites of the Northern Triangle, who must do their part. For too long these elites have benefited from the status quo. Real change will require their full engagement and, as President, Beto will demand it. That means if they want access to the United States – to do business, to vacation, to send their kids to college – they must commit to ending corruption and self-dealing. They must pay their taxes and invest in their broader communities. They must hold their elected officials accountable.
● Strengthen Mexico and Latin America’s capacity to contribute to regional security, by supporting the United Nations’ Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) work and the development of strong asylum and refugee protection systems in Mexico and across the region, to manage migration flows from the Northern Triangle, specifically by:

o WorkingwithUNHCRtoexpandthecapacityofMexico’srefugeesystemandto collaborate with Mexico on asylum seekers who are both traveling to and through Mexico; and
o Launching a regional resettlement initiative, including building a safe and comprehensive repatriation and reintegration program.
IN OUR OWN IMAGE
The following are first-hand testimonials from immigrants in El Paso and across America
Evelyn, survivor of human trafficking
Silver Spring, MD
“I came to this country when I was 9 years old. I had no idea that I didn’t come here legally, and I was forced into modern-day slavery for the next seven years. With the help a local church and law enforcement, I was able to escape the system I was forced into, get a visa, and I eventually became a naturalized citizen. I got my GED, went to community college, saved money, and in 2016 received my Bachelor’s Degree. Becoming a naturalized citizen enabled me to do more work helping survivors of human trafficking find jobs and start new lives for themselves. It also enabled me to travel across the United States and abroad to educate people about human trafficking and how many people who come to this country and don’t have legal status are victims of violence or horrible situations often without anywhere to turn.”
Carlos G. Maldonado, J.D., immigration lawyer
El Paso, TX
“I came to the United States from Quito, Ecuador when I was 16 without knowing a word of English. I had always wanted to become either a doctor or a lawyer, but after navigating the difficult and complicated immigration system myself, I knew I wanted to go into law to help others have the chance to start and build their lives in America too.
“It took me almost 18 years to finally be able to become a United States citizen. For the first 13 years I was here – even though I had finished law school and was here legally – I never once left the country because I feared I wouldn’t be able to return or that it would slow down my immigration process. I finally became a U.S. citizen in 2018 – and that day was the best day of my life. It was honestly a dream come true. I was relieved, happy and thankful all at the same time. I am so honored today to be able to say that I am an American, and I’m honored that through my work every day I am able to help others navigate the immigration process and have a chance at the American Dream too.”

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

Immigration cannot be successfully addressed or reformed without correcting the current unconstitutional and totally dysfunctional Immigration Court system and replacing it with an independent Article I Immigration Court that complies with our Constitution and guarantees constitutional due process as well as efficient, professional, de-politicized judicial and docket administration.

As our current failed Immigration Court system proves every day, all of our legal and constitutional rights are meaningless without a fair, independent, and impartial forum in which to vindicate them. Injustice to one is injustice to all!

PWS

06-01-19

“FALSE COURTS” OPERATING UNDER UNETHICAL & INAPPROPRIATE EXECUTIVE CONTROL KEY TO GULAG’S PURPOSE OF EXTINGUISHING DUE PROCESS THROUGH DURESS, MISTREATMENT, & DEHUMANIZATION — Would A “Real” Court System Participate In Such a Charade? — “America’s immigration system takes the myth of due process and turns it on its head.“

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/power-asylum-seekers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Former Border Patrol Agent and author Francisco Cantu writes in the NY Times:

Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison

Power is condemning lawful asylum seekers to a system designed for criminals.

By Francisco Cantú

Mr. Cantú is a former Border Patrol agent and an author.

May 31, 2019

For more than seven months, Ysabel has been incarcerated without bond at an immigrant detention center in southern Arizona, part of a vast network of for-profit internment facilities administered by private companies under contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

I visit Ysabel (who has asked not to be identified by her real name for her protection) every two weeks as a volunteer with the Kino Border Initiative, one of ahandful of migrant advocacy groups running desperately needed visitation programs in Arizona, including Mariposas Sin Fronteras and Transcend. As volunteers, our primary role is to provide moral support; facilitate communication with family members and legal service providers; and serve as a sounding board for frustration, confusion and, often, raw despair.

Ysabel and the other asylum seekers we visit often ask for simple forms of support, such as small deposits into their commissary accounts to let them call relatives or purchase overpriced goods like dry ramen, tampons, shampoo or headphones for watching telenovelas. They often ask us to send them books in Spanish — one of the few things that they are permitted to receive through the mail without clearance from a property officer. Large-print Bibles are the most popular, along with books of song and prayer, bilingual dictionaries and English course books, romance novels, and other books that provide ways to pass the time — word puzzle collections, coloring books, books for learning how to draw and instruction manuals for making origami figurines.

Ysabel arrived at the United States border last October after leaving her home and two children in eastern Venezuela. The region she fled was plagued by disorder long before the more widely reported upheavals of recent months, suffering frequent power outages, widespread violence and unrest, and severe shortages of food, water and medication. In the years leading up to her flight from the country, Ysabel told me that she had been kidnapped, robbed at gunpoint multiple times and shot at during an attempted carjacking.

Like millions of her compatriots, Ysabel became disillusioned after her government failed to provide even the most basic security and public services. She joined a local opposition movement, and after participating in several antigovernment demonstrations, she was marked as an enemy of the governing regime. After her house was raided by Venezuelan intelligence forces, she decided to leave for good.

To get to the United States, Ysabel went to Caracas before embarking on nearly three weeks of circuitous travel via airplane, car, bus and taxi. She journeyed through Panama City, Bogotá, Cancún, Mexico City and Mexicali, before finally arriving in San Luis Rio Colorado, a Mexican border town adjacent to Yuma, Ariz., where she presented herself to be considered for asylum at the designated port of entry.

Image

CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Ysabel, it should be noted, has now been detained for more than half a year despite following American immigration and asylum laws to the letter. When interviewed by officials from the Department of Homeland Security, she was quickly found to have a legitimate fear of returning to Venezuela. Nevertheless, like tens of thousands of asylum seekers like her, she has been made to endure the suffocating precarity of our criminal justice system despite never having committed, nor ever being accused of, a crime.

THE BIG IDEAS: WHAT IS POWER?

A special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen notable thinkers and writers answer the question, “What is power?” The entire series can be read here.

Instead of appearing in criminal court, those who seek asylum in the United States undergo civil proceedings. Public defenders are not provided in civil court, so most migrants and asylum seekers receive no legal counsel as they fight their immigration cases, instead relying entirely on pro-bono legal services like The Florence Project, Arizona’s only nonprofit dedicated to representing migrants. According to a 2016 report by the American Immigration Council, only 14 percent of immigrant detainees are represented by an attorney — a number that has likely fallen with recent increases in asylum seekers arriving at the border. The overwhelming majority of those without lawyers — almost 91 percent — have their cases rejected

America’s immigration system takes the myth of due process and turns it on its head. Instead of a presumption of innocence, migrants face the assumption of inadmissibility. They are tasked with demonstrating that they face a certifiable risk to their lives, though in most of their home countries there are few tangible ways to document their plight. Asylum seekers are thus saddled with a confounding burden of proof in an entirely unfamiliar legal system.

Image

CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Our detention and deportation system is further obscured by a Kafkaesque, multi-agency bureaucracy that must be navigated in a language foreign to most of those ensnared in it. Even along the border with Mexico, prison guards and judges often do not speak or understand Spanish, distancing them even further from the population over whom they wield staggering control. This, in turn, exacerbates the vulnerability of detainees and their families, who are commonly preyed upon by lawyers, bail bondsmen and a microeconomy of individuals offering dubious document preparation, translation support and myriad other “services.”

In Arizona, the immigration judges who decide cases inside detention facilities are often notorious for their hard-line approach. For instance, from 2013 to 2018, one southern Arizona judge, John W. Davis, denied 96.9 percent of his cases, granting only nine asylum claims out of the 291 that came before him (the nationwide denial rate during this same period was dramatically lower, at 57.6 percent). In one two-year stretch, Judge Davis ordered the deportation of every single asylum seeker who entered his courtroom.

Despite all the odds stacked against her, Ysabel was granted asylum by a federal immigration judge in February, winning her case even without a lawyer. When I visited her a few days after the decision, she was visibly changed, carrying herself with a lightness I have rarely seen inside the walls of the detention center. After half a year suffering the oppression of uncertainty, a path had finally been laid out before her. Any day now, she told me, she would be released, the exit door into America finally opened.

Days and weeks passed, however, and still the door remained inexplicably shut. Week after week, I arrived at the detention center expecting Ysabel’s name to have disappeared from our list, only to find her sitting again in the visitation room among the other women seeking refuge — mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters. Each time we spoke, her freedom seemed to be slipping further away. The government had asked that her release be delayed while officials prepared an appeal. The deadline to file came and went without Ysabel receiving any updates regarding her case. Finally, she heard that the government had indeed filed its appeal, but she was given no follow-up court date — the one piece of information that allows detained asylum seekers to build a potential timeline for their near future, the single point around which some glimmer of hope might coalesce.

