🛡⚔️⚖️🗽 ROUND TABLE ASSISTS FIGHT AGAINST “AMERICA’S STAR CHAMBERS” — Here’s Our Amicus Brief In Las Americas v. Trump! — With Thanks To Our Pro Bono Friends STOLL STOLL BERNE LOKTING & SHLACHTER P.C. in Portland, OR!

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

Excerpt:

The immigration court system lacks independence. An agency within the Department of Justice, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) houses the immigration court system, which consists of trial-level immigration courts and a single appellate tribunal known as the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Immigration judges, including appellate immigration judges, are viewed by EOIR “management” not as judges, but as Department of Justice attorneys who serve at the pleasure and direction of the Nation’s prosecutor-in-chief, the Attorney General.

As former immigration judges, we offer the Court our experience and urge that corrective action is necessary to ensure that immigration judges are permitted to function as impartial adjudicators, as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA and its implementing regulations set forth procedures for the “timely, impartial, and consistent” resolution of immigration proceedings. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1103, 1230; 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(d)(1) (charging the Board with appellate review authority to “resolve the questions before it in a manner that is timely, impartial, and consistent with the [INA] and regulations”) (emphasis added); 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(b) (similarly requiring “immigration judges . . . to resolve the questions before them in a timely and impartial manner”) (emphasis added).

Although housed inside an enforcement agency and led by the Nation’s chief prosecutor, immigration judges must act neutrally to protect and adjudicate the important rights at stake in immigration cases and check executive overreach in the enforcement of federal immigration law. Applying a detached and learned interpretation of those laws, judges must correct overzealous bureaucrats and policy makers when they overstep the bounds of reasonable interpretation and the requirements of due process.

Here’s the full brief:

Las Americas Amicus (full case)

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As I often say, it’s an honor to be a part of this group with so many of my wonderful colleagues. It’s also an honor to be able to assist so many wonderful “divisions and brigades” of the New Due Process Army, like the SPLC and Immigration Law Lab.

Here’s another thought I often express: What if all of this talent, creativity, teamwork, expertise, and energy were devoted to fixing our broken Immigration Court System rather than constantly fighting to end gross abuses that should not be happening? There is a “systemic cost” to “maliciously incompetent” administration and the White Nationalist agenda promoted by the Trump kakistocracy!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-04-20

🛡⚔️👍🗽⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️FIGHTING THE STAR CHAMBER! — US District Judge Holds That Constitutional Challenge To Weaponized Immigration “Courts” Can Proceed! — “Both policies change the way immigration judges run their dockets and their courtrooms. Accordingly, Plaintiffs have at least sufficiently alleged that such docket management has practical consequence for parties or their attorneys.”

Melissa Crow
Senior Supervising Attorney
Southern Poverty Law Center

Tess Hellgren, Staff Attorney and Justice Catalyst Legal Fellow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 3, 2020

Contact:

Marion Steinfels, marionsteinfels@gmail.com / 202-557-0430
Ramon Valdez, ramon@innovationlawlab.org / 971-238-1804

Federal Court Denies Government’s Motion to Dismiss in Immigration Court Case
Advocates’ challenge to immigration courts as “deportation machines”
moves forward; constitutionality of immigration court system at issue

PORTLAND, OR – Immigrant rights advocates challenging the weaponization of the U.S. immigration courts applaud Friday’s late-afternoon ruling by the U.S. District Court of Oregon that their lawsuit, Las Americas v Trump, will move forward. The legal services providers, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Innovation Law Lab, and Santa Fe Dreamers Project (SFDP), working with Perkins Coie LLP for pro bono support, allege that the Administration has failed to establish an impartial immigration court as required under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and the Take Care Clause of the U.S. Constitution – weaponizing them into deportation machines against asylum seekers and other noncitizens – and asks the court to end the unlawful use of the courts to effectuate mass deportations instead of fair decisions.

In Friday’s order, the Honorable Karin Immergut denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case. The district court rejected the government’s arguments, holding that all of the organizations’ claims could proceed, including their claim that the Attorney General has grossly mismanaged the immigration court system and weaponized the system against asylum seekers.

“This is a clear victory for everyone who has sought a fair hearing in immigration court, only to face a system plagued by rampant dysfunction and policies designed to subvert justice,” said Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “For asylum seekers and those who represent them, the current process is like playing Russian roulette. Despite the life-or-death stakes in these cases, there is little rhyme or reason to the court’s workings apart from prioritizing deportation at all costs.”

“Friday’s decision is an important milestone in our fight for a truly fair, transparent, and independent immigration court,” said Tess Hellgren, staff attorney with Innovation Law Lab. “Whether an asylum seeker wins or loses should not depend on the political whims of the President or Attorney General. ”

Not only does the Court’s decision confirm that the gross mismanagement of the immigration court system is subject to judicial review, it also recognizes that there may be important constitutional checks and balances on the power of presidential administrations to manipulate the immigration courts to achieve mass deportation.

“This win is incredibly validating. We often operate under the guise that the work we are doing is impossible,” said Linda Corchado, Managing Attorney of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “We feel uplifted as we can take the giant step forward to tackle the system now, with everything we’ve got.”

“ASAP works with families across the United States and at the border who fled persecution and now face countless obstacles to seeking asylum in the U.S. immigration court system,” said Conchita Cruz, Co-Executive Director of ASAP. “This decision gets us one step closer to showing that the injustices of the U.S. immigration court system are not only wrong, but illegal. We stand with asylum seekers and immigrants’ rights advocates in bringing these abuses to light and demanding better from our government.”

The lawsuit, which was filed in December 2019, alleges President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and other members of the executive branch have failed to establish a fair immigration court system in which the plaintiff organizations can provide meaningful legal assistance to their asylum-seeking clients. The complaint outlines pervasive dysfunction and bias within the immigration court system, including:

The Enforcement Metrics Policy, , which requires immigration judges to decide cases quickly, at the expense of a fair process, in exchange for favorable performance reviews.

The “family unit” court docket, which stigmatizes the cases of recently arrived families and rushes their court dates, often giving families inadequate time to find an attorney and prepare for their hearings.

Areas that have become known as “asylum-free zones,” where virtually no asylum claims have been granted for the past several years.

The nationwide backlog of pending immigration cases, which has now surpassed 1 million — meaning that thousands of asylum seekers must wait three or four years for a court date.

In June 2019, Innovation Law Lab and SPLC also released a report, based on over two years of research and focus group interviews with attorneys and former immigration judges from around the country, documenting the failure of the immigration court system to fulfill the constitutional and statutory promise of fair and impartial case-by-case adjudication. The report can be accessed here: The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.

The court’s opinion is HERE.

###

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org and follow us on social media: Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook and @splcenter on Twitter.

Innovation Law Lab, based in Portland, Oregon with projects around the country and in Mexico, is a nonprofit organization that harnesses technology, lawyers, and activists to advance immigrant justice. For more information, visit www.innovationlawlab.org.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) provides community support and emergency legal aid to asylum seekers, regardless of where they are located. ASAP’s model has three components: online community support, emergency legal aid, and nationwide systemic reform. For more information, see www.asylumadvocacy.org and follow us on social media at @asylumadvocacy on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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So, finally, the clear unconstitutionality of “Star Chambers” run by a biased prosecutor who basically views himself as the personal lawyer for a racist xenophobic President is going to get some scrutiny, along with the beyond grotesque mismanagement of EOIR that has created a “backlog” that in all likelihood now exceeds 2 million cases. But, of course we don’t know, and may never know, the exact extent of the backlog because of 1) the notoriously defective record keeping at EOIR; and 2) the manipulation of and sometimes outright misrepresentation of data by the Trump Administration.

Thanks to SPLC and Innovation Law Lab for undertaking this long-overdue effort. And, special appreciation to my friends and New Due Process Army superstars Melissa and Tess.

Due Process Forever!🗽⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️

PWS

08-03-20

MUST SEE TV: “IMMIGRATION NATION” PREMIERES TODAY ON NETFLIX: Time Magazine Says “Netflix’s Searing Docuseries Immigration Nation Is The Most Important TV Show You’ll See In 2020!”

Immigration Nation

Directed by Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz

I appear, along with many others, in a later episode.

As you watch, ask this question: What does most of the enforcement you see have to do with any legitimate notion of “homeland security” except in the sense that abusing, terrorizing, separating, and removing individuals of color evidently makes some folks in the U.S., particularly Trump supporters, feel “more secure?”

No, it’s not “just enforcing the law!” No law is enforced 100% and most U.S. laws are enforced to just a limited extent due to priorities, funding, and sensible prosecutorial discretion used by every law enforcement agency.

