"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Description Immigrants & Refugees Welcome – Banner on Facade – Pilsen – Chicago – Illinois – USA Date Taken on 18 February 2017, 10:55 Source Immigrants & Refugees Welcome – Banner on Facade – Pilsen – Chicago – Illinois – USA Author Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada Creative Commons License
Migrants are cut from the same cloth as the rest of us
One of the words I have not heard to describe migrants — but is a more accurate than the negative portrayals — is “families.”
By Letters to the Editor Nov 30, 2023, 5:11pm EST
With the holidays upon us, there will undoubtedly be plenty of work parties, shopping sprees with kids in tow and the ubiquitous family gatherings. The coming months will also challenge us to wear layers of clothes and wrap ourselves and our loved ones in blanket-like coats. I am fortunate to have plenty of gloves, scarves, coats and boots.
Others are less fortunate. The unfortunate ones include the “new arrivals,” most of whom have never experienced a Chicago winter. Since the migrants’ arrival, critics have taken to the airwaves offering their comments about the tents, buses, use of police stations, encroachment on city streets, and, what they believe is the destruction of the city’s social and economic fabric. Descriptions of migrants are also disconcerting: liars, troublemakers, thieves, wayward parents using their kids to manipulate the immigration system and outsiders trying to live off the municipal dough.
One of the words I have not heard but is a more accurate depiction of the new arrivals is families. The buses full of people reflect a multi-generational exit from countries steeped in turmoil and unrest: infants, children, parents, or other caretakers. Describing those who arrive as families could lead us to consider them fully human, more like us. Instead, we use words that create a chasm that places the migrants at an arm’s distance from us, society and our city.
Throughout the next month, love, joy, harmony and peace will be words we will likely hear daily in songs, written in holiday cards and celebrated in plays and movies that bring friends and families together. Some will celebrate the season by remembering the birth of a unique child. Warned to flee to ensure the safety of his wife and newborn child, the family patriarch left for other lands. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if we could see the face of this child in the faces of the children we see coming here? Perhaps we can take the first step by using words that remove the stigma and distance between us and the “new arrivals.” The words? Families, of course.
Esther Nieves, Wicker Park
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Yup, contrary to the absolute, hateful, BS from Trump, Johnson, and the rest of the MAGA right, and the disgraceful indifference of too many Dems, most migrants want: 1) security, 2) opportunity, and 3) a better future, particularly for family. That’s what I found over more than 13 years on the trial bench at the Immigration Court. Basically, what all of us want from life!
Migrants deserve fair, humane, dignified treatment from the U.S. and our legal system, regardless of whether they ultimately are able to meet the legal criteria to remain!
Families arriving at the border today likely to find those in power parrot the words of Christ while ignoring his teachings about mercy, humility, humanity. IMAGE: SojournersTodd Miller Border Correspondent Border Chronicle PHOTO: Coder Chron
I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.
I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.
I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?
In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.
At the height of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph walked for days, fleeing a Caesar Augustus’s occupying force—a story that resonates with more than 184 million people on the move today. I am reminded of my dear friend Irene Morales, a nun with the Madres of the Eucaristia, who I worked with two decades ago and who told me day after day—as we traveled through northern Mexico and the U.S. borderlands—that she saw Christ in the faces of people on the move. In the early 2000s, thousands of people were arriving to Altar, Sonora, to cross through the Arizona deserts. The people I talked to and interviewed were mostly from southern Mexico, and in many cases they were migrating because they could no longer make ends meet. From about 2002 to 2005, I talked to hundreds of people, and often it was parents thinking about their children, parents who talked about skipping meals for their children, wanting their children to get an education, or sometimes it was children on the move for a sick parent. So often it was a story of sacrifice at a time in a post-9/11 era characterized by a massive ramp-up on the border, with terrorism and migration blurring into each other at a policy level. “El rostro de Cristo,” Irene told me.
Stanton Street Bridge at sunset with a long line of people crossing from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso as is typical during the holidays. (Photo credit: Todd Miller)
As I stand on the bridge in Juárez, where everything seems basically the same, I know a lot has happened over the last year, and we have covered much of it at The Border Chronicle. I, for one, have been following that contaminated river and have gone into Chihuahua to report on border water struggles for a forthcoming book, and I have shared some photo essays here. Melissa also wrote about Chihuahua earlier this year for The New Yorker, focusing on the epidemic of journalists assassinated in Mexico, which she summarized in The Border Chronicle. I feel so fortunate to work alongside Melissa, who not only wrote (and talked to experts) about the innards of this massive border fortification, whether it be the surge of wall building, deadly vehicle chases, Operation Lone Star, or Florida cops patrolling the border—and the right-wing rhetoric that so often propels it (not to mention the Elon Musk circus)—but also about people in border communities for inspiration and solutions such as border artists, a brilliant sidewalk school, or a doctor who spends his time treating border crossers (Doctor Brian Elmore also penned an op-ed for us). And that’s just a taste. This year, I had the opportunity to go to Yale and debate border enforcement, a humbling and educational experience, to say the least. As I wrote about my losing effort, some of the dynamics we constantly struggle with in this sort of border journalism were clearly revealed.
Much has changed over the last year, but—from what I can tell suspended between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—much has remained the same. The border policy is the same, there is more money in the budgets, there is more money in as-of-yet-unpassed supplemental funding bills, there are more and more contracts for private industry. And now we have an election year. And, as we all know, during an election year, the border is a politician’s sacrificial lamb. So be prepared for a good dose of border theater, and we’ll be here with our coverage, commentary, interviews, and podcasts. The last thing I want to do is stand on that bridge a year from now and watch people wade through the trickling Rio Grande to “pedir posada” at a large gate at an even more fortified border wall in El Paso. That is, however, the likely outcome of 2024, and we will cover all of it. But we will also find the spaces where people are trying to make change, we will listen to the border communities, and we will document the humanitarian efforts. And trust me you, we will be looking in the places where there is generosity toward the stranger.
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40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25:40
It’s very straightforward. Yet, somewhere between the Nativity and MAGAMike Johnson, the message got lost! The real “War on Christmas” and Judeo-Christian values is being conducted by those in powerful positions who disingenuously press for deadly, illegal, inhumane, dehumanizing treatment of forced migrants!
I read somewhere that God’s eternal promise of Christmas is a closeness with humanity, forgiveness of sins and a radical, unconditional love for all. We ain’t there yet.
Also lost in the rush to cruelty and “deterrence:” Individuals have a legal right to apply for asylum at the U.S. border regardless of whether they arrive at a port of entry. See, INA, section 208.