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Ysabel’s case, I later determined after an hour of being referred from one phone line to another, had been transferred to the Board of Immigration Appeals — America’s highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration law. When I finally got ahold of someone from the office to inquire whether a court date had been set for Ysabel’s case, I was told that there was none. Instead of holding hearings, the court decides most cases behind closed doors, usually based solely on “paper review.” When I asked if the office could estimate how long it might take for a decision to be reached, I was told bluntly “there’s no timeline for the board.”

The power the government wields over Ysabel’s fate is difficult to fully grasp. The purgatory she and other asylum seekers are made to endure often lasts for months or even years. All across the country, migrants like her are being shut off from public view in hundreds of facilities that are largely unaccountable to the outside world. Few other countries are engaged in imprisoning noncriminals at such a scale: According to the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, the American immigration detention system is the largest in the world, and one of the few that locks up migrants in criminal-style prisons.

An internal report conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009 plainly states that the agency’s detention model “relies primarily on correctional incarceration standards designed for pretrial felons,” standards that, ICE admits, “impose more restrictions and carry more costs than are necessary.” But these costs represent immense profits for the private detention industry: In fiscal year 2016, roughly two-thirds of all detained migrants (more than 260,000 people) were held in for-profit facilities, generating more than $4 billion in revenue.

Prolonged detention magnifies the most dehumanizing elements of the migrant experience — the commodification of bodies that occurs as migrants are trafficked, the dangers they endure along our militarized border and the criminalization thrust upon them from the moment they cross it. All of that is concentrated within the walls of the detention center. The women I meet feel this keenly. “I hope I can soon leave these four walls,” they tell me, because within them, “it’s like we are animals.”

The acute power of this dehumanization is also meant to serve as a tool of deterrence. Deterrence, after all, has become the underlying philosophy of border enforcement — the ever-growing danger and expense of crossing our Southwestern deserts, the horrifying prospect of parents being separated from their children, the destabilizing uncertainty of being imprisoned with no end in sight. All of it is meant to discourage, dissuade and ultimately break the spirit of the would-be migrant.

One of the women I visit regularly, a 57-year-old grandmother from Guatemala, recently admitted to me that she was considering dropping her asylum claim in order to be deported as soon as possible. The power she felt crushing her after more than half a year of detention was becoming even more unendurable than the overwhelming fear that led her to flee her home in the first place. “No puedo aguantar mas,” she told me — “I can’t take it any longer.”

This, I wanted to tell her, was the system working as it was designed. Instead, I told her not to lose faith, not to give up, wondering all the while if the refuge she sought here might be withheld from her forever.

Francisco Cantu is a former Border Patrol Agent and the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Beneath all of the Trump Administration’s diversionary tactics and overt White Nationalist racism is an even more disturbing truth: our country is systematically denying due process, fundamental fairness, and humane treatment to those who, unlike Trump and his scofflaws, are actually following our laws and deserve a “fair shot” at receiving life-saving protection.

Folks like Yasabel pose no “threat” to the United States other than the color of their skin. But, Trump, Stephen Miller, Bill Barr, and the rest of the Trump sycophants, their supporters, and their GOP enablers, pose an existential threat to our continued existence as a nation.

Outrageously, the U.S. Immigration Courts, supposedly a courageous bastion of protection for the legal and constitutional rights of asylum applicants and others against Government overreach, have become “weaponized” under Barr and Sessions. Now, they function as tools of repression, not justice.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the United States will escape the eventual consequences of the systemic abuses of our legal system and human dignity being carried out under our noses by the Trump Administration through the seriously corrupted Immigration “Court” System.

Yes, 1939 can happen in America, and it’s coming closer all the time! Trump’s disgusting rhetoric is the same as fascists before him: hate, shame, blame, vilification and dehumanization of the innocent and most vulnerable.

Wake up, before it’s too late! Join the New Due Process Army and fight against this Administration’s vile White Nationalist Plan to destroy our country!

PWS

06-01-19

OUR AMERICAN GULAG: As Cowardly Trump Whines About The “Threat” Posed By Individuals Exercising Their Legal Rights At Border, His Administration Continues To Illegally Hold Children In Substandard Conditions — ABA President Bob Carlson Speaks Out Against This Violation Of Human Rights!

James Hohmann reports for the Washington Post’s “Daily 202:”

— Hundreds of minors are being held at U.S. facilities at the southern border beyond legal time limits. Abigail Hauslohner and Maria Sacchetti report: “Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials. … One government official said about half of the children in custody — 1,000 — have been with the Border Patrol for longer than 72 hours, and another official said that more than 250 children 12 or younger have been in custody for an average of six days. …

“The McAllen Border Patrol station, a facility near the southern tip of Texas that is routinely overwhelmed, was holding 775 people on Tuesday, nearly double its capacity. The Washington Post this week made a rare visit inside the facility, where adults and their toddler children were packed into concrete holding cells, many of them sleeping head-to-foot on the floor and along the wall-length benches, as they awaited processing at a sparsely staffed circle of computers known as ‘the bubble.’ … Experts say transferring children out of detention facilities as quickly as possible is critical, especially for ‘tender age’ children — those 12 or younger, who face physical and mental health issues even during short periods in detention. They sleep fitfully, do not eat well and suffer anxiety, said Amy Cohen, a child psychiatrist and expert witness in the Flores case.”

— Border agents apprehended 1,036 migrants in a record roundup near El Paso earlier this week. The apprehensions, which included 63 children traveling alone, reflect an uptick in the number of large groups trying to cross the border. Border agents apprehended a group of 424 migrants, the previous record, just last month. (NBC News)

Here’s the statement of ABA President Bob Carlson:

May 31, 2019

Statement of ABA President Bob Carlson, Re: Improper Detention of Immigrant Children

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WASHINGTON, May 31, 2019 — The American Bar Association is deeply disturbed by reports that hundreds of unaccompanied children seeking refuge in the United States are being held by the U.S. Border Patrol in violation of the law and federal policies.According to federal law and court orders, immigrant children generally cannot be held by law enforcement for more than 72 hours before being transferred to shelters that are better equipped to care for their physical and psychological needs. Yet news reports cite recent federal data that hundreds of children, many aged 12 and younger, have been held in Border Patrol custody for an average of six days, in facilities that are intended to be short-term processing stations.The current situation is unacceptable. Leaders at every level of the federal government, including the White House and Congress, must immediately find legal and humane alternatives that relieve the suffering of these children – and then work to create and fund comprehensive, long-term solutions.

With more than 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is one of the largest voluntary professional membership organizations in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law. View our privacy statement online. Follow the latest ABA news at www.americanbar.org/newsand on Twitter @ABANews.

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How “gonzo” has our country become? Our dishonest and unqualified “President” makes idiotic threats against our “friends” because his Administration has been too maliciously incompetent to deal with a relatively predictable flow of individuals merely seeking to exercise their legal rights. Somehow, the mess in Central America, for which we share a great part of the blame, becomes Mexico’s problem to solve. But, while the vast majority of those arriving at our borders are surrendering themselves to apply under our laws, the Trump Administration is violating the law on a grand scale by mistreating children and others in detention.

In a rational country, there would be a massive, bipartisan, expedited movement to remove this unqualified demagogue from office before he does more damage to our country and our world. But not in today’s America.

Sadly, that appears to be the real meaning of “American exceptionalism.”

PWS

06-01-19

SANE & HUMANE SOUTHERN BORDER POLICIES: Meissner, De Pena, Clemons, Schmidt With Practical Solutions That Would Control The Border & Treat Asylum Seekers Fairly!

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/what-would-it-actually-take-to-fix-the-asylum-system/

Doris M. Meissner, Senior Fellow, Migration Policy Institute

Kristie De Pena, Director of Immigration, Niskanen Center

Michael Clemons, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development

Noah Lanard, Reporter, Mother Jones

Noah Lanard reports in Mother Jones:

In April 2018, the Department of Homeland Security began using a new word to describe the situation at the southern border: crisis. The number of parents and children crossing the border to seek protection under US asylum laws was climbing to nearly 10,000 per month, up from barely a thousand at the start of the Trump administration. Trump did everything in his power to stop families from coming. He deployed the military to the border, separated parents from children, turned away asylum seekers at official border crossings, and then tried to make it illegal to request asylum unless people went to those crossings.

Nothing worked. More than 58,000 parents and children traveling togethercrossed the border last month, the seventh record-high in eight months. DHS officials have upped their hyperbolic rhetoric, saying that the immigration system is “on fire” and in “meltdown.”

At first, Democrats dismissed Trump’s fearmongering on immigration by pointing out that the total number of border crossers was still near historic lows. But as the number of parents and children coming to the border continues to skyrocket and the backlog of asylum seekers awaiting court hearings swells, it’s becoming clear to people across the political spectrum that doing nothing is not an option. Solutions are needed—the question is, what do they look like?