How much does the Trump Administration “enforce” environmental protection laws, civil rights laws, laws protecting the LGBTQ community from discrimination, fair housing laws, financial laws, health and safety laws, tax laws, or for that matter ethics laws, whistleblower protections, or anti-corruption laws?

Indeed, as hate crimes directed against the Hispanic, Asian, and Black communities have risen, prosecutions have actually fallen under Trump. See e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/us/hate-crimes-latinos-el-paso-shooting/index.html.

Although domestic violence hasn’t decreased in ethnic communities, prosecutions have gone down as a result of the Administration’s “terror tactics” as illustrated in Immigration Nation. Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypoto” Sessions’s racially-motivated prosecutions of minor immigration violators, intended to promote family separation and “deter” others from asserting legal rights, actually diverted Federal prosecutorial resources from real crimes like drug trafficking and white collar crimes.

Remember, Jeff Sessions walks free (his biggest “trauma” being a well-deserved primary defeat in Alabama); his victims aren’t so lucky; some of their trauma is permanent; their lives changed for the worse, and in some cases eradicated, forever! Where’s the “justice” and the “rule of law” in this?

Prosecutions are always prioritized and “targeted” in some way or another, sometimes rationally, reasonably, and prudently, and other times with bias and malice. So, as you watch this and hear folks like former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan and other Government officials pontificate about “just enforcing the law” or “required by law,” you should recognize it for the total BS that it is!

The Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement program is clearly designed by folks like Stephen Miller, Sessions, and others to be invidiously motivated and to terrorize communities of color including U.S. citizens and lawful residents who are part of those communities. They are an affront to the concepts of “equal justice under law” and eliminating “institutional racism.”

The Administration’s policies are actually “Dred Scottification” or “dehumanization of the other.” You can see and hear it in the voices of DHS enforcement officials, a number of whom eventually view other humans as “numbers,” “priorities,” “quotas,” “missions,” “ops” (“operations”), “beds,” or “collateral damage.”

That’s exactly how repressive bureaucracies in Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and other authoritarian states have worked and prospered, at least for a time. By breaking dehumanization into “little bureaucratic steps” individuals are relieved of moral responsibility and lulled into losing sight of the “big picture.”

Did the folks repairing the tracks and switches for the German railroads focus on where the boxcars were heading and what eventually would happen to their passengers? Did they even know, wonder, or care what was in those boxcars?

And, in case you wonder, family and child separations, supposedly eventually abandoned by Trump, might have diminished as a result of court cases, but they still regularly occur. Only now they are kept largely “below the radar screen” and disingenuously disguised under the bureaucratic rubric “binary choice.”

What has really diminished is less the abuses and more the national and international outrage about those abuses. Dishonesty, immorality, and cruelty have simply become “normalized” under Trump as long it’s largely “out of sight, out of mind.”

What do you imagine happens to those turned away at our borders without any meaningful process and “orbited” to the Northern Triangle — essentially “war zones?” (Preliminary studies show that many die or disappear.) A majority of the Supremes don’t care, and apparently most Americans don’t either as long as the carnage and tears aren’t popping up on their TV screens.

And, in many cases, the “removals” and denials of fair process, both the ones you see in Immigration Nation and the ones you don’t, are actually detrimental to our nation, our values, our society, and our future. The series mentions “being one on the wrong side of history;” that’s precisely where the DHS is under Trump. But, so is the rest of our nation for having allowed an evil charlatan like Trump to have power over our humanity.

This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it! Because they do! We can’t undo the past! But, we can make Trump part of that past and change our future for the better!

PWS

08-03-20

🏴‍☠️☠️👎🏻NATIONAL SECURITY: The Threat Isn’t On The Streets Of Portland Or From The Virtually Non-Existent & Largely Mythical “Antifa” — Leaving Aside The Existential Threat Posed By Trump, The Biggest Threat To America’s Future Existence Is On Our Payroll & Operates With Impunity From The 5th Floor Of The USDOJ — “Billy The Bigot” Barr Is Hell-Bent On Seeing The US Become A Hitlerian/Putinist State! — “It isn’t arguable; it’s wrong.” — So Why Does The “JR Five” Give Billy A Pass While Failing To Protect Humanity & The Rule of Law?

From the LA Times:

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=9c0e081f-1c63-4c31-af1d-af5fddcb108d&v=sdk

What makes Barr a danger to democracy

The attorney general channels Trump

HARRY LITMAN

Atty. Gen. William Barr left us with a terrifying certainty in the wake of his testimony Tuesday in front of the House Judiciary Committee: Under him, the Department of Justice stands ready to advance any pro-Trump policy, justifying it on the basis of a blinkered, tenuous view of the facts and the law, or maybe just Barr’s personal ideological intuitions.

For all its finger-wagging, the Judiciary Committee is not in a position to constrain the attorney general. There is no real brake on Barr’s conduct short of a Trump loss in November. Or, to adopt Barr’s own unsettling gloss, a Trump loss that is sufficiently “clear” that he and his boss would accept it.

Since the hearing, commentators have seized on a couple of blows that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee — Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) primarily — landed on the attorney general. But there was nothing close to a knockdown, and the hard facts remain: The House will not impeach Barr and President Trump will continue to give him full rein.

It’s no secret that the Democrats in Congress (and more than half of the country) view Barr as Mephistopheles — dishonest, partisan, corrupt, even racist. He did nothing Tuesday to try to revise that view; in fact, he seemed indifferent to it.

Norms of evenhandedness, professionalism and especially political disinterest, which traditionally check U.S. attorneys general, do not moderate his conduct. He championed every partisan act his DOJ has taken on the president’s behalf, blandly claiming they reflected the faithful application of the rule of law.

For example, when he defended the highly unusual deployment of federal agents in Portland, Ore., Barr described a “Batman”-like dystopia in which a few U.S. marshals were beset by a marauding horde of uncontrollable professional anarchists. If that were accurate, it would be hard to quibble with sending in the feds.

But the justification dries up immediately if the protests were, as a lot of the reporting on the ground indicates, largely peaceful, and if local law enforcement were capable of defending the Portland federal courthouse and separating lawbreakers from peaceful protestors. (The announcement Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s mystery troops were withdrawing suggests the argument for the invasion was tenuous all along.)

Or consider Barr’s legally tortured defense of the president’s memo attempting to exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the 2020 census. The plain language of the 14th Amendment, as well as a unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, leaves no room for argument: Everyone who “inhabits” the U.S. must be counted.

But Barr claims that Congress has delegated to the Commerce Department an ability to advance an Orwellian definition of “inhabitant.” He called it an “arguable position.” It isn’t arguable; it’s wrong.

And given that it is the attorney general’s job to uphold the law of the land, he shouldn’t even bring up the theory, regardless of the half- or quarter-baked views of the president.

Barr’s partisan proclamations went on and on, with this whopper as a high point: “From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents.”

. . . .

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Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.

Beyond Congressional fecklessness, perhaps the most disturbing and scary aspect of Billy’s anti-democracy, anti-humanity, racist agenda is that it has received only “light pushback” from the supposedly independent Article III Courts, particularly the Supremes’ majority led by Roberts.

Private practitioners who made the types of specious, disingenuous, and wrong arguments to Federal Courts advanced by Billy and fellow Trump toady Solicitor General Noel Francisco and their minions would probably have been disbarred or even in jail by now. Not only do these guys continue their wanton destruction of our legal system, but Roberts & Co. sometimes actually reward the DOJ’s fraud, racism, and bad faith.

Crooked and corrupt politicos are one thing. But, Supreme Court Justices who won’t call them out for their invidious motivations, won’t stand up for equal justice under law, allow racist abuses in the guise of patently bogus “national security” and Executive prerogative pretexts, won’t protect refugees, asylum seekers, children, or migrants of color, favor tyranny over humanity, and allow their courts to be paralyzed by frivolous Government litigation, dilatory appeals, and transparently bogus procedural gimmicks are the real problem here!

As Litman points out, despite the “smokescreens” thrown up by Barr and complicit courts, there’s really no ambiguity about what’s happening here. It’s straightforward! It’s a full scale attack on our justice system, our democracy, and our humanity by a bunch of would-be facist thugs operating out of the Executive Branch of our Government. America needs better Justices and Federal Judges who will cut through the legalistic BS, show courage, have integrity, and stand up for democracy, humanity, and equal justice for all!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

08-03-20

BAD NEWS FOR BIGOTLAND: Even As Billy The Bigot Blatantly Bashes The “Categorical Approach,” 10th Cir. Blasts Billy’s Biased BIA’s Bogus Blowing Of Same To Illegally Deport Under CO Controlled Substances Law!