The so-called “illegal” crossings are driven largely by the USG’s failure to implement timely and fair screening and processing at ports of entry. Even so, many individuals cross nearby the ports and wait patiently, in an orderly manner, outdoors, often in harsh conditions, to be “processed” by CBP.
This is hardly a “law enforcement crisis.” It’s a humanitarian crisis that, despite warnings and plenty of constructive ideas from experts, Congress and the Executive have jointly failed to address in a reasonable and responsible manner.
How unserious are Congress and the Administration about addressing the situation at the border in a responsible manner? The increasing flow of asylum seekers is predictable, considering that it is part of a worsening worldwide refugee flow.
So one logical, obvious thing to do, rather than building walls, prisons, and installing barbed wire, would be to hire and “surge” more USCIS Asylum Officers to the Southern Border to screen asylum seekers for credible fear, perhaps even expanding operations to foreign territory.
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden is taking a more active role in Senate negotiations about changes to the immigration system that Republicans are demanding in exchange for providing money to Ukraine in its fight against Russia and Israel for the war with Hamas.
The Democratic president has said he is willing to make “significant compromises on the border” as Republicans block the wartime aid in Congress. The White House is expected to get more involved in talks this week as the impasse over changes to border policy has deepened and the money remaining for Ukraine has dwindled.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who is leading the negotiations, pointed to the surge of people entering the U.S. from Mexico and said “it is literally spiraling out of control.”
But many immigration advocates, including some Democrats, say some of the changes being proposed would gut protections for people who desperately need help and would not really ease the chaos at the border.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democratic bargainer, said the White House would take a more active role in the talks. But he also panned Republican policy demands so far as “unreasonable.”
. . . .
Critics say the problem is that most people do not end up getting asylum when their case finally makes it to immigration court. But they say migrants know that if they claim asylum, they essentially will be allowed to stay in America for years.
“People aren’t necessarily coming to apply for asylum as much to access that asylum adjudication process,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration court judge and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration in the U.S.
Some of what lawmakers are discussing would raise the bar that migrants need to meet during that initial credible fear interview. Those who do not meet it would be sent home.
But Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration court judge who blogs about immigration court issues, said the credible fear interview was never intended to be so tough. Migrants are doing the interview soon after arriving at the border from an often arduous and traumatizing journey, he said. Schmidt said the interview is more of an “initial screening” to weed out those with frivolous asylum claims.
Schmidt also questioned the argument that most migrants fail their final asylum screening. He said some immigration judges apply overly restrictive standards and that the system is so backlogged that it is hard to know exactly what the most recent and reliable statistics are.
. . . .
WHAT MIGHT THESE CHANGES DO?
Much of the disagreement over these proposed changes comes down to whether people think deterrence works.
Arthur, the former immigration court judge, thinks it does. He said changes to the credible fear asylum standards and restrictions on the use of humanitarian parole would be a “game changer.” He said it would be a “costly endeavor” as the government would have to detain and deport many more migrants than today. But, he argued, eventually the numbers of people arriving would drop.
But others, like Schmidt, the retired immigration court judge, say migrants are so desperate, they will come anyway and make dangerous journeys to evade Border Patrol.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” he said.
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Ignoring both the powerful forces that drive human migration and folks who actually work with migrants at the border and in foreign countries seems like a totally insane way to “debate policy.” But, then, whoever said this “nativist-driven debate” on enhanced cruelty, dismantling the rule of law, and de-humanization is rational?
You can read Rebecca’s full article, with an “accessible” explanation of what’s at stake and what’s being proposed at the above link.
The settlement involves a 2018 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to block the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which called for separating parents from their children to prosecute the adults for crossing the border illegally. Officials sent parents to detention centers and children to shelters, without a plan to reunite them, under the policy. Some were apart for months, some for years.
“It does represent, in my view, one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw said before he approved the settlement in a hearing that recalled the shock and disbelief surrounding the policy in 2018.
Under the settlement approved Friday, crossing the border illegally will no longer be a reason to separate a family, at least for the next eight years, which is how long that provision will last, lawyers said. The Justice Department has said the government will not prosecute parents for crossing the border without permission, a misdemeanor, or for the felony crime of reentering after being deported.
The settlement also offers aid to once-separated families so that they may apply to stay in the United States permanently. Those who were deported may apply to come back. Their immigration records will be cleared, giving them a fresh start on applying for humanitarian protection such as asylum.
Once they are in the United States, formerly separated families may apply for three-year work permits, six months of housing assistance and one year of medical care, according to the settlement. The families also are eligible for three years of counseling under the settlement.
Sabraw, a Republican nominee, declared the separations unlawful and ordered the families reunited in June 2018, after President Donald Trump halted the policy amid widespread condemnation.
Trump’s zero-tolerance policy ran from May to June 2018. Later, investigations determined that officials separated migrant families throughout Trump’s four-year term, which ended in January 2021.
Biden administration officials said the Trump administration separated more than 4,000 children from their parents, though past estimates have put that figure as high as 5,500. Lawyers for the ACLU, which represented the migrant families in court, estimated that as many as 1,000 children may still be separated from their parents. Advocates are trying to track them down.
The ACLU has called the case the most significant settlement in the organization’s 103-year history.
“This settlement brings much needed help to these brutalized children but there remains significant work to ensure that every family is now reunited and to monitor that no future administration tries to circumvent the agreement and reenact the same horrific policy,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer and the lead counsel in the case, said in a statement.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Maria’s report at the link!
The human and fiscal costs of this illegal policy, developed and implemented by GOP White Nationalist child abusers, is beyond comprehension! Some of the damage can never be repaired!
Notably, there has never been any accountability for the architects of this clearly unconstitutional abuse and the Government attorneys who failed to do “due diligence” and misrepresented the facts surrounding child separation in Federal Court. The truth was only brought out when the ACLU was forced to do the DOJ’s job for it! It’s also curious how a prohibition on clearly unconstitutional conduct could have only an “eight year shelf life.”
But, there are even worse developments on the horizon — immoral, illegal, and unconscionable policies under consideration that will dwarf even this horrible episode in terms of preventable deaths, disregard for humanity, dereliction of duty, moral cowardice, and degradation of our nation!
Why are Dems ignoring their “core supporters” and negotiating with this notorious human rights abuser! Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com
So why are Dem legislators and the Administration “negotiating” even more outrageous legal violations, moral transgressions, and human rights abuses with the GOP? Talk about “shameful!” If Dems don’t get some backbone and live up to their professed values and the law, “shameful” will have a whole new meaning!