Mother Jones interviewed a half-dozen immigration experts from the left and center to see how they would create a fairer, more efficient, more humanitarian system for asylum seekers. Here’s what they recommend.

1. Hire more immigration judges

A backlog of nearly 900,000 asylum cases means that families seeking asylum often spend years living in the United States before their cases are decided by immigration judges. Most asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have not won their cases in recent years, and it’s even harder now that the Trump administration has limited protections for victims of gang and domestic violence, the most common forms of persecution in these “Northern Triangle” countries. Many of those who receive deportation orders, either because they lost their case or they did not apply for asylum after being released at the border, remain in the country as undocumented immigrants.

The backlog, combined with ICE’s limited ability to find people who don’t comply with removal orders, creates the accurate perception among migrants that families who turn themselves in to border agents are highly unlikely to be quickly deported. That presents an incentive for families unlikely to win asylum to cross the border anyway. More than 260,000 parents and children crossed the southern border between the 2016 and 2018 fiscal years. ICE deported about 7,000 family members during that period.

Trump has increased the number of immigration judges from 289 in 2016 to 435. But the backlog has been increasing by more than 100,000 cases per year,faster than under Barack Obama. That’s partly because of the surge in asylum claims but also because indiscriminate immigration enforcement has led to a dramatic increase in arrests of immigrants without criminal histories and forced judges to reopen cases they had set aside. The president is asking to fund 100 new judges in his 2020 budget, while Democrats have called for hiring at least 300 judges over four years.

Those numbers of hires would barely put a dent in the backlog in the short term. That’s why some experts think the administration should bring entire new classes of judges into the fold. Paul Schmidt, who served as an immigration judge from 2003 to 2016, suggests training retired state judges to handle bond and scheduling hearings so that judges have more time to handle asylum decisions. Kristie De Peña, director of immigration at the center-right Niskanen Center, proposes appointing emergency judges to decide asylum cases, and says that to assuage concerns about the Trump administration’s hiring, these judges could be selected by groups such as the American Bar Association and signed off on by governors.

2. Process asylum claims more efficiently

While serving as Bill Clinton’s top immigration official in the 1990s, Doris Meissner eliminated a similar asylum backlog with a series of technical fixes. Previously, asylum seekers were eligible for work permits immediately, even if their cases wouldn’t be resolved for years, giving people with weak asylum cases an incentive to come to the United States and start working. To remove that incentive, Meissner imposed a six-month waiting period before asylum seekers were eligible for work permits and made sure that nearly all cases were decided within six months. The number of new asylum applications fell by more than half within a year, and the share of claims that were approved eventually more than doubled.

Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, proposes another change that could have a huge impact on the backlog: letting asylum officers, not immigration judges, make the initial decisions in asylum cases.

Those officers already decide many asylum cases—for people who weren’t stopped at the border—and conduct all the “credible fear” interviews that determine whether asylum seekers have a strong enough case to go before an immigration judge. If officers took the place of immigration judges in asylum cases, migrants arriving at the border with strong claims would have their asylum approved more quickly, allowing them to bring their families to the United States rather than waiting years for a hearing before being allowed to bring relatives. Those with weaker claims, sensing that they’d be denied quickly and deported, might skip the trip and avoid taking on massive debts in a futile attempt to win asylum.

Another solution that could spare asylum seekers a long and uncertain trip to the United States and cut down on the backlog would be letting Central Americans apply for refugee status from their home countries. The Obama administration started a program along these lines, but the Trump administration quickly ended it. Democrats are calling for bringing back an expanded version so people have an alternative to traveling to the border.

Schmidt also thinks attorneys should be provided to asylum seekers so they’re informed of their legal rights and cases run more smoothly. The problem for the Trump administration, he says, is that fairer hearings would likely lead to more people winning their cases. Instead of running an effective asylum system, the Trump administration practices what Schmidt calls “malicious incompetence,” a noxious mix of bureaucratic dysfunction and intentional undermining of legal protections for asylum seekers. “If you had a competent administration willing to put the money in the right places,” he says, “you could solve this problem, and it wouldn’t cost as much as all the stuff they’re doing now.”

3. Consider alternatives to family detention

There’s no issue where the government and immigrant advocates differ more sharply than immigrant detention. The vast majority of families are quickly released at the border because of detention capacity constraints and the Trump administration’s recognition that short-term detention doesn’t do much to deter immigration. Under both Obama and Trump, DHS has sought to detain families for longer than the current legal limit of about 20 days and quickly deport them if they lose their cases.

Indefinite family detention is a nonstarter for immigrant advocates, who point to the government’s abysmal track record on immigration detention, the traumatic impact detention can have on children, and the challenges of fighting cases from behind bars. Immigrant advocates and Democrats in Congress oppose all family detention, preferring to release immigrants and track them with ankle monitors and check-ins with case workers.

De Peña is trying to find a middle ground. She proposes a solution that would avoid prolonged detention and the quick releasing of families at the border,while taking advantage of a move Trump already made. Trump has cut refugee admissions to record lows, forcing resettlement agencies to close offices and lay people off. De Peña wants to bring some work back to these agencies by having the government contract with them to house families seeking asylum. Under her plan, the families would be located in proximity to one another and have access to schools, medical facilities, and lawyers. They could move about freely, though they’d be monitored with ankle bracelets, as they often are now. That way, families seeking asylum wouldn’t be locked up like criminals, but they would also be less likely to disappear into undocumented life in American cities.

4. Send foreign aid—but don’t rely on it

Almost everyone in both parties supports sending foreign aid to Central America.Senate Democrats’ border plan, which was first introduced in October, provides $3 billion in aid to address the “root causes” of migration from the Northern Triangle, specifically poverty and violence. The outlier is Trump, who is moving to cut off aid to Central America despite his own acting DHS secretary’s support for that assistance.

But that foreign aid is not likely to be a quick fix. Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and researcher Hannah Postel concluded in a 2018 article that the chance of deterring migration through development assistance is “weak at best.” To greatly impact migration, theyfound, aid would have to work in “unprecedented ways” over multiple generations. There is some evidence that security assistance for neighborhood-level programs such as community policing can reduce migration, but economic aid could actually have the opposite effect, boosting migration from the poorest areas of the Northern Triangle by giving people the resources needed to reach the border. Clemens considers Trump’s decision to cut off aid “vacuous and nihilistic,” but he believes foreign aid mostly gets as much attention as it does because it’s a “political winner”—not an actual short- or medium-term solution to the migration challenge.

5. Open up economic visas

People are leaving the Northern Triangle to escape intense gang violence, find jobs, or reunite with relatives—often all three. The problem is that economic and family concerns aren’t valid grounds for asylum, but asylum is essentially the only way for most Central Americans to come to the United States legally. (The State Department rejects nearly all tourist visa applications from low-income Central Americans, worried that they’ll overstay their visas.) But asylum doesn’t have to be the only path into the United States.

Last year, the Department of Labor approved nearly 400,000 guest workers recruited by US employers to work in agriculture and other seasonal industries. The vast majority of the temporary work visas have gone to Mexicans, many of whom have longstanding relationships with specific employers. The United States could easily require or encourage employers to hire more Central Americans. Clemens calls this the “lowest-hanging fruit” for accommodating people whose countries are passing through the same phase of economic development that caused migrants to come to the United States from everywhere from Sweden to South Korea in previous generations.

Opening up more visas for Central Americans wouldn’t require legislation and could be done “literally next month,” Clemens says. And given that Trump and his family already employ many of these guest workers, he says, “they know all about it.”

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These problems can be solved. But, not by “malicious incompetence.”

The biggest and most critical statutory change has nothing at all to do with “closing” bogus “loopholes” in asylum law that have been invented to further the White Nationalist narrative.

If I could make just one statutory change, it would be an independent Article I Immigration Court. Over time, a “real” court would establish a fair and efficient administration of the existing asylum laws and would hold the Government accountable for violating and ignoring those laws.

A border control system focused on administering asylum laws, rather than avoiding, flouting, or intentionally misinterpreting them, would look much different and undoubtedly would produce different results. That, in turn, would force the Government to establish and carry out real border law enforcement, rather than just targeting asylum seekers. Without a credible independent Immigration Court system to insure the integrity of the law, no statutory change in immigration law will be fully effective.

PWS

05-29-19

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: “Roundtable” Leader Judge Jeffrey Chase Tells NPR’s Michel Martin How Trump’s “Malicious Incompetence” & EOIR’s “Dysfunctional Bias” Are Increasing Backlog & Killing Due Process In Failing Immigration Court System

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/19/724851293/how-trumps-new-immigration-plan-will-affect-backlog-of-pending-cases

Here’s the transcript:

LAW

How Trump’s New Immigration Plan Will Affect Backlog Of Pending Cases

5:40

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TRANSCRIPT

May 19, 20195:35 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Jeffrey Chase, a former immigration judge, about how President Trump’s new proposals will affect immigration courts.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I’m Michel Martin. Immigration, both legal and unauthorized, has been a central issue for Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president. Last week, he announced his plan for an overhaul to the current system, which emphasizes family ties and employment, moving to a system that would prioritize certain education and employment qualifications.

