ROQUE PLANAS @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP’S BOGUS CARAVAN THREAT MIGHT BE HIS MOST OUTRAGEOUS SCAM YET! — GOP’S Racist Commercial So Vile That Even Fox Pulls It!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fabricating-border-crisis-before-election_us_5be0a522e4b09d43e321d731

Roque Planas writes in HuffPost:

Almost every day last week, the White House thrust immigration to the center of national politics. The Pentagon announced plans to dispatch some 5,200 troops to the border with Mexico. Trump said he planned to eliminate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat. He announced a coming plan to bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and to detain them indefinitely in tent cities. To hear him speak at a press conference on Thursday, it would appear the United States faces an onslaught of illegal immigration.

None of this reflects reality. For the last eight years, arrests for illegal border crossing have been at their lowest levels since the 1970s.

But it does jibe with the strategy of a president who propelled himself to the White House by making specious immigration claims. Facing an election cycle that imperils the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the president’s message is clear: Voters should blame Democrats for a nonexistent catastrophe at the border.

The ad — which NBC abandoned, along with Fox and Facebook, after a major backlash — is part of Trump’s strategy to drum up fears of the caravan among his base. CNN declined to air it, calling it “racist.”

It’s also flatly false.

Luis Bracamontes, the unauthorized immigrant in Trump’s ad, was convicted in 2014 for killing two Sacramento police officers and has nothing to do with the caravan.

The original version of the ad that Trump posted to Twitter was even more blatantly dishonest. After showing clips of a deranged Bracamontes ranting in court about how he would escape and kill others, it claimed that Democrats let him into the country and that they let him stay. It then it cuts to video of the caravan, giving the impression that it’s composed of similar fiends.

In fact, no one let Bracamontes in. He was deported twice, once in 1997 and again in 2001.

Some critics of the ad have noted that the last time he entered the country illegally appears to have been during the presidency of George W. Bush. He didn’t let Bracamontes in either, though. The fact is that Bracamontes evaded law enforcement, which is not in itself noteworthy. The rate of success for people who attempt to enter the country illegally multiple times never dipped below 96 percent until 2008, according to the Mexico Migration Project, the most comprehensive sociological database to track migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Implying that the migrant caravan is consists of dangerous criminals like Bracamontes is just as untenable as the claim that Democrats let him in. Among the several thousand people traveling through Mexico in the main caravan are 2,300 kids, according to UNICEF USA. The migrants are banding together in caravans not as some kind of invading force but as a way to seek protection in numbers from human traffickers.

The major challenge that the U.S. faces at the border is how to process efficiently an uptick in the number of Central American families and children who make asylum claims or ask for other forms of humanitarian relief from deportation. But that trend dates from 2014, so it’s hardly new.

It won’t be clear until after the midterm elections whether Trump will follow through on his barrage of immigration promises. But with less than 24 hours to Election Day, the more immediate question is how voters will react to his statements.

Mass migration from Mexico had petered out seven years before Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and blaming “open border” Democrats for an immigration crisis that didn’t exist. The strategy helped get him elected in 2016. On Tuesday, we’ll see if it works for him again.

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Lies, knowingly false narratives, corruption, scams on the American people, racism, intolerance, disrespect for millions of Americans and our Constitution — that’s just business as usual for the Trump Administration.

Truth is, the “Caravans” are doing favors for the US Government in a number of ways:

Easy to track;
Plenty of advance notice;
Reduces danger and deaths along the way;
Takes business away from professional smugglers;
Almost all “Caravan” members who actually reach the border (only a fraction of those who begin the thousand mile plus journey) are processed in an orderly fashion, either waiting patiently at ports of entry or turning themselves in to the Border Patrol immediately upon entry;
There is no evidence of significant numbers of “Caravan” members disappearing into the interior of the US without some type of inspection and screening — almost all those who are not summarily returned have gone through credible fear screenings and are either detained or released on bond after the Government confirms their identity and reasons for coming, and determines that they have credible cases for protection under our laws;
There is no record that I’m aware of that any “Caravan” has attempted to “storm the border” or violently attacked US border authorities en masse — why would they, since their only chance for survival is to hope and pray that the US authorities will actually live up to our legal responsibilities and give them a chance to seek legal protection under our laws?

However, if the Trump Administration continues to ignore our laws and to mount bogus attacks on fleeing refugees, they probably will be able to convince many of those folks that our legal system is a fraud and they had best employ the services of a professional smuggler to get them into the interior of the US where they can lose themselves in the crowd and probably save their lives — a sort of “do it yourself asylum.” And, while wasting taxpayer money on the “border hoax,” this Administration is failing to fund and intentionally ignoring international efforts to address the dangerous and chaotic conditions in the Northern Triangle that causes these refugee flows in the first place — and will continue to cause them until we put wiser and more honest policies into effect.

The real threat to our country’s security and future is Trump and his willfully blind or in some cases outright White Nationalist, racist, or purposefully racially tone-deaf supporters and enablers.

If that’s not the America you want and want for future generations, get out the vote to start regaining control of our country from a misguided yet loud and active minority trying to shove their lack of values down the rest of our throats! America is for all Americans, not just the “Trump Base” and their fellow travelers!

PWS

11-06-18

RECREATING 1939: Led By Trump’s Brand Of Selfish “It’s All About Me” Racially Charged Nationalism, Prosperous Western Democracies Are Abandoning Their Legal & Moral Commitments To Refugees! – Are We On The Verge Of A “New Holocaust” While The Free Word Looks Inward? — “[M]illions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to go without the protections once promised by a world that had agreed ‘never again.'”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/world/europe/trump-asylum.html

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub in the NY Times:

LONDON — President Trump’s promise to stop a caravan of Central American migrants from reaching the United States border, if necessary through military force, might seem like just another effort by the president to unilaterally dismantle international laws and accepted practices.

But there is one important difference between this and Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone defiance of climate change agreements, trade deals or arms control treaties. In attacking the long accepted means of protecting refugees and upholding stability in times of mass displacement, he’s got company. Lots and lots of company.

There is no shortage of countries that also skirt, and therefore undermine, global refugee rules. The European Union and Australia are two of the biggest offenders. Peru and Ecuador are restricting Venezuelan refugees, while Tanzania is working to push out Burundians.

Image
Stateless Rohingya migrants passing food supplies dropped by a Thai Army helicopter to others on a boat drifting in Thai waters in the Andaman Sea in 2015.CreditChristophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In 2015, as Rohingya refugees fled Myanmar on overcrowded boats, the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — in a move that might make even Mr. Trump blush — pushed the boats out to sea, stranding them, to prevent them from reaching safe shores.

Still, countries tend to hide their violations by presenting themselves as following the letter of the law, or by dressing up anti-refugee measures in humanitarian terms. But Mr. Trump is selling his harsh treatment of asylum-seekers as deliberate. And even if he is not the first to breach the rules, he is contributing to their breakdown in ways that could have global consequences.

“The more brazen you get, like Trump, and the more frequent you get, you can easily imagine a norm being completely torn down,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a migration expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who added that Mr. Trump was “taking an ax” to “one of the strongest norms we’ve got in international law” — the right of a refugee to seek asylum.

To consider how that would happen and what it would mean, it helps to understand the basics of asylum and how Mr. Trump fits into its erosion.

. . . .

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Read the complete article at the link for a clear understanding of how refugee and asylum law is supposed to work and how immoral scofflaws like Trump, Sessions, and Miller are intentionally perverting and subverting it to satisfy their racist White Nationalist agenda.

Their final paragraph should send chills down the spine of every decent human being

The resurgence of populist and nationalist politics also bodes poorly. Us-vs-them movements, skeptical of international agreements and immigration, have little interest in asylum’s foundational concepts of global burden-sharing or universal rights.

If asylum rights were declining even in the era of sunny 1990s global liberalism, it is hard to imagine their doing much better in the era of Donald J. Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir V. Putin.

“It takes a really, really long time to build these norms, especially when they restrict government actions in some way,” Ms. Schwartz said. “It’s so much easier to take them down.”

If that happens, the consequences will be most felt far away from the United States-Mexico border, in places like Honduras, Myanmar, Jordan or Burundi, where millions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to go without the protections once promised by a world that had agreed “never again.”

PWS

11-03-18

WASHPOST: DON’T SEND TROOPS, GUNS, & MONEY – SEND JUDGES!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-send-troops-to-the-border-send-judges/2018/11/02/cd54d0f0-deda-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html

The Post Editorial Board writes:

PRESIDENT TRUMP has based his midterm election campaign on the specter of an “invasion” by immigrants marching from Central America to the southern border. His demagoguery is disgusting and irresponsible. But there is a real problem of migrants — one that his administration is failing to address.

Many people are crossing the border with their children and applying for asylum, overwhelming existing mechanisms for dealing with asylum seekers. They are feeding what the president calls a “catch-and-release” revolving door for migrants freed as they await hearings to adjudicate their cases, and contributing to a backlog of some 750,000 cases in immigration courts.

A rational response would be to add substantially to the approximately 350 immigration judges, who cannot handle the tens of thousands of asylum claims flooding the immigration courts annually. The administration this year hired a few dozen new judges, a fraction of what is required. As the caseload has more than quadrupled since 2006, the number of judges has not even doubled, according to congressional testimony in April by Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Despite that, Mr. Trump has sneered at the idea of hiring more, even after aides pressed him to do so. “Who are these people?” he raged, before suggesting darkly that adding many new judges would somehow corrupt the system. “Now can you imagine the graft that must take place?” he said.

Granted, the hiring could be challenging, in vetting and cost. But any major challenge involves scaling up resources and personnel, and it’s hard to see why that’s beyond the government’s capabilities.

On the other hand, maybe Mr. Trump prefers having an issue to a solution. He has made it clear he believes the immigration question propelled him into the White House. Now, by ramping up his inflammatory rhetoric, and by advancing over-the-top measures such as sending thousands of troops to the border to fulfill a mission for which they are not trained — Congress has barred troops from law enforcement duties — it seems apparent Mr. Trump has opted for crisis instead of constructive improvements to what he rightly calls a broken system. Instead of deploying thousands of troops, why not hire hundreds of judges?

