"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
“Petitioner Wilber Agustin Acevedo Granados (“Acevedo”), a native of El Salvador, petitions for review of the decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirming an order of removal and the denial by the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) of Acevedo’s application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). Acevedo’s petition is based on his fear that, if returned to El Salvador, he would face persecution or torture on account of his membership in a particular social group, defined based on his intellectual disability. The BIA rejected Acevedo’s claims on the ground that the proposed group definition was not cognizable. The BIA held that Acevedo’s proposed social group was not sufficiently particular, finding that the terms “intellectual disability” and “erratic behavior” rendered the proposed group “amorphous, overbroad, diffuse,[and]subjective.” The BIA further determined that the group was not a “meaningful social unit, distinct from the larger population of mentally ill individuals” in El Salvador. We conclude that the agency misunderstood Acevedo’s proposed social group, and thus grant the petition for review with respect to the claims for asylum and withholding of removal. The BIA and IJ treated the term “intellectual disability” as if it were applied by a layperson. Instead, that term as used in Acevedo’s application referred to an explicit medical diagnosis with several specific characteristics. Recognized that way, the clinical term “intellectual disability” may satisfy the “particularity” and “social distinction” requirements necessary to qualify for asylum and withholding of removal. However, because the IJ did not recognize the proposed social group before her, we remand to the agency for fact-finding on an open record to determine if the group is cognizable.”
[Hats off to Prof. Evangeline Abriel and her Certified Law Students Keuren A. Parra Moreno (argued) and Jared Renteria (argued)!]
2) 8th Cir. — BIA Goofs On “Aggravated Felony” Analysis
“In May 2017, an Immigration Judge (IJ) determined that Lopez-Chavez is ineligible for cancellation of removal because his 2006 federal conviction for illegal reentry in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326 qualifies as an aggravated felony. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) affirmed the IJ’s ruling and dismissed Lopez-Chavez’s administrative appeal the following year. The question now before the court is whether Lopez-Chavez’s 2006 conviction qualifies as an aggravated felony under the INA, thus making Lopez-Chavez statutorily ineligible for cancellation of removal. We hold that it does not. … Because Lopez-Chavez’s 2003 Missouri marijuana conviction is not a categorical match for the corresponding federal offense in 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(43)(B), the 2006 conviction for illegal reentry under § 1326 does not qualify as an aggravated felony under § 1101(a)(43)(O). Accordingly, Lopez-Chavez is not statutorily ineligible for cancellation of removal. See 8 U.S.C. § 1229b. We grant the petition for review, vacate the BIA’s order, and remand for proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
“[T]o decide whether his 2018 conviction renders him removable, we need to determine whether we can parse MMB-Fubinaca from those other drugs; we decide that by determining whether Penalty Group 2-A is divisible. The government says it’s divisible, Alejos-Perez says not. … Because the government has not shown that the modified categorical approach is called for, we apply the categorical approach. … Because Penalty Group 2-A is not a categorical match, we must identify the appropriate result. … Once it’s clear that Penalty Group 2-A is not a categorical match to its federal counterpart, AlejosPerez “must also show a realistic probability . . . that the State would apply its statute to conduct that falls outside the generic definition of the crime” under federal law. We are unable to resolve that issue, because the BIA didn’t address it, and we can “only affirm the BIA on the basis of its stated rationale for ordering an alien removed from the United States.” … We thus remand for consideration of whether Alejos-Perez has shown a realistic probability that Texas would prosecute conduct that falls outside the relevant federal statute.”
Significantly, the 5th Circuit’s rejection of the BIA’s analysis was written by very conservative Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee. Judge Smith wrote the majority opinion upholding the legally questionable injunction against President Obama’s “DAPA Program” — something many scholars believe to have been a entirely legitimate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. (The case later was lamely affirmed w/o opinion by an evenly divided Supremes.)
Even conservative Federal Judges not known for sympathy to immigrants and their legal rights appear to have grown weary of the BIA’s consistently sloppy attempts to rule against foreign nationals, regardless of the merits. This is the second rejection by the normally reliably pro-Government 5th Circuit in the last several weeks!
Ironically, one (former) Federal Judge who appears not bothered by the BIA’s defective jurisprudence is the current Attorney General, Judge Garland. He’d better get himself a “tomato resistant”🍅 raincoat to wear at work. This is just the beginning. His reputation and credibility will diminish every day that he fails to replace the BIA with competent jurists who will give migrants the fair and impartial treatment that our Constitution demands, but the DOJ’s “captive court” constantly fails to deliver!
And, leaving aside the legal ineptitude, there can be no excuse for the stunning level of dysfunction and incompetence in how one of the nation’s largest so-called “court” systems is administered by EOIR under DOJ. No tribunal in America issues more potential “death sentences” with less due process! Not exactly what Mies Van Der Rohe had in mind when he famously said “the less is more.”
“Eyore In Distress” Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Poor “Belly-Up Eyore.” He was forlornly, and apparently vainly, hoping to be “put out to pasture” after Judge Garland took over the helm at DOJ. Such high expectations!
But, he is already exhausted again by all the continuing “calls to duty on Courtside” after just 22 days of Judge Garland’s “where’s Falls Church” approach to the ongoing EOIR disaster/travesty! Judge, here’s the key; just think like it wereyour children or grandchildren, actual human beings, being orbited into the abyss without much attention to the law, our Constitution, common sense, or human decency! Maybe starting each day with a briefing on each Article III case that was wrongly decided in your name by the BIA and a live reading of each outrageous media story about disorder in your Immigration Courts would help raise your consciousness? Maybe you should speak with a few of the “customers” of your “courts” that put public service last. Men, women, children, and their lawyers are being abused out there every day by EOIR and you are legally and morally responsible.
You can’t lead the fight for racial justice in America while running a bogus court system that denies and mocks it on a daily basis!
Hon. Merrick B. Garland Attorney General of The United States & Eyore’s Boss, Official White House Photo Public Realm
PANEL: KING, DIAZ, and RICHARDSON, Circuit Judges.
OPINION BY: JUDGE DIAZ
CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION: Judge Richardson
KEY QUOTE FROM MAJORITY:
Plaintiffs argue that DACA’s rescission was arbitrary and capricious because the
Department of Homeland Security failed to give a reasoned explanation for the change in policy, particularly given the significant reliance interests involved. We agree.17
17 Plaintiffs also assert that (1) the district court failed to consider evidence of “bad faith” and “animus” underlying the decision to rescind DACA presented in their complaint and (2) the Department’s conclusions about DACA’s legality are substantively incorrect. Given our disposition, we decline to address these arguments.
30
As we have explained, DACA was rescinded based on the Department’s view that the policy was unlawful. But neither the Attorney General’s September 4 letter nor the Department’s Rescission Memo identify any statutory provision with which the DACA policy conflicts. Cf. Encino Motorcars, 136 S. Ct. at 2127 (rejecting as insufficient agency statement regarding statutory exemption proffered in support of policy change where agency did not “analyze or explain” why statute should be interpreted as agency suggested).
The Attorney General’s letter does mention that the Fifth Circuit affirmed the injunction against the DAPA policy on “multiple legal grounds” in the Texas litigation, J.A. 379, and the Rescission Memo cites to this ruling. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling was based in part on its determination that the DAPA policy likely ran counter to the INA’s “intricate process for illegal aliens to derive a lawful immigration classification from their children’s immigration status.” Texas, 809 F.3d at 179. There is no dispute here, however, that “DACA has no analogue in the INA.” NAACP, 298 F. Supp. 3d at 239 (internal quotation marks omitted). Further, as the Fifth Circuit explained in reaching its conclusion, “DACA and DAPA are not identical.” Texas, 809 F.3d at 174.
The Attorney General’s letter also asserts that DACA suffered from the same “constitutional defects that the courts recognized as to DAPA.” J.A. 379. The courts in the Texas litigation, however, did not address constitutional claims. And while the Attorney General urged in his letter that his office had a duty to “defend the Constitution” and “faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress,” J.A. 379, he does not explain how
allowing the DACA policy to remain in effect would violate that duty.
The Attorney General’s letter and the Rescission Memo also proffer the concern— based on the Attorney General’s determination that the DAPA and DACA policies share the same legal defects—that “potentially imminent” litigation would result in a ruling in the Texas litigation enjoining DACA. Entirely absent, however, is an explanation why it was likely that the district court in the Texas litigation would have enjoined DACA.
Further, the 2014 OLC Opinion outlining the Department’s authority to implement the DAPA policy identified “from the nature of the Take Care duty” at least “four general…principles governing the permissible scope of enforcement discretion,” J.A. 137-38; 2014 WL 10788677, at *5-6, and noted that concerns “animating DACA were . . . consistent with the types of concerns that have customarily guided the exercise of immigration enforcement discretion,” J.A. 149 n.8; 2014 WL 10788677, at *13 n.8.
The point is that the Department had before it at the time it rescinded DACA a reasoned analysis from the office tasked with providing legal advice to all executive branch agencies that supported the policy’s legality. Yet the Department changed course without any explanation for why that analysis was faulty. Cf. Fox Television Stations, 556U.S. at 516 (“[A] reasoned explanation is needed for disregarding facts and circumstances that underlay . . . the prior policy.”).
Nor did the Department adequately account for the reliance interests that would be affected by its decision. Hundreds of thousands of people had structured their lives on the availability of deferred action during the over five years between the implementation of DACA and the decision to rescind. Although the government insists that Acting
Secretary Duke18 considered these interests in connection with her decision to rescind DACA, her Memo makes no mention of them.
Accordingly, we hold that the Department’s decision to rescind DACA was arbitrary and capricious and must be set aside.
KEY QUOTE FROM CONCURRENCE/DISSENT:
Just as in BLE, there is a nonsensical implication in the plaintiffs’ position: that the Executive’s discretion is more constrained when it gives a “reviewable” reason for its actions than when it gives no reason at all. If the Acting Secretary was wrong about the likely illegality of DACA,5 then this might mean that she had provided no lawful reason for the rescission. But in the context of the Executive’s enforcement discretion, this is perfectly appropriate. The Executive need not explain why it makes particular enforcement and non-enforcement decisions. The Judicial Branch cannot bootstrap review of decisions committed to the discretion of the other branches simply because the reasons provided are of a type that judges consider themselves competent to evaluate.