Here’s a link to tell your Congressional representatives to “just say no” to the truly repulsive proposals to bully and inflict pointless harm on the most vulnerable and to arrogantly violate human rights on a massive scale being pushed by theGOP and some so-called Dems.https://lnkd.in/gp2RteRr.
Trading away human rights that are not yours to dispose of for unrelated foreign military aid is beyond unconscionable! 🤮
U.S. immigration law and policy, including border security and asylum, have nothing to do with Ukraine, NATO, Russia and Putin. Right?
Wrong, if you are a Republican in Congress. Here, let Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) explain: “I think … Schumer will realize we’re serious … and then the discussions will begin in earnest.”
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If you are still having trouble with the concept, I’ll translate for you: “Yes, we understand and agree that Russia cannot be allowed to take over Ukraine, and we will fund aid to Ukraine, but in exchange, we insist on fundamental changes to our immigration laws to make sure no more Brown people come to America, starting right effing now.” (“Brown,” in this context, means anyone who is poor, Latin American, Asian, African, non-Anglophone…you get the idea.)
How will this play out in the next few weeks? I see three options: 1) Biden and the Dems cave, so the 1980 Refugee Act is scrapped, Dreamers get deported, the southern border is further militarized, and the economy tanks because a good chunk of the workforce is afraid to come to work; or 2) the GOP does a Tuberville and caves; or 3) the Unknown Unknown.
Stay tuned…
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Thanks for telling it like it is, Dan! There is no validity to the GOP’s attempt to punish asylum seekers by unconscionably returning them to danger and death with no process.
The cruelty and threat to life from forcing desperate seekers to wait in dangerous conditions in Mexico, pushing them to attempt entry in ever more deadly locations along the border, detaining them in inhumane substandard prisons in the U.S., and or returning them without meaningful screening by qualified independent decision-makers is overwhelming. That Congress, the Administration, and much of the “mainstream media” choose to ignore, and often intentionally misrepresent, truth and reality about the horrible human and fiscal wastefulness of “border deterrence” doesn’t change these facts!
The Administration’s three year failure to build a functional, robust asylum system at the border with humane reception centers, access to legal assistance, a rational resettlement system, and sweeping, readily achievable, administrative reforms and leadership changes at EOIR and the Asylum Office (as laid out by experts, whose views were dismissed) is also inexcusable.
Yet, the media misrepresents this farce as a “debate.” It’s a false “debate” in which neither disingenuous “side” speaks for the endangered humans whose rights and lives they are bargaining away to mask their own failures and immorality.
Jennifer Habercorn and Burgess Everett report for Politico:
A growing number of Senate Democrats appear open to making it harder for migrants to seek asylum in order to secure Republican support for aiding Ukraine and Israel.
They are motivated not just by concern for America’s embattled allies. They also believe changes are needed to help a migration crisis that is growing more dire and to potentially dull the political sting of border politics in battleground states before the 2024 elections.
“Look, I think the border needs some attention. I am one that thinks it doesn’t hurt,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats in next year’s midterm election.
Tester said he’s eager to see if a bipartisan group of negotiators can come up with an agreement on a policy issue as elusive as immigration. While he refused to commit to supporting a deal until he sees its details, he didn’t rule out backing stronger border requirements. And he’s not alone.
“I am certainly okay with [border policy] being a part of a national security supplemental,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), another Democrat facing reelection next year. On changes to asylum policy, she said: “I would like to see us make some bipartisan progress, which has eluded us for years. The system’s broken.”
. . . .
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Professor Karen Musalo Director, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, Hastings Law
Meanwhile, the GOP’s proposal to essentially end asylum — going well beyond the unfair and unduly restrictive policies already imposed by the Administration — has been condemned in the strongest possible terms by human rights and immigration experts. For example, here’s what Professor Karen Musalo, Founder & Director of the Center For Gender & Refugee Studies at Hastings Law, and an internationally-renowned human rights expert, said yesterday:
CGRS Urges Senators to Reject GOP Push to End Asylum
Nov 28, 2023
As negotiations over President Biden’s supplemental funding request continue, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) urges lawmakers to reject Republican-led proposals that would upend the U.S. asylum system and eviscerate life-saving protections for people fleeing persecution and torture. If enacted, they would erase our longstanding tradition of welcoming asylum seekers and lead to the wrongful return of refugees to countries where they face persecution or torture, in violation of international law.
“These radical proposals amount to a complete abandonment of the U.S. government’s legal and moral obligations to extend protection to refugees fleeing persecution,” Karen Musalo, Director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS), said today. “In practice, they would result in the persecution, torture, and deaths of families, children, and adults seeking safe haven at our nation’s doorstep. It is utterly shameful that Republican lawmakers are attempting to exploit the budget negotiations process to advance an extremist, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee agenda. The lives of people seeking asylum are not political bargaining chips. We urge lawmakers to join Senator Padilla and other congressional leaders in rejecting these cynical proposals.”
Read the complete Politico article at the first link above.
To me, expressions like “attention” and “bipartisan progress” used by Dem politicos in connection with the Southern border are “code words” for appeasing the GOP nativist right by agreeing to “more border militarization” and “abrogation of the human rights of refugees and asylees!”
I see little “attention” or “bipartisan progress” being discussed on measures that, unlike the GOP “end of asylum/uber enforcement” proposals, would actually address the humanitarian situation on the border (and elsewhere) in a constructive and positive manner:
More, better trained, expert Immigration Judges and Asylum Officers;
Organized resettlement assistance and expedited work authorization for asylum applicants;
Legal assistance for asylum seekers;
An independent Article I Immigration Court;
Revision of the refugee definition to more clearly cover forms of gender-based persecution;
Increased DHS funding for sophisticated undercover and anti-smuggling operations targeting smugglers and cartels;
Adjustment of status for long-term TPS holders.
These are the types effective measures that have long been recommended by experts, yet widely ignored or even directly contravened by those in power. The negative results of “enforcement only” and “extreme cruelty” at the border are obvious in today’s continuing humanitarian situation.
The idea that a forced migration emergency will be “solved” by more draconian enforcement, eradication of human rights, and elimination of due process, as touted by GOP nativists, is a preposterous! Yet, many Dems seem ready, even anxious, to throw asylum applicants and their advocates under the bus — once again!
Unhappily, Congress and the Biden Administration have paid scant attention to the views of experts and those actually involved in relieving the plight of asylum seekers at the border. The politicos continue to dehumanize and demean forced migrants while stubbornly treating a human rights emergency as a “law enforcement crisis” that can be solved with more cruelty and repression.
As experts like Karen Musalo continue to point out, experience shows us that more deterrence and harshness will only make things worse, squandering resources and attention that could more effectively be used to address and alleviate unnecessary human suffering and finally making our refugee and asylum systems function in a fair and efficient manner.
