Haiti – Page 2 – immigrationcourtside.com

🏴‍☠️MAYORKAS DOUBLES DOWN ON USE OF TRUMP’S BOGUS TITLE 42 RATIONALE TO DEPORT HAITIANS — ABSURDLY & DISINGENUOUSLY CLAIMS HAITI IS “SAFE” FOR RETURNS!

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/26/haiti-deportations-covid-biden-homeland-secretary-mayorkas?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday defended the Biden administration’s decision to send thousands of Haitians to a home country they fled because of natural disasters and political turmoil.

White House criticizes border agents who rounded up migrants on horseback

Mayorkas told NBC’s Meet the Press the removals were justified because of the coronavirus pandemic, a point disputed by advocates and public health experts.

“The Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention, or CDC] has a Title 42 authority that we exercise to protect the migrants themselves, to protect the local communities, our personnel and the American public,” Mayorkas said.

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“The pandemic is not behind us. Title 42 is a public health policy, not an immigration policy.”

Since Donald Trump’s administration implemented Title 42 in March 2020, advocates and dozens of public health experts have called for its end.

Under Title 42, people who attempt to cross the border are returned to Mexico or deported to their home countries without an opportunity to test asylum claims.

In January, Joe Biden stopped the rule from applying to children. Despite that, at least 22 babies and children were deported to Haiti in February.

More than 30 public health experts wrote to Mayorkas and the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, earlier this month, saying Title 42 was “scientifically baseless and politically motivated”.

This coalition has repeatedly said the policy violates the right to seek asylum and ignores how basic public health measures can reduce the spread of Covid-19.

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“Title 42 runs counter to the government’s own commitment to address Covid-19 globally,” the coalition said. “The absence of effective Covid-19 mitigation services at the border and the expulsion of people to situations in which they may be exposed to Covid-19 and unable to practice prevention are contrary to the US government commitment to address Covid-19 globally.”

On Sunday, Mayorkas told CNN about 4,000 Haitians who arrived in the past two weeks have been expelled, 13,000 others had been allowed to enter the US to pursue their immigration cases in court and 8,000 had voluntarily chosen to return to Mexico.

NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd questioned Mayorkas about why thousands were being sent to Haiti even though they had traveled to the US from South America.

“These are Haitian nationals,” Mayorkas said. “Some of them don’t have documents from the countries from which they just left. So they are subject to removal.”

. . . .

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Of course, Haiti clearly is not a safe place to return migrants:

‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/26/they-treated-us-like-animals-haitians-angry-and-in-despair-at-being-deported-from-us?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US

Haitian deportees arriving from Texas say they were ‘rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals’

Joe Parkin Daniels in Port-au-Prince

Published:

05:00 Sunday, 26 September 2021

Follow Joe Parkin Daniels

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When Evens Delva waded across the Rio Grande with his wife and two daughters, he had dreams of starting a new life in Florida. But less than a week later, he and his family stepped on to the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, the sweltering and chaotic capital of Haiti, with nothing except traumatic memories and a feeling of bubbling anger.

Delva, along with nearly 2,000 other Haitians, was deported from southern Texas this week to Haiti, despite having lived in Chile for the past six years and having few remaining connections to his home country. His younger daughter, who is four, does not hold Haitian citizenship, having been born in Chile, and speaks more Spanish than Haitian Creole.

“I don’t know what we’ll do, we don’t have anywhere to stay or anyone to call,” the 40-year-old said, moments after getting off the plane in the blistering midday Caribbean heat. “All I know is that this is the last place I want to be.”

Evens Delva and his wife at Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti on Friday after being deported from Texas. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian

It is not hard to understand why. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is mired in overlapping crises. Gasoline shortages and blackouts are a daily reality, while warring gangs routinely kidnap for ransom and wage battle on the streets.

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The grim situation only worsened when the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his home on 7 July, triggering a political power struggle and further instability and street violence. On 14 August, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s poor southern peninsula, killing more than 2,200 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

US envoy to Haiti resigns over ‘inhumane’ decision to deport migrants

The Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitians under such circumstances drew opprobrium around the world, and prompted the US envoy to Haiti to resign in protest. Haiti is “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life”, he wrote in his resignation letter. “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”

Last week, the world was shocked by images of police officers on horseback charging at desperate Haitian migrants near a camp of 12,000, set up under the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. Delva was on his way to buy food and water for his family when the cavalry charge sent him and dozens of his compatriots running in a frenzy.

“We were rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals,” he said, having spent the six-hour flight from San Antonio with his hands and legs tied.

“They treated us like animals,” added Maria, his wife.. “We’ll never forget how that felt.”

. . . .

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David Shipler does a great job of exposing the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Mayorkas and other Biden Administration immigration officials.

America’s Callous Border

By David K. Shipler

Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”

Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.

We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.

When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?

Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.

Instead, a new torment is found: Haitians with enough grit to leave their country a decade or so ago and build lives on the margins in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere are taken from their first steps onto U.S. soil and summarily—summarily, without due process—deported. And where to? To Haiti, a failed state where many have long since lost family or work or even places of shelter. To Haiti, which has collapsed into such violence and disarray that the State Department warns Americans on its website: “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19.”

What is wrong with the air in the White House? Is there not enough oxygen? What accounts for the impaired thinking that seems to transcend administrations, from Republican to Democratic. Where is the regard for human dignity? Why is it so often absent in the calculations that create policy?

Donald Trump wore callousness on his sleeve and was proud of it. His base hooted its applause at his vilification of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. By contrast, Joe Biden wears a badge of empathy. His mantra is compassion. “Horrible” and “outrageous” were the words he found to describe the photographed attacks on Haitians from horseback. He halted the use of horses and vowed that agents responsible “will pay.” He also said, “It’s simply not who we are.”

But it is who we are. The images have been compared to old photos of white overseers on horseback commanding enslaved Blacks in the fields. The Border Patrol in cowboy hats have been compared to Texas Rangers “who were celebrated for their excellent ‘tracking skills’ that were put to use to hunt and capture enslaved people,” said historian Monica Martinez of the University of Texas.

These are compelling analogies with painful resonance. They are also flawed as parallels, for the Black migrants at the border are not slaves. They are clamoring to be here, crossing illegally, seeing the border as a threshold. They were not brought here in chains against their will. Some are being removed in chains against their will.

Nevertheless, in a sense they are enslaved by their blackness. If white Canadians tried this up north, does anybody truly believe that they would be treated as the Black Haitians are? Animating America’s conscience should not require reaching back to the sin of slavery. The present ought to be enough.

Our borders always put our split personality on display: We are cruel and welcoming, hateful and helpful, defined by doors closed at times to entire ethnic groups and then opened to invigorate the nation with willing hands and vital contributions.

In fact, if the country is not sufficiently moved by simple morality, then it might consider self-interest. The U.S. population growth rate has been falling steadily since 2008, dropping to a mere 0.58 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many regions lack skilled workers, as homeowners and small business owners and even hospitals can testify from trying to hire carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, and nurses. We should have winced when one Haitian deportee was quoted as describing himself as a welder and carpenter.

Using abuse to manipulate determined people did not work under Trump—a lesson that Biden and his advisers might have learned. Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the border, his aides reasoning that families heading north would get the message and—what?–abandon their fortitude and survival instincts, turn around, and head back to life-threatening misery?

So, too Biden officials are reportedly figuring that tossing Haitian expatriates into Haiti’s maelstrom will dissuade others from coming. In other words, don’t be humane, and folks will give up. But they won’t give up. They will still roll the dice, because there’s always a chance, especially since some are being allowed to stay, at least for a while, pending proper examination of their asylum claims as the law requires. When your ship has sunk, you don’t stop clinging to a piece of flotsam just because some shipmates have slipped off into the sea.

What the Biden White House needs is somebody in an influential position who has made this journey, who has shepherded family and children through jungles and ganglands to reach this supposedly promised land. That official might bring to the Oval Office a glimmer of understanding and respect for the force of personality and perseverance that drive a person toward our callous border.

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Something about the DHS Secretary job seem to require checking honesty, common sense, historical perspective, and humanity at the door, not to mention the true “rule of law.”

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-26-21

🤮☠️ARMED GUYS ON HORSES ROUNDING UP AND WHIPPING BLACKS ACCURATELY REPRESENTS AMERICA’S UGLY RACIAL HISTORY & BIDEN’S ASYLUM POLICIES! — That’s Why The Administration Is So Eager To Disingenuously Disown The Actions They Have Encouraged & Enabled! — Blacks & Hispanics Saved Biden’s Candidacy — THIS Is Their “Reward?” — U.S. Envoy To Haiti Quits In Protest Of Biden’s Human Rights Policies, As “Strange Departures” Continue To Roil Biden’s Bumbling, Failing Immigration Bureaucracy!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/men-on-horses-chasing-black-asylum-seekers-sadly-america-has-seen-it-before?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The Biden administration has condemned abuses at the border – while maintaining the policies underlying these abuses. That’s beyond cynical

Published:

06:22 Thursday, 23 September 2021

Follow Moustafa Bayoumi

You’ve probably seen a photograph haunting the internet this week: a white-presenting man on horseback – uniformed, armed and sneering – is grabbing a shoeless Black man by the neck of his T-shirt. The Black man’s face bears an unmistakable look of horror. He struggles to remain upright while clinging dearly to some bags of food in his hands. Between the men, a long rein from the horse’s bridle arches menacingly in the air like a whip. The photograph was taken just a few days ago in Texas, but the tableau looks like something out of antebellum America.