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Certainly on the right track here!

But here’s what really needs to happen to address the issue in a rational way:

Send more Asylum Officers to do credible fear interviews at the border;
Send enough private attorneys to represent all arriving migrants before both the Asylum Office and the Immigration Courts;
Allow Asylum Officers to grant temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) to the many applicants who have a probability of torture upon return, which clearly happens with “government acquiescence” — or in many cases actual participation or connivance — in the Northern Triangle;
Put the asylum claims of those granted CAT withholding on the “back burner” (thus keeping them from clogging the Immigration Courts) while working with the UNHCR and other counties in the Hemisphere (including, of course Mexico and Canada) on a more durable solution for those currently fleeing the Northern Triangle;
Otherwise, individuals who pass credible fear should be released on minimal bonds and allowed to go to locations where they will be represented by pro bono lawyers (thus avoiding the money wasted on “tent cities” and other types of expensive and arguably illegal detention) — contrary to the Trump Administration lies, almost all represented asylum applicants show up faithfully for their Immigration Court Hearings;
If the Administration wants to “prioritize” the cases of recent arrivals before the Immigration Courts, this can and should be done without creating more “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.” Not “rocket science.” Here’s how:
- Hundreds of thousands of those now unnecessarily clogging the Immigration Court dockets are long-time residents eligible to apply for “Cancellation of Removal for Non-Lawful Permanent Residents.” Take those with no serious criminal records off the Immigration Court docket and send them to USCIS Adjudications for initial processing. No rush, since only 4,000 “numbers” are available each year for grants;
- Those granted can be put in a line for green card numbers maintained by USCIS;
- Those denied who have committed serious crimes should be referred back to the Immigration Courts;
- For others who don’t qualify for cancellation of removal, the Administration should sponsor bipartisan legislation to provide legal status to such long-term residents. With Administration support, such legislation clearly could pass both Houses and be enacted into law.
The Immigration Courts could then return to real priorities: detained cases; cases of recently arrived individuals with or without asylum claims; cases of immigrants who have committed crimes; and cases of other individuals who don’t fit within our legal system, as properly administered.
Sure, this doesn’t match the “White Nationalist game plan.” But, it’s a practical, legal solution that would be good for immigration enforcement, the legal system, and the country as a whole. And, until the final step of legalization of long-term residents, it can be achieved under the current law.
And, I’ll bet you the overall cost would be much less than some of the “designed to fail” and perhaps illegal schemes now being pursued by the Administration. That’s particularly true because applications to USCIS and legalization programs actually “pay their own way” through application fees — perhaps even turning a slight profit for the Government.

PWS

11-03-18

YES, THEY ARE LEGITIMATE REFUGEES — WSJ EXPOSES THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATIONS’S BOGUS NARRATIVE ON CENTRAL AMERICA – Gangs Have Basically Assumed Quasi-Governmental Authority In El Salvador – The Punishment They Inflict On Those Who Oppose Them Is Good Old Fashioned “Political Persecution” That Squarely Fits The “Refugee” Definition & Our Protection Laws! — Contrary To Sessions’s Misrepresentations, The El Salvadoran Government Clearly “Acquiesces” To The Daily Torture & Threats By Gangs Going On In The Country!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-or-die-extortion-economy-drives-latin-americas-murder-crisis-1541167619?mod=hp_lead_pos5

Robbie Whelan reports for the WSJ:

APOPA, El Salvador—The Congress of El Salvador agreed in April to extend the authority of jailers to keep gang leaders in solitary confinement. Over the next five days, the two reigning street gangs killed more than 100 people.

With the highest homicide rate of all countries in the world, El Salvador is a nation held hostage.

Law-enforcement officials estimate that one gang, MS-13, operates an extortion racket with little pressure from authorities in 248 of the 262 of the country’s municipalities. It battles for neighborhood control with another gang, Barrio 18, which runs its own protection scheme in nearly as many regions.

Politicians must ask permission of gangs to hold rallies or canvass in many neighborhoods, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors said. In San Salvador, the nation’s capital, gangs control the local distribution of consumer products, experts said, including diapers and Coca-Cola . They extort commuters, call-center employees, and restaurant and store owners. In the rural east, gangs threaten to burn sugar plantations unless farmers pay up.

A law-enforcement officer checks the phone of a man suspected of working as a gang lookout during a police sweep this year in a neighborhood of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

They have grown so pervasive that “you don’t know where the state ends and the criminal organizations begin,” said Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, El Salvador’s minister of justice and security, who oversees the national police force.

Latin America accounts for 8% of the world’s population and a third of its homicides, which makes it one of the world’s most murderous regions. At its violent core is El Salvador, where an imported American gang culture rivals government authority, and its leaders hold sway with a surplus of money, guns and willing young men.

Unlike the major drug cartels that for years produced much of the region’s violence—using murder in the service of selling marijuana, cocaine and heroin largely to Americans—gangs in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala profit from extorting their own neighborhoods.

The gangs have evolved a more violent, chaotic economic model, one that is advancing in drug-trafficking countries, including Mexico, where large cartels have splintered into many warring groups.

Mauricio Ramirez Landaverde, El Salvador’s minister of justice and security.

“We’ve left behind the era of the cartel and the kingpin,” said Alejandro Hope, a security consultant in Mexico City. “Today, most violence in Latin America is the result of a new system that’s more diverse, harder to control, and much more local.”

While drug cartels collect profits from customers abroad, with dollars and euros trickling into local communities, these gangs steal from their own people. Documents collected in a recent federal investigation in El Salvador found that MS-13 earns as much as $600,000 a month in extortion payments from bus companies, retailers and other businesses. The payments range from a few dollars a day on each vehicle operated to hundreds of dollars a month charged to vendors in public markets.

Drug enforcement officials said El Salvador’s gangs earn about $20 million a year from extortion, with an estimated $3 million coming from businesses in San Salvador’s historic center. The gangs also sell drugs and stolen cars, adding to the revenue from legitimate businesses they have seized.

Cementing their national role, MS-13 and Barrio 18 may be El Salvador’s largest employers. The defense ministry estimates the gangs hire as many as 60,000 people as lookouts, collectors and assassins. By comparison, the two largest private employers, underwear makers Hanesbrands Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway’s Fruit of the Loom, together employ about 20,000.

. . . .

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

Read Robbie’s full article at the link.

These aren’t “your father’s neighborhood hoodlums.” No, they are organized, probably more powerful than the Government, and basically control most of the country. Opposing their will is a potential death sentence — not dissimilar to the ways in which totalitarian dictatorships operate.

Rather than wasting time and money sending troops to our borders and pledging to violate our own laws as well as international standards, the Administration needs to begin treating the Central American migration for what it is — a humanitarian refugee situation. They should begin working constructively and cooperatively with the UNHCR and governments in the Western Hemisphere to address it as a refugee situation and to develop meaningful resettlement plans as well as plans to address the chaos going on in the Northern Triangle which is creating the refugee flow in the first place!

PWS

11-02-18

NO LONGER SUBTLE: Racism, Hate, Intolerance, Lies, Fear-Mongering Against Immigrants At Core Of Trump GOP’s Midterm Pitch! -– The Ugliest Side Of American History & Politics Rears Its Head!

https://apple.news/AxHra5TtoTEqR96pQ3ermwA

RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:

COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.

On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.

“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.

The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.

Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.

“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”

He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”

Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.

Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.

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“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”

Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.

The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.

The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”

Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.

“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”

Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.

“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”

Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.

Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”

Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.

Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.

“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”

David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”

“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”

As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.

In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”

An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.

A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”

And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.

“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”

The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.

After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.

Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”

“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”

Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.

Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.

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I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.

Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!

PWS

11-02-18

READ MY SPEECH TO THE PRO BONO TRAINING @ CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY SPONSORED BY THE FBA AND THE TAHIRIH JUSTICE CENTER ON OCT. 26, 2018: “A Brief Audio Tour Of The Arlington Immigration Court – 2018 Edition”

A Brief Audio Tour of the Arlington Immigration Court

A Brief Audio Tour of the Arlington Immigration Court

Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt
United States Immigration Judge (Retired)

Federal Bar Association & Tahirah Justice Center Pro Bono Training

Columbus School of Law

Catholic University of America

Washington, DC.

Oct. 26, 2018

Thanks so much to our FBA Immigration Section Chair Betty Stevens, Danielle Beach-Oswald, and Kursten Phelps of The Tahirih Justice Center for putting this great program together and inviting me. It’s always an honor to be on a panel with my good friend Professor Maureen Sweeney the Director of the Immigration Clinic at UMD Baltimore. Unlike me, (I’m just an “interested observer” at this point) Professor Sweeney and her clinic students “walk the walk and talk the talk” in Immigration Court all the time. So, please direct all of your questions to Professor Sweeney.
I call this speech “A Brief Audio Tour of the Arlington Immigration Court.” It gives you a very compact introduction to what happens in Immigration Court, namely the U.S. Immigration Court in Arlington, Virginia.
Our tour today consists of two parts, both concentrating on asylum cases, since those are a significant part of the docket and the topic of this training. First, I will give you an overview of the Arlington Immigration Court, as much of it as I still understand as an “outsider” who was once an “insider.” Second, I will describe the mechanics of an asylum case in Immigration Court. When I am done, you should have at least some idea of what happens at the “retail level” of our immigration system.
As some of you know, I used to give a comprehensive disclaimer. But, I’m retired now, so I don‘t have to do that. But, I do want to hold the FBA, The Tahirih Justice Center, Catholic University, Professor Sweeney and everyone else concerned harmless for my remarks today which are my opinion and mine only. No sugar-coating, no bureaucratic doublespeak, no “party line,” no BS – just the unvarnished truth, as I see it!
As your tour guide, and because this is Friday, and you are such a great audience, I also give you my absolute, unconditional, money-back guarantee that this tour will be completely free from computer-generated slides, power points, or any other type of distracting modern technology that might interfere with your total comprehension or listening enjoyment. In other words, I am the “power point” of this presentation