Yet, politicos are more interested in grandstanding, “victim shaming,” and finger pointing than in achieving success and harnessing the positive potential of forced migration for countries like ours fortunate enough to be “receivers” rather than “senders!”
Ending asylum will NOT stop refugees from coming — at least in the long run. Every Administration manipulates or misrepresents statistics to show immediate “deterrent” effect from their latest restrictionist gimmicks (some ruled illegal by Federal Courts). But such “bogus successes” are never durable!
As the current situation shows, decades of failed deterrence merely creates new flows, in different places, piles up more dead migrant bodies, and surrenders the control of border policies to smugglers and cartels. That, in turn, fuels calls by restrictionists and their enablers for harsher, crueler, and ever more expensive (and profitable to some) sanctions imposed on some of the world’s most vulnerable humans.
If asylum ends, America will find itself with a larger, less controllable reality of a growing underground population of extralegal migrants. Contrary to nativist alarmism, this population has remained largely stable recently.
But, that will change as the legal asylum system contracts. Right now, most asylum seekers either apply at ports of entry (often undergoing unreasonable and dangerous waits and struggling with the dysfunctional “CBP One App”) or voluntarily surrender to CBP shortly after entering between ports. The GOP and Dem “go alongs” are determined to change that so that those seeking refuge will have no choice but to be smuggled into the interior where they can become lost in the general population.
This, in turn, will fuel demands by GOP White Nationalists and their Dem enablers for even more expensive and ultimately ineffective border militarization. It will also turn DHS into an internal security police.
Unable to “ferret out” and remove the underground population — because, in fact, they look, act, and are in many cases indistinguishable from native-born Americans and often perform essential services — they will concentrate on harassing and spreading fear among minority populations in America. Also, Trump has also promised that if re-elected, he will abuse his Executive authority to punish his critics and political opponents. Further empowerment of DHS in the interior would be handy in this respect.
Underground populations are also more susceptible to exploitation — another unstated objective of GOP restrictionist policies. What’s better for employers than a disenfranchised workforce who can be fired and turned over to DHS if they demand fair wages or better treatment?
Senate Dems appear to be on the verge of doing precisely what Karen and other experts have repeatedly warned against: using the lives and rights of asylum seekers as a “political bargaining chip” to appease the GOP right and secure military funding for Israel and Ukraine. It’s exactly what happens when experts and those with “on the ground” experience dealing with forced migrants are “locked out of the room” where decisions are made!
While White Nationalist neo-fascists like Stephen Miller and his cronies have remained “at the heart” of GOP policy making on eradicating human rights and punishing asylum seekers, lifetime experts on human rights and asylum find themselves reduced to the role of “outside critics” and “kibitzers” as the Dem Administration and Senate Dems bumble along on the border and human rights. That’s a shame that will certainly diminish and threaten the future of American democracy! And, it’s hard to see how appeasing the GOP restrictionist right will help Dems in 2024!
Three principles are at the core of Andy’s article:
. . . .
International Obligations and Refugee Protection
Key international obligations regarding refugees also play a crucial role in shaping the discourse. The United States, as a signatory to the 1967 Protocol to the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, is bound by several obligations, including:
Non-refoulement: Prohibiting the return of refugees to countries where they would face persecution or harm based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
Access to asylum procedures: Ensuring a fair and accessible process for individuals to seek asylum and present their claims for protection.
Non-discrimination: Preventing discrimination against refugees based on factors such as nationality or place of entry.
. . . .
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Read the complete article at the link!
I think that the U.S. is in violation of all three of these essential, mandatory legal obligations.
Gimmicks like Title 42, “Remain in Mexico,” coercive detention, “CBP One,” and artificial roadblocks for those applying between ports of entry have violated and continue to violate our “non-refoulment” obligation.
These provisions, along with conducting interviews in detention settings, improperly limiting access to representation, and “expedited dockets” to limit the ability to prepare and present claims are examples of violations of our obligation to provide “fair access” to our asylum system.
And, by intentionally designing our system to discourage and deny applicants of color from the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Muslim nations, and imposing illegal higher burdens on those not applying at ports of entry, we clearly are violating the “non-discrimination” requirement.
The GOP answer is simply to double down on the violations and abrogate our domestic and international obligations. While the Biden Administration at least nominally acknowledges these obligations, their actions and policies, some actually carried over or borrowed from the Trump Administration, blatantly undermine these principles of protection.
Indeed, the whole “movement” by both parties to use the refugee/asylum system for “rejection and deterrence” rather than “enhanced protection” is a “bipartisan legal and moral travesty!”
What if our “number one priority” was what it should be: Establish a world-class, expert, efficient, robust, generous system that is driven by, and true to, these three governing obligations?
Only after achieving that can we discuss and achieve “border security” in a realistic and effective manner! And, it couldn’t possibly be more expensive, in both fiscal terms and human lives cost, than decades of costly failed deterrence gimmicks and schemes! It’s a case of badly screwed up priorities aggravated by political cowardice!
Institutionalized cruelty, deterrence, and unlawful behavior by our Government has failed to create order at the border and has demonstrably destroyed or diminished human lives. Why not give adherence to laws and to humanitarian values and principles a chance?🤯
We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but it won’t stop human migration!
Katharina Obser Director of Migrants Rights and Justice Women’s Refugee Commission PHOTO: Women’s Refugee Commission website
Close to San Diego, California, hundreds of people seeking asylum are being held in deplorable conditions. So-called open-air detention sites are desolate areas in the US at or close to the US-Mexico border, where men, women, and children seeking protection wait outside, exposed to the elements. Nonprofit organizations and volunteers do their best to provide desperately needed water, meals, snacks, first aid, diapers, clothing, and blankets.
Last month, the Women’s Refugee Commission traveled to San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, to assess the conditions that people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border face. Our short report, released today, is heartbreaking. We heard about families being separated. About people scared to go to hospital for treatment in case they aren’t reunited with their loved ones. And about rampant exploitation of people seeking asylum as they travel through Mexico to reach the United States.
We will use our findings to advocate that the Biden administration rescind its asylum ban; ends the use open-air detention sites; and that Congress significantly increase investment in organizations providing short-term aid, housing, and services. And we will continue to call for those seeking asylum to be treated humanely and with dignity.
Katharina Obser
Director, Migrant Rights and Justice Program
Compare this with the “border BS” spread by the GOP and the media that ignores the human and legal traumas at the border and falsely insists that competently administering domestic and international refugee and asylum laws is “mission impossible” for the world’s most prosperous superpower.