The image is profoundly upsetting, not just for what it portrays but for the history it evokes. What’s happening at the border right now puts two of our founding national myths – that we’re a land of liberty and a nation of immigrants – under scrutiny. To put it plainly, we don’t fare well under inspection.

US border patrol agents on horseback search for migrants trying to enter the United States along the US-Mexico border. Photograph: José Luis González/Reuters

. . . .

Without review, it’s impossible to know who is facing real threats of persecution when returned to Haiti. The United Nations human rights spokesperson, Marta Hurtado, said that the UN “is seriously concerned by the fact that it appears there have not been any individual assessments of the cases”. Why does the Biden administration not share her concern?

One has to wonder if the same policies expelling Haitians from the US today would be in effect if those arriving at the border were Europeans or even Cubans. If history is any guide – for decades, the US privileged Cubans over Haitians and other Caribbean peoples in immigration matters – the answer is no.

It’s one thing for the Biden administration to condemn abuses conducted by its own government that recall the worst parts of our national history. But it’s quite another to do so while maintaining the policies that enable those abuses. That’s not just cynical. It’s despicable.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America

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Read the complete article at the link.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-special-envoy-to-haiti-resigns-over-migrant-expulsions_n_614c7f70e4b00164119101a3

Foote’s sudden departure leaves a void in U.S. policy toward Haiti and adds another prominent, critical voice to the administration’s response to Haitians.

AP By Joshua Goodman and Matthew Lee, September 21, 2021

The Biden administration’s special envoy to Haiti has resigned, protesting “inhumane” large-scale expulsions of Haitian migrants to their homeland wracked by civil strife and natural disaster, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Daniel Foote was appointed to the position only in July, following the assassination of Haiti’s president. Even before the migrant expulsions from the small Texas border town of Del Rio, the career diplomat was known to be deeply frustrated with what he considered a lack of urgency in Washington and a glacial pace on efforts to improve conditions in Haiti.

Foote wrote Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he was stepping down immediately “with deep disappointment and apologies to those seeking crucial changes.”

“I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” he wrote. “Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”

Two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the resignation on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

One official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Foote had consistently sought greater oversight of Haiti policy and that the administration did not believe his requests were appropriate.

Foote’s sudden departure leaves a void in U.S. policy toward Haiti and adds another prominent, critical voice to the administration’s response to Haitians camped on the Texas border. The camp has shrunk considerably since surpassing more than 14,000 people on Saturday – many of them expelled and many released in the U.S. with notices to report to immigration authorities.

The White House is facing sharp bipartisan condemnation. Democrats and many pro-immigration groups say efforts to expel thousands of Haitians without a chance to seek asylum violates American principles and their anger has been fueled by images that went viral this week of Border Patrol agents on horseback using aggressive tactics against the migrants.

. . . .

___

Goodman reported from Miami, Lee from New York on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly meetings.

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Read the complete article at the above link.

And, there are more “strange happenings” within the flailing Biden immigration/human rights bureaucracy.

Over at ICE, “Immigration pro” John Trasviña is out at OPLA after only a few months in office:

https://www.wgbh.org/news/national-news/2021/09/22/biden-chooses-local-ice-critic-to-be-the-agencys-top-prosecutor

By Sarah Betancourt

September 22, 2021

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The Biden administration has appointed seasoned Boston immigration attorney Kerry Doyle to become its immigration enforcement agency’s top prosecutor.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed to GBH that Doyle, previously of Graves & Doyle, will be its principal legal advisor. The office she will lead is the largest legal program within the Department of Homeland Security, with over 1,250 attorneys and 290 support personnel.

The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor sends its prosecutors to litigate deportation cases before the Executive Office for immigration Review, the body that oversees the nation’s immigration courts.

Doyle has been an outspoken critic of the agency and has led many lawsuits against it.

She is a graduate of the American University Washington School of Law, and George Washington University. She started her career as a legislative assistant to former U.S. Rep. Bob Wise (D-W.Va.), and became an attorney for Legal Services for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers in 1993. She was managing attorney for the International Institute of Boston from 1998 to 2001, before founding Graves & Doyle with partner William E. Graves Jr.

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The Boston-based firm handled a breadth of immigration issues, from citizenship, to business and family immigration, federal litigation, asylum, and deportation cases.

Doyle took the case of Iranian student Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, who was enrolled at Northeastern University and deported because it was assumed by Logan Airport border patrol agents that he would remain in the U.S. beyond the time frame of his student visa. She co-authored an op-ed in The Boston Globe about Abadi’s case, entitled “Customs and Border Protection gone rogue.”

Doyle has also been particularly outspoken against ICE on Beacon Hill, including one appearance in January 2020, where she called ICE “out of control” during a hearing over the Safe Communities Act, which would limit how state and local municipalities interact with federal immigration enforcement.

Doyle declined to comment on her appointment, asking GBH to speak with ICE’s media office, which did not return requests for comment.

Susan Church of Demissie & Church has known and worked with Doyle for over two decades.

“She actually taught me much of what I know about immigration law,” said Church. “I can’t imagine a better, more knowledgeable attorney to run that agency because she knows the immigration system in and out.”

Church and Doyle co-filed a 2017 federal lawsuit against former President Donald Trump with the American Civil Liberties Union after he banned entry to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor has control over whether immigrants are released from detention, what financial amounts — or bonds — are set for them to be released, or whether a lawsuit gets postponed.

“There will be a tremendous opportunity to craft policy procedures, rules and the like to make sure that immigrants receive a fair day in court and a fair hearing and have a fair shot at getting a life in the United States,” said Church.

Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has been criticized for continuing to keep immigrants detained with high bond amounts, but Church thinks Doyle’s appointment shows there may be a shift.

“I think it’s clear that the Biden administration is following the path of the progressive district attorney and installing somebody in charge who cares about safety issues, but also cares deeply about the rights and the protections for immigrants,” she said, referring to the recent nomination of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins to be the U.S. attorney.

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, also applauded the pick. “We hope Kerry Doyle’s outstanding track record of fighting for immigrants’ rights continues in her new position at ICE,” Rose said. But, she added, “the ACLU remains committed to holding this and other government agencies accountable.”

The former principal legal advisor John D. Trasviña announced his retirement at the beginning of September.

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

On one hand, Kerry Doyle is well qualified and presumably will work to restore professionalism, common sense, and humanity to what had been a misdirected, counterproductive, and totally out of control agency under Trump and his toadies.

But, there has to be more to Trasviña’s “retirement” than meets the eye. One does not normally accept a senior level policy position in a new Administration while planning to “retire” within a few months.

So, something else is going on here. Many of us had applauded the appointment of Trasviña, a high profile, nationally respected, experienced expert in immigration, civil rights, human rights, and racial justice, at OPLA. During his short tenure, he issued helpful memos and guidance expanding the use of prosecutorial discretion (“PD”) at ICE. More aggressive and sensible use of PD is critical to controlling and eventually eliminating the largely Government-created 1.4 million case Immigration Court backlog.

Best wishes to Kerry in her new position!

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

Immigration and human rights are a mess because Biden and his advisors ignored expert advice to move quickly and aggressively to restore robust refugee and asylum systems and to institute long overdue progressive reforms and personnel changes at EOIR. Right now, there appears to be neither an overall plan nor the dynamic progressive leadership and better Immigration Judiciary to carry it out.

It’s going to take more than a few intellectually dishonest expressions of “outrage” from Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki and a bogus “investigation” of Border Patrol Agents who were only carrying out the cruel, inhumane, and racist policies developed and approved at the highest levels of the Biden Administration, to wipe out the images of the abuse of asylum applicants at our border and the deep-seated racial prejudices and biases it represents. 🏴‍☠️It’s all about dehumanization and continuing “Dred Scottification” of the “other”🤮☠️ — predominantly courageous, yet vulnerable, people of color!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-24-21

🏴‍☠️ADMINISTRATIONS COME & GO — BUT, INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM DIRECTED AGAINST BLACK HAITIAN MIGRANTS REMAINS A BIPARTISAN STAPLE OF U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY!

Haitians — Torch
By Bill Day
Republished by license

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:

Nicole Phillips, Legal Director, Haitiian Bridge Alliance, nmp.law@gmail.com, +1 (510) 715-2855

Tom Ricker, Policy Director, The Quixote Center, tomr.quixote@gmail.com, (301) 922-8909

Biden’s Invisible Wall: New Report Describes the Hardships that Title 42 Expulsions Create for Haitian Migrant Families and Calls on Biden to Stop Expelling Migrants to Haiti

San Diego, California, March 25, 2021 — Today, one year after the “Title 42” policy was enacted, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Quixote Center and UndocuBlack release the report, The Invisible Wall: Title 42 and its Impacts on Haitian Migrants, and call on the Biden-Harris Administration to immediately revoke Title 42 and end expulsions to Haiti. According to Guerline Jozef, Executive Director of Haitan Bridge Alliance, “Most if not all of the expulsions to Haiti are per the Title 42 policy, which was adopted under a false pretext of the coronavirus pandemic. Title 42 is Trump’s invisible wall that effectively closed the U.S.-Mexico border to migrants.” “Our Report,” says Ms. Jozef, “presents the voices and hardships of Haitian migrant families who have been abused in immigration custody and then expelled under the Title 42 policy without the opportunity to seek legal counsel or request asylum or other protection.”

On February 1, 2021, the first day of Black History Month, the U.S. government drastically expanded removals and expulsions to Haiti. Rather than dismantle the Trump Administration’s invisible wall, the Biden-Harris Administration doubled down. More Haitians have been removed per the Title 42 policy in the weeks since President Joe Biden took office than during all of Fiscal Year 2020. The Report provides the narratives of Haitian families who were apprehended at the U.S. Mexico border within the last year under the Title 42 policy and were subject to expulsion to Haiti or Mexico.