Overshadowing all of this, however, is the huge backlog of immigration cases already in the system waiting to go before the courts. More than 800,000 cases are waiting to be resolved, according to The New York Times. We wanted to get a sense of how the immigration courts are functioning now and how the new system could affect the courts, so we’ve called Jeffrey Chase. He is a retired immigration judge in New York. He worked as a staff attorney at the Board of Immigration Appeals. We actually caught up with him at the airport on his way back from a conference on national immigration law, which was held in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Chase, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

JEFFREY CHASE: Thank you. Yeah, it seems appropriate to be at JFK Airport talking about immigration. So…

MARTIN: It does.

CHASE: It worked out.

MARTIN: So, first of all, just – as you said, you’re just coming back from this conference. Could you just give me – just overall, what are you hearing from your colleagues, particularly your former colleagues in the courts, about how this system is functioning now? How do they experience this backlog? Is it this unending flow of cases that they can’t do anything with? Or – how are they experiencing this?

CHASE: Yeah. You know, the American Bar Association just put out a report on the immigration courts recently in which they said it’s a dysfunctional system on the verge of collapse. And that was, basically, agreed to by everybody at the conference, including sitting immigration judges. What the judges have said is that the new judges being hired are pretty much being told in their training that they’re not really judges, that instead, they should view themselves as loyal employees of the attorney general and of the executive branch of government. They are basically being trained to deny cases not to fairly consider them.

So, you know, the immigration court itself has to be neutral, has to be transparent and has to be immune from political pressures. And unfortunately, the immigration courts have always been housed within the Department of Justice, which is a prosecutorial agency that does not have transparency and which is certainly not immune from political pressures. So there’s always been this tension there, and I think they’ve really come to a head under this administration.

MARTIN: Well, the president has said that his new proposal should improve the process by screening out meritless claims. And I think his argument is that because there will be a clearly defined point system for deciding who is eligible and who is not, that this should deter this kind of flood of cases. What is your response to that?

CHASE: Yeah, I don’t think it addresses the court system at all because he’s talking – his proposal addresses, you know, the system where people overseas apply for visas and then come here when their green cards are ready. And those are generally not the cases in the courts. The courts right now are flooded with people applying for political asylum because they’re fleeing violence in Central America.

MARTIN: Well, can I just interrupt here? So you’re just saying – I guess on this specific question, though, you’re saying that this proposal to move to a system based on awarding points for certain qualifications would not address the backlog because that is not where applicants come in. Applicants who are a part of this backlog are not affected by that. Is that what you’re saying?

CHASE: Yes. Applying for asylum is completely outside of that whole point system and visa system. And that’s saying that anyone who appears at the border or at an airport and says, I’m unable to return; I’m in fear for my life, goes on a whole different track.

MARTIN: And so, finally, what would affect this backlog? What would be the most – in your view, based on your experience – the most effective way to address this backlog – this enormous backlog of cases?

CHASE: I think, to begin with, any high-volume court system – criminal courts, you know, outside of the immigration system – can only survive when you have – the two parties are able to conference cases, are able to reach pre-case settlements, are able to reach agreements on things. If you could imagine in the criminal court system, if every jaywalking case had to go through a – you know, a full jury trial and then, you know, get appealed all the way up as high as it could go, that system would be in danger of collapse as well. So I think you have to return to a system where you allow the two sides to negotiate things.

And you also have to give the judges – let them be judges. Give them the tools they need to be judges and the independence they need to be judges. And lastly, you have to prioritize the cases.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, I assume that there were different political perspectives at this conference, given that people come from all different sectors of that – of the bar. And I just wondered – and I assume that there are some there who favor more restrictionist methods and some who don’t. I was wondering, overall, was there a mood at this conference?

CHASE: I think the overall mood, even amongst the restrictionist ones – the idea that, you know, look; judges have to be allowed to be judges and have to be given the respect and the tools they need to do their job is one that’s even held by the more restrictionist ones. And although the government people aren’t allowed to speak publicly under this administration, I think privately, they’re very happy about a lot of the advocates fighting these things and bringing – making these issues more public.

MARTIN: Jeffrey Chase is a former immigration judge. He’s returned to private practice. And we actually caught up with him on his way back from an immigration law conference in Austin, Texas. We actually caught up with him at the airport in New York.

Jeffrey Chase, thank you so much for talking to us.

CHASE: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

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Go to the link for the full audio from NPR.

I agree with my friend Jeffrey that the sense at the FBA Immigration Conference in Austin, TX was that EOIR had hit “rock bottom” from all angles: ethics, bias, and competence, but amazingly was continuing in “free fall” even after hitting that bottom. It’s difficult to convey just how completely FUBAR this once promising “court system” has become after nearly two decades of politicized mismanagement from the DOJ culminating in the current Administration’s “malicious incompetence” and EOIR’s aggressive disdain for its former “Due Process mission.”

PWS

05-21-19

NBC NEWS: MIGRANT KIDS CONTINUE TO DIE IN TRUMP’S “NEW AMERICAN GULAG” — 16 Year Old Guatemalan Boy 5th “Kid Casualty” Since Dec!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/16-year-old-migrant-boy-dies-u-s-custody-5th-n1007751

Daniella Silva reports for NBC News:

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy died Monday in immigration custody in south Texas, the fifth migrant child to die since December, Customs and Border Protection said.

The teenager, who was not identified by authorities, was apprehended after crossing the border May 13 near Hidalgo, Texas, CBP said in a statement posted Monday. The boy was transferred from the Rio Grande Valley Sector’s Central Processing Center to the Weslaco Border Patrol Station on Sunday, the statement said.

He was then due to be placed with the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that oversees care of unaccompanied or separated migrant children after they are initially processed by immigration authorities, the statement said.

But the boy was found unresponsive Monday morning during a welfare check, the statement said. He died at the Weslaco Station.

“The men and women of U.S. Customs and Border Protection are saddened by the tragic loss of this young man and our condolences are with his family,” acting Commissioner John Sanders said in the statement. “CBP is committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody.”

The cause of death is unknown and the incident is being reviewed by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The Guatemalan government has been notified, the statement said.

The boy is the fifth migrant child to die since December. All of the children were Guatemalan. Asylum-seekers and other migrants from Guatemala have been fleeing a mix of violence, drought, food shortages and poverty.

In December, Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7, died of a bacterial infection, and Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, died of a flu infection while in CBP custody, according to authorities.

On April 30, Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16, died following “several days of intensive care” at a hospital after falling ill while in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services.

A medical examiner in Corpus Christi, Texas, said Juan had been diagnosed with a rare condition known as Pott’s puffy tumor, which can be caused by a severe sinus infection or head trauma, according to The Associated Press.

Last week, a 2½-year-old died after being hospitalized for pneumonia, following high fever and difficulty breathing after he was apprehended in early April, authorities said.

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The death toll for kids doesn’t even count some who have died or been killed in Mexico while awaiting processing that they are legally entitled to, but are not receiving in violation of law by the Administration.

Seems like rather than wasting time and money on walls, troops to string barbed wire, “remain in Mexico,” tent cities, increased detention, and using Border Patrol Agents illegally as unqualified “Asylum Officers,” the Administration should be concentrating all efforts on humanitarian care and assistance, fairly and timely processing asylum applicants at ports of entry, and granting as many asylum cases as possible under the current law to clear those cases out of the crowded system.

The existing law is actually flexible enough to deal with the current humanitarian situation if we had a competent, law-abiding Administration. However, the likely results, granting asylum to legitimate refugees fleeing situations in the Northern Triangle for which we share a great deal of responsibility, wouldn’t please the White Nationalist nativists. Just imagine using the law properly to protect deserving refugees, rather than “gaming” it to reject them.

One main purpose of the “Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Act” (“TVPA”) was to insure maximum protection to minors arriving at the border. Shamefully, rather than seeing that those protections are carried out, the Trump Administration and the GOP actually seek to remove Wilberforce Protection from those who need it most, thereby paving the way for massive child exploitation and casualties. Throughout his Administration, Trump and his White Nationalist cronies have been the “best friends” and “biggest boosters” of the druggies, human smugglers, cartels, and gangs. How about an Administration that protects victims rather than enriching and enabling their persecutors and abusers?

PWS

05-20-19

REPORT FROM FBA, AUSTIN: Read My Speech “JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW”

OUR DISTINGUISHED PANEL:

Eileen Blessinger, Blessinger Legal

Lisa Johnson-Firth, Immigrants First

Andrea Rodriguez, Rodriguez Law

FBA Austin -Central America — Intro

JUSTICE BETRAYED: THE INTENTIONAL MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN ASYLUM APPLICANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Federal Bar Association Immigration Conference

Austin, Texas

May 17, 2019

Hi, I’m Paul Schmidt, moderator of this panel. So, I have something useful to do while my wonderful colleagues do all the “heavy lifting,” please submit all questions to me in writing. And remember, free beer for everyone at the Bullock Texas State Museum after this panel!