5 Evaluating the actual legality of DACA requires considering whether and how a court may adjudicate an alleged violation of the Take Care Clause. See Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes, 37 U.S. (12 Pet.) 524, 613 (1838). But it also requires addressing the distinct question of whether and how one presidential administration may determine that a previous administration’s policy was inconsistent with the constitutional obligation to take care that the nation’s immigration laws be faithfully executed. Cf. Letter from President George Washington to Sec’y Alexander Hamilton, U.S. Dep’t of the Treasury (Sept. 7, 1792) in 32 WRITINGS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON 144 (John C. Fitzpatrick ed., 1939) (writing in 1792 about enforcing unpopular tax laws, President Washington explained that it was his “duty to see the Laws executed: to permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to it”).
In any event, the Acting Secretary’s rescission memorandum was not a mere statement on the legality of DACA. Instead, the memorandum considered various court rulings as well as the Attorney General’s letter before concluding that the “DACA program should be terminated.” Duke Memorandum at 4 (emphasis added). She did not say that DACA must be terminated or that she lacked the legal authority to enforce DACA or a DACA-like program. And in declaring the rescission of DACA after a six- month wind-down period, the Acting Secretary invoked her statutory authority to “establish[] national immigration policies and priorities.” Id. The Acting Secretary’s legal analysis was only one aspect of her reasoning for rescinding DACA, and, of course, a prosecutor may consider beliefs about the law when setting enforcement policy, see BLE, 482 U.S. at 283.
For these reasons, I conclude that the plaintiffs’ APA claims are not reviewable and would dismiss them.
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The “good guys” win again! The forces of White Nationalist irrationality and lawless behavior are thwarted, at least for the present.
Interestingly, Judge Titus was the only Federal Judge that I’m aware of to have upheld the Government’s termination of DACA. Even the Supremes, the majority of whom Trump widely and contemptuously advertises the GOP has “brought and paid for,” weren’t eager to intervene in the Administration’s idiotic “war on DACA, human decency, and common sense” at this point.
But, let’s not forget that we’re only at this point because the Obama Administration and the Dems failed to solve the DACA issue in 2009 and 2010. Never again!
A June photo released by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows undocumented people at the central processing center in McAllen, Texas. Photograph: Handout/US Customs and Border Protection/AFP/Getty Images
All day and night they listened to the wailing of hungry children.
Here, in a freezing immigration detention facility somewhere in the Rio Grande valley of south Texas, adults and children alike were fainting from dehydration and lack of food.
Sleep was almost impossible; the lights were left on, they had just a thin metallic sheet to protect against the cold and there was nothing to lie down on but the hard floor.
This is the account of Rafael and Kimberly Martinez, who, with their three-year-old daughter, had made the dangerous trek from their home on the Caribbean coast of Honduras to the US border to ask for political asylum.
“The conditions were horrible, everything was filthy and there was no air circulating,” Kimberly Martinez told the Guardian of the five days the family spent cooped up in one facility they – like tens of thousands before them – referred to as “la hielera”: the icebox. Her husband added: “It’s as though they wanted to drain every positive feeling out of us.”
They knew, from following the news, that their ordeal of escaping gang violence back home and trekking across desert terrain at the height of summer would not end when they reached the United States.
What they did not expect, though, were days of hunger, separation and verbal abuse that they said they endured at the hands of federal immigration officials.
‘Caged up like animals’
All they were given to eat, they said, were half-frozen bologna sandwiches, served at 10 in the morning, five in the afternoon and two in the morning, and single sugar cookies for their daughter. What water they were given had a strong chlorine taste – a common complaint – and upset their stomachs.
The Martinezes (not their real name) were among dozens of asylum-seekers the Guardian interviewed in the border city of McAllen recently after they secured their provisional release from federal custody – with black electronic monitors fastened tightly around their ankles – and just before they continued their journeys by bus to the homes of US-based sponsors to await court hearings on their statuses.
The Guardian sat in with a team of volunteer doctors and nurses administering emergency medical care and listened as family after family gave jarringly consistent accounts of what they described as grim conditions in a variety of border detention facilities – conditions that have grown only grimmer since the advent of Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies.
Activists in Los Angeles protest Donald Trump’s immigration policies, 30 June. Photograph: Mike Nelson/EPA
Officials said the allegations made by families about their experiences in detention did not equate with what they knew to be common practice and they insisted detainees were treated with dignity and respect.
The “hieleras”, or iceboxes, asylum-seekers said, were overcrowded, unhygienic, and prone to outbreaks of vomiting, diarrhea, respiratory infections and other communicable diseases. Many complained about the cruelty of guards, who they said would yell at children, taunt detainees with promises of food that never materialized and kick people who did not wake up when they were expected to.
At regular intervals, day and night, the Martinezes, and many others, said guards would come banging on the walls and doors and demand that they present themselves for roll call.
If they talked too loudly, or if children were crying, the guards would threaten to turn the air temperature down further. When the Martinezes gathered with fellow detainees to sing hymns and lift their spirits a little, the guards would taunt them, or ask aggressively: “Why did you bother coming here? Why didn’t you stay in your country?”
“Many of these agents were Latinos, like us, but they were people without morals,” Rafael Martinez said, his voice choking with tears. “There we were, caged up like animals, and they were laughing at us.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of Gumbel’s shocking, disturbing, and downright infuriating report at the above link. If any other country treated vulnerable individuals seeking to exercise their legal rights to claim refuge under the Geneva Convention in this way we would call it just what it is — extreme cruel and inhuman treatment amounting to torture. Yet, somehow, the architects of this abhorrent, racist, wasteful, and dehumanizing system — Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and others — remain free and largely unaccountable.
They even have the absolute audacity to whine and complain when Federal Courts occasionally call them out for their gross contempt for the law and Constitution and force them to take corrective action — which they do grudgingly, disrespectfully, without apology, and ineffectively.
Just today, “Gonzo Apocalypto” was sputtering about Federal Courts issuing nationwide injunctions against some of his corrupt, illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral practices. What a totally disingenuous jerk! I don’t remember Ol’ Gonzo complaining when a single Federal Judge in Texas, Judge Hanen, tanked Obama’s “DAPA” program that would have helped hundreds of thousands of deserving parents of US citizens and green card holders (and also helped reduce the Immigration Court backlog). Heck, Gonzo even tried to use that decision as the bogus justification for terminating DACA, a step that even Judge Hanen is not very anxious to take. Unlike Gonzo, Judge Hanen at least understands that DACA individuals have substantial equities in the United States that Congress would be wise to recognize through legislation.
Undoubtedly, there is a need for some detention of dangerous individuals or some so-called “flight risks” pending the completion of immigration proceedings. But, it is only a minuscule fraction of the number now being unnecessarily and wastefully detained.
And, there is seldom any reason whatsoever for detaining women and children who have passed the credible fear process and seek asylum. Work with the private bar to get them represented, help them understand the system, including their obligations to appear at court and when summoned by DHS, and work with the U.S. Immigration Judges, the private bar, and the DHS Offices of Chief Counsel to get these cases scheduled in a reasonable manner.
For every case that DHS seeks “priority processing,” they should be required to offer prosecutorial discretion or “PD” to a “lower priority” case. That would eliminate the current Government practice of “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” (“ADR”), keep the court backlogs from growing out of control, and insure timely and fair processing of recent arrivals. The DHS would also be “incentivized” to agree or stipulate to well-documented, clearly grantable asylum cases, as they are supposed to do. That’s how the system could and should work pending enactment of more comprehensive immigration reform.
Additionally, individuals who satisfy “credible fear” should be offered an opportunity to apply first to the USCIS Asylum Office, before the case is sent to Immigration Court, since that office would already have a “preliminary workup” of the case.
There are lots of ways of improving this system and making it work better for the asylum applicants, their lawyers, and the DHS. But, they aren’t going to happen as long as irresponsible, biased, ethically and morally challenged “White Nationalist” officials such as Trump, Sessions, & Nielsen are in charge.
Associate professor at Morgan State University and politics editor for the Root
August 15
Omarosa Manigault Newman — who once declared that “every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump” — evolved from mentee to frenemy to antagonist before her nonstop media blitz promoting her new post-White House tell-all, during which she’s touted the existence of a recording of Trump using the n-word. It’s all sent the White House scrambling, with the president tweetingMonday that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday she “can’t guarantee” Americans will never hear audio of Trump using the slur.
It doesn’t matter.
Trump is a racist. That doesn’t hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It’s about the totality of his presidency, and after 18 months you can see his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not.
ADVERTISING
Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump’s antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In the ’70s, his real estate company was the subject of a federal investigation that found his employees had secretly marked the paperwork of minority apartment rental applicants with codes such as “C” for “colored.” After black and Latino teenagers were charged with sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, he took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. He never backtracked or apologized when the teenagers’ convictions were overturned. He championed birtherism, and wouldn’t disavow the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya until the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president, he’s targeted African American athletes for criticism, whether it’s ranting, “Get that son of a bitch off the field,” in reference to professional football players silently protesting police brutality or tweeting that:
Calling African American Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) a “low IQ person” is now a routine bit at his political rallies. He was quoted referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole” countries. He announced his campaign in 2015 by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Later that year, he called for the United States to implement a “total and complete” Muslim ban.
After taking office, he hired xenophobes such as Stephen Miller — an architect of the ban, whose hostility toward immigrants is so stark, and hypocritical, that his uncle excoriated him this week in an essay for Politico Magazine, writing of Miller and Trump that “they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.”
I could go on. The point is that Trump’s view of nonwhites is out in the open. As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci notes, there’s every reason “to believe that an n-word tape wouldn’t torpedo Trump’s presidency”; there’s no indication his supporters “will turn against him because he used a racial slur.” Trump’s words and deeds over time have demonstrated his racism — it doesn’t hinge on being outed, Paula Deen-style, by a tape of him using the word. Racism hardly ever does.