The Report explains how Haitian migrants are expelled under the Title 42 policy without being informed whether or when they will be expelled, and without the opportunity to seek asylum or other forms of protection. “Abigale” (name changed), a Haitian woman interviewed for the Report, describes the cruelty of immigration officials during her family’s expulsion, “None of the officers ever confirmed that we were being deported. No one would even say the word deportation. None of them, through this whole process. All the families were crying on the bus, for over an hour. My husband and others kept asking what was going on, if they were deporting us. They would not tell us anything despite our desperation. It was all extremely emotional.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration has continued cruelty against immigrants,” said Patrice Lawrence, Co-director of the UndocuBLack Network. “We hope that this will not be their legacy. It is cruel to use Title 42 as a loophole for deporting immigrants in general and Black migrants in particular. It is a euphemism for removals and deportation of immigrants which the Trump Administration deemed expendable in the wider context of its eugenic agenda of creating a Whiter America and atmosphere of nativism. The invisible wall named Title 42 keeps at bay brown and Black people fleeting war, violence, poverty and disasters under the pretext of protecting Border Protection officers from COVID-19 and to minimize the number of persons in congregate settings, such as immigration detention centers. The Biden-Harris Administration continues to ignore the cry and plight of immigrants that are being forced to board a plane and are taken to the very places they escaped from. The xenophobic language of the previous Administration might be gone, but the practices still remain.”

“There is no sound public health rationale for the Title 42 ban on migrants,” says Tom Ricker, Policy Director with the Quixote Center. “The idea for the policy came not from public health officials, but from the Trump White House. The entire justification for the Title 42 policy is the claim that the United States lacks the capacity to safely detain people. Yet, the United States is holding people for weeks only to then put them on crowded planes. How do you deny someone asylum who has been placed in detention – with no legal representation at all – based on the argument that there is no capacity to detain them?”

The Report also describes the high security risks that Haitian migrants face when they are expelled to Haiti or Mexico. As one woman who was recently expelled to Haiti under Title 42 describes, “Now the country is in more turmoil so I’m even more afraid to leave [my home]. If these people find us, they would just kill us this time around.”

“Haitian migrants flee violence, instability and persecution in Haiti, then travel a long and treacherous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking safety and security in the United States,” says Nicole Phillips, Legal Director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. “Instead of security, they are abused by immigration officers and – under the Title 42 policy – summarily expelled back to the country they fled without any chance to seek protection. As this Report explains, these expulsions are not only tragic, they are illegal.”

The authors offer nine recommendations. “First,” says Ms. Phillips, “the Title 42 policy must be revoked immediately. It is also critical that asylum processing resumes, while migrants are released to shelter in place with their loved ones in the United States rather than being detained. Incarceration must stop.”

The Full report can be read here.

***********

Same old song! Where’s Vice President Kamala Harris on this one?

🇺🇸🗽⚖️Due Process Forever! Treat Haitians as persons with constitutional and human rights. End the racist travesties embodied in U.S. immigration policy that fuel racial injustice throughout America!☠️

PWS

3-28-21

CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH @ DHS: ICE DEPORTS BLACKS TO DANGER & POTENTIAL DEATH, MANY WITH NO DUE PROCESS!🏴‍☠️ — Legislators Call On Biden Administration To End Racist Enforcement Policies!

Colfax

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/black-immigrants-deportations-biden/2021/02/12/5f395932-6d54-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html

Arelis R. Hernandez
Southern Border Reporter
Washington Post, Photo: WashPost

By Maria Sacchetti and Arelis R. Hernández in WashPost:

Prominent Black lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants to nations such as Haiti that are engulfed in political turmoil, fearing that they could be harmed or killed.

Hundreds of immigrants have been swept out of the United States in recent days, a blow to groups that had been counting on President Biden and Vice President Harris, the daughter of immigrants and the first Black vice president, to halt deportations and overturn the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

Biden attempted to pause most deportations on Jan. 20, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. Immigration officials say the recent removals match Biden’s new enforcement priorities — such as people who recently crossed the border or who were convicted of serious crimes — but advocates say immigrants are being sent to nations where they could face danger.

“The community should not still be in panic across this nation when we have an administration that is willing to do the work of stopping these deportations,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Friday in a call with reporters. “They have the authority to say no more flights will leave the United States.”

Migrants who cross the border are still being removed under a Trump administration order that allowed the expulsion of recently arrived people under Title 42, Section 265, of the public health law that aims to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Advocates for immigrants tracking the flights say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled approximately 900 Haitians, including dozens of children, in the past two weeks.

Advocates for immigrants say the situation is urgent, as Haiti and nations in Africa are facing varying threats. Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has seen its democracy plunge into a constitutional crisis with allegations of a coup attempt and conflicting claims to the presidency.

. . . .

ICE deported New York resident Paul Pierrilus to Haiti on Feb. 2, even though he has never been to that country and has lived 35 of his 40 years in the United States.

He had fought deportation since 2004 after a drug conviction. His parents are of Haitian descent, but they are U.S. citizens and Pierrilus was born on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

Haiti had never recognized him as a citizen, he said, but an immigration judge ordered him deported more than 16 years ago and he lost his appeals.

In an interview, Pierrilus described how he had to be dragged off the airplane. He wore the parka he used to wear in New York into the tropical 85-degree air. He said he is stunned and defeated.

“I’m not a Haitian citizen! I’m not a Haitian citizen!” Pierrilus recalled yelling as local officials pushed him onto a bus. “I felt helpless because it’s a situation out of my control. It’s a situation I can’t do anything about. No one is hearing what I’m saying.”

. . . .

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Read the complete article at the link.

The Pierrilus story is particularly indicative of ICE’s attitude toward people of color: If he’s black send him to Haiti, ask questions later!

Courtside was “on top” of Ed Pilkington’s recent Guardian article on deporting babies and children to total disorder and danger in Haiti.

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/02/08/%f0%9f%96%95ice-continues-to-give-biden-administration-humanity-the-big-middle-finger-racism-also-on-display-as-haitian-kids-babies-deported-to-burning-house/

Remember, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in ethnic communities throughout the United States was a key priority of the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy — with a some help from the Supremes’ majority. It has been very successful. In fact, as noted by Vice President Harris, hate crimes directed against Asian Americans are up astronomically.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjxhrifm-fuAhU4MVkFHTW0BywQ0PADegQIGRAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnbc.com%2F2021%2F02%2F12%2Fvp-harris-responds-to-surge-in-violent-attacks-against-asian-americans.html&usg=AOvVaw2FZQYF9caSSckRsqU9fO58

But, of course, there aren’t any Asian American Justices, are there? So, out of sight out of mind for perhaps Ameria’s “least representative” court (with the possible exception of the EOIR “courts”).

I’ve consistently been making several points that others are finally starting to pick up on and that will be essential for Biden Administration policy makers to keep in mind:

The issues of racial justice and immigrant justice are deeply intertwined — one can’t be solved without addressing the other;
Dehumanization of “the other” (Black, Latino, Asian-American, women, immigrants, asylum seekers, etc.) — “Dred Scottification” — has been promoted over the past four years and essentially endorsed and furthered by a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority;
Racist attitudes and misogyny are deeply ingrained in the current DHS and EOIR (now operating as an adjunct of DHS Enforcement) enforcement mechanisms and in some of the personnel carrying out enforcement policies, including some EOIR judges;
An aura of impunity and unaccountability infects both DHS and DOJ;
Racial justice and equal justice under law will not be achieved without significant personnel and attitude changes at the “retail level” of both DHS and EOIR.

Finally, complaining is a start. But, it won’t result in the necessary systemic changes.

The only way that African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and female lawmakers are going to get durable change is by prevailing on their colleagues to recognize the humanity of all persons in the United States and to make the necessary statutory changes in the immigration laws, beginning, but not ending, with an independent Article I Immigration Court.

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-13-21

🖕ICE CONTINUES TO GIVE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, HUMANITY THE BIG MIDDLE FINGER! — Racism Also On Display As Haitian Kids & Babies Deported To “Burning House!”

https://apple.news/ATjEjX2Z_QnKYbl01eYMHNA

Ed Pilkington reports for The Guardian:

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) deported at least 72 people to Haiti on Monday, including a two-month-old baby and 21 other children, in an apparent flagrant breach of the Biden administration’s orders only to remove suspected terrorists and potentially dangerous convicted felons.

The children were deported to Haiti on Monday on two flights chartered by Ice from Laredo, Texas to the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. The removals sent vulnerable infants back to Haiti as it is being roiled by major political unrest.

New claims of migrant abuse as Ice defies Biden to continue deportations

Read more

Ice is facing a rising chorus of denunciation as a “rogue agency” for its apparent refusal to abide by the new guidelines laid down by Biden and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. The incoming administration ordered a 100-day moratorium on all deportations, which was temporarily blocked by a judge in Texas.

However, the judge’s restraining order left in place the new guidelines stipulating that only the most serious immigration cases should be subject to deportation.

Last Friday, the administration appeared to gain the upper hand in its attempt to rein in Ice when deportation flights to Haiti were suspended. But on Monday the immigration agency reasserted itself again with the renewed flights to Port-au-Prince, children and infants on board.

Human rights activists are dismayed by the deportations, which bear a close resemblance to the hardline course set by Donald Trump. “It is unconscionable for us as a country to continue with the same draconian, cruel policies that were pursued by the Trump administration,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the immigration support group the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

She added: “I don’t know what’s going on between Ice and the Biden administration, but we know what needs to be done: the deportations must stop.”