I. Immigration Court Overview

For those of you unfamiliar with the Immigration Court system, while it’s called a court, and sort of looks like a court, it’s actually a dysfunctional mess that has little resemblance to any other real court system in America! Your challenge will be to figure out how to get a broken system to work well enough to provide justice for your client in your particular case. The good news: It can be done!
And, I will say that your chances of doing that in Arlington and Baltimore, where the judges have a history and a reputation of treating all parties fairly, impartially, professionally, and courteously will be better than in many other courts.
The Arlington Immigration Court is part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review — affectionately known as “EOIR” for you Winnie the Pooh fans — a separate branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. There are approximately 350 Immigration Judges in more than 50 court locations nationwide, with another 100 or so additional judges “on order.”
As an Immigration Judge, I was an administrative judge appointed by the Attorney General. I was not a judge under Article III of the Constitution, like a U.S. District Judge, who is appointed for life by the President and confirmed by the Senate. My powers and authority were delegated by the Attorney General and limited by his or her regulations.
Unfortunately, that means that the Immigration Judges currently work for Jeff Sessions. He is an unapologetic immigration restricitonist and enthusiastic cheerleader for DHS immigration enforcement. He has expressed great antipathy for asylum seekers and their attorneys – namely you! His actions have stripped Immigration Judges of effective control over their dockets and made it much more difficult for refugees from Central American, particularly women, to obtain protection which they desperately need and richly deserve under our laws as properly interpreted and applied.
One of the best descriptions of what it’s like to be an Immigration Judge was offered by the late Judge Terence T. Evans of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals who said:
Because 100 percent of asylum petitioners want to stay in this country, but less than 100 percent are entitled to asylum, an immigration judge must be alert to the fact that some petitioners will embellish their claims to increase their chances of success. On the other hand, an immigration judge must be sensitive to the suffering and fears of petitioners who are genuinely entitled to asylum in this country. A healthy balance of sympathy and skepticism is a job requirement for a good immigration judge. Attaining that balance is what makes the job of an immigration judge, in my view, excruciatingly difficult.
Unfortunately, the need for balance and some sympathy for the situation of asylum seekers has been completely subsumed by this Administration’s fixation with deporting more migrants – at any cost. Indeed, in a recent outrageously inappropriate and unethical speech to newly hired Immigration Judges, Sessions actually told them “not to act out of a sense of sympathy for the personal circumstances of the respondent.” What a crock! Interpreting a humanitarian relief statute without humanity and empathy – it’s the polar opposite of “good judging” as described by the late Judge Evans!
My good friend and colleague, Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the President of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told the New York Times that “immigration judges often feel asylum hearings are ‘like holding death penalty cases in traffic court.’” I viewed my job as an Immigration Judge as half scholar, half performing artist.
Currently, there are 13 judges sitting at the Arlington Immigration Court. While at one time, all the judges were “generalists,” handling all types of cases, that had started to change even before my retirement in June 2016. For example, Judge Bryant was assigned full time to the juvenile dockets, while other of my colleagues worked full time on detained cased, and others of us did only the non-detained docket.
I clearly recognize the hazards of peppering you with statistics, particularly on the first presentation of the morning. Nevertheless, I am going to throw out a few numbers just to give you some perspective on our workload. We must keep in mind, however, that these figures and percentages represent real people, with very human stories, encompassing all of the hopes, dreams, schemes, flaws, tragedies, and triumphs of mankind.
According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (known as “TRAC”), as of August 2018, there were nearly 43,000 pending cases at the Arlington Immigration Court, of which approximately 500 were on the detained docket. The average pending docket, therefore, is approximately 3,000+ cases per judge, giving rise to an average wait of 830 days – more than two years – for a case to be decided, and leading to a mushrooming nationwide backlog in excess of 750,000, notwithstanding additional judges on the bench.
This Administration’s misguided policies and mismanagement are rapidly destroying the U.S. Immigration Court System as we speak. Typically, Sessions tries to shift the blame elsewhere – primarily to the victims: you and your clients and the demoralized U.S. Immigration Judges caught up in this nightmare parody of a court system.
At one time, each Arlington Judge had a detained and a non-detained docket, and each of those was subdivided into Master Calendar and Individual Calendar dockets. The majority of the time was spent on the non-detained docket. In Arlington, detained cases are heard exclusively by TeleVideo connections, mostly with the DHS Contract Detention Center in Farmville, and sometimes with various regional jails in Virginia. Farmville is conveniently located in in the rural southern part of the state, far away from Arlington or any other major metropolitan area.
At one time, there were case priorities in the Immigration Courts. However, my understanding is that those have been abolished except for detained cases. Apparently, all non-detained cases are now of equal priority, meaning that none are priorities. This leads to a phenomenon I’m sure you will experience that I call “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” or “ADR.” Cases are arbitrarily and inexplicably moved around the judges’ dockets at the whim of the politicos at the DOJ and their subordinates at Falls Church.
Each judge conducts at least one Master Calendar, sometimes more, per week. The Master Calendar is basically the court’s intake and triage system, similar to an arraignment or preliminary hearing in the criminal court system.
The most important aspects of a Master Calendar are finding out the type of case, taking pleadings, ascertaining interpreter requirements, accepting applications for relief (including asylum), checking the status of fingerprints and biometrics, checking the address, giving warnings, ruling on preliminary motions, and, most important, ensuring that the alien, known as the “respondent” in our “Removal Proceedings” gets a lawyer, at no expense to the Government. If the respondent does not have a lawyer at the initial Master Calendar, the judge hands out the official list of free or low-cost legal service providers in the area and reset the case to another Master.
Of course, given the backlogs and ever shifting priorities, most free or nominal cost legal service providers are already overwhelmed and can’t take additional cases on the unrealistic schedules sometimes set by the courts at Sessions’s urging. This perverse system runs largely without regard to, and sometimes with intentional disregard of, the availability and professional needs of the hard-working, often pro bono or “low bono,” attorneys who are literally “keeping it afloat.” Indeed, I predict that at some point you will feel that you are the only ones honestly trying to make this system work. Otherwise, from top down, it’s largely “programmed for failure.”
Once the preliminaries have been satisfied during the Master Calendar process, the case is assigned a date for an Individual Calendar hearing. This is the hearing on the merits, which most often involves an application for relief from removal by the respondent. At the Individual hearing, the judge will admit evidence, listen to witnesses, hear arguments by both counsel and either render an oral decision on the merits or schedule a date for issuing a written decision.
The Arlington Immigration Court does a full range of cases. In addition to asylum-related matters, this includes custody and bond proceedings for individuals in detention, cancellation of removal for both residents and non-residents, contested issues of removability, returning permanent resident aliens, adjustment of status, and various types of waivers of grounds of removability, many of them related to criminal convictions. The judges also decide many motions, some of them dispositive, in chambers. Historically, the majority of Individual Calendar time in Arlington has been spent on asylum and related cases such as withholding of removal or relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”).
Judges are under pressure to complete more cases and have been directed to schedule at least three, sometimes more, merits cases per day. Part of the system for pressuring judges involves new “performance quotas” that ultimately can be used in making retention decisions for the judges.
Remarkably, while EOIR hasn’t been able to produce a functioning nationwide e-filing system after nearly two decades of failed efforts (in which both Betty Stevens and I were involved during our Government careers, well over a decade ago), they miraculously have been able to produce the “Immigration Judge Automated Dashboard.” Thus, every Immigration Judge’s computer now has a “stress screen” that reminds them of how they are doing on their “quotas” and “time limits.”
It’s all a question of priorities! Sadly, at the “New EOIR,” public service and Due Process take a back seat to the restrictionists’ political agendas.
Asylum cases reach Immigration Court in two basic ways. One is through “affirmative applications” filed initially at the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Asylum Office in Arlington and “referred” to the Immigration Court for a de novo, that is, “entirely new,” hearing if that office is unable to grant. The other way is by “defensive applications” filed initially with the Immigration Court after a Notice to Appear has been issued.
During most of my career at Arlington, the number of affirmative filings exceeded defensive filings. However, according to EOIR statistics, in recent years there has been a dramatic reversal so that defensive applications now greatly exceed affirmative applications by a ratio of approximately 16:1 in FY 2016. Perhaps not surprisingly, affirmative application grant rates are substantially greater than those for defensive filings.
According to the latest TRAC reports, for the period 2012-2017, for one representative Immigration Judge in Arlington approximately 25% of the asylum cases were from Ethiopia, followed by El Salvador (16%), PRC (13%), Cameroon (5%), and Eritrea (5%). According to media reports and U.S. Department of State Country Reports, none of these countries is exactly a “garden spot” with respect to human rights and, with the exception of China, none would be major tourist destinations. In fact, according to EOIR statistics, China, Ethiopia, and Eritrea have been among the “top ten” asylum grant countries for many years, with China leading the pack.
The Immigration Court nationwide asylum grant rate has been falling steadily since the “high-water mark” of nearly 56% approvals in FY 2012. It was 43% in FY 2016. Still, in that year the grant rate for Arlington was 62%, well above the national average.
In Arlington, the attorney representation rate for asylum seekers historically has been at or above 90%. Nationwide, it was approximately 80% during FY 2017. Generally, representation rates are significantly lower for asylum seekers in detention.