It appears that the politicos are too busy spreading lies and myths about the most vulnerable among us to solve problems in a humane, reasonable, and efficient manner!
This article is a collaboration between The Border Chronicle and TomDispatch, a great outlet which has been looking at U.S. foreign policy, the military industrial complex, the “forever wars,” climate change, and many other topics since 2001.
On September 23rd, at about 2:30 a.m., a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying, while holding her month-old baby swaddled in a blanket.
The agent commanded her to get in the vehicle. As they then drove to the Nogales Border Patrol station, the girl, he later reported, tried to speak to him in Spanish through the security partition that separated them. Her tiny daughter, she was telling him, was in distress. Cameras showed that the vehicle stopped for all of 10 seconds before continuing. The agent later claimed he couldn’t understand what she was saying and that he wanted to find a fluent Spanish speaker at the station. He didn’t realize, he insisted, that the infant was struggling to breathe, though the child soon died.
This hellish story of suffering at our border is but one of hundreds of similar tales of horror from 2023. They illustrate a fundamental truth about that border: it neither is, nor ever was, an “open” one in the Biden years, nor does the president faintly have an open-border policy, though prepare yourself to hear otherwise — over and over again — in Trumpublican campaign ads next year. They’ll repeat what party officials are already saying all too repetitively: that “President Biden’s radical open borders policies” have created “the worst border crisis in American history.” (While those are the exact words of House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, similar sentiments are already being offered by countless members of the GOP.)
Comer’s claim is, of course, no less predictable than the hardships migrants like that girl are suffering as they try to reach this country. While such border narratives traffic in the unreal, what is real either isn’t effectively reported or gets lost amid all the politically motivated noise. Loud fantasies are expansively covered, while life-and-death stories, like those of that infant and her mother, are seldom reported and, if they are, quickly disappear.
Barely a week before that 16 year old was desperately trying to communicate to the agent in Spanish, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) labeled the U.S.-Mexico border the world’s “deadliest migration land route.” In 2022, a record 853 remains of dead border crossers were recovered (and this is the U.S. Border Patrol’s figure, which is even higher than the IOM’s), dwarfing the record of 568 set the previous year. Such numbers, the IOM stresses, are known to be distinct undercounts, leaving all too many families pining for lost loved ones.
But those border fatalities weren’t the only record breaker. Another was confirmed just a week after medical personnel at the Nogales station rushed to treat that girl’s baby. The number of border contracts issued to private industry also set a new record. Like those deaths, such contracts soared in fiscal year 2023 to $9.96 billion, instantly stripping the previous high, also set last year, of $7.5 billion.
And mind you, those gifts to industry were made from the highest budget ever (including in the Trump years) for border and immigration enforcement: $29.8 billion. So, don’t for a second think that the U.S. has an “open” border. In fact, it’s never been more fortified or — something few even bother to mention — more profitable, if you happen to be part of the border-industrial complex.
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Read the full article at the link.
Maybe it’s because the victims are “only migrants, mostly people of color” and therefore not considered to be “real human beings” by some in the media; maybe it’s because getting the real story about the border requires intensive digging, intellectual expertise, and perhaps some danger; maybe it’s because editors are in search of alarmist “sky is falling” myths about the “border apocalypse” to attract readers, viewers, and “online hits;” maybe it’s because of a false belief that truth is “boring” and “doesn’t sell!”
For whatever reason, the non-Fox networks (Fox is a primary purveyor of the “Big Lie” and the “Open Borders Fantasy”) and “mainstream media” do a really poor job on border reporting.
Those with even a passing familiarity with “talking heads” are no-doubt familiar with claims from nativist GOP politicos, righty reporters, and even some Dems about the mythical a “open borders!” None of these folks have recent experience helping asylum seekers trying to exercise their legal rights under domestic laws, international treaties, and ourConstitution in a border system specifically designed to “discourage and deter” them, rather than identify and promptly grant the many legally sufficient claims for protection.
By contrast, when is the last time you saw real experts — folks like Clinical Professor Steve Yale-Loehr, former Deputy UNHCR and Georgetown Law Dean Alex Aleinikoff, CGRS Director Karen Musalo, HRF Refugee Programs Director Eleanor Acer, UC Davis Law Dean Kevin Johnson, NIJC Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy, Immigrant Defenders Executive Director Lindsay Toczylowski, Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) or any of the other huge numbers of highly articulate, well-recognized, “hands on practical experts” on human rights and asylum appear on the “talking heads” to throw some truth and real light on this important, nearly totally misunderstood and intentionally misconstrued, issue that GOP nativists have thrust to the forefront of the 2024 campaign?
Meanwhile, Dems should NOT be “running away” from the realities and essential benefits provided by robust immigration and the cruel wastefulness and immorality of Trumps’s proposed neo-Nazi “crackdown” on all forms of migration (although, disgracefully, some Dems are doing exactly that, thus playing into the hands of GOP nativists for absolutely NO return).
Simon Rosenberg Veteran U.S. Political Analyst Hopium PHOTO: Substack
Here are some ideas from Simon Rosenberg at Hopium on Substack on how Dems can make immigration a centerpiece for success in 2024:
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.
Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.
Despite being inhumane and jawdroppingly cruel, this plan is now a major political problem for an already struggling Republican Party for at least three main reasons:
Raids and Mass Deportations Are Deeply Unpopular – We have decades of polling on the forced removal of the 10m+ undocumented immigrants (almost all of whom are employed and pay taxes) in the US, and it is wildly unpopular, perhaps even more so than “abortion bans.” One example – in the 2016 exit polls, in the election that gave Trump the Presidency, the American people choose “offer legal status” to “deported to home country” 70%-25%. Republicans may have a slight advantage on immigration issue right now, but mass deportation is seen as an extreme position by the American people (rightly so). It was so unpopular that the anti-immigration movement dropped mass deportation as a goal, moving to the softer “attrition through enforcement,” or “self-deportation,” political strategy more than a decade ago.
Trump’s plan is another sign of how extremism and extremists have overtaken the party of Lincoln and Reagan.
As I document here, since 2005, when the national Republican Party began adopting a far harder line on immigration (Reagan, W. Bush and McCain were all immigration reformers), the 4 battleground states of the Southwest, AZ/CO/NM/NV, have drifted away from the Republican Party, becoming far bluer. In the last 2 elections we’ve seen the best Democratic performance in that region since the 1940s and 1950s, and a reminder that Biden got within 5 points of Trump in Texas in 2020. In the heavily Mexican-American parts of the country in particular raids and mass deportations are wildly unpopular.
