WILL CLUELESS CLOWN COURTS ENDANGER PUBLIC HEALTH & SAFETY? 🤡🤡 — The Inevitable Spread of Coronavirus Is “Old News” & Poorly Designed & Mismanaged Immigration Courts Appear To Be a “High Risk” Potential Breeding Ground — Predictably, Dysfunctional EOIR Has No Contingency Plans In Place! — 100-Case “Master Calendars” in Mini-Courtrooms Bringing Old & Young, Infirm & Able, From Far & Near Together Under Threat Of In Absentia Deportation — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

NDPA stalwart Laura Lynch, Senior Policy Counsel @ AILA reports:

Flagging this new CNN article along with two letters from the NAIJ.

Letter from NAIJ to Acting Chief Immigration Judge Chris Santoro on the lack of guidance issued to EOIR staff, March 9, 2020

Letter from NAIJ to IJs to provide guidance on the immigration courts and COVID-19, March 9, 2020

CNN: Immigration judges want to know how to handle coronavirus, March 9, 2020

Immigration judges want to know how to handle coronavirus

By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

Updated 5:04 PM ET, Mon March 9, 2020

(CNN)The union representing immigration judges urged the Trump administration in a letter Monday to “immediately” implement steps to protect judges and their staff and provide guidance on how to proceed amid the coronavirus outbreak, which also has the potential to exacerbate the overwhelming backlog of pending cases.

The letter calls for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency within the Justice Department that oversees the nation’s immigration courts, to inform employees about the plan “as it relates to a potential pandemic,” noting that some immigration court functions “may not lend themselves to telework.”

“As you know, our work requires us to be in close contact with the public on a daily basis, often in very large numbers and groups,” wrote Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

She continued: “Beyond our own employees, the respondents who come before us may also be at high risk for developing serious illness. Because we order their appearance and they face the prospect of removal if they don’t appear, sick respondents and respondents vulnerable to serious illness will keep coming to court unless we take action.”

As concerns over the coronavirus ramp up, some government agencies, businesses and organizations have taken steps to try and prevent the spread of the disease by preparing for employees to telework, limiting travel and canceling gatherings.

In Monday’s letter, the union asked the Trump administration to consider measures such as waiving the appearance of some respondents, allowing for telephonic appearances and limiting in-court paper filings. The union is also recommending in an email to the workforce that judges keep bottles of hand sanitizer in the courtroom, use disinfecting wipes to clean surfaces and limit court attendance.

Any change in daily operations is critical in immigration court, which faces a pile-up of pending cases. Immigrants fighting deportation generally have a chance to make their case in court, where they can ask a judge to allow them to stay in the US by arguing they qualify for asylum or another legal option.

Last year’s US government shutdown, which resulted in some cases being postponed, exacerbated the long-standing issue and added to the backlog. There are more than 1 million pending cases before the immigration courts, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse or TRAC, which tracks immigration court data — resulting in cases being scheduled out years in advance.

TRAC estimated last year that between 80,000 and 94,000 immigration court hearings may have been canceled as a result of last year’s government shutdown. The only cases that moved forward during that time were those of immigrants in detention.

The concerns held among immigration lawyers Monday are reminiscent of the government shutdown.

Immigration attorneys are worried about the effect on the backlog of cases if judges, attorneys, and other stakeholders are out because of the illness.

“If this thing gets out of control, it’s always a problem when cases are canceled, given the backlog,” Lawrence K. Le Roy, an immigration lawyer based in Newark, said in reference to coronavirus.

John Leschak, an immigration attorney, had a hearing scheduled Monday at the Newark immigration court for a client seeking asylum in the United States. The judge was not in court and the hearing was postponed. It’s unclear whether the reason behind the judge’s absence was related to coronavirus.

“It’s unfortunate because it’s a case that’s been pending for a long time,” Leschak said. “We’re between a rock and a hard place.”

The coronavirus is also already impacting the operations of some federal courts across the US.

For example, a district court in Washington state and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from nine western states including Washington, altered some of the procedures as the virus continues to spread. Washington has seen at least 80 cases.

Unlike other courts, however, immigration courts fall under the executive branch, not the judicial branch.

Ariane de Vogue and Kevin Bohn contributed to this story.

Laura A. Lynch, Esq.

Senior Policy Counsel

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

Thanks Laura, my friend, for keeping us up to date. And, as always, thanks to Priscilla for her great reporting on the never-ending mess and continuing outages at EOIR.

When it comes to public service and professional court administration from “Headquarters,” “today’s EOIR is the pits.” And, that’s not a knock on Chief Judge Chris Santoro who is generally known as a “straight shooter” and a “problem solver.” I think that I’ve acknowledged before that he was always kind and supportive to me and helped me through some very difficult times in my career at Arlington. I’ll always be appreciative for that.

“Reading between the lines,” he was ordered by one of his “superior bozos” in EOIR’s ludicrous “chain of command” to issue the inane order and then to rescind it when everything “hit the fan.” Typical EOIR “march ‘em up the hill, then march ‘em down again nonsense,” that actually has an adverse effect on both internal morale and the public.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s time for those who know how screwed up and “maliciously mismanaged” this system is to “come out and join the resistance,” as others in our Round Table have done, some at considerable personal sacrifice (not me, of course — I was fortunate enough to be able and ready to retire from EOIR even before the current regime took over.) I have no doubt that someone with Chief Judge Santoro’s ample and diverse skill set could find employment in the private sector.

But, this “circus-like” incident raises deeper issues.

In what kind of “court system” are “judges” not allowed to post public notices issued by the CDC without saying “Captain May I?” The DOJ falsely claims that its “judges” are “policy officials.” Whoever heard of a “policy official” who couldn’t hang up a Government public health poster? This whole thing is an unbelievable farce! Why does it take a directive from “Headquarters” to rectify what should be a no brainer in any functioning court system?

And, what kind of “court system” (outside the military) reports to “headquarters.” You think that the U.S. District Courts in Washington called up John Roberts to see if it was OK to cancel trials because of a public health threat? I doubt it.

Why wasn’t NAIJ President Judge Ashley Tabaddor involved in the Coronavirus planning. She speaks for those “on the line” in contact with the public. Certainly, few issues could have a greater effect on “working conditions” than steps to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Why is the NAIJ forced to waste time complaining and going to such lengths when competent management would have involved them in advance planning months ago?

Imagine how much better this system would operate if it were run by real judges who hired professional court administrators to work for the public good, instead of maliciously incompetent clowns carrying out Stephen Miller’s fascist agenda?

As you know, I blame the Article IIIs and Congress for letting this deadly mockery of our Constitution and American Justice continue to operate — essentially to dehumanize, abuse, and sometimes kill. I trust the younger members of the NDPA, folks like Laura and her colleagues, and the next generations to see that the life-tenured judges and legislators who looked the other way and knowingly acted as enablers as human dignity, our Constitution, and the rule of law were trampled upon by a White Nationalist regime are held fully accountable in the “court of history.”

The “J.R. Five’s” toxically improper action in Wolf v. Cook County, skirting the rules to enable the regime’s illegal, racially motivated rewriting of the “public charge” rules to go into effect has been exposed for the outrageous politically biased action it is. It allows the regime to intentionally spread panic in ethnic communities, particularly targeting Hispanics, citizens, immigrants, and the undocumented, and to intimidate those who should be seeking health care advice from doing so. Nice public health policy. As if Coronavirus and other diseases know the difference between “documented” and “undocumented” humans. It’s likely that Roberts and his tone deaf cronies will have even more “blood on their hands” before this is over.

As I said on Courtside recently, in the future, we also need more courageous, scholarly, humane, and ethical Article III Judges — folks who will read the Constitution and stand up for individual rights and for human dignity — folks who understand as MLK once said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The current group of Article IIIs is a national disgrace (as a whole, although there are many notable exceptions, mostly among the U.S. District Court Judges who all too often get reversed by the CAs and the Supremes as their “reward” for “standing tall” for the rest of us and standing up for the fair application of the rule of law).

In the meantime, NAIJ President Judge Ashley Tabaddor is a national hero for standing up for the due process rights of all and having the courage to “speak truth to power” in these perilous times. Obviously, the unethical “decertification action” started by DOJ and EOIR is part of the effort to punish and silence her. Hang in there Ashley! We in the NDPA and the Round Table support and appreciate you and your tireless efforts!

Due Process Forever! Clown Courts 🤡& Complicit Article III Courts Never!

PWS

03-11-20

“POLITBURO COURTS” ARE CLOWN COURTS🤡🤡: ANOTHER IMMIGRATION JUDGE QUITS AFTER IMPROPER REGIME PRESSURE TO TILT RESULTS!

Andrew Naughtie
Political Reporter
The Independent

Hon. Charles Honeyman — Honorable Charles Honeyman
Retired U.S. Immigration Judge
Member, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

https://apple.news/A5ORx13cZQ3ar2fi70BcjJA

Andrew Naughtie reports for The Independent:

An immigration judge in Philadelphia has stepped down from the bench early citing pressure from the Trump administration, which he says is turning the Immigration Court into a “politburo rubber stamp”.

Speaking to the Philadephia Inquirer, Judge Charles Honeyman described how he left the bench earlier than he had planned after the government began taking a harder line on immigration and deportation cases.

“At some point I was just not comfortable,” he told the paper.

Judge Honeyman is now joining the immigration law firm of Solow, Isbell, & Palladino, which specialises in immigration cases. There, he will provide litigation advice to clients facing deportation.

Immigrants subject to removal cases often struggle to gain legal representation in the court system, with up to two thirds going into their cases without counsel – radically reducing their chances of remaining in the US.

‘Families belong together’ protests over Trump immigration policy

The Immigration Court system sits outside the judiciary and is governed instead by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. That means it is subject to direct political pressure from the administration, including instructions from the attorney general, whose interpretation of the law immigration judges are meant to follow.

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link.

Proud that Judge Honeyman is a member of the Round Table of Former Immigration Judges.

PWS

03-05-20

🤡🤡CLOWN COURT REPORT: As Due Process Goes Into “Death Spiral,” Regime Muzzles Immigration Judges!

Cristian Farias reports in The Atlantic:

For more than two years, immigration judges have been subject to a policy that more or less prevents them from performing an essential part of their civic duties: speaking publicly about their work.