EYORE — “Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)

10th-Johnson-drugs19-9550

From: Dan Kowalski

Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 4:16 PM
To: ICLINIC@LIST.MSU.EDU; Immigration Law Professors List
Subject: [immprof] FW: victory in Johnson v. Barr – Colorado possession statute overbroad and indivisble!!!

team,

a huge victory today for one of our clients, and hopefully many other folks in our community.

in Johnson v. Barr, the 10th circuit ruled that the Colorado statute of possession of a controlled substance is overboard as to the federal schedule and indivisible as to the particular controlled substance within a schedule.

the court honed in on the categorical approach, looking first to the plain language of the statute, the penalties assigned under the statute, its unpublished decision in Arellano, and persuasive state case law in deciding in our favor.

-this means that no conviction for possession of a schedule I or II CS can support the CS grounds of inadmissibility or deportability. this will hopefully help countless people who were found inadmissible, deportable, subject to mandatory detention, and ineligible for relief to seek redress of those legal errors.

-by extension, this decision is likely to apply to simply possession of a schedule III-V because it is also overbroad and structured nearly identically to the possession statute at issue in Johnson. moreover, due to legislative change last year classifying all PCS of schedule I-V CS as a DM1 offense starting in 2020, all future PCS offenses are likely also overbroad and indivisible.

this is definitely a day to celebrate. we will see whether the govt seeks rehearing or cert.

keep loving, keep fighting.

h

—

Hans Meyer

The Meyer Law Office, P.C.

—

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to immprof+unsubscribe@lists.ucla.edu.

Hans Meyer ESQ
Meyer Law
Denver, CO

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

Congratulations, Hans!

As noted by Hans, this decision could have “big-time” impact and result in numerous motions to reopen and “redos.” It’s just another example of how the gimmicks and misinterpretations used and encouraged by the Trump regime as part of their “haste makes waste” deport everyone policies actually create backlogs and waste resources while doing grave injustices.

America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court with real expert judges, with a commitment to human rights and due process, dedicated to seeing that individual results are fair and just, rather than carrying out a perverted, race and hate driven nativist political agenda to maximize deportations in disregard of the law.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-02-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚖️⚰️👎🏻KAKISTOCRACY WATCH: BILLY THE BIGOT BLOWS BIGTIME BS AT CONGRESS: Laura Coates @ CNN With Analysis Of Billy’s Opening Statement Liefest & Stream Of Racist Tropes! — With This Trump Toady As Chief Lawyer, & Feckless Courts & Legislators, The U.S. Legal System Is Functionally Dead ☠️⚰️

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/opinions/william-barr-fallacies-undermine-justice-department-coates/index.html

Laura Coates is a CNN legal analyst. She is a former assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia and trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She is the host of the daily “Laura Coates Show” on SiriusXM. Follow her @thelauracoates. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Attorney General Bill Barr’s written opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee was replete with mischaracterizations, fallacies and unnerving stereotypes that run afoul of the principle of equal justice — and which, taken together, show how he has transformed the Department of Justice that enforces the law to a department that undermines the rule of law.

These are but a few lines that should evoke a visceral reaction to the views of a man who sits at the helm of the most powerful prosecutorial office in the country.

1. “Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.”

No, Attorney General Barr, you are not being accused of being a factotum, colloquially defined as a handyman. You stand accused of being a henchman who acts not only under the President’s instructions but, perhaps more nefariously, exclusively in the President’s interests. And what conveys this impression is not a deceptive narrative crafted by the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, but rather your own conduct.

Case in point: undermining career prosecutors in what appears to clearly be the interests of President Donald Trump. Not once can I recall an attorney general weighing in on a career prosecutor’s sentencing recommendations for a defendant convicted of multiple felonies by a jury. Yet, this appears to be an increasingly frequent endeavor by this Attorney General on behalf of Trump associates, including, most recently former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the President’s long-time friend Roger Stone.

William Barr has a lot to explain about actions on Michael Cohen

The disturbing trend is underscored by the fact that the one convicted felon who has fallen out of the President’s favor, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, felt the knife twisted rather than removed when the Justice Department recently, albeit briefly, sent him back to prison under questionable

And Barr’s misuse of terms continues with the use of the term “Russiagate.” The use of the suffix “gate” insinuates that it is conspiratorial, farcical and worthy of derision. And yet, the Attorney General has confirmed, as recently as today’s colloquy with Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, that Russia did interfere with the past presidential election and will presumably continue to interfere with our upcoming presidential election. Perhaps the nod to conspiracy theorists was inadvertent in light of overwhelming evidence he fails to dispute.

2. “Like his predecessors, President Trump and his National Security Council have appropriately weighed in on law-enforcement decisions that directly implicate national security or foreign policy, because those decisions necessarily involve considerations that transcend typical prosecutorial factors.”

No one doubts the propriety of the President of the United States and members of his National Security Council to get involved in cases that directly implicate the national security of this nation or those matters that directly relate to our foreign policy interests. What is in doubt is whether Barr’s defense of deploying federal agents to US cities is anything more than a pretextual reason to infringe upon the constitutional rights of Americans, namely their First Amendment rights to assemble and to protest their grievances with the government. A bald assertion of a national security interest does not absolve the executive branch from having to provide an appropriate and lawful justification when constitutional rights are implicated. And yet Barr has offered no compelling reason.

3. “I had nothing to prove and had no desire to return to government. … When asked to consider returning, I did so because I revere the Department and believed my independence would allow me to help steer her back to her core mission of applying one standard of justice for everyone and enforcing the law even-handedly, without partisan considerations.”

This is just laughable. He had no desire to return to the government? I have a June 2018 memo that says otherwise. It was entirely unsolicited, offered Barr’s insight on special counsel Robert Mueller’s handling of an investigation into Russia’s interference in our presidential election and read like a solicitation for a job. And lo and behold, he got his wish. Now, Barr has launched an investigation into the origins of what he calls “Russiagate” that seems to track the very outline he presented when he, ahem, had no desire to put skin in the game.

Barr’s suggestion that he was compelled to return to the helm out of a sincere interest to restore the objectivity and credibility of the Department of Justice is belied by his decision-making. His sentencing decisions that seem to show political favor, his failure to justify the use of force against peaceful protestors and his involvement in the removal of Geoffrey Berman, the former Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, comprise just a handful of the many instances where his conduct has undermined — not restored — the credibility of the Justice Department.

. . . .

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Read the rest of Laura’s seven points at the link.

It’s a familiar pattern. After “stonewalling” Congressional oversight, Administration Kakistocrat finally shows up and arrogantly spews lies, misrepresentations, and false narratives under oath. Dems spend their time lecturing and pontificating, but don’t create the factual record for a subsequent perjury prosecution. (Ask yourself: What if Laura Coates were doing the questioning?)

GOP toadies in Congress “circle the wagons” and double down on the lies showing their complete contempt for truth, human decency, and good governance.

We already knew Barr was a shady character and that the GOP is unfit for any office in any branch. So, this hearing didn’t really accomplish much.

But it does demonstrate the absolute necessity for the majority of us who want to save our nation to get out the vote to remove Trump and the GOP at every level 🧹 in November.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does! Another four years of Trump’s racist malicious incompetence and the GOP kakistocracy could kill us all (including the truth-impervious Trumpsters and GOP toadies willing to seek the end of our democracy)! Victory for the “good guys” isn’t inevitable — it will take lots of energy and continuing hard work to save our nation!👍🏼🗽🇺🇸

PWS

07-29-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️IS THIS HOW WE WANT TO BE REMEMBERED BY FUTURE GENERATIONS? – America “is no longer committed to basic standards of decency!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/canada-gives-americas-treatment-of-refugees-a-failing-grade/2020/07/27/3eabeb8e-cdfa-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html

From the WashPost Editorial Board:

Opinion by Editorial Board

July 27, 2020 at 1:23 p.m. EDT

NOT SO long ago, asylum seekers turned to the United States, seeking refuge from repressive states. Now the United States is one of those repressive states.

That’s the gist of a Canadian federal court ruling, which would scrap a 16-year-old bilateral treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States each recognize the other as a safe place to seek refuge. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that Canada’s practice of turning back third-country refugees who try to cross at official points of entry along the U.S.-Canada frontier — on the theory that they have already reached a safe harbor in the United States — no longer makes sense given the atrocious treatment to which they are subjected south of the border. Canada, she wrote, can no longer turn a blind eye to the reality that the United States denies decent and dignified treatment to asylum seekers.