It Was A Plan Like This That Caused The Big Hispanic Protests Across the US in 2006 – In 2005 the Republican House of Representatives bucked their President, George W. Bush, and passed a bill that called for the rounding up and mass deportation of the 11m undocumented immigrants in the country. It was the moment when the party of the Sun Belt and the West went from pro-immigration to deeply restrictionist. Over the next year huge protests against this bill and mass deportation erupted across the US, and Republicans became so spooked that we were able to pass a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill through a Republican Senate in 2006. That bill, like the 2013 immigration reform bill we passed through the Senate, was never taken up by the Republican House and it died.
But those protests did something important politically – after years of Republican gains with Hispanics under W. Bush, Hispanics ran back into the arms of Democrats in 2006 and they have essentially stayed there ever since. In the 2006 midterms Democrats won 69% of the Hispanic vote, among our best performances in recent decades.
In the four Presidential elections leading up to 2006 Democrats averaged 47% of the vote, and in 2004 we lost AZ/CO/NM/NV. In the four Presidential elections since 2006 Democrats have averaged 51% and in 2020 we won AZ/CO/NM/NV at the Presidential level for the first time since 1940. As the Hispanic population has grown across the US and in these states, our net vote margin with Hispanic voters keeps increasing, even if we lose a few points in vote share. As I show here, in 2004 the net Hispanic vote margin for Democrats was about 700,000 votes nationally, meaning we won 700,000 more Hispanic votes nationally than Republicans. In 2020 that number was at least 4.5m net votes across the US, with this same dynamic playing out in each state with large Hispanic populations (except Florida of course).
My instinct is that whatever advantage Republicans had on immigration, and whatever small gains they had made with Hispanic voters in recent years, is now gone.
This Plan Will Wreck The American Economy – In a time of existing wide scale worker shortages, removing 10-15m workers from the American economy in a short period of time would be national economic suicide, and will be seen that way by the business community in DC and in the battleground states. It’s just totally insane and extremist policy no matter how you look at it, and I think it could become as much of a drag on the GOP brand as abortion is now.
For a party which has lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 elections, lost the popular vote to Democrats 51%-46% over the past 4, lost the 2018/2019/2020/2022 and 2023 elections, has deep performance issues across the country even in red states since Dobbs, embracing mass deportations seems like a colossal political error.
It is another reason why I think our goal in 2024 should be not just to win, but to really go on offense, get to 55, and make this election an historic repudiation of the worst and most dangerous political party in our history. We can do this people!
Onward/Adelante – Simon
Thank you for reading Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg. This post is public so feel free to share it.
It’s critical to remember that migrants aren’t the ONLY target of Trump’s neo-Nazism — they might not even be the primary ones! You can guarantee that many US citizens and lawfully present non-citizens of color will be caught up in the dragnet and sent off to deportation concentration camps where due process is non-existent.
Others will simply avoid certain public places and activities for fear of being accosted. Still others will be forced underground because of fear of drawing attention to undocumented relatives or neighbors. Some U.S. citizens will fear voting, which indeed is a key part of the GOP plan to cement their “out of the mainstream” minority rule by suppressing suffrage! As those of us who adjudicated asylum claims know, many will fear reporting abuses or asserting rights to police who openly identify with their oppressors. Fear, despair, distrust, and resignation are key pillars of any authoritarian regime!
It’s attack on all people of color in America and those who might speak with an accent or dress differently from the GOP’s “White Christian Nationalist norms.”
How many of us carry around documentation proving that our parents were U.S. citizens? Notably, although occupational status is often menioned on U.S. birth certificates, citizenship status is NOT. It’s not hard to guess who will be “required” to “document” their parents’ citizenship by Trump’s internal security police!
Trump and the GOP are an existential threat to U.S. democracy, human progress, and American leadership on the world stage. Don’t let them destroy OUR country and take away YOUR rights!
Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”
The former president’s speech in Claremont, N.H., echoed his message of vengeance and grievance, as he called himself a “very proud election denier” and decried his legal entanglements, once again attacking the judge in a New York civil trial and re-upping his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith. In the speech, Trump once again portrayed himself as a victim of a political system that is out to get him and his supporters.
Yet Trump’s use of the word “vermin” both in his speech and in a Truth Social post on Saturday drew particular backlash.
“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
“We are still creating [monsters]. We see it in … Russian attitudes toward Ukrainians, in Hindu Islamophobia, and in American racism against Black people,” psychologist David Livingstone, a professor at the University of New England in Maine, told EL PAÍS.
It wasn’t just Germany.
In 1909, a U.S. satirical magazine, Puck, published a cartoon that showed Uncle Sam as a pied piper leading a group of immigrants from Europe. The immigrants were rats. Sending them off: smiling, well-dressed White men.
I appreciate that Marianne LeVine of WashPost was one of the few “mainstream journalists” with the guts to make the painfully obvious connection and comparison between Trump’s insane threats and Hitler, Mussolini, and other horrible dictators!
Marianne LeVine Political Reporter Washington Post PHOTO: WashPost
Even so, it was only “page 2” news in today’s Post, apparently being of far less concern to her editors than the plans of Middle Eastern countries to “upend global sports!” Harkens back to 1936, when participating in Hitler’s “Aryan Showcase Olympics” was more important to the U.S. and other Western Democracies than protesting and condemning Hitler’s ongoing persecution of Jews!
There was a time in the not too distant past when use of racist, neo-Nazi language like Trump’s would have earned an immediate forceful condemnation from politicians across the political spectrum, from the media, and would have ended a candidacy. Now, it’s “just another day at the office.” Hate, lies, racism, and threats by a powerful national politician, a former President no less, cause barely a ripple in our national political dialogue. Not even front page news! Not covered at all by most “legitimate” news outlets! Yet the threat to our nation is real! Very real!
And, in case anyone still doubts the existential threat to American democracy and civilization itself posed by Trump and his anti-American followers, his “plans” include politicization of government, economic chaos, increasing global warming, and destabilization of the U.S. and world economies. See, e.g.,http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=019284ab-7357-40c1-91c7-112654eb687a.
An immigrant advocacy center found that when their staff were able to provide legal representation or help to immigrants facing credible fear interviews, the immigrant outcomes improved considerably.
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a nonprofit based in El Paso, released a report last week detailing challenges the organization’s staff found and recommendations for change and statistical data on individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. The nonprofit initiated a pilot project over eight weeks in the summer of 2023 in two New Mexico immigration detention facilities: The Torrance County Detention Facility and Otero County Processing Center along with the El Paso Processing Center. The project sought to provide participating asylum seekers legal representation or help in preparation prior to the migrant’s credible fear interview. They found that the participating asylum seekers had a 91.6 percent pass rate at the three facilities.
