“The Creature from the Black Lagoon” – Page 4 – immigrationcourtside.com

THE HONORABLE JEFFREY CHASE: HOW THE PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE OF JEFF SESSIONS IS STANGLING THE US ASYLUM SYSTEM AND ITS “GO ALONG TO GET ALONG” ADJUDICATORS AND “JUDGES” — “Matter of A-B- Being Misapplied by EOIR, DHS”

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2018/7/13/matter-of-a-b-being-misapplied-by-eoir-dhs

Jul 13 Matter of A-B- Being Misapplied by EOIR, DHS

One month after Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued his cruel, misguided decision in Matter of A-B-, we are seeing the first signs of how the decision is being implemented by the BIA, USCIS, and ICE.

There is no question that Sessions’ intent was to eliminate domestic violence and gang violence as bases for asylum. How can I be so certain of this? While Matter of A-B- was pending before him, Sessions told a Phoenix radio station in March: “We’ve had situations in which a person comes to the United States and says they are a victim of domestic violence, therefore they are entitled to enter the United States. Well, that’s obviously false but some judges have gone along with that.” (here’s the link: https://ktar.com/story/2054280/ag-jeff-sessions-says-closing-loopholes-can-fight-illegal-immigration/).

However, Sessions chose to attempt to achieve this goal by issuing a precedent decision. A decision is not a fiat. It must be analyzed in the same manner as any other legal decision and applied to the facts accordingly.

Asylum experts and advocacy groups analyzing the decision have reached the following conclusions. The main impact of Sessions’ decision is to vacate the Board’s 2014 precedent decision, Matter of A-R-C-G-, holding that a victim of domestic violence was eligible for asylum as a member of a particular social group. Therefore, asylum applicants can no longer rely on that decision.

However, Sessions’ decision otherwise cobbled together already existing case law (which was taken into consideration in deciding Matter of A-R-C-G-), and added non-binding dicta, i.e. his statement that “generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence…will not qualify for asylum.” (Note the use of the pejorative “aliens” to describe individuals applying for asylum.)

Furthermore, most of the items covered by Sessions involved questions of fact (which are specifically dependent on the evidence in the individual case, and which the BIA and AG have very limited ability to reverse on appeal) as opposed to questions of law, which can be considered de novo on appeal and have more general applicability. The questions of fact raised by Sessions include whether the persecutor was aware of the existence of the group and was motivated to harm the victim on account of such membership; whether the society in question recognizes the social group with sufficient distinction; whether the authorities in the home country are unable or unwilling to protect the victim, and whether the victim could reasonably relocate to another part of the country to avoid the feared harm.

So in summary, Sessions felt that the Board’s decision in Matter of A-R-C-G- did not provide a sufficiently detailed legal analysis, therefore vacated it, and laid out all of the legal analysis that future decisions must address. Domestic violence and gang violence claims still remain very much grantable, provided that all of the requirements laid out by the Attorney General are satisfied. Hearings on these cases may now take much longer, as testimony will need to be more detailed, additional social groups will need to be proposed and ruled on, more experts must be called, and more documents considered. But nothing in A-B- prevents these cases from continuing to be granted.

Therefore, how discouraging that the first decision of the BIA to apply this criteria failed to do what is now required of them. A single Board Member’s unpublished decision issued shortly after A-B-’s publication did not engage in the detailed legal analysis that is now warranted in domestic violence cases. Instead, the decision noted that the case involved a social group “akin to the group defined in Matter of A-R-C-G-.” The Board then found that the AG’s decision in A-B- “has foreclosed the respondent’s arguments,” because “the Attorney General overruled Matter of A-R-C-G- and held that it was wrongly decided.”

What is particularly dispiriting is that the decision was authored by Board Member Linda Wendtland. A former OIL attorney whose views are more conservative than my own, I have always respected her scholarly approach and her intellectual honesty. At the BIA, staff attorneys draft the decisions which the Board Members then edit. Judge Wendtland always took the time to write her edits as academic lessons from which I always learned something. She recently authored the lone dissenting opinion in a case involving a determination of whether a women was barred from relief for having provided material support to terrorists; Judge Wendtland correctly determined that the cooking and cleaning that the woman was forced to perform after having been kidnapped by rebels did not constitute “material support.” It is therefore perplexing why she would sign the post-A-B- decision that so sorely lacked her usual degree of analysis.

In addition to the BIA, on July 11, both USCIS and ICE issued guidance on applying A-B- to asylum adjudications. Much like the BIA decision, the USCIS guidelines to its asylum officers, which serve as guidance not only in adjudicating asylum applications, but also for making credible fear determinations, seem to apply the personal opinion of Sessions rather than the actual legal holdings of his decision. USCIS decided to print in boldface Sessions’ nonbinding dicta that such cases will generally not establish eligibility for asylum, refugee status, or credible or reasonable fear of persecution.

Credible fear interviews are conducted right after an asylum seeker arrives in this country, while they are detained, scared, often unrepresented by counsel, before having a chance to understand the law or gather documents or witnesses. The interviewer is supposed to find credible fear if there is a significant possibility that the applicant will be able to establish eligibility for relief at a future hearing before an immigration judge. It is likely that, at such future hearing, the applicant will have an attorney who will make the proper legal arguments, call expert witnesses, formulate the particular social group according to the requirements of case law, submit other supporting evidence, etc. But now asylum officers are being instructed to ignore all of that and deny individuals the chance to even have the opportunity to apply for asylum before an immigration judge essentially because Jeff Sessions doesn’t believe these are worthy cases.

ICE (through its Office of the Public Legal Advisor) has issued guidance that, while probably reflecting internal conflict within the bureau, is nevertheless somewhat more reasonable than the interpretations of either USCIS or the Board. The ICE guidance does ask its attorneys to hold asylum applicants to some exacting legal standards, to look for flaws in supporting evidence, and to question asylum applicants in great detail. It also asks its attorneys not to opine on whether gender alone may constitute a PSG until further guidance is offered (again, probably reflecting internal conflict within the bureau on the issue). But the guidance does not simply conclude that all domestic violence and gang violence cases should be denied. It even encourages attorneys to employ a “collaborative approach” by pointing out flawed social groups offered by pro se applicants in the hope that the IJ might help the applicant remedy the situation early on.

However, let’s remember that ICE stipulated to grants of asylum for victims of domestic violence in both Matter of R-A- (during the Bush administration, and to the consternation of then Attorney General John Ashcroft), and in Matter of A-R-C-G-. ICE argued in its brief to Sessions in Matter of A-B- that Matter of A-R-C-G- was good law and should not be vacated. So then shouldn’t ICE be applying these same principles to its guidance to attorneys?

It should also be noted that ICE and USCIS could see a way to granting worthy cases in spite of Sessions’ decision. In the early 1990s, then INS General Counsel Grover Joseph Rees III took exception with the BIA’s precedent decision holding that forcible abortions and sterilization under China’s family planning policies did not constitute persecution on account of a protected ground. Rees instructed his attorneys to seek to remand cases involving such claim to the INS Asylum Office, where per his instructions, such claims were granted affirmatively by asylum officers. There is no reason that a similar practice could not be employed now, particularly as both ICE and USCIS are not part of the Department of Justice and therefore are not controlled by Sessions. The only thing lacking is the political will to take such a stand. In the early 1990s, Rees’s stance involving abortion played to the Bush Administration’s political base. Today, ICE and USCIS would have to take action contrary to the wishes of that same base because doing so is the just and humane thing to do. Unfortunately, based on the tone of their recent advisals, doing the right thing is not enough of a motive in the present political climate.

Copyright 2018 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

JEFF CHASE

MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE @ LA TIMES: ASSEMBLY LINE INJUSTICE IN OVERDRIVE @ BORDER: UNDER SESSIONS, JUDGES THROW ALL PRETENSES OF DUE PROCESS AND FAIRNESS OUT THE WINDOW AND ESSENTIALLY BECOME “DEATH CLERKS” – Is Beating Up On Dazed, Befuddled, Traumatized, Unrepresented Respondents Who Have No Idea What The Judge Is Talking About REALLY a “Judicial Function?” — “I’m not here to give you an opportunity [to be heard],” says one judge before imposing possible “death sentence!”

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1b21fb3b-e996-4631-833b-b3e2d6b0a1c7

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports for the LA Times:

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

PORT ISABEL DETENTION CENTER, Texas — Sitting before an immigration judge in this south Texas detention center Thursday, a Central American mother separated from her son pleaded for asylum.

“Your honor, I’m just asking for one opportunity to be here,” said the woman wearing a blue prison uniform and a red plastic rosary around her neck. “You don’t know how much pain it has caused us to be separated from our children. We’re kind of losing it.”

Judge Robert Powell’s face was stern. During the last five years, he has denied 79% of asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“What you’re describing is not persecution,” he said.

“I’m asking for an opportunity,” the woman replied in Spanish through an interpreter.

“I’m not here to give you an opportunity.” He ordered her deported.

Immigrant family separations on the border were supposed to end after President Trump issued an order June 20. A federal judge in California ordered all children be reunited with their parents in a month, and those age 5 and under within 15 days. On Thursday, the administration said up to 3,000 children have been separated — hundreds more than initially reported — and DNA testing has begun to reunite families.

Port Isabel has been designated the “primary family reunification and removal center,” but lawyers here said they have yet to see detained parents reunited.

To qualify for asylum in the U.S., immigrants must prove they fear persecution at home because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them. Most of the Central American parents detained here after “zero tolerance” fled gang and domestic violence. But that’s no longer grounds for seeking asylum, according to a guidance last month from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, so judges are following that guidance.

Because immigration courts are administrative, not criminal, immigrants are not entitled to public defenders. And so, each day, they attempt to represent themselves in hearings that sometimes last only a few minutes.

The courtrooms are empty. That’s because, like others nationwide, the court is inside a fortified Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Access is restricted, and may be denied. The Times had to request to attend court hearings — which are public — 24 hours in advance. After access to the facility was approved last week, admission was denied to the courtrooms when guards said the proceedings were closed, without explanation.

Detainees have little access to the outside world, including their children. It costs them 90 cents a minute to place a phone call. When they do, they can be nearly inaudible. They receive mail, but when reporters wrote to them last week, the letters were confiscated and guards questioned why they had been contacted, according to a lawyer. Lawyers also said some separated parents have been pressured into agreeing to deportation in order to reunite with their children.

UNICEF officials toured Port Isabel Thursday. A dozen pro bono lawyers visited immigrants. But they were spread thin. None represented parents at the credible fear reviews, where judges considered whether to uphold an asylum officer’s finding that they be deported.

Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi, a former Homeland Security lawyer appointed to the bench two years ago, questioned several parents’ appeals.

“You have children?” he asked a Honduran mother.

Yes, Elinda Aguilar said, she had three.

“Two of them were with me when we got separated by immigration, the other is in Honduras,” said Aguilar, 44.

“How many times have you been to the U.S.?” the judge asked.

Aguilar said this was her first time. The judge reviewed what Aguilar had told an asylum officer: That she had fled an ex-husband who beat, raped and threatened her. “He told you he would kill you if you went with another man?” the judge said.

Yes, Aguilar replied.

The judge noted that Aguilar had reported the crimes to police, who charged her husband, although he never showed up in court. Then he announced his decision: deportation.

Aguilar looked confused. “Did the asylum officer talk to you and explain my case?” she said.

The judge said he was acting according to the law.

Although she was fleeing an abusive husband, he said, “your courts intervened and they put him through the legal process. That’s also how things work in this country.”

Aguilar knit her hands. She wasn’t leaving yet.

“I would like to know what’s going to happen to my children, the ones who came with me,” she asked the judge.

“The Department of Homeland Security will deal with that. Talk to your deportation officer,” he said. Guards led her away as she looked shocked, and brought in the next parent.

Down the hall, Judge Powell heard appeals from separated parents appearing by video feed from Pearsall Detention Center to the west. Though he denied most asylum cases, there are exceptions. Recently, after an asylum officer denied a claim by a Central American woman who said police raped and threatened to kill her, Powell reversed that decision. She can now pursue her asylum claim, though she still hasn’t been released or reunited with her kids.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

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Obvious question: What, in fact, is a “judge” who isn’t there to give individuals fair hearings and treat them with respect, dignity, and humanity “there for?” What good is a judge who won’t protect individual rights from Government abuses? That’s the whole reason for our “Bill of Rights!”

Jeff Sessions regularly makes bogus, racist inspired claims about “fraud” in our asylum system. But, the REAL fraud in our asylum system is holding ourselves out as a nation of laws and Constitutional government instead of the Banana Republic we have become under Trump. And, maybe if this is what America is today, Trump is right: we don’t need any judges. Just jailers and executioners.

PWS

07-06-18

PROFESSOR CASS SUNSTEIN WITH THE UGLY TRUTH: IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND TRUMPISM, YOU MUST UNDERSTAND ITS ANTECEDENT, NAZISM – Many Ordinary Germans Were Enthusiastic About Life Under Hitler Prior To The War – Fat, Happy, Satisfied, & Willfully Indifferent To The Torture & Suffering Of Their Fellow Human Beings – They Chose To Bury All Morality & Believe Reich Propaganda and Lies That Any Reasonable Person Would Have Known Were Untrue!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/?mbid=nl_hps_5b368db0384c1d5c5734bfbc&CNDID=48297443

Professor Cass Sunstein in the NY Review of Books:

It Can Happen Here

Cass R. Sunstein

JUNE 28, 2018 ISSUE

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

by Milton Mayer, with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans

University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century

by Konrad H. Jarausch

Princeton University Press, 446 pp., $35.00

‘National Socialist,’ circa 1935; photograph by August Sander from his People of the Twentieth Century. A new collection of his portraits, August Sander: Persecuted/Persecutors, will be published by Steidl this fall.

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

In such a time, we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. The problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.

But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.

Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. Dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch, it provides a jarring contrast with Sebastian Haffner’s devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler, which gives a moment-by-moment, you-are-there feeling to Hitler’s rise. (The manuscript was discovered by Haffner’s son after the author’s death and published in 2000 in Germany, where it became an immediate sensation.)^* A much broader perspective comes from Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives, an effort to reconstruct the experience of Germans across the entire twentieth century. What distinguishes the three books is their sense of intimacy. They do not focus on historic figures making transformative decisions. They explore how ordinary people attempted to navigate their lives under terrible conditions.

Haffner’s real name was Raimund Pretzel. (He used a pseudonym so as not to endanger his family while in exile in England.) He was a journalist, not a historian or political theorist, but he interrupts his riveting narrative to tackle a broad question: “What is history, and where does it take place?” He objects that most works of history give “the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be ‘at the helm of the ship of state’ and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.” In his view, that’s wrong. What matters are “we anonymous others” who are not just “pawns in the chess game,” because the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” Haffner insists on the importance of investigating “some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences,” involving “the private lives, emotions and thoughts of individual Germans.”

Mayer had the same aim. An American journalist of German descent, he tried to meet with Hitler in 1935. He failed, but he did travel widely in Nazi Germany. Stunned to discover a mass movement rather than a tyranny of a diabolical few, he concluded that his real interest was not in Hitler but in people like himself, to whom “something had happened that had not (or at least not yet) happened to me and my fellow-countrymen.” In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.

In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew.

In the late 1930s—the period that most interested Mayer—his subjects were working as a janitor, a soldier, a cabinetmaker, an office manager, a baker, a bill collector, an inspector, a high school teacher, and a police officer. One had been a high school student. All were male. None of them occupied positions of leadership or influence. All of them referred to themselves as “wir kleine Leute, we little people.” They lived in Marburg, a university town on the river Lahn, not far from Frankfurt.