Justice McDonald based her ruling partly on testimony from asylum seekers who described harrowing conditions of confinement in U.S. detention, to which they are automatically taken when turned back by Canada. One of them, a refugee from Ethiopia named Nedira Jemal Mustefa, recounted what she called a “terrifying, isolating and psychologically traumatic” experience at a “freezing” facility where she was held in upstate New York. Other testimony in the Canadian court provided evidence that detainees in U.S. facilities were denied access to counsel, phone calls and translators, and some were subjected to solitary confinement.

The judge found that the “accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” in the United States.

None of this is surprising to advocates and others who have monitored the travails of asylum seekers, especially since President Trump took office. In the past two years, his anti-immigration policies have prompted more than 50,000 asylum seekers to cross into Canada outside official ports of entry, thereby skirting the treaty’s automatic-return provision — until the pandemic forced the border’s closing this spring. After arriving in Canada and undergoing security and medical screening, they have been allowed to work and receive basic benefits such as medical care as they await adjudication of their asylum claims.

Canada is among the United States’s closest allies; gratuitous America-bashing is not the norm there. That a Canadian judge would give a failing grade to this country’s commitment to human rights where they concern refugees is a damning rebuke.

Before her ruling takes effect, the judge gave the Canadian government six months to appeal, should it choose to do so. Until now, the treaty’s supporters have justified it on the grounds that it bars “asylum shopping” by refugees. The question facing the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is whether its neighbor to the south still adheres to what Western democracies regard as the basic standards of dignity and decency on which the original treaty was based. The evidence suggests it does not.

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

Actually, this is a “Duh” for those of us who have been speaking out for the last three years about the Trump regime’s racist White Nationalist hate inspired anti-asylum, anti-immigrant, anti-human rights agenda. The only “shocker” is that neither the Congress nor the Article III Courts have put up meaningful resistance to these clearly illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral actions.

Basically, “Brown Lives Don’t Matter” to this gang of nativist thugs and their legislative and judicial enablers. Perhaps most disgustingly, the Supremes’ majority has been an eager participant in this “Dred Scottification” of “the other” based largely on race and covered by only the most transparent pretexts of “national emergency” and the like.

America needs not only a qualified, non-racist Executive, but also better qualified legislators and judges who reject institutionalized racism and hate masquerading as “emergency justifications” for suspending the rule of law and the Constitution as it applies to human rights, human lives, and human dignity. To state the obvious, our nation is disintegrating because far too many of those we have entrusted to govern reject the basic concept that equal justice for all, ending racism, and due process for all persons in the U.S. are both Constitutional requirements and moral imperatives.

This November, vote like your life and the future of America depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

07-26-20

THE GIBSON REPORT — 07-27-20 — Compiled by Elizabeth Gibson, Esquire, NY Legal Assistance Group — U.S. Not A “Safe” Country For Refugees & Other News About The Kakistocracy 🏴‍☠️☠️

COVID-19

Note: Policies are rapidly changing, so please verify the latest policies on the relevant government websites and with colleagues on listservs as best you can.

New

Opening dates for some non-detained courts: Hearings in non-detained cases at courts without an announced date are postponed through, and including, August 14, 2020.

Federal Employees Exposed to COVID-19 File Class Action Lawsuit Against U.S. Government

DOS Announces One-Month Extension for Immigrant Visa Medical Examinations

Closures

EOIR Operational Status & Standing Orders

EOIR Case Status

ICE Updates (Including ERO and Detention)

USCIS Updates

Consular Updates

NY Courts Updates

Guidance:

IJ Email Filings

BIA Email Filings

EOIR Standing Orders

EOIR Electronic Signature Guidance

EOIR Update Regarding EOIR Practices Related to the COVID-19 Outbreak

USCIS Announces Flexibility for Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Deny

Electronic database of COVID-19 related materials

TOP NEWS

OIRA Concludes Review on USCIS Final Rule Fee Rule

On 7/22/20, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) completed review of a final rule increasing many of USCIS’s filing fees. AILA anticipates that the Federal Register will post a copy of the rule for public inspection in the coming days, before publishing it officially. AILA Doc. No. 20072402

Immigration agency pushes back 13,000 furloughs until the end of August

CNN: Earlier this week, two Democratic senators are called on the agency to postpone its planned furloughs. The request came after revised estimates showed the agency will end the fiscal year with a surplus, not the originally projected deficit, according to the lawmakers.

Canada court rules ‘Safe Third Country’ pact with U.S. invalid, cites detention risk

Reuters: A Canadian court on Wednesday ruled invalid a bilateral pact that compels asylum seekers trying to enter Canada via the American border to first seek sanctuary in the United States, saying U.S. immigration detention violates their human rights.

Trump Sued Over Attempt To Omit Unauthorized Immigrants From A Key Census Count

NPR: Trump now faces a total of three new federal lawsuits that are joining ongoing legal challenges surrounding the 2020 census. A fourth lawsuit may be coming from California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office, which is planning to file a complaint against the Trump administration, Sarah Lovenheim, an adviser to Becerra, tells NPR.

Homeland Security Dept. Admits Making False Statements in Fight With N.Y.

NYT: The surprise admission came as the Trump administration unexpectedly reversed its decision to bar New Yorkers from programs that allow travelers to speed through airports.

In Unprecedented Move, AILA Opposes Trump’s Reelection

AILA: For the first time in our nearly 75 year history, AILA has decided to take action and urge our members to oppose the re-election of the President.

The Great Climate Migration

NYT Magazine: Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home.

After Increasing Its Caseload, Attorneys Say Boston’s Immigration Court Is In ‘Disarray’

WBUR: WBUR heard from more than a dozen immigration attorneys in New England who say they’ve had hearings advanced or postponed with no written notice from the federal government. In many cases, the attorneys only discovered the rescheduling by checking an online portal or repeatedly calling the court.

Trump Admin. Risks Penalties For Inaction On DACA

Law360: The Trump administration’s failure to fully restart the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, despite court orders telling it to do so, leaves the government on shaky legal ground and may put immigration officials at risk of court penalties.

Trump Cuts Legal Immigrants By Half And He’s Not Done Yet

Forbes: By next year, Donald Trump will have reduced legal immigration by 49% since becoming president. That will have significant repercussions for the nation’s economic growth, according to a new analysis. The cuts to legal immigration have come in several categories, and it appears the Trump administration is not finished restricting immigration.

A Rare Look Inside Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Draws Legal Threats

NYT: A new documentary peers inside the secretive world of immigration enforcement. The filmmakers faced demands to delete scenes and delay broadcast until after the election.

ICE Courthouse Arrest Bill Reaches Cuomo’s Desk

DocumentedNY: Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill that would bar arrests in and around courthouses without a judicial warrant.

Isolated In Their New Country, Refugees Are Sewing — And Innovating — Covid-19 Masks

Gothamist: About a dozen refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, are working from their new residences in New Jersey sewing masks to help protect against COVID-19. Shut out of the regular workforce because of the pandemic, they have produced more than 2,000 $10 organic fabric masks in a variety of styles. The masks are sold online through their resettlement agency’s Global Grace Marketplace, and at local farmers’ markets and fair trade stores across the country.

LITIGATION/CASELAW/RULES/MEMOS

D.C. Circuit Upholds Injunction Against Enforcement of Two of Government’s New Credible Fear Policies

The court affirmed in part the district court’s injunction against enforcement of the government’s new credible fear policies, finding that the “condoned-or-completely-helpless” standard and USCIS’s choice-of-law policy were arbitrary and capricious. (Grace, et al. v. Barr, et al., 7/17/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072134

Human Rights Organizations Charge The United States And Mexico With Systemic Human Rights Violations

CentroLegal: Today the USF Immigration & Deportation Defense Clinic and Migration Studies program in conjunction with 40 organizations who do work in Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the United States filed a request for a thematic hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

BIA Says §13-3407 of the Arizona Revised Statues is Divisible with Regard to the Specific Drug Involved in Violation

The BIA issued a decision stating that §13-3407 of the Arizona Revised Statues, which criminalizes possession of a dangerous drug, is divisible with regard to the specific “dangerous drug” involved in a violation of that statute. Matter of P-B-B-, 28 I&N Dec. 43 (BIA 2020) AILA Doc. No. 20072336

CA2 Equitable Estoppel and USCIS Misconduct

Justia: The court held that the government is equitably estopped from initiating rescission proceedings to reopen plaintiff’s adjustment of status application or placing her in removal proceedings. In this case, the undisputed facts show that USCIS failed to issue a rejection notice, despite controlling regulation and, consequently, plaintiff was not advised of any defect in her application, depriving her of the opportunity to correct the issue.