. . . .

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

Read the full article at the the link.

Unfortunately, as I have pointed out, ICE is totally of control. It’s going to take more than policy memos to change that!

PWS

02-08-21

🏴‍☠️🇺🇸☠️ DEATH MERCHANT ⚰️⚰️ — U.S., “The Wuhan Of The America’s,” Deports Death 💀 To Latin America! — Legal Immigrants Aren’t A Threat To U.S., But Trump Regime Threatens The World’s Health!

Kevin Sieff
Latin America Correspondent
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-deporting-infected-migrants-back-to-vulnerable-countries/2020/04/21/5ec3dcfe-8351-11ea-81a3-9690c9881111_story.html

Kevin Sieff & Nick Miroff report for WashPost:

They arrive 24 hours a day in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, groups of men, women and children deported by the United States. Each time, at the edge of the international bridge, Ricardo Calderón Macias and his team get ready.

They put on masks and gloves. They prepare their thermometers and health forms. They wonder, sometimes aloud: Will anyone in this group test positive?

“We’re worried that eventually, with these deportations, we’re all going to get infected,” said Calderón, the regional director of the Tamaulipas state immigration institute.

Since the coronavirus struck the United States, immigration authorities have deported dozens of infected migrants, leaving governments and nonprofits across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean struggling to respond.

[[Public health experts: Coronavirus could overwhelm the developing world]]

When some countries resisted continued deportations, U.S. officials said they would screen migrants slated for removal. But they did not commit to administering coronavirus tests. In many instances, the screenings, which consist primarily of taking a person’s temperature, have failed to detect cases. Even though overall deportations declined this month, the United States has returned thousands of people across the Western Hemisphere in April.

President Trump said late Monday he would “suspend immigration” to the United States. Even before that announcement, officials in the region were concerned about the deportations. Guatemala’s health minister spoke this month of the worrying number of infected deportees sent from the United States — the “Wuhan of the Americas,” he said.

[[Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.]]

Mexicans just deported from the United States walk toward a repatriation building in Matamoros. (Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)

Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, across the Rio Grande from the southern tip of Texas, is receiving roughly 100 deportees per day, officials there say. In some cases, repatriation workers have noticed that deportees are visibly sick as they arrive. Those deportations are blamed for at least one new outbreak in a Mexican migrant shelter.

On Monday, the Mexican government asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to test deportees for the virus, but DHS has not committed to doing so, according to a Mexican official with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe diplomatic talks.

In Guatemala, at least 50 deportees have tested positive, about 17 percent of the country’s total confirmed cases. Three-quarters of passengers on a deportation flight to Guatemala City last month were infected, according to the country’s Health Ministry. Guatemalan officials said last week they would suspend returns from the United States.

[[Coronavirus outbreaks at Mexico’s hospitals raise alarm, protests]]

In Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, three people sent back from the United States in early April have tested positive, officials said. The country has 62 ventilators for 11 million people. The Trump administration reportedly was planning another deportation flight to Haiti this week.

“Rather than be deported where they face serious harm if they fall ill and risk infecting thousands of others, they should be released from detention into the care of their friends and families so that they may safely quarantine,” a coalition of 164 human rights and religious organizations said in an open letter pleading for suspension of deportations.

Health workers carry supplies delivered by family members to a temporary shelter for Guatemalan citizens deported from the United States in Guatemala City. (Moises Castillo/AP)

In Mexico over the past week, two deportees tested positive for the virus. Calderón’s team spotted a deportee in Reynosa who was visibly ill, with a dry cough, red eyes and a fever. They wondered how the man, who arrived from Atlanta, had made it through U.S. health screenings.

A second man was deported to Nuevo Laredo from Houston “without knowing he was a carrier of the virus,” the Tamaulipas state government said in a statement, and was sent to a migrant shelter in the city.

That case apparently prompted an outbreak in the shelter, Casa del Migrante Nazareth; 14 others have since tested positive.

“The risk we face is bringing a massive contagion into our own country,” said Raúl Cardenas, the city manager of Nuevo Laredo. “We’re mortified that these deportations are continuing.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Not only are Trump’s immigration diversions racist and inappropriate, they are dangerous and threaten unnecessarily to spread the pandemic. Unwilling and unable to address the real needs of the American people during the pandemic (see, e.g., tests, aid to states, speaking truth, encouraging compliance with “best practices”) Trump diverts our resources on controversial and counterproductive measures while diminishing our national humanity and surrendering our world leadership.

This November, Vote ‘Em Out. End The Deadly ☠️ Trump/GOP Clown Show 🤡!

PWS

04-22-20

TRUMP SCOFFLAWS OUTED AGAIN: Even As Lawless Prez & His Band Of Brigands Considers More Illegal Retaliatory Political Action, U.S. District Judge Slams Termination Of Haitian TPS: “Trump administration . . . being motivated by politics and not facts!” – So, What Else Is New In World Of White Nationalism & Fabricated “Facts?”

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article229151574.html

Jacqueline Charles reports for the Miami Herald:

Accusing the Trump administration of being motivated by politics and not facts, a second U.S. federal judge is blocking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from forcing tens of thousands of Haitians to return to Haiti by ending their temporary legal protection.

In a 145-page federal ruling, U.S. District Judge William F. Kuntz of the Eastern District of New York issued a nationwide temporary injunction preventing DHS from terminating Temporary Protected Status, TPS, for Haitians. Kuntz said 50,000 to 60,000 Haitians and their U.S.-born children would suffer “irreparable harm” if the legal protection ended and they were forced to return to a country that is not safe.

Kuntz’s detailed ruling came out of a lawsuit filed by Haitians in Florida and New York, challenging the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS granted to Haiti by the Obama administration after its 2010 devastating earthquake. The administration has rescinded the protection for Central America and some African nations as well, sparking several lawsuits around the country.

“It’s a sweeping indictment of the political manner in which the Trump administration at the very highest levels of the government illegally terminated Protected Status for Haitians,” said Miami immigration attorney Ira Kurzban, one of several lawyers who filed the lawsuit.

In October, a federal judge in California granted a temporary injunction blocking the administration from deporting Haitian TPS holders and others as their termination deadlines approach. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen granted the temporary injunction as part of a California lawsuit filed by lawyers on behalf of TPS recipients from Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan who have U.S.-born children. The decision is being appealed by the government.

Kurzban noted that unlike the California case, which had not yet gone to trial when Chen issued his decision, Kuntz’s decision is the result of a full-blown trial. The New York lawsuit was the first of the five to go to trial.

“It’s far more detailed in its reasoning in respect to why what the government did was completely illegal,” Kurzban said of Kuntz’s decision. “It found findings on discrimination. … It found very clearly that the government’s decision was not only an arbitrary decision, but they violated their own procedures in reaching the conclusion that they reached.

“This is a direct and very detailed account of how the government acted in a completely arbitrary way,” he added.

During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that then-Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke violated procedures and TPS holders’ due process when she ended the program for Haiti. They also cited emails and other internal government documents, including Duke’s handwritten November 2017 notes, to bolster the plaintiffs’ argument: that the White House was not interested in the facts about conditions in Haiti as DHS officials mulled over whether to continue to shield up to 60,000 Haitians from deportations, and Duke was under repeated pressure to terminate the program.

The decision, the suit alleged, was also rooted in the president’s “racially discriminatory attitude toward all brown and black people.”

“Clearly political motivations influenced Secretary Duke’s decision to terminate TPS for Haiti,” Kuntz said in his findings. “A TPS termination should not be a political decision made to carry out political motivations. Ultimately, the potential political ramifications should not have factored into the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS.”

Kuntz said he could not issue a final injunction, only a temporary one, because Haiti’s TPS designation, which was supposed to end on July 22 but was recently extended by DHS until January 2020 due to the legal challenges, has not yet expired.

Steve Forester, an immigration advocate who has been championing the rights of Haitians enrolled in the TPS program, said it was “a victory demonstrating the government’s unlawful and unconstitutional behavior in reaching its decision to terminate Haiti TPS.”

“It’s a resounding condemnation of unlawful government behavior,” added Forester, who works as policy coordinator for the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.

The government is expected to appeal.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article229151574.html#storylink=cpy

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

The Trump Administration plans to tie up the Federal Courts with more frivolous litigation based on their knowingly and intentionally unlawful actions. That’s even as today, Trump refuted reports that he had discarded the idea of unlawfully “dumping” asylum applicants on so-called “sanctuary cities” as punishment to Democrats who have opposed his lawless regime. The Administration’s own lawyers say what Trump wants to do is illegal.

The lies come so fast and furious from Trump and his cronies that the White House “flacks” can’t even keep their fictional “cover stories” straight.

Fraud, waste, and abuse right in plain sight.

PWS

04-12-19

HON. JEFFREY S. CHASE — USCIS RACISTS TARGET BLACK HAITIANS: As Evidence Unfolds In Federal Court, The Blatant Racism & Dishonesty Of USCIS Politicos In Bogus Termination Of TPS Becomes A Matter Of Public Record!

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/1/7/haiti-tps-and-racial-bias

Jan 7 Haiti, TPS, and Racial Bias

This morning, the trial begin in Saget v. Trump, before District Judge William Kuntz in the Eastern District of New York. As your Brooklyn observer, I attended the opening hours of what is likely to be a two or three day trial.