II. MECHANICS OF AN ASYLUM CASE

Turning to the mechanics of an asylum case in Immigration Court, I will focus on the non-detained docket which historically has comprised the vast majority of cases at Arlington. You should be aware, however, that more and more asylum-related matters do appear on the detained docket, and are, therefore, given a higher priority than non-detained cases. This is likely to increase as Sessions appears to be on track to reverse the BIA precedent allowing bond for those who pass the credible fear process at the border.
A non-detained asylum case referred from the Asylum Office to the Arlington Immigration Court will be given an initial Master Calendar date a number of months in the future. In other words, a non-detained asylum case referred by the Arlington Asylum Office today might not appear on any Master Calendar until sometime next year.
In the past, all cases were randomly assigned to the Arlington Immigration Judges by the Court Administrator, who is analogous to the Chief Clerk of a state court, and our dedicated administrative staff. Each of us received an approximately equal number of new cases. I can’t tell you how they are assigned today. But, I assume there is at least some attempt to distribute the work equally among the judges.
In Arlington, a non-detained Master Calendar usually consists of 40-50 cases in a three-hour time slot. When the case initially appears on Master Calendar, one of two things usually happens. If the respondent has an attorney, the case usually will be set for the next available Individual Calendar hearing, often several years in the future for non-detained cases. Alternatively, a respondent who does not have an attorney will receive the Legal Services List, and the case will be reset for the next available Master Calendar.
Many cases “drop out” during the Master calendar process either when the respondent, having no relief from removal, accepts pre-merits-hearing voluntary departure or when the respondent fails to appear and therefore receives an in absentia removal order.
Additionally, the DHS, which initiates cases before the Immigration Court by issuing a “charging document” known as a “Notice to Appear,” (“NTA”) occasionally is unable to submit sufficient proof of the charge of removability at the Master Calendar hearing. This results in the dismissal or “termination” of the case, without prejudice to later refiling.
In the past cases, were terminated or continued to allow the respondent to apply for status to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), a branch of the DHS. But, this practice has been severely restricted by recent precedents issued by Attorney General Sessions. The judge can also grant a change of venue (“COV”) to another Immigration Court if the respondent no longer lives within the jurisdiction. The most common COVs in this area are Arlington to Baltimore and vice versa.
Obviously, the Immigration Court has no jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. Therefore, nationality, or alienage, is an important jurisdictional issue. While alienage is usually conceded by the respondent during the Master Calendar process, occasionally merits hearings involving complex questions of U.S. citizenship. This is certainly an important issue that an advocate must always fully explore fully before conceding alienage.
Otherwise, once the preliminaries have been satisfied during the Master Calendar process, the case is assigned a date for an Individual Calendar hearing. This is the hearing on the merits, which most often involves an application for relief from removal by the respondent. As mentioned earlier, at the Individual hearing, the judge will admit evidence, listen to witnesses, hear arguments by both counsel and either render an oral decision on the merits or schedule a date for issuing a written decision.
Not surprisingly, unrepresented asylum cases, those where the respondent cannot find a lawyer and tries to represent him or herself, seldom are happy experiences for anyone involved. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, most asylum applicants in Arlington, at least on the non-detained docket, are represented.
Some of the representation, particularly that coming from dedicated and scholarly lawyers, law school clinics, and large law firms appearing pro bono, is truly outstanding. In the case of large law firms and clinics, this might be because those organizations are likely to be willing and able to devote the time, resources, and attention to detail that complex asylum cases require. For example, 20 years ago when I was a partner at a major American law firm we generally budgeted 100 hours of attorney time for a pro bono immigration hearing and 40 hours for any appeal.
Over the years, the Arlington Immigration Court has provided educational outreach and “hands on” practical training opportunities to countless law students, new attorneys, and interested observers from both the private and public sectors.
When I became an Immigration Judge in 2003, fully contested asylum hearings were the norm at the Arlington Immigration Court. Over time, thanks to the joint efforts of the DHS Chief Counsel for Arlington and the local bar, there were many fewer fully contested asylum hearings than in the past. In many cases, particularly those involving natives of countries we saw on a repetitive basis, key issues or eligibility were stipulated, that is, agreed upon by the parties, thus allowing the judges to concentrate on genuinely disputed points or cases.
Additionally, under the Obama Administration policies, the Office of Chief counsel often offered “prosecutorial discretion” or “PD” to individuals with good behavior and substantial equities in the U.S.
However, the Trump Administration has dramatically curtailed the PD program by DHS, while Sessions has removed the authority of Immigration Judges to “administratively close” cases, thus removing them from the docket. Combined with the negative asylum precedents issued by Sessions, and the overwhelming emphasis on enforcement, you should expect that almost all asylum cases will be fully contested by DHS Counsel. In all too many ways, the Immigration Court system is actually regressing in terms of fairness and efficiency as a result of the Trump Administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.
An average contested non-detained asylum hearing before me took approximately three to four hours. That often generated an appellate transcript well in excess of 100 pages. Although not always obvious from the hearing transcript, the hearing time and stress levels substantially increase if we are using a foreign language interpreter, which happens in the majority of asylum cases.
Generally, preliminaries such as marking the record, discussing any evidentiary objections, and opening arguments took approximately 30 minutes. The Assistant Chief Counsel for the DHS, the prosecutor, fulfills a role similar to that of an Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney or an Assistant District Attorney in the state criminal justice system, or an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the federal system. The Assistant Chief Counsel usually submits the latest State Department Country Report and other relevant Department of State reports, such as the International Religious Freedom Report, if not submitted by the respondent. This insures that the record reflects the social, political, religious, and historical context in which the persecution claim is made.
I expected opening statements from both counsel identifying and discussing the issues. But, not all Immigration Judges encourage or even permit opening statements. It’s always wise to ascertain the judge’s preferences in advance.
As you can imagine, the primary issue in most asylum hearings is credibility, that is, whether the respondent’s version of what happened or will happen in his or her home country appears to be reliable and true. The efficiency and accuracy of the Immigration Court system has improved markedly with the installation of a Digital Audio Recording system (known as the “DAR”) in each courtroom that replaced totally antiquated and all too often defunct tape recorders.
Usually, the respondent’s direct testimony took approximately one hour with the same amount of time for cross-examination by the Assistant Chief Counsel. In a substantial majority of the cases coming before me, I utilized the services of an EOIR-approved court interpreter. The most frequent foreign languages in my cases are Amharic (the native language of Ethiopia), Spanish, French (as spoken in many West African countries), and Mandarin Chinese. Predictably, as I mentioned earlier, having the hearing in a foreign language both takes considerably longer and increases the stress level in the courtroom.
Most respondents in asylum cases bring one or more corroborating witnesses, although sometimes the corroborating testimony can be summarized and accepted as a proffer. Expert witnesses, normally on country conditions, are not common, but occasionally appear for the respondent. Also, the respondent might present testimony from medical professionals with experience in working with survivors of trauma and/or torture. The judge might also receive notes or materials from the DHS Asylum Office.
For me, probably the most important part of the case was closing argument by both parties. But, not all judges have the same view. Also, as the pressure to produce more cases ramps up, and numerical quotas kick in, some judges will undoubtedly be looking for ways to cut corners and shorten hearings. Strange as it might seem if this were a real court system, eliminating or truncating both opening and closing statements might be one of the ways in which judges under pressure to produce numbers, not justice, choose to cut corners to meet quotas.
I allowed approximately 30 minutes for closings, during which time I normally questioned both parties about their legal and factual positions. I also took this opportunity to test my preliminary theories about the case.
If my notes showed various inconsistencies, omissions, or discrepancies during the examination, I raised these to respondent’s counsel to see how he or she would explain them and what arguments can be advanced as to why they are not fatal to the respondent’s case. Conversely, I challenged the DHS to tell me how and under what authority particular discrepancies could be a basis for disbelieving all of the respondent’s testimony or why the unchallenged documentary or corroborating evidence does not rehabilitate the respondent’s claim.
Often, I could tie portions of the closing argument directly into the analytical portion of my decision. I think that appellate judges, whether at the Board of Immigration Appeals or the Fourth Circuit, also appreciate seeing a demonstrably close relationship between what happened at trial and the merits decision.
At the conclusion, if the Assistant Chief Counsel either announces that he or she is satisfied that the respondent qualifies for asylum or that a grant will not be appealed, provided that fingerprints have cleared, the judge can announce the decision on the spot in a brief oral statement memorialized in a summary form order. I suspect that this will be happening much less often under the current regime. However, if prints have not cleared, the case must be put over to a Master Calendar to check prints and issue the final decision.
If either party is likely to appeal, the judge must issue a detailed decision on the merits. Most of those decisions are rendered orally at the end of the case. Judges are being pressured to issue more contemporaneous oral decisions. These, in turn, are more likely to be problematic when they reach the Courts of Appeals. “Haste makes waste,” as my mother used to say.
If the case is very complex, the judge will take it under advisement and issue a detailed written decision. Often, that involves obtaining the assistance of one of the talented Judicial Law Clerks who serve at the court.
Because of the detail-oriented nature of credibility determinations, and the many legal requirements imposed by the statute, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Fourth Circuit, I found that the quality and fairness of my final decision was substantially improved by having someone listen to the recorded hearing and compare the testimony with the asylum application, documentation, and country background information in the record. However, as Sessions candidly admitted in a recent speech to Immigration Judges, the emphasis these days is strictly on volume, not quality or Due Process for respondents (ironically, the only reason for the system’s existence).

III. CONCLUSION

In summary, I have shared with you a snapshot of the Immigration Court system. I also have given you an overview of the Arlington Immigration Court and the way in which asylum cases move through our court system, in other words, “due process, or what passes for it these days, at the retail level.” I hope that I have increased your understanding of the Immigration Courts and inspired you to fight to restore balance, fairness, professionalism, and Due Process to this critically important part of our American justice system.
This concludes today’s “mini-tour.” Thank you for listening.

(11-01-18)

HUFFPOST: HOW THE TRUMP-FOX CYCLE OF LIES, HATE, BIGOTRY, & RACISM IS DESTROYING AMERICA!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-caravan-fox-and-friends_us_5bd768c4e4b017e5bfd4c948?p9

Matt Gertz writes in HuffPost:

The role of President Donald Trump’s ominous warnings about the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday highlights the destructive consequences of Fox News’ grip on the president.

While Robert D. Bowers, the man accused of carrying out the mass shooting, had criticized Trump for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, critics pointed out that president had “stoked the fears of the Bowerses among us,” deploying incendiary and false rhetoric about the migrant caravan in hopes of bolstering the Republican Party’s standing. “The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day,” Adam Serwer wrote for The Atlantic. “But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.”

Trump, in turn, came into contact with that fiction via Fox’s fearmongering. The president’s first public statements about the caravan came in response to a segment he watched on the Fox News morning show ”Fox & Friends,” and in the weeks that followed, his rhetoric and that of the conservative network escalated at pace.