Mayer talked with them over the course of a year, under informal conditions—coffee, meals, and long, relaxed evenings. He became friends with each (and throughout he refers to them as such). As he put it, with evident surprise, “I liked them. I couldn’t help it.” They could be ironic, funny, and self-deprecating. Most of them enjoyed a joke that originated in Nazi Germany: “What is an Aryan? An Aryan is a man who is tall like Hitler, blond like Goebbels, and lithe like Göring.” They also could be wise. Speaking of the views of ordinary people under Hitler, one of them asked:

Opposition? How would anybody know? How would anybody know what somebody else opposes or doesn’t oppose? That a man says he opposes or doesn’t oppose depends upon the circumstances, where, and when, and to whom, and just how he says it. And then you must still guess why he says what he says.

When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt “that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,” and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.

Mayer suggests that even when tyrannical governments do horrific things, outsiders tend to exaggerate their effects on the actual experiences of most citizens, who focus on their own lives and “the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.” Nazism made things better for the people Mayer interviewed, not (as many think) because it restored some lost national pride but because it improved daily life. Germans had jobs and better housing. They were able to vacation in Norway or Spain through the “Strength Through Joy” program. Fewer people were hungry or cold, and the sick were more likely to receive treatment. The blessings of the New Order, as it was called, seemed to be enjoyed by “everybody.”

. . . .

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Read the complete article at the link.

As a historical footnote, I crossed paths with Cass Sunstein at the DOJ during the Carter Administration in 1980-81, when he was an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel and I was the Acting General Counsel/Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy INS.” About all I remember is that: 1) he was brilliant, 2) he wrote really well; 3) everyone had him pegged as among “the most likely to succeed;” and 4) we both had lots, lots more hair then.

I agree with pretty much everything Sunstein says. Except for one major point. I don’t think “it can happen here.” It is happening here!

Cass says “Thus far, President Trump has been more bark than bite.” Really! With all due respect, that seems like a view directly from the “Ivory Tower.”

Ask U.S. citizens children whose parents have been deported for no rational reason without any consideration of what will happen to those left behind; ask those children intentionally abused and probably damaged for life by the likes of Jeff Sessions; ask communities that have been terrorized by the Homan-led “ICE Gestapo” that strikes terror, performs few if any “real” law enforcement functions these days, while insuring that whole segments of the population are “easy marks” for crime and abuse; ask women and children refugees from Central American who are essentially being railroaded back to the “death camps” from which they fled by the noxious White Nationalist racists Trump, Miller, & Sessions, with the assistance of morally vapid sycophants like Nielsen and Kelly, without even the semblance of due process; ask Dreamers who are slurred by the always disingenuous Sessions while being held as hostages by Trump, and hung out to dry by the GOP Congress; ask the kids and families being held in the “New American Gulag” established by Sessions — combined with his intentional distortion of asylum law, they are basically being held in concentration camps waiting to be shipped off to death camps in the Northern Triangle! And we haven’t even gotten to Sessions’s absolutely outrageous, lawless, unconstitutional, and totally immoral plan to rewrite asylum law so that nobody who needs protection actually gets it! Or how about not taking any Syrian refugees, even though they are dying in refugee camps awaiting resettlement every day. Just because the actual deaths, rapes, torture, US-caused human trafficking, and other unspeakable abuses take place outside our national boundaries doesn’t mean that we aren’t just as responsible for them as the fat & happy Burghers of the Third Reich!

I wrote about Sunstein’s timely, yet totally disturbing, article in my response to a comment from my good friend, colleague, and fellow member of the “Gang of Retired Immigration Judges,” Judge Gus Villageliu in response to one of his “right on” comments today. Here’s what I said:

There is a great article by Professor Cass Sunstein about the parallels between Nazism and Trumpism. The key: Germans who supported Hitler were fat, happy, and satisfied with their lives under Nazism and were willfully indifferent to the torture and suffering of their fellow human beings. They happily accepted the Nazi propaganda that Jews were either traitors or had voluntarily left the country after being fairly compensated for their property. Even after the war, some ordinary Germans looked back on the 1933-39 era of Nazi rule as the best time of their lives.

Another key observation by Sunstein: resistance is never futile and every individual act of resistance, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem at the time, is important. The little acts and persistence add up over time.

In my view, they also establish an important record for historians and future generations. I want my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren to know where I stood in the era of Trump, Sessions, Miller & the rest of the White Nationalist neo-Nazis and their utterly disgusting perversion of Western Judeo-Christian values!

Due Process, tolerance, courage, standing up for the less fortunate, and recognizing the human rights and dignity of every person are eternal values that are always worth fighting for!

Join the New Due Process Army. Resist the White Nationalist Regime every step of the way. Force “go along to get along” courts (like the Supremes) to face up to the horrible immorality of their appeasement of the cruel, inhuman, and illegal actions of the Trump Administration. Write the historical record that even the Trumpsters and their followers won’t be able to escape so that we might never, ever again have a Neo-Nazi revival like the Trump Administration!

PWS

07-01-18

INSIDE AMERICA’S HORRIBLE WHITE NATIONALIST REGIME WITH TAL @ CNN: 1) Trump Never Planned To Reunite Children With Families; 2) Tom Homan Retires – Trump Sycophant Made ICE America’s Most Despised Agency; 3) Sessions Planning To Follow Child Abuse With Barrage Of Racist Lies, Massive Violations Of Constitution, Abuses Of Human Rights, & Vicious Attacks On Rights Of Vulnerable Brown-Skinned Refugees!

1) Government never had specific plan to reunify families, court testimony shows

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

In recent weeks, the government has stumbled trying to explain its plan for reunifying families in the wake of its much-criticized family separations policy at the border.

But newly reviewed court filings show that the byzantine system that has resulted in thousands of children separated for weeks and months from parents elsewhere in government custody was not an accident. It was always the design.

In fact, one of the women in an ongoing lawsuit over family separations can now was apparently one of the first separations that took place during a quiet pilot of the policy last year. The pilot program has been previously reported, but took on new attention on the heels of an NBC report about it Friday.

A government attorney admitted in court just days before the border-wide initiative was unveiled in early May that there was never a plan for parents like her to be proactively reunited with their kids.

And an analysis of the purported success of the pilot shows that the Department of Homeland Security’s justification that the program worked as a deterrent was likely based on dubious data.

A DHS official confirmed Friday that the agency first tested the policy of prosecuting parents caught illegally crossing the border in the El Paso sector in Texas from July to October of last year. The pilot had been previously reported, but was not widely known. NBC reported the effort anew Friday.

Ms. C, as she is known in court filings, was apprehended crossing the border illegally in late August 2017 and prosecuted in El Paso, according to court documents. She asked for asylum and in the midst of the legal process, the government took her 14-year-old son from her, sending him to a Health and Human Services facility in Chicago. They were separated for months.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/politics/family-separations-reunification-never-plan-court/index.html

2) Controversial ICE chief retiring, replacement expected to be named soon

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan is serving his last day Friday, as the controversial face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration retires.

Homan’s final day was confirmed by spokeswoman Liz Johnson.

The polarizing face of the administration’s immigration enforcement, and a favorite of President Donald Trump himself, Homan had announced in April he would be taking his long-delayed retirement this month.

Homan has told the story of receiving the request to stay on as chief of ICE under Trump while celebrating at his going away party — a retirement that was deferred for a year and a half.

According to a source familiar, acting CBP Deputy Commissioner Ronald Vitiello is expected to be named acting director of ICE in Homan’s stead as soon as Friday.

Vitiello has been a familiar face for the media as well, often speaking with reporters about the President’s border wall project.

The White House has not responded to a request for comment.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/politics/tom-homan-retirement-replacement/index.html

3) Trump administration may further restrict asylum rights

By: Laura Jarrett and Tal Kopan, CNN

The Justice Department is considering a regulation that would prevent people from claiming asylum if they’re convicted of illegally entering the US, according to two sources familiar with the plans.

Such a rule would be a dramatic change in the landscape of US immigration law and could conflict with domestic law and long-standing international obligations.

The draft regulation was described to CNN as being in its very early stages and has not yet been submitted to the White House for review. Should it be implemented, it would likely result in immediate legal challenges from asylum-seekers and advocates.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

The proposal was first reported by Vox.

Current law allows migrants to raise an asylum claim at any lawful port of entry to the US, as well as between valid ports of entry where crossing to the US is illegal.

The Immigration and Nationality Act states that anyone who arrives in the US “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” may apply for asylum if he or she has a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Yet another part of the law gives Attorney General Jeff Sessions the leeway to regulate which offenses “will be considered to be a crime,” in which case asylum is not available.

How exactly the rule will be tailored and whether it will include any exceptions remains unclear.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/politics/trump-administration-asylum-draft-limit/index.html

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Ah, America as a rogue state!

Join the New Due Process Army — Fight White Nationalism, Lies, Cowardice, and Bullying by Trump and his evil gang of immoral, scofflaw, racist “swamp monsters.”

PWS

06-30-18

NEW DUE PROCESS ARMY CONTINUES TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST ADMINISTRATION’S STUPID AND ILLEGAL ACTIONS & POLICIES! — Jesica Yanez On NPR — I Speak With Sally Kidd @ Hearst News TV!

Jessica Yanez leads Yanez Immigration Law in Greensboro, NC.

Here’s her bio:

About Attorney Yañez

Attorney Yañez earned a Bachelor’s of Arts Degree in Spanish from UNC Greensboro and her Juris Doctor Degree from Elon University School of Law.

Since founding her practice in 2012, she and her team of legal assistants have assisted individuals from approximately 40 different countries in a broad range of immigration matters including family-based petitions, waivers, consular processing, removal defense, U visas, VAWA, naturalization and asylum cases.

In 2016, Attorney Yañez became a NC Board Certified Specialist in Immigration Law. For more information about the benefits of hiring a Board-Certified Specialist, click here: http://www.nclawspecialists.gov/for-the-public/the-benefit-of-hiring-a-specialist/#standards.

Attorney Yañez also serves an Adjunct Professor of immigration law at Elon University School of Law.

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Here is Sally Kidd, National Correspondent for Hearst News:

And, here’s the clip containing my interview:

http://www.wmur.com/article/president-trump-blasts-judicial-system/22003693

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Thanks To Jessica and many other members of the NDPA for leading the charge against the Administration’ s cruel, immoral, and illegal policies!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-30-18

WHITE NATIONALIST ALERT AT JUSTICE: NEO-NAZI SESSIONS REPORTEDLY PROPOSING MASSIVE VIOLATION OF CONSTITUTION, REFUGEE ACT OF 1980, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS WITH RACIALLY TARGETED ABOLITION OF ASYLUM BY REGULATION! – Is Our Republic Teetering On The Brink?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17514590/asylum-illegal-central-american-immigration-trump

LIND REPORTS FOR VOX NEWS:

The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is drafting a plan that would totally overhaul asylum policy in the United States.

Under the plan, people would be barred from getting asylum if they came into the US between ports of entry and were prosecuted for illegal entry. It would also add presumptions that would make it extremely difficult for Central Americans to qualify for asylum, and codify — in an even more restrictive form — an opinion written by Sessions in June that attempted to restrict asylum for victims of domestic and gang violence.

Vox has confirmed that the regulation is in the process of being evaluated, and has seen a copy of a draft of the regulation.

When the regulation is ready, it will be published in the Federal Register as a notice of proposed rulemaking, with 90 days for the public to comment before it’s enacted as a final regulation.

The version Vox saw may change before it’s finalized, or even before the proposal is published in the Federal Register. (The Department of Justice declined to comment.)

But as it exists now, the proposal is a sweeping and thorough revamp of asylum — tightening the screws throughout the asylum process.

One source familiar with the asylum process but not authorized to speak on the record described the proposed changes as “the most severe restrictions on asylum since at least 1965” — when the law that created the current legal immigration system was passed — and “possibly even further back.”

The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the attorney general, along with the Department of Homeland Security, discretion over asylum standards — saying that the government “may grant asylum” to an applicant who they determine meets the definition of a refugee. But the proposed regulation would make it nearly impossible for Central Americans, including families, to earn the government’s approval.

It would eliminate the path that thousands of Central Americans, including families, take every month to seek asylum in the US: entering between ports of entry and presenting themselves to Border Patrol agents. It would make it all but impossible for victims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum — going even further than a June decision from Sessions that sought to limit asylum access for those groups. It would create a presumption against Central Americans who travel through Mexico on their way to the US.

Anyone convicted of entering the US illegally would become ineligible for asylum

What happens under current policy: Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” initiative, all migrants who cross between ports of entry and are apprehended by Border Patrol are supposed to be criminally prosecuted for illegal entry.

That arrest can delay a person’s claim of asylum, but it doesn’t derail it. An asylum-seeker may not get their initial screening interview, which determines whether they’ll be allowed to file an asylum application and get a hearing, until after they’ve been prosecuted and convicted. And they definitely won’t get approved for asylum before their criminal conviction.

But the conviction for illegal entry doesn’t affect the asylum claim; as Customs and Border Protection puts it, the two are on “parallel tracks.”

What would happen under the new plan: The proposed regulation would bar anyone from getting asylum if they’d been convicted of illegal entry or illegal reentry. That means people who asked for asylum when they were apprehended at the border, but were prosecuted first, would get denied asylum.

In effect, under this new regulation, combined with the zero-tolerance prosecution initiative, no one would be able to come to the US and get asylum unless they presented themselves at a port of entry. Many asylum-seekers simply don’t have that option. Smugglers often prevent asylum-seekers from using official ports of entry, and many of those who do come to ports of entry are being forced to wait days or weeks, after being told there’s no room to process them right now. And asylum-seekers who come to ports of entry are often required to stay in immigration detention without bond until their case is complete.

The administration would almost certainly get sued over this provision if it ended up included in the finalized regulation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has the power to bar people from getting asylum (or other forms of relief from deportation) if they’ve committed “particularly serious crimes.” While there’s no definition of seriousness in the law, lawyers and immigration advocates would likely challenge the idea that illegal entry, a misdemeanor, is “particularly serious.”

But even if that provision is struck down or eliminated by the courts, another proposal in the draft regulation could have much the same effect. It would instruct immigration judges to consider how the asylum-seeker got into the US, and treat it as a significant factor in whether or not to grant asylum (since asylum-seekers have to show they deserve “favorable discretion” from the judge). So even if people who crossed between ports of entry weren’t officially banned from getting asylum, they would have a very hard time winning their cases in practice.

If adopted, the regulation, combined with the zero tolerance initiative, would allow the administration to set up assembly-line justice for asylum seekers, including families, entering the US. People who entered between official ports would be held by the Department of Homeland Security, prosecuted for illegal entry, convicted, then have their asylum applications denied and get deported.

While the Trump administration is currently trying to win the power to detain families for more than 20 days, if this regulation were enacted, they might not even need to. They could deny most asylum claims and deport the claimants within that time.

Victims of domestic or gang violence would be all but banned from asylum

What happens under current policy: US law limits asylum to people who are persecuted because of their race, religion, political opinions, nationality, or membership in a particular social group.

The government has been wrestling for decades with that last classification — what exactly counts as a “particular social group”? — and with whether someone is “persecuted” if they’re victimized by someone other than the government. These questions are key to the fate of many of the Central Americans (including children and families) who have come to the US to seek asylum in recent years, many of whom are claiming asylum based on domestic violence or gang victimization in their home countries.

In June, with a sweeping ruling overturning a case from the Board of Immigration Appeals, Sessions attempted to narrow the circumstances in which someone fleeing domestic or gang violence could qualify for asylum in the US — saying that, generally, victims of domestic or gang violence wouldn’t be eligible for asylum based on their victimization.