CA2 Finds Petitioners’ New York Firearms Convictions Were Not Removable Offenses

Applying the categorical approach, the court held that the BIA erred in finding the petitioners removable for having been convicted of a firearms offense under the INA, because their New York convictions criminalized conduct that the INA does not. (Jack v. Barr, 7/16/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072135

CA4 Says Convictions for Leaving an Accident and Using False Identification in Virginia Are Not CIMTs

The court held that the petitioner’s convictions for leaving an accident in violation of Va. Code Ann. §46.2–894 and for using false identification in violation of Va. Code Ann. §18.2–186.3(B1) were not categorically crimes involving moral turpitude (CIMTs). (Nunez-Vasquez v. Barr, 7/13/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072033

CA5 Rejects Petitioner’s Argument That BIA Acted Ultra Vires by Applying a Heightened Standard to His Waiver Application

The court found that the petitioner’s contention that the BIA should have weighed the equities more in his favor failed to establish that the agency had acted ultra vires by applying a heightened standard to his waiver of inadmissibility application. (Nastase v. Barr, 7/1/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072034

CA6 Finds Petitioner Failed to Show That She Would Likely Be Tortured in Bosnia

The court upheld the BIA’s denial of deferral of removal, finding that nothing in the record proved that any mistreatment the petitioner might face in Bosnia due to her family ties and criminal past was more likely than not to rise to the extreme level of torture. (Kilic v. Barr, 7/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072131

CA6 Finds BIA Failed to Consider Evidence of Russian Petitioner’s Threatened Prosecution in Assessing His Asylum Claim

Granting the petition for review, the court held that the BIA erred in disregarding evidence that the petitioner, who had engaged in anticorruption whistleblowing activities, would be criminally prosecuted for his political opinion if he was returned to Russia. (Skripkov v. Barr, 7/20/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072192

CA7 Upholds Denial of Asylum to Petitioner Who Feared Life as an Openly Gay Woman in Mexico

The court upheld the BIA’s denial of asylum to the Mexican petitioner, who sought relief based on threats of physical violence she had received because of her gay sexual orientation, concluding that substantial evidence supported the agency’s decision. (Escobedo Marquez v. Barr, 7/13/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072132

CA8 Finds It Lacks Jurisdiction to Consider Petitioner’s Arguments Concerning Changed Country Conditions in Somalia

The court held that it lacked jurisdiction to review the vast majority of the petitioner’s arguments concerning his motion to reopen his asylum and withholding of removal claims based on changed country conditions in Somalia. (Sharif v. Barr, 7/7/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072233

CA9 Upholds Injunction Barring DOJ from Withholding Byrne JAG Awards, But Limits Scope to California

The court affirmed the district court’s permanent injunction barring DOJ from withholding or denying Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants to plaintiffs, but limited the geographical reach of the injunction to California. (City and County of San Francisco v. Barr, et al., 7/13/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072235

CA9 Says Conviction for Petty Theft in California Is a CIMT

The court held that petitioner’s conviction for petty theft in California was a CIMT, and that the BIA did not abuse its discretion in denying his motion to reopen to seek asylum based on changed country conditions in the Philippines. (Silva v. Barr, 7/10/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072234

CA11 Finds USCIS’s Denial of Form I-129 Was Final Agency Action Where Intended Beneficiary’s Removal Proceedings Were Ongoing

The court held that the denial of the plaintiffs’ Form I-129 was final agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and that INA §242(b)(9) and (g) did not bar the plaintiffs’ challenge to the visa petition denial. (Canal A Media Holding, LLC, et al. v. USCIS, et al., 7/8/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072200

CA11 Says BIA’s Application of Stop-Time Rule to Petitioner’s 1995 Conviction Was Impermissibly Retroactive

The court held that the BIA erred in retroactively applying the stop-time rule to the petitioner’s pre-Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) conviction, and thus that he was eligible for cancellation of removal. (Rendon v. Att’y Gen., 7/14/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072103

Presidential Memorandum on Excluding Undocumented Immigrants from the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census

President Trump issued a memo on 7/21/20 noting that for the purpose of the reapportionment of representatives following the 2020 census, any immigrants who are not in a lawful immigration status under the INA will be excluded from the apportionment base. (85 FR 44679, 7/23/20) AILA Doc. No. 20072100

ICE Issues Follow-Up Guidance for Students for Fall 2020 School Term

ICE SEVP issued follow-up guidance stating that active F and M students, as well as schools, should abide by SEVP guidance originally issued in March 2020, which enables schools and students to engage in distance learning in excess of regulatory limits due to COVID-19. AILA Doc. No. 20072492

CIS Ombudsman Provides Update on Card Production Delays at USCIS

The CIS Ombudsman’s Office provided an update regarding card production delays at USCIS, which are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The Ombudsman’s Office is assisting individuals by sending weekly spreadsheets to USCIS to verify card requests are in line to be processed. AILA Doc. No. 20072232

USCIS Launches Updated Website

USCIS launched updated versions of all USCIS websites, including uscis.gov, myUSCIS, and Case Status Online. The updates include a new look to all USCIS websites, an “Explore My Options” feature to the forms section, enhanced on-page search and filter-by features, and more. AILA Doc. No. 20072133

RESOURCES

Practice Pointer: Obtaining I-551 Stamps for Form I-9 Verification

Resources Related to DOD’s Tightening of Rules and Discharges of Immigrants from the Military

Resources Related to Presidential Proclamations Temporarily Suspending Entry of Certain Immigrants and Nonimmigrants into the United States

Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Presidential Proclamation 10052 Temporarily Suspending Entry of Certain Nonimmigrants into the United States

Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Presidential Proclamation 10014 Temporarily Suspending Entry of Certain Immigrants into the United States

Summary of Immigrant Ineligibility for Federal Public Benefits

The 2019 DHS U Visa Law Enforcement Resource Guide

Acquisition & Derivation Quick Reference Charts

NYCBA Podcase: The Supreme Court’s Decision on DACA

EVENTS

Note: Check with organizers regarding cancellations/changes

7/28/20 Immigrant Youth vs. The State: Strategic Litigation in the Trump Era

7/29/20 ASISTA Caserounds: Your Questions on Survivor-based Petitions

7/30/20 How to File a Successful Travel Ban Waiver

8/3/20 From RFEs to Federal Court: Latest Strategies in Defending Survivors During the Time of COVID

8/5/20 Unraveling Aggravated Felonies and Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude

8/18/20 Strategies for I-601 Waivers in Adjustment of Status Cases

6/20/20 2020 AILA Virtual Immigration Court Conference

8/25/20 Emerging Public Charge Issues Related to COVID-19

8/26/20 Immigration Legal Services in Rural America

8/27/20 Crafting a Winning Particular Social Group for an Asylum Case

9/8/20-9/29/20 Webinar Series: All About Public Charge Inadmissibility (Fall)

9/11/20-10/2/20 Webinar Series: Dealing With Denials

9/14/20 Working with Domestic Violence Immigrant Survivors: The Intersection of Basic Family Law, Immigration, Benefits, and Housing Issues in California 2020

9/22/20 Defenses to Denaturalization

9/23/20-10/7/20 3-Part Webinar Series: Integrating Technology to Improve Your Immigration Legal Services

10/1/20 Representing Children in Immigration Matters 2020: Effective Advocacy and Best Practices

ImmProf

Monday, July 27, 2020

States Sue Trump Administration Over Counting of Undocumented Immigrants for Congressional Districting

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Epic Climate Migration

Now Streaming: A 3 Minute Hug

Saturday, July 25, 2020

WTF is Happening in Portland? (Part 2)

President Trump’s Transformation of the Immigration Courts

USCIS Delays Furloughs — At Least Through August

Friday, July 24, 2020

Your Playlist: Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP

August 10 Deadline to Submit Comments on New Proposed Asylum Regulation

ICE bars new foreign students from U.S. if classes are fully online

The Impact of the Coronavirus Crisis on Immigrants and Immigration: What to Know and How to Help

Report: In Children’s Best Interests: Charting A Child-Sensitive Approach to U.S. Immigration Policy

At the Movies: The Migrant Crisis: “Where Can We Live in Peace?

Census 2020: Controversy to Result in a Record Undercount?

#NoMuslimBanEver

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Poll Suggests Support for Shift from Immigration Enforcement to Progressive Policies

The Racial Roots of the Federal Administrative State, by Jonathan Weinberg

Netflix’s Immigration Nation

Canadian court deems U.S. unsafe for refugees in striking down joint agreement

UK’s Visa Plan for Hong Kong’s British National (Overseas) passport holders

Fight Over “Big, Beautiful Wall” Continues: ACLU, Sierra Club Asks Supreme Court to Halt Construction of the U.S./Mexico Border Wall

Trump’s “Paramilitary Units” Trained at the Border for the Assaults on Portland Moms

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Complaint Against U.S. and Mexico Filed with Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over Human Rights Violations at the Border

Immigration, Trump, and COVID-19

UnEqual Protection in Immigration Law by Carrie Rosenbaum

Will Delays in Naturalization Affect Election 2020?