Since September 2017, immigration judges and all other employees at the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review have been required to adhere to an onerous pre-approval process whenever they desire or are invited to speak publicly on any issue, immigration-related or not. I learned of the policy through a Freedom of Information Act request my colleagues made to the department, as part of an investigation I’ve been conducting on the intersection of free speech and U.S. border enforcement.

Read: The thousands of children who go to immigration court alone

It is not uncommon for government agencies to set rules on employee conduct and outside activities. But the perspective of immigration judges is particularly valuable to the public, especially one grappling with complicated questions about America’s immigration laws. In his 2019 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts commended American judges who, “without fanfare or acclaim,” take time to reach out to their communities in all sorts of public-education initiatives. As Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told Congress in 2018, immigration judges “help the community better understand our immigration courts and their function in the community, helping to demystify the system and bring transparency about our operations to the public.”

Although immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, they’re judges in the truest sense of the term, presiding over cases that have enormous consequences for asylum seekers or people facing removal from the U.S. The Trump administration appears determined to remove from the public’s view the very people the chief justice and Tabaddor believe play an essential role in promoting public confidence in the administration of justice. The Justice Department should heed their call—rescind its misguided policy and let judges speak.

In the 2017 memo, the official overseeing the work of immigration judges, James McHenry III, did acknowledge that “the public has become increasingly interested in hearing about, and understanding, what the agency does and specifically how Immigration Courts operate.” But the policy went on to severely restrict judges’ freedom to speak even in a personal capacity about these matters, requiring them to seek permission through the chain of command. “Supervisors will determine the capacity in which an employee is speaking,” McHenry’s memo stated, thus effectively eliminating a judge’s discretion to speak about immigration in public settings, even with a disclaimer that he or she was doing so in a personal capacity. Supervising judges and other senior employees have it even worse—they are simply forbidden from speaking at public events in a personal capacity at all.

Lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, where I’ve been conducting my investigation, believe that the policy violates the First Amendment, and in early January issued a letter asking the Justice Department to suspend it. Their reasoning was grounded in well-settled Supreme Court precedent. In the 1968 case Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court recognized that public employees’ “right to speak on issues of public importance” doesn’t vanish the moment they take a government job. For the government to restrain public employees’ ability to speak, the Supreme Court has said, the Constitution requires officials to show that their interest in restraining speech outweighs employees’ interest in speaking and the public’s interest in hearing what they have to say. “The Government must show,” Justice John Paul Stevens explained in a 1995 case, “that the interests of both potential audiences and a vast group of present and future employees in a broad range of present and future expression are outweighed by that expression’s ‘necessary impact on the actual operation’ of the Government.” That’s a heavy lift.

The Justice Department hasn’t officially responded to the lawyers’ letter. But in mid-January, McHenry’s office did reply in a way: It purported to reissue the 2017 memorandum, calling it “established policy,” and unveiled an online portal through which immigration judges may submit their speaking-engagement requests for approval. According to the department, the new portal was necessary “to provide for more certainty and clarity” for judges, an implicit acknowledgment that the earlier guidance was causing confusion among immigration judges. (The reissued policy hasn’t been made public, but a person familiar with it showed it to me.)

. . . .

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

Read Cristian’s complete article at the above link.

”The truth will set you free.” But, at EOIR, the truth will get you fired!

Given the due process and management disasters going on at EOIR, it’s not surprising that they want to silence the witnesses. What is surprising is that they have been getting away with it so far.

NOTE: Even prior to becoming the home of EOIR Headquarters, Bailey’s Crossroads had long reputation of being associated with the circus. However, more recent scholarship has cast doubt on those claims. According to this Washington Post article, Bailey’s Crossroads’ claimed association with the Ringling Bro’s Barnum & Bailey Circus might be as attenuated as EOIR’s claimed association with due process and fundamental fairness! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/05/19/history-at-the-crossroads/5da541c9-5aa4-49cc-83f9-7ecb49a1b12b/

However, what the article does correctly point out, and EOIR under the influence of the White Nationalist regime appears to have forgotten, is that Bailey’s Crossroads has a long history of being a vibrant community of industrious immigrants who made Northern Virginia into what it is today!

Due Process Forever; Clown Courts Never!

PWS

03-03-20

EOIR’S LATEST RIPOFF: As “Justice” In Immigration Court Becomes A “Clown Show,” The Price Of A Ticket to “The Big Top” Will Rise By Nearly 1000%!🤡🤡

https://www.axios.com/trump-immigrant-fee-fight-deportation-02cfcff7-147b-479f-88e8-6eaa4dbc29ba.html

Steph W. Kight — Steff W. Kight
Politics Reporter
AXIOS

Stef W. Kight reports for AXIOS:

The Justice Department wants to dramatically increase fees for immigrants trying to fight deportation— including nearly $1,000 to appeal an immigration judge decision, according to a proposed Executive Office for Immigration Review rule.

Between the lines: It currently costs around $100 for immigrants to begin to legally fight deportation orders. If implemented, the new rule would raise fees to at least $305 and as much as $975, depending on the appeal.

By the numbers: In the rule, the administration argues that the discrepancy between fees collected and the processing costs “has become more of a burden on the immigration adjudication system as aliens overall have begun filing more of these fee-based forms and motions.”

They estimate that immigrants appealing deportation orders given by an immigration judge cost taxpayers $27.6 million in FY 2018. The rule proposes that fees be raised so that immigrants cover the total cost, which is how the $975 fee came about.

What they’re saying: When hearings are set two or three years in advance, immigrants have time to save for the fees. But with many new immigration judges and a rise in fast-track cases, that may no longer possible, immigration lawyer Jeffrey Chase, a former judge and senior legal advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, told Axios

Former immigration judge Paul Schmidt, who retired in 2016, told Axios in an email the proposed rule is “outrageous.”
He said correcting errors through the appeals process is one of the most important government functions. “That’s particularly true when the public segment ‘served’ is generally limited income individuals and getting results correct could be ‘life determining.’”

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

Here’s my complete commentary on EOIR’s latest shady maneuver:

In a single word, “outrageous.”

As set forth in the notice, EOIR is an “appropriated agency.” It was never supposed to recoup its costs, nor does it need to.

Correcting errors on appeal is probably one of the most important functions the Government performs. That’s particularly true when the public segment “served” is generally limited income individuals and the getting results correct could be “life determining.”

Applications, as opposed to “appeals,” also serve a critical public function in insuring that those who qualify under our laws to remain in the U.S. are permitted to do so. That’s a “winner” for everyone.

The astronomical proposed fee increase is particularly absurd in the current context. EOIR is actually cutting corners and has reduced the quality and accuracy of its work product. Why should the public pay nearly 10X more for a rapidly deteriorating product?

Moreover, given the “captive” nature of the courts and the illegal and unethical interference in their operations by the Attorney General and other political operatives at the DOJ, the only chance at fair and impartial “justice” for many individuals is to petition the Article III Courts. That requires going through EOIR, even when EOIR’s biased and unfair adjudication procedures make the results inevitable. It’s called “required exhaustion of administrative remedies.”

Sure, folks can continue to seek “fee waivers.” But, I’ll bet that the procedures for those will become more bureaucratic and unduly restrictive, and that many will be improperly denied. How does someone with no money appeal a wrongful denial of a fee waiver? He or she can’t. They are denied justice!

That gets us to the real point here. In an era and an area of the law where “access to justice” is everything, this is another blatant attempt by the White Nationalist regime to restrict access to justice. In real world terms, the claimed cost savings (and we should never accept the regime’s often flawed and manipulated calculations) here are peanuts compared with the human interests at stake. The regime wastes more than this every week on unneeded and unauthorized walls that blow down in the wind and overpriced golf security for Trump.

As I said at the beginning, it’s outrageous.

PWS

02-28-20

“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

Dead Refugee Child Washes Ashore in Turkey — Stephen Miller Hopes To Kill More Refugees in The Americas

Stephen Miller & Wife — Mr. & Mrs. Stephen Miller Look Forward to Planning Together for More “Crimes Against Humanity” Targeting World’s Most Vulnerable Refugees

“KILLER ON THE ROAD” – EMBOLDENED BY THE COMPLICITY OF THE “ROBERTS’ COURT,” GOP ABDICATION OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT, & BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND VALUES, REGIME APPARENTLY PLANNING EXTRALEGAL MOVE TO KILL MORE OF THE MOST VULNERABLE REFUGEES – Refugee Women, Children, LGBTQ Community, Victims Of Government-Enabled Gangs Said To Among Targets of Miller/Trump White Nationalist “American Death Squads!”

“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah”

— From “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors (1971)

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Feb. 24, 2019

I have been getting “unverified hearsay” reports from Courtside readers and others across the country that an emboldened and now totally unrestrained Trump regime actively is planning an all-out extralegal, extrajudicial onslaught against established asylum laws. It’s likely to claim the lives of many of the most vulnerable and deserving asylum seekers in the United States.

Predictably, this atrocious attack on humanity and human dignity is the “brainchild” of newly married neo-fascist White Nationalist hate monger Stephen Miller. Although unconfirmed, these reports have come from diverse enough sources and sound so consistent with the regime’s nativist, xenophobic approach to asylum that I, for one, give them credence. It’s time to start sounding the alarm for the regime’s latest vile assault on the rule of law and our common humanity!

I have gleaned that there is a 200-page anti-asylum screed floating around the bowels of the regime’s immigration bureaucracy representing more or less the nativist version of the “final solution” for asylum seekers. The gist of this monumental effort boils down along these lines:

[W]ould ban the grant of asylum claims involving PSGs defined solely by criminal activity, terrorist activity, persecutory actions, presence in country with generally high crime rates, attempted recruitment by criminal, terrorist, persecutors, perception of wealth, interpersonal disputes which government were not aware of or involved in and do not extend countrywide; private criminal acts which government was not aware of and do not extend countrywide; status as returned from U.S. and gender. Note the inclusion of “gender” at the end.

Thus, in one “foul swoop” the regime would illegally: 1) strip women and the LGBTQ community of their decades-long, hard-won rights to protection under asylum laws; 2) eliminate the current rebuttable regulatory “presumption of countrywide future persecution” for those who have suffered past persecution; 3) reverse decades of well-established U.S. and international rulings that third party actions that the government was unwilling or unable to protect against constitute persecution; and 4) encourage adjudicators to ignore the legal requirement to consider “mixed motivation” in deciding asylum cases.