As I reported last week, though, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been cautious in implementing Sessions’s opinion. Most notably, while Sessions decreed that his ruling overturned any precedent that contradicted it, USCIS only told asylum officers to stop using the one precedent decision Sessions explicitly named as moot.

It looks like the DOJ may be trying to use regulation to accomplish the same goal — with even narrower definitions of “persecuted” and “particular social group.”

What would happen under the plan: The proposed regulation would add several restrictions to what could constitute a particular social group: a family, for example, wouldn’t be a social group unless the family had a visible national presence. Interpersonal violence or crime victimization, similarly, wouldn’t be the basis for social group membership unless they were happening on a national scale. Having been recruited by a gang would be explicitly prohibited as grounds for an asylum claim.

To qualify for asylum, an applicant would have to show that the people who persecuted her were also persecuting others on the same basis. Human-rights lawyers worry this could disqualify many legitimate asylum claims. One lawyer raises the example of a gay man in Russia who suffers a violent homophobic attack: Under the proposal, “this would not be persecution on account of sexual orientation unless you could prove that these attackers had previously persecuted other gay men.”

An asylum-seeker would be required to provide an exact definition of her “particular social group” when she was applying for asylum. And she wouldn’t be allowed to appeal a denial, or reopen a claim, on the basis of any group she hadn’t originally named.

It’s extremely difficult for anyone other than a trained immigration lawyer to know exactly what does and doesn’t count as a particular social group eligible for asylum. Under the proposed regulation, however, an asylum-seeker who didn’t know the precise nature of the basis for her persecution would be assumed to not really be a victim of persecution at all.

This standard wouldn’t just apply to final approvals or denials of asylum. The initial step for an asylee is what’s called a “credible fear” screening, during which an asylum officer decides whether the person has a credible fear of going back to their home country. The proposed rule would tighten standards for those, too.

Immigration lawyers and border advocates were already extremely concerned that Sessions’s May ruling would cause asylum officers to radically hike the standards for passing the screening interview (though the USCIS memo posted by Vox suggests that might not be the case just yet). If this regulation were finalized, however, it seems very possible that many people who are currently given the opportunity to apply for asylum would be turned away before they got the chance.

Central Americans would be penalized for not seeking asylum in Mexico

What happens under current policy: Many asylum seekers are Central Americans who come through Mexico to seek asylum in the US. The US is not allowed to simply turn them back and force them to seek asylum in Mexico instead. (The Trump administration is trying to get Mexico to sign a “safe third country” agreement that would allow them to do this, but Mexico appears unenthusiastic.) But the proposed regulation would make it a lot easier to deny their asylum claims based on not having sought asylum in Mexico first.

What would happen under the plan: Under the proposed rule, the government would generally withhold “favorable discretion” (and, therefore, deny the asylum claim) for anyone who had spent more than two weeks in another country en route to the US without seeking asylum there, or who had traveled through more than one country on the way to the US.

Many Central Americans, especially if they take the train through Mexico or travel on foot, take more than two weeks to travel through Mexico. And asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador cross through Guatemala and Mexico to get to the US — meaning that they would almost certainly not earn the “favorable discretion” required to get their asylum claim approved.

Tightening the screws on the entire asylum process

The proposed regulation is extremely broad, with a lot more provisions — all of which would make it much harder for people to seek and get asylum. Some of the remaining ideas in the proposed draft include:

Limiting appeals for asylum-seekers who fail their screening interviews. Under current law, if an asylum-seeker fails her initial “credible fear” interview with an asylum officer, she can appeal for a judge to review her claim with fresh eyes — ignoring the fact that the asylum officer hadn’t found it a credible claim. Under the proposed regulation, judges would only be able to approve a credible-fear claim on appeal if there was clear evidence that the asylum officer had screwed up.

Rejecting incomplete applications first and letting them get completed later. Instead of returning incomplete asylum applications to the applicant and asking her to complete it, the government would reject the application. The applicant would still have 60 days to complete and resubmit the application before it was officially denied, but it’s not clear how applicants would be told about that — or whether they’d read beyond the word “rejected.”

Allowing judges to put evidence into the record on their own. The proposal would allow immigration judges considering asylum cases to unilaterally insert any information from credible sources into the record (as long as both the prosecutor and defense were informed). This provision would make it much easier for judges to insert information claiming that an asylum-seeker’s home country isn’t as dangerous for him as he claims — since asylum cases often hinge on whether there’s anywhere safe in the home country the asylum-seeker could live instead of the US.

Immigrants could be barred from asylum based on traffic offenses… In addition to the new prohibitions on asylum for immigration-specific crimes, the regulation would ban any applicant who’d been convicted of two or three misdemeanors (depending on what they were) from getting asylum.

This would have the biggest impact on unauthorized immigrants living in the US who get arrested and put in deportation proceedings, but ask for asylum to avert their deportation. (Under asylum law, someone can ask for asylum at any point within their first year of living in the US.)

In immigration policy, traffic offenses like driving without a license often don’t count as misdemeanors because in many states unauthorized immigrants aren’t allowed to get licenses. But the draft regulation makes clear that if driving without a license is a misdemeanor in the jurisdiction in question, it counts toward ineligibility.

…and blue states can’t fix eligibility by expunging immigrants’ records. Some Democratic state officials (most notably Gov. Jerry Brown in California) have started to use the pardon power to clear the criminal records of immigrants facing deportation. This regulation would do an end-run around that strategy.

Convictions that had been expunged or otherwise modified after the fact would still count as convictions if there was any evidence that the criminal record had been altered for immigration purposes. In other words, if Brown tried to expunge a record to make someone eligible for asylum, the fact that that’s why he did it would prevent it from stopping their deportation.

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WOW!

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT ADOLF HITLER WOULD LOSE WORLD WAR II, YET HAVE HIS DIRECT IDEOLOGICAL DESCENDANTS IN CONTROL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 73 YEARS LATER?

Seems to me that we’re witnessing the end of the U.S. as a democratic republic and the beginning of a Nazi-style, White Nationalist, racist authoritarian regime that, with the help of a complacent Supreme Court led by a spineless Chief Justice and his group of GOP appointed sycophants, is basically tearing up our Constitution, spitting on it, and dismantling our democratic institutions before our eyes.

I do have to admit, however, that becoming a neo-Nazi, White Nationalist totalitarian state is likely to diminish our attractiveness as a destination for immigrants and anyone else: The “Stalin theory” of immigration control. And, I suppose that once the kids have been disposed of by returning them to death in the Northern Triangle, Trump & Sessions will use the cages to keep the rest of us in.

The New Due Process Army might be the last defender of our Constitution and human values!

PWS

06-30-18

A-R-C-G- RULING SAVED THE LIFE OF THIS WOMAN, HER CHILDREN, & OTHERS LIKE THEM – SESSIONS PLANS “DEATH ROW” FOR FUTURE REFUGEE WOMEN & CHILDREN OF COLOR — Their Blood Will Be On Our Hands As A Nation If We Don’t Stop His White Nationalist Agenda!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/these-are-the-asylum-seekers-that-jeff-sessions-wants-to-turn-away_us_5b2b966ee4b0321a01ce5efb

Melissa Jeltsen reports for HuffPost:

BALTIMORE, Md. ― Aracely Martinez Yanez, 33, knows she’s one of the lucky ones. A deep scar that carves a line through her scalp, from crown to cheek, is proof of that fortune.

She got lucky when her abusive partner shot her point-blank in the head, and she survived.

She got lucky when she escaped her tiny village in Honduras. Local villagers blamed her for her partner’s death; he killed himself and their two young sons after he shot her.

She got lucky when she wasn’t harmed as she made the treacherous 2,000-mile journey to America.

And she got luckiest of all when she was granted asylum after she got here.

If she were to make her journey to America now, she would likely be turned away. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that immigration judges generally cannot consider domestic violence as grounds for asylum. Sessions overturned a precedent set during the Obama administration that allowed certain victims to seek asylum here if they were unable to get help in their home countries.

Domestic abuse of the kind experienced by Martinez Yanez is endemic in Central America. In Honduras, few services for victims exist, and perpetrators are almost never held criminally responsible. One woman is killed every 16 hours there, according to Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights.

For many victims, the United States is their best shot at staying alive.

While the exact numbers are not available, immigration lawyers have estimated that the Trump administration’s decision could invalidate tens of thousands of pending asylum claims from women fleeing domestic violence. Advocates warn it will be used to turn women away at the border, even if they have credible asylum claims.

“This administration is trying to close the door to refugees,” said Archi Pyati, chief of policy at Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that works with immigrant women and girls who have survived gender-based violence. They represented Martinez Yanez in her asylum case. Travel bans, increased detention and family separation are all being used as tools to deter individuals from coming here, Pyati said.

Still, that will not stop women from coming. Because there are thousands of women just like Martinez Yanez, and their stories are just as harrowing.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST

Aracely Martinez Yanez is pictured with her three daughters: Alyson, 4, Emely, 11 and Gabriela, 7. She holds her only photograph of her murdered sons: Daniel, 4, and Juancito, 6.

A Violent Start

Martinez Yanez grew up in a tiny village in Honduras with her parents and seven siblings. Her family made a living by selling homemade horchata, a sweet drink made from milky rice, and jugo de marañon, cashew juice. They also sold fresh tortillas out of their house. Her childhood was simple and happy.

But after she turned 15, a man in her village named Sorto became obsessed with her. At her cousin’s wedding, he tried to dance with her. She pushed him off: He was 15 years her senior, and gave her the creeps. A few days later, Martinez Yanez said, he waited outside her house with a gun and kidnapped her. He took her to a mountain and raped her repeatedly.

“I wanted to die,” she told HuffPost through an interpreter at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday. “I felt dirty. He said that I was his woman, and that I would not belong to anyone else.” As she told her story, she rubbed her legs up and down, physically uncomfortable as she recalled the terrible things that had happened to her.

Over the next six years, she said, Sorto went on to rape and beat her whenever he pleased. In the eyes of the village, she was his woman, just like he said. She got pregnant immediately, giving birth to her first son, Juancito, at 16, and her second son, Daniel, at 18. Sorto would come and go from the village, as he had a wife and children in El Salvador. But when he wasn’t there, she said she was watched by his family.

As for help, there were no police in her village, she said. She had seen what happened to other women who traveled to the closest city to report abuse: It made things worse. The police did nothing, and the abuser would inevitably find out.

“I felt like I was worthless, like I had no value,” she said.

A few years after her sons were born, she became friends with a local barber who cut her children’s hair. He was sweet and respectful, nothing like Sorto, she said. They began a secret relationship. Sorto had been gone from the village for a few years, and Martinez Yanez hoped she was free of him. Then she got pregnant. Scared that Sorto would find out, she fled to San Pedro Sula, a city in the north of the country. She didn’t tell anyone where she had gone.

But Sorto found her anyway. He called her on the phone and told her if she did not come back to the village within the next 24 hours, he would kill her family, she said. Martinez Yanez got on the next bus back.

A few days after she returned, she said, Sorto told her that he was taking her and their two boys to the river. He brought a hunting rifle with him. The family walked through the mountainside. Martinez Yanez recalled handing her children some sticks to play with, and crouching on the ground with them. Then she felt the rifle pressing into her head. The rest is a blank.

Sorto shot her in the back of the head, and killed her two sons, before shooting himself. Juancito was 6, Daniel was 4. Somehow, Martinez Yanez, five months pregnant, survived. She was hospitalized for months and had to relearn to walk and talk. She is still deaf in one ear, and has numbness down one side of her body.

When she returned home to the village, she said, people threw rocks at her and called her names. Someone fired a gun into her house. Someone else tried to run her over with a bicycle. The community blamed her for the killings because she had tried to leave Sorto, she explained. His family wanted to avenge his death.

“The whole village was against me,” she said. “Children, adults. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.”

A few months later she gave birth to a girl, Emely, but she was overwhelmed with stress. On top of grieving the death of her two sons, learning to live with a traumatic brain injury, and caring for her newborn, she was constantly worried about being killed by people in her village.

It was too much. She eventually fled to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, but Sorto’s family found her there too, she said. In a last-ditch effort to save Martinez Yanez’s life, her family paid over $7,000, an enormous sum for the family, to a coyote, a person who helps smuggle people across the border to the U.S. Emely, who was now 2, had to stay behind. They couldn’t afford to send her, too.

Martinez Yanez made the heartbreaking decision to go alone.

The Journey To Freedom

She left in the middle of the night, traveling with a group of four or five people. They were transported in a van for part of the trip, and then in taxis.

There was very little to eat or drink, she said, and she barely slept. Her stomach was upset and she suffered from debilitating headaches. In Mexico, she almost turned back.

“I missed my parents and my daughter so much,” she said. “But the threats and the conditions that I knew were waiting for me in my village gave me the motivation to continue to the U.S. to be safe.”

It took them two weeks to get to the U.S. border. Then they waited two days before attempting to cross, she said. She was terrified that she would be caught by immigration officials and sent back. She crossed the border illegally in February 2009, and went to her uncle’s house in Houston, Texas, before traveling on to Annapolis, Maryland, where her brother lived.

Women like Aracely are saving their own lives.Kristen Strain, a lawyer who worked on Martinez Yanez’s asylum case.

Martinez Yanez didn’t know that she could apply for asylum as a domestic violence victim until a few years later, when she sought medical care for her head injury in Maryland. There, she was referred to Tahirih Justice Center.

Kristen Strain, an attorney who worked on her case, wrote the legal brief arguing that Martinez Yanez should be granted asylum.

Generally, applicants must show that the persecution they have suffered is on account of one of five grounds: race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Strain successfully argued that being a female victim of severe gender-based violence in Honduras counted as a particular social group for purposes of obtaining asylum.

“There simply aren’t laws in place that protect women like Aracely,” she said. “They have no recourse. It is accepted in their communities that women can be treated like men’s property.”

She said it took over a year to gather all the evidence for Martinez Yanez’s claim, which included a neurological evaluation, medical documents, news stories from Honduran papers about the shooting, dozens of interviews, and statements from friends and family in Honduras to corroborate her story.

“It is not as if it’s easy,” Strain said. “In addition to having to physically get here, which is harrowing and dangerous, women have to navigate a complex legal system that is difficult to understand, especially when they don’t speak the language. It’s hard for them to even know what their rights are, let alone find an attorney who can advocate for them.”

“Women like Aracely are saving their own lives,” she went on.

Martinez Yanez was granted asylum in 2013. Her daughter, Emely, was allowed to join her in 2014. While they talked on the phone regularly, the mother and daughter had not seen each other for five years.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER FOR HUFFPOST

Martinez Yanez watches her daughters play outside the family’s Baltimore apartment.

A New Life

In her Baltimore home, more than 3,000 miles from the tiny village in Honduras where she was raised, Martinez Yanez likes to be surrounded by photos. They remind her of those she had to leave behind.

There’s one of her sister graduating college. Another of her parents beaming happily.

And then, hanging in the entrance to the kitchen, is a photograph of her with her two deceased sons. It is the only picture she owns of them. She brought it with her when she fled Honduras. When she spoke to HuffPost about her sons, she cried. She still doesn’t understand why they were killed.

Since she’s been in the U.S., Martinez Yanez has expanded her family. Emely, who is 11, now has two sisters: Gabriela, 7, and Alyson, 4.

“I’m very fortunate to be able to have my daughters with me,” she said. “I can’t ask for anything better to happen. I am so happy with my life.”

Martinez Yanez still struggles with the repercussions of being shot in the head. She is forgetful and can get confused easily. She said she has to put every appointment she has in her phone with an alarm, otherwise she’ll miss it.

She said she was grateful that she was granted asylum, and heartbroken for other women who may not have the same opportunity she did.

“I just feel so sad that other women in my situation, or even in worse situations than mine will not be allowed in the country anymore,” she said. “Here, I don’t have to hide or run away from anyone.”