Michigan State University College of Law Immigration Clinic Honored

Business groups sue Trump administration over immigration restrictions

Immigration Article of the Day: Symposium, Immigration Politics: Shifting Norms, Policies & Practices, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Stakeholder Town Hall Meeting Hosted by National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ)

Mother Jones: “Trump’s New Census Directive Is Almost Certainly Unconstitutional His memorandum would exclude undocumented immigrants when drawing congressional districts.”

Immigration Article of the Day: Immigrants’ Access to Federal District Court: The Narrowing of § 1252(b)(9) Post-Jennings by Adam Garnick

Monday, July 20, 2020

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

Item #3 under “Top News” on how a Canadian court has held that the U.S. is no longer a “safe” country for refugees is not surprising, but serves as a confirmation of how far America has fallen under Trump’s White Nationalist kakistocracy.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

07-28-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻KAKISTOCRACY HAS CONSEQUENCES: CLIMATE MIGRATION IS ONE OF THEM! — Trump’s Stupidity & Cruelty On Immigration Climate Science, & Disease Control Promises Horrible Global Human Disaster For Future Generations — Empowering & Enabling A Moron Is Always A Very Bad Idea! — No Idiotic Wall Or “Drill Baby Drill” Insanity Is Going To Prevent This Human Catastrophe We Are Inflicting On Those Who Follow!

🏴‍☠️

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.

From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

. . . .

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.

Reporting and translation were contributed by Pedro Pablo Solares in Guatemala and El Salvador, and Louisa Reynolds and Juan de Dios García Davish in Mexico.

Data for opening globe graphic from “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” by Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Marten Scheffer, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic by Bryan Christie Design/Joe Lertola.

Maps in Central America graphics sequence show total population shift under the SSP5 / RCP 8.5 and SSP3 / RCP 8.5 scenarios used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it is calculated on a 15-kilometer grid. A cube-root scale was used to compress the largest peaks.

Projections based on research by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Model graphics and additional data analysis by Matthew Conlen.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint and Shannon Lin.

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

Read the full article, with pictures and neat graphics, at the link!

“Safe Third Countries” indeed! It’s total fraud-enhanced immorality by the Trump regime, with our failed and failing “governing institutions” and the rest of the world fecklessly watching us be driven by the irrational hate and stupidity filled agenda of a madman and his toadies!

No wall will be high enough, no “American Gulag” cruel enough, no rhetoric racist enough, no laws hateful enough, no Supreme Court dehumanizing enough, no immorality and stupidity gross enough to stop mass human migration driven by climate change. “Desperate people do desperate things!”

This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

07-26-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮👎🏻ERROR SUPPLY: EOIR’s Anti-Asylum Bias, Failure To Apply Precedents, Earns Yet Another Rebuke From 3d Cir. — Blanco v. AG

Dan Kowalski reports for LexisNexis Immigration Community:

Immigration Law

Daniel M. Kowalski

25 Jul 2020

persecution

cat

Honduras

asylum

CA3 on Persecution: Blanco v. Atty. Gen.

Blanco v. Atty. Gen.

“Ricardo Javier Blanco, a citizen of Honduras, is a member of Honduras’s Liberty and Refoundation (“LIBRE”) Party, an anti-corruption political party that opposes the current Honduran president. After participating in six political marches, he was abducted by the Honduran police and beaten, on and off, for twelve hours. He was let go but received death threats over the next several months until he fled to the United States. He applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). The Immigration Judge (“IJ”) denied all relief, and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirmed. Blanco now petitions for review of the agency’s decision, arguing that the BIA and IJ erred in denying his asylum and withholding of removal claims on the basis that his treatment did not rise to the level of persecution. He also argues that it was improper to require him to corroborate his testimony to prove his CAT claim. Because the agency misapplied our precedent when determining whether Blanco had established past persecution, and because it did not follow the three-part inquiry we established in Abdulai v. Ashcroft, 239 F.3d 542, 554 (3d Cir. 2001), before requiring Blanco to corroborate his CAT claim testimony, we will grant the petition, vacate the BIA’s decision, and remand for further proceedings.”

[Hats off to patent lawyers Gary H. Levin and Aaron B. Rabinowitz!]

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

This should have been a “no brainer” asylum grant!

Instead, after two levels of disturbingly unprofessional administrative decision-making, now driven by racism and overt anti-immigrant bias, and one layer of “real court” review, the case is basically back to square one. No wonder this “Deadly Clown Court” ☠️🤡 is running a 1.4 million backlog, and counting!

Think we have the wrong folks on the “Immigration Bench?” You bet! Two smart patent lawyers from Baker Hostetler run legal circles around an IJ, the BIA, and OIL!

Interestingly, a significant number of students in my Georgetown Law Summer Semester Immigration Law & Policy (“ILP”) Class have been patent examiners and/or patent attorneys! They have all been amazing, both in class dialogue and on the final exam. I suspect it has something to do with analytical skills, meticulous research, and attention to detail — always biggies in asylum litigation!

That’s why we must end a “built to fail” system that preys on unrepresented or underrepresented asylum seekers in illegal, intentionally inhumane and coercive, detention settings, where adequate preparation and documentation are impossible and where judges, too often lacking in asylum expertise, humanity, and/or the time to carefully research and deliberate, are pressured to engage in “assembly line denials.”

And, thanks to the racial dehumanization embraced by the Supremes’ majority many refugees, disproportionately those with brown or black skins, are completely denied fair access to the asylum hearing system. They are simply treated by our highest Court like human garbage — sent back to torture or potential death in unsafe foreign countries without any due process at all. So, the systemic failure is not by any means limited to the “Immigration Star Chambers.”

A simple rule of judging that appears “over the heads” of the current Supremes majority: If it wouldn’t be due process for you or your family in a death penalty case, than it’s not due process for any “person.” Not “rocket science.” Just “Con Law 101” with doses of common sense and simple humanity thrown in. So why is it beyond the capabilities of our most powerful judges?

If there is any good news coming out of this mess, it’s that more talented litigators like Gary Levin and Aaron Rabinowitz from firms like Baker Hostetler are becoming involved in immigration and human rights litigation. They often run circles around Billy the Bigot’s ethically-challenged group of captive DOJ lawyers, who can no longer operate independently and ethically, even if they want to.

So, in a better future, after regime change, there are going to be lots of really great sources for better judges out there at all levels of the Federal Judiciary from the eventually independent Immigration Courts, to the U.S. District Courts and Magistrate Judges, to the Courts of Appeals, all the way to the Supremes.

At the latter, we need new and better Justices: Justices who understand immigration and human rights laws and the overriding human interests at stake, who will “lose” the White institutional racial bias and perverted right-wing ideologies that infect our current Court, and who are dedicated to making the vision of folks like Dr. King and Congressman John Lewis for “equal justice under law” and an end to dehumanization of persons of color a reality under our Constitution and within our system of justice!

There is no excuse for the current Supreme Court-enabled travesty unfolding in a biased, broken, and dysfunctional immigration system every day!

Due Process Forever!

This November, vote like our nation’s future existence depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

07-26-20

☠️👎🏻KAKISTOCRACY CLOSE-UP: When He Isn’t Busy Appointing Hate Groupers To Immigration “Judgeships,” The Lies Just Keep Flowing From Billy The Biogot’s Mouth — Laura Coates Reports On His Latest Whoppers For CNN!

Laura Coates says AG Bill Barr has some explaining to do

CNN Tonight

CNN’s Laura Coates argues that Attorney General Bill Barr has some explaining to do about a number of issues surrounding him and how he runs the US Department of Justice.

Source: CNN

Watch Laura’s report here:https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/25/laura-coates-case-attorney-general-bill-barr-has-explaining-to-do-ctn-vpx.cnn

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Lies to Federal Courts, cover-ups, brutality, First Amendment violations, pretexts, misrepresentations, racism, it all just in a few days’s work for Billy.

The worst Attorney General in modern U.S. history, toady to the worst President in U.S. history, just keeps getting worse!

PWS

07-25-20

BIA SHOOTS UNREPRESENTED RESPONDENT ON “DIVISIBILITY” ANALYSIS — MATTER OF P-B-B-, 28 I&N Dec. 43 (BIA 2020) — Like Shooting Fish 🐟 In A Barrel 🛢!

MATTER OF P-B-B-, 28 I&N Dec. 43 (BIA 2020)

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1296956/download

BIA HEADNOTE:

Section 13-3407 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, which criminalizes possession of a dangerous drug, is divisible with regard to the specific “dangerous drug” involved in a violation of that statute.