I’m not saying it would be okay for Trump to use any variation of the n-word — in jest, in anger, singing along to the lyrics of a song, with or without the hard “R.” But the feverish speculation about whether he ever deployed the term wrongly implies that a verdict on his racist character turns on its use. What matters more about Trump are the positions he’s taken and the policy choices he’s made that harm communities of color. In his first year as president, Trump evolved from mere interpersonal racist to racist enabler when he proclaimed there were “very fine people, on both sides” when white supremacists and anti-racist protesters converged in Charlottesville last year. Jeff Sessions, a senator from Alabama who, three decades ago, was denieda federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee over concerns that he was a racist, was installed by Trump as attorney general.
Since assuming that role, Sessions has worked to undermine consent decrees meant to restrain racially abusive police departments and explicitly articulated the administration’s intent to use family separation to deter immigration. The Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos, is dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Trump hired Manigault Newman as a liaison to black constituent groups based on their reality TV relationship and, according to him, her willingness to say “GREAT things” about him, despite almost universal criticism of her appointment and subsequent work by African American Republicans and Democrats.
Being a racist — which entails belief in a fixed racial hierarchy and the power to act upon that belief in commerce, government or social spaces — is not now, and never has been, about one word or one slip of the tongue. It is about the ability of those in power to use public and private resources to enforce a racial hierarchy, whether that means having black people arrested for sitting in Starbucks, refusing to hire or promote qualified black job applicants or staffing a presidential administration with people who tolerate or encourage white nationalists. Trump’s statements and his approach to governance suggest he believes in a set racial hierarchy, and the possible existence of a hyped tape doesn’t change that. So far, and as far as I know, no one’s produced audio of white nationalist participants in last Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington using the n-word. Presumably, by the logic of some Trump defenders, that would mean there’s no proof they’re racist, either.
If American public discourse on race continues to revolve around a game of “gotcha,” with sentiments and smoking guns, divorced from an acknowledgment of how racists use their power, we won’t make any progress, during this administration or any other.
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Johnson states a simple truth that some don’t want to acknowledge. But, racist anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Mexican American, xenophobic “dog whistles” were at the heart of Trump’s campaign and remain at the heart of his policies, particularly on immigration, refugees, and law enforcement.
Does that mean that the majority of Americans who don’t endorse racism don’t need to deal with the fact that Trump is President and that Sessions and Miller are exercising outsized control over our justice system? Or that today’s Trumpist GOP isn’t your grandparents’ GOP (in my case, my parents’ GOP) and, although they might occasionally mutter a few insincere “tisk, tisk’s,” are firmly committed to enabling Trump and his racist policies including, of course, voter disenfranchisement. Of course not. Just think of how African-Americans, Hispanics, and liberals had to deal in practical terms with Southern political power in the age of Jim Crow (which is basically the “Age of Jeff Sessions”).
But, it is essential for us to know and acknowledge who and what we are dealing with and not to let political expediency totally obscure the harsh truth. Trump is a racist. And, that sad but true fact will continue to influence all of his policies for as long as he remains in office. Indeed, “Exhibit 1,” is the failure of the GOP to achieve “no-brainer” Dreamer protection over the last two years and the stubborn insistence of Sessions and others in the GOP to keep tying up our courts with bogus attempts to terminate already limited protections for those who aren’t going anywhere in the first place.
NAACP v. Trump, U.S.D.C., D.D.C., 04-24-18 (Judge John D. Bates)
Read Judge Bates’s 60 page decision invalidating the Trump Administration’s decision to “rescind” DACA and ordering the restart of the program, but delaying the order for 90 days to give the Administration a chance to come up with a legal rationale for recision:
Executive Branch officials possess relatively unconstrained authority to enforce the law against certain violators but not others. Ordinarily, the exercise of that authority is subject to review not in a court of law, but rather in the court of public opinion: members of the public know how their elected officials have used their enforcement powers, and they can hold those officials accountable by speaking out, by petitioning their representatives, or ultimately at the ballot box. When an official claims that the law requires her to exercise her enforcement authority in a certain way, however, she excuses herself from this accountability. Moreover, if her view of the law is incorrect, she may needlessly forego the opportunity to implement appropriate enforcement priorities and also to demonstrate those priorities to the public.
Fortunately, neither Supreme Court nor D.C. Circuit precedent compels such a result. Rather, the cases are clear that courts have the authority to review an agency’s interpretation of the law if it is relied on to justify an enforcement policy, even when that interpretation concerns the lawful scope of the agency’s enforcement discretion. See Chaney, 470 U.S. at 832–33; OSG, 132 F.3d at 812; Crowley, 37 F.3d at 676–77. Under this rule, an official cannot claim that the law ties her hands while at the same time denying the courts’ power to unbind her. She may escape political accountability or judicial review, but not both.
Here, the Department’s decision to rescind DACA was predicated primarily on its legal judgment that the program was unlawful. That legal judgment was virtually unexplained, however, and so it cannot support the agency’s decision. And although the government suggests that DACA’s rescission was also predicated on the Department’s assessment of litigation risk, this consideration is insufficiently distinct from the agency’s legal judgment to alter the reviewability analysis. It was also arbitrary and capricious in its own right, and thus likewise cannot support the agency’s action. For these reasons, DACA’s rescission was unlawful and must be set aside.
For the reasons given above, then, the Court will vacate the Department’s September 5, 2017 decision to rescind the DACA program. The Court will stay its order of vacatur for 90 days, however, to afford DHS an opportunity to better explain its view that DACA is unlawful. The Court will also deny the government’s motion to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, its motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ APA claims on reviewability grounds, and its motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ substantive APA claim; grant the government’s motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ procedural APA claim, the NAACP plaintiffs’ RFA claim, and plaintiffs’ information-sharing claim; and defer ruling on the government’s motion to dismiss plaintiffs’ remaining constitutional claims.
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So, who “won” under Judge Bate’s order? The plaintiffs won a smashing victory on all the significant legal issues. And, Judge Bates appears prepared to not only halt the termination of DACA for those already approved under the program, as other courts have done, but also to order the DHS to resume accepting new applications for those who meet the DACA criteria.
On the flip side, nothing happens for the next 90 days while the DHS searches for a rationale for terminating DACA. I think that’s going to be hard to develop. But, you never know.
This case follows a disturbingly familiar pattern. Trump, Sessions, & Co. institute actions against immigrants based on bias, racism, xenophobia, and campaign promises. They are promptly rejected by the courts as illegal.
Then, the Administration goes “to the drawing board” (they never seriously considered the law in the first place) in an attempt to come up with a legal rationale (usually a fairly obvious pretext) for their original actions.
That’s why it’s so infuriating to hear an intellectually dishonest scofflaw like Jeff Sessions constantly pontificating about a “rule of law” that actually represents only his own distorted and biased view of the law — likely drawn up for him by one of the restrictionist or White Nationalist groups he likes to hang around with.
Of course, even if Judge Bates eventually rules against the Administration, there no doubt will be an appeal to the DC Circuit. But, without a further stay pending appeal (which seems unlikely given the Supreme Court’s declination to give one in other DACA litigation) DACA would be restarted while the case is working its way through the lower courts, perhaps to the Supremes.
The Administration could easily have avoided this mess by agreeing to a “clean” DACA bill. They likely could even have gotten some “Wall” funding and other enforcement enhancements (short of more unneeded agents or more inhumane and unnecessary detention) thrown in with the deal. But, Trump blew the chance.
So now the fate of DACA is likely to be tied up in the Federal Courts for the indefinite future.
“All he had were his words and the power of truth,” Sessions said. “ . . . His message, his life and his death changed hearts and minds. Those changed souls then changed the laws of this land.”
But civil rights leaders criticized Sessions’s remarks, made at a time, they said, when the Justice Department is rolling back efforts to promote civil and voting rights.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Tuesday for Justice Department employees to “remember, celebrate and act” in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
“It is beyond ironic for Jeff Sessions to celebrate the architecture of civil rights protections inspired by Dr. King and other leaders as he works to tear down these very protections,” said Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama and now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“Make no mistake,” Gupta said. “If Dr. King were alive today, he would be protesting outside of Jeff Sessions’s office.”
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that in the past year, the Justice Department under Sessions has taken action to “obstruct and reverse civil rights enforcement.”
She and others point to a new policy that calls for federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges even if that might mean minority defendants face stiff, mandatory-minimum penalties. Sessions has defended President Trump’s travel ban and threatened to take away funding from cities with policies he considers too lenient toward undocumented immigrants. The department’s new guidance and stances on voting rights and LGBT issues also might disenfranchise minorities and poor people, civil rights advocates say.
Justice officials say that Sessions’s actions reflect an aggressive, by-the-book interpretation of federal law and that his policies are geared toward fighting violent crime and drug trafficking.”
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Read the complete article at the above link.
Absurd and insulting! Actions speak louder than words, Gonzo! Every day that you spend in office mocks our Constitution, the rule of law, human decency, and the legacy of MLK and others who fought for racial and social equality and social justice under the law.
I have no doubt that if Dr. King were alive today, he and his followers would be on your and Trump’s “hit list.” Indeed, peacefully but forcefully standing up to and shaming tone-deaf, White Nationalist, racially challenged politicos like you, who lived in the past and inhibited America’s future with their racism, was one of the defining marks of MLK’s life!
How do things like increasing civil immigration detention, building the “New American Gulag,” stripping unaccompanied children of their rights to an Immigration Court hearing, mindlessly attacking so-called “sanctuary cities,” mocking hard-working pro bono immigration attorneys and their efforts, reducing the number of refugees, excluding Muslims, building a wall, stripping protections from Dreamers, reducing legal immigration, favoring White immigrants, and spreading false narratives about Latino migrants and crime “honor” the legacy of Dr. King?
Indeed, the “Sanctuary Cities Movement” appears to have a direct historical connection to King’s non-violent civil disobedience aimed at the enforcement of “Jim Crow” laws. Much as today, those on the “wrong side of history” wrapped themselves in hypocritical bogus “rule of law” arguments as they mocked and violated the civil rights of African Americans.
At some point, America needs and deserves a real Attorney General, one who recognizes and fights for the rights of everyone in America, including minorities, the poor, the most vulnerable, and the so-called undocumented population, who, contrary to your actions and rhetoric, are entitled to full Due Process of law under our Constitution. Imagine how a real Attorney General, one like say Vanita Gupta, might act.Now that would truly honor Dr. King’s memory.