For more than a year, I’ve been studying the Trump-Fox feedback loop, my term for the way Fox News at times is able to set the national media agenda because the president watches the network’s programming, tweets about it in real time and adopts its particular fixations. As the rest of the press scrambles to cover Trump’s comments, Fox’s right-wing obsessions consume the news cycle, whether or not they were originally newsworthy. In this case, Fox News urged him to whip his followers into a frenzy over the caravan, and he did it. There’s no indication that either Fox News or Donald Trump will cut off this campaign of fear.

The caravan formed in Honduras on Friday, Oct. 12. By Oct. 15, it was already receiving substantial coverage on Fox News. The next morning, in response to a report on ”Fox & Friends,” Trump issued his first public statement on the migrants, warning the Honduran government that he would cut its aid if the caravan was not stopped. Trump’s comment generated more coverage both on Fox News and at other media outlets. On Wednesday night, Oct. 17, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and urged Republicans to make the caravan a key voting issue, claiming that “the left is eager” for the caravan to enter the United States.

The next morning, “Fox & Friends” repeatedly aired Gingrich’s comments and suggested that Republicans should take his advice. In response, Trump issued a series of tweets using the caravan’s advance to attack Democrats, saying they had “led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws)” an “assault on our country.”

The network and its most powerful viewer spent the next week raising the temperature, stoking fears about whether the migrants were criminals or terrorists, calling the caravan an “invasion” and describing its approach as a national emergency. Escalation bred response bred further escalation, with no sign of a line beyond which the president and his propagandists wouldn’t go.

Trump’s Fox-fueled commentary turned the caravan story into a major national news story as reporters sought to explain and contextualize what he was talking about. But the situation does not, on its face, justify the coverage the caravan has received. The migrants are currently in southern Mexico, their numbers are dwindling and, depending on which route the caravan chooses, they face a journey of 1,000 to 2,000 miles to the U.S. border that will take weeks or months. Those who make it to the border have the right to seek asylum, and those whose claims are rejected will be turned away. That’s what happened when a similar caravan ― which also drew vitriol from Fox News and then from Trump ― reached the U.S. border in May. The caravans have been going on for roughly a decade without issue. There is no crisis except for the one that Fox News and Trump have sought to create in order to get GOP voters to the polls.

I’ve written before of the perils of having a president who relies on conservative cable news hosts to help him understand current events. When federal policy and personnel shifts can be driven by a Fox-inspired presidential whim, the network’s influence is staggering. The greatest risk is that Trump could use his unilateral control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to a Fox segment; Trump was reportedly unnerved by b-roll the network aired in March 2017 of a North Korean missile launch, convinced that it was happening live. But on a day-to-day basis, the major concern is that the president is a demagogue who constantly lashes out at his perceived enemies in order to secure his base’s support, and Fox News’ programming is providing him with targets for his ire, whether that’s protesting NFL players or recalcitrant Justice Department officials. That pattern has played out again and again since Trump ascended to the presidency.

“Ordinarily,” Serwer wrote, “a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower.” So, too, it usually doesn’t make sense to attribute a president’s actions to a news network. But Trump is suggestible, he watches Fox News constantly, and the network’s commentators are aware of that. In lighter moments, the “Fox & Friends” hosts joke about the president’s tendency to watch the programs. In heavier ones, the program’s commentators openly offer him advice, telling him not to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller or pull troops out of Syria.

But on the Monday after the synagogue murders, nothing had changed. The migrants were again drawing coverage on “Fox & Friends” (“Border Battle Rages as Caravan Heads to U.S.,” read one chyron). And hours later, Trump tweeted that the migrants were conducting “an invasion of our Country.”

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

Thanks to Trump, the GOP, and their myriad of lies, distortions, false narratives, and hate rhetoric, our democracy is on the ropes. If we don’t start voting these misguided folks out of office, on all levels, we wont have any country left.

PWS

10-30-18

SCOFFLAW KAKSITOCRACY: Trump Politicos Were Advised That “Zero Tolerance” & Family Separation Likely Illegal & Unconstitutional – They Went Ahead Anyway!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/10/25/feature/civil-servants-said-separating-families-was-illegal-the-administration-ignored-us/

Scott Shuchart writes in the Washington Post:

The meeting was way overdue, and it wasn’t going well.

It was May 21. The Department of Homeland Security, where I worked as a senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, had been making a show of prosecuting undocumented immigrant parents for weeks, cleaving them from their children without paying much attention to where the family members went or setting up any procedure for tracking and reuniting them later.

My office had played a central role, for years, in Homeland Security’s treatment of families and children. But when a cadre of Trump administration political appointees put the family separation plan into motion, neither they nor the career staff in the immigration enforcement agencies under DHS consulted with the civil servants in my office. When media reports throughout April and May led us to understand what was going on, we had urgent questions: What exactly was the policy? What had DHS’s front-line agents in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) been told to do? How had the department assessed the risk that litigation would interfere with the policy? How was this justified in light of our treaty obligations toward refugees? And why was the department pushing out transparently misleading — or simply false — statistics to justify these steps? We were obliged, under the law that created our office, to register our objections that the administration was knowingly violating people’s rights.

But the top political appointee at the May meeting — John Mitnick, the experienced, Senate-confirmed general counsel — and his deputy seemed confused that the civil rights office would see any cause for concern. The administration was claiming in public that a policy of prosecuting all border crossers didn’t target families as such, so it could not present any legal issues. And if there were any issues, they hadn’t been raised ahead of time.

That was false. The next day, I called around to colleagues who confirmed that there had been multiple interagency phone calls and documents, involving the State and Justice departments as well as DHS, making clear that lawyers throughout the government worried that deliberately separating families could violate migrants’ rights under humanitarian treaties or U.S. law. But the political appointees simply didn’t listen. And a few weeks later, I came across an April 24 memo — signed by the very officials I had met with a month later — acknowledging, but dismissing, the legal risks. Even worse, it encouraged indicting immigrants specifically because doing so would justify separating families, arguing that the government’s “legal position” on “separating adults and children through the immigration process . . . is likely strongest [when] separation occurs in connection with a referral of an adult family member for criminal prosecution.”

Mitnick, through a DHS spokeswoman contacted by The Washington Post, declined to comment for this story. That spokeswoman, Katie Waldman, said: “The Department of Homeland Security does not disclose or comment on privileged legal advice provided by our attorneys to the Secretary or other officials, and therefore, unfortunately, we are not in a position to refute false narratives put forward by a former employee. We note, however, that in order to address the crisis at the border, the Trump Administration made a decision to enforce long-standing U.S. law and refer for prosecution under 8 U.S.C. § 1325(a) adults who crossed into the United States illegally. As we have repeatedly stated, the policy was to enforce the law, not to separate families.”

She also sent a statement from Cameron Quinn, the Trump appointee who runs the office I worked in: “I participated in the meeting in question. It was a brief, general discussion, and Mr. Mitnick made it clear that he desired to work collegially with our office.”

By law, our job in that office was to ensure that “the civil rights and civil liberties of persons are not diminished” by DHS’s programs. When it became clear that the department would be tearing families apart and — thanks to incompetence, dishonesty and sheer disinterest — had no reasonable plan to put them back together, I realized I could not do that. A few weeks after that meeting, I quit my job and left public service, carrying a profound sense of failure.

Children and parents from Central America, part of a caravan trying to reach the United States, wait to apply for asylum in Mexico at a checkpoint in Ciudad Hidalgo on Oct. 20. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

The government formally announced the family separation policy in April. The point was clear, as several officials later admitted: By threatening to separate their children, the administration hoped to deter Central American asylum seekers from coming here in search of humanitarian protection. Then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly had suggested the practice during a CNN interview in March 2017, and it had been gaining support in the White House since then.

Many senior civil servants at DHS believed that the policy violated the civil and human rights of migrants. (Many of them, like me, were trained and licensed attorneys, though our role was to give policy advice, not legal advice.) Crossing the border to surrender immediately to authorities and claim asylum is protected by the United Nations refugee protocol signed by the United States. Even for families outside that protection, the substantive due process principle in the Constitution suggests that it is illegitimate to threaten to harm or abscond with someone’s children to deter the commission of a misdemeanor. (First-time unlawful entry is the lowest level of federal crime.)

During past surges in border crossings, such as in 2005, 2006 and 2007 under George W. Bush and 2014 under Barack Obama, the civil rights office was central to planning humane and effective protections for migrants as they were arrested, detained, screened and, if they passed initial “credible fear” screenings, placed into immigration court proceedings. But Trump appointees such as White House adviser Stephen Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna — along with many deputies, assistants and enablers inside ICE and CBP who dreamed up the “zero tolerance” policy — didn’t consult career experts like me: not when it was being considered last year, not when it was unveiled and not for the critical weeks afterward, even as we begged to share our legal and policy analyses.

My job was to ensure that the government did not violate clearly established individual rights, and the Trump administration was pushing a policy whose principal aim was to do just that. My colleagues and I identified a number of constitutional provisions and related case law holding that parents had rights to due process that could limit the ability of the government to separate them from their children for civil immigration violations. That meant that once parents served their typically short criminal sentences for crossing the border illegally, they should have been reunited with their children. Our research also suggested that threatening to detain children separately, and threatening civil detention generally to deter future conduct, was probably unconstitutional.

In our capacity as a gateway for public complaints about DHS, my office was analyzing hundreds of incidents of family separation, including dozens sent over by career staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was taking custody of children who had been separated from their parents. We noticed early that CBP and ICE weren’t providing HHS with proper records to allow families to be reunited or pursue their immigration cases jointly. We recommended that officials tell parents promptly and clearly where their children were going, how they could be reached and how family members could get them out of government custody while the parents were detained. Perhaps most urgently, we tried to ensure that children with serious disabilities were not thrown into a system unprepared to care for them. As allegations emerged of chaotic separations and deliberate lies — parents being told that their children were headed to a shower when they were instead placed in another agency’s custody — we started drafting guidelines and training for the Border Patrol agents on the ground. Above all, we tried to ring the alarm that the legal, strategic and human dimensions of the policy hadn’t been thought through, needed fast improvement and posed a massive liability for the government.