A credible fear interview is an important part of the immigration process for asylum seekers, advocates have said. Often, asylum seekers are placed into detention facilities where there is documented abuse before they are allowed a credible fear interview with an immigration judge. Advocates who work with asylum seekers have said that asylum seekers are often brought to a room to talk to the immigration judge over the phone. The conversation is not private and the asylum seeker is often not given time to prepare. Sometimes the asylum seeker is not provided a translator and not all asylum seekers speak Spanish or English. If the asylum seeker fails to convince an immigration judge of the danger they left behind, the asylum seeker is most likely to face deportation and are often returned to life threatening situations, advocates have told NM Political Report in the past.
. . . .
One recommendation to help solve the problem is for the creation of scholarship programs for community members with lived experience and building a community accreditation program that would offer community members with free training and job placement.
“This would also provide a cost-effective way of expanding legal services to meet demand, giving organizations like ours a more sustained means of providing quality legal services to a higher number of migrants,” the report states.
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Read Susan’s complete article at the link.
Studies like this reflect a reality that experts have long recognized, but few politicos and media figures are willing to admit:
Many, probably the majority, of those arriving at the border have credible claims for asylum;
They won’t be “deterred” from coming by cruelty, punishment, negative, often racist, rhetoric, and ever more extreme, deadly, yet ultimately ineffective border militarization;
With competent representation and better adjudicators —those with demonstrated, recognized adylum expertise — at both USCIS and EOIR many more asylum claims can and should be granted in a timely manner;
Rather than more expensive, ineffective border militarization, harsh imprisonment (“New American Gulag”), and coming up with new immoral and illegal restrictions on asylum, the Federal Government should be investing in more rational and cost-effective measures such as:
Training and approving more accredited representatives for arriving asylum seekers through programs like VIISTA Villanova;
Assisting localities and NGOs with reception and resettlement services;
Implementing better hiring practices and asylum training at the Asylum Office and EOIR;
Granting more asylum cases in a timely manner at or near to the “initial encounter” level (something that the Administration empowered itself to do, then inexplicably “suspended” the program just when it was MOST needed);
Developing better coordination, skills matching, and job training for those granted asylum;
Investing in English Language Learning, vocational training, social work, and other integration and assimilation services in communities where refugees resettle (notably, this would also create good job opportunities — many at the “professional” level — for existing U.S. workers).
It’s past time to move beyond “open border myths” and come up with humane,productive, legal, and effective programs to deal with the realities of human migration at our border!
🇺🇸 Due Process Forever, and great appreciation to all our veterans, past, present, and future!🙏👍
If Pima County can effectively handle a migrant surge, why is it so hard for Congress?
Opinion: If Congress weren’t so dysfunctional, it would see where and how many resources are needed to effectively manage immigrants and the border.
Gregory Chen opinion contributor
It’s hard to imagine any American having faith in government — or its ability to solve a complex problem like immigration — when Congress can barely pass a temporary spending bill without getting mired in controversial issues like border security and coming dangerously close to shutting down the government.
Fortunately, dysfunction is not the story in every part of the country.
While Congress is pointing fingers on immigration, small towns and cities throughout the country are doing the hard work of managing migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border.
I recently visited Arizona with a delegation of immigration attorneys and policy experts and saw the work by government officials, social workers and health care professionals up close.
Every day, federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents take recent arrivals to a church-affiliated shelter in Tucson, which does COVID-19 and other health screenings, provides a hot meal, and finds short-term local shelter, busing or other transportation in a matter of days or hours.
Remarkably, even with increased numbers of people coming into Pima County, the coalition of county administrators and nonprofits has found temporary housing and transport for everyone and avoided having people end up on the streets.
The local collaboration, supported by federal emergency funding, is a model for how migration at the border can be managed effectively.
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Read Greg’s complete article at the link. It’s largely what I’ve been saying all along. Although far from perfect (what is perfect these days?), the current law could be made to work if there were the political will to do so.
The GOP’s unrelenting racism, xenophobia, dehumanization, and “doubling down” on failed deterrence and punishment “strategies” are guaranteed to make things worse. Dems need to stand tall for solving the humanitarian issues at Southern Border in a humane, legal, and practical manner, using the tools available under current law!
It can be done! We just need the political will (and political pressure) to make it happen. It’s not rocket science!🚀
“Pie in the sky?” Hardly! Undoubtedly, these measures could be carried out far less expensively than further, ultimately fruitless, border militarization and enhanced cruelty being pushed by the GOP and some Dems. And, they would be more effective in bringing “law and order” to the border and our overall legal system.
Fanned by alarmist narratives being spread by folks like Adams and Hochul (no, Governor, 8 billion people aren’t going to descend on your state — in fact, the U.S. has a “refugee/1,000 population ratio” far below that of many smaller, much poorer countries), and the mainstream media’s insatiable need for a “trumped-up invasion narrative” to create headlines and sound bites, I suspect that the Administration and Dem politicos might be prepared to “throw asylum seekers under the bus” to reach an agreement with the GOP to keep the Government open. After all, asylum seekers don’t vote, and their advocates have historically been good “team players” who go to bat for the Dem Party despite having their contributions, energy, and ideas consistently undervalued, even dissed, once elections are over.
Don’t do it Dems!Giving in to the righty nativists will NOT solve anything, nor will abandoning values help you in the next election! Indeed, the Administration could set more “world records” for exclusions, deportations, denials, imprisonments, wall-building, enforcement hiring, “rocket dockets,” and the GOP would still spout the same “open borders” myth, and the media would give it equal, or greater, time. They largely ignore HRF and other experts who actually understand the border, migration, and have practical, humane, if less inflammatory or drastic, solutions to offer.
The mainstream media seems to have endless time for folks like Trump, Gaetz, Jordan, Haley, Ramaswamy, etc., who have little to contribute to solving pressing national problems. Why aren’t they talking to the folks who understand migration, asylum seekers, the border, and the legal framework? Why aren’t they “headlining” and publicizing reasonable, humane, values-based solutions rather than promoting narratives of doom, hopelessness, and expensive, often illegal, cruelty as the only “solutions?” There actually have been some bipartisan proposals for addressing the border while respecting and even enhancing the rights of asylum seekers. See, e.g.,https://immigrationcourtside.com/2023/02/14/🇺🇸courtside-politics-rep-hillary-scholten-d-mi-is-part-of-a-bipartisan-group-of-new-house-members-reaching-across-the-aisle-in-an-attempt-to-govern-for-the-public-good/. But, you sure wouldn’t know it from listening to the so-called “mainstreamers!”