Folks, as we take a few minutes today to remember Dr. King, his vision for a better America, and his inspiring “I Have A Dream Speech,” we have to face the fact that everything Dr. King stood for is under a vicious and concerted attack, the likes of which we haven’t seen in America for approximately 50 years, by individuals elected to govern by a minority of voters in our country.
So, today, I’m offering you a “potpourri” of how and why Dr.King’s Dream has “gone south,” so to speak, and how those of us who care about social justice and due process in America can nevertheless resurrect it and move forward together for a greater and more tolerant American that celebrates the talents, contributions, and humanity of all who live here!.
On Martin Luther King’s birthday, a look back at some disquieting events in race relations in 2017.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop and looked out over the promised land. In a powerful and prophetic speech on April 3, 1968, he told a crowd at the Mason Temple in Memphis that while there would certainly be difficult days ahead, he had no doubt that the struggle for racial justice would be successful.
“I may not get there with you,” he said. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I am happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything.”
The following day, he was assassinated.
The intervening years have been full of steps forward and steps backward, of extraordinary changes as well as awful reminders of what has not changed. What would King have made of our first black president? What would he have thought had he seen neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., so many years after his death? How would he have viewed the shooting by police of unarmed black men in cities around the country — or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement? He would surely have heard the assertions that we have become a “post-racial” society because we elected (and reelected) Barack Obama. But would he have believed it?
This past year was not terribly heartening on the civil rights front. It was appalling enough that racist white nationalists marched in Charlottesville in August. But it was even more shocking that President Trump seemed incapable of making the most basic moral judgment about that march; instead, he said that there were some “very fine people” at the rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Racial injustices that bedeviled the country in King’s day — voter suppression, segregated schools, hate crimes — have not gone away. A report released last week by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on inequities in the funding of public schools concludes — and this should surprise no one — that students of color living in poor, segregated neighborhoods are often relegated to low-quality schools simply due to where they live. States continued in 2017 to pass laws that make it harder, rather than easier, for people of color to vote.
The Trump administration also seems determined to undo two decades of Justice Department civil rights work, cutting back on investigations into the excessive use of force and racial bias by police departments. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in March ordered a review of all existing federal consent decrees with local police departments with the possibility of dismantling them — a move that could set back police reform by many years.
Here in Los Angeles County, this statistic is telling: 40% of the estimated 57,000 homeless people — the most desperate and destitute residents of the county — are black. Yet black residents make up only 9% of the L.A. County population.
But despite bad news on several fronts, what have been heartening over the last year are the objections raised by so many people across the country.
Consider the statues of Confederate generals and slave owners that were brought down across the country. Schools and other institutions rebranded buildings that were formerly named after racists.
The Black Lives Matter movement has grown from a small street and cyber-protest group into a more potent civil rights organization focusing on changing institutions that have traditionally marginalized black people.
When football quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest, as he said, a country that oppresses black people, he was denounced by many (including Trump) but emulated by others. Kaepernick has been effectively banished from professional football but he started a movement.
Roy Moore was defeated for a Senate seat in Alabama by a surge of black voters, particularly black women. (But no sooner did he lose than Joe Arpaio — the disgraced, vehemently anti-immigrant former Arizona sheriff — announced that he is running for Senate there.)
So on what would have been King’s 89th birthday, it is clear that the United States is not yet the promised land he envisioned in the last great speech of his life. But we agree with him that it’s still possible to get there.”
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See this short HuffPost video on “Why MLK’s Message Still Matters Today!”
Read about how the Arizona GOP has resurrected, and in some instances actually welcomed, “Racist Joe” Arpaio, an unapologetic anti-Hispanic bigot and convicted scofflaw. “Racist Joe” was pardoned by Trump and is now running for the GOP nomination to replace retiring Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake, who often has been a critic of Trump. One thing “Racist Joe’s” candidacy is doing is energizing the Latino community that successfully fought to remove him from the office of Sheriff and to have him brought to justice for his racist policies.
Spared from the threat of deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, she campaigned to oust Joe Arpaio when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection as Maricopa County sheriff in 2016. She knocked on hundreds of doors in south Phoenix’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods to register voters. She made phone calls, walked on college campuses. Her message was direct, like the name of the group she worked with, Bazta Arpaio, a take on the Spanish word basta — enough Arpaio.
But now, the 85-year-old former sheriff is back and running for Senate. Sanchez, who had planned to step away from politics to focus on her studies at Grand Canyon University, is back as well, organizing once more.
“If he thinks he can come back and terrorize the entire state like he did Maricopa County, it’s not going to happen,” Sanchez, 20, said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”
Arpaio enters a crowded Republican primary and may not emerge as the party’s nominee, but his bid has already galvanized Arizona’s Latino electorate — one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing voter blocs.
Organizers like Sanchez, who thought they might sit out the midterm elections, rushed back into offices and started making calls. Social media groups that had gone dormant have resurrected with posts reminding voters that Arpaio was criminally convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos.
“We’ve been hearing, ‘Is it true Arpaio is back? OK, what can we do to help?’” said Montserrat Arredondo, director of One Arizona, a Phoenix nonprofit group focused on increasing Latino voter turnout. “People were living in terror when Arpaio was in office. They haven’t forgotten.”
In 2008, 796,000 Latinos were eligible to vote in the state, according to One Arizona. By 2016, that potential voting pool jumped to 1.1 million. (California tops the nation with the most Latinos eligible to vote, almost 6.9 million.)
In 2016, Latinos accounted for almost 20% of all registered voters in Arizona. Latinos make up about 30% of Arizona’s population.
. . . .
Last year, President Trump pardoned Arpaio of a criminal conviction for violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos. When announcing his candidacy Tuesday, Arpaio pledged his full support to the president and his policies.
On Saturday, Arpaio made his first public appearance since announcing his candidacy, attending a gathering of Maricopa County Republicans. He was unmoved when asked about the enthusiasm his candidacy has created among Latinos.
“Many of them hate me for enforcing the law,” he said. “I can’t change that. … All I know is that I have my supporters, they’re going to support who they want. I’m in this to win it though.”
Arpaio, gripping about a dozen red cardboard signs that read “We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio in DC,” walked through the crowd where he mingled with, among others, former state Sen. Kelli Ward and U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, who also are seeking the GOP Senate nomination. Overall, Arpaio was widely met with enthusiasm from attendees.
“So glad you’re back,” said a man wearing a “Vietnam Veteran” hat.
“It’s great to be back,” Arpaio replied.
Arpaio, who handed out business cards touting his once self-proclaimed status as “America’s toughest sheriff,” said he had no regrets from his more than two decades in office.
“Not a single one,” he said. “I spoke my mind and did what needed to be done and would do it the same in a minute.”
In an interview, Arpaio, who still insists he has “evidence” that former President Obama’s birth certificate is forged, a rumor repeatedly shown to be false, did not lay out specific policy platforms, only insisting he’ll get things done in Washington.
During his tenure as sheriff, repeated court rulings against his office for civil rights violations cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.”
Read the complete story at the link.
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Professor George Yancy of Emory University writing in the NY Times asks “Will America Choose King’s Dream Or Trump’s Nightmare?”
“Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written, spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about itself.
So, as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live, and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head on.
On the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.
We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy.
So many Americans suffer from the obsessive need to claim “innocence,” that is, to lie to ourselves. Yet such a lie is part of our moral undoing. While many will deny, continue to lie and claim our national “innocence,” I come bearing deeply troubling, but not surprising, news: White racism is now comfortably located within the Oval Office, right there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, embodied in our 45th president, one who is, and I think many would agree, must agree, without any hesitation, a white racist. There are many who will resist this characterization, but Mr. Trump has desecrated the symbolic aspirations of America, exhumed forms of white supremacist discourse that so many would assume is spewed only by Ku Klux Klan.”
Read the rest of Professor Yancy’s op-ed at the link.
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From lead columnist David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick at the NY Times we get “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”
Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. More recently, his political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.
The New York Years
Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.
Trump treated black employees at his casinos differently from whites, according to multiple sources. A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”
In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
In 1989, on NBC, Trump said: “I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.”
He uses the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants. Among many other statements, he has suggested that Obama’s protection of the Dreamers — otherwise law-abiding immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children — contributed to the spread of MS-13.
In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.
In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
At the White House on Jan. 11, Trump vulgarly called forless immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.”
The disgusting list goes on and on. Go to the link to get it all!
“I find nothing more useless than debating the existence of racism, particularly when you are surrounded by evidence of its existence. It feels to me like a way to keep you fighting against the water until you drown.
The debates themselves, I believe, render a simple concept impossibly complex, making the very meaning of “racism” frustratingly murky.
So, let’s strip that away here. Let’s be honest and forthright.
Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.
The history of America is one in which white people used racism and white supremacy to develop a racial caste system that advantaged them and disadvantaged others.
Understanding this, it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.
It is not a stretch to say that Trump is racist. It’s not a stretch to say that he is a white supremacist. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump is a bigot.
Those are just facts, supported by the proof of the words that keep coming directly from him. And, when he is called out for his racism, his response is never to ameliorate his rhetoric, but to double down on it.
I know of no point during his entire life where he has apologized for, repented of, or sought absolution for any of his racist actions or comments.
Instead, he either denies, deflects or amps up the attack.
Trump is a racist. We can put that baby to bed.
“Racism” and “racist” are simply words that have definitions, and Trump comfortably and unambiguously meets those definitions.
We have unfortunately moved away from the simple definition of racism, to the point where the only people to whom the appellation can be safely applied are the vocal, violent racial archetypes.
Racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness. We want racism to be fringe rather than foundational. But, wishing isn’t an effective method of eradication.
We have to face this thing, stare it down and fight it back.
The simple acknowledgment that Trump is a racist is the easy part. The harder, more substantive part is this: What are we going to do about it?
First and foremost, although Trump is not the first president to be a racist, we must make him the last. If by some miracle he should serve out his first term, he mustn’t be allowed a second. Voters of good conscience must swarm the polls in 2020.
But before that, those voters must do so later this year, to rid the House and the Senate of as many of Trump’s defenders, apologists and accomplices as possible. Should the time come where impeachment is inevitable, there must be enough votes in the House and Senate to ensure it.
We have to stop thinking that we can somehow separate what racists believe from how they will behave. We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.