So, without the interference of the DOJ politicos, here was an actual working system that helped get deserving cases granted and off the docket, conserved judicial resources, saved time, saved lives, and complied completely with Due Process. In other words, a smashing Immigration Court and U.S. system of justice “success story” by any rational measure!

That has all been disgracefully dismantled by Sessions. Now, following his perversion of the law in Matter of A-B-, He’s encouraging DHS and Immigration Judges to deny such cases without even hearing the testimony (even though every one of these individuals easily should qualify for the lesser relief of protection under the Convention Against Torture). That’s almost certain to result in appeals, prolonged litigation in the Courts of Appeals, and ultimately return of most cases to the Immigration Courts for full hearings and fair consideration.

At some point, not only is A-R-C-G- likely to be reinstated, but it is likely to be expanded to what is really the fundamental basis for these claims — gender as a qualifying “Particular Social Group.” It’s undeniably immutable/fundamental, particularized, socially distinct and clearly the basis for much of the persecution in today’s world!

In the meantime, however, those who don’t have the luxury of great pro bono representation, lack an attentive Circuit Court of Appeals, or who can’t get through the “credible fear interview” as it has now been “rigged for denial” by Sessions will likely be unlawfully returned to their home countries to suffer abuse, torture, and a lifetime of torment or death, along with those cute little kids in the pictures we’re seeing.

The White Nationalist, neo-Nazi regime of Trump, Sessions, and their enablers will be one of the most horrible and disgusting periods in our history. History will neither forget nor treat kindly those who failed to stand up to the racists and child abusers running and ruining our Government, and destroying many innocent lives in the process.

Due Process Forever! Jeff Sessions Never!

PWS

06-25-18

LA TIMES: TRUMP REPLACES HIS POLICY OF CHILD ABUSE WITH HIS POLICY OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AGAINST FAMILIES THAT COURTS HAVE ALREADY OUTLAWED!

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=f8193bbb-9764-4506-929a-3a8c59fa25e4

A non-solution at the border

Throwing kids behind bars with their parents isn’t a whole lot better than separating them.

The nation should be thankful that President Trump finally came to his senses and ended the inhumane and traumatizing practice of separating children from their immigrant parents who illegally enter the United States. Facing an extraordinary backlash not just from Democrats but from some Republicans, every living former first lady (and, amazingly, the current one), United Nations human rights officials, Willie Nelson, Pope Francis and many, many others who reacted in dismay to scenes of children corralled in metal cages, Trump probably had little choice.

But his solution — detaining entire families together while the adults face, in most cases, misdemeanor charges of illegal entry — raises enormously troubling problems of its own. Innocent children do not belong in jails or detention centers, as a 20-year-old federal consent decree acknowledges.

The congressional Republicans and Christian conservatives who spoke out against separating children from parents — more than 2,300 have been separated — deserve acknowledgment for finally drawing a line, though it is disheartening that it took a policy as cruel and damaging as ripping children from their parents’ arms to finally get them to stand up to the administration.

Of course, the president’s change of heart also put the lie to his assertions, echoed by underlings such as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, that loopholes in immigration laws and court decisions made the separations necessary. They did not. It was Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policydecision to charge all suspected illegal border crossers with crimes and detain them pending court action. Though entering the U.S. without permission is a misdemeanor, no law requires the government to prosecute every violation. Nor does the government have to detain the border crossers, which is what led to the family separations. The administration chose to do that.

Under Trump’s new policy, the zero-tolerance arrests will continue, but the government apparently will keep the families together in detention — in direct violation of the 1997 Flores consent decree that says the government cannot hold undocumented children in detention centers for more than 20 days, with or without their parents. In fact, during the surge of unaccompanied minors and families fleeing violence in Central America, the Obama administration detained entire families to try to deter others from making the dangerous trip from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, where violent gangs have terrorized neighborhoods. The administration ended the policy in the face of political backlash and court orders. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled that while the Flores agreement does not require parents to be released, it does bar the government from keeping the children in detention.

In his order, Trump said he intends to ask the court to revise the Flores settlement to allow for longer family detentions. The court should rebuff that. The goal here is to keep the families together — but not by violating a rule that was designed to set ra-tional and compassionate immigration detention standards for children. The better solution is to stop the over-reliance on incarceration. Unless there is a valid belief that the parents pose a threat, they should be released along with their children, with steps taken to ensure they will return for their court dates. Those steps can include electronic monitoring through ankle bracelets and other techniques.

It’s notable that the president, who repeatedly said it would be up to Congress to change laws to end the family separations, ultimately decided for his own political expediency to issue his executive order even as bills barring family separations were being introduced. We’re glad the president didn’t wait forthe glacially slow Congress to act, which would have repeated the error he made in ending Obama-era protections for “Dreamers” and then telling Congress to save the program legislatively. Trump can undo that executive decision, too.

But the president is right that Congress should — really, must — address its two-decade impasse over how to fix the nation’s dysfunctional immigration laws and enforcement system. In fact, some efforts to push reform legislation are currently underway, but Congress should be wary of using the crisis of family separations as blackmail to force through the kinds of draconian policies pushed by hard-liners like Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who seek to severely reduce legal immigration. What the U.S. needs is a fair and humane bipartisan immigration overhaul that addresses the complicated but solvable issues that have divided the country for too long.

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And, we haven’t even gotten to the pictures of headless, mutilated corpses that will certainly be the result of Jeff Sessions’s twisted White Nationalist reinterpretation of refugee protection law. Sessions’s lawless (and, naturally intentionally cruel and inhumane) actions will enable the Administration to return legitimate refugees, primarily women and children, to death and torture at the hands of gangs and cartels that exercise quasi-governmental authority in the Northern Triangle.

Or, perversely, the Administration is effectively telling refugees to stop resisting the gangs and join up or cooperate in abusing others as the only way to save their lives. Because, under the White Nationalist Trump Regime, “brown lives” don’t matter either.

The stain of the Trump Regime and its human rights abuses are on the hands of all of us.

PWS

06-21-18

INSIDE THE CHILD ABUSE CONSPIRACY: LIKE MANY CRIMINALS, TRUMP’S “GANG OF SIX” CAN’T KEEP THEIR STORIES STRAIGHT — But, There Is One Consistency — Everything These “Kakistocrats” Say Is A Lie!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/how-the-trump-administration-is-defending-its-indefensible-child-separation-policy.html

Dahlia Lithwick reports for Slate:

Photos by Win McNamee/Getty Images, Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images, Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Leon Neal/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, and Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

COVER STORY

POLITICS

How They Defend the Indefensible

The Trump administration is playing a game of choose your own facts, but every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK

JUNE 19, 20181:32 PM

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You can call it a “policy” (Jeff Sessions) or you can call it a not-policy (Kirstjen Nielsen) or you can call it a “law” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders). You can say that yes it’s a policy but nobody likes it (Kellyanne Conway) or you can say it’s a “zero-tolerance” enforcement of a Democratic law (Donald Trump) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of an amalgam of various congressional laws (Nielsen) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of the Department of Justice’s own preferences with respect to enforcing prior laws (Sessions).

You can say the purpose of the Justice Department’s family separation policy is deterrence (Stephen Miller, John Kelly) or you can claim that asking if the purpose of the policy is deterrence is “offensive” (Nielsen). You can claim in your legal pleadings that the family separation policy is wholly “discretionary” and thus unreviewable by any court, meaning that only the president can change it (Justice Department in Ms. L v. ICE). Or you can claim that only Congress can “fix loopholes” (Nielsen) or you can say that Congress as a whole can’t fix anything because congressional Democrats are entirely to blame (Trump, Mike Huckabee).

You can blame all this newfound “loophole” action on a consent decree from 1997 in a case called Flores (Sessions, Paul Ryan, Chuck Grassley) or on a 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that interpreted Flores (Nielsen) or on a 2008 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (Nielsen). Better yet, you can fault some magical mashup of “the law” that forces you to defend every statute to its most absurd extreme (Sanders). By this logic, you can also claim that Korematsu—the case authorizing the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II—is still on the books and thus needs to be enforced because it’s also “the law,” but that would be insane. Oh, but wait. Trump proxies made that very claim during the campaign (Carl Higbie).

You can pretend that by turning every adult who crosses the border into a presumptive criminal your hands are tied, so you need to jail children to avoid jailing children (Nielsen). You can insist that the vast majority of children who cross the border are being smuggled in by gang members (Nielsen) or that all asylum-seekers are per se criminals (which they are not) or that lawful asylum-seekers should just come back at a better time (Nielsen). You can claim you never intended your policy (if it is in fact a policy) to have any impact on asylum-seekers at all (Nielsen) but of course it would turn out you were lying and this has been the plan all along (John Lafferty, Department of Homeland Security asylum division chief).

You can say the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sessions). You can say again, incredibly, that the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sanders). But that would be pathetic (Stephen Colbert).

You can blame the press for the photographs they take (Nielsen) and for the photographs they don’t take (Nielsen). You can suggest that the children in cages are not real children (not linking to Ann Coulter) or that the cages are not in fact cages (Steve Doocy) even though government officials admit that they are cages. You can claim that the detention facilities are “summer camps” or “boarding schools” (Laura Ingraham). You can take umbrage that the good people of DHS and CBP and ICE are being maligned (Nielsen).

You can say that separating children from their parents is a strategic move to force an agreement on Trump’s wall, which would make the children purely instrumental (Trump). Or you could say that this is a way to protect children by deterring their parents, which would also make the children purely instrumental (Kelly). Or you can instead say you are protecting the children from all the harm that happens to children transported over borders by doing untold permanent damage to them as they scream in trauma (Nielsen). Because the best way to deter child abuse is through child abuse.

You can fight to the death about comparisons to Nazis or you can celebrate a candidate (Corey Stewart) who is a hero to Nazis or you can merely show a staggering lack of comprehension about what Nazis actually did (Sessions).

You can fact check and fact check and fact check these claims and it won’t matter that they are false. And the fact that nobody in this administration even bothers to coordinate their cover stories at this point reflects just how pointless it is to fact check them anyhow. It’s an interactive game of choose your own logic, law, facts, and victims, but every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages, sleeping under foil blankets as strangers change their diapers. The trick is twisting and dodging and weaving until you get to that final page.

It is very sad (Melania Trump). Something should be done (Ted Cruz). If only there were some mechanism to stop torturing children. If only there were some way to stop litigating why we’re doing it and who is doing it and just stop doing it.

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http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/politics/fact-check-trump-family-separations-immigration/index.html

Tal Kopan reports for CNN:

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump on Tuesday delivered a stream-of-consciousness-style speech on immigration as furor over his administration’s separation of families at the border reaches a fever pitch.

But his speech at a small business event in Washington contained several factual inaccuracies.

White House says family separations at the border are a ‘binary choice,’ but stats say otherwise

Here is what Trump said, and what the reality is.

False claim: Family separations are Democrats’ fault

Trump said the family separations at the border are “a result of Democrat-supported loopholes in our federal laws” that he said could be easily changed.

“These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don’t want,” Trump said.

The reality: Trump’s administration made a decision to prosecute 100% of adults caught crossing the border illegally even if they came with children, and thus are separating parents from their kids at the border with no clear plan to reunite them after the parents return from jail and court proceedings.

The administration has long wanted to roll back a law unanimously passed under President George W. Bush and a court settlement dating back decades but most recently affirmed under the Obama administration — citing those two provisions as “loopholes.” Both were designed to protect immigrant children from dangers like human trafficking and to provide minimum standards for their care, including turning them over to the Department of Health and Human Services for resettlement within three days of arrest, as opposed to being held in lengthy detention, and dictating that children with their families also cannot be held in detention or jail-like conditions longer than three weeks.

The administration has complained the laws make it harder to immediately deport or reject immigrants at the border, and that they are not able to detain families indefinitely.

False claim: Thousands of judges

Trump said his administration was hiring “thousands and thousands” of immigration judges, that the US already has “thousands” of immigration judges and that other countries don’t have immigration judges.

Trump to huddle with Republicans during crucial week on immigration

In reality, there the Justice Department’s immigration courts division has 335 judges nationwide, with more than 100 more judges budgeted for, according to a DOJ spokesman.

Because of a massive backlog in the immigration courts, it can take years for those cases to work their way to completion, and many immigrants are allowed to work and live in the US in the meantime, putting down roots. The funding for immigration courts and judges has increased only modestly over the years as funding and resources for enforcement have increased dramatically. A proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to address the family separation issue would double the number of judges to 750.

Trump’s comments Tuesday echoed remarks he made last month. In a May Fox News interview, he claimed the United States was “essentially the only country that has judges” to handle immigration cases. But that is incorrect.

A number of other countries have immigration court systems or a part of the judiciary reserved for immigration and asylum cases, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and Canada.

False claim: Virtually all immigrants disappear

Trump also claimed falsely that when immigrants are let into the country to have their cases heard by a court, they virtually all go into hiding.

“And by the way, when we release the people, they never come back to the judge, anyway. They’re gone,” Trump said. “Do you know if a person comes in and puts one foot on our ground, it’s essentially, ‘Welcome to America, welcome to our country.’ You never get them out because they take their name, they bring the name down, they file it, then they let the person go. … Like 3% come back.”

In reality, the number of immigrants who don’t show up to court proceedings is far lower. And many of the immigrants released from detention are given monitoring devices such as ankle bracelets to ensure they return.

Republicans craft bill to keep detained families together

According to the annual Justice Department yearbook of immigration statistics from fiscal year 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, 25% of immigration court cases were decided “in absentia” — meaning the immigrant wasn’t present in court. In that year, there were 137,875 cases. The number of cases decided “in absentia” between fiscal year 2012 and fiscal year 2016 was between 11% and 28%.

When White House legislative chief Marc Short made a similarly inaccurate claim on Monday, the White House pointed to a statistic about the high percentage of deportation orders for undocumented children that were delivered in absentia, but amid total case completions for minors, the number of in absentia orders has ranged from 40% to 50% in recent years.

Advocates for immigrants attribute some of the missed hearings to often not receiving a court notice mailed to an old address or not having an attorney who can adequately explain the process to the child. Studies have shown that with legal advice and guidance, immigrants are far more likely to show up for hearings and have their claims ultimately be successful.

False claim: Countries are sending bad eggs to the US

Trump said that countries deserve to be punished for illegal immigration, and that they “send” bad eggs to the US.

“They send these people up, and they’re not sending their finest,” Trump said.

He continued: ‘When countries abuse us by sending people up — not their best — we’re not going to give any more aid to those countries.”

In fact, there is no evidence that countries “send” anyone in particular to the US — rather analyses of recent immigration flows have shown that in recent years, a much higher number of Central Americans have come to the US fleeing rampant gang violence and instability in especially the countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Experts who study the countries agree that cutting aid would only further destabilize the region, likely making illegal immigration worse, not better.

Though gang members do cross the border illegally alongside those fleeing violence, the administration has never been able to provide numbers showing that those are a large percentage of the cases. Only a handful of such prosecutions occur a year, while more than 300,000 people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally last fiscal year. Nearly 120,000 defensive asylum applications were filed last year, according to government data, meaning those individuals believed they were fleeing violent situations back home.

False Claim: Mexico isn’t helping the US

Mexico, Trump said, “does nothing for us.”

As for Mexico’s contribution, experts say the country’s crackdown on immigrants within its borders has been a major help to the US in recent years. According to statistics from the US and Mexican governments compiled by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and shared with CNN, over the past three years, Mexico has deported tens of thousands more migrants back to the primary countries in Central America that drive immigration north. Each of the last three years, Mexican removals exceeded US removals to those countries.