Welcome to the front lines of the battle for our legal system, and ultimately for the future of our constitutional republic. Because, make no mistake, once this Administration, its nativist supporters, and enablers succeed in eradicating the rights and humanity of Central American asylum seekers, all their other “enemies” — Hispanics, gays, African Americans, the poor, women, liberals, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, Democrats — will be in line for “Dred Scottification” — becoming “non-persons” under our Constitution. If you don’t know what the “Insurrection Act” is or “Operation Wetback” was, you should “tune in” to today’s edition of my blog immigrationcourtside.com and take a look into the future of America under our current leaders’ dark and disgraceful vision.

Before I introduce the “Dream Team” sitting to my right, a bit of asylum history.

In 1987, the Supreme Court established in INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca that a well founded fear of persecution for asylum was to be interpreted generously in favor of asylum applicants. So generously, in fact, that someone with only a 10% chance of persecution qualifies.

Shortly thereafter, the BIA followed suit with Matter of Mogharrabi, holding that asylum should be granted even in cases where persecution was significantly less than probable. To illustrate, the BIA granted asylum to an Iranian who suffered threats at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, DC. Imagine what would happen to a similar case under today’s regime!

In the 1990s, the “Legacy INS” enacted regulations establishing that those who had suffered “past persecution” would be presumed to have a well-founded fear of future persecution, unless the Government could show materially changed circumstances or a reasonably available internal relocation alternative that would eliminate that well-founded fear. In my experience as a judge, that was a burden that the Government seldom could meet.

But the regulations went further and said that even where the presumption of a well founded fear had been rebutted, asylum could still be granted because of “egregious past persecution” or “other serious harm.”

In 1996, the BIA decided the landmark case of Matter of Kasinga, recognizing that abuses directed at women by a male dominated society, such as “female genital mutilation’ (“FGM”), could be a basis for granting asylum based on a “particular social group.” Some of us, including my good friend and colleague Judge Lory Rosenberg, staked our careers on extending that much-need protection to women who had suffered domestic violence. Although it took an unnecessarily long time, that protection eventually was realized in the 2014 precedent Matter of A-R-C-G-, long after our “forced departure” from the BIA.

And, as might be expected, over the years the asylum grant rate in Immigration Court rose steadily, from a measly 11% in the early 1980s, when EOIR was created, to 56% in 2012, in an apparent long overdue fulfillment of the generous legal promise of Cardoza-Fonseca. Added to those receiving withholding of removal and/or relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), approximately two-thirds of asylum applicants were receiving well-deserved, often life-saving legal protection in Immigration Court.

Indeed, by that time, asylum grant rates in some of the more due-process oriented courts with asylum expertise like New York and Arlington exceeded 70%, and could have been models for the future. In other words, after a quarter of a century of struggles, the generous promise of Cardoza-Fonseca was finally on the way to being fulfilled. Similarly, the vision of the Immigration Courts as “through teamwork and innovation being the world’s best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all” was at least coming into focus, even if not a reality in some Immigration Courts that continued to treat asylum applicants with hostility.

And, that doesn’t count those offered prosecutorial discretion or “PD” by the DHS counsel. Sometimes, this was a humanitarian act to save those who were in danger if returned but didn’t squarely fit the somewhat convoluted “refugee” definition as interpreted by the BIA. Other times, it appeared to be a strategic move by DHS to head off possible precedents granting asylum in “close cases” or in “emerging circumstances.”

In 2014, there was a so-called “surge” in asylum applicants, mostly scared women, children, and families from the Northern Triangle of Central America seeking protection from worsening conditions involving gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments.There was a well-established record of femicide and other widespread and largely unmitigated gender-based violence directed against women and gays, sometimes by the Northern Triangle governments and their agents, other times by gangs and cartels operating with the knowledge and acquiescence of the governments concerned.

Also, given the breakdown of governmental authority and massive corruption, gangs and cartels assumed quasi-governmental status, controlling territories, negotiating “treaties,” exacting involuntary “taxes,” and severely punishing those who publicly opposed their political policies by refusing to join, declining to pay, or attempting to report them to authorities. Indeed, MS-13 eventually became the largest employer in El Salvador. Sometimes, whole family groups, occupational groups, or villages were targeted for their public acts of resistance.

Not surprisingly in this context, the vast majority of those who arrived during the so-called “surge” passed “credible fear” screening by the DHS and were referred to the Immigration Courts, or in the case of “unaccompanied minors,” to the Asylum Offices, to pursue their asylum claims.

The practical legal solution to this humanitarian flow was obvious — help folks find lawyers to assist in documenting and presenting their cases, screen out the non-meritorious claims and those who had prior gang or criminal associations, and grant the rest asylum. Even those not qualifying for asylum because of the arcane “nexus” requirements appeared to fit squarely within the CAT protection based on likelihood of torture with government acquiescence upon return to the Northern Triangle. Some decent BIA precedents, a robust refugee program in the Northern Triangle, along with continued efforts to improve the conditions there would have “sealed the deal.” In other words, the Obama Administration had all of the legal tools necessary to deal effectively and humanely with the misnamed “surge” as what it really was — a humanitarian situation and an opportunity for our country to show human rights leadership!

But, then things took a strange and ominous turn. After years of setting records for deportations and removals, and being disingenuously called “soft on enforcement” by the GOP, the Obama Administration began believing the GOP myths that they were wimps. They panicked! Their collective “manhood” depended on showing that they could quickly return refugees to the Northern Triangle to “deter” others from coming. Thus began the “weaponization” of our Immigration Court system that has continued unabated until today.

They began imprisoning families and children in horrible conditions and establishing so-called “courts” in those often for profit prisons in obscure locations where attorneys generally were not readily available. They absurdly claimed that everyone should be held without bond because as a group they were a “national security risk.” They argued in favor of indefinite detention without bond and making children and toddlers “represent themselves” in Immigration Court.

The Attorney General also sent strong messages to EOIR that hurrying folks through the system by “prioritizing” them, denying their claims, “stuffing” their appeals, and returning them to the Northern Triangle with a mere veneer of due process was an essential part of the Administration’s “get tough” enforcement program. EOIR was there to “send a message” to those who might be considering fleeing for their lives — don’t come, you won’t get in, no matter how strong your claim might be.

They took judges off of their established dockets and sent them to the Southern Border to expeditiously remove folks before they could get legal help. They insisted on jamming unprepared cases of recently arrived juveniles and “adults with children” in front of previously docketed cases, thereby generating total chaos and huge backlogs through what is known as “aimless docket reshuffling” (“ADR”).

Hurry up scheduling and ADR also resulted in more “in absentia” orders because of carelessly prepared and often inadequate or wrongly addressed “notices” sent out by overwhelmed DHS and EOIR court staff. Sometimes DHS could remove those with in absentia orders before they got a chance to reopen their cases. Other times, folks didn’t even realize a removal order had been entered until they were on their way back.

They empowered judges with unusually high asylum denial rates. By a ratio of nine to one they hired new judges from prosecutorial backgrounds, rather than from the large body of qualified candidates with experience in representing asylum applicants who might actually have been capable of working within the system to fairly and efficiently recognize meritorious cases, promote fair access to pro bono counsel, and insure that doubtful cases or those needing more attention did not get “lost” in the artificial backlogs being created in an absurdly mismanaged system. In other words, due process took a back seat to “expedience” and fulfilling inappropriate Administration enforcement goals.

Asylum grant rates began to drop, even as conditions on the ground for refugees worldwide continued to deteriorate. Predictably, however, detention, denial, inhumane treatment, harsh rhetoric, and unfair removals failed to stop refugees from fleeing the Northern Triangle.

But, just when many of us thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. The Trump Administration arrived on the scene. They put lifelong White Nationalist xenophobe nativists Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller in charge of eradicating the asylum process. Sessions decided that even artificially suppressed asylum grant rates weren’t providing enough deterrence; asylum seekers were still winning too many cases. So he did away with A-R-C-G- and made it harder for Immigration Judges to control their dockets.

He tried to blame asylum seekers and their largely pro bono attorneys, whom he called “dirty lawyers,” for having created a population of 11 million undocumented individuals in the U.S. He promoted bogus claims and false narratives about immigrants and crime. Perhaps most disgustingly, he was the “mastermind” behind the policy of “child separation” which inflicted lifetime damage upon the most vulnerable and has resulted in some children still not being reunited with their families.

He urged “judges” to summarily deny asylum claims of women based on domestic violence or because of fear of persecution by gangs. He blamed the judges for the backlogs he was dramatically increasing with more ADR and told them to meet new quotas for churning out final orders or be fired. He made it clear that denials of asylum, not grants, were to be the “new norm” for final orders.