And finally, we have to stop giving a pass to the people — whether elected official or average voter — who support and defend his racism. If you defend racism you are part of the racism. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you’re an egalitarian, how much you say that you are race blind, how much you say that you are only interested in people’s policies and not their racist polemics.
As the brilliant James Baldwin once put it: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” When I see that in poll after poll a portion of Trump’s base continues to support his behavior, including on race, I can only conclude that there is no real daylight between Trump and his base. They are part of his racism.
When I see the extraordinary hypocrisy of elected officials who either remain silent in the wake of Trump’s continued racist outbursts or who obliquely condemn him, only to in short order return to defending and praising him and supporting his agenda, I see that there is no real daylight between Trump and them either. They too are part of his racism.
When you see it this way, you understand the enormity and the profundity of what we are facing. There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.
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Back over at the Washington Post, op-ed writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., tells us the depressing news that “We could be a much better country. Trump makes it impossible.”
Dionne concludes his piece with the following observations about our current “Dreamer” debate:
“Our current debate is frustrating, and not only because Trump doesn’t understand what “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” even mean. By persistently making himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation, Trump is blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward.
And while Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will do all they can to avoid the issue, there should now be no doubt (even if this was clear long ago) that we have a blatant racist as our president. His reference to immigrants from “sh–hole countries” and his expressed preference for Norwegians over Haitians, Salvadorans and new arrivals from Africa make this abundantly clear. Racist leaders do not help us reach mutual toleration. His semi-denial 15 hours after his comment was first reported lacked credibility, especially because he called around first to see how his original words would play with his base.
But notice also what Trump’s outburst did to our capacity to govern ourselves and make progress. Democrats and Republicans sympathetic to the plight of the “dreamers” worked out an immigration compromise designed carefully to give Trump what he had said he needed.
There were many concessions by Democrats on border security, “chain migration” based on family reunification, and the diversity visa lottery that Trump had criticized. GOP senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) bargained in good faith and were given ample reason by Trump to think they had hit his sweet spot.
Trump blew them away with a torrent of bigotry. In the process, he shifted the onus for avoiding a government shutdown squarely on his own shoulders and those of Republican leaders who were shamefully slow in condemning the president’s racism.
There are so many issues both more important and more interesting than the psyche of a deeply damaged man. We are capable of being a far better nation. But we need leaders who call us to our obligations to each other as free citizens. Instead, we have a president who knows only how to foster division and hatred.”
Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.
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Our “Liar-in-Chief:” This short video from CNN, featuring the Washington Post’s “Chief Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler deals with the amazing 2000+ false or misleading claims that Trump has made even before the first anniversary of his Presidency: “Trump averages 5-6 false claims a day.”
Also on video, even immigration restrictionists sometimes wax eloquent about the exceptional generosity of U.S. immigration and refugee laws (even as they engage in an unending battle to undermine that claimed generosity). But, the reality, as set forth in this short HuffPost video is that on a regular basis our Government knowingly and intentionally returns individuals, mostly Hispanics, to countries where they are likely to be harmed or killed because we are unable to fit them within often hyper-technical and overly restrictive readings of various protection laws or because we are unwilling to exercise humanitarian discretion to save them..
I know first-hand because in my former position as a U.S. Immigration Judge, I sometimes had to tell individuals (and their families) in person that I had to order them returned to a country where I had concluded that they would likely be severely harmed or killed because I could not fit them into any of the categories of protection available under U.S. law. I daresay that very few of the restrictionists who glory in the idea of even harsher and more restrictive immigration laws have had this experience.
And clearly, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Steven Miller, Bob Goodlatte and others in the GOP would like to increase the number of humans we return to harm or death by stripping defenseless juveniles and other vulnerable asylum seekers of some of the limited rights they now possess in the false name of “border security.” Indeed, Sessions even invented a false narrative of a fraud-ridden, “attorney-gamed” (how do folks who often don’t even have a chance to get an attorney use attorneys to “game” the system?) asylum system in an attempt to justify his totally indefensible and morally bankrupt position.
Check out this video from HuffPost, entitled “This Is The Violent And Tragic Reality Of Deportation” to see the shocking truth about how our removal system really works (or not)!
Thinking of MLK’S “I have a dream,” next, I’ll take you over to The Guardian, where Washington Correspondent Sabrina Siddiqui tells us how “Immigration policy progress and setbacks have become pattern for Dreamers.”
“Greisa Martínez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.
Martínez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca.
She considers herself “one of the lucky ones”. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.
Martínez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines.
In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trump’s reported – if contested – reference to African and Central American nations as “shithole countries”.
“It feels like a sequel,” Martínez told the Guardian, adding that Trump’s adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. “This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.”
Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants “rapists” and “killers”, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.
He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers – despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.
Then, less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.
“People are picking their jaws up from the table and they’re trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.
“We always knew we were climbing a mountain … but it’s improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.”
As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trump’s remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.
Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship – an effort to appease Trump’s stance against so-called “chain migration” – but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status.
There would be other concessions to earn Trump’s signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall.
The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.
The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship.
The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.
Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trump’s ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.
“I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before,” Flake told the Guardian. “We’re going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. That’s the biggest difference.”
Read the rest of the story at the link.
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Finally, John Blake at CNN tells us “Three ways [you might not know] MLK speaks to our time.”
That’s a famous line from the 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it could also apply to a modern American hero: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the nation celebrates King’s national holiday Monday, it’s easy to freeze-frame him as the benevolent dreamer carved in stone on the Washington Mall. Yet the platitudes that frame many King holiday events often fail to mention the most radical aspects of his legacy, says Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College and author of several books on the civil rights movement.
“We turn him into a Thanksgiving parade float, he’s jolly, larger than life and he makes us feel good,” Theoharis says. “We’ve turned him into a mascot.”
Many people vaguely know that King opposed the Vietnam War and talked more about poverty in his later years. But King also had a lot to say about issues not normally associated with civil rights that still resonate today, historians and activists say.
If you’re concerned about inequality, health care, climate change or even the nastiness of our political disagreements, then King has plenty to say to you. To see that version of King, though, we have to dust off the cliches and look at him anew.
If you’re more familiar with your smartphone than your history, try this: Think of King not just as a civil rights hero, but also as an app — his legacy has to be updated to remain relevant.
Here are three ways we can update our MLK app to see how he spoke not only to his time, but to our time as well:
. . . .
But here’s one more uncomfortable thought that also explains why King remains so relevant:
The country is still divided by many of the same issues that consumed him.
On the last night of his life, King told a shouting congregation of black churchgoers that “we as a people” would get to “the Promised Land.” That kind of optimism, though, sounds like it belongs to another era.
What we have now is a leader in the White House who denies widespread reports that he complained about Latino and African immigrants coming to America from “shithole” countries; a white supremacist who murders worshippers in church; a social media landscape that pulsates with anger and accusations.
King’s Promised Land doesn’t sound boring when compared to today’s headlines. And maybe that’s what’s so sad about reliving his life every January for some people.
Fifty years after he died, King’s vision for America still sounds so far away.”
Read the complete article at the link.
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There you have it. A brief but representative sample of some of the many ways in which Dr. King’s dream of a “post racist America” is still relevant and why there’s still much more work still to be done than many of us might have thought several years ago.
So, the next time you hear bandied about terms like “merit-based” (means: exclude Brown and Black immigrants); “extreme vetting” (means: using bureaucracy to keep Muslims and other perceived “undesirables” out); “tax cuts” (means: handouts to the rich at the expense of the poor); “entitlement reform” (means: cutting benefits for the most vulnerable); “health care reform” (means: kicking the most needy out of the health care system); “voter fraud” (means: suppressing the Black, Hispanic, and Democratic vote); “rule of law” (means: perverting the role of Government agencies and the courts to harm Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, women, the poor, and other minorities); “job creation” (means: destroying our precious natural resources and the environment for the benefit of big corporations), “border security” (means: slashing rights for children and asylum seekers, and more money for building a wall and expanding prisons for non-criminal migrants, a/k/a/ “The New American Gulag”), “ending chain migration” (means keeping non-White and/or non-Christian immigrants from bringing family members) and other deceptively harmless sounding euphemisms, know what the politicos are really up to and consider them in the terms that Dr. King might have.
What’s really behind the rhetoric and how will it help create the type of more fair, just, equal, and value-driven society that majority of us in American seek to be part of and leave to succeeding generations. If it isn’t moving us as a nation toward those goals, “Just Say NO” as Dr. King would have done!
“(CNN)A federal judge in California late Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Judge William Alsup also said the administration must resume receiving DACA renewal applications.
But the ruling is limited — the administration does not need to process applications for those who have never before received DACA protections, he said.
The Trump administration announced the move to draw down the program last September with a planned end for early March. DACA protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation.
The fate of DACA and the roughly 700,000 “Dreamers” is the subject of heated negotiations in Washington, where President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are searching for a way to allow Dreamers to stay while also addressing border security concerns. It is not clear how the order will impact those talks.
In his 49-page ruling, Alsup said “plaintiffs have shown that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the rescission was arbitrary and capricious” and must be set aside under the federal Administrative Procedures Act.
The judge said a nationwide injunction was “appropriate” because “our country has a strong interest in the uniform application of immigration law and policy.”
“Plaintiffs have established injury that reaches beyond the geographical bounds of the Northern District of California. The problem affects every state and territory of the United States,” he wrote.
In response to the ruling, the Department of Justice questioned the legality of DACA, calling it “an unlawful circumvention of Congress.” DOJ spokesman Devin O’Malley said that DHS “acted within its lawful authority in deciding to wind down DACA in an orderly manner” and implied that the legal battles aren’t over yet.
“The Justice Department will continue to vigorously defend this position, and looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation,” O’Malley said.
‘A huge step in the right direction’
California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra hailed the ruling as a “a huge step in the right direction” in a statement. A coalition of attorneys general, including Becerra had also filed suit against the federal government over ending DACA, maintaining that it would cause “irreparable harm to DACA recipients.”
In contrast, Mark Kirkorian, the executive director of Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for lower immigration, described the ruling as “our lawless judiciary” in a tweet.
The plaintiff, the University of California said in a statement it was “pleased and encouraged” by the judge’s ruling, which would allow DACA recipients to stay in the US as the lawsuits make their way through the courts.