Mexico is also apprehending tens of thousands of Central Americans before they reach the US. According to the data, Mexico intercepted 173,000 Central Americans in fiscal year 2015, 151,000 in fiscal year 2016 and just under 100,000 in fiscal year 2017.

In the past two years, Mexico has lagged behind the US in apprehensions, but Migration Policy Institute President Andrew Selee, an expert on Mexican policy, said that could be due to a number of factors including smugglers successfully changing their routes to avoid detection or relations with Trump.

CNN’s Catherine Shoichet and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

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Join the New Due Process Army today!

Free the children.

Require Due Process and real justice for refugees.

Hold the lying child abusers in the kakistocracy accountable for their indefensible actions.

Remove the abusers and their enablers from office and political power.

Welcome more immigrants and refugees.

End racism masquerading as “government policy” or the “rule of law.”

Time for the decent, tolerant, majority to take back our country from the forces of darkness, evil, and dishonesty.

PWS

06-20-18

DIVINE JUDGEMENT: 600 UNITED METHODISTS AND CLERGY FILE FORMAL COMPLAINT AGAINST JEFF SESSIONS FOR VIOLATIONS OF CHRIST’S TEACHINGS AND CHURCH RULES – CHARGES INCUDE: “CHILD ABUSE, IMMORALITY, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, & DISSEMINATION OF DOCTRINES CONTRARY TO THE STANDARDS OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH!” — “Outing False Christianity!”

Monday, July 18, 2018
Dear Rev. Boykin and Rev. Wines,

We, the undersigned laity and clergy of the United Methodist Church, issue a formal complaint against fellow United Methodist layperson Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, by our understanding a lay member of Ashland Place United Methodist Church, in Mobile, AL, and an active participant in Clarendon United Methodist Church, Arlington, VA. While we are reticent to bring a formal complaint against a layperson, Mr. Sessions’ unique combination of tremendous social/political power, his leading role as a Sunday School teacher and former delegate to General Conference, and the severe and ongoing impact of several of his public, professional actions demand that we, as his siblings in the United Methodist denomination, call for some degree of accountability.

We write to you, Mr. Sessions’ pastors, copying his District Superintendents and Bishops, in the hopes that you will, as members of our connectional system, dig deeply into Mr. Sessions’ advocacy and actions that have led to harm against thousands of vulnerable humans. As members of the United Methodist Church, we deeply hope for a reconciling process that will help this long-time member of our connection step back from his harmful actions and work to repair the damage he is currently causing to immigrants, particularly children and families.

Pursuant to Paragraph 2702.3 of the 2016 United Methodist Book of Discipline, we hereby charge Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Attorney General of the United States, a professing member and/or active participant of Ashland Place United Methodist Church (Mobile, Alabama) and Clarendon United Methodist Church (Alexandria, Virginia), with the chargeable offenses of:

Child Abuse (examples: advocacy for and implementation of documented practices that indefinitely separate thousands of young children from their parents; holding thousands of children in mass incarceration facilities with little to no structured educational or socio-emotional support)

Immorality (examples: the use of violence against children to deter immigration; advocating and supporting the separation of children from their families; refusal of refugee/asylee status to those fleeing gang or sexual violence; oppression of those seeking asylum or attempting to enter the United States with refugee status; directing employees and staff members to kidnap children from their parents)

Racial discrimination (examples: stopping investigations of police departments charged with racial discrimination; attempting to criminalize Black Lives Matter and other racial justice activist groups; targeting incarceration for those engaged in undocumented border crossings as well as those who present with requests for asylum, with a particular focus on those perceived as Muslim or LatinX)

Dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church (examples: the misuse of Romans 13 to indicate the necessity of obedience to secular law, which is in stark contrast to Disciplinary commitments to supporting freedom of conscience and resistance to unjust laws)

While other individuals and areas of the federal government are implicated in each of these examples, Mr. Sessions – as a long-term United Methodist in a tremendously powerful, public position – is particularly accountable to us, his church. He is ours, and we are his. As his denomination, we have an ethical obligation to speak boldly when one of our members is engaged in causing significant harm in matters contrary to the Discipline on the global stage. Several Bishops and other denominational leaders have spoken out about this matter, urging Methodists to contact Mr. Sessions and for these policies to change, but we believe that the severity of his actions and the harm he is causing to immigrants, migrants, refugees, and asylees calls for his church to step into a process to directly engage with him as a part of our community.

We look forward to entering into the just resolution process with Mr. Sessions as we seek to journey with him towards reconciliation and faithful living into the gospel.

In the community of Jesus, the Liberator and Redeemer,

Rev. Dave Wright, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Kelly Dalhman-Oeth, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Terri Stewart, Pacific Northwest Conference

Elaine Marston, Pacific Northwest Conference

Becca Brazell, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Stephen Tarr, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. JoDene Romeijn-Stout, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Paul Mitchell, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Katie Stickney, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Dr. Joanne Carlson Brown, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Nico Romeijn-Stout, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Sharon Moe, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Eric Stone, Detroit Conference

Celeste Blay, PNW Conference

Rev. Hilary Marchbanks, Rio Texas Conference

Adam Richards, North Texas Conference

Rev. Jan Bolerjack, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Ryan Russel, Iowa Conference

Rev. Kristin Hawes Joyner, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Lyda Pierce, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. J. Cody Nielsen, Iowa Conference

Rev. Dr. Israel I. Alvaran, Philippines Annual Conference

Aaron Taylor Pazan, Pacific Northwest Conference

Rev. Austin Adkinson, Pacific Northwest Conference

Margo Gislain, Northern Illinois Conference

Robyn Gislain, Northern Illinois Conference

Rev. Nestor Santiago Gerente, California Pacific Conference

Rev. Anna Voinovich, Northern Illinois Conference

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The names of the rest of the 640 signers of this letter can be found here:

A_Complaint_regarding_Jefferson_Sessions

AMEN

As a United Methodist myself, I was wondering when someone would bring up the mind boggling disconnect between the kind, forgiving, self-sacrificing, generous, honor and assist the poor, eschew cruelty and arrogance teachings of Jesus Christ that are the subject of our services every week and the horrible totally un-Christian life and dispicable lack of values preached and advocated by Jeff Sessions. The thought of Sessions teaching a Sunday School class based on his ignorant, arrogant, mis-interpretation of Christian doctrine, particularly as it relates to social justice and equality, is simply appalling. Just ask the Jesuit Fathers down at Georgetown University, where I teach.

To state the obvious, Jesus Christ was not a shill for the secular state. He was actually put to death unfairly by a corrupt judge under the “rule of law” of the secular state of Rome.

Christ was a rabble rouser not a booster of the “status quo” or the “powers that be” (that’s why he was executed). He was a supporter of the poor, the foreign, the condemned, women, and the despised of society. An arrogant, bigoted individual like Sessions would have been the absolute last guy that Christ would have “hung out” with, in the absence of some showing of contrition, remorse, and genuine request for forgiveness for his many horrible sins against the human race.

And, I doubt that there would be much room in Christ’s Kingdom for unrepentant supporters of the vile “MAGA Movement” that elevates things like pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth to “national values” embodied in an idolatrous and godless ruler. Yeah, Old Testament rulers like David had some big time problems — but they did have a few redeeming virtues of which our current king and his sycophantic worshipper/followers like Sessions have none whatsoever.

Here’s a repeat of my comments on one of my recent posts reacting to Sessions’s appalling attempt to justify his criminal child abuse with a quotation from Romans.

A NOTE TO MY WAYWARD CHILD, JEFF

I am very concerned about our relationship, Jeff.

For I was hungry Jeff, and you gave me nothing to eat.

I was thirsty, Jeff, and you gave me nothing to drink.

I was a stranger seeking refuge, Jeff, and you did not invite me in.

I needed clothes, Jeff, and you clothed me only in the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner.

I was sick and in a foul prison you called “detention,” Jeff, and you mocked me and did not look after me.

I said “suffer the children to come unto me,” Jeff, and you made my children suffer.

In your arrogant ignorance, Jeff, you might ask when did I see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

But, Jeff, I was right there before you, in a caravan with my poor sisters, brothers, and children, having traveled far, seeking shelter and refuge from mistreatment and expecting mercy and justice under your laws. But, in your prejudice and ignorance, Jeff, you did not see me because I did not look like one of you. For you see, Jeff, as you did not show love, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and human compassion for the least of my children, you did not do for me.

And so, Jeff, unless you repent of your wasted life of sins, selfishness, meanness, taking my name and teachings in vain, and mistaking your often flawed view of man’s laws for my Father’s will, you must go away to eternal punishment. But, the poor, the vulnerable, the abused, and the children who travel with me and those who give us aid, compassion, justice, and mercy will accompany me to eternal life.

For in truth, Jeff, although you yourself might be immoral, none of God’s children is ever “illegal” to Him. Each time you spout such nonsense, you once again mock me and my Father by taking our names, teachings, and values in vain.

Wise up, Jeff, before it’s too late.

Your Lord & Would Be Savior,

J.C.

While it’s painfully obvious that Sessions has attended the Methodist Church for years and claimed membership without any basic understanding of Christ’s true message, some United Methodists have “gotten the message” and have the courage to stand up to arrogant, self-righteous, bullies like Sessions. I find that comforting. It’s also the type of true Christian action that Jesus told us to take.

PWS

06-20-18

ADVOCATES ALERT: NEW MEMO TO USCIS ASYLUM OFFICERS ELIMINATES A-R-C-G- AS A BASIS FOR CREDIBLE FEAR — To Get Through Credible Fear Interview, Applicants Must Meet The “Proof Heavy” Evidentiary Test — It Can Be Done! – Administration Obviously Looking At Unrepresented Applicants As “Fish In Barrel” To Be Summarily Denied & Shipped Off To Death, Abuse, Torture – Representation Can Force System To Deal With Real Facts In Northern Triangle!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/19/17476662/asylum-border-sessions

Dara Lind reports at VOX News:

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a sweeping ruling that threatened to radically narrow the standards by which people fleeing domestic or gang violence could claim asylum in the US — or even be allowed to stay in the country to plead their case.

But an internal memo sent to the people actually responsible for implementing Sessions’s ruling at the border, and obtained exclusively by Vox, indicates that Sessions’s revolution isn’t as radical as it seemed — at least not yet.

That could be very good news for parents separated from their children, who will have to face an asylum screening to be allowed to stay in the US in immigration detention after they are criminally charged and convicted under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.

The memo obtained by Vox was written by John L. Lafferty, the head of the Asylum Division for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, on Wednesday, June 13, two days after Sessions’s ruling in Matter of A- B- was released. It’s labeled “Interim Guidance” for asylum officers — the people in charge of conducting interviews for asylum and “credible fear” screening interviews for migrants at the border that determine whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the US and pursue an asylum claim.

As the “Interim” label suggests, Lafferty’s memo makes it clear that USCIS will be issuing more directives to asylum officers as it continues to analyze Sessions’s ruling. But in the meantime, it doesn’t dictate sweeping changes to asylum standards.

Jeff Sessions has all but slammed the door on survivors of domestic and gang violence

Michael Bars, a spokesperson for USCIS, told Vox, “Asylum and credible fear claims have skyrocketed across the board in recent years largely because individuals know they can exploit a broken system to enter the U.S., avoid removal, and remain in the country. This exacerbates delays and undermines those with legitimate claims. USCIS is carefully reviewing proposed changes to asylum and credible fear processing whereby every legal means is being considered to protect the integrity of our immigration system from fraudulent claims — the Attorney General’s decision will be implemented as soon as possible.”

But the initial implementation doesn’t appear to be quite as aggressive as that rhetoric implies.

“While the Attorney General made some very sweeping assertions in Matter of A-B-, including as to what he thinks would happen to the claims of different kinds of asylum seekers under this ruling, the legal holding of this case is considerably narrower,” said Anwen Hughes, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First, when sent the text of the memo. “This guidance focuses on what the AG’s decision actually held.”

Sessions’s ruling declared, “Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.” That language isn’t replicated in the memo — which urges officers to deal with claims on a case-by-case basis.

The only specific change the memo mandates to asylum policy is for officers to stop citing a past Board of Immigration Appeals precedent, Matter of A-R-C-G-, which found that “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” constituted a particular social group — allowing some domestic violence victims to claim asylum based on their persecution as members of that group.

But while A-R-C-G- was the only precedent Sessions explicitly overturned, his ruling also said that “any other” precedent from the Board of Immigration Appeals was also moot if it had defined “particular social group” more broadly than Sessions did last week.

The initial implementation memo from USCIS doesn’t mention any such rulings. It emphasizes that officers should make decisions based on two precedents Sessions held up as gooddecisions — both of which denied asylum claims based on gang violence — but doesn’t identify any decisions that are too broad under Sessions’s standards.

That means that for the moment, at least, asylum officers would be able to determine that a victim of domestic or gang violence still deserves asylum — or deserves to plead her asylum case — if there’s another precedent decision that they think fits the case.

The USCIS memo does emphasize that people seeking asylum based on gang violence or any other “private crime” need to demonstrate that the government in their home country “condoned the behavior or demonstrated a complete helplessness to protect the victim.”

Before Sessions’s ruling, immigrants could claim asylum if they were persecuted by a nonstate group and the government was “unable or unwilling” to prevent it. Technically, that’s still the standard. But Sessions’s formulation about condoning or “complete helplessness” could set the bar higher for what counts as unable or unwilling — especially because his ruling emphasized (in a passage quoted by the implementation memo) that police ignoring crime reports doesn’t mean they’re unable or unwilling to help the victim.

This guidance could be very good news for parents separated from children

The implementation of Sessions’s asylum ruling has real and immediate impacts for asylum seekers — including the thousands of parents who have been separated from their children at the border and prosecuted in recent weeks.

After being prosecuted and sentenced (usually to “time served”), asylum seekers are returned to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation. They face “expedited” deportation, without a full immigration court hearing, unless they can demonstrate that they have a “credible fear” of persecution and should stay in the US to pursue an asylum claim.

At the moment, the overwhelming majority of people are passing their “credible fear” screenings. Sessions sees this as a sign of widespread fraud and lax standards, and his ruling last week was explicitly written to raise the bar not only for eventual approvals or denials of asylum, but for the initial screenings as well.

If Sessions’s ruling were being interpreted as broadly as possible by USCIS, many parents would likely find it impossible to pass their screening interviews, and would find themselves deported without their children and with little time to locate or contact them. But because USCIS appears to be relatively cautious in its implementation, parents in custody — at least for the moment — appear to have a better shot of staying in the US to pursue their asylum case and reunite with their children.

Of course, asylum claims and initial screenings are both partly up to the discretion of individual asylum officers. It’s totally possible that some asylum offices will interpret this memo as an instruction to get much harsher. But the memo doesn’t force them to do that, at least in its interim form.

The text of the memo obtained by Vox is below.

From: Lafferty, John L
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2018 5:20 PM
To: [redacted by Vox]
Subject: Asylum Division Interim Guidance – Matter of A- B-, 27I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018)

Asylum Division colleagues:

I’m sure that most of you have heard and/or read about the decision issued by Attorney General Sessions on Monday in Matter of A- B-, 27I&N Dec. 316 (A.G. 2018).

Below is our Office of Chief Counsel’s summary of the AG’s decision, which is followed by Asylum’s summaries of two 2014 decisions – Matter of M-E-V-G and Matter of W-G-R- – that were cited by the AG in support of his decision. While we continue to work with our OCC colleagues on final guidance for the field, we are issuing the following interim guidance on how to proceed with decision-making on asylum cases and CF/RF [credible fear/reasonable fear] screening determinations:

Matter of A-R-C-G- has been overruled and can no longer be cited to or relied upon as supporting your decision-making on an asylum case or in a CF/RF determination.