Here’s another fascinating thing. Humane, sensible, legally compliant, cost effective solutions to migration issues proposed by experts, many of whom are immersed in the reality on a daily basis, are often dismissed, if even mentioned, as “impractical,” “unrealistic,” “idealistic,” “costly.” On the other hand, when politicos, think tankers, reporters, commenters, profiteers, many largely removed from the human trauma of the border situation, present costly, proven to fail, draconian, often illegal measures directed against asylum seekers, the same prejorative, dismissive terms are seldom used.
Indeed, the worse, crueler, and more hare-brained a scheme is, the more likely it is to be mischaracterized as a “realistic response” to a hyped-up emergency! Somehow, wanton cruelty and end-running legal obligations are packaged as a “practical necessities,” while creative ideas on how to solve problems and make the current laws work are summarily brushed aside, often without meaningful analysis and discussion.
For six years, I have represented adults, children and families who have fled persecution in their home countries and sought protection in the United States. My clients have traveled thousands of miles from countries including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cameroon, Togo, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. They leave their homes, communities and culture because the pain and risks of fleeing pale in comparison to the dangers they will face if they stay.
I have seen the difference between the outcomes for clients who have meaningful access to legal counsel and due process, who are able to safely settle into a community as they pursue their cases, and people who are deprived of these basic human rights. But over the past several months there has been an onslaught of Biden administration policies designed with one goal: to rapidly deport people. These programs block people from a fair asylum process, and I am deeply concerned that thousands of individuals fleeing persecution will never be able to tell their stories and have a chance at safety in our country.
For the clients I have helped win asylum, the key to my representation was consistent and thorough communication. Through multiple sessions, we built a rapport, I provided them with information about their legal rights and the immigration system and they provided me with the details of their lives. These details formed the basis of their legal claims, which I assisted them in presenting to the immigration judge. The judge decided whether they could stay in the United States based on an individualized determination of their future risk of harm if deported.
When one of my clients and her six-year-old daughter completed their two-month journey from El Salvador to Texas, Customs and Border Protection detained them for three days and then released them with notice of their obligation to appear in immigration court. They made their way to the Midwest, where they sought legal representation.
At the National Immigrant Justice Center, my colleagues and I worked with the mother over several months to document her experiences of being raped, impregnated, beaten and locked up at home by her older relative. Finally safe in the United States, she started therapy and began working at a restaurant to support herself and her daughter. At her final immigration court hearing, she bravely testified about her traumatic past, and the immigration judge granted both mother and daughter asylum.
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Read the rest of Stephanie’s article at the link.
On the basis of reports like this, there is reason to believe that not only should many more of the individuals allowed to enter the U.S. be granted asylum under a properly functioning system, but that many of those barred, rejected, and deported are erroneously being returned to life-threatening situations.
This, of course, directly contradicts the restrictionist myths peddled by most GOP politicos and even some Dems. It also contradicts the fear-mongering and scare tactics employed by the right-wing media that has unfortunately spilled over into the so-called “mainstream media.”
The real “border crisis/tragedy” is the lack of a legitimate, well-functioning, fair, efficient system to carry out our legal obligations to asylum seekers under both domestic and international laws. Calls for more “deterrents, cruelty, walls, harsh imprisonment, lawless deportations, and truncations of already-routinely-violated rights” are not going to solve the real problems! Indeed, they are likely to make things even worse!
The Afghan man speaks only Farsi, but he wasn’t worried about representing himself in U.S. immigration court. He believed the details of his asylum claim spoke for themselves.
Mohammad was a university professor, teaching human rights courses in Afghanistan before he fled for the United States. Mohammad is also Hazara, an ethnic minority long persecuted in his country, and he said he was receiving death threats under the Taliban, who reimposed their harsh interpretation of Sunni Islam after taking power in 2021.
He crossed the Texas border in April 2022, surrendered to Border Patrol agents and was detained. A year later, a hearing was held via video conference. His words were translated by a court interpreter in another location, and he said he struggled to express himself — including fear for his life since he was injured in a 2016 suicide bombing.
At the conclusion of the nearly three-hour hearing, the judge denied him asylum. Mohammad said he was later shocked to learn that he had waived his right to appeal the decision.
“I feel alone and that the law wasn’t applied,” said Mohammad, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition that only his first name be used, over fears for the safety of his wife and children, who are still in Afghanistan.
. . . .
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase Jeffrey S. Chase Blog Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges
Former immigration judge Jeffrey Chase, who reviewed the transcript, said he was surprised John-Baptiste waived Mohammad’s right to appeal and that the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that decision. Case law supports granting protection for people who belong to a group long persecuted in their homelands even if an individual cannot prove specific threats, said Chase, an adviser to the appeals board.
But Andrew Arthur, another former immigration judge, said John-Baptiste ruled properly.
“The respondent knew what he was filing, understood all of the questions that were asked of him at the hearing, understood the decision, and freely waived his right to appeal,” Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, said via email.
Chase said the hearing appeared rushed, and he believes the case backlog played a role.
“Immigration judges hear death-penalty cases in traffic-court conditions,” said Chase, quoting a colleague. “This is a perfect example.”
Overall, the 600 immigration judges nationwide denied 63% of asylum cases last year, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Individual rates vary wildly, from a Houston judge who denied all 105 asylum requests to a San Francisco one denying only 1% of 108 cases.
John-Baptiste, a career prosecutor appointed during the Trump administration’s final months, denied 72% of his 114 cases.
. . . .
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Read Julie’s complete article at the link.
Hazaras are an historically persecuted group in Afghanistan whose already perilous situation has demonstrably worsened under the Taliban. See, e.g., https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/blog/urgent-action-needed-hazaras-in-afghanistan-under-attack. This case should have been a “slam dunk grant” under a proper application of precedents like Cardoza and Mogharrabi! Additionally, Hazara claims should be routinely grantable under the “pattern or practice of persecution” regulations that EOIR judges are supposed to apply (but seldom do).
No wonder this system builds incredible unnecessary backlogs when it botches the easy grants, wastes time on specious, disingenuous reasons for denial, and allows questionably-qualified judges to run roughshod over due process, the rule of law, and binding precedents.
Here’s additional commentary from “Sir Jeffrey:”
Thankfully, the amazing Steve Schulman at Akin Gump took on Mohamed’s case after his pro se hearing, and Human Rights First provided additional support.
(The Round Table was prepared to file an amicus brief on this one at the Fifth Circuit, but an agreement was reached to reopen the case at the IJ level before briefing was due.)
That the Government agreed to reopen this case basically “says it all” about the absurd result in the original hearing and the bogus “waiver” of appeal.
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