“Unfortunately, even with this decision, fear and uncertainty persist for DACA recipients,” said Janet Napolitano, president of the UC school system and was the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2012 who established DACA.
While the ruling that orders DACA renewals is “a sigh of relief,” it’s a fleeting one, said Karen Tumlin, legal director of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for rights of immigrants.
“It is important to remember, however, this is temporary relief by a single federal district court judge, it should not take the pressure off of Congress to do the right thing and enact a permanent solution for these young people.”
Lawmakers are racing toward a January 19 deadline for government funding and a host of issues, including DACA are tied to the negotiations.
“Dreamers deserve permanence they can count on, not legal thrillers. Congress needs to bring that home,” tweeted Tumlin.
CNN’s Sonya Hamasaki, Emily Smith, David Shortell and Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.”
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We now essentially have a conflict with a much earlier ruling from USDJ Hanen in Texas who found that a different, but related, Obama-era program called “DAPA” was illegal. That case was affirmed by the Fifth Circuit in a split opinion and went to the Supreme Court where an equally divided Court let the ruling below stand. So, unless new Justice Neil Gorsuch sides with the plaintiffs in this case, its likely to eventually be a loser (and a winner for the Administration) before the Supremes. Hopefully, Congress will resolve this in a way that ultimately makes further litigation unnecessary.
But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.
According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.
More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.
Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
As the meeting continued, John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, and Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, tried to interject, explaining that many were short-term travelers making one-time visits. But as the president continued, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Miller turned their ire on Mr. Tillerson, blaming him for the influx of foreigners and prompting the secretary of state to throw up his arms in frustration. If he was so bad at his job, maybe he should stop issuing visas altogether, Mr. Tillerson fired back.
Tempers flared and Mr. Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied on Saturday morning that Mr. Trump had made derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.
“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” she said, referring to the current White House chief of staff, the national security adviser and the secretaries of state and homeland security. “It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”
While the White House did not deny the overall description of the meeting, officials strenuously insisted that Mr. Trump never used the words “AIDS” or “huts” to describe people from any country. Several participants in the meeting told Times reporters that they did not recall the president using those words and did not think he had, but the two officials who described the comments found them so noteworthy that they related them to others at the time.
The meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.
How We Reported This Story
The Times conducted over three dozen interviews with current and former administration officials, lawmakers and others close to the process.
Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Mr. Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thought-out goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.
Like many of his initiatives, his effort to change American immigration policy has been executed through a disorderly and dysfunctional process that sought from the start to defy the bureaucracy charged with enforcing it, according to interviews with three dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers and others close to the process, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private interactions.
But while Mr. Trump has been repeatedly frustrated by the limits of his power, his efforts to remake decades of immigration policy have gained increasing momentum as the White House became more disciplined and adept at either ignoring or undercutting the entrenched opposition of many parts of the government. The resulting changes have had far-reaching consequences, not only for the immigrants who have sought to make a new home in this country, but also for the United States’ image in the world.
“We have taken a giant steamliner barreling full speed,” Mr. Miller said in a recent interview. “Slowed it, stopped it, begun to turn it around and started sailing in the other direction.”
It is an assessment shared ruefully by Mr. Trump’s harshest critics, who see a darker view of the past year. Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, argues that the president’s immigration agenda is motivated by racism.
“He’s basically saying, ‘You people of color coming to America seeking the American dream are a threat to the white people,’” said Mr. Sharry, an outspoken critic of the president. “He’s come into office with an aggressive strategy of trying to reverse the demographic changes underway in America.”
. . . .
Even as the administration was engaged in a court battle over the travel ban, it began to turn its attention to another way of tightening the border — by limiting the number of refugees admitted each year to the United States. And if there was one “deep state” stronghold of Obama holdovers that Mr. Trump and his allies suspected of undermining them on immigration, it was the State Department, which administers the refugee program.
At the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, there was a sense of foreboding about a president who had once warned that any refugee might be a “Trojan horse” or part of a “terrorist army.”
Mr. Trump had already used the travel ban to cut the number of allowable refugees admitted to the United States in 2017 to 50,000, a fraction of the 110,000 set by Mr. Obama. Now, Mr. Trump would have to decide the level for 2018.
At an April meeting with top officials from the bureau in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room, Mr. Miller cited statistics from the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies that indicated that resettling refugees in the United States was far costlier than helping them in their own region.
Mr. Miller was visibly displeased, according to people present, when State Department officials pushed back, citing another study that found refugees to be a net benefit to the economy. He called the contention absurd and said it was exactly the wrong kind of thinking.
But the travel ban had been a lesson for Mr. Trump and his aides on the dangers of dictating a major policy change without involving the people who enforce it. This time, instead of shutting out those officials, they worked to tightly control the process.
In previous years, State Department officials had recommended a refugee level to the president. Now, Mr. Miller told officials the number would be determined by the Department of Homeland Security under a new policy that treated the issue as a security matter, not a diplomatic one.
When he got word that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had drafted a 55-page report showing that refugees were a net positive to the economy, Mr. Miller swiftly intervened, requesting a meeting to discuss it. The study never made it to the White House; it was shelved in favor of a three-page list of all the federal assistance programs that refugees used.
At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mr. Trump cited the Center for Immigration Studies report, arguing that it was more cost-effective to keep refugees out than to bring them into the United States.
“Uncontrolled migration,” Mr. Trump declared, “is deeply unfair to both the sending and receiving countries.”
. . . .
As the new year approached, officials began considering a plan to separate parents from their children when families are caught entering the country illegally, a move that immigrant groups called draconian.
At times, though, Mr. Trump has shown an openness to a different approach. In private discussions, he returns periodically to the idea of a “comprehensive immigration” compromise, though aides have warned him against using the phrase because it is seen by his core supporters as code for amnesty. During a fall dinner with Democratic leaders, Mr. Trump explored the possibility of a bargain to legalize Dreamers in exchange for border security.
Mr. Trump even told Republicans recently that he wanted to think bigger, envisioning a deal early next year that would include a wall, protection for Dreamers, work permits for their parents, a shift to merit-based immigration with tougher work site enforcement, and ultimately, legal status for some undocumented immigrants.
The idea would prevent Dreamers from sponsoring the parents who brought them illegally for citizenship, limiting what Mr. Trump refers to as “chain migration.”
“He wants to make a deal,” said Mr. Graham, who spoke with Mr. Trump about the issue last week. “He wants to fix the entire system.”
Yet publicly, Mr. Trump has only employed the absolutist language that defined his campaign and has dominated his presidency.
After an Uzbek immigrant was arrested on suspicion of plowing a truck into a bicycle path in Lower Manhattan in October, killing eight people, the president seized on the episode.
Privately, in the Oval Office, the president expressed disbelief about the visa program that had admitted the suspect, confiding to a group of visiting senators that it was yet another piece of evidence that the United States’ immigration policies were “a joke.”
Even after a year of progress toward a country sealed off from foreign threats, the president still viewed the immigration system as plagued by complacency.
“We’re so politically correct,” he complained to reporters in the cabinet room, “that we’re afraid to do anything.”
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Read the full, much more comprehensive and detailed, article at the link.
Disturbing for sure, but unfortunately not particularly surprising for those of us who have watched the Administration roll out its toxic, ill-informed immigration policies. Perhaps ironically, while the immigration issue has certainly allowed Trump to capture and control the GOP, polls show that his extreme restrictionist, xenophobic views on immigration are generally out of line with the majority of Americans (although not necessarily the majority of GOP voters).
Maria’s always “on top” of the almost daily examples of cruel, intentionally inhumane, unconstitutional, wasteful “Gonzo” Enforcement by the Trump regime. Here is some of what she reports on the deadly conditions in “NAG:”
“The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has criticized several immigration detention facilities for having spoiled and moldy food and inadequate medical care, and for inappropriate treatment of detainees, such as locking down a detainee for sharing coffee and interfering with Muslims’ prayer times.
Acting Inspector General John V. Kelly, who took over Dec. 1, said the watchdog agency identified problems at four detention centers during recent, unannounced visits to five facilities. The Dec. 11 report , released Thursday, said the flaws “undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment.”
“Staff did not always treat detainees respectfully and professionally, and some facilities may have misused segregation,” the report found, adding that observers found “potentially unsafe and unhealthy detention conditions.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails tens of thousands of immigrants for civil immigration violations, holding them until they are deported or released in the United States. The jails are not supposed to be punitive, according to the report.
ICE concurred with the inspector general’s findings and said it is taking action to fix the problems, some of which have already been addressed.
“Based on multi-layered, rigorous inspections and oversight programs, ICE is confident in conditions and high standards of care at its detention facilities,” the agency said in a statement. “To ensure the safety and well-being of those in our custody, we work regularly with contracted consultants and a variety of external stakeholders to review and improve detention conditions at ICE facilities.”
The Office of Inspector General said it launched the surprise inspections after receiving complaints from immigrant advocacy groups and on its hotline about treatment of detainees. The inspectors also interviewed staff members and detainees and examined records.
Advocates for immigrants said the report reaffirmed their long-standing calls for the detention facilities to be closed. Advocates have complained about reports of physical and sexual assaults, deaths in detention and other concerns for years under past presidents — and say their worries are increasing under President Trump.
Trump has pledged to dramatically increase deportations and is seeking congressional approval for more than 51,000 detention beds this fiscal year, up from about 30,000 under President Barack Obama.
Trump’s pick for the permanent director of ICE, Thomas D. Homan, previously ran the ICE detention system.
“The realities documented by the OIG inspectors, and many more, are endemic to the entire detention system,” Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, a nonprofit group that monitors immigration detention, said in a statement. “ICE has proven time and time again to be incapable of meeting basic standards for humane treatment.”
In a statement, Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, in Atlanta, cited the death in May of Jean Jimenez-Joseph. The 27-year-old Panamanian national was held in solitary confinement for 19 days at the Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia, according to Project South.
Shahshahani said his death “should have served as a final wake-up call and resulted in the immediate closure of the facility.”
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The Administration tries to hide, obscure, cover up, and bureaucratize what’s happening in the NAG. But, thanks to courageous reporters like Maria, the truth isn’t going to be suppressed. Read the rest of Maria’s report at the link.
Is this YOUR America? Is this the America you want YOUR children and grandchildren to read about and inherit?