There is neither legal nor moral justification for this intentional distortion and rewriting of established human rights principles. Indeed, in my experience of more than two decades as a judge at both the appellate and trial levels, a substantial number, perhaps a majority, of the successful asylum and/or withholding of removal claims in Immigration Court involved non-governmental parties and/or gender-based “particular social groups.” They were some of the clearest, most deserving, and easiest to grant asylum cases coming before the Immigration Courts.

At the “pre-Trump” Arlington Immigration Court, many of these cases were so well-documented and clearly “grantable” that they were “pre-tried” by the parties and moved up on my docket by “joint motion” for “short hearing” grants. This, in turn, encouraged and rewarded multiparty cooperation and judicial efficiency. It was “due process with efficiency, in action.”

Consequently, in addition to its inherent lawlessness, cruelty, and intentional inhumanity, the regime’s proposed actions will stymie professional cooperation between parties and inhibit judicial efficiency. This is just one of many ways in which the regime has used a combination of wanton cruelty and “malicious incompetence” to artificially “jack up” the Immigration Court backlog to over 1.3 million pending and “waiting” cases, even with the hiring of hundreds of additional Immigration Judges.

In a functioning democracy, with an independent judiciary, staffed by judges with knowledge, integrity, and courage, you might expect a timely judicial intervention to block this impending legal travesty and humanitarian disaster as soon as it becomes effective. But, as Justice Sotomayor recently pointed out in a blistering dissent, Chief Justice Roberts and his four GOP colleagues appear to have “tilted” in favor of the regime.

They can’t roll over and bend the laws fast enough to “greenlight” each new immigrant-bashing gimmick instituted by the regime. Moreover, as I’m sure is intended, once these new anti-asylum regulations are railroaded into force, the USCIS Asylum Offices will deny “credible fear” in nearly all cases, thus preventing most asylum applicants from even getting a day in court to properly challenge the regulations. All this will happen while the life-tenured Article III Courts look the other way.

For Stephen Miller, the coming Armageddon for defenseless asylum seekers must represent the ultimate triumph of fascism over democracy, hate over reason, and racism over tolerance. Miller was recently quoted in a New Yorker article about how screwing asylum applicants, and presumably knowing that they and their families would suffer and die, be tortured, or be otherwise harmed by his unlawful acts, was, in effect, his “life’s dream.” “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life,” said Miller after a meeting in which he had promoted a fraudulent “Safe Third Country Agreement” with El Salvador, a country he acknowledged was without a functioning asylum system.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/stephen-miller-immigration-this-is-my-life.html.

It appears that even Miller’s forlorn “love life” has taken an upturn. Although the Trump Administration has been a “coming out party” for racists, White Nationalists, and White Supremacists of all stripes, the “hater dater circuit” has remained somewhat “restricted.” Evidently, not everyone “gets off” on the chance to get “up close and personal” with “wannabe war criminals.”

Nevertheless, in the middle of all the suffering he has caused, Miller finally found somebody who apparently hates and despises humanity just as much as he does, in Vice Presidential Press Secretary Katie Waldman. They were recently married at the Trump Hotel in D.C. with the “Hater-in-Chief” himself attending the festivities. How can America “get any greater,” particularly if you have the good fortune not to be a refugee condemned to rape, torture, abuse, family separation, beatings, disfiguration, burning, cutting, extortion or other horribles by this cruel, scofflaw, and “maliciously incompetent” regime?

54 NGOs DECLARE EOIR A DUE PROCESS DISASTER AREA, URGE CONGRESS TO CREATE INDEPENDENT ARTICLE I COURT — Round Table of Former Immigration Judges Among Groups Seeking Change — Join AILA’S “Twitterstorm” Today (Wednesday)

Hi Local Asylum Liaisons-

Today AILA, the American Immigration Council, and 52 additional organizations sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to establish an independent immigration court! This letter was sent in advance of tomorrow’s twitterstorm that aims to bring attention to the dysfunction in the immigration court system and call for reform.

Asks:

Please amplify this letter on social media.

Twitter: You can retweet AILANational’s tweet or use some of the sample tweets below.

·          Click to tweet: Case-completion quotas force immigration judges to rush through cases, often at the expense of due process. This assembly-line justice is unacceptable. Read the letter @AILANational & others sent to Congress calling for independent courts. http://ow.ly/mV3730qiMW5

·          Click to tweet: The Trump administration’s certification decisions have undermined due process and weakened protections for asylum seekers. Read more in this letter @AILANational and over 50 orgs sent to Congress. #JudicialIndependence http://ow.ly/mV3730qiMW5

·          Click to tweet: Due process and #JudicialIndependence should never be sacrificed in the name of political expediency. Read the letter @AILANational sent with over 50 other orgs calling for the establishment of an independent immigration court. http://ow.ly/mV3730qiMW5

Sample LinkedIn/Facebook Post: Please share AILA’s Facebook post or use sample post below.

Due process and judicial independence should never be sacrificed in the name of political expediency. Read the letter AILA National sent with 50 other organizations calling for the establishment of an independent immigration court. http://ow.ly/mV3730qiMW5

Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday (2/19) from 3pm – 4pm ET to participate in a Twitterstorm hosted by AILA, NIJC, and Human Rights First.

You can share tweets from our social media toolkit or craft your own using the hashtag #JudicialIndependence. Looking forward to seeing you on Twitter!

Thank you! -Laura

Also ICYMI –last week a group of Senators accused the Department of Justice of politicizing the immigration courts in a letter to Attorney General Barr. Read more here.

Laura A. Lynch, Esq.

Senior Policy Counsel

Direct: 202.507.7627 I Email: llynch@aila.org

American Immigration Lawyers Association

Main: 202.507.7600 I Fax: 202.783.7853 I www.aila.org

1331 G Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005

Here’s the link to our letter:

NGOLTREOIR20021838

DUE PROCESS FOREVER!

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

PWS

02-19-20

U.S. CENSUS BUREAU CONFIRMS WHAT MANY OF US ALREADY KNOW: Trump Regime’s White Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant Policies Are As Stupid & Counterproductive As They Are Vile!

Marissa J. Lang
Local Reporter
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/us-population-will-decline-faster-without-steady-immigration-census-report-says/2020/02/13/1ccff6d6-4ea7-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html

Marissa J. Lang

Feb. 13, 2020 at 8:15 p.m. EST

Limiting immigration over the next four decades would do little to stop the racial diversification of the United States — but it could push the country into a population decline, according to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

For the first time in a decade, the federal agency gamed out how varying degrees of immigration could impact the U.S. population in terms of growth, age and racial diversity and its labor force.

Its conclusions, experts said, underscore the important role immigrants play in keeping the U.S. population trending upward.

“We desperately need immigration to keep our country growing and prosperous,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the Census numbers this week. “The reason we have a good growth rate in comparison to other developed countries in the world is because we’ve had robust immigration for the last 30 to 40 years.”

Virginia poised to help undocumented immigrants get driver’s licenses

The Census compared population estimates based on immigration levels from 2011 to 2015 and ran several “what if” scenarios to see how changing the flow of immigrants could impact the population as a whole.

Analysts compared the status quo with a “high immigration” scenario in which immigration would increase by about 50 percent; a “low immigration” scenario in which immigration would decline by about 50 percent; and a “zero immigration” scenario that demonstrates what would happen if immigration ground to a complete stop.

Immigration fluctuations between now and 2060 could make the difference of as many as 127 million people in the U.S. population, the Census found.

If immigration declines by 50 percent, the United States would still add about 53 million people over the next four decades, the report says.

But if immigration is stopped altogether, the population would stall out in 2035, after which it would slide into a decline. By 2060, under a zero-immigration scenario, the Census found the population could reach a low of 320 million people with a large and rapidly aging senior population.

The population of American seniors — aged 65 and older — is expected to surpass the population of children under the age of 18 in every scenario, though higher immigration patterns would delay the inevitable: In the zero-immigration plot, seniors outpace children by the year 2029; in the high-immigration pattern, seniors don’t overtake children until 2045.

Immigration has, of course, been shaped by the policies and rhetoric of President Trump, whose rise to power in 2016 and subsequent immigration policies are not accounted for in the Census report.

Last month, the president added six countries to his administration’s travel ban list, which already prohibited nearly all citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea from immigrating to the United States.

The new ban, which takes effect on Feb. 22, would bar immigrants from Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country — as well as Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan. It would also prevent people from Tanzania and Sudan from applying for the visa lottery, which issues up to 50,000 visas annually to countries with historically low migration to the United States.

Nigerian official expressed confidence country will be dropped from U.S. travel-ban list

Most of the people affected by the policy hail from predominantly black and Muslim nations, a fact that has prompted Democrats and other critics to call the ban an exercise in racism and xenophobia.

But according to census data, eliminating all forms of immigration altogether would not prevent the United States from becoming increasingly nonwhite.

“The fastest-growing racial group in this country is people who identify as multiracial,” Frey said.

Without any new immigrants coming to the United States, the non-Hispanic white population would still fall by about 17 percent over the next four decades, the Census reports. That means that by 2060, white people would make up just barely more than half of the country — 51 percent, with that number expected to decline further in the future.

In all other scenarios, the United States is projected to become majority-minority well before then: by 2041, if immigration increases; by 2045, if immigration remains constant; and by 2049, if immigration is cut in half.

Among young people below age 30, the change is more rapid, and is expected to tip the scales in this decade.

“You could stop immigration tomorrow, and this country would still become more racially diverse,” Frey said.

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

It would make more sense if we had a thoughtful, honest Government that worked to achieve the full potential of inevitable immigration rather than fighting a costly, rancorous, counterproductive, and ultimately fruitless “war” against that which made America great in the first place.

The latest regime “scam on America:” sending “elite Border Patrol Tactical Squads” (who obviously lack any real, meaningful law enforcement assignment) to “sanctuary cities” to round up more undocumented individuals to aimlessly throw into a failing and mismanaged “court” system that’s already backed up for years. There has to be a more intelligent and efficient way to prioritize and conduct immigration enforcement.

“We can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are in the process of doing that on many fronts), but it won’t stop human migration.”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-15-20

THE “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” HAS FALLEN FOR BILLY BARR’S LATEST “CON JOB” HOOK, LINE & SINKER — But YOU Shouldn’t — Bess Levin @! Vanity Fair Decodes Billy’s Real Message to His Don: “Let [me] turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!“ — Plus, My Bonus “Friday Essay” — “Don’t Believe A Word Billy Barr Says!”

Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/william-barr-trump-doj-tweets

Bess writes:

Even before he was hired as Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr made it clear that he would be acting as the president’s lackey first and the chief lawyer for the United States second, having auditioned for the role by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department calling the Russia inquiry “fatally misconceived” and describing Robert Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible.” Since then, Barr has told Congress it’s perfectly okay for the president to instruct aides to lie to investigators, suggested that Mueller’s report fully exonerated Trump, which of course it did not, and attempted to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s impeachment proceedings.

Now, if it were up to Barr, he’d happily carry on doing the president’s dirty work, but for one problem: Trump, with his flapping yap and quick trigger finger, has been making it a little too obvious that the DOJ, in its current form, exists to punish his enemies and spare his friends. The most recent example of this, of course, came this week, when the president tweeted, at 1:48 a.m., that the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for his longtime pal Roger Stone was “horrible,” “very unfair,” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Then, after Barr’s DOJ intervened with a new filing calling for a much lighter sentence—which prompted the four prosecutors on the case to withdraw from it—the president tweeted his thanks, congratulating the attorney general on getting involved in matters relevant to his personal interests.

For many people long aware of Barr’s status as a boot-licking hack, this was a bridge too far. The calls for him to resign or be impeached were swift. And they got so bad that on Thursday, the attorney general felt compelled to sit down with ABC News and send the message to the president that if he’d like the DOJ to continue to do his dirty work, he needs to stop tweeting about it. Do criminals tell their social-media followers “Check out this sweet scam I just pulled”? No! Of course, rather than stating directly that the president’s penchant for telling the world about the many ways he’s corrupted the government have made it difficult for that corruption to continue, Barr had to pretend his comments were all about ensuring the DOJ’s independence, which would be a funny, not-at-all-believable thing for him to start caring about now.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody….whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president,” Bill Barr tells @ABC News.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

http://

abcn.ws/39yd9bE

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” Barr insisted to ABC News chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. “Whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. I’m gonna do what I think is right. And you know…I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.” Just in case that extremely obvious hint was lost on its intended audience, Barr added: “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Maybe it’s not the tweets damaging his integrity but the nakedly partisan and quasi-legal decisions he’s made on the tweeter’s behalf? Just a thought.

AG Bill Barr: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” He says Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.” via @ABC @PierreTABC @alex_mallin

Asked about the decision to reverse the sentencing recommendation for Stone, Barr insisted that it definitely had nothing to do with the guy being a longtime friend of Trump’s, claiming that he came to the unbiased conclusion on his own that the seven-to-nine-years call was excessive and that he was planning to file an update even before Trump tweeted about it being “horrible and unfair.” (He was not asked about the NBC News report that he additionally removed a U.S. attorney from her post for failing to punish Trump’s enemy Andrew McCabe, or that the Justice Department also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for convicted criminal and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.)

Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long. “Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.

Barr also told ABC he was “a little surprised” that the entire Stone prosecution team had resigned from the case—and one from the DOJ entirely—which presumably has something to do with the fact that after using your department to do the president’s bidding for so long, you sometimes forget that other people will take issue with such behavior.

Asked if he expected Trump to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr responded: “I hope he will react.”

“And respect it?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Barr said. You hear that, Mr. President? Let the man turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!

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

DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

Even smart folks like The NY Times’ David Leonhardt are babbling about, perhaps, giving Billy “the benefit of the doubt.” Come on, man!

As Bess Levin points out, Barr’s faithfully been doing Trump’s “dirty work” for him since even before he set foot inside the DOJ again. It’s not like he’s suddenly had a “moral awakening” or discovered human decency.

No, Trump is the “unitary Executive” that Billy and some of his GOP righty neo-fascists have always salivated over. But, understandably he’d prefer more privacy as he deconstructs the DOJ and undermines fair and impartial justice, including, of course, further trashing the Immigration Courts that, incredible as it might seem in a country that actually has a written Constitution supposedly guaranteeing Due Process to “all persons,” belong exclusively to him.

Remarkably, and quite stunningly to anyone who has actually studied the law, the Article III Courts, all the way up to the feckless Supremes, have gone along with this absurd charade. You get the message: Immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers aren’t really “persons” at all. They have been dehumanized by the regime and “Dred Scottified” by the Article IIIs.

There is no particular legal rationale or justification for this ongoing miscarriage of justice. It’s just a matter of enough folks in black robes being too cowardly or self-absorbed, or maybe in a few cases too ignorant, to stand up for the Constitutional and human rights of the most vulnerable among us.

To paraphrase an expression from the world of religion: “What would Jesus think about this blindness to human suffering?” Nothing good, I’m sure!

If he’s actually out there among us today, he’s undoubtedly among those suffering in the regime’s “New American Gulag” or waiting in squalor along the Mexican border for a “fixed hearing” that’s probably never going to happen anyway. I know where he isn’t: among the sign waving crazies shouting hateful slogans glorifying human rights abuses at the “hate fests” z/k/a “Trump rallies!”

In Immigration Court, the conflicts of interest and threats to human decency aren’t just “implied” or “apparent.” They are very real, and they are destroying real human lives, even killing innocent folks, every day.

And, unlike U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, whose life tenure allows her to “ignore the noise and do what she thinks is right” (as Trump’s GOP toadies love to point out), Immigration Judges are “wholly owned commodities” of Billy and the regime: disposable, subservient, and told to “follow orders.” They can’t even schedule their own cases without political interference, let alone apply the law in a way that conflicts with Billy’s unethical precedents or those entered by his “wholly owned appellate body,” the Board of Immigration Appeals!

The latter has recently gone out of its way to show total subservience to the regime’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, anti-due-process, anti-immigrant agenda. Indeed, they have even drawn the ire of at least one conservative GOP-appointed Article III Judge by contemptuously disobeying a direct court order in favor of a footnote in a letter from the Attorney General.

This remarkable, yet entirely predictable, event was first highlighted in “Courtside.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/25/contempt-for-courts-7th-cir-blasts-bia-for-misconduct-we-have-never-before-encountered-defiance-of-a-remand-order-and-we-hope-never-to-see-it-again-members-of-the-board-must-count-themse/

It was also the subject of a highly readable analysis by my good friend and NDPA leader Tess Hellgren, at Innovation Law Lab, certainly no stranger to scofflaw behavior by EOIR and “go along to get along” complicity by Article IIIs. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

More recently, EOIR’s trashing of judicial norms under Billy Barr has been highlighted in another fine article in CNN by Professor Kimberly Wehle, herself a former DOJ prosecutor.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/12/a-conservative-judge-draws-a-line-in-the-sand-with-trump-administration-114185

“Shocking” as this professional malpractice and contempt for the justice system might be to those journalists and former DOJ employees who haven’t been paying attention, it’s nothing new to those of us involved in immigration. For the last three years, the regime has been actively and unethically “gaming” the unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system against the very migrants and asylum seekers whose legal rights and human dignity they are actually supposed to be protecting! How is this “just OK?”

Feckless Article III Courts have largely “gone along to get along,” although they might be showing less patience now that the scofflaw actions and disrespectful attitudes promoted by Billy and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions are directed at them personally rather than just screwing vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers.

While it’s nice that at least some Article III Judges are finally reacting to being “given the finger” by Barr, Trump, and their gang of White Nationalist thugs, outrage at their own disrespectful treatment pales in comparison with the death, torture, rape, extortion, and the other parade of horribles being inflicted daily on vulnerable migrants by the Immigration “Courts” and the human rights criminals in the Trump regime while the Article IIIs fail to step in and save lives.

In the end of the day, as history will eventually show, human lives, which are the key to the “rule of law,” will prove to be more important than “hurt feelings” among the Article III “lifers” or the kind of legal gobbledygook (much of it on “jurisdiction” which often translates into “task avoidance”) that Article IIIs, particularly those from the right wing, like to throw around to obscure their legal tone-deafness and moral failings from their fellow humans.

Due Process Forever; Complicity in the Face of Tyranny Never!

PWS

02-14-20

DEM SENS BLAST REGIME’S CONTINUING DUE PROCESS FARCE IN IMMIGRATION COURTS! – Round Table Member Hon. Charles Honeyman Takes to Airwaves to Call For Independent U.S Immigration Court!

https://www.wabe.org/senate-democrats-accuse-justice-department-of-politicizing-immigration-courts/

Joel Rose reports for NPR:

Senate Democrats Accuse Justice Department Of Politicizing Immigration Courts

JOEL ROSE • FEB 13, 2020

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.(left), and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter accusing the Trump administration of politicizing the immigration courts.

CREDIT J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP

Top Senate Democrats warn that the Trump administration is deliberately undermining the independence of immigration courts.

In a bluntly-worded letter to the Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, the senators accuse the administration of waging an “ongoing campaign to erode the independence of immigration courts,” including changing court rules to allow more political influence over decisions, and promoting partisan judges to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

“The administration’s gross mismanagement of these courts,” they write, threatens to do “lasting damage to public confidence in the immigration court system.”

The letter was sent Thursday to Attorney General William Barr. It was signed by nine Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. They are requesting extensive information about the department’s hiring practices for trial-level and appellate judges, among other documents.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

The senators’ concerns echo those voiced by former and current immigration judges, including the head of the union representing those judges. Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last month that immigration courts should no longer be overseen by the Justice Department.

“The only real and lasting solution is the establishment of an independent Immigration Court,” Tabaddor wrote in her testimony. “It must be free from the constantly changing (often diametrically opposed) politicized policy directives of the Department of Justice.”

The judge’s union has pushed back against productivity quotas for immigration judges, which were announced in 2018. The union also opposed new Trump administration rules that gave more power to the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a political appointee.

The Trump administration, for its part, has moved to decertify the judges’ union.

Immigration courts face a massive backlog of more than a million cases. And there’s wide agreement that the court system needs reform. But not everyone believes that removing immigration courts from the Justice Department is the right approach.

“The attorney general and his subordinates are actively working to remedy this problem, by providing the needed resources to the immigration courts,” wrote Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last month. “Restructuring the immigration courts … will almost certainly not address the core problems that are facing those courts,” Arthur added.

At a time when caseloads are surging, some immigration judges are quitting, citing frustration and exhaustion. Judge Charles Honeyman retired from the Philadelphia Immigration Court in January after 24 years on the job.

“I would want future administrations and the Congress to think of immigration judges as judges, literally, and give them the autonomy and the independence and the confidence to make decisions without political interference or overreach,” he said in an interview with NPR’s Noel King.