The basis for the case is the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for Haitians who have been present in the U.S. since January 12, 2011, and remain unable to return due to conditions in that country following a massive earthquake in 2010, a 2016 hurricane, and a major cholera epidemic. 59,000 Haitians in the U.S. are presently in TPS status, a number too large for the Haitian government to presently absorb if returned en masse.

TPS is not asylum, and offers no permanent status in this country. It was created by Congress in 1990 to afford blanket protection to nationals of countries to which return is currently untenable for a variety of reasons, including armed conflict, natural disaster, rampant disease, or the inability of the country to absorb the mass repatriation of its nationals. Such designation is granted in intervals of 6 to 18 months, and is reviewed by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) at least 60 days before the end of each designated period. The law only allows TPS status to be terminated where such review finds that the conditions for designation no longer exist in the country; otherwise, the period of TPS is to be extended. In the case of Haiti, after being designated for TPS in early 2010, such designation was extended in 18-month increments continually until the coming of the Trump Administration in 2017.

DHS, within its subcomponent, USCIS, has a Country Conditions Unit. I know that unit’s director, LeRoy Potts, and met with him and some of his senior staff when I oversaw EOIR’s country conditions database during my time at the BIA. They are knowledgeable, fair-minded, and in my experience, issued accurate reports free of political influence. The Country Conditions Unit is generally consulted in TPS decisions. As it had in the past, the Unit again drafted a report finding serious problems in Haiti that would call for an extension of TPS.

However, as the Plaintiffs’ counsel noted in his opening statement, Robert T. Law, previously director of the vehemently anti-immigration lobby group ironically known by the acronym FAIR, who under the Trump administration was made a senior policy advisor to USCIS (which is mind-boggling on its own), decided that the Country Condition Unit’s memo was “overwhelmingly weighted for extension which I do not think is the conclusion we are looking for.” According to petitioner’s counsel, Law edited the document (with the blessing of the USCIS chief policy strategist, Kathy Nuebel Kovarik) in 35 minutes, without further research. https://nationaltpsalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DPP-3349-EX-3.pdf According to the opening statement, the only research requested by the administration was for evidence that Haitians in the U.S. had criminal records or received public assistance, a clear attempt to discredit a nationality using racial stereotypes. Plaintiff’s counsel stated that the USCIS Country Conditions Unit characterized DHS’s final version of the report used to justify its termination of TPS for Haiti as “complete fiction.”

The Plaintiffs called as their first witness Ellie Happel, an expert on country conditions in Haiti and resident of that country from 2011 to 2017, who took apart the DHS memo sentence by sentence. For example, Happel explained the meaninglessness of DHS’s claim that 98 percent of internal displacement camps (“IDPs”) in Haiti have been closed. Happel stated that the majority who left the camps did so due to actual or threatened forced eviction, and many did not return to durable housing. When one settlement, Canaan, was decertified as an IDP camp, it statistically eliminated 50,000 people from the list of those internally displaced. However, those 50,000 people continue to live on the site of the former camp, a windswept, previously uninhabited land far from government services.

Happel cited a report (also referenced in the USCIS report) that a minimum of 500,000 homes would have to be constructed to meet the housing needs of the Haitian population. Happel also testified in convincing detail to continued food insecurity, political instability, an economy marred by a 2 billion dollar debt to Venezuela caused by misappropriation or embezzlement of funds by government officials, and a continued susceptibility to cholera following one of the worst epidemics of the disease in recent history.

Why would DHS’s leadership go to such lengths to fabricate a fictitious report to justify returning 59,000 Haitians to such conditions before it was advisable to do so? The plaintiffs pointed to the answer in the statements of President Trump himself, made a few months earlier to members of Congress, in which he referenced predominantly black nations as “shithole countries” (the presiding judge insisted on the use of the unedited quote), questioned “why do we need more Haitians? (whom he previously claimed “all have AIDS”); and stated his preference for immigrants from places such as Norway. The government’s attorney somehow managed to keep a straight face when claiming in response that DHS’s acting Secretary had reached the decision to terminate independent of Trump’s opinions.

Sadly, Haitians have suffered a long history of unfair treatment under our country’s immigration laws. In his excellent 1998 law review article “Race, the Immigration Laws, and Domestic Race Relations: A ‘Magic Mirror’ Into the Heart of Darkness,” Prof. Kevin R. Johnson wrote “No U.S. policy approached…the government’s extraordinary treatment of Black persons fleeing the political violence in Haiti.” When the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1993 decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc., upheld the policy initiated by President George H.W. Bush, and surprisingly continued under President Clinton, of repatriating intercepted Haitians without first screening the returnees to see if they qualified for refugee status, Justice Brennan argued in dissent that the Haitian refugees “demand only that the United States, land of refugees and guardian of freedom, cease forcibly driving them back to detention, abuse, and death. We should not close our ears to it.”

Sadly, 25 years later, our nation’s most openly racist president continues to advocate for policies of extraordinary cruelty towards Haitians. And seemingly without embarrassment, many of his underlings are happy to go to extreme lengths to carry out such policies, the admirable exception being the USCIS Country Conditions Unit.

It was heartwarming to see the large team of lawyers, paralegals, and expert witnesses united in Judge Kuntz’s courtroom to continue to fight against such cruelty. Among those in attendance were Ira Kurzban, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, and Michael Posner, founder and former director of Human Rights First, both of whom were early defenders of Haitian rights in the 1980s. To see them working alongside a younger generation of attorneys and experts, such as Happel, the director of NYU Law School’s Haiti Project, and Florida attorney Kevin Gregg reminded this aging attorney that the struggle for immigrants’ rights will be passed on to most capable hearts and hands.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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

Tal Kopan has unearthed some of this in an earlier post based on documents obtained under the FOIA. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-2rC

Gotta wonder about the ethics of DOJ lawyers defending the indefensible in Federal Court.

PWS

01-09-19

BIA’S LATEST ON CAT DETACHED FROM REALITY – MATTER OF J-R-G-P, 27 I &N DEC. 482 (BIA 2018)

3944_ed

Matter of J-R-G-P-, 27 I & N Dec. 482 (BIA 2018)

BIA HEADNOTE:

Where the evidence regarding an application for protection under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted and opened for signature Dec. 10, 1984, G.A. Res. 39/46, 39 U.N. GAOR Supp. No. 51, at 197, U.N. Doc. A/RES/39/708 (1984) (entered into force June 26, 1987; for the United States Apr. 18, 1988), plausibly establishes that abusive or squalid conditions

n pretrial detention facilities, prisons, or mental health institutions in the country of removal are the result of neglect, a lack of resources, or insufficient training and education, rather than a specific intent to cause severe pain and suffering, an Immigration Judge’s finding that the applicant did not establish a sufficient likelihood that he or she will experience “torture” in these settings is not clearly erroneous.

PANEL: APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGES GREER and WENDTLAND; CROSSETT, TEMPORARY APPELLATE IMMIGRATION JUDGE

OPINION BY: JUDGE ANNE GREER

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

BIA’S LATEST ON CAT DETACHED FROM REALITY – MATTER OF J-R-G-P, 27 I &N DEC. 482 (BIA 2018)