Gee whiz, what were my parents and grandparents doing while neo-Nazis were invading the government and recreating the “Fourth Reich?”
And, when are the Article III Courts going to get some backbone to go with their lifetime sinicure and stand up for the Constitution and human decency before it’s too late? When good people stand by and do nothing, tyrants like Trump, Sessions, Homan, Bannon, and their corrupt supporters will have their way!
Tell your legislators:
NO to Tom Homan as ICE Director;
NO to funding for the NAG;
NO to funding DOJ’s corrupt defense of the NAG and Gonzo Immigration Enforcement;
NO to additional unneeded DHS Enforcement agents;
YES to legislative and criminal investigations of the unconstitutional activities of Gonzo, Nielsen, Homan, and their cronies and the human rights abuses they are knowingly creating by misusing the immigration laws;
YES to “Dreamer Relief” with “no strings attached;”
YES to immigration reform that legalizes law-abiding residents already here and provides additional legal visas for the future to end the “false criminalization” of needed workers and refugees!
Stand up for America as a Nation of Immigrants — Stand up for human decency — Stand against Trump, Nielsen, Sessions, Homan, Bannon, Miller and the other neo-Nazis promoting the NAG!
“Doug Jones, weeks away from taking office as Alabama’s first Democratic senator since 1996, is not done talking about his win. On Wednesday, as national TV cameras rolled, he spent 26 minutes talking about his goals for 2018. On Thursday, he talked to the hosts of “Pod Save America” — a tastemaking podcast for liberals — about how he won. And on Sunday, he will be interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox broadcast channel, and the show will be repeated later in the day on Fox News — a cable channel on which many Democrats refuse to appear.
So far, Jones has not made much news since his victory, ducking the Democratic fight over whether he should be seated in time to cast a vote on the GOP tax bill. (“We’ve still got a process in Alabama that we have to go though,” he said on “Pod Save America.”) He’s said more about how he won — as a “kitchen table” pragmatist and critic of Republican policy — and his hope that the South’s Republican dominance may start to crack.
“I believe we are on the road to having a competitive two-party state,” Jones said at Wednesday’s news conference.
Jones had been talking like that for months, though rarely before a national audience, and not in stump speeches. But as Republicans knew, and as they failed to exploit Tuesday, Jones did not run as a conservative and rarely took the Trump administration’s side on key issues. Most of Jones’s television ads, especially in the last month, portrayed the election as a choice between a Democrat who could “work with anybody” and a Republican who would engage in futile, embarrassing grandstanding.
In interviews, however, Jones often spoke of a different choice for Alabama — whether they wanted to send a new representative of the Deep South to the national stage. In an August interview with The Washington Post, before much national attention had driven toward his campaign, Jones said he would have theoretically opposed Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general. He rattled off the reasons: Sessions was too harsh on voting rights and criminal-justice issues.”
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Jones might have added “bigot, racist, xenophobe, White Nationalist, homophobe, Islamophobe, bully, liar, theocrat, sexist, and “D-grade legal mind,” to the reasons. But, we get the point. Even in Alabama, Sessions’s obvious bias, retrograde views, and general lack of qualifications for high office were well known.
In other words, if you remove the pedophelia, the ridiculous leather vest, poor little pony, waving pistol, and totally obnoxious wife, then “Gonzo” is “Ayatollah Roy.”
Unfortunately, Gonzo has been able to do even more damage to our country, our Constitution, and our future (e.g.,our “Dreamers“) as an appointed official than he was in the Senate (perhaps because he was so, well, “Gonzo,” that even in his own party nobody took his “parallel universe” 1950’s segregationist view of America seriously). Probably happy enough to get rid of him as a colleague, the GOP inflicted him on the entire nation!
But, the majority of Americans who don’t believe in Gonzo’s “Apocalyptic Vision” don’t have to put up with this travesty indefinitey. Hopefully, working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and drawing on the abysmal record of “Gonzo in action,” Doug Jones will be able to use “the system” to work cooperatively with others to remove the most stunningly unqualified Attorney General since John Mitchell from office.
A woman holds up a sign outside the U.S. Capitol in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on Dec. 5. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
By Tim Cook and Charles KochDecember 14
Tim Cook is chief executive of Apple. Charles Koch is chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries.
The holidays are upon us, and families across the United States are coming together to celebrate. Yet for about 690,000 of our neighbors, colleagues and friends, this holiday season is marked by uncertainty and fear.
These are the “dreamers” — children of undocumented immigrants who are working, in countless ways, to make the United States stronger. Unless Congress acts, this holiday season might be the last one the dreamers get to spend in the country they love and call home.
We must do better. The United States is at its best when all people are free to pursue their dreams. Our country has enjoyed unparalleled success by welcoming people from around the world who seek to make a better life for themselves and their families, no matter what their backgrounds. It is our differences that help us to learn from each other, to challenge our old ways of thinking and to discover innovative solutions that benefit us all. To advance that prosperity and build an even stronger future, each successive generation — including, today, our own — must show the courage to embrace that diversity and to do what is right.
Politics newsletter
The big stories and commentary shaping the day.
We have no illusions about how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington, and we know that people of good faith disagree about aspects of immigration policy. If ever there were an occasion to come together to help people improve their lives, this is it. By acting now to ensure that dreamers can realize their potential by continuing to contribute to our country, Congress can reaffirm this essential American ideal.
This is a political, economic and moral imperative. The sooner Congress resolves this situation — on a permanent basis — the sooner dreamers can seize the opportunity to plan their lives and develop their talents.
This extraordinary set of circumstances has brought the two of us together as co-authors. We are business leaders who sometimes differ on the issues of the day. Yet, on a question as straightforward as this one, we are firmly aligned.
As a matter of both policy and principle, we strongly agree that Congress must act before the end of the year to bring certainty and security to the lives of dreamers. Delay is not an option. Too many people’s futures hang in the balance.
Both of our companies are fortunate to have dreamers on our teams. We know from experience that the success of our businesses depends on having employees with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It fuels creativity, broadens knowledge and helps drive innovation. For our nation to maximize progress and prosperity, we need more, not fewer, talented people at the table.
Another foundation of our country’s success is our consistent and equal application of the law. In a free nation, individuals must be able to trust that when our government makes a promise, it is kept. Having laws that are reliable is what gives people the confidence to plan their futures and to invest in their businesses, their communities and themselves.
The United States should not hold hard-working, patriotic people hostage to the debate over immigration — or, worse, expel them because we have yet to resolve a complex national argument. Most Americans agree. In fact, more than 8 in 10 Americans support a straightforward solution to allow dreamers to stay.
No society can truly flourish when a significant portion of its people feel threatened or unable to fulfill their potential. Nor can it prosper by excluding those who want to make positive contributions. This isn’t just a noble principle; it’s a basic fact, borne out through our national history.
Dreamers are doing their part. They have shown great faith in the United States by coming forward, subjecting themselves to background checks, and submitting personal and biometric data.
Now, the rest of us need to do our part. Congress should act quickly, ideally before year’s end, to ensure that these decent people can work and stay and dream in the United States. As a nation, we must show that the dreamers’ faith in our word and goodwill was not misplaced. And we should make clear that the United States welcomes their contributions as part of our national life.
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I agree with every word.
My only question: Why are Ol’ Charlie and his bro David (the “Koch Bros”) bankrolling a GOP that has been taken over by repulsive, dishonest, backward looking, fundamentally dumb, anti-American guys like Trump, Sessions, Bannon, Miller and their racist, White Nationalist, xenophobic, homophobic, religiously intolerant, exclusionary agenda of hate, fear, and loathing, which if followed to its logical conclusion, would destroy America and quite possibly the world?
Even though the Koch Bros are White, many of the employees they depend on to maintain their billionaire status aren’t White, Christian, straight, or U.S. citizens. They have no place in the Trump GOP’s vision of America. Trump and his band wouldn’t exempt the Koch Bros from their planned Armageddon just because of their Whiteness or past services to the party.
So, why keep supporting these heinous individuals and their anti-American agenda? The only reason we have this problem is because a minority of voters with incredibly poor judgement and total disregard for the common good, in an intentionally gerrymandered America, voted for the absurdly unqualified Trump rather than the clearly more qualified candidate. And, if the Kochs had supported Clinton, America would be closer to the place that Charlie Koch and Tim Cook describe in their article. Indeed, the whole costly, divisive, and totally unnecessary self-created “Dreamer Disaster” need never have occurred. What do you expect when you enable a racist xenophobe like Jeff Sessions (who doesn’t know much, if any, law either) to serve as our Attorney General?
At some point, decent folks (and, I’d be willing to admit the Kochs into that company even if I don’t agree with them on most things) who believe in America have to either 1) support Democrats, or 2) form an honest Third Party that excludes the White Nationalist haters. Today’s GOP is not that party.
Realizing that I actually have a fundamental area of agreement with the Koch Bros makes their overall conduct all the more inexplicable.
Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.
Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.
In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.
Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.
She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.
Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.
Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.
In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.
Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.
She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.
Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.
Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.
In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.
Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.
She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.
Maria Sacchetti reports in the Washington Post:
“Cruz Mendez, 30, made this trip in reverse when she was 18 years old, skipping her high school graduation to flee a neighborhood man who had harassed her in San Salvador. She was detained at the U.S.-Mexico border, released and allowed to join her brother in Virginia. Two months later, an immigration judge in Texas ordered her deported. Cruz Mendez says she never knew about the hearing.
In Fairfax, she was crowned beauty queen at a local Salvadoran festival and met Rene Bermudez, a hazel-eyed laborer who worked construction.
Steve was born in 2007, Danyca in 2012.
Late in 2013, police stopped Cruz Mendez for failing to turn on the lights on her minivan and charged her with driving without a license, an arrest that alerted federal agents to her old deportation order.
While President Barack Obama deported high numbers of undocumented immigrants during parts of his tenure, parents of American citizens with little to no criminal record were not priorities for expulsion. So officials released Cruz Mendez with orders to stay out of trouble and check in with them once a year.
But under President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, anyone here without papers can be expelled.
Interior deportations — of people already living in the United States, as opposed to those caught crossing the border — have risen 37 percent since Trump took office. Deportation arrests of non-criminals such as Cruz Mendez — many, like her, with children who were born in this country and are U.S. citizens — surged past 31,000 from inauguration to the end of September, triple the same period last year.