My colleagues and I learned while reviewing internal DHS documents through April and May that CBP had, the previous fall, undertaken a pilot project of prosecuting parents with small children who crossed the border illegally near El Paso, leading to a wave of separated families. But when we asked the acting second-ranking CBP official about it, he denied having any information.

That was also false. The formal memo to Nielsen from CBP, ICE and USCIS recommending the family separation policy had justified it on the basis of this same El Paso project, including misleading statistics that had already been debunked by Vox when DHS tried to pass them off to reporters.

Every attempt to raise civil rights concerns led nowhere: a lengthy staff memo to my boss, the top civil rights official; efforts to explain in meetings the toll on our staff from investigating complaints of children and parents who had been separated, without any communication to get back together; multiple efforts to schedule, and reschedule, a briefing that James McCament, the head of the DHS Office of Policy, had promised near the start of the crisis but never convened. Civil servants advanced recommendations for mitigating the worst of the harm; we suggested improving record-keeping, giving separated parents and children better information, and permitting more regular phone calls among families.

After hundreds of complaints filed by migrant children, parents and advocates on their behalf, my office finally managed to arrange a meeting in June with CBP managers to understand how they were separating families and to present ideas about how to do it in a more humane way, if they insisted on doing it. My notes from the meeting record my boiling frustration with the absurd answers we received. Border Patrol agents dismissed our offer to train them on how to speak to children after ripping them from their families. “No,” we were told, “many of our agents are parents themselves. They are very empathetic to the child’s needs and will know what to do.” Had officials in Washington directed agents to record family members’ names and information, so they could later be reunited? “I think we sent an email.” Can we see the email so we know what agents were directed to do? “Um, I’d have to find it.” (The official never did.) Is there a written policy on how to determine whether children have suffered trauma or have some other condition that would mean separating them from their parents would do too much harm? “No, we have no need for written policy. It’s simply ingrained in law enforcement culture.”

The culture ingrained at CBP, though, is one where the Border Patrol’s union opened its podcast (“The Green Line”) with the oath of the Night’s Watch from “Game of Thrones” — the pledge of a band of warrior monks to protect a magical kingdom from an army of ice zombies. If federal law enforcement agents see Central American children as the moral equivalent of the frozen undead, we can’t expect them to understand intuitively how to detain and process them humanely without training, guidance and leadership. That’s why my colleagues and I were pushing for record-keeping, communication and other policies that Trump appointees ignored. (Representatives of the Border Patrol union did not immediately return requests for comment from The Post.)

A U.S. Border Patrol agent acknowledges a family that had illegally crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in Fronton, Tex., on Oct. 18. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)

It would be easy to see all this as part of the federal sausage-making, the usual intentional delays and risk-managing memos that bureaucrats deploy. But this level of dishonesty and subterfuge was unusual. This month, the DHS inspector general released a report making clear that the incompetence in managing family separation was pervasive, from a lack of planning, to “information provided to alien parents [that] resulted in some parents not understanding that their children would be separated from them,” to false public claims of having a “central database” of parents and children.

The Department of Homeland Security is filled with excellent, dedicated public servants. But it also has enormous authority and the power to enforce thousands of laws well or badly. Its leaders have a responsibility to give their people orders that they can competently and ethically execute, and the tools and guidance to do so. The family separation crisis represented a new frontier in weaponizing DHS’s authority, and its borderline competence, to disastrous effect. Front-line officers weren’t given enough guidance, and their managers in the field didn’t do enough to help them figure it out. Only the administration’s naivete in failing to predict the bipartisan public outrage kept it from being worse.

But most culpable were the high-level appointees, unwilling to take ownership of what they’d decided to do; lying to their staffs in the expectation that nobody really cared what happened to poor Central American kids; cynical about the notion that most of us who swear an oath to uphold the Constitution actually mean it. I cast about for more to do, but within a month of that June meeting, I realized there was no way to keep my oath and my job.

I quit.

Outlook • Perspective

Scott Shuchart was a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties from 2010 to 2018. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Follow @scottshuchart

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Seems like these are precisely the type of knowingly lawless, extra-legal actions that personal liability under the “Bivens doctrine” is supposed to discourage and prevent. It remains to be seen whether the Federal Courts, particularly the Supremes, will have the backbone to hold scofflaw Government officials like Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, & co. personally accountable for their intentional perversions of the rule of law. Recently, the Supremes have indicated that a majority would like to narrowly limit or even abolish Bivens liability. Just when the country needs it most to rein in an out of control Administration!

PWS

10-29-18

LAUREN MARKHAM @ POLITICO: Trump’s Policies Won’t Stop Human Migration — It’s Driven By Dynamics He Neither Understands Nor Controls!

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This Is What It’s Like to Be a Migrant in the Age of Trump

Lauren Markham

TAPACHULA, MEXICO-Rosa Gonzalez arrived in the shelter here after leaving her native El Salvador suddenly in late summer, fleeing her small town with her older brother and a few possessions, hoping to avoid becoming yet another murder statistic at the hand…

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KEY EXCERPT:

To hear these men and women talk, it’s clear that, in a way, Trump’s policies are being received just as he expects them to be: Migrants seem to be more apprehensive about the journey than ever. But that doesn’t mean they’re staying home. Some, like Rosa, are choosing to leave their kids home and migrating without them. Some are moving through more dangerous routes if they do want to continue on to the United States—discarding the long-standing practice of turning themselves in to Border Patrol and applying for asylum. And in some cases, they are avoiding the United States: They’re deciding to settle in other countries, like Mexico or even Canada.

PWS

10-27-18

LA TIMES TAKES STAND AGAINST INHUMANE, UNNECESSARY, AND EXPENSIVE CIVIL IMMIGRATION DETENTION — “A National Embarrassment”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-detention-immigrants-ice-20181027-story.html

The United States has the dubious honor of maintaining the world’s largest immigration detention system. Other countries may house more refugees and temporarily displaced persons, but we lock up the most people whose right to stay in the country is in dispute. Tens of thousands of people a day are held until they’re deported or granted permission to stay by an immigration judge (or at least released on bond or into a sponsor’s custody pending a further hearing).

It is a shameful aspect of U.S. immigration enforcement that the government denies liberty to so many people who have neither been accused nor convicted of a crime. To be sure, every nation has a right to control its borders and determine who gets to come in, for what reasons, and through what legal mechanism. We don’t believe that the U.S. should maintain open borders, but the government’s historic reliance on detention as a tool for dealing with people accused of arriving or staying here illegally is needlessly expensive, grossly inhumane and unjust to people exercising their legal right to seek asylum

While the current administration has embraced and expanded the practice, this is not a creation of President Trump. Such detentions date to the Immigration Act of 1882, and current detention policies are rooted in the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act. More recently, Cuban and Haitian migrants arriving by boat in the 1970s and ’80s were placed in detention centers, in part to deter their countrymen from similarly setting off to sea on rickety boats. Congress eventually mandated detention for migrants convicted of certain crimes that made them ineligible for admission.

ICE spends nearly $3 billion a year on immigration detention.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 greatly expanded the immigration detention system through contracts with local jails and state and privately run prisons. In fact, most of the 39,000 people incarcerated on any given day in the U.S. for immigration reasons — more than 350,000 pass through the system each year — are held in prison-like conditions in more than 200 locations around the country.

Some local governments have expanded their jails so they can house, for a daily fee, migrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants detained. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has granted $360 million in low-interest loans since 1996 to help rural communities build jails often larger than they need, so local officials can use detainees and the federal fee payments they bring to cover operating expenses, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.

ICE spends nearly $3 billion a year on immigration detention, according to the Government Accountability Office. About two-thirds of that goes to private prison corporations to operate detention centers and to local jails to reimburse them for housing detainees. Through those efforts the government has expanded an incarceration industry costing an exorbitant amount of tax dollars to deny freedom of movement of people who, in the vast majority of cases, pose no threat to us.

And notably, at least 77% of migrants facing deportation proceedings show up for their hearings, according to reports. Rates are highest among those who find legal help or receive support from community groups, which suggests there are better methods for handling thisthan detention.

There may, of course, be valid reasons for detaining some migrants, such as newly arrived asylum-seekers whose identities have yet to be verified, people facing imminent court-ordered deportation who the government has reason to fear might disappear, or violent felons who pose a realistic threat to public safety.

One of the largest contributors to no-shows is the government’s failure to keep current contact information for migrants during proceedings that can stretch out for years. One approach would be to match migrants to community service groups or sponsors to better keep track of the individuals and ensure they appear for court hearings; sadly, Trump killedan experimental Obama program that did just that.

This administration has chosen instead to double down on detention, and now it reportedly is considering reviving a version of the vile family separations. If family separation and detention worked as a deterrent, the president wouldn’t be tweeting so furiously these days about the current caravan of Central American migrants moving northward through Mexico. Detention-as-deterrence is not only an inhumane approach, it’s a failed one.

The government can neither detain nor deport its way out of this problem. It must find a better way. The fact that it has failed to do so for so long, regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House, is an embarrassment.

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Doubling down on the worst, most ineffective, wasteful, and expensive policies. That’s the mantra of the Trump Administration on immigration. What if our Government spent the same amount of time, money, personnel, and effort on solving problems, rather than intentionally and cynically aggravating them?

PWS

10-27-18

TAL @ SF CHRONICLE: Administration “Discovers” More Separated Children — Have Others “Slipped Through The Cracks?”

New questions raised on Trump’s family separations as 14 children discovered

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration failed to recognize that 14 children in its care for months had been separated from their families at the Mexican border, officials conceded in a court filing late Thursday.

The disclosure raises fresh questions about whether the administration neglected to account for additional children after separating them from their parents under its “zero tolerance” immigration policy this spring. Two recent government reports faulted the administration’s tracking efforts, and one said officials feel no obligation to find children who were released to other homes before a judge ordered an accounting of the youths, suggesting the total separated under the policy may never be known.

Seven of the 14 children’s parents have criminal histories that disqualify them from reunification, officials with the Health and Human Services Department told a federal judge in San Diego. The judge demanded in June that the administration account for every child separated under the enforcement strategy ordered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

All of the newly discovered children are 5 years old or older.

More:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/New-questions-raised-on-Trump-s-family-13338722.php

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While still picking up the pieces of their last border enforcement fiasco, the Administration is off and running on new policies that potentially will be found to be in violation of law.

PWS

10-26-18

THE HILL: NOLAN COMMENTS ON THE “CARAVAN” — Plus, Friday Bonus: An Index Of All 162 Of Nolan’s Published Articles!

/thehill.com/opinion/immigration/412761-caravan-will-prove-to-the-world-that-the-united-states-has-an-open-border

Family Pictures

Nolan writes:

. . . .

The only solution is to find a way to process their asylum applications outside of the United States.

In July 2014, I suggested a way to do this to deter unaccompanied alien children from making the perilous journey from Central America to seek asylum in the United States. I proposed working with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to set up refugee centers in Central America for children to make it unnecessary for them to travel to the United States.

A few months later, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of a Central American Minors (CAM) refugee program to provide in-country refugee processing by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for qualified children in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Trump could establish such a program that would be open to adults too.

He also should be able to persuade UNHCR to process asylum seekers who come to the United States at a location outside of the United States if processing is limited to aliens who enter without inspection.

Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, undocumented aliens do not have a right to apply for asylum in the United States. Asylum is a discretionary form of relief. The asylum provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act just states that eligible aliens “may” be granted asylum.

The United States, however, is a signatory to the UN’s Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. This means that it cannot return or expel “a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

This obligation could be met by arranging for UNHCR to process their persecution claims in some other country with the understanding that an agreed upon number of them would be accepted by the United States as refugees.

It would have to be a very large number to make the program politically feasible.

Aliens who enter without inspection would be placed in expedited removal proceedings. The ones who fear persecution would be transferred to UNHCR. Asylum seekers also could go directly to the processing centers without having to make the journey to the United States.

The alternative is to accept the fact the that our 2,000-mile border is open to anyone who is willing to cross it illegally and ask for asylum.

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Go on over to The Hill at the above link to read Nolan’s complete article.

You can compare Nolan’s approach with the one I described in a recent post:http://immigrationcourtside.com/2018/10/22/trump-launches-predictable-largely-fact-free-tirade-against-desperate-migrants-they-arent-a-threat-to-our-national-security-but-trump-his-white-nationalist-policies-of/

I disagree with Nolan’s statement that because asylum is, in the end, discretionary, there is no right to apply for asylum at the border or in the United States. The statute, 8 USC 1158(a)(1), specifically states that: “Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters) irrespective of status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or . . . .”

It couldn’t be clearer that ANY MIGRANT, whether documented or not and whether applying at a port of entry or not, who reaches the U.S., including the border, is legally entitled to apply for asylum. While the ultimate granting of the application might be discretionary (I note, however, that current Article III Court decisions restrict the grounds for discretionary denial), the right to apply is clear. Moreover, in light of the obvious care and comprehensiveness that Congress used in insuring that EVERYONE at the border or in the U.S. could at least apply for asylum, I doubt that “blanket denials,” based solely on nationality and/or method of arrival would be proper exercises of discretion.

However, Nolan is correct in that the Supreme Court has held that the INA.s right to apply for asylum does not apply extraterritorially to individuals stopped before they can reach U.S. territory (such as interdiction).

Nolan and I agree on a major point: The Trump Administration should be using the overseas refugee processing provisions of the Refugee Act, the auspices of the UNHCR, and cooperation with other countries who have signed the UN Convention & Protocol to address forced migration issues abroad, closer to the sending country, wherever possible.

However, this Administration has shown little interest in doing that. Threats of sanctions, welshing on our own obligations to take overseas refugees under the Act, false characterizations of the refugees as “criminals and terrorists,” and threats to reduce or eliminate foreign aid aimed at solving the very infrastructure and societal problems that produce refugee flows are certainly not ways to show leadership and to inspire international cooperation in solving refugee problems.

Finally, for “Nolan’s Fan Club,” here’s a link to all 162 of his published articles:

Article List

PWS

10-16-18

TRUMP LAUNCHES PREDICTABLE LARGELY FACT FREE TIRADE AGAINST DESPERATE MIGRANTS – They Aren’t A Threat To Our National Security – But, Trump & His White Nationalist Policies Of Hate & Xenophobia Are!

http://time.com/5430940/donald-trump-migrant-caravan-false-claims

Katie Reilly reports for Time:

For more than 15 years, nonprofit groups have helped hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants journey through Central America to the United States, traveling together in a caravan to make the journey safer and their plight more visible. Thousands of Central American migrants currently walking to the U.S. border are doing the same, fleeing deadly violence on a trek that has drawn international focus.

As many as 7,000 migrants, according to one local estimate, have now joined the caravan that started on Oct. 13 in Honduras, many wearing flip flops and carrying their children on a journey that will be at least 1,500 miles long, depending on which part of the U.S. border they reach.

President Donald Trump — who has long critiqued U.S. immigration policies and denigrated immigrants since the start of his presidential campaign — has made numerous baseless claims about the caravan in recent weeks, spreading alarm and touting it as a “Great Midterm issue for Republicans!” Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the group included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” and falsely suggested that Democrats funded the caravan. He also blamed Democrats for the current immigration laws, though Republicans currently control both chambers of Congress and the White House.

“I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emerg[enc]y,” Trump tweeted early Monday, threatening to cut off foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for not “stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S.”

But videos and reporting from journalists traveling with the caravan of migrants show weary families making an arduous journey because of violence or lack of opportunity in their home countries, and no evidence that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” among the group.

“The migrants are ordinary people from Central America. They’re joining the caravans because the migration routes through Mexico are perilous for them and highly expensive,” says Elizabeth Oglesby, an associate professor of Latin American studies at the University of Arizona, who has studied Central America and human rights issues. “The more that the border has become militarized between the U.S. and Mexico, the more perilous and the more expensive the journey has become for Central Americans. So that’s why we see people coming together in the caravans.”

She says the caravan, which is larger than many of its annual predecessors, has grown because of how word spread on social media and because of worsening conditions in Honduras, where the murder rate is among the highest in the world and where the government has cracked down on political protestersfollowing last year’s disputed presidential election.

Oglesby says just a fraction of migrants who begin the trek make it to a U.S. point of entry each year, as many turn back or peel off if they can find work or safety in Mexico instead.

While no specific group has said it’s responsible for organizing the current caravan, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, founded in 2010, has led asylum-seeking migrants through Central America for more than 15 years, most recently in April — another caravan that drew ire from Trump. The group aims to “provide shelter and safety to migrants and refugees in transit, accompany them in their journey, and together demand respect for our human rights.” Some Pueblo Sin Fronteras leaders and organizers are involved in the current caravan.

Trump has lashed out at the caravan as an example of illegal immigration, threatening to deploy U.S. military force to “close our Southern border” and stop what he has described as a crisis. But illegal border crossings have been declining overall for more than a decade, though the number of border apprehensions fluctuates month-to-month. And under U.S. law, it is legal to petition for asylum at the border, though the process may be lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful.

“These migrant caravans are not a border crisis,” Oglesby says. “People are doing this openly and visibly, and they plan to show up at the U.S. port of entry and petition for political asylum, and that is exactly how our laws are supposed to function. The crisis comes about when U.S. border officials discourage people from political asylum, leave them on the bridges or threaten them that if they go forward with a political asylum claim, they might lose their children.”

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Katie is hardly the only informed observer to note that Trump is even more full of BS, fabricated facts, and bogus scare techniques than usual on this one.

Here’s Maegan Vasquez over at CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/politics/donald-trump-migrant-caravan-fact-check/index.html

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump, in a series of tweets on Monday, claimed he would declare a “national emergency” over an issue that has frequently piqued his attention — migrant caravans moving toward the United States through Central America and Mexico.

His tweets come just weeks ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and he has emphasized immigration as a key issue, without evidence accusing Democrats of pushing for overrun borders in what appears to be a naked fear campaign aimed at turning out his supporters. Immigration was a key issue in the 2016 presidential race.

Crowds of migrants, estimated to be in the thousands on Monday, resumed their long journey north on Sunday into Mexico as part of a migrant caravan originating in Central America.

Bolton and Kelly get into heated shouting match sparking resignation fears

Currently migrants are at the Central Park Miguel Hidalgo in the center of Tapachula. Organizers plan for them to begin moving north, reaching the northern city of Huixtla, which is about 20 miles north, and resting there.

The President, in his tweets, also made several questionable claims concerning immigration and the caravan. Among them: that “unknown Middle Easterners” are “mixed” in with the caravan, that he would be cutting off foreign aid over the caravan, and that Mexican authorities failed to stop migrants from coming into Mexico.

Asked later Monday about his assertion about “unknown Middle Easterners” in the caravan, Trump said: “Unfortunately, they have a lot of everybody in that group.”

“We’ve gotta stop them at the border and, unfortunately, you look at the countries, they have not done their job,” he said. “They have not done their job. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador — they’re paid a lot of money, every year we give them foreign aid and they did nothing for us, nothing.”

Here’s what we know:

Are there “unknown Middle Easterners” “mixed” into the migrant caravan?

Trump tweeted “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed” into the migrant caravan moving toward the United States. He called this a “national emergy” (sic).

It’s unclear what “unknown Middle Easterners” Trump appears to be referring to in his tweet, since there have been no reports, in the press or publicly from intelligence agencies, to suggest there are “Middle Easterners” embedded in the caravan.

A senior counterterrorism official told CNN’s Jessica Schneider that “while we acknowledge there are vulnerabilities at both our northern and southern border, we do not see any evidence that ISIS or other Sunni terrorist groups are trying to infiltrate the southern US border.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday afternoon that the administration “absolutely” has evidence of Middle Easterners in the caravan, “and we know this is a continuing problem.”

However, she did not provide the specific evidence supporting that claim.

During a White House conference call with surrogates regarding the caravan, a Homeland Security official said the administration is looking into a claim from Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales that his country has been able to capture around 100 terrorists. However, the official did not offer any evidence of the Middle Eastern people who Trump claims are hiding among migrants in the caravan.