- - No dialogue, no dissent, on today’s BIA. And, yes, the reviewing courts have largely deferred to the BIA’s interpretation of “specific intent.”
  - But, there are other plausible constructions that actually are more consistent with the purpose of the CAT to prevent the use of torture. In her dissenting opinion in Matter of J-E-, 23 I &N Dec. 291 (BIA 2002) my former colleague Judge Lory Diana Rosenberg set forth a “better view” (note, I also filed a vigorous separate dissenting opinion in J-E-):
    - “The majority’s reading of the regulations functionally converts the Senate understanding that torture must be specifically intended into a “specific intent” requirement. I disagree. I can find no basis to conclude that the Senate understanding was intended to require proof of an intent to accomplish a precise criminal act, as the majority contends is required. See Matter of J-E-, supra, at 301 (defining “specific intent”). Rather, the plain language of the text of 8 C.F.R. § 208.18(a)(5) reflects only that something more than an accidental consequence is necessary to establish the probability of torture. Id. (stating plainly that unanticipated or unintended pain and suffering that is severe enough to constitute torture is not covered). Moreover, 8 C.F.R. § 208.18(a)(4) states that a threat of infliction of severe physical pain or suffering may amount to torture.”
  - The J-R-G-P- opinion basically analogizes the intentionally pathetic efforts of the Mexican Government to deal with mental illness with the efforts of “poor countries like Haiti” at issue in Matter of J-E.
    - But, Mexico is actually the 14^th largest economy in the world (11^th by consumer buying power); Haiti rates 141^st. It appears Mexico in fact has more than adequate resources to deal with mental illness; it has just intentionally chosen not to do so, even knowing the severe harm constituting torture that choice intentionally inflicts on individuals.
  - The opinion also minimizes the evidence of the intentionally torturous conditions that exist in the Mexican institutional mental health system.
    - From the 2017 State Department Country Report on Mexico: Among the numerous human rights abuses: “lethal violence and sexual assault against institutionalized persons with disabilities;”
    - Here’s how the same Country Report addresses the specifically horrible treatment of institutionalized individuals with disabilities: “Abuses in mental health institutions and care facilities, including those for children, were a problem. Abuses of persons with disabilities included lack of access to justice, the use of physical and chemical restraints, physical and sexual abuse, trafficking, forced labor, disappearances, and illegal adoption of institutionalized children. Institutionalized persons with disabilities often lacked adequate medical care and rehabilitation, privacy, and clothing and often ate, slept, and bathed in unhygienic conditions. They were vulnerable to abuse from staff members, other patients, or guests at facilities where there was inadequate supervision. Documentation supporting the person’s identity and origin was lacking, and there were instances of disappearances.
    - As of August 25, the NGO Disability Rights International (DRI) reported that most residents had been moved to other institutions from the privately run institution Casa Esperanza, where they were allegedly victims of pervasive sexual abuse by staff and, in some cases, human trafficking. Two of the victims died within the first six months after transfer to other facilities, and the third was sexually abused. DRI stated the victim was raped repeatedly during a period of seven months at the Fundacion PARLAS I.A.P. and that another woman was physically abused at an institution in another state to which she was transferred.
  - Here’s the “real skinny” on how Mexico intentionally scrimps on budget and tortures those institutionalized for mental health disabilities: “THE NIGHTMARE THAT IS MEXICO’S MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM byAriel Jacoby from Medelita (https://www.medelita.com) | Thursday, Jan 21, 2016 tags: features (https://www.medelita.com/blog/category/features)health-feat-img.jpg&url=https://www.medelita.com/blog/the-nightmare-that-is-mexicos-mental– system/)
    - Though there are an estimated 10 million people with mental, visual, hearing or motor disabilities living in Mexico, the country’s mental health system is so dysfunctional that the unlucky patients under its care are colloquially referred to as “abandanodos (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/mexican-psychiatric-institution-hell/story?id=12267276)” – abandoned ones.
    - It’s an accurate description for these lost souls. A 93-page report from Disability Rights International (http://s3.amazonaws.com/nytdocs/docs/526/526.pdf) revealed the horrific living conditions at Mexican mental health facilities, which are a breeding ground for human rights violations and abuse of the handicapped patients that these institutions are meant to help. Many patients never received a clinical diagnosis of their condition and don’t have families to give them private care – these patients remain locked inside the hospitals indefinitely and become completely anonymous to the world.
    - Patients rock back and forth in urine soaked clothes or walk about soiled, feces-smeared floors without shoes. Bedsheets are an uncommon luxury; hygiene is an abstract concept in a Mexican mental hospital where some “patients and their caretakers could not fully explain how or why they were institutionalized” (New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01mexico.html)). Without proper oversight and the absence of any sort of registry system, it is not uncommon for mentally ill children to literally disappear from Mexican mental health facilities with no record of their name, age, or families.
    - In this dismal hole of human despair, atrocities are ubiquitous and plentiful (http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/01/appalling-conditions-in-mexicos-mental-health-institutions/). Many of the patients in these institutions have been detained against their will for years and will likely languish inside the walls of these torture chambers until their death. Psychotropic drugs are excessively relied upon to treat patients and the more aggressive patients who don’t respond to medication can be subject to forced lobotomies, which need only the approval of the facility director. Eric Rosenthal, the director of Disability Rights International, found that 1/4 of the mental health facilities were keeping patients in restraints for extended periods of time – an act that violates Article 1 of the United Nations convention against torture.

- - - - The concept of human rights has no real meaning or significance in these unregulated, inhumane environments. The investigation conducted by DRI revealed the severity and frequency of human rights violations within the walls of such state-run facilities. In one institution, a terrified blind patient admitted to being raped by one of the staff members – a claim that was quickly dismissed by Mexican officials.
      - In another facility, investigators discovered two young women who had been institutionalized at a young age, grew up in the hospital, and had been working as unpaid laborers for years. There exists no record of how or why these women were institutionalized and Mexican law requires no legal review to detain them indefinitely as modern-day slave laborers.
      - The director of Samuel Ramirez Hospital, one of the 31 state-run mental health facilities in Mexico, calls his own hospital “hell” and has voiced his belief that the mental health of every patient at his facility have been made worse by their institutionalization. He blames the lack of proper funding and a deficiency of properly trained personnel – at a different mental institution nearby, there are only two psychologists and one doctor to treat the 365 patients who have been institutionalized there.
      - The sad state of Mexico’s mental health system can be traced back to its government’s complex and deep-rooted political issues. Mexico’s budget for mental health makes up about 2.5% of its overall health spending. This is an improvement from the paltry 1.6% allocated to mental health a decade ago, but still significantly lower than the WHO’s recommendation of 10%. Without a significant electorate of mental health advocates, mental health lacks any real political sway in Mexico. Back in 2006, Mexico was among 96 countries who ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp? navid=13&pid=150). But it is clear that not much has changed within the system itself.

Bottom line: The BIA is using “legalese” to “normalize” sending an ill individual back to probable intentional torture in a “dismal hole of human despair.” After all, if being intentionally thrown in this kind of “torture chamber” by a country that has intentionally chosen to ignore, or in many cases aggravate, extreme human rights abuses, then who indeed could actually win protection under CAT? The message is clear — nobody! Use this case to deny ‘em all! Meet those quotas! Keep the assembly line moving!

Political officials of all Administrations have never been enthusiastic about complying with our international obligations under the CAT. Several Attorneys General, BIA Appellate Immigration Judges, and some Immigration Judges have found lots of creative ways to narrow the scope of protection, raise the standards of proof to near impossible levels, and to intentionally misconstrue country conditions against CAT applicants.

Undoubtedly, that gratifies and satisfies the desires of their political masters and handlers. Not surprisingly it comes as the Administration is denying access to asylum seekers and sending them into the CAT “reasonable fear” process.

What it doesn’t do is honestly live up to our solemn and binding international and human rights agreements, nor does it comply with Constitutional concepts of fundamental fairness and Due Process.

We need an independent U.S. Immigration Court System populated by Judges from diverse backgrounds with expertise in immigration and human rights laws, human empathy, and the courage and integrity to stand up for the full legal and human rights of the most vulnerable and endangered individuals in our legal system. Even when it could be “career threatening!”

PWS

11-16-18

TAL @ CNN: Documents Obtained Under FOIA Lend Support To Widely Held View That Trump Administration’s Decision To End Haitian TPS Driven By Bias Not Facts!

DHS decision to end Haitian immigrant protections questioned

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

Newly released internal documents are raising questions about the Trump administration’s decision to end protections for tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants — and whether the argument that the protections were no longer merited was valid.

Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has been aggressive in ending a number of temporary protected status designations that have been on the books, in some cases, for decades.

Roughly 300,000 people who have lived in the US with legal permission, most of whom have been here for upward of 15-20 years, could have their status pulled in the coming months as the protections expire. In the case of Haiti, nearly 60,000 immigrants are set to see their status expire next year.

The justification from the administration for ending the protections has been that by law, when the conditions from the original disaster that triggered the protections have improved, they must expire. DHS has been clear that it does not believe it can look at the totality of conditions in the country to factor in its decision making.

But the documents released Tuesday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit raise questions about whether DHS was accurately interpreting information in drawing those conclusions.

The documents suggest DHS contradicted its own staff assessment of Haiti when it opted to end TPS for the country, which was put in place after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The documents also include email correspondence showing Haiti’s deep concern about ending TPS for the country.

While many of the documents are redacted, the release includes a report prepared by staff about the conditions in Haiti, which was included as part of a recommendation by the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/haiti-tps-documents-questions/index.html

And SCOTUS coverage here:http://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/supreme-court-federal-law-deportation-immigrants/index.html

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

It’s no surprise that Trump Administration immigration policies are based on racial animus and White Nationalism and that they often fly in the face of known conditions in foreign countries. That’s what bias and congenital dishonesty are all about.

Haitian immigrants, who have made great contributions to the United States, have been singled out for poor treatment by past Administrations of both parties. But, they have persevered in the face of adversity both at home and abroad.

Not sure what the remedy would be here even if bias could be proved. The legislation creating TPS status makes country designations or non-designations matters committed to Executive discretion without any judicial review.

So the remedy is probably the same as for most of the Trump Administration’s unlawful and immoral acts: removal of the Administration and its GOP enablers at the ballot box. Even if that eventually happens, it’s not clear whether it will be soon enough to save Haitians in TPS status.

On the other hand, since most of the Haitians in TPS status would be entitled to full hearings before the Immigration Courts, they probably won’t be ordered out of the country any time soon. But, in some cases they could lose their authorization to work.

PWS

04-18-18

TRUMPSTERS’ WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES HURT SENIORS: No, There Was No Legal Requirement To Terminate TPS — It Was Just A Combination Of Disingenuousness, Stupidity, Racism, & Plain Cruelty!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/as-trump-targets-immigrants-elderly-and-others-brace-to-lose-caregivers/2018/03/24/72d5a0d0-2d3e-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html

Melissa Bailey reports for Kaiser Health News in the Washing gton Post:

BOSTON — The two women have been together since 2011, a 96-year-old originally from Italy and a Haitian immigrant who has helped her remain in her home — giving her showers, changing her clothes, taking her to her favorite parks and discount grocery stores.

“Hello, bella,” Nirva greets Isolina Dicenso, using the Italian word for “beautiful.”

“Hi, baby,” Dicenso replies.

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But changes to federal immigration policy are putting both at risk. Haitian caregivers like Nirva, who got temporary permission to stay in the United States after the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of their homeland, now face a July 22, 2019 deadline for returning. If they and tens of thousands of other immigrants with similar jobs and tenuous legal status are forced to leave the country, Americans living with disabilities, serious illness or, like Dicenso, the frailties of old age could find themselves with few options besides nursing homes.

And many of those facilities could themselves be caught short of staff, at a time when more of the country’s aging baby boom generation could need care.

The situation reflects the crosscurrents that often roil immigration debates, with a central question being how many Americans are willing to fill the arduous, low-pay positions that immigrants often work. The expected fallout offers a glimpse into how such policy changes under President Trump will affect older Americans nationwide, especially those in large cities.