“The only way to do that is to create an independent court where the judge makes a decision and the judge isn’t afraid of how many cases he has to complete for the year or whether some political actor is going to be looking over his shoulder and say, I don’t agree with that decision; we’re going to find a way to put pressure on you,” Honeyman said.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

WABE brings you the local stories and national news that you value and trust. Please make a gift today.

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

Here’s the letter:

https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020-02-13%20Ltr%20to%20AJ%20Barr%20re%20independence%20of%20immigration%20courts%20(004).pdf

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

Thanks, Charlie, my friend, for speaking out so forcefully for Due Process and justice in our Immigration Courts!

After seeing how Trump attacked an Article III life-tenured U.S. District Judge this week, does anyone seriously think that an Immigration Judge, a mere civil servant, who ruled against the Trump/Miller White Nationalist agenda in a case that came to Trump’s attention would retain their job under Billy Barr? After seeing how Trump treated some career civil servants and military officers after they “spoke truth to power” does anyone seriously think that Billy Barr of any other regime sycophant would defend fair and impartial decision making that Trump didn’t like?

No way! So how can ANY foreign national get a fair hearing before a “fake court system” where the prosecution authorities retain the right to change any result that goes against them and to remove subordinates who are supposed to be exercising independent judgement from their jobs if they don’t like the result.

The entire Immigraton Court system is and has been for some time now a cruel, unconstitutional hoax. Why haven’t the Article III Courts, whose judges are protected by life tenure, done their duty by stepping in and putting an end to this unconstitutional dysfunctional mess that is destroying innocent lives and ruining futures?

PWS

02-13-20

THE DOJ’S NEW TITLE UNDER BILLY BARR: “HOOKERS FOR TRUMP” – “Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus” – Why “There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/11/why-bill-barrs-doj-replaced-catholic-charities-with-hookers-jesus/

Dana Milbank writes in WashPost:

There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.

In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.

Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.

That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.

Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.

Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.

But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.

Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.

The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.

On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.

Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”

Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.

In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.

Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.

Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.

This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle.Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.

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

Barr’s inspirational lesson for new lawyers: Once you achieve fame, fortune, and protection from corrupt politicos and complicit judges, it’s virtually impossible to get your law license revoked for unethical performance. As long as you thumb your nose at the law and ethical rules right in public, right in front of judges, you’re essentially immune. The “rules” only apply to those poor suckers at the bottom of the “legal totem pole.”

This is actually a fairly new development under the Trump regime. In the past, even high-profile lawyers who violated their ethical obligations got zapped: John Mitchell, Dick Kleindienst, Bill Clinton(technically, he might have “surrendered his law license” in lieu of disbarment), Webb Hubbell, etc.

But, during the Trump regime, Federal Judges seem content to just “roll their eyes” at lies, false narratives, thinly veiled racist or religiously bigoted rationales for policy, and simply astounding conflicts of interest (how about running a biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Court” right in plain view?) streaming out of an ethics-free zone at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson was actually a “target” of Roger Stone’s contemptuous and openly threatening behavior. It will be interesting to see how she deals with the sudden reversal and baseless plea for mercy from Barr for this unrepentant and totally unapologetic criminal.

As if to resolve any doubts as to his contempt for America and democratic institutions, the cowardly “Bully-in-Chief” unleashed an unprovoked twitter tirade against Judge Jackson and the career prosecutors in the case. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/12/trump-stone-judge/

Perhaps predictability, this was followed by an impotent call by Senate Democrats for the uber corrupt Billy Barr to resign and for the equally corrupt and spineless Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to stop slithering around the Capitol and schedule an “investigative hearing” into improper political influence at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.” https://apple.news/Az2hAo6yqT8uKJSuAX26F1Q Don’t hold your breath, folks!

At the same time, former DOJ Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich was telling WashPost’s Greg Sargent that the conduct of Trump and Billy the Toady was an “existential threat to the institutions that most of us value, prize and have served.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/12/trump-openly-corrupts-doj-former-insider-sounds-alarm/. Right on with that!

This is not “normal.” This is not “right.” It’s time for those of us who still believe in American democracy to take a stand in November to remove Trump and the sociopathic element that he represents in our society from power. Otherwise, the “race to the bottom” will continue, unabated. And more innocent people will be hurt by or die because of this unprincipled, totally immoral lunatic.

PWS

02-12-20

MONDAY SATIRE: ANDY BOROWITZ ON SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): “PERSON WHO IS ALWAYS TROUBLED OR CONCERNED SHOULD GET DIFFERENT JOB, WORKPLACE EXPERTS SAY”

Andy Borowotz — Andy Borowitz
Political Satirist
The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/person-who-is-always-troubled-or-concerned-should-get-different-job-workplace-experts-say?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Borowitz_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Borowitz_021020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67c363f92a41245df49eb&cndid=48297443&esrc=right_rail_borowitz&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Borowitz

Person Who Is Always Troubled or Concerned Should Get Different Job, Workplace Experts Say

Andy BorowitzFebruary 10, 2020

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—An employee who regularly self-identifies as “troubled” or “concerned” would benefit from seeking a different job, leading workplace experts said on Monday.

Professor Davis Logsdon, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Workplace Health Institute, cited the case of a Maine woman who appeared to undergo a traumatic experience every time she was faced with a difficult decision at work.

“According to her own account, each decision followed an excruciating period of existential torment,” Logsdon said. “Any employee who finds decision-making this harrowing should clearly consider working somewhere else.”

Logsdon said that the woman’s frequent episodes of being troubled and/or concerned usually resulted in an unsatisfactory outcome.

“At the end of her nightmarish deliberation process, she lost the capacity for individual judgment,” he said. “She just went along with what everyone else in the office decided to do, regardless of the harm that such a decision might cause.”

Consequently, the researchers at the Workplace Health Institute concluded that any person who approaches his or her job with the levels of self-doubt and anxiety regularly exhibited by the Maine woman should find a new job that requires no decision-making whatsoever.

“In her current position, she is useless,” Logsdon said.

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

All too true! At least most of the other GOP toadies didn’t give it two seconds of thought before enthusiastically and boisterously selling out America. Why “beat around the bush” if you’re in the “Party of Putin” and “Moscow Mitch” has already told you how to vote to avoid a “public flogging?”

PWS

02-10-20

GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators & Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

Fernanda Echavarri
Reporter
Mother Jones

https://apple.news/AyKjNs5gOQJqIJ2_IeeQvcg

Fernanda Echavarri reports for Mother Jones:

“A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2;
PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face.

Eleven children and six adults—all of them from Central America, all of them in court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board government buses headed to immigration court in downtown San Diego, Kevlar-vested federal agents in tow. Like the dozens of families jam-packed into the lobby and the six other courtrooms, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, often for months, as part of the Trump administration’s controversial border policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols.

O’Connor has a docket full of MPP cases today, like every day. Before he gets to them, though, he quickly postpones a non-MPP case to January 2021, explaining to a man and his attorney that he simply doesn’t have time for them today, motioning to the families in the gallery. While he’s doing this, the little girl in front of me keeps asking her mom if she can put on the headphones that play a Spanish translation of the proceedings. A guard motions the little girl to be quiet.

For months, immigration attorneys and judges have been complaining that there’s no fair way to hear the cases of the tens of thousands of Central Americans who have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their claims inch through the courts. MPP has further overwhelmed dockets across the country and pushed aside cases that already were up against a crippling backlog that’s a million cases deep, stranding immigration judges in a bureaucratic morass and families with little hope for closure anytime in the near future.

I went last month to San Diego—home to one of the busiest MPP courts, thanks to its proximity to Tijuana and the more than 20,000 asylum seekers who now live in shelters and tent cities there—expecting to see logistical chaos. But I was still surprised at how fed up immigration judges like O’Connor were by the MPP-driven speedup—and by the extent to which their hands were tied to do anything about it.

Once O’Connor is done rescheduling his non-MPP case, he leans forward to adjust his microphone, rubs his forehead, and starts the group removal hearing. The interpreter translates into Spanish, and he asks if the adults understand. “SÃ,” they say nervously from the back of the courtroom. O’Connor goes down his list, reading their names aloud with a slight Spaniard accent, asking people to identify themselves when their names are called. He reprimands those who do not speak up loud enough for him to hear.

O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench in 2010, is known for being tough: Between 2014 and 2019, he has denied 96 percent of asylum cases. He explains to the migrants that they have the right to an attorney, although one will not be provided—there are no public defenders in immigration court. O’Connor acknowledges finding legal representation from afar is difficult, but he tells them it’s not impossible. He encourages them to call the five pro bono legal providers listed on a sheet of paper they received that day. The moms sitting in front of me have their eyes locked on the Spanish interpreter, trying to absorb every bit of information. Their kids try their best to sit quietly.

As he thumbs through the case files, O’Connor grows increasingly frustrated: None of them has an address listed. “The government isn’t even bothering to do this,” he grumbles. The documents for MPP cases list people’s addresses as simply “Domicilio Conocido,” which translates to “Known Address.” This happens even when people say they can provide an address to a shelter in Mexico or when they have the address of a relative in the United States who can receive their paperwork. “I’ve seen them do this in 2,000 cases since May,” O’Connor says, and the Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t even bothered to investigate.” He looks up at the DHS attorney with a stern look on his face, but she continues shuffling paperwork around at her desk.

O’Connor picks up a blue form and explains to the group that they have to change their address to a physical location. The form is only in English; many of the adults seem confused and keep flipping over their copies as he tells them how to fill it out. O’Connor tells them they have to file within a week—perhaps better to do it that day, he says—but it’s unclear to me how they could follow his exacting instructions without the help of an attorney. He points out other mistakes in the paperwork filed by DHS and wraps up the hearing after about 45 minutes. The families don’t know that’s typical for a first hearing and seem perplexed when it ends.

O’Connor schedules the group to come back for their next hearing in five weeks at 8:30 a.m. That will mean showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry at 4:30 a.m.; the alternative, he says, is being barred from entering the United States and seeking forms of relief for 10 years. “Do you understand?” he asks. The group responds with a hesitant “SÃ.”

The Trump administration designed MPP to prevent people like them from receiving asylum, and beyond that, from even seeking it in the first place. First implemented in San Diego in late January 2019 to help stem the flow of people showing up at the southern border, the policy has since sent somewhere between 57,000 and 62,000 people to dangerous Mexican cities where migrants have been preyed upon for decades. Their cases have been added to an immigration court that already has a backlog of 1,057,811 cases—up from 600,000 at the time when Obama left office—according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The skyrocketing immigration court backlog

View on the original site.