Effective upon issuance of this guidance, no affirmative grant of asylum or positive CF/RF screening determination should be signed off on by a supervisor as legally sufficient, or issued as a final decision/determination, that specifically cites to or relies upon Matter of A-R-C-G- as justification for the result. Instead, it should be returned to the author for reconsideration consistent with the next bullet.

All pending and future asylum decisions and CF/RF screening determinations finding that the individual has shown persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of membership in a particular social group must require that the applicant meet the relevant standard by producing evidence that establishes ALL of the following:

A cognizable particular social group that is 1) composed of members who share a common immutable characteristic; 2) defined with particularity, and 3) socially distinct within the society in question;

Membership in that PSG;

That membership in the PSG was or is a central reason for the past and/or future persecution; and

The harm was and/or will be inflicted by the government or by non-governmental actors that the government is unable or unwilling to control.

When the harm is at the hands of a non-governmental actor, the applicant must show that the government condoned the behavior or demonstrated a complete helplessness to protect the victim. This new decision stresses that, in applying this standard, “[t]he fact that the local police have not acted on a particular report of an individual crime does not necessarily mean that the government is unwilling or unable to control crime, any more than it would in the United States. There may be many reasons why a particular crime is not successfully investigated and prosecuted. Applicants must show not just that the crime has gone unpunished, but that the government is unwilling or unable to prevent it.” A-B- at 337-338. (See RAIO Lesson Plan – Definition of Persecution and Eligibility Based on Past Persecution, Section 4.2 “Entity the Government Is Unable or Unwilling to Control”, for further guidance).

The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.

Every asylum decision and CF/RF screening determination must consider and analyze whether internal relocation would be reasonable, as provided for at 8 CFR 208.

If you have questions on this interim guidance, please raise them up your local chain of command so that they can be brought to the attention of HQ Asylum QA Branch.

Thank you!!

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Sure, the BIA has worked hard to reject almost every gang-related formulation in the past. But, that’s often 1) without effective representation; 2) without the respondent presenting the necessary specific and voluminous evidence; and 3) by intentionally misconstruing facts — more or less along the lines of Sessions in A-B-.

Keep it simple:

“Women in El Salvador” actually fits well within the BIA’s three PSG criteria and is “at least one central for persecution” in many cases.

“Public opponents of gangs in X Country” also should be a pretty straightforward fit with a proper factual record and specific legal arguments. It also fits the “political” ground if the accurate factual basis is presented and documented effectively.

The reality is that gender is a major reason for persecution all over the world — one of the largest, in fact — and is well within the 1952 Convention’s ambit! Likewise, in countries where all real experts say gangs have infiltrated or in many cases are actually acting in concert with the Government, public opposition represents fundamental values that are limited to a readily identifiable segment of the population for which the punishment is immediate and severe. Likewise, it’s a rather clear case of political persecution, just like “whistleblowers” and “union activists.”

For years, the advocacy community has been willing to cooperate with the Government’s highly restrictive “incremental approach” to protection, because it was showing signs of real, if slow, progress and other viable alternatives such as “prosecutorial discretion” and “Special Immigrant Juvenile Status” were often available. Now, Sessions has intentionally reversed almost all of that progress and “returned us to the Dark Ages” as one expert put it.

So, no more “Mr. Nice Guy!” If it’s war that Sessions & Co. want, why not give it to them? Now is the time to simply “blow the roof off” of the Executive’s overly restrictive, unjustifiable, often disingenuous, confusing, contradictory, and clearly biased misinterpretation of what’s really happening in the Northern Triangle and elsewhere and how international protection laws must and should be applied if they are to have any meaning in the 21st century.

And, forget the bogus “floodgates” arguments. “Christians,” Jews,” “Muslims,” “Blacks,” “Pentecostals” are all potentially huge groups that have been recognized for asylum purposes.

Sure, maybe if forced to interpret the asylum and CAT laws properly Congress with withdraw from all of our international obligations so that nobody gets in. I doubt it. But if it happens, it happens.

At least it will then be out in the open that we are a “bogus” democracy that spreads false myths about our values, but won’t actually live up to them when the going gets tough (which, incidentally and not surprisingly, is also a symptom of “False Christianity”).

Then, maybe when folks figure out that “we aren’t who we say we are,” they will stop coming! Or, we could simply set up machine gun nests along the border and gun down all the unwanted women and children before they can become a burden on our “justice” system. In the end, the results of that might not be lots different from using our asylum and “court” systems as a “deterrent” to those fleeing for their lives. Just more honest about who we really are deep down, when it counts.

PWS

06-19-18

NATION OF CHILD ABUSERS: WHILE MANY RIGHT WING APOLOGISTS (ALONG WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ) PAN NAZI COMPARISON, ACTUAL HOLOCAUST CHILD SURVIVOR YOKA VERDONER UNDERSTANDS THE PARALLELS! — Child Abuse Is Child Abuse —Evil Is Evil — Damage Is Irreparable!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/18/separation-children-parents-families-us-border-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Holocaust survivor Yoka Verdoner in The Guardian:

The events occurring now on our border with Mexico, where children are being removed from the arms of their mothers and fathers and sent to foster families or “shelters”, make me weep and gnash my teeth with sadness and rage. I know what they are going through. When we were children, my two siblings and I were also taken from our parents. And the problems we’ve experienced since then portend the terrible things that many of these children are bound to suffer.

‘It’s on us all’: Democrats press on border separations as White House digs in

My family was Jewish, living in 1942 in the Netherlands when the country was occupied by the Nazis. We children were sent into hiding, with foster families who risked arrest and death by taking us in. They protected us, they loved us, and we were extremely lucky to have survived the war and been well cared for.

Yet the lasting damage inflicted by that separation reverberates to this day, decades hence.

Have you heard the screams and seen the panic of a three-year-old when it has lost sight of its mother in a supermarket? That scream subsides when mother reappears around the end of the aisle.

This is my brother writing in recent years. He tries to deal with his lasting pain through memoir. It’s been 76 years, yet he revisits the separation obsessively. He still writes about it in the present tense:

In the first home I scream for six weeks. Then I am moved to another family, and I stop screaming. I give up. Nothing around me is known to me. All those around me are strangers. I have no past. I have no future. I have no identity. I am nowhere. I am frozen in fear. It is the only emotion I possess now. As a three-year-old child, I believe that I must have made some terrible mistake to have caused my known world to disappear. I spend the rest of my life trying desperately not to make another mistake.

My brother’s second foster family cared deeply about him and has kept in touch with him all these years. Even so, he is almost 80 years old now and is still trying to understand what made him the anxious and dysfunctional person he turned into as a child and has remained for the rest of his life: a man with charm and intelligence, yet who could never keep a job because of his inability to complete tasks. After all, if he persisted he might make a mistake again, and that would bring his world to another end.

My younger sister was separated from our parents at five. She had no understanding of what was going on and why she suddenly had to live with a strange set of adults. She suffered thereafter from lifelong, profound depression.

I was older: seven. I was more able than my siblings to understand what was happening and why. I spent most of the war with Dick and Ella Rijnders. Dick was mayor of a small, rural village, and he and Ella lived in a beautiful house next to a wide waterway. Ella had a warm smile and Dick referred to me as his “oldest daughter”. I was able to go to school normally, make friends, and became part of village life. I was extraordinarily lucky, but I was not with my own parents, sister, and brother. And, eventually, I also had to leave the Rijnders, my loving second “family”. I was returning to my own family, but this meant another separation.

How can America sleep at night when families are being torn apart?

In later life, I was never able to really settle down. I lived in different countries and was successful in work, but never able to form lasting relationships with partners. I never married. I almost forgot to mention my own anxiety and depression, and my many years in psychotherapy.

My grief and anger about today’s southern border come not just from my personal life. As a retired psychotherapist who has worked extensively with victims of childhood trauma, I know all too well what awaits many of the thousands of children, taken by our government at the border, who are now in “processing centers” and foster homes – no matter how decent and caring those places might be. We can expect thousands of lives to be damaged, for many years or for ever, by “zero tolerance”. We can expect old men and women, decades from now, still suffering, still remembering, still writing in the present tense.

What is happening in our own backyard today is as evil and criminal as what happened to me and my siblings as children in Nazi Europe. It needs to be stopped immediately.

Yoka Verdoner is a child survivor of the Holocaust. A retired teacher and psychotherapist now living in California, she edited Signs of Life: The Letters of Hilde Verdoner-Sluizer from Nazi Transit Camp Westerbork, 1942-1944

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In fairness to Dershowitz he has asked President Trump to end the cruel and inhuman policy of child abusez/child separation. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/18/alan-dershowitz-mr-president-please-end-policy-separating-children-from-parents.html But, his “put down” of the parallels with Nazism is highly disingenuous for the following reasons:

This about race. It is no accident that virtually all of the separated parents and kids are Hispanic and the few others affected are almost all “of color.” We wouldn’t be having all this ruckus if the arrivals were White. Trump, Sessions, and Miller are White Nationalists in the “Bannon Mode.” Kelly and Nielsen have decided to come out of the closet and reveal their racist sympathies.
The harm is permanent. All experts say that the harm intentionally inflicted in these kids will be permanently disabling. More blogging on that later.
We’re sending these families to concentration camps masquerading as countries. Make no mistake about it, most of these folks are refugees fleeing persecution and torture at the hands of gangs and cartels that basically are the government in much of the Northern Triangle. Sessions & Trump have intentionally misconstrued the law, misrepresented facts, and violated Constitutional Due Process to artificially deny most of these individuals legal protections they deserve. Their return is likely to mean death, torture, a lifetime of abuse, extortion, rape, sexual enslavement, forced drug trafficking, or prostitution. Others will be forcibly impressed into a life of serving the gangs because we have turned our collective backs on them. Inhumanity is inhumanity; it’s only a matter of degree. And, that the Nazis were even worse in no way makes any difference to those we are sentencing to death, torture, or a lifetime of abuse. Dead is dead. Tortured is tortured. Decapitated is functionally the same as shot or gassed.
Sessions keeps parroting that misdemeanor unlawful entry “isn’t a victimless crime.” Perhaps he’s right. The “victims” here are the migrants and their families seeking to exercise legal rights to apply for asylum. The “criminals” are Sessions, Trump, Nielsen, Miller, Kelly and other Administration hard liners who engage in child abuse rather than protection. And, they lie about what and why they are doing it. Who will eventually bring the real criminals to justice?

PWS

06-19-18

ELIZABETH BRUENIG & DANA MILBANK @ WASHPOST: Jeff Sessions Abuses Women & Children, Ignores Our Constitution, & Perverts Christian Teachings! — “Dealing compassionately with strangers seems to be a minimal requirement for just leadership in the model set forth by God, a theme that carries into the New Testament, where Christ’s followers are taught to view themselves as wanderers on earth, and to treat others with appropriate empathetic mercy.” — “You don’t have to be a theologian to see the difference between people who do God’s work on earth and those who pervert God’s word to justify inhumanity.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sessions-and-sanders-radically-depart-from-the-christian-religion/2018/06/15/5216ac9a-70d2-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.f4ea0bc7e4b6

Elizabeth Bruenig writes:

The greater the truth, the worse the lie; the corruption of the best is the worst of all. People mislead one another all the time about temporary and venial things, which constitutes its own category of error, but rarely — even in the moral wasteland of American politics — do they get around to prevaricating about the eternal and cosmic. Lying about the capital-t, transcendent Truth is a category of error all on its own, whether you spend most of your time fooling others or just yourself.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders perhaps indulged in a bit of both Thursday, when asked about the moral reasoning behind separating migrant parents from their children at the U.S. border.

Sessions argued that, as criminals, immigrants have put themselves beyond the protection of God’s care. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Sessions explained by way of scriptural warrant. He added that “orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves . . . [and protect] the weak and lawful.” Sanders later offered an artful gloss in defense of Sessions: “It is very biblical to enforce the law,” she said.

Here, whether deliberately or unknowingly, Sessions and Sanders radically depart from the Christian religion, inventing a faith that makes order itself the highest good and authorizes secular governments to achieve it. In Christianity as billions of faithful have known it, order and lawful procedures are not “good in themselves” and it is not “very biblical” to “enforce the law” whatever it might be. Rather, there is a natural order inscribed into nature. Human governance can comport with it or contradict it, meaning Christians are sometimes morally obligated to follow civil laws and are sometimes morally obligated not to.

Conservatives seize on this approach when it suits them; this is why they’re so keen on carving out legal protections for matters of religious conscience. Because religious obligations precede and generate civic ones, laws must accommodate religious practice, not the other way around.

As Sessions himself observed quoting James Madison in a lengthy October 2017 memorandum on federal protections concerning religious liberty, “the duty owed to one’s Creator is ‘precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.’” Sessions can either believe that or believe what he and Sanders said Thursday, but he can’t believe both. To put a finer point on it: God’s law can’t only precede — and top — civil law when a pharmacist would prefer not to sell the Plan B contraceptive, but not when it would appear a ruler is duty-bound to show compassion to strangers.

But there are worse things than confusion, or even than hypocrisy. One of them is self-deception. When Sessions invoked Romans 13 — a verse infamous for earlier bad-faith invocations to justify slavery — he shifted the subject of the question from himself and his own department to those under his control. He was summoned to defend his choices, his judgment, his own moral reasoning — but instead offered a condemnation of the decisions and morality of migrants. He wanted to talk about what, in his view, the Bible demands of the ruled. But he omitted the more important question: What does it demand of rulers?

Any number of scriptural passages aavailable here, though less useful for Sessions’s purposes. From Deuteronomy 10 : “For the Lord your God . . . loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Or from Jeremiah 7: “If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place . . . then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever.” Dealing compassionately with strangers seems to be a minimal requirement for just leadership in the model set forth by God, a theme that carries into the New Testament, where Christ’s followers are taught to view themselves as wanderers on earth, and to treat others with appropriate empathetic mercy.

But some Christians aren’t strangers in the world at all. Some are very much at home here, or believe that they are, and that there is no tension between the desire of God and the desire of man. People can believe any number of things, especially given the right incentives.

If you had all the power in the world, maybe you would also hear a serpent dipping its smooth body down from some shadowy bough to say: God wants you to do whatever you like with your power, and whatever you do with it is good.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-the-way-of-the-cult/2018/06/15/9a9c9346-70ad-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.f4671688dec7

Dana writes:

“It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it?” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) mused this week about his Republican Party under President Trump.

As if to prove Corker’s point, the Trump administration the very next day claimed that it had the divine right to rip children from their parents’ arms at the border.

Officials justified the unique form of barbarism — taking infants from parents and warehousing children in tent cities and an abandoned Walmart — by saying they are doing God’s will.

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. “I am not going to apologize for carrying out our laws.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about Sessions’s remarks, said: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.”

This isn’t religion. It’s perversion. It is not the creed of a democratic government or political party but of an authoritarian cult.

The attorney general’s tortured reading of Romans is exactly the strained interpretation that others have used before to justify slavery, segregation, apartheid and Nazism. The same interpretation could be used to justify Joseph Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.

Romans 13 does indeed say to “submit to the authorities,” because they “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” But this is in the context of what comes before it(“share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality”) and after (“owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law”) – and, indeed, admonitions to care for the poor and the oppressed that come from Isaiah, Leviticus, Matthew and many more.

Evangelical leaders who looked the other way when Stormy Daniels and the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced this time have denounced Trump’s recent “zero-tolerance” policy that, as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and others wrote to Trump this month, has the “effect of removing even small children from their parents.”

“God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,” they wrote. The leaders urged Trump to end zero tolerance and use “discretion” as previous administrations did.

But a cult, by definition, is not about mainstream theology. I looked up characteristics of cults in the sociological literature to see how Trump’s stacks up.