Some 59,000 Haitians live in the United States under temporary protected status (TPS), a humanitarian program that has given them permission to live and work in this country since the earthquake. Many are nursing assistants, home health aides and personal care attendants — the trio of jobs that often defines direct-care workers.

The Trump administration decided last November to curtail that protection, saying the island no longer faced the same adverse conditions and giving the immigrants until mid-2019 to leave or face deportation. In Boston, the city with the nation’s third-highest Haitian population, the action has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health-care agencies that rely on their labor.

The decision “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing facilities to provide quality care to frail and disabled residents,” Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, warned in a letter published late last year in the Boston Globe. Nursing facilities in the state, which already are grappling with a shortage of several thousand workers, employ about 4,300 Haitians, according to Gregorio.

Nationwide, 1 in 4 direct-care workers are immigrants, said Robert Espinoza, vice president of policy at the New York-based Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute.

It’s not clear how many of those workers rely on the TPS program, but the Institute calculates that there are 34,600 who are non-U.S. citizens from Haiti, Nicaragua (for which TPS will end in January), El Salvador (in September 2019) and Honduras (in July, unless the Trump administration decides to renew protected status for individuals from this country). TPS decisions cannot legally take economic considerations into account, a Department of Homeland Security official said.

In addition, another 11,000 workers come from countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, primarily from Somalia and Iran, and about 69,800 are non-U.S. citizens from Mexico, according to the Institute.

Even immigrants with secure legal status may be affected when family members are deported, Espinoza noted: Under Trump, noncriminal immigration arrests have doubled. The “totality of the anti-immigrant climate” threatens the stability of the workforce — and “the ability of older people and people with disabilities to access home health care,” he said.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports more restrictive immigration policies, disputes such dire scenarios. Since three-quarters of direct-care workers are U.S. citizens, spokesman David Ray argues, then “these are clearly not ‘jobs that Americans won’t do.’ ” He does the math this way: The country has 6.7 million unemployed people, and if the health-care industry can’t find enough workers to replace those who lose TPS and other protected statuses, “then it needs to take a hard look at its recruiting practices and compensation packages.”

Yet nursing homes in Massachusetts are already losing immigrant workers who have left the country in fear, because of the White House’s immigration proposals and public remarks , according to Gregorio. Nationally, thousands of Haitians have fled to Canada.

“What people don’t seem to understand is that people from other countries really are the backbone of long-term care,” said Sister Jacquelyn McCarthy, chief executive of Bethany Health Care Center in Framingham, Mass., which runs a nursing home with 170 patients. She has eight Haitian and Salvadoran workers with TPS, mostly certified nursing assistants, who show up reliably for 4:30 a.m. shifts and never call out sick, she said. She already has six CNA vacancies and can’t afford to lose more, she said.

“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.

Nirva, who asked that she be identified only by her first name, works 70 hours a week taking care of senior citizens, sick and disabled patients. She started working as a CNA shortly after she arrived in Boston in March 2010 with her two sons.

She said she chose this work because of her harrowing experience in the earthquake, which destroyed her home and killed hundreds of thousands, including her cousin and nephew. After the disaster, she walked 15 miles with her sister, a nurse, to a Red Cross station to try to help survivors. When she got there, she recounted, the guards wouldn’t let her in because she wasn’t a nurse.

“So, when I came here — I feel, people’s life is very important,” she said. But at first, caring for elderly patients was difficult. “At the beginning, it was very tough for me,” she acknowledged, especially “when I have to clean their incontinence. . . . Some of them, they have dementia, they are fighting. They insult you. You have to be very compassionate to do this job.”

Nirva, 46, works with a soft voice, a bubbling laugh and disarming modesty. She says her faith in God — and a need to pay the bills to support her sons, now in high school and college — help her get through each week.

She started caring for Dicenso in her Boston home as the older woman recovered from surgery in 2011. With support from Nirva, another in-home aide and her daughter, Dicenso has been able to continue living alone. She now sees Nirva once a week for walks, lunch outings and shopping runs. The two have grown close, bonding in part over their Catholic faith. At home, Dicenso proudly displays a bedspread that Nirva gave her, emblazoned with the word LOVE.

Nirva also fills three shifts a week at a chiropractor’s office as a medical assistant. Five nights a week, she does an overnight shift at a Boston rehabilitation center.

The Trump administration’s immigration restrictions may exacerbate a serious shortage of direct-care workers, warns Paul Osterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He forecasts a national shortfall of 151,000 workers by 2030 and of 355,000 workers by 2040. If immigrants lose their work permits, the gap would widen further.

“People aren’t going to be able to have quality care,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to stay at home.”

Angelina Di Pietro, Dicenso’s daughter, worries about who could help her mother if Nirva can’t. “There’s not a lot of people in this country who would take care of the elderly,” she said. “Taking care of the elderly is a hard job.”

“Nirva, pray to God they let you stay,” said Dicenso, sitting in her living-room armchair after a long walk and ravioli lunch. “What would I do without you?”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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

Restrictionist myths:

Health care workers are unskilled;
At virtually 100% employment, there are other American workers to take these jobs;
There wasn’t a rational basis for continuing Haitian TPS;
There is a legal prohibition on taking humanitarian factors and US interests into account in making discretionary, unreviewable TPS determinations;
That legal requirements are a factor in the actions of the Trump Administration (the most lawless and dishonest Administration in US history).

What will happen when xenophobes like David Ray of FAIR need help in their old age? Will they will get the benefit of the qualified, compassionate care that they would deny the rest of us? Or, will they be cared for by “anybody off the street” as they propose for others?

PWS

03-24-18

Michael Paarlberg @ THE GUARDIAN: HOW WACKO & COUNTERPRODUCTIVE IS TRUMP/SESSIONS “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT? — Who Screws Their Friends & Productive Residents While Empowering Multinational Gangs? — “[MS-13] can’t really be described accurately as a single gang but is rather a network of gangs with little centralized authority and a franchised name, whose street value only increases with each press conference by Trump and Sessions. . . . There aren’t many beneficiaries of Trump’s immigration policy, but there’s at least one: MS-13 couldn’t have asked for a better president than Trump.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/trump-immigration-bogeymen-ms-13-chain-migration?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Paarlberg writes:

“In 1968, a British Conservative politician, Enoch Powell, made what became known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. In it, he sounded an alarm about what he imagined to be an unchecked immigrant invasion of the United Kingdom, at a time when the country’s immigrant population had only grown from 5 to 6% in the previous decade.

Crime was low, less than one homicide per 100,000 residents, a tenth the rate of the US. Quoting a constituent, he foresaw the day when “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. In subsequent decades, immigration slowly inched upwards, but the scenario Powell envisioned failed to materialize.

Half a century later, we Americans live in a Powellesque moment in which politicians’ hysterical rhetoric surrounding immigration is completely at odds with the facts. President Trump, giving his own Rivers of Blood speech on Tuesday, painted a grim picture of a wave of hardened criminal immigrants, exploiting diversity visas and “chain migration”, running around the country murdering people left and right.

In reality, illegal immigration to the US is down, not up. Trump would like to take credit for this with his tough talk about walls, rapists, and “bad hombres” from Mexico, but the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country has been falling for the past decade, due not to xenophobic bluster but the Great Recession.

Read more

Net migration from Mexico is currently negative: more Mexicans are leaving the US than coming in, and have been doing so since the end of the Bush administration. In coming decades, most new immigrants to the US will not be from Latin America at all, but from China and India.

Violent crime, too, is down, way down: FBI statistics show violent crimes are just half of what they were in the early 90s. Trump would have you believe that immigrants are responsible for “tremendous amounts of crime”, but research shows immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans.

Yet to convince us the opposite is true, Trump and the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have zeroed in on one group in particular, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, a gang I’ve researched in El Salvador. MS-13 makes for a picture-perfect boogeyman given its reputation for violence and scary face tattoos, and misreported origins in Central America.

In fact, it started in Los Angeles in the 1980s, was originally made up of adolescent stoners who listened to heavy metal, and only grew into a much larger and more vicious, officially designated “transnational gang” thanks to mass criminal deportations by the Clinton administration to poor countries that were ill-equipped to deal with the influx.

It can’t really be described accurately as a single gang but is rather a network of gangs with little centralized authority and a franchised name, whose street value only increases with each press conference by Trump and Sessions. And for all the hype, MS-13 is a relatively small player here. Its estimated US membership has remained constant for the past decade at around 10,000, or less than 1% of the 1.4 million gang members in the US: far smaller than the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, or Aryan Brotherhood.

Even the face tattoo image is out of date; MS cliques have been discouraging members from getting them after belatedly realizing it makes them easy to identify by police.

As for the origins of this nonexistent immigrant crime wave, Trump blames “chain migration”, the more menacing nativist buzzword for family reunification, the principle on which our immigration laws are founded.

“Chain migration” is actually a conservative idea: the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed in 1965, was sold to immigration restrictionists as a law which would preserve mostly white immigration while doing away with the overtly racist, eugenics-inspired quota laws it replaced. Because by 1965, most immigrants to the US were from Europe, it was assumed that giving preference to family members of current immigrants would restrict immigration from other parts of the world.

The opposite happened, with immigration surging from Asia and Latin America, not coincidentally many countries with histories of US military intervention: Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Iraq. Yet family reunification has remained the cornerstone of immigration policy, with broad conservative support, for decades.

After all, it is a policy which upholds the family as a unit. Families, conservatives argued, were preferable to single men. They encourage stable employment, homeownership, participation in the community, and provide a source of private, non-state welfare for needy relatives. Families are what keeps people out of trouble, the kind Trump imagines immigrants are getting into, and which may actually happen if he succeeds in taking away this base of support.