According to immigration judge Ashley Tabaddor, who spoke to me in her capacity as union president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, MPP has constituted a fundamental change to the way courts are run. DHS, she says, is “creating a situation where they’re physically, logistically, and systematically creating all the obstacles and holding all the cards.” The MPP program has left the court powerless, “speeding up the process of dehumanizing the individuals who are before the court and deterring anyone from the right to seek protection” All this while the Department of Justice is trying to decertify Tabbador’s union—the only protection judges have, and the only avenue for speaking publicly about these issues—by claiming its members are managers and no longer eligible for union membership. Tabaddor says the extreme number of cases combined with the pressure to process them quickly is making it difficult for judges to balance the DOJ’s demands with their oath of office.

Immigration attorneys in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego have told me they are disturbed by the courtroom disarray: the unanswered phones, unopened mail, and unprocessed filings. Some of their clients are showing up at border in the middle of the night only to find that their cases have been rescheduled. That’s not only unfair, one attorney told me, “it’s dangerous.” Central Americans who speak only indigenous languages are asked to navigate court proceedings with Spanish interpreters. One attorney in El Paso had an 800-page filing for an asylum case that she filed with plenty of time for the judge to review, but it didn’t make it to the judge in time.

As another lawyer put it, “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is designed to fail.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty People line up at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana in May 2019.

COURTROOM #4; PRESIDING: JUDGE PHILIP LAW

Down the hall, a Honduran woman I’ll call Mari stands up next to her attorney and five-year-old son, raises her right hand, and is sworn in.

Mari’s hearing isn’t much of a hearing at all. Stephanie Blumberg, an attorney with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, who is working the case pro bono, asks for more time because she only recently took the case; Judge Philip Law says he will consolidate the cases of mother and child into one; and he schedules her next hearing for the following week at 7:30 a.m., with a call time of 3:30 a.m. at the border.

Just as it’s about to wrap up, Bloomberg says her client is afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to know what is going to happen with me. I don’t want to go back to Mexico—it’s terrible,” Mari says in Spanish, an interpreter translating for the judge. “I have no jurisdiction over that,” Law says. “That’s between you and the Department of Homeland Security.” Law then turns to the DHS attorney, who says he’ll flag the case and “pass it along.”

While nine families begin their MPP group hearing, Mari tells me back in the waiting room that she and her son crossed the border in Texas and then asked for asylum. They were detained for two days and then transported by plane to San Diego, where she was given a piece of paper with a date and time for court and then released in Tijuana. She didn’t know anyone, barely knew where she was, and, trying to find safety in numbers, stuck with the group released that day. Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.

Mari’s voice gets shaky, and she tries to wipe the tears from her eyes, but even the cotton gloves she’s wearing aren’t enough to keep her face dry. I tell her we can end the conversation and apologize for making her relive those moments. She looks at her son from across the room and says she’d like to continue talking.

“I thought about suicide,” she whispers. “I carried my son and thought about jumping off a bridge.” Instead, she ended up walking for a long time, not knowing what to do or what would happen to them because they didn’t have a safe place to go.

“I haven’t talked to my family back home—it’s so embarrassing because of the dream I had coming here, and now look,” she says. “We’re discriminated against in Mexico; people make fun of us and the way we talk.” Her boy was already shy but has become quieter and more distrusting in recent months.

In the last year, I’ve spoken to dozens of migrants in border cities like Ciudad JuÃ¡rez and Tijuana who share similarly horrific stories. Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 public reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, and murder against asylum seekers sent to Mexico in the last year. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies is challenging MPP on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the “United States’ duty under international human rights law” not to return people to dangerous conditions.

“The system has not been set up to handle this in any way,” says Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of the groups listed on the pro bono sheet Judge O’Connor handed out earlier in the day. They’re the only ones with a WhatsApp number listed, and their phones are constantly ringing because “it’s clear that people don’t know what’s going on or what to expect—and they’re in fear for their lives,” Clark says. Still, her 8-person team working MPP cases can only help a small percentage of the people coming through the courtroom every day.

Later that afternoon, shortly after 5, two large white buses pull up to the court’s loading dock. Guards in green uniforms escort about 60 people out from the loading dock. Moms, dads, and dozens of little kids walk in a straight light to get on a bus. They are driven down to the border and sent back to Tijuana later that night.

A few days later, Mari’s attorney tells me that despite raising a fear of retuning to Mexico in court, US port officials sent Mari back to Tijuana that night.

COURTROOM #2; PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

I find myself back in O’Connor’s courtroom for his afternoon MPP hearings. This time, the only people with legal representation is a Cuban family who crossed in Arizona in July 2019 and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. This is their first time in court, and their attorney calls in from out of state.

Right away, O’Connor wants to address a different kind of clerical error from the one that bothered him earlier in the day—and one that he thinks matters even more. It involves the first document that DHS issues to “removable” immigrants, known as a Notice to Appear (NTA) form. Although the form allows agents to check a box to categorize people based on how they encountered immigration officials, O’Connor points out that in this case it was left blank—and that “this is fairly typical of the overwhelming majority of these cases.”

He isn’t the first or only judge to notice this; I heard others bring up inconsistent and incomplete NTAs. Border officials are supposed to note on the form if the people taken into custody are “arriving aliens,” meaning they presented at the port of entry asking for asylum, or “aliens present in the United States who have not been admitted or paroled,” meaning they first entered illegally in between ports of entry. Thousands of MPP cases have forms without a marked category. As far as O’Connor is concerned, that’s a crucial distinction. He believes that this Trump administration policy shouldn’t apply to people who entered the country without authorization—meaning countless immigrants who applied for MPP should be disqualified from the get-go.

In the case of the Cuban family, like dozens more that day, the DHS attorney filed an amended NTA classifying them as “arriving aliens.” O’Connor points out is not how they entered the United States. The DHS attorney is unphased by the judge’s stern tone and came prepared with piles of new forms for the other cases of incomplete NTAs. The family’s lawyer says maybe the government made a mistake. O’Connor, unsatisfied, interrupts her: “There was no confusion. I’ve seen 2,000 of theseâ¦the government is not bothering to spend the time.” After a lengthy back-and-forth, a testy O’Connor schedules the family to come back in three weeks.

O’Connor’s stance and rulings on this issue have broader implications. He terminated a case in October because a woman had entered the country illegally before turning herself in and wrote in his decision that DHS had “inappropriately subjected respondent to MPP.” He is among the loudest voices on this issue, saying that MPP is legal only when applied to asylum-seekers presenting at legal ports of entry—though it’s unclear to many lawyers what it might mean for their clients to have their cases terminated in this way. Would these asylum seekers end up in immigration detention facilities? Would they be released under supervision in the United States? Would they be deported back to their home countries?

Since MPP cases hit the courts last March, asylum attorneys have been critical of DHS for not answering these questions. I was present for the very first MPP hearing in San Diego and saw how confused and frustrated all sides were that DHS didn’t seem to have a plan for handling these cases. Now, almost a year later, little has changed.

Tabaddor, the union president, tells me that “there are definitely legal issues that the MPP program has presented” and that judges are having to decide whether the documents “are legally sufficient.” “The issue with DHS—frankly, from what I’ve heard—is that it seems like they’re making it up as they go,” she says.

Last week, Tabaddor testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and for the independence of immigration courts from the political pressures of federal law enforcement. There are approximately 400 immigration judges across more than 60 courts nationwide, and almost half of those judges have been appointed during the Trump era. (According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, dozens of judges are quitting or retiring early because their jobs have become “unbearable” under Trump.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, an immigrants’ rights supporter in Congress, argued during the hearing that the immigration courts are in crisis and the issue requires urgent congressional attention. “In order to be fully effective, the immigration court system should function just like any other judicial institution,” she said. “Immigration judges should have the time and resources to conduct full and fair hearings, but for too long, the courts have not functioned as they should—pushing the system to the brink.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty Asylum seekers in Tijuana in October

COURTROOM #1; PRESIDING: JUDGE SCOTT SIMPSON

“I don’t want any more court,” a woman from Guatemala pleads just before lunchtime. “No more hearings, please.”

Unlike many of the people who were there for their first hearing when I observed court in San Diego, this woman has been to court multiple times since mid-2019. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a lawyer, she tells Judge Scott Simpson. She’s had enough.

“We’ve reached a fork on the road, ma’am,” Simpson says in a warm, calm tone. “You either ask for more time for an attorney to help you or you represent yourself.”

“No, it’d be a loss since I don’t know anything about the law,” the woman responds, her voice getting both louder and shakier. Simpson explains to her again the benefits of taking time to find an attorney.

“It’s been almost a year. I don’t want to continue the case. I want to leave it as is,” she tells him. After more explanation from the judge, the woman says she’d like to represent herself today so that decisions can be made. Simpson asks what she would like to do next, and the woman says, “I want you to end it.”

This woman’s pleas are increasingly common. Tabaddor says MPP has taken “an already very challenging situation and [made] it exponentially worse.” The new reality in immigration courts “is logistically and systematically designed to just deter people from seeking or availing themselves of the right to request protection,” Tabaddor says.

After hearing the Guatemalan woman ask for the case to be closed multiple times, Simpson takes a deep breath, claps his hands, and says there are four options: withdrawal, administrative close, dismissal, or termination. He explains each one, and after 10 minutes the woman asks for her case to be administratively closed. The DHS attorney, however, denies that request. Simpson’s hands are tied.

The judge tells the woman that because DHS filed paperwork on her case that day, and because it’s only in English, that he’s going to give her time to review it, because “as the judge I don’t think it would be fair for you to go forward without the opportunity to object to that.” He schedules her to come back in a month.

“MPP is not a program I created,” he says. “That decision was made by someone else.”

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard.

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

“Malicious incompetence,” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” — it’s all there on public display in this deadly “Theater of the Absurd.”

Here, from a recent Human Rights Watch report on over 200 of those illegally returned to El Salvador without Due Process and in violation of the rule of law:

138 Killed;

70 Sexually abused, tortured, or otherwise harmed.

Here is the HRW report as posted on Courtside:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

Where, oh where, has our humanity and human decency gone?