PANEL: Board Panel: GREER and O’CONNOR, Appellate Immigration Judges; SWANWICK, Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge.

OPINION: O’CONNOR, Appellate Immigration Judge

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You think this isn’t “Theater of The Absurd?” Let’s check out Fns 5 & 6 from the opinion:

5 We recognize that the Ninth Circuit, in whose jurisdiction this case arises, utilized a modified categorical inquiry in Alvarado, 759 F.3d at 1130–33, to discern whether an alien’s conviction under section 13-3407 involved a federally controlled substance and was therefore a predicate for removal under section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) of the Act. However, the Ninth Circuit did not expressly analyze the divisibility of section 13-3407 in that decision, nor did the court have the benefit of the Supreme Court’s articulation of divisibility in Mathis. Moreover, the circuit recently certified a similar issue to the Arizona Supreme Court. See Romero-Millan v. Barr, 958 F.3d 844, 849 (9th Cir. 2020) (asking the court to resolve whether Arizona statutes proscribing possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a narcotic drug under sections 13-3415 and 13-3408 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, respectively, are divisible with respect to the identity of the drug involved in each offense). For these reasons, we do not consider Alvarado to be persuasive authority regarding the divisibility of section 13-3407, which, in light of Romero-Millan, we view as an unsettled issue in the Ninth Circuit.

6 We acknowledge that State v. Prescott, No. 1 CA-CR 15-0188, 2016 WL 611656, at *2 (Ariz. Ct. App. Feb. 16, 2016), and State v. Castorina, No. 1 CA-CR 08-0816, 2010 WL 2450117, at *4 (Ariz. Ct. App. June 17, 2010), suggest that the identity of the “dangerous drug” involved in a violation of section 13-3407 is not an element of the statute. However, the United States District Court for the District of Arizona recently reviewed both cases, found that their reasoning was flawed, and concluded that Arizona case law fails to provide a “clear answer[] as to the divisibility” of section 13-3407. United States v. Sanchez-Murillo, No. CR-19-00795-PHX-SPL, 2019 WL 3858606, at *2–3 (D. Ariz. Aug. 16, 2019) (alteration in original) (citation omitted). Accordingly, we are not persuaded that Prescott or Castorina “definitively answer[s] whether the dangerous drug requirement of [section] 13-3407[] is divisible.” Gonzalez-Dominguez v. Sessions, 743 F. App’x 808, 811 (9th Cir. 2018).

So, how do you think that the unrepresented, almost certainly detained, respondent did on these issues, assuming that he even can read the BIA’s decision or have someone accurately read It to him?

The whole Immigration Court System has become a judicially and Congressionally-enabled “Due Process Farce” befitting a third word failed state that our country now resembles under the Trump kakistocracy.

NO, those who say our democratic institutions are “holding up” under Trump are living in a parallel universe!

PWS

07-24-20

🤮☠️⚰️👎THE UGLY ROLE OF RACISM IN THE AMERICAN “RULE OF LAW” FICTION — Administrative Law & The Administrative State Deeply Rooted In Racism — When You Hear Racists Like Trump, Miller, Barr, Wolf, & Cotton Refer To The “Rule Of Law” They Actually Mean The Rule Of White Supremacy!

🏴‍☠️

https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-racial-roots-of-the-federal-administrative-state-by-jonathan-weinberg/

The Racial Roots of the Federal Administrative State, by Jonathan Weinberg

July 20, 2020

Symposium on Racism in Administrative Law

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Federal administrative agencies have existed since this nation’s founding – the First Congress created the Patent Office, the Departments of War, Foreign Affairs, and Treasury, and more. But in the century that followed, Congress rarely tasked any of those agencies with adjudicating the status of individuals so as to hand out benefits and burdens.[1]  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to be sure, broke that pattern. It established a set of federal commissioners to make the most consequential determination of individual status possible – a ruling that a person was or was not an escaped slave, to be handed over to a purported owner or his agent. The procedure established for that determination bore no relation to anything we would think of as modern administrative law. Slaveholders provided testimony ex parte, and the alleged slaves could say nothing; commissioners received higher fees for ruling in slaveholders’ favor than for ruling against them.

The next important time the federal government set up an agency to adjudicate the legal status of individuals, its methods were different. Like the Fugitive Slave Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 enabled a system of racial oppression. But in contrast to the Fugitive Slave Act, which covered freewheeling lawlessness with the barest fig leaf of administrative legality, the Chinese Exclusion Act gave rise to a body of administrative law, and a body of administrative mechanisms and methods, that survived and lie at the root of today’s administrative state.[2]

The Chinese Exclusion Act reflected deep racial prejudice. U.S. Congress members and others attacked Chinese people as disease-ridden, dishonest, degraded, and incapable of self-government; “a race of people,” in the words of the California Supreme Court, “whom nature has marked as inferior.” Legislatures enacted legal attacks including state laws (many struck down in court) forbidding them from securing business licenses, working for corporations, fishing in public waters, owning real estate, working mining claims, or indeed entering the state. Mobs engaged in anti-Chinese mass violence, such as the burning of Seattle’s Chinatown in 1885.

The 1882 federal statute forbade the entry of most Chinese into the United States, and directed the deportation of any Chinese person who had entered in violation of its requirements. This performance of racism, though, required a new bureaucracy facing new challenges.  The U.S. had never before enacted a large-scale restriction on entry of free persons. It had no passport or visa infrastructure; the law would not require white noncitizens arriving on our shores to present passports for another 35 years. So the bureaucracy had to break new ground in enforcing the statute and the fine distinctions it drew.

How were officers to adjudicate whether a person seeking to enter the U.S. was a forbidden Chinese laborer or a permitted upper-class “merchant”? a forbidden new entrant or a permitted returning resident?[3] or, indeed, whether the person was a U.S. citizen, since lower courts had ruled as early as 1884 that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen with full rights to leave the U.S. and return?

For that matter, how were federal officers to know whether any ethnically Chinese person living in the U.S. had legal status? The system’s underlying assumptions, repeated over and over by policy-makers, were first, that Chinese people would routinely lie to gain immigration benefits; and second, that they were physically nearly indistinguishable from one another. What sort of bureaucracy could be put in place to make their status visible?

To answer those questions, Congress and the agency (first the Customs Bureau, then the Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department, then the same Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor) developed new techniques of bureaucratic investigation and control.  They provided for initial adjudications by line personnel with the possibility of internal administrative appeal. They provided for agency rulemaking and federal-state partnerships.  Their targets brought challenges in sometimes-sympathetic courts, leading to battles over the availability of judicial review, exhaustion, the “jurisdictional fact” doctrine, burdens of proof, standards of review, and the demands of due process. There were controversies over the scope of government’s enforcement discretion in light of resource constraints.

We can see, in other words, the seeds of nearly all of modern administrative law in the administration of Chinese exclusion. To bolster that system, Congress mandated that every Chinese migrant in the U.S. carry federally-issued identification papers with his or her photograph and identifying information. The Bureau put in place increasingly elaborate, searchable and cross-referenced, databases of information about Chinese individuals, to be used in connection with systematic and standardized interviews of would-be entrants and applicants for immigration benefits. For a time, it mandated that some Chinese individuals be subject to a system of precise body measurement developed for identifying criminals.

The Chinese exclusion regime worked badly, and was never very good at achieving its stated goals. It was effective in enforcing racial domination.  If you were an ethnically Chinese person in the U.S. in that time period, you lived subject to the possibility of arrest on suspicion of illegal presence. The exclusion laws enabled, on a broad scale, the humiliation, labelling, and arbitrary detention of individual Chinese.

But the system of Chinese exclusion was not just an exercise in domination and humiliation. It was conceived, rather, as embedding racial hierarchy within the rule of law. Its framers hoped to achieve accurate determinations, within a legal structure, regarding the racially-motivated categories into which individuals should be sorted. That legal structure incorporated the possibility of judicial review. It required a functioning system of federal administrative law. To that end, racial exclusion laid the groundwork for much of modern public administration and administrative law. That’s our heritage. Our current system grew from that soil.

Jon Weinberg is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School. Follow him on Twitter here.

[1]           One exception: the U.S. military pension system: Congress as early as 1776 legislated pensions for disabled Revolutionary War veterans. In 1818, it extended pension eligibility to anyone who had served in the Continental Army and needed public assistance. This required it to develop procedures for determining whether claimants were disabled, whether their injuries were incurred as part of their service, whether they were indigent, and more. Most of that work, though, was done by local judges sitting as benefits adjudicators.