His sycophantic successor, Bill Barr, an immigration hard-liner, immediately picked up the thread by eliminating bond for most individuals who had passed credible fear. Under Barr, the EOIR has boldly and publicly abandoned any semblance of due process, fairness, or unbiased decision making in favor of becoming an Administration anti-asylum propaganda factory. Just last week they put out a “bogus fact sheet” of lies about the asylum process and the dedicated lawyers trying to help asylum seekers. The gist was that the public should believe that almost all asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle are mala fide and that getting them attorneys and explaining their rights are a waste of time and money.

In the meantime, the Administration has refused to promptly process asylum applicants at ports of entry; made those who have passed credible fear “wait in Mexico” in dangerous and sometimes life-threatening conditions; unsuccessfully tried to suspend the law allowing those who enter the U.S. between ports of entry to apply for asylum; expanded the “New American Gulag” with tent cities and more inhumane prisons — dehumanizingly referred to as “beds” as if they existed without reference to those humans confined to them; illegally reprogrammed money that could have gone for additional humanitarian assistance to a stupid and unnecessary “wall;” and threatened to “dump” asylum seekers to “punish” so-called “sanctuary cities.” Perhaps most outrageously, in violation of clear statutory mandates, they have replaced trained Asylum Officers in the “credible fear” process with totally unqualified Border Patrol Agents whose job is to make the system “adversarial” and to insure that fewer individuals pass “credible fear.”

The Administration says the fact that the “credible fear” pass rate is much higher than the asylum grant rate is evidence that the system is being “gamed.” That’s nativist BS! The, reality is just the opposite: that so many of those who pass credible fear are eventually rejected by Immigration Judges shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the Immigration Court system. Under pressure to produce and with too many biased, untrained, and otherwise unqualified “judges,” many claims that should be granted are being wrongfully denied.

Today, the Immigration Courts have become an openly hostile environment for asylum seekers and their representatives. Sadly, the Article III Courts aren’t much better, having largely “swallowed the whistle” on a system that every day blatantly mocks due process, the rule of law, and fair and unbiased treatment of asylum seekers. Many Article IIIs continue to “defer” to decisions produced not by “expert tribunals,” but by a fraudulent court system that has replaced due process with expediency and enforcement.

But, all is not lost. Even in this toxic environment, there are pockets of judges at both the administrative and Article III level who still care about their oaths of office and are continuing to grant asylum to battered women and other refugees from the Northern Triangle. Indeed, I have been told that more than 60 gender-based cases from Northern Triangle countries have been granted by Immigration Judges across the country even after Sessions’s blatant attempt to snuff out protection for battered women in Matter of A-B-. Along with dependent family members, that means hundreds of human lives of refugees saved, even in the current age.

Also significantly, by continuing to insist that asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle be treated fairly in accordance with due process and the applicable laws, we are making a record of the current legal and constitutional travesty for future generations. We are building a case for an independent Article I Immigration Court, for resisting nativist calls for further legislative restrictions on the rights of asylum seekers, and for eventually holding the modern day “Jim Crows” who have abused the rule of law and human values, at all levels of our system, accountable, before the “court of history” if nothing else!

Eventually, we will return to the evolving protection of asylum seekers in the pre-2014 era and eradicate the damage to our fundamental values and the rule of law being done by this Administration’s nativist, White Nationalist policies.That’s what the “New Due Process Army” is all about.

Here to tell you how to effectively litigate for the New Due Process Army and to save even more lives of deserving refugees from all areas of the world, particularly from the Northern Triangle, are three of the “best ever.” I know that, because each of them appeared before me during my tenure at the Arlington Immigration Court. They certainly brightened up my day whenever they appeared, and I know they will enlighten you with their legal knowledge, energy, wit, and humanity.

Andrea Rodriguez is the principal of Rodriguez Law in Arlington Virginia. Prior to opening her own practice, Andrea was the Director of Legal Services at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). She is a graduate of the City University of New York Law and George Mason University.

Eileen Blessinger is the principal of Blessinger Legal in Falls Church, Virginia. Eileen is a graduate of the Washington College of Law at American University. In addition to heading a multi-attorney practice firm, she is a frequent commentator on legal issues on television and in the print media.

Lisa Johnson-Firth is the principal of Immigrants First, specializing in removal defense, waivers, family-based adjustment, asylum and Convention Against Torture claims, naturalization, U and T visas, and Violence Against Women Act petitions. She holds a J.D. from Northeastern University, an LLB from the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and a B.A. degree from Allegheny College.

Andrea, starting with you, what’s the real situation in the Northern Triangle and the sordid history of the chronic failure of state protection?

PWS

05-20-19

KERWIN & WARREN @ CMS: No, We Don’t Need To Spend More Money On “Designed To Fail” Border Enforcement — What We Need Is A Smarter, More Competent, Less Corrupt Government!

https://cmsny.org/publications/essay-kerwin-warren-051619/

The Trump administration came into office at a time when illegal border crossings from Mexico had been reduced to one-fourth from their historic highs and the US undocumented population had been falling for a decade. At present, the administration enjoys the largest immigration enforcement budget in US history, but in fiscal year (FY) 2019 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is on track to apprehend the highest numbers of border crossers in more than a decade. In both March and April, the Border Patrol recorded more than 100,000 apprehensions at the US-Mexico border. Its border enforcement strategies are failing on their own terms and, until the United States reassesses its overall immigration and refugee policies, further enforcement funding would be throwing good money after bad.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) needs increased staffing and better infrastructure at certain ports of entry (POEs), where large quantities of illegal narcotics enter the country and illegal firearms and drug proceeds leave it. It may also need to expand its capacity to respond in real time to changed migration patterns. However, lack of resources does not explain the administration’s failures. Rather, it is its failure to respond adequately to the conditions driving Central American and (increasingly) Venezuelan migrants, to provide legal pathways to protection for those fleeing violence and other impossible conditions, and to create a strong, well-resourced US asylum system.[1]

Historically Unprecedented Immigration Enforcement Spending

In 1990, the total appropriation to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — for both immigration enforcement and adjudication of applications — was $1.2 billion. By 2018, the enacted budgets of the two DHS immigration enforcement agencies, CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), equaled a combined $23.8 billion (DHS 2019, 21, 27). This figure does not include the significant immigration enforcement responsibilities and expenditures of: (1) US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which primarily adjudicates immigration applications; (2) the Department of State (DOS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and other federal agencies; (3) the federal criminal justice system, which prosecutes and adjudicates a high volume of illegal entry and re-entry offenses (TRAC 2017, 2018); and (4) the many states and localities officially delegated by ICE to enforce US immigration laws through programs like 287(g) (ICE 2018). While enforcement expenditures have increased, investments in the USCIS Asylum Corps and the Immigration Court system have lagged badly behind, leading to massive case backlogs and long delays in adjudicating cases (Kerwin 2018).

The president’s budget for 2020 would increase combined CBP and ICE funding to $30.2 billion (DHS 2019, 21, 27). Moreover, the Trump administration has set “operational control” — defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries”[2] — as its overarching border enforcement goal and metric. Because unattainable, this goal positions the administration to argue that border enforcement resources — however much they are increased — do not suffice, and to respond to its own failures by insisting on additional enforcement funding and ever more divisive and cruel enforcement tactics, like separating children from their parents.

According to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, the funding and staffing levels of CBP and ICE exceed the combined levels of the four major DOJ law enforcement agencies (Meissner et al. 2013). These two agencies also receive many times more in funding than the three main US labor standards and workplace protection entities and all the state labor standards agencies combined.

The Changed Composition of Border Crossers, the Diminishing US Unauthorized Population, and the Border Wall

On February 15, 2019, the President declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border which, if it withstands legal scrutiny, will allow the administration to redirect an estimated $8 billion appropriated for other purposes, primarily from the Department of Defense, to extending the wall at the US-Mexico border. The proposed increases follow years of dramatically reduced arrivals across the border that have transformed the US undocumented population.

Apprehensions at the border — which include multiple entries of the same person — dropped from more than 1.6 million in 2000 to about 300,000 in 2017 even though the size of the Border Patrol more than doubled, from 9,200 in 2000 to 19,400 in 2017 (CBP 2017a,b). Between 2010 and 2017, the total undocumented population fell from 11,725,000 to 10,665,000, spurred by a 1.3 million decrease in the number of Mexican undocumented residents (Warren 2019). Moreover, since 2010 the number of persons that illegally crossed has been roughly one-half of the number that entered legally and overstayed their visas, undermining the case for a border wall (ibid.).

Beginning in FY 2014 and continuing through FY 2019, immense numbers of unaccompanied children and families, primarily from the Northern Triangle states of Central America, have been driven to the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere by some of the world’s highest homicide rates, rampant extortion and conscription by gangs, criminal impunity, and intense poverty (Labrador and Renwick 2018). The number of migrants from Venezuela — a country in economic free fall and with very high rates of violent crime — has also increased sharply in recent years. Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Guatemala rank among the nations with world’s highest intentional homicide rates at 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th respectively (World Atlas 2018). Many of these migrants have sought asylum in the United States, but mostly they are seeking protection wherever they can find it. They do not try to evade detection, but present themselves to Border Patrol agents or to CBP officials at POEs. CBP adds them to its “apprehension” statistics, as if they were criminals, but they have the legal right to seek asylum under both domestic and international law.