And, how do spineless jurists on Article III Courts who continue to “rubber stamp” and overlook the disgraceful abrogation of Due Process and fundamental fairness going on in a grotesquely biased and mismanaged “court system” controlled by a White Nationalist, nativist regime look at themselves in the mirror each morning. Maybe they don’t.

Abuse of the most vulnerable among us might seem to them to be “below the radar screen.” After all, their victims often die, disappear, or are orbited back to unknown fates in dangerous foreign lands. Out of sign, out of mind! But, what if it were their spouses, sons, and daughters sent to Tijuana to be raped while awaiting a so-called “trial.”

Rather than serving its intended purpose, promoting courage to stand up against government tyranny and to defend the rights of individuals, even the downtrodden and powerless, against Government abuse of the law, life tenure has apparently become something quite different. That is, a refuge from accountability and the rules of human decency.

John Roberts, his “Gang of Five,” and the rest of the Article III enablers will escape any legal consequences for their actions and, perhaps more significant, inactions in the face of unspeakable abuses of our Constitution, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and the obligations we owe to other human beings.

How about those cowardly 9th Circuit Judges who ignored the law, betrayed human decency, and enabled rapes, killings, and other “crimes against humanity” by “green lighting” the unconstitutional and clearly illegal “MPP” — better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” with their absurdist legal gobbledygook in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan. They are enjoying life in the ivory tower while their human victims are suffering and dying.

But, folks like Fernanda and many others are recording their abuses which will live in history and infamy, will forever tarnish their records, and be a blot on their family names for generations to come.

There is no excuse for what is happening at our borders and in our Immigration Courts today. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Flood the Article IIIs with examples and constant reminders of their handiwork and dereliction of duty! Let the bodies pile up on their collective doorsteps until the stench is so great that even they can no longer ignore and paper over their own complicity and moral responsibility with legal banalities. Force them to see their own faces and the faces of their loved ones in the scared, tormented faces and ruined lives of those destroyed by our scofflaw regime and its enablers.

Also, if you haven’t already done so, tell your Congressional representatives that you have had enough of this grotesque circus!

Here’s what I wrote to my legislators, and some from other states, recently:

I hope you will also speak out frequently against the grotesque abuses of human rights, Due Process, and human decency, not to mention the teachings of Jesus Christ and almost all other religious traditions, that the Trump Administration is carrying out against refugees of color, many of them desperate and vulnerable women and children, at our Southern Border.

Additionally, under Trump, the U.S. Immigration Courts, absurdly and unconstitutionally located within a politically biased U.S. Department of Justice, have become a mockery of justice, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. I urge you to join with other legislators in abolishing the current failed (1.1 million case backlog) and unfair system and replacing it with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. It’s time to end the abuse! This must be one of our highest national priorities.

I invite you and your staff to read more about the grotesque abuses of law, human rights, and fundamental human decency being committed daily on migrants and other vulnerable humans by the Trump Administration in my blog: immigrationcourtside.com, “The Voice of the New Due Process Army.” This is not the America I knew and proudly served for more than three decades as a Federal employee.

Due Process Forever; Trump’s Perverted View of America Never!

Thanks again.

With my appreciation and very best wishes,

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Feckless Legislators, Never!

PWS

02-07-20

JAMELLE BOUIE @ NYT: SUPREMES’ TRAVEL BAN “TANK” ENCOURAGED & ENABLED TRUMP’S RACIST AGENDA — THE BOGUS EXTENSION OF THE TRAVEL BAN TO NIGERIA PROVES IT — “Which is to say that it does not matter that Nigeria isn’t much of a national security threat or that Nigerians are among the most successful immigrants to the United States, surpassing native-born Americans in income and educational attainment. What matters is that they’re black and African and, for Trump, at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/opinion/trump-travel-ban-nigeria.html

Bouie writes:

It’s happening a little bit out of public consciousness — swamped by impeachment, the coronavirus and the Democratic presidential race — but on Friday President Trump announced further restrictions on immigration and foreign entry to the United States. Citing security concerns, the administration has slammed the door on immigrants from the African nations of Sudan, Tanzania and Eritrea, as well as Myanmar in Southeast Asia and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. These countries, which have large Muslim populations, join seven others on the president’s ever-developing travel ban.

There’s one other country on the expanded list — Nigeria. Home to more than 200 million of Africa’s 1.2 billion people, Nigeria has the largest economy on the continent and has worked with the American military on joint operations. But given an “elevated risk and threat environment in the country,” administration officials say there’s a chance Nigeria could become a vector for terrorists who want to enter the United States. Nigeria’s government has long struggled with the Islamist group Boko Haram, which is responsible for multiple kidnappings and dozens of attacks that amount to mass slaughter.

But there’s little to no evidence that this group is a threat to Americans, nor is there any history of Nigerian terrorism on American soil. From 1975 to 2015, according to an analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute, just one Nigerian national was implicated in a terrorist attack against the United States. And, it should be said, the administration has not banned all entry from Nigeria — only applications for permanent residence. Tourists can still visit America, an odd loophole if the White House is actually worried about terrorism.

But I don’t think President Trump is actually worried about Nigerian terrorism.

JAMELLE BOUIE’S NEWSLETTERDiscover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle. Sign up here.

In 2017, The New York Times reported on a meeting between Trump and several members of his cabinet in which he raged against foreign visitors to the United States. Citing a memo from Stephen Miller, the president’s chief immigration hard-liner, Trump complained about the pending arrival of thousands of people from Muslim and predominantly African nations. They “all have AIDS,” Trump reportedly said, about immigrants from Haiti. As for Nigerians? Once they saw America, they would never “go back to their huts.”

All of this was separate from the president’s remarks on what he famously called “shithole countries” — those came the next year, when he found a fresh way to articulate his racist vision of immigration policy, where white Europeans are welcome and nonwhites are not.

Which is to say that it does not matter that Nigeria isn’t much of a national security threat or that Nigerians are among the most successful immigrants to the United States, surpassing native-born Americans in income and educational attainment. What matters is that they’re black and African and, for Trump, at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.

I’ve written before about the 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which codified a decade’s worth of nativist hysteria into law. It followed the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed literacy tests on new immigrations and barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific region, and the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which established the first per-country percentage limits on the number of immigrants to the United States. The 1924 act was the harshest. It was also the most far-reaching. Meant to reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, it also defined the American nation in explicitly racial terms.

The quota system established by Johnson-Reed, the historian Mae Ngai writes, “subtracted from the total United States population all blacks and mulattoes, eliding the difference between the ‘descendants of slave immigrants’ and the descendants of free Negroes and voluntary immigrants from Africa. It also discounted all Chinese, Japanese and South Asians as persons ‘ineligible to citizenship,’ including descendants of such people with American citizenship by native birth.”

In doing so, Ngai continues, the 1924 Immigration Act “excised all nonwhite, non-European peoples” from its “legal representation of the American nation,” setting the stage for the “racialization of immigrant groups around notions of whiteness, permanent foreignness and illegality.”

Trump is almost certainly ignorant of the Johnson-Reed Act (Stephen Miller, on the other hand, is not). But he’s channeling the impulse of that law — the attempt to cast the United States as a white nation, off-limits to those who don’t fit his preferred racial type. And with the Supreme Court’s blessing (granted to the revised version of the original travel ban), he’s doing just that: using his immigration policy to resurrect and reconstitute the exclusions of the early 20th century.

Although immigration policy deals with the external boundaries of the United States, the elevation of whiteness has internal consequences as well. Not because the president intends to distribute benefits and favors on the basis of race — although there are elements of that in his administration’s behavior — but because it sends a larger signal about who matters in this society. Every time Trump and other members of his administration make the decision to stratify and racialize, they are also making a statement about who receives a voice and who deserves respect.

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

America needs Supremes with the expertise, legal understanding, and moral courage to stand up for the legal, Constitutional, and human rights of all persons against the Trump/Miller/GOP White Nationalist agenda.

By enabling the rebirth of Jim Crow, the “GOP Justices” are destroying America to enable a vile anti-social agenda of a neo-fascist regime!

Human lives matter more than corporate profits!

Due Process Forever; White Nationalism Never!

PWS

O2-06-20

AS THE “J.R. FIVE @ HIS SUPREMES” HELP USHER IN A “NEW JIM CROW ERA OF UNACCOUNTABILITY,” AFRICAN-AMERICANS ARE ALL TOO FAMILIAR WITH “SHAM TRIALS” RESULTING IN “FIXED ACQUITTALS” OF THE GUILTY WHO HOLD POWER IN AMERICA! – We’re Back To The Days When Empowered “Arrogant White Guys” & Their Enablers Can Boast of Their Public Abuses of Our Legal System & Their Impunity!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/opinions/impeachment-no-witness-no-evidence-american-history-love/index.html

David Love @ CNN:

An impeachment trial with no witnesses or evidence is very American

Opinion by David Love

Updated 9:53 AM ET, Tue February 4, 2020

Senator: This is a tragedy in every possible way 02:05

David A. Love is a writer, commentator and journalism and media studies professor based in Philadelphia. He contributes to a variety of outlets, including Atlanta Black Star, ecoWURD and Al Jazeera. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidALove. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is a relative rarity in American political history, and yet aspects of it have the haunting familiarity of a sham trial in the Jim Crow South, where black people were routinely criminalized and murdered in the name of “justice.” Yes, there are certainly obvious differences between this political trial and the ones that many black Americans have faced, but the common thread remains: going through a trial that has already been decided before it even began.

David A. Love

There is little precedent for how to conduct only the third presidential impeachment trial ever to take place. However, with the Senate vote by the Republican majority to exclude witnesses — likely including former national security adviser John Bolton and indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas — the impeachment trial became nothing more than a kangaroo court with a predetermined outcome, a very American ritual of injustice masquerading as due process.

Comparing impeachment to Jim Crow jurisprudence, Rev. William J. Barber II of Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign summed it up when he tweeted: “In the old Jim Crow South, when racists harmed Black folks, the prosecutor & judge would conspire to have a fake trial & ensure the racists didn’t get convicted. We are seeing these same tactics play out in the impeachment trial under McConnell & it’s shameful.”

There is ample evidence the fix was in, that GOP senators had no intention of acting as impartial jurors. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said there was no chance the President would be removed from office, pledged to work closely and in “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment.

The Senate’s dangerous move

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham said, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” And as some senators reportedly fell asleep and played with fidget spinners during the trial, Trump threatened to invoke executive privilege to block the testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton.