□ “Presents a distinct alternative to dominant patterns within the society in fundamental areas of religious life.” Grab ’em by the p—y!

□ “Possessing strong authoritarian and charismatic leadership.” I alone can fix it!

□ “Oriented toward ‘inducing powerful subjective experiences.’ ” Alternative facts. Fake news!

□ “Requiring a high degree of conformity.” See: Flake, Jeff and Sanford, Mark.

□ A tendency “to see itself as legitimated by a long tradition of wisdom or practice.” It is very biblical to enforce the law.

Check, check, check, check and check.

And members of the Cult of Trump, formerly known as the GOP, follow him over the cliff and onto the spaceship. They swallowed their heretofore pro-life, pro-family and pro-faith views to embrace Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries (“Such blatant religious discrimination is repugnant,” said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and applaud him tossing paper towels at Puerto Ricans as they died by the thousands because they didn’t get adequate hurricane relief.

They’ve joined his efforts to shred food, income and health programs that help the least among us while giving tax cuts to the wealthiest. They’ve accepted his abandonment of human rights abroad. They’ve joined his attempt to end family-based immigration and to threaten deportation of “dreamers,” immigrants brought here as children.

It appeared, briefly, that things might be different this time. House Republicans drafted legislation allowing children to be detained with their parents. But Trump on Friday signaled that he would veto the bill, and, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week, the “last thing I want to do is bring a bill out of here that I know the president won’t support.”

This is the way of the cult.

Will the vivid cruelty of taking babies from parents, coupled with the obscene use of Scripture to justify it, finally lead some Trump supporters to abandon the compound? God knows.

But the rest of us don’t need to drink the Kool-Aid. Give to groups such as the Florence Project, which provides legal aid and social services to immigrant families in Arizona, and Catholic Charities USA, which provides crucial help to immigrant families in the Rio Grande Valley.

You don’t have to be a theologian to see the difference between people who do God’s work on earth and those who pervert God’s word to justify inhumanity.

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Yup! Time for all good people to come to the aid of those who are truly doing “God’s work on earth” by bringing serial child abuser, scofflaw, and false Christian Jeff Sessions to justice! Save the children! Stop Jeff Sessions! Force America to own up to and reject his toxic rhetoric and bigoted actions. His lies and outrageous abuses of his authority are truly “over the top.” The lasting damage he is doing to children will still be with our next generations long after Sessions, Trump, and Miller have gone to their final judgment. Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all. And, harm to our children and God’s children is the worst harm of all!

Join the New Due Process Army! Just say no to Jeff Sessions!

PWS

06-17-18

TRUMP TREATS KIDS AS HUMAN PAWNS IN UGLY POLITICAL CHESS GAME – Administration’s Continued Spreading Of False Narrative On Migration Makes Continuing Migration Outside of Legal System Inevitable!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-cites-as-a-negotiating-tool-his-policy-of-separating-immigrant-children-from-their-parents/2018/06/15/ade82b80-70b3-11e8-bf86-a2351b5ece99_story.html

Michael Scherer & Josh Dawsey report for the Washington Post:

President Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.

On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.

Trump’s public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.

“The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda,” he tweeted. After listing his demands in any immigration bill, he added, “Go for it! WIN!”

The attempt to gain advantage from a practice the American Academy of Pediatrics describes as causing children “irreparable harm” sets up a high-stakes gambit for Trump, whose political career has long benefited from harsh rhetoric on immigration.

Democrats have latched onto the issue and vowed to fight in the court of public opinion, with leaders planning trips to the border to highlight the stories of separated families, already the focus of news media attention. Democratic candidates running for vulnerable Republican seats also have begun to make the harsh treatment of children a centerpiece of their campaigns.

The policy has cracked Trump’s usually united conservative base, with a wide array of religious leaders and groups denouncing it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention issued statements critical of the practice.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, signed a letter calling the practice “horrible.” Pastor Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse, a vocal supporter of the president’s who has brushed aside past Trump controversies, called it “terrible” and “disgraceful.”

Besides increasing the odds of a broader immigration bill, senior Trump strategists believe that the child separation policy will deter the flow of migrant families across the border. Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The figure is the only one released by the goverment.

“The president has told folks that in lieu of the laws being fixed, he wants to use the enforcement mechanisms that we have,” a White House official said. “The thinking in the building is to force people to the table.”

Trump reinforced that notion Friday morning at the White House when he suggested Democrats alone had the power to alter the policy.

“I hate the children being taken away,” Trump said.

The president used a similar strategy last year as he sought to gain approval for his immigration demands by using the lure of protection for young immigrants brought to the United States as children. That effort, which ran counter to Trump’s earlier promise to sign a bipartisan bill protecting the young immigrants, foundered in Congress.

. . . .

The current policy resulted from a decision made in April by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute all migrants who cross the border, including those with young children. Those migrants had avoided detention during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Because of a 1997 court settlement that bars children from being imprisoned with parents, Justice Department officials now say they have no choice but to isolate the children.

Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have defended the policy as a sound, and biblical, decision to enforce the law.

“The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children,” Sessions said Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind., citing biblical advice to follow laws. “It was de facto open borders.”

The biblical underpinnings have been challenged by religious leaders.

“There’s definitely a groundswell of opposition from virtually every corner of the Christian community,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “People are able to understand immediately the drive of parents to protect their child and to understand the horror of splitting up vulnerable children from their parents.”

Yet several key Trump administration officials support the family separation policy, including Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and senior adviser Stephen Miller, a vocal supporter of stricter immigration laws.

Some senior officials think Democrats will be pressured by the policy to cut an immigration deal.

“If they aren’t going to cooperate, we are going to look to utilize the laws as hard as we can,” said a second White House official.

Others have argued that the main benefit of the policy is deterrence. Miller has said internally that the child separations will bring the numbers down at the border, a goal that Trump wants to achieve. Miller and Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, have argued that immigration legislation is unlikely to pass this summer, officials said.

“The side effect of zero tolerance is that fewer people will come up illegally, and fewer minors would be put in danger,” said a third senior administration official. “What is more dangerous to a minor, the 4,000-mile journey to America or the short-term detention of their parents?”

. . . .

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Please read the complete article at the link.

So, the choice is ““What is more dangerous to a minor, the 4,000-mile journey to America or the short-term detention of their parents?” Not really!

The real choices are 1) a dangerous 4,000 mile journey to a place where you might be able to save your life and that of your loved ones; or 2) the much more dangerous option of remaining in a place where you will likely be beaten, raped, extorted, tortured, impressed against your will, or killed by gangs, who are not just “street criminals” (as falsely portrayed by Sessions and other restrictionists) but who exercise quasi-governmental authority with the knowing acquiescence of the recognized governments.

Realistically, folks are going to opt for #1. We could recognize them as refugees; screen them abroad to weed out gang members and criminals and to take the danger out of the 4,000 mile journey; work with the UNHCR and other countries to distribute the flow; open more paths to legal immigration for those who want to leave but might not fit easily within the refugee definition; and encourage those who still arrive at our borders without documents seeking protection to go to a port of entry where they will be treated respectfully, humanely, and be given a prompt but full opportunity to present their cases for protection with access to counsel in a system that satisfies all the requirements of Constitutional Due Process, with the additional understanding that if they lose they will have to return to their home country.

Alternatively, we could double down on our current failed policies of detention, deterrence, and lawless and immoral Governmental behavior; send the message that folks shouldn’t bother using our legal system because it’s a fraud that has intentionally been fixed against them; encourage the use of smugglers who will charge ever higher fees for developing new and more dangerous means of entry; and send the message that if folks rally want to survive, they should pay a smuggler to get them into the interior of our country where they have at least a fighting chance of blending in, hiding out from immigration enforcement, behaving themselves, and working hard until they are caught and removed, die, conditions improve and they leave voluntarily for their country of origin, or we finally give them some type of legal recognition.

My first alternative could likely be established and operated for a fraction of what we are now spending on failed immigration enforcement, useless and unnecessarily cruel detention, unnecessary criminal prosecutions, and a broken Immigration Court system.

Plus, at a time of low birth rate and low unemployment, it would give us a significant economic boost by bringing a highly motivated, hard-working, family oriented, and appreciative workforce into our society. It might also inspire other stable democratic nations to join us in an effort to save lives (which also happens to fit in well with religious values), resettle individuals, and, over time, address the horrible situation in the Northern Triangle that is creating this flow.

Alternative two, which is basically a variation on what we already are doing, will guarantee a continuing “black market flow”of migrants, some of whom will be apprehended and removed at significant financial and societal costs, while most will continue to live in an underground society, subject to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and law enforcement, underutilizing their skills, and not being given the opportunity to integrate fully into our society.

The thing we will not be able to do is to halt human migration solely by law enforcement actions taken at “our end” of the chain. That is, unless we wish to establish a “Stalinist type state” that is so grim and repressive that nobody wants to come any more.

Kids as human pawns. Child abuse as policy. Dreamers as hostages. Jesus told us to do it. It’s the Democrats fault. I really hate to let Jeff abuse children, but I have no choice. Refugee women fleeing gang controlled states reduced to human scum who should just accept their beatings and rape and get in the non-existent line for legal immigration that we want to eliminate. That is, if they actually live long enough to get in the non-existent line, which is unlikely. Biased judges cheering the chance to sign death warrants for the most vulnerable among us. Courts clogged with refugees being prosecuted for seeking refuge while being pressured by seizure of their children into giving up rights.

Once again, I’ve been proved right: We are actively diminishing ourselves as a nation every day; but, it isn’t stopping, and won’t in the long run stop, human migration. Sure, there is a natural ebb and flow that responds in some minor ways to our futile attempts to stop it. Sort of like throwing up man-made sand bars to stop beach erosion. Works for a few months or even years, but eventually the inevitable forces of nature win out. It sure seems to me that it would be smarter to work with the flow of the river and turn it to our advantage, rather than trying to make it reverse course — an exercise in futility that only serves to diminish the humanity of each of us.

PWS

06-16-18

JIM CROW’S RETURN: SESSIONS ENDS TOXIC WEEK BY REVEALING HIMSELF AS ANTI-CHRIST! — Makes Bogus Claim That Christian Teaching Supports Child Abuse & Cruelty In The Name of “The Law” — African Americans Well Understand AG’s Perverted Bible Quote Once Used To Justify Slavery And Dehumanization (As Well As Nazism & Apartheid) — Shines Spotlight On His Own Deviance From The Merciful, Healing, Kind, & Forgiving Message of Christ!

Here’s a wonderful response to Sessions by Kansas City Attorney Andrea C. Martinez:

The “Christian” B.S. Litmus Test
By , Andrea C. Martinez, Esq.

To my amazing friends who are atheist, agnostic, or non-Christian. To the good-willed and the pissed-off. To the people who are genuinely confused as to how Jefferson Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders can use the Bible as a justification for abhorrent policies such as the separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border or the persecution of vulnerable asylum seekers, I am a Jesus-follower with a Bible degree from a Christian college and I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO CALL B.S.

Please join me in calling B.S. whenever you hear people use the Bible to justify the oppression of others. Especially when they misuse and cite Romans 13 to justify their mistreatment. While Romans 13:4 calls us to submit to government authorities because “the one in authority is God’s servant for your good” it does not require us to submit to an unjust law. If the government authority is not acting in a way that reflects God’s law, which is the loving treatment of others, Jesus invites us to participate in civil disobedience. Remember when Jesus healed a man’s hand on the Sabbath in violation of the Jewish law (Mark 3:1-6) and says, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” Matthew 3:4. Then he goes ahead and heals the man. There are numerous other examples in the Bible of civil disobedience that I would be happy to analyze with you at a different time (like the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego).

We must look first and foremost to Jesus Himself and His words when deciding whether a law is just and therefore should be followed. Jesus gave us a “Greatest Commandment” litmus test for determining which actions are really done in his name: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Luke 6:31. And Jesus provided us a pretty simple “B.S. Litmus Test” (my words, not Jesus’!) to determine whether an action or law reflects His heart. The B.S. Litmus Test is this: “is this law/action/policy treating others as I would like to be treated?” (Matthew 7:12). And a second question would be, “does this law reflect love or fear?” If the latter, it is not from God. Because “perfect love casts out fear.” 1 John 4:18.

Regarding Jesus’ exact instructions on the treatment of immigrants, read Matthew 25: 34-46. Jesus refers to the immigrant/refugee/foreigner as “the stranger” and says, “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger (refugee/immigrant/foreigner) and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” -JESUS

PLEASE BE ON GUARD: when you hear a government official use a passage like Romans 13 to try to justify actions that contradict the commandments of Jesus Himself, it is akin to a lawyer trying to convince a judge that a policy or regulation should be followed even though a statute or the Constitution of the United States itself prohibits it. Oh wait, that is exactly what is happening in the Jeff Sessions video above. The United States has ratified international refugee treaties legally obliging our nation to consider the claims of each asylum-seeker on its own merit and the Attorney General has now created his own self-indulging policy persecuting asylum seekers as a “deterrent” to seeking the protection they are legally entitled to. Laws trump policies in the hierarchy of authority, and Jesus’ words trump unjust government action in the spiritual context.

So please join me in calling BS on policies that oppress the immigrant, the refugee, and the foreigner. No citation to Romans 13 can ever trump Jesus’ calling to love the immigrant in Matthew 25. I stand with Jesus-followers and non-Christians alike in the disgusted renunciation of any attempt to cite Holy Scripture as a justification to oppress the weak or the vulnerable. I proudly stand with Jesus and will continue to defend the “stranger” in my law practice as an act of worship to my Jesus who I know loves and cares for them even more than I do.

Thank You,

Andrea C. Martinez, Esq.

Attorney/Owner

” src=”blob:http://immigrationcourtside.com/1416d79c-b6be-44d1-aab8-d9f091b8c723″ alt=”cid:image001.jpg@01D238F4.0AFDDA30″ class=”Apple-web-attachment”>

7000 NW Prairie View Road, Suite 260

Kansas City, MO 64151

(816) 491-8105: phone

(816) 817-2480: fax

info@martinezimmigration.com

www.martinezimmigration.com

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

Thanks Andrea!

I call B.S. But, then most of what Sessions says is B.S.

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

**Here’s another from JRube in the WashPost:**

Attorney General Jeff Sessions displayed an appalling lack of appreciation for the religious establishment clause, not to mention simple human dignity. Speaking to a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and in the wake of the Church’s condemnation of the barbaric policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Sessions proclaimed: “Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government, because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.” Later in the day, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated his religious admonition to obey the law.

This is horrifically objectionable on multiple grounds. First, he is a public employee and must uphold the First Amendment’s establishment clause. If Sessions wants to justify a policy, he is obligated to give a secular policy justification. (Citing the Bible — inaptly — to Catholic bishops who exercise their religious conscience in speaking out against family separation may be the quintessential example of chutzpah.) Second, he is a policymaker, in a position tochange a position that is inconsistent with our deepest values, traditions and respect for human rights. Third, the bishops were not advocating civil disobedience; they were objecting to an unjust law. Sessions is trying to use the Bible to squelch dissent.

We should point out that invoking this Biblical passage has a long and sordid history in Sessions’s native South. It was oft-quoted by slave-owners and later segregationists to insist on following existing law institutionalizing slavery (“read as an unequivocal order for Christians to obey state authority, a reading that not only justified southern slavery but authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid”).

I’m no expert in Christianity, but the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was when he drafted his letter from the Birmingham jail:

Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Sessions perfectly exemplifies how religion should not be used. Pulling out a Bible or any other religious text to say it supports one’s view on a matter of public policy is rarely going to be effective, for it defines political opponents as heretics.