On the May morning when she was scheduled for her yearly check-in, Cruz Mendez lingered in the apartment, which she’d decorated with family photographs, Danyca’s art projects and Steve’s citizen-of-the-month award from elementary school.
She considered the possibility of skipping the check-in, aware of other longtime immigrants who had been deported after similar appointments. But she could not fathom life as a fugitive. Worried, Bermudez warned her that she was going to be late.
“Why are you trying to turn me over so fast?” Cruz Mendez snapped in Spanish.
She eventually walked into the immigration agency’s Fairfax office, accompanied by advocates and loved ones. Agents took her into custody as her supporters shouted.
For a month, her husband and lawyers fought to free her. Steve tried, too, writing letters to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were full of pleas and questions.
“Plz don’t deport my mom,” one of the letters said.
Who will take me to the doctor, the dentist? Who will take care of me and my sister? Who will I live with?
It didn’t work. On June 14, they sent her back. Bermudez and the kids filled a giant cardboard box with her dresses and shoes, pots and pans, and placed it by the front door, waiting for a courier to take it away.
Steve Bermudez, 10, wrote immigration officials in May to ask them not to deport his mother. For a month, Cruz Mendez’s husband and lawyers fought to free her and stop the deportation. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Steve looks out the window of the bedroom he used in his mother’s childhood home in El Salvador. The sign advertises fruit and vegetables his family sells. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
‘How can I go?’
Deportations can shatter a family or a marriage. In one study of the aftermath of six immigration raids, family income dropped an average of 70 percent. Another study, of U.S.-born Latino children, found that those whose parents had been detained or deported experienced significantly higher post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms than their peers.
“That child’s more likely to be poor. They’re more likely to be depend on public benefits,” said Randy Capps, U.S. research director for the Migration Policy Institute. “And then psychologically, you just don’t know. There could be an immediate impact; it could be a long time before that psychological impact shows up.”
In the Falls Church apartment, Steve and Danyca cried all the time after Cruz Mendez was deported. No one wanted to eat.
. . . .
Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.
Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.
In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.
Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.
She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.“
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Read Maria’s entire story of this grotesque failure of responsible government, common sense, and human decency at the link!
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE
What kind of country abuses its youth — our hope for the future — this way? What kind of county wastes its human capital and potential in this manner? What kind of country empowers leaders who are intentionally cruel, immoral, dishonest, and stupid? What kind of country intentionally turns valued friends and positive contributors into potential disgruntled enemies?
This is the way that a once great nation transforms itself into an “overstuffed banana republic!”
But, it’s not yet too late to change the grim vision of “Christmas Future” being promoted by Trump, Sessions, Kelly, Homan, Bannon, Miller, and their cronies. We can resist the horrible policies of the Trump Administration in the courts of law and the courts of public opinion! Ultimately, totally unqualified officials like Trump, Sessions, and their White Nationalist cronies — who are plotting the end of America as we know it — can be defeated at the ballot box and removed from office.
But, there will come a “point of no return” when the damage done by these corrupt individuals and their enablers (both willing and unwitting) cannot be undone! Are we as smart, human, and capable of leaving behind selfishness and embracing decency and human kindness as Ebineezer Scrooge? Or will the Ghost prove to be the Prophet in this version of the Christmas Carol?
“Jeff Sessions’s memory works in mysterious ways. He has “no clear recollection” of the March 2016 meeting where George Papadopoulos offered to set up a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin — but the attorney general does remember shooting down the campaign aide’s unseemly suggestion.
Or, so Sessions tells the House Judiciary Committee.
In October, Sessions testified to the Senate that he did not have any “continuing exchange of information” with Russian operatives — and that he wasn’t “aware of anyone else [on the Trump campaign] that did.” Weeks later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed
“Papadopoulos’s confession to the crime of lying to the FBI. In that written statement, the former Trump campaign national security adviser claimed that he had told Sessions about “connections” he had that “could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin” in March of last year. In his testimony before Congress Tuesday, Sessions tried to account for this apparent discrepancy.
“I do now recall the March 2016 meeting at Trump Hotel that Mr. Papadopoulos attended, but I have no clear recollection of the details of what he said at that meeting,” Sessions explained. “After reading his account, and to the best of my recollection, I believe that I wanted to make clear to him that he was not authorized to represent the campaign with the Russian government, or any other foreign government, for that matter.”
Later, Sessions said more firmly, “At the meeting, I pushed back.”
So, the attorney general has no clear memory of the meeting, but has a vivid recollection of behaving admirably during it.
This isn’t the first time that Sessions’s memories of last year have failed him. In January, the attorney general testified to the Senate that he had not “been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day.” Months later, the Washington Post revealed that Sessions had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States multiple times during the 2016 campaign. Sessions responded to these revelations by insisting that he’d met with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in his capacity as U.S. senator (not as a Trump surrogate), and that they did not discuss the 2016 election. Sessions later conceded that it was “possible” that Trump’s positions on U.S.-Russia relations came up in his discussions with Kislyak.
Some Democrats have suggested that Sessions’s multiple false statements to Congress this year were conscious lies. The former senator responded to such charges with indignation Tuesday.
“My answers have not changed,” Sessions said. “I have always told the truth, and I have answered every question as I understood them and to the best of my recollection, as I will continue to do today … I will not accept and reject accusations that I have ever lied under oath. That is a lie.”
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Meanwhile, speaking to a friendly audience over at the Heritage Foundation, Gonzo treated the Russia investigation as a joke. Mary Papenfuss reports for HuffPost:
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“Attorney General Jeff Sessions had lawyers rolling in the aisles with a surprising string of Russian quips at the start of a speech he gave Friday.
Sessions was the keynote speaker at the National Lawyers Convention at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel hosted by the conservative Federalist Society.
He thanked the applauding crowd for welcoming him. Then, smiling mischievously, he added: “But I just was thinking, you know, I should ― I want to ask you. Is Ambassador Kislyak in the room? Before I get started ― any Russians?” As the laughs grew louder, he continued: “Anybody been to Russia? Got a cousin in Russia?” The audience roared.
The jarring jokes came just three days after Sessions was pressed in Congress on apparent discrepancies in his previous testimony about Trump associates’ meetings with Russians during the 2016 campaign.
Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., met with several members of Donald Trump’s campaign during the Republican National Convention, Kislyak and some Trump associates have revealed. Kislyak was widely believed a top spy recruiter.
Kislyak has said he discussed Trump’s policy positions during the campaign with Sessions, an early Trump supporter who was an Alabama senator at the time, The Washington Post reported.
But during his confirmation hearings to become attorney general ― before the Post report ― Sessions said he “never met with or had any conversations with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election.”
Sessions later recused himself from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the U.S. election.
Critics were stunned by Sessions’ attitude in the lawyers’ speech.
Sessions “still doesn’t get it” — he’s “in trouble,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) told Wolf Blitzer later on CNN.
“He’s not in trouble where he happened to be in places where there are Russians,” said Lieu, a member of the House Judiciary Committee who grilled Sessions this week. “He is in trouble because he had a nearly hour-long meeting with Ambassador Kislyak — also a spy — and then he failed to disclose the existence of that meeting under oath to the U.S. Senate. That’s why Jeff Sessions is in trouble.”
Blitzer noted that Kislyak “now says he spoke with so many Trump officials it would take him more than 20 minutes to name them all.”
To those of us who are familiar with his career, it’s probably no surprise that Jeff “Gonzo Apocalyoto” Sessions would make light of the real threat to our national security — Russia, Vladimir Putin, and his “easy marks” in the Trump Administration including Ol’ Gonzo — while trying to paint “Dreamers,” individuals with TPS status, refugees, asylum applicants, and other hard-working contributing members of the American community as a fake “security threat.”
It’s all part of the White Nationalist agenda to deflect attention from the “clear and present danger” they pose to our Constitution and our national security to a “dummied-up enemy” consisting mostly of persons who are here to help us as a country but, unfortunately for their sakes, aren’t straight, White Christians who vote GOP. In other words, they are outside Gonzo’s “zone of the chosen people” — those whom he considers “real” Americans. And, those whom Gonzo has determined to be “unworthy of protection” include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Democrats, Liberals, Muslims, women who seek abortions, immigration lawyers, those living in so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” and legal immigrants.
“In the story of our country, the Trump administration’s dismantling of the DACA program is a national tragedy that will be a source of confusion for generations to come. The program was one of the few compromises that the Obama administration made in attempt to right unjust, inhumane and outdated immigration laws. Our own history tells us that laws are fluid and change over time; they do not dictate morality, but are dictated by morality (or the lack thereof). It wasn’t until the 20th century, for example, that we saw women first granted the right to vote and the abolishment of Jim Crow laws.
The pervasive rhetoric around immigrants who received DACA and their families is predicated on an underlying judgement that their mere presence in this country is a crime. It is not: Being in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense.
Yet if a crime has been committed, someone must be responsible, right? If you qualify for DACA, it means that you were under a certain age when you came here, so you were too young to have committed a “crime.” You are a “good,” “acceptable,” “assimilated” one. But your parents are not. America will accept you — provisionally — but you must condemn the actions of your family members who brought you here.
“Divide and conquer.”
No wall has yet been built, no border yet drawn, no law yet written that overpowers the love of parents for their children. Let us celebrate and give thanks to the resilience of immigrant families who, despite all possible obstacles, find ways to survive, even thrive. Our laws and various languages may separate them, but united they stand.
Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist and filmmaker, and the CEO of Define American. In 2010, Vargas revealed his status as an undocumented immigrant. He has produced and directed his autobiographical documentary, “Documented,” broadcasted by CNN, and MTV’s White People.“
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One of the most offensive things that Sessions consistently does is to undervalue the contributions of immigrants, both documented and undocumented. This was particularly true in his slandering of “Dreamers.” They are America’s youth; we’re fortunate to have them!
The closely related idea of GOP White Nationalist restrictionists that “chain migration” is bad is equally insulting and totally wrong. Family immigration has contributed as much to America as has so-called “employment-based” immigration. Undocumented migrants have also contributed to our success, particularly our economic success.
Our real problem is with White Nationalists and restrictionists who insist on overly restrictive immigration policies that are unenforceable, expensive, corrosive, and against our national interests.