Boasting about hiding the impeachment evidence, Trump said “We have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

In a perfect example of jury nullification, Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexanderacknowledged Trump’s wrongdoing as “inappropriate,” yet supported acquittal and voted against witnesses. And Florida Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a Medium post, “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”

Trump’s impeachment defense lawyers gave campaign contributions to Sen. McConnell and other Republican jurors in advance of the trial, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Preventing first-hand witnesses from testifying and new documents from being entered into evidence is very typical of how trials were conducted in the Jim Crow South, when gerrymandering, voter suppression and violence maintained white political rule, and all-white juries quickly convicted black defendants and exonerated white defendants without the need for evidence or deliberation.

For example, in 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — two white men — went on trial in Mississippi for the brutal kidnapping, murder and mutilation of Emmett Till — a black 14-year old boy from Chicago.

It was obvious then, as now, that the trial was for show, almost more a justification for what had happened to Till. A white woman, the wife of one of the defendants, alleged Till had whistled at her (decades later she admitted to lying).

A number of witnesses were called, including two black men, one of whom identified the killers, and both of whom were threatened with death for testifying. However, the sheriff reportedly placed other black witnesses in jail to prevent them from testifying. An all-white-male jury — black people were effectively not allowed to vote or serve on juries — deliberated for only 67 minutes to deliver a not guilty verdict. Even the jurors knew they were participating in theater; “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said.

Similarly, in 1931, nine black teens known as the Scottsboro boys were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. While the boys were awaiting trial, a white mob threatened to lynch them. With the exception of the 13-year-old, they were swiftly sentenced to death by an all-white-male jury. Although none were executed, they collectively served 100 years in prison. Some of the boys were retried and reconvicted, and the Supreme Court twice overturned the guilty verdicts.

Echoes of Jim Crow jurisprudence continue to the present day, and even with attempts to reform the criminal justice system, injustices plague the poor and people of color, who are disproportionately incarcerated. When black and Latino teens, known as the Central Park Five, were falsely arrested, interrogated and coerced in the brutal rape and beating a white woman in New York, Trump placed a full-page ad in four newspapers calling for the death penalty. Even after the accused were exonerated by DNA evidence linking another person to the crime, as recently as last year, Trump has declined to apologize for his actions.

It is not surprising that Trump’s GOP would work overtime to conduct a fake impeachment trial with their own narrative and set of facts and no witnesses to avoid accountability. This, despite a CNN poll showing that 69% of Americans want to hear new witness testimony, and a Quinnipiac Poll in which 75% say witnesses should be allowed to testify. A recent Pew poll found a slight majority of Americans supporting Trump’s removal from office, with 63% saying he has definitely or probably broke the law, and 70% concluding he has done unethical things.

However, if the Senate does not reflect the will of most Americans, it is because the Senate is a fundamentally undemocratic institution that exercises minority rule. For example, on a strictly 53-47 party line vote, the Senate voted to reject a series of amendments to subpoena documents and witnesses (for the vote that decided whether to allow witnesses, two Republicans voted with Democrats in a vote that failed 49-51 to allow witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial).

Those 53 Republican senators in the first vote, as author and reporter Ari Berman noted, represent 153 million Americans, as opposed to the 168 million people the Democratic senators represent. Minority rule is subverting democracy and the rule of law and undermining the popular will, resulting in unjust policies and decisions. This, as Republicans who control the Senate with a minority of popular support block the impeachment of a President who was elected with nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than his opponent. Jim Crow segregationists employed voter suppression, violence and coups to maintain power. Similarly, today’s GOP must rely on anti-democratic methods to cling to power in a changing America, and prop up a President who will most certainly stay in office through malfeasance, playing to xenophobic fear and threats of violence.

Meanwhile, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has assumed the role of a potted plant throughout most the proceeding, helped create this mess by playing an active role in the erosion of democracy and the legitimacy of the political system. Under Roberts’ leadership, the high court has sanctioned gerrymandering, eviscerated voting rights, and allowed for unlimited money in our elections, including potentially from foreign sources.

If the Republicans hope for an end run around democracy with a kangaroo court, this is nothing new. Following in the footsteps of those who played a part in sham trials in the Jim Crow South, the Trump party cares little about justice, and everything about breaking the rules to maintain power in perpetuity. Unfortunately, sham trials are as American as apple pie.

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

By aligning himself with the totally corrupt, lawless, and immoral Trump and his various scofflaw schemes, Roberts seems intent on following in the footsteps of the now reviled Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision.

Obviously, given a chance at a Second Term, a Senate of toadies, and a complicit, willfully tone-deaf Supremes, Trump has every intention of “Dred Scottifying” immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, political opponents, and other large segments of America.

“Corruption, impunity,” those are words that those of us who actually decided immigration cases saw often in country background information on third word dictatorships and autocracies. Now, thanks to Trump, his Senate toadies, and Article IIIs “go alongs,” those are also words that can be used to describe the American justice system.

PWS

02-05-20

NO EXPERTISE NECESSARY! – At The “New EOIR,” Immigration Judges No Longer Need to Demonstrate Immigration Experience – Just a Willingness To Send Migrants to Potential Death, Danger, or Misery Without Due Process or Fundamental Fairness – When Your Job Is To Impose Arbitrary “Death Sentences,” Maybe It’s Easier If You Don’t Understand What You’re Really Doing!

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/481152-us-hiring-immigration-judges-who-dont-have-any-immigration-law-experience

Nolan Rappaport writes in The Hill:

. . . .

Hiring judges without immigration law experience

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) pointed out that the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has been hiring as judges lawyers who do not have any immigration law experience.

In fact, the experience requirement in immigration judge vacancy announcements doesn’t even mention immigration law experience:

“Experience: Applicants must have a full seven (7) years of post-bar experience as a licensed attorney preparing for, participating in, and/or appealing formal hearings or trials … Qualifying litigation experience involves cases in which a complaint was filed with a court, or a charging document … was issued by a court, a grand jury, or appropriate military authority…”

EOIR recently swore in 28 new immigration judges, and 11 of them had no immigration law experience.

None.

That’s a problem for justice.

Due process isn’t possible when judges do not fully understand the law — and it takes a long time to learn immigration law. According to the American Bar Association, “To say that immigration law is vast and complex is an understatement.” Rutgers University law professor Elizabeth Hull says that our immigration laws are “second only to the Internal Revenue Code in complexity.”

The concern over judges with no immigration law experience is more than just idealism or theory — the inexperience can impact people’s lives in major ways.

For instance, an otherwise deportable alien may be eligible for lawful permanent resident status if he has been in the United States long enough. 8 USC §1259 permits certain deportable aliens to register for permanent residence if they entered the United States prior to Jan. 1, 1972; have resided in the United States continuously since such entry; have good moral character; and are not ineligible for citizenship.

How many inexperienced immigration judges would know that?

This influx of inexperience may explain why asylum decisions vary so widely from judge-to-judge.

What’s more, these judges might not be able to meet the eligibility standards for an Article 1 court if subject matter expertise is required.

. . . .

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

You can read Nolan’s full article, from which this is excerpted, at the above link. I agree wholeheartedly with this part of Nolan’s conclusion: “EOIR should not be trying to deal with this backlog by hiring more judges if it can’t find judges with adequate immigration law experience.”

Here’s an actual anecdote that I received recently from a Courtside reader:

I had a merits hearing . . . with a new IJ with no immigration background at all. It happened to be an old adjustment which the ICE trial attorney had reviewed and agreed in advance to a grant, pending a few questions. So the ICE TA explained this to the IJ, and I asked the IJ if [he/she] understood the terms involved. And it turned out that the IJ didn’t know what an I-140 is and didn’t know what 245(i) is. [He/She] didn’t say a word; we ran the hearing. The ICE attorney actually had to fill out the IJ’s order for [him/her] to sign; [he/she] had no idea what to write or what boxes to check.

What if it had been a contested hearing?

Yes, indeed, “what if this had been a contested hearing?” I assume that what passes for EOIR/DOJ “new judge training” these days just tells new judges that “when in doubt, kick ‘em out.” Just check the “denied” and “ordered removed” boxes on the form orders. At least this one had a “happy ending.” Many do not!

I’ve heard other anecdotes about newer Immigration Judges totally ignorant about asylum law and afraid to admit it who cited Matter of A-B- as basis for “blanket summary denial” of all gender-based asylum claims from Central America. Other newer judges reportedly are largely unaware of the burden-shifting “regulatory presumption of future persecution” arising out of past persecution.

Others apparently don’t understand the interplay and differing requirements and consequences among asylum, withholding of removal under the Act, CAT withholding, and CAT deferral. “Mixed motive,” a key life or death concept in asylum cases — you’d be lucky to find a handful of Immigration Judges these days who truly understand how it applies. That’s particularly true because the BIA and the Attorney General have recently bent the concept and many of the Circuit precedents interpreting it intentionally out of shape to favor DHS enforcement and discriminate against bona fide asylum applicants.

The generous interpretation of the “well founded fear” standard required by the Supremes in Cardoza-Fonseca and embodied in the BIA’s Matter of Mogharrabi is widely ignored, even mocked in some of today’s enforcement driven, overtly anti-asylum Immigration Courts.

To be fair, I’ve also heard praise from advocates for some of the newer Immigration Judges who seemed eager and willing to be “educated” by both counsel, weren’t afraid to admit their gaps in knowledge and request amplification, and seemed willing carefully to weigh and deliberate all the facts and law to reach a just and well-explained decision; this contrasts with “summary preconceived denial” which is a common complaint among advocates that also includes some judges who have been on the bench for years.

The larger problem here is that too many of the Circuits Courts of Appeals seem to have gone “belly up” on their duty to carefully review what is happening in the Immigration Courts and to insist on the basics of fundamental fairness, due process, and fair and impartial decision-making.

It’s pretty simple: At neither the trial nor appellate levels do today’s Immigration Courts operating under EOIR and DOJ control qualify as “expert tribunals.” It is legally erroneous for Article III Courts to continue to “defer” to decision makers who lack fairness, impartiality, and subject matter expertise.

With human lives, the rule of law, and America’s future at stake here, it’s past time for the Article III’s to stop pretending that is “business as usual” in the warped and distorted “world of immigration under the Trump regime.”

Would any Article III Judge subject his or her life to the circus now ongoing at EOIR. Of course not! Then it’s both legally wrong and morally corrupt for Article IIIs to continue to subject vulnerable migrants to this type of charade and perversion of justice!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-05-20

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