Enforcement-Only Approaches Are Counterproductive

Notwithstanding its extraordinary border enforcement budget, the Trump administration has presided over the highest numbers of border crossers in a decade. After peaking in 2000 and with the exception of a slight surge in FY 2014, arrests at the US-Mexico border were at or below 400,000 between 2011 and 2018. Over the first six months of FY 2019, however, Border Patrol apprehensions spiked to more than 361,000 (CBP 2019). Additional enforcement funding will do nothing to address the humanitarian crises compelling hundreds of thousands of persons to seek protection for themselves and their children, however slim the odds of finding it.

Human smugglers should not be viewed as a cause of this crisis, but as a symptom of bad policies. Some smugglers commit unspeakable acts. Others do not and enjoy the trust of members of migrant-sending communities. In any event, migrants mostly understand the risks of migrating and do not make decisions based solely on what smuggling facilitators tell them. Dr. Gabriella Sanchez, Migrant Smuggling Research Fellow at the European University Institute, reports that potential migrants “gather as much information as they can from friends, family members, clergy, media, and smugglers themselves, and make their decisions based on what they learn.” Moreover, they are not cavalier about their children’s safety. They are willing to subject themselves to greater risks than they would others, particularly their loved ones (Slack and Martinez 2018).

By all accounts, the administration’s policies have been a boon to smugglers. The administration has failed to provide legal avenues for the truly desperate to reach protection, both persons fleeing violence and formerly deported persons seeking to return to their US families.[3] Instead, it has erected new barriers to the US asylum system, separated parents from their children at the border, enacted unsustainable and cruel “zero tolerance” criminal prosecution policies for asylum seekers and other border crossers, and terminated the Central American Minors (CAM) program which allowed El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran children to undergo refugee screening in their own countries and, if approved, to join their legally present parents living in United States as refugees or parolees. At a time of record numbers of refugees worldwide, it has limited refugee admissions to the lowest number in the history of the US Refugee Assistance Program and sought to eviscerate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which allows designated national groups who cannot safely return home to remain in the United States.

These actions have been accompanied by the President’s threats to end foreign aid to Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for “doing nothing” to stop migration to the United States, his repeated promises to enact ever “tougher” enforcement policies, and by his poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric. With no legal options to migrate, little hope that conditions will improve in their home communities, and assurance (by the US president) that US policies will become more severe — most recently through threats to charge fees to apply for asylum, to deny bond and work authorization to asylum seekers, or to accelerate court hearings — large numbers have chosen not to wait at home (Wasem 2019). More border enforcement funding will do nothing to change this dynamic.

Conclusion

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that in 2017 there were 68.5 million forcibly displaced persons, including 25.4 million refugees (UNHCR 2018); that developing regions hosted 85 percent of them; and that increasing numbers of asylum seekers were fleeing Northern Central America and Venezuela (UNHCR 2018, 7, 40). These trends have grown more acute in the interim. On December 17, 2018, UN member states — albeit not the United States — affirmed the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), which seeks to support communities in developing states that host refugees, promote refugee self-reliance, expand their legal access to third countries, and allow for their safe and dignified return home (UNGA 2019, § 7). Not all of the migrants from the Northern Triangle states of Central America, Venezuela, or other global hotspots meet the narrow refugee definition, but very high percentages of them have been forced from their homes by unsafe and untenable conditions.

The United States would be well served by the kind of holistic strategy and commitments promoted by the GCR. The nation’s current enforcement-only approach will not improve conditions so that refugees and others at risk can stay or return home. Nor will it support their safe resettlement in other communities, afford them fair and timely asylum hearings, or allow them to reach safety through legal channels. It will make this humanitarian crisis worse, and do nothing to stop desperate people from crossing borders.

[1] Although not the subject of this essay, many scholars and lawyers have also reported on the immense population of deportees from the United States that plan to return to their US families (Kerwin, Alulema, and Nicholson 2018) despite the risk of prosecution, detention, and removal. One study concluded that US immigration enforcement programs will inevitably fail “when placed against the powerful pull of family and home” (Martinez, Slack, and Martinez-Schuldt 2018).

[2] Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, Exec. Order No. 13767, 82 Fed. Reg. 8793 (Jan. 25, 2017).

[3] Of course, in any large-scale migrant flow, there will be persons with different intentions and motivations, making screening a necessity.

References

CBP (US Customs and Border Protection). 2017a. “ Southwest Border Sectors: Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions by Fiscal Year (Oct. 1st through Sept. 30th).” Washington, DC: CBP. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2017-Dec/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Apps%20FY1960%20-%20FY2017.pdf.

———. 2017b. “US Border Patrol Fiscal Year Staffing Statistics (FY 1992 – FY 2017).” Washington, DC: CBP. https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/us-border-patrol-fiscal-year-staffing-statistics-fy-1992-fy-2017.

———. 2019. “US Border Patrol Southwest Border Apprehensions FY 2019.” Washington, DC: CBP. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration.

DHS (US Department of Homeland Security). 2019. FY 2020 Budget in Brief. Washington, DC: DHS. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0318_MGMT_FY-2020-Budget-In-Brief.pdf.

ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement). 2018. “Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g) Immigration and Nationality Act.” Washington, DC: ICE. https://www.ice.gov/287g.

Kerwin, Donald. 2018. “From IIRIRA to Trump: Connecting the Dots to the Current US Immigration Policy Crisis.” Journal on Migration and Human Security 6(3): 192-204. https://doi.org/10.1177/2331502418786718.

Kerwin, Donald, Daniela Alulema, and Mike Nicholson. 2018. “Communities in Crisis: Interior Removals and their Human Consequences.” Journal on Migration and Human Security 6(4): 226-42. https://doi.org/10.1177/2331502418820066.

Labrador, Rocio Cara, and Danielle Renwick. 2018. “Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle.” Backgrounder. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-northern-triangle.

Martinez, Daniel E., Jeremy Slack, and Ricardo D. Martinez-Schuldt. 2018. “Repeat Migration in the Age of the ‘Unauthorized Permanent Resident’: A Quantitative Assessment of Migration Intentions Postdeportation.” International Migration Review52(4): 1186-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318767921.

Meissner, Doris, Donald Kerwin, Muzaffar Chishti, and Claire Bergeron. 2013. “Immigration Enforcement in the United States: the Rise of a Formidable Machinery.” Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigration-enforcement-united-states-rise-formidable-machinery.

Slack, Jeremy, and Daniel E. Martinez. 2018. “What Makes a Good Human Smuggler? The Differences between Satisfaction with and Recommendations of Coyotes on the US-Mexico Border.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 676(1): 152-73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716217750562.

TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. 2017. “Criminal Immigration Prosecutions Down 14% in FY 2017.” Syracuse, NY: TRAC. http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/494/.

———. 2018. “Stepped Up Illegal-Entry Prosecutions Reduce Those for Other Crimes.” Syracuse NY: TRAC. https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/524/.

UNGA (United National General Assembly). 2018. Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: Part II Global Compact on Refugees. UN Doc. A/73/12 (Part II). New York, NY: United Nations. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/5b3295167.pdf.

UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2018. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017. Geneva: UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547.pdf.

Warren, Robert. 2019. “US Undocumented Population Continued to Fall from 2016 to 2017 and Visa Overstays Significantly Exceeded Illegal Crossings for the Seventh Consecutive Year.” Journal on Migration and Human Security 6(1): 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1177/2331502419830339.

Wasem, Ruth Ellen. 2019. “To solve the US ‘crisis at the border,’ look to its cause.” The Hill, April 4. https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/436725-to-solve-the-us-crisis-at-the-border-look-to-its-cause.

World Atlas. 2018. “Murder Rate by Country.” https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/murder-rates-by-country.html.

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PWS

05-18-19

AS TRUMP’S POLICY OF “MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE” CONTINUES TO UNRAVEL, UNHINGED PREZ CONSIDERS MASSIVE VIOLATIONS OF CONSTITUTION & HUMAN RIGHTS — “OPERATION WETBACK 2019” In The Offing?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-leaves-open-possibility-of-invoking-insurrection-act-to-remove-migrants/2019/05/17/6b49c2c4-7892-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html

John Wagner reports for the Washington Post:

A White House spokesman left often the possibility Friday that President Trump would invoke an arcane law that would allow him to deploy the military to remove illegal immigrants, as Trump warned migrants on Twitter that they could be leaving the country soon.

Asked during a television appearance whether Trump is considering using the Insurrection Act, spokesman Hogan Gidley said the president is “going to do everything within his authority to protect the American people” and has “lots of tools at his disposal.”

“We haven’t used them all, and we’re looking at ways to protect the American people,” Gidley said during an appearance on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

His interview took place amid a series of tweets from Trump, including some that suggested new actions to crack down on illegal immigration.