“We are looking into that claim from the President Morales on the numbers,” Jonathan Hoffman, the DHS official, said. “It is not unusual to see people from Middle Eastern countries or other areas of the world pop up and attempt to cross our borders.”

Earlier this month, Morales claimed foreign individuals linked to terrorism were captured in the country during his administration, which began in January 2016.

“We have arrested almost 100 people highly linked to terrorist groups, specifically ISIS. We have not only detained them in our territory, they have also been deported to their countries of origin. All of you here have information to that effect,” Morales said during a Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America event attended by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

There’s no direct link or correlation between Morales’ statement and Trump’s assertion about the caravan on Twitter.

The Department of Homeland Security also did not provide any evidence to bolster the President’s claim about “unknown Middle Easterns” in the caravan when asked for it by CNN on Monday.

A department official told CNN that in fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection “apprehended 17,256 criminals, 1,019 gang members, and 3,028 special interest aliens from countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria and Somalia. Additionally, (Customs and Border Protection) prevented 10 known or suspected terrorists from traveling to or entering the United States every day in fiscal year 2017.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not specify any Middle Eastern countries.

Pressed about the President’s assertion that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” mixed in with the caravan, a State Department spokesperson said they understand there are several nationalities in the caravan and referred us to Department of Homeland Security for more information.

Will the administration cut off foreign aid? Can they?

Trump is threatening foreign aid over the new migrant caravan. Here’s what’s at stake.

Trump tweeted that because “Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S.,” the United States “will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given to them.”

It’s unclear where the administration will propose to make the cuts the President appears to be talking about, and CNN has reached out to the White House and the DHS for further information.

However, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act prohibits the President from withholding — or impounding — money appropriated by Congress.

New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said Monday that his office has reached out to the Government Accountability Office to ensure that the President does not violated the act.

“Fortunately, Congress — not the President — has the power of the purse, and my colleagues and I will not stand idly by as this Administration ignores congressional intent,” Engel said in a statement.

Trump has made the threat of cuts to foreign aid going to Latin American countries over migrant caravans several times over the last year.

Under the Trump administration, and with the approval of the Republican-controlled Congress, there have already been significant cuts to foreign aid to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — the three countries he mentioned Monday — and the administration plans to continue making cuts in fiscal year 2019.

Were authorities from Mexico unable to stop the migrant caravan from heading into the US?

Migrant caravan resumes march north from Mexico-Guatemala border

Trump tweeted Monday that “Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States.”

There are some 7,500 people marching north as part of a migrant caravan through Mexico, caravan organizer Dennis Omar Contreras told CNN. He said the organizers did a count of participants Monday morning.

He said the migrants will leave Mexico’s Tapachula for the town of Huixtla, which is located more than 20 miles northwest of their Monday morning location.

While Mexican authorities said before the caravan’s arrival that anyone who entered the country “in an irregular manner” could be subject to apprehension and deportation, many migrants from the caravan appear to have circumvented authorities.

CNN crews witnessed migrants jumping off a bridge at the Mexico-Guatemala border and riding rafts to reach Mexican soil.

Mexican authorities say more than 1,000 Central American migrants officially applied for refugee status in Mexico over the past three days.

It’s unclear how authorities will respond to the thousands of other migrants who are marching north.

Will the President declare a national emergency over the caravan?

It’s unclear exactly what executive action, if any, the President will take following his tweet saying that he has “alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National (emergency).”

Previous administrations have ordered troops to the US southern border, and Trump issued a similar memorandum earlier this year ordering National Guard troops to be deployed to the US-Mexico border. The memo came around the same time another, smaller migrant caravan was moving toward the US through Central America.

Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis, a spokesman for the Defense Department, told CNN that “beyond the National Guard soldiers currently supporting the Department of Homeland Security on our southern border, in a Title 32, U.S. Code, section 502(f) duty status under the command and control of the respective State Governors, the Department of Defense has not been tasked to provide additional support at this time.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, referred questions about the national emergency to the White House, which did not answer to several questions for comment.

Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told CNN that the President’s use of the term national emergency, and his potential subsequent declaration, is “a subjective judgment.”

“It is certainly true that the numbers that have been reported in this group are larger than anything that we’ve seen before this from these countries concentrated in one group,” she said.

However, she added that the reaction is “disproportionate to what’s happening.”

“I’m not saying it’s not a genuine problem, but it’s not like this is organized insurrection, in the way that its been characterized,” she added.

CNN’s Catherine Shoichet, Sarah Westwood, Ryan Browne, Jennifer Hansler, Geneva Sands, Dakin Andone, Patrick Oppmann, Natalie Gallón, Kevin Liptak and Jessica Schneider contributed to this report.

This story has been updated.

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And, here’s the ever-wonderful Tal from her “new home” over at the SF Chronicle:

Here’s what happens when the migrant caravan arrives at U.S. border

By Tal Kopan

WASHINGTON — President Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric Monday about a caravan of thousands of Central Americans making its way toward the U.S., even as uncertainty grew over what will happen to the migrants if they reach the border.

Trump has seized on the caravan as a key talking point heading into the midterm elections. The president has been pointing to the growing group of migrants as justification for his aggressive immigration proposals.

“Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!” Trump tweeted Monday.

A source familiar with the government’s information on the caravan said there was no evidence Middle Easterners were mixing into it. It’s unclear whether Mexico will allow the group to continue the remaining 1,000-plus miles to the U.S. border without interfering.

More:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Here-s-what-happens-when-migrant-caravan-13327887.php#photo-16376169

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Actually, contrary to the false narrative put out by Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, and others, our legal system is set up to handle this situation:

USCIS could move additional Asylum Officers to ports of entry along the Southern border, particularly given the substantial advance notice;
Arriving migrants could be promptly and fairly screened for “credible fear;”
Those who pass could be matched with available pro bono lawyers and released to those locations where their lawyers and community support are located, thus insuring a high rate or appearance for asylum hearings in Immigration Court;
Those who fail credible fear could be returned to their home countries in a humane manner, perhaps working with the UNHCR;
If the Administration wants these cases to be “prioritized” in a backlogged Immigration Court system, they could remove an equal number of “low priority” older cases from the docket, thus preventing growth in the backlog and largely avoiding “Aimless Docket Reshuffling;”
The Refugee Act of 1980 could be used to establish a robust program for screening and resettlement of refugees directly from the Northern Triangle, thus both reducing the incentive to make the land journey to apply for asylum and setting a leadership example for other countries in the hemisphere to take additional refugees from the Northern Triangle;
We could work cooperatively with the UNHCR and other countries to establish shared resettlement programs for those who flee the Northern Triangle and can’t return;
We could invest more foreign aid in infrastructure, and job creation programs in the Northern Triangle which would deal with the causes of the continuing outward migration.

We do know from experience and observation what won’t work: incarceration, prosecutions, threats, family separation, child abuse, misconstruing asylum law against applicants, tirades directed against sending and transit countries, saying “we don’t want you,” etc.

PWS

10-22-18

GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST A.G. PUTS IDEOLOGY ABOVE LAW & FACTS – How He’s Destroying the U.S. DOJ & Corrupting Our Government! –“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/politics/jeff-sessions-justice-department.html

Katie Benner reports for the NY Times:

Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach

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Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

By Katie Benner

Oct. 19, 2018

WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.

Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

President Trump has exacerbated the dynamic, they said, by repeatedly attacking Mr. Sessions and the Justice Department in baldly political and personal terms. And he has castigated rank-and-file employees, which career lawyers said further chilled dissent and debate within the department.

The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.

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“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.

A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.

“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.

Driven by Ideology

Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.

Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.

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The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.

In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.

Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.

To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.

Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.

In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.

The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.

Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.

“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.

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To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.

During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?

After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.

Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.

During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.

When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.

Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”

Without directly addressing the department’s positions on transgender rights or the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Flores noted that its reversals on workplace arbitration, voting rights, labor unions and the appointments of federal officials were validated by wins at the Supreme Court.

Trump’s Shadow

Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.

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President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

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The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.

More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.

Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.

“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.

As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.

Empty Spots

Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.

DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.

Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.

“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”

Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.

Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.

Correction: October 18, 2018

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.

Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

Follow Katie Benner on Twitter: @ktbenner.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

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I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)

Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.

Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”

PWS

10-21-18

LEXISNEXIS: SCOFFLAW NATION: New Amnesty International Reports Document Trump Administration’s Intentional Abuses Of International Refugee Protection Standards, Call For Congressional Action!

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/immigration/b/outsidenews/posts/amnesty-international-report-illegal-pushbacks-arbitrary-detention-ill-treatment-of-asylum-seekers-in-the-united-states

Posted by Dan Kowalski at LexisNexis Immigration Community:

Amnesty International Report: Illegal Pushbacks, Arbitrary Detention & Ill-Treatment of Asylum-Seekers in the United States

Amnesty International, Oct. 11, 2018 – “The US government has deliberately adopted immigration policies and practices that caused catastrophic harm to thousands of people seeking safety in the United States, including the separation of over 6,000 family units in a four-month period more than previously disclosed by authorities, Amnesty International said in a new report released today.

USA: ‘You Don’t Have Any Rights Here’: Illegal Pushbacks, Arbitrary Detention and Ill-treatment of Asylum-seekers in the United States reveals the brutal toll of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine and dismantle the US asylum system in gross violation of US and international law. The cruel policies and practices documented include: mass illegal pushbacks of asylum-seekers at the US–Mexico border; thousands of illegal family separations; and increasingly arbitrary and indefinite detentions of asylum-seekers, frequently without parole.

“The Trump administration is waging a deliberate campaign of widespread human rights violations in order to punish and deter people seeking safety at the US–Mexico border,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.”

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No, desperate families seeking refuge at our Southern Border don’t pose any real threat to the U.S., regardless of what Trump might say and whether they ultimately are found qualified or unqualified to enter. What does pose a real threat to our nation and to the legal rights and future of every American is “waging a deliberate campaign of widespread human rights violations in order to punish and deter people seeking safety at the US–Mexico border.”

PWS

10-18-18

PWS

11-06-18

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Empty Spots

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