[2]           Gabriel (Jack) Chin first made this point in his pioneering Regulating Race: Asian Exclusion and the Administrative State, 37 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1 (2002).

[3]           Initially, the law allowed Chinese people already resident in the U.S. to leave here and return; the government would close that door in 1888 (stranding many U.S. residents outside the country), and then partially reopen it in 1894.

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Obvious solutions:

All Administrative “Courts” are inherently unconstitutional and should be abolished forthwith;
An expanded Article I independent judiciary;
Demonstrated commitment to equal justice under law and rejecting racism in all forms as an absolute requirement for future Article III Judicial appointments.

PWS

07-24-20

🤮👎🏻☠️CHILD ABUSERS ON THE LOOSE — Rosenstein & Sessions Still At Large Even As Those Whose Lives Were Destroyed By Their Unconstitutional Actions Continue To Suffer Irreparable Harm — A Complete Institutional Meltdown Across All Three Branches Leaves U.S. As A Major Human Rights Abuser! — How Low Will We Go Before We Finally Say “No” To Racist Abuses! — “The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/23/child-separation-migrants-prosecutors-rod-rosenstein?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

From The Guardian:

Revealed: Rod Rosenstein advised there was no age limit on child separations

Former deputy attorney general’s 2018 conference call with US prosecutors in border states shocked some participants, Guardian learns

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington

Published:

06:00 Thursday, 23 July 2020

Follow Stephanie Kirchgaessner

Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, advised US attorneys implementing the 2018 zero-tolerance policy that there could be no blanket ban on prosecuting migrant parents who had children under the age of five, the Guardian has learned.

The comments on a conference call in May 2018 privately shocked some border state prosecutors because, in effect, it meant that no child was too young to be separated from its parents under the policy, which called for all migrants entering the US illegally to face criminal prosecution.

‘Suddenly they started gassing us’: Cuban migrants tell of shocking attack at Ice prison

The family separations that followed are seen today by experts as one of the gravest domestic human rights violations to have occurred under the Trump administration.

The policy was in place for six weeks and resulted in the separation of 2,814 children from their parents and guardians, about 105 of whom were under the age of five and 1,033 under 10.

Rosenstein issued his guidance to US attorneys from states on the Mexican border about two weeks after the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued an order that there would be an “escalated effort” to prosecute all illegal entries into the US along the southern border, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity.

Previously, under the Obama administration, most families who crossed the border illegally were detained together if they were arrested or were released pending an immigration trial, but were only separated if authorities deemed children to be in danger.

There were questions among the border state US attorneys at that time about how the zero-tolerance policy would be implemented and the conference call with Rosenstein sought to address those issues.

On the call, one US attorney, John Bash of the western district of Texas, said he had declined to prosecute several cases that had been referred to him by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that involved children under the age of five.

In response, sources familiar with the matter said Rosenstein told the US attorneys that they could not decline to prosecute cases based on the age of the children who would be separated from their parents because there was “no categorical exemption” under the order.

During the call, Rosenstein was also asked whether prosecutors could decline to prosecute parents with children who only spoke indigenous languages, meaning they were unable to communicate in English or Spanish, or those whose children had intellectual disabilities. Rosenstein said that prosecutors could opt to decline to prosecute individuals with children under those two circumstances on a case-by-case basis, sources said.

The comments were met with shock by some of the US attorneys, sources said, because there was concern that children who were under the age of five would not know their own names or their parents’ names and that it posed a risk of children potentially getting lost in the system.

. . . .

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

What does this say about firms like King & Spaulding who offer employment and “cover” to human rights abusers like Rosenstein? Why is serving a racist, neo-Nazi, would-be authoritarian regime considered “OK” by “big law” and other supposedly “legitimate” employers? Where’s the outrage?

If human lives and human dignity matter, why is Rosenstein on anyone’s payroll? Why is he still licensed to practice law?

On the bright side: Unapologetic White Nationalist racist “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions is finally off the public dole, hopefully for good.

PWS

07-23-20

PWS

07-23-20

👍IT’S A START, BUT STILL A LONG, LONG WAY TO GO: House-Passed Bill To Begin Removing The Stain Of Trump’s White Nationalism Is Also A Long-Overdue Exposure & Put Down Of Roberts’ Court’s Abject Failure To Stand For Equal Justice For All & Against Trump’s Overtly Unconstitutional Bigotry & “Dred Scottificaton” Of The Other!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/23/house-votes-remove-moral-stain-trumps-immigration-policies/

Jason Rezaian writes in WashPost:

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged sweeping changes to immigration policy. As president, Trump has succeeded — despite a broad public outcry and many legal roadblocks — in implementing many of his proposed restrictions through a series of executive orders.

Now Congress is pushing back. On Wednesday the House passed the No Ban Act, legislation introduced last year by Sen Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). The act aims to repeal Trump’s ban on arrivals from majority-Muslim countries and prevent future presidents from issuing discriminatory bans on foreign nationals or followers of specific religions.

“Throughout the history of the U.S., we’ve had a series of tragic nativist chapters in our history,” Coons told me this week. “Did I think we’d be facing another one? No. But when Donald Trump announced his candidacy, I remember thinking I am so glad I live in a country where a man like this couldn’t be president. I was wrong, and we’ve seen how damaging that has been.”

In recent months, the novel coronavirus pandemic, the associated economic downturn, and protests over police killings of African Americans have diverted public attention from Trump’s immigration policies. But they must not be forgotten.

Trump’s plans for an immigration ban have inspired widespread outrage. Some dismissed Trump’s words as empty threats, noting that they were probably unconstitutional. But Trump pressed ahead as soon as he took office.

The first iteration of what became known as the Muslim ban halted entry into the United States of citizens from seven countries, five of which are majority-Muslim.

Since then we’ve watched as immigration officials have separated kids from their parents in detention centers, with at least one of them dying in custody. The images of children in cages provoked an intense backlash and could end up costing Trump at the polls — to the extent that his policies have led his own voters, especially college-educated white Republican women, to question his xenophobic and racist policies.

. . . .

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Read the rest of Jason’s op-ed at the above link.

Somewhat like Sen. Coons, I originally thought that there would be some institutional integrity and moral courage even among the more conservative members of our Judiciary, particularly among the Supremes. After all, there have been at least a few times in our history when judges across the ideological and political spectrum have stood together against the evils of racism, religious bigotry, and hate.

It’s not like Trump, Miller, Bannon, Sessions, Ross, and their hate-mongering cronies were ever particularly subtle about their invidious intent (although, to be fair, I was at the very beginning willing to give Sessions “the benefit of the doubt,” until I saw that his assurances to the Senate were lies under oath in the face of the deep moral corruption and bigotry that infected his whole being).

Boy was I wrong! Right from the git go, even with the advantage of clear evidence of invidious intent, ridiculously transparent and overtly dishonest “pretexts,” (some publicly contradicted by Trump in mid-stream) and the vast majority of lower Federal Court Judges pointing the way with cogent opinions standing up to the Trump charade and endless parade of hate, the Supremes majority tanked. Where the rights of “the other” particularly Muslims and persons color are concerned, they fully embraced Trump’s unconstitutional and tyrannical program of hate and bias thinly disguised as legitimate exercises of Executive Power. They became willing “Dred Scottifiers!”

Perhaps just as seriously, the Supremes’ “normalized” demonstrable lies, false narratives, and dishonesty as attributes that were to be expected and tolerated from our Chief Executive. What a crock! Ordinary persons are held to basic standards of honesty and candor when dealing with the Government and with Government tribunals. But the President is above it all. While, later on, the Supremes fecklessly claimed that “nobody is above the law,” their actions have shown a disturbing and intellectually dishonest unwillingness to require Trump and his regime to comply with the basics of the rule of law and to act with even a minimal level of candor and honesty.

We can’t vote the “JR Five” out of their lifetime sinecures. But, our democracy does enable us to take the actions necessary to insure that folks like the “JR Five” and other Federal Judges who embrace racism, bigotry, and political corruption over the “equal justice and real due process for all persons” required by our Constitution are not selected to serve in the future in positions requiring legal experiences and moral qualifications that they so obviously lack.

Better judges for a better America. This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

07-23-20

Due Process Forever!

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This November, vote like your life and the future of our nation depend on it! Because they do! We can’t undo the past! But, we can make Trump part of that past and change our future for the better!

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But it does demonstrate the absolute necessity for the majority of us who want to save our nation to get out the vote to remove Trump and the GOP at every level 🧹 in November.

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This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

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This November, vote like our nation’s future existence depends on it! Because it does!

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Better judges for a better America. This November, vote like the future of humanity depends on it. Because it does!

Due Process Forever!

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