It wouldn’t be the first time US immigration policy had the opposite of its intended effect, from Johnson’s 1965 immigration law to Clinton’s criminal deportations. Similarly, Trump’s recent decision to revoke TPS protection for over 200,000 legal immigrants from Haiti and El Salvador will only increase the number of unauthorized immigrants and lead to more unauthorized immigration in the future: mass deportations mean a loss of cash remittances from those immigrants to countries whose economies are heavily dependent on them, which will only worsen unemployment and send more migrants north.

Breaking up families also creates the conditions of insecurity under which predatory gangs thrive. In Central America, deportations from the US give gangs a new vulnerable population to recruit from. In the US, the loss of family networks and raids which push migrants into the shadows give them a new vulnerable population to extort. There aren’t many beneficiaries of Trump’s immigration policy, but there’s at least one: MS-13 couldn’t have asked for a better president than Trump.”

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

Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along! With their toxic mixture of ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, bias, White Nationalism, and racism, Trump, Sessions, Miller, and their sycophantic followers have been destroying American communities, weakening and dissolving American society, and empowering our enemies, foreign and domestic! Other than that, they’re a great bunch of guys.

The only folks happier than MS-13 about the Trump/Sessions regime and their “sell-out” of America and American values are Vladi Putin and his Oligarchs.

PWS

02-02-18

ICEMEN GONE WILD: MINDLESS, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, CRUEL, WASTEFUL “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY UNDER THE TRUMP/SESSIONS REGIME! — “Have discretion and humanity been dropped from the attributes that Americans can expect of their law enforcement agencies?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/unshackled-by-the-trump-administration-deportation-agents-discount-basic-decency/2018/01/28/0785a7b2-013d-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html

From the Washington Post Editorial Board:

“IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS Enforcement, the federal agency whose deportation agents have been unshackled by the Trump administration, has intensified its efforts to such a degree that cruelty now seems no impediment to its enforcement decisions, and common sense appears to play a diminishing role.

Recent months have brought news of one senseless detention and deportation after another. From all appearances, the agency seems to have embraced the idea that it is just to sunder established families and separate immigrant parents from their U.S.-born children — even in cases involving garden-variety technical violations of immigration rules.

Yes, the Obama administration also deported some longtime residents who had committed no serious offenses, but its deportation efforts were focused on criminals. By contrast, detentions of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled in the first year of President Trump’s administration — to 13,600 in 2017 from 5,498 in 2016. Evidently seized by a vainglorious notion of its mission, ICE too often discounts basic decency as a guiding tenet.

How else to explain the detention and imminent deportation of a 27-year-old Ohio man, arrested for driving without a license, who is the only means of financial support, and one of just two trained medical caregivers, for a 6-year-old paraplegic boy (who also happens to be a U.S. citizen)? How else to explain the deportation of a construction worker in Michigan, the father of 10- and 3-year-old U.S.-born boys, who provided critical help to police in Detroit in their investigation of a shooting?

How else to explain the airport arrest and deportation of a 22-year-old female college student from Spain, visiting the United States for a vacation at the invitation of a librarian at Oregon State University, on grounds that she would give Spanish lessons to the librarian’s young son for a few weeks — work for which she lacked the right visa? How else to explain the deportation of a 39-year-old landscaper living in the Detroit suburbs, a father and husband of U.S. citizens, who had lived in the United States since age 10 and whose record was so unblemished that it didn’t even feature a traffic violation? How else to explain the Israeli undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego, a “dreamer” studying legally in the United States, who was detained upon trying to cross back into the United States minutes after his roommate made a wrong turn on the highway, unintentionally driving into Mexico?

In its boilerplate communiques, the agency defends its actions by insisting that it prioritizes bona fide threats to national security and public safety but exempts no category of “removable alien” from enforcement. Which raises a question: Have discretion and humanity been dropped from the attributes that Americans can expect of their law enforcement agencies?”

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

In answer to the Post’s question: YES, thanks exactly what has been happening in America since the very beginning of the Trump regime — starting with the “Muslim Ban” and continuing with a consistent White Supremecist agenda! Many of us have been saying that all along!

We already have the “New American Gulag” — expanded “civil” immigration detention in substandard, potentially even deadly conditions, in obscure “out of sight, out of mind” locations. There, individuals, many deserving legal protection from the US under our laws, are denied fair access to counsel and railroaded out of the country in what essentially are “mock court” hearings conducted by “judges” controlled by notorious White Nationalist Jeff “Gono Apocalypto” Sessions.

Sessions and his minions encourage the judges to view individuals in removal proceedings as “production numbers, possible fraudsters, and potential terrorists,” rather than as vulnerable human beings deserving of fairness, respect, and due process.

To complement the “New American Gulag,” we now have the “New American Gestapo,” headed by Acting Chief ICEMAN Tom Homan. It’s an internal police force that operates without rules, rhyme, reason, or humanity — in other words arbitrary “Gonzo” enforcement intended to terrorize ethnic (primarily Latino) communities.

And, in case you haven’t read about it, ICE now has the capacity to electronically track the whereabouts and driving patterns of every license plate in America —- including YOURS! Of course they say that they will only use it for “legitimate” law Enforcement purposes.

But, for the “New American Gestapo” everything is “legitimate” — boundaries on law enforcement conduct and misconduct went out the widow when the Trumpsters crawled in. Remember, Gonzo essentially told local police forces he really didn’t care what they were doing to the civil rights of African-Americans and other minorities as long as they were enforcing the law and bringing crime rates down!

This is why ICE is well on its way to becoming the most hated, distrusted, and least respected police force in America.

Had enough of the Trump Administation’s trampling on Constitutional rights, civil rights, human rights, and just plain old human decency in America! Join the resistance!

The “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”) is out there every day fighting for the Due Process and the legal rights of everyone in America and standing up against the excesses of the Trump Administration. Join their effort today!

PWS

01-29-18

SATURDAY SATIRE: DAVOS REPORT: TRUMP WOWS INTERNATIONAL FAT CATS WITH PROMISE THAT AMERICA WILL LEAD THE WORLD TO NEW HEIGHTS OF INCOME INEQUALITY — “Starving The Poor To Feed The Rich Will End Poverty,” Says Leader Of World’s Most Powerful Kleptocracy!

“God loves the greedy and selfish, for they shall inherit the earth, the sun, the planets, and the entire universe.”

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

WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING!

PWS

01-27-18

ELIZABETH BRUENIG @ WASHPOST: TRUMP & THE GOP WHITE NATIONALISTS ARE DECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN SOCIETY!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-promised-to-unite-americans-his-policies-leave-us-more-alone-than-ever/2018/01/25/d9b60e62-0155-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html

Bruenig writes:

“At his inauguration, President Trump promised to renew the unity of the American people, claiming that “through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.” Then, Trump seemed intent on creating a reborn civic and social consciousness, and on empowering ordinary people against big government and big money.

And yet, Trump’s administration has ushered in a virulently antisocial politics that dissolves the most basic bonds and leaves individuals powerless against both market and state. Trump, like many populists of the right, gained a foothold by promising that a resurgent nationalism could make people feel cohesive, trusting and strong again. But like his right-leaning populist predecessors, he has offered only the imaginary bonds of nationalism — the illusion of fellow-feeling and homogeneity — even as his policies destroy the real and foundational bonds of family and community in the arenas of health care, immigration, labor and more.

. . . . In its amicus brief in support of unions, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops points out that the destruction of unions based on the loose interpretation of money as speech will render workers weaker than ever before. “Ironically then,” the bishops observe, “a misguided effort to protect one individual from government coercion would leave only individuals to stand against government (or economic) coercion.”

If only that world were really so far away. In reality, it is already here. What unites workfare, the annihilation of DACA and the war on unions is a totalizing individualism — the belief that people are essentially isolated individuals. That we are alone before we are together. That we are more and not less ourselves in total isolation. From that view flow policies that disregard or deny that people are, in fact, embedded in families, communities and industries, and that their bonds and obligations are powerful and ought to be respected and protected by the state. No politics issuing from that view can ever cultivate unity.

What Trump offered as an answer to the aching aloneness of Americans was nationalism, the exchange of an imagined community for actual ones, the promise of a mystic bond with people you’ll never meet even while the ones you know and love are deported, abandoned, dying. It was supposed to bring us together, supposed to make us strong. But his policies stand to leave us more alone than we’ve ever been, and in our solitude, weak.

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

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

First, it was Mexicans, Muslims, and undocumented workers. Then came Legal Immigrants, Latinos, African-Americans, LGBTQ individuals, demonstrators, the sick, the poor, women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to abortion, unionists, Liberals, and Democrats. Don’t see YOUR GROUP on the “hit list.” Just wait. It keeps expanding, Folks like Trump and his White Nationalist buddies can’t live without an “enemy of the day” to rally their “base.”

When the GOP White Nationalists decide that YOU no longer fit their image of America, who will be left to stand up for YOUR rights. Harm to the most vulnerable members of our community, and failure to stand up for them, harms and ultimately diminishes the humanity of all of us. And, that’s how free societies are “deconstructed and destroyed.” Stand up for everyone’s rights! Just say no to Trump and his White Nationalist Cabal!

PWS

01-26-18

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

Of course, Haiti clearly is not a safe place to return migrants:

David Shipler does a great job of exposing the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Mayorkas and other Biden Administration immigration officials.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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“God loves the greedy and selfish, for they shall inherit the earth, the sun, the planets, and the entire universe.”

WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING!

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