[Trump’s plan to overhaul legal immigration draws cool reception]

“All people that are illegally coming into the United States now will be removed from our Country at a later date as we build up our removal forces and as the laws are changed,” Trump said in one tweet. “Please do not make yourselves too comfortable, you will be leaving soon!”

In another, Trump said “bad ‘hombres’” were being detained and would be “sent home.”

His tweets followed a Rose Garden speech on Thursday about a new immigration plan that opened him to criticism from conservatives for not pressing a harder line.

The new White House proposal seeks to prioritize the admission to the United States of high-skilled workers over those with family members who are U.S. citizens, but it does not change the net level of green cards allocated each year.

The proposal sidestepped some major components of the nation’s immigration system that can be far more complex and controversial to resolve, such as the fate of the estimated 11 million immigrants without legal status and visas for temporary, low-skilled workers — issues that have divided the Republican Party and pit the business community against labor unions.

In a sign of sensitivity to criticisms from immigration hard-liners, The Post reported Thursday that Trump’s advisers are looking at measures behind the scenes such as the Insurrection Act, an arcane law that allows the president to employ the military to combat lawlessness or rebellion, to remove illegal immigrants.

The idea of using the law was first reported by the Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet, after Trump finished his speech Thursday afternoon.

Such a plan would involve deployment of the National Guard and cooperation of governors who might not be inclined to go along with Trump’s order.

Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey and David Nakamura contributed to this report.

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

Sounds like the “brainchild” of Stephen Miller!

Nothing brings cowardly nativists to their knees more quickly than hordes of unarmed, desperate migrants seeking to exercise their legal and human rights! The Trump Administration might be “rattling the sword” with Iran, but truth is that they are scared of their own shadows. Race-baiting and threatening the weakest, most vulnerable, and defenseless among us are about the only things they know how to do.

PWS

05-17-19

WELCOME TO FRANZ KAFKA’S AMERICA: Where Individuals Are Imprisoned Indefinitely In Substandard Conditions Without Trial For The “Crime” Of Asking For Protection Under Our Legal Process — The Objective: Coerce Them To Stop Asking For The Benefits Our Law Offers & Demoralize Them To The Point Where They Would Rather Be Killed Or Tortured Than To Proceed With Their Legal Cases!

https://apple.news/ADUUhY0-QSR6JBMSznV322A

Professor Stacy Burstin writes in USA Today:

I toured an immigration detention center. The prison-like atmosphere was mind-numbing.

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop — not an endless jail sentence with the goal of causing migrants to self-deport.

4:00 am EDT May. 16, 2019

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop, not a prison. But what else can one call a place with razor wire covered fences, holding cells, head counts, locked dormitories, solitary confinement, limited recreation, inadequate mental health services and no-contact visits?

While visiting the New Mexico border area as volunteers with Catholic Charities Immigration Legal Services of Southern New Mexico in March, a group of undergraduates, three law students, a campus minister and I toured the Otero County Processing Center. Management & Training Corp. (MTC) runs the facility for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service.

A smiling ICE officer greeted us at the start of our visit, explaining that ICE likes giving tours of Otero to dispel criticisms circulating about immigration detention.

Inside an immigration detention center

Our first stop was the count room dominated by a large board covered with more than 900 colored tags on hooks — mostly blue and orange — representing the detainee population and designating the level of security and privileges afforded based on jumpsuit color. “Blues” have no known criminal history and simply entered the United States without papers. “Oranges” are divided into two groups — individuals who have a history of very minor crimes such as public intoxication, and those arrested for or convicted of other nonviolent crimes. “Reds” have arrests, convictions or other history involving violent activity.

Read more commentary:

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Stories from the border: The women asylum seekers I met need protection, not barriers

In the intake area, we found newly arrived men lingering in a large holding cell behind a locked, metal door waiting to be processed. A security officer explained the intake procedure, but it was hard for me to focus on his words because I couldn’t take my eyes off the mountain of duffel bags and backpacks full of their belongings piled next to a shower room. I later learned that same image haunted my students.

We passed through the medical unit where individuals receive basic medical care. Those with more serious conditions, we were told, are sent outside of the facility. Our guides told us that a psychiatrist visits once a month to oversee medication, and one full-time counselor is available for the 900 or more detainees. There is a small room where detainees deemed suicidal are watched.

Our guides also brought us into one of the dorms — locked housing where 50 men sleep on thin mattresses in rows of bunk beds. I was overcome with a sense of time standing still; boredom pervaded the room. Despite MTC’s commitment to “provide an atmosphere that is comfortable, safe, and conducive to making time pass quickly for those who find themselves in our care,” individuals are limited to two hours of recreation a day.

One of the students asked whether English classes are offered. Our guide replied that they are working on it, that such programs have not been instituted because those at Otero only stay for six to eight weeks. But we met detainees who reported being there for six to eight months or more.

The blues and oranges able to secure a job in the facility (only four of the 50 men in the dorm we visited were working at the time) earn at least $1 a day, the ICE-stipulated minimum wage. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the detainees we saw raking the grounds, mopping hallways, doing laundry or preparing food allowed MTC to meet its labor needs without actually paying for them.

A glimpse through a narrow window revealed the Secured Housing Unit — the solitary confinement block — a row of small cells where individuals causing problems are sent. Men who are vulnerable to bullying or abuse (including transgender women) can also request a move here for protection, though they would have to be pretty desperate to do so.

Immigrants need asylum, not imprisonment

Facilities like Otero are not supposed to be prisons. Most ICE detainees have not been convicted of any crime. For many others, they are detained even though a U.S. court had dismissed charges, authorized release while awaiting trial, or convicted and imposed a minimal sentence already served.

None of these men belong in jail.

Yet the realization that we were in a jail only intensified at our last stop — the visiting area. We found a large glass window running the length of a long table, seats placed on either side. Detainees are kept separate from loved ones and communicate by phone.

Immigration detention is supposed to be a temporary stop for individuals seeking a determination of whether they have a legal basis for staying in the United States. Yet many at Otero are eligible to apply for asylum and other forms of humanitarian protection.

Why are U.S. taxpayers paying a private company to provide housing, food and 24/7 security for individuals, the majority of whom pose no security threat and have a right under U.S. law to seek protection?

Why are these men consigned to live in a mind-numbing, prison-like atmosphere that leads many — in Otero and similar facilities around the country — to become so desperate to get out that they abandon valid claims and self-deport?

Unfortunately, my students and I came to the troubling conclusion that this desperation is not just the inevitable result of immigration confinement, but may actually be the goal in the first place.

Stacy Brustin, professor of law, is director of the Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Clinic at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

4:00 am EDT May. 16, 2019

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

In the final “Kafkaesque” twist, perhaps Trump’s “maliciously incompetent” immigration policies will simply convince individuals needing refuge that our legal system is as worthless and dishonest as the ones they are leaving behind.

For the right price and degree of risk (and refugees are by nature risk takers) smugglers will be able to eventually get persistent individuals to the interior. There, as I have pointed out, their chances of avoiding forced removal will be much better than their odds of getting asylum in an unfairly biased, increasingly lawless system that uses illegal coercive methods and is stacked against their claims, no matter how valid or compelling.

Right now these folks are NOT a security risk, no matter what lies Trump and the restrictionists spread. A smart, humane, competent, and law-abiding Administration would simply encourage them to arrive at ports of entry, promptly screen them, apply the asylum laws in the generous way that they were intended, integrate those granted (probably the majority, under a fair, generous application of the law, in accordance with Cardoza-Fonseca) into our society, and return those who do not qualify after full due process in a humane and dignified manner.

Why would folks cross the border between ports of entry to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol if they could present themselves at a border port and be treated promptly, humanely, and fairly? That’s what would actually give us a secure border as well as many grateful, productive new residents who will help the U.S. It would also promptly separate out those who clearly can’t qualify for protection before they establish ties to the U.S.

With a smarter, common-sense approach to the Immigration Courts, universal access to counsel, and better, more professional, judges who were actually well-trained in recognizing and granting meritorious asylum cases (and not expected to function as a “Border Patrol junior auxiliary”), asylum cases could be completed in compliance with full Due Process in months, rather than years. The Border Patrol could go back to real law enforcement, which they are largely ignoring right now in a rush to do Trump’s bidding.

Instead, Trump seems determined to create a situation where many will die, smugglers will get richer, but more individuals will get to the interior where they will live, unscreened and perhaps exploited, but alive, as part of a growing “underground” or “immigration black market.” The Border Patrol won’t even be able to count them or “arrest” (arguably an inappropriate term for
“turn ins”) them as they do now to support their bogus claims of a “law enforcement emergency.” This self-created “emergency” — actually a humanitarian tragedy —has little to do with legitimate law enforcement. How maliciously incompetent can one Administration get?

And, no, “Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall” won’t stop professional smugglers! They are already laughing at his ineptness and anxiously waiting to see how his next nativist-driven dumb policy will improve their business and fill their coffers. The dumbest smuggler is probably smarter than Trump, and much less dangerous to America.

PWS

05-17-19

ANALYSIS: Trump Lays Another Egg On Immigration — Everybody Loses, But It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse

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