The bishops and other religious figures are speaking out as their religious conscience dictates, which they are morally obligated to do and are constitutionally protected in doing. A statement from the conference of bishops, to which Sessions objected, read in part:

At its core, asylum is an instrument to preserve the right to life. The Attorney General’s recent decision elicits deep concern because it potentially strips asylum from many women who lack adequate protection. These vulnerable women will now face return to the extreme dangers of domestic violence in their home country. This decision negates decades of precedents that have provided protection to women fleeing domestic violence.

Reminding the administration of the meaning of family values, the bishops continued, “Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together. While protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety. Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”

The Catholics are not alone. The administration’s vile policy has alarmed a wide array of faith leaders. The Southern Baptist Convention issued their own statement. It is quoted at length because it is so powerful:

WHEREAS, Every man, woman, and child from every language, race, and nation is a special creation of God, made in His own image (Genesis 1:26–27); and

WHEREAS, Longings to protect one’s family from warfare, violence, disease, extreme poverty, and other destitute conditions are universal, driving millions of people to leave their homelands to seek a better life for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren; and

WHEREAS, God commands His people to treat immigrants with the same respect and dignity as those native born (Leviticus 19:33–34; Jeremiah 7:5–7; Ezekiel 47:22; Zechariah 7:9–10); and

WHEREAS, Scripture is clear on the believer’s hospitality towards immigrants, stating that meeting the material needs of “strangers” is tantamount to serving the Lord Jesus Himself (Matthew 25:35–40; Hebrews 13:2); and

WHEREAS, Southern Baptists affirm the value of the family, stating in The Baptist Faith and Message that “God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society” (Article XVIII), and Scripture makes clear that parents are uniquely responsible to raise their children “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). . . .

RESOLVED, That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Dallas, Texas, June 12–13, 2018, affirm the value and dignity of immigrants, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, culture, national origin, or legal status; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we desire to see immigration reform include an emphasis on securing our borders and providing a pathway to legal status with appropriate restitutionary measures, maintaining the priority of family unity, resulting in an efficient immigration system that honors the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we declare that any form of nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we encourage all elected officials, especially those who are members of Southern Baptist churches, to do everything in their power to advocate for a just and equitable immigration system, those in the professional community to seek ways to administer just and compassionate care for the immigrants in their community, and our Southern Baptist entities to provide resources that will equip and empower churches and church members to reach and serve immigrant communities. . . .

Rabbi David Wolpe dryly observed that “until 2018, I don’t believe any reader of the Bible has argued that separating families is rooted in the Bible, and if the Bible is about obeying the government, it is hard to understand what all those prophets were yelling at the kings about.” (Meanwhile, 26 Jewish organizations sent a letter condemning the policy to Sessions.)

Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has written extensively on the role of religion in politics. “I would say that this is just the most recent, but also one of the most egregious, ways that those who call themselves Christians are disfiguring and discrediting their faith. They are living in an inverted moral world, where the Bible is being invoked to advance cruelty,” he said. “Rather than owning up to what they are doing, they are trying to sacralize their inhumane policies. They are attempting to harm children and then dress it up as Christian ethics.”

He added: “This shows you the terrible damage that can be done to the Christian witness when the wrong people attain positions of power. They subordinate every good thing to their ideology, twisting and distorting everything they must to advance their political cause. In this case, it’s not simply that an authentic Christian ethic is subordinate to their inhumane politics; it is that it is being thoroughly corrupted, to the point that they are using the Bible to justify what is unjustifiable.”

If the administration is embarrassed by a policy they are trying to insist is required by law (that is untrue, and I know the prohibition against lying is very biblical) they should change it. Trump and his aides need to stop shifting blame to other politicians, and stop telling Christians what their obligations are. Frankly, the lack of outrage from Trump’s clique of evangelical supporters on this issue is not simply unusual given the near-universal outrage in faith-based communities, but is a reminder that leaders of “values voters” traded faith for the political game of power and access. As Wehner put it, “To watch the Christian faith be stained in this way by people like Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders is painful and quite a disturbing thing to watch. I don’t know whether they realize the defilement they’re engaging in, but that’s somewhat beside the point. The defilement is happening, and they are leading the effort. It’s shameful, and it’s heretical.”

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

Remarkably, Sessions claims to be a Christian and a Methodist (although I can’t for the life of me find a speck of the actual kind, merciful, forgiving, teachings of Jesus Christ in any aspect of Sessions’s life, career, or actions). He’s one of the most “unChristian” people I’ve ever witnessed in American public life. And, I’ve seen some pretty bad actors, going all the way back to infamous Wisconsin GOP Senator Joe McCarthy! In his own way, Sessions is just as far removed from the true meaning of Christ’s teaching as his pagan, idolatrous boss, Trump.

At any rate, the Methodist Council of Bishops has joined other religious denominations in condemning Sessions’s policies of cruelty and child abuse.

Faith leaders’ statement on family separation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, June 7, 2018

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church is joining other faith organizations in a statement urging the U.S. government to stop its policy of separating immigrant families.

Below is the full statement signed by dozens of faith organizations. Bishop Kenneth H. Carter, president of the Council of Bishops, signed on behalf of the Council.

FAITH LEADERS’ STATEMENT ON FAMILY SEPARATION

Recently, the U.S. Administration announced that it will begin separating families and criminally prosecuting all people who enter the U.S. without previous authorization. As religious leaders representing diverse faith perspectives, united in our concern for the well-being of vulnerable migrants who cross our borders fleeing from danger and threats to their lives, we are deeply disappointed and pained to hear this news.

We affirm the family as a foundational societal structure to support human community and understand the household as an estate blessed by God. The security of the family provides critical mental, physical and emotional support to the development and wellbeing of children. Our congregations and agencies serve many migrant families that have recently arrived in the United States. Leaving their communities is often the only option they have to provide safety for their children and protect them from harm. Tearing children away from parents who have made a dangerous journey to provide a safe and sufficient life for them is unnecessarily cruel and detrimental to the well-being of parents and children.

As we continue to serve and love our neighbor, we pray for the children and families that will suffer due to this policy and urge the Administration to stop their policy of separating families.

His Eminence Archbishop Vicken Aykazian
Diocesan Legate and
Director of the Ecumenical Office
Diocese of the Armenian Church of America

Mr. Azhar Azeez
President
Islamic Society of North America

The Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera
Bishop of Scranton, PA
Chair, Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs

Senior Bishop George E. Battle, Jr.
Presiding Prelate, Piedmont Episcopal District
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

Bishop Kenneth H. Carter, Jr.
President, Council of Bishops
The United Methodist Church

The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry
Presiding Bishop
Episcopal Church (United States)

The Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer
General Minister & President
United Church of Christ

The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton
Presiding Bishop
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

The Rev. David Guthrie
President, Provincial Elders’ Conference
Moravian Church Southern Province

Mr. Glen Guyton
Executive Director
Mennonite Church USA

The Rev. Teresa Hord Owens
General Minister and President
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Rabbi Rick Jacobs
President
Union for Reform Judaism

Mr. Anwar Khan
President
Islamic Relief USA

The Rev. Dr. Betsy Miller
President, Provincial Elders’ Conference
Moravian Church Northern Province

The Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson II
Stated Clerk
Presbyterian Church (USA)

Rabbi Jonah Pesner
Director
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

The Rev. Don Poest
Interim General Secretary
The Rev. Eddy Alemán
Candidate for General Secretary
Reformed Church in America

Senior Bishop Lawrence Reddick III
Presiding Bishop, The 8th Episcopal District
Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The Rev. Phil Tom
Executive Director
International Council of Community Churches

Senior Bishop McKinley Young
Presiding Prelate, Third Episcopal District
African Methodist Episcopal Church

###

Media Contact:
Rev. Dr. Maidstone Mulenga
Director of Communications – Council of Bishops
The United Methodist Church
mmulenga@umc-cob.org
202-748-5172

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

Ed Kilgore over at NY Magazine also nails Sessions’s noxious hypocrisy:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/no-jeff-sessions-separating-families-isnt-biblical.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Intelligencer-%20June%2015%2C%202018&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20Daily%20Intelligencer%20%281%20Year%29

No, Jeff Sessions, Separating Kids From Their Parents Isn’t ‘Biblical’

By Ed Kilgore

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St. Paul would probably like Jeff Sessions to keep his name out of his mouth. Photo: Getty Images

When he spoke to a law enforcement group in Indiana today, the attorney general of the United States was clearly angry about religious objections to his administration’s immigration policies. He may have had in mind incidents like this very important one this week (as notedby the National Catholic Reporter):

The U.S. bishops began their annual spring assembly by condemning recent immigration policies from the Trump administration that have separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border and threatened to deny asylum for people fleeing violence.

The morning session here began with a statement, but by its end escalated to numerous bishops endorsing the idea of sending a delegation to the border to inspect the detention facilities where children are being kept and even floating the possibility of “canonical penalties” for those involved in carrying out the policies.

Being a Protestant and all, Sessions has no fear of the kind of “canonical penalties” Catholic bishops might levy. But perhaps he is aware of an official resolution passed by his own United Methodist Church in 2008 (and reaffirmed in 2016), which reads in part:

The fear and anguish so many migrants in the United States live under are due to federal raids, indefinite detention, and deportations which tear apart families and create an atmosphere of panic. Millions of immigrants are denied legal entry to the US due to quotas and race and class barriers, even as employers seek their labor. US policies, as well as economic and political conditions in their home countries, often force migrants to leave their homes. With the legal avenues closed, immigrants who come in order to support their families must live in the shadows and in intense exploitation and fear. In the face of these unjust laws and the systematic deportation of migrants instituted by the Department of Homeland Security, God’s people must stand in solidarity with the migrants in our midst.

So Sessions decided he’d smite all these ninny-faced liberal clerics with his own interpretation of the intersection of Christianity and immigration:

In his remarks, Sessions hit back at the “concerns raised by our church friends about separating families,” calling the criticism “not fair or logical” and quoting scripture in his defense of the administration’s tough policies.

“Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Sessions said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

Those who are unacquainted with the Bible should be aware that the brief seven-verse portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has been throughout the ages cited to oppose resistance to just about every unjust law or regime you can imagine. As the Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum quickly pointed out, it was especially popular among those opposing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the run-up to the Civil War. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite biblical passage. And it was used by defenders of South African Apartheid and of our own Jim Crow.

Sessions’s suggestion that Romans 13 represents some sort of absolute, inflexible rule for the universe has been refuted by religious authorities again and again, most quoting St. Augustine in saying that “an unjust law is no law at all,” and many drawing attention to the overall context of Paul’s epistle, which was in many respects the great charter of Christian liberty and the great rebuke to legalism in every form. Paul was pretty clearly rejecting a significant sentiment among Christians of his day: that civil authorities deserved no obedience in any circumstance.

Beyond that, even if taken literally, in Romans 13 Paul is the shepherd telling the sheep that just as they must love their enemies, they must also recognize that the wolf is part of a divinely established order. In today’s context, Jeff Sessions is the wolf, and no matter what you think of his policies, he is not entitled to quote the shepherd on his own behalf. Maybe those desperate women and men at the border should suck it up and accept their terrible lot in life and defer to Jeff Sessions’s idolatry toward those portions of secular immigration law that he and his president actually support. But for the sake of all that’s holy, don’t quote the Bible to make the Trump administration’s policies towards immigrant families sound godly. And keep St. Paul out of it.

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

Last, but certainly not least among my favorite rebuttals to Sessions is this article from Marissa Martinelli at Slate incorporating a video clip from John Oliver which captures the smallness, meanness, and lack of humane values of Sessions perfectly:

https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/stephen-colbert-quotes-the-bible-to-jeff-sessions-video.html

Stephen Colbert Tells Jeff Sessions to Go Reread the Bible Before He Defends Trump’s Child Separation Policy

By MARISSA MARTINELLI

JUNE 15, 201811:33 AM

There’s nothing funny about the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, which doesn’t make it an ideal topic for late night hosts. Stephen Colbert acknowledged that difficulty directly on The Late Show on Thursday night, explaining that he usually only addresses tragic stories on the show if everyone is already talking about them. But he’s willing to make an exception:

That’s my job: to give you my take on the conversation everyone’s already having. With any luck, my take is funnier than yours, or I would be watching you. But this story is different, because this is the conversation everybody should be having. Attorney General and man dreaming of legally changing his name to “Jim Crow” Jeff Sessions has instituted a new policy to separate immigrant kids from their parents at the border.

An estimated 1,358 children have been taken from their families so far, with some officials reportedly telling their parents that the children were being taken away for a bath, only to never return them. “Clearly, no decent human being could defend that,” said Colbert. “So Jeff Sessions did.”

Colbert, who is devoutly Catholic, especially took issue with Sessions quoting the bible—specifically, Romans 13, the same passage used to defend slavery in the 1840s—to justify the policy as morally acceptable. Colbert suggested that Sessions might want to go back and reread that bible, and quoted Romans 13:10 to him. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law,” he recited, before ripping into Sessions’s use of the bible as a smokescreen: “I’m not surprised Sessions didn’t read the whole thing. After all, Jesus said, ‘Suffer the children to come unto me’ but I’m pretty sure all Sessions saw was the words children and suffer and said ‘I’m on it.’”

Colbert concluded the segment by borrowing a phrase from Samantha Bee: “If we let this happen in our name, we are a feckless … country.”

Here’s a link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4KaLkYxMZ8#action=share

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

A NOTE TO MY WAYWARD CHILD, JEFF

I am very concerned about our relationship, Jeff.

For I was hungry Jeff, and you gave me nothing to eat.

I was thirsty, Jeff, and you gave me nothing to drink.

I was a stranger seeking refuge, Jeff, and you did not invite me in.

I needed clothes, Jeff, and you clothed me only in the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner.

I was sick and in a foul prison you called “detention,” Jeff, and you mocked me and did not look after me.

I said “suffer the children to come unto me,” Jeff, and you made my children suffer.

In your arrogant ignorance, Jeff, you might ask when did I see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

But, Jeff, I was right there before you, in a caravan with my poor sisters, brothers, and children, having traveled far, seeking shelter and refuge from mistreatment and expecting mercy and justice under your laws. But, in your prejudice and ignorance, Jeff, you did not see me because I did not look like one of you. For you see, Jeff, as you did not show love, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and human compassion for the least of my children, you did not do for me.

And so, Jeff, unless you repent of your wasted life of sins, selfishness, meanness, taking my name and teachings in vain, and mistaking your often flawed view of man’s laws for my Father’s will, you must go away to eternal punishment. But, the poor, the vulnerable, the abused, and the children who travel with me and those who give us aid, compassion, justice, and mercy will accompany me to eternal life.

For in truth, Jeff, although you yourself might be immoral, none of God’s children is ever “illegal” to Him. Each time you spout such nonsense, you once again mock me and my Father by taking our names, teachings, and values in vain.

Wise up, Jeff, before it’s too late.

Your Lord & Would Be Savior,

J.C.

Jul 13 Matter of A-B- Being Misapplied by EOIR, DHS

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Here’s a wonderful response to Sessions by Kansas City Attorney Andrea C. Martinez:

Thanks Andrea!

I call B.S. But, then most of what Sessions says is B.S.

Here’s another from JRube in the WashPost:

At any rate, the Methodist Council of Bishops has joined other religious denominations in condemning Sessions’s policies of cruelty and child abuse.

Faith leaders’ statement on family separation

Ed Kilgore over at NY Magazine also nails Sessions’s noxious hypocrisy:

Last, but certainly not least among my favorite rebuttals to Sessions is this article from Marissa Martinelli at Slate incorporating a video clip from John Oliver which captures the smallness, meanness, and lack of humane values of Sessions perfectly:

A NOTE TO MY WAYWARD CHILD, JEFF

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**Here’s another from JRube in the WashPost:**