"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general
12-12-19
Attorney General William P. Barr in Washington on Tuesday. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
By Eric H. Holder Jr.
Dec. 11, 2019 at 9:13 p.m. EST
Eric H. Holder Jr., a Democrat, was U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015.
As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.
But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office.
Last month, at a Federalist Society event, the attorney general delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power, dismissing the authority of the legislative and judicial branches — and the checks and balances at the heart of America’s constitutional order. As others have pointed out, Barr’s argument rests on a flawed view of U.S. history. To me, his attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.
When, in the same speech, Barr accused “the other side” of “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling — and telling — was a later (and little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law.
In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests. It is also revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.
Not long after Barr made that speech, he issued what seemed to be a bizarre threat to anyone who expresses insufficient respect for law enforcement, suggesting that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” No one who understands — let alone truly respects — the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing. It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for.
It’s also particularly ironic in light of the attorney general’s comments this week, in which he attacked the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — two vital components of his own department. Having spent the majority of my career in public service, I found it extraordinary to watch the nation’s chief law enforcement official claim — without offering any evidence — that the FBI acted in “bad faith” when it opened an inquiry into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. As a former line prosecutor, U.S. attorney and judge, I found it alarming to hear Barr comment on an ongoing investigation, led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, into the origins of the Russia probe. And as someone who spent six years in the office Barr now occupies, it was infuriating to watch him publicly undermine an independent inspector general report — based on an exhaustive review of the FBI’s conduct — using partisan talking points bearing no resemblance to the facts his own department has uncovered.
When appropriate and justified, it is the attorney general’s duty to support Justice Department components, ensure their integrity and insulate them from political pressures. His or her ultimate loyalty is not to the president personally, nor even to the executive branch, but to the people — and the Constitution — of the United States.
Career public servants at every level of the Justice Department understand this — as do leaders such as FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Their fidelity to the law and their conduct under pressure are a credit to them and the institutions they serve.
Others, like Durham, are being tested by this moment. I’ve been proud to know John for at least a decade, but I was troubled by his unusual statement disputing the inspector general’s findings. Good reputations are hard-won in the legal profession, but they are fragile; anyone in Durham’s shoes would do well to remember that, in dealing with this administration, many reputations have been irrevocably lost.
This is certainly true of Barr, who was until recently a widely respected lawyer. I and many other Justice veterans were hopeful that he would serve as a responsible steward of the department and a protector of the rule of law.
Virtually since the moment he took office, though, Barr’s words and actions have been fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct — running political interference for an increasingly lawless president — will wreak lasting damage.
The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department.
Since there is neither legal nor intellectual defense for the vicious attack on our institutions by Trump & Barr, in a misguided effort to “present both sides” of an “argument” where the facts all point one way, the Post has beenreduced to giving space to disingenuous right wing hacks like Hewitt.
Jonathan Rose, who served under the Reagan administration as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, said the inspector general’s report “rebuts in detail the AG’s charge that the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign was unjustified, overly intrusive, or systematically suppressed exculpatory evidence.”
“This is the first attorney general in the history of presidential impeachment proceedings to enlist as a partisan warrior on behalf of a President. It is a sad day for those of us who revere the historic commitment of the FBI and the Department of Justice to even-handed law enforcement based on truth and verifiable facts,” said Rose, who had previously served under the Nixon administration as the deputy associate attorney general.
Donald Ayer, who served as deputy attorney general under the George H.W. Bush administration, said Barr’s reaction to the inspector general’s report was reminiscent of his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation. Ahead of the Mueller report’s release, Barr came under criticism for mischaracterizing the report’s findings.
Ayer, a former Jones Day partner who now teaches at Georgetown Law, said the inspector general’s exhaustive investigation showed that the Russia investigation was “properly initiated based on a sound factual basis, and that the allegations of ‘witch hunt’ and bias on the part of those overseeing it are without foundation.”
“Rather than focus on those critical findings which should reassure all Americans, Barr dwells entirely on the report’s further findings that some agents (who he describes as a ‘small group of now-former’ FBI employees) were guilty of misconduct in the manner in which they put forward evidence in some submissions to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court,” Ayer said, referring to the secretive court tasked with weighing warrant applications filed under the surveillance law.
I personally knew and worked with both Jon Rose and Don Ayer. We were all partners at Jones Day’s D.C. Office in the 1990’s.
We also all served in Senior Executive positions in the DOJ during the Reagan Administration. I knew Don better than Jon. I believe he adjudicated a grievance case that I was handling for the “Legacy INS” during my tenure as Deputy General Counsel. My recollection is that case was one of those stemming from the massive “Attorney Reorganization” that Mike Inman and I implemented to unite all INS Attorneys under the General Counsel’s supervision as part of the “Litigation and Legal Advice Offices,” the actual forerunners of today’s Offices of Chief Counsel at DHS!
Another of those cases actually reached a U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh where I was the Government’s “star witness.”I was found “credible” by the District Judge in his ruling in favor of INS Management.
However, admittedly, about 20 minutes into my answer to the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s first question, the Judge interrupted and said something like: “Counsel, could you instruct your witness to stop the history lesson and just answer the question asked?” Ah, the hazards of witnesses who “know too much.”
Of course, I also served at the DOJ under Eric Holder twice: once when he was the Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton Administration and again during his tenure as Attorney General under Obama.
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have started to send families seeking asylum to Guatemala, even if they are not from the Central American country and had sought protection in the United States, the Los Angeles Times has learned.
In July, the Trump administration announced a new rule to effectively end asylum at the southern U.S. border by requiring asylum seekers to claim protection elsewhere. Under that rule — which currently faces legal challenges — virtually any migrant who passes through another country before reaching the U.S. border and does not seek asylum there will be deemed ineligible for protection in the United States.
A few days later, the administration reached an agreement with Guatemala to take asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border who were not Guatemalan. Although Guatemala’s highest court initially said the country’s president couldn’t unilaterally enter into such an agreement, since late November, U.S. officials have forcibly returned individuals to Guatemala under the deal.
At first, U.S. officials said they would return only single adults. But starting Tuesday, they began applying the policy to non-Guatemalan parents and children, according to communications obtained by The Times and several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.
One family of three from Honduras, as well as a separate Honduran parent and child, were served with notices on Tuesday that they’d soon be deported to Guatemala.
The Trump administration has reached similar agreements with Guatemala’s Northern Triangle neighbors, El Salvador and Honduras, in each case obligating those countries to take other Central Americans who reach the U.S. border. Those agreements, however, have yet to be implemented.
The administration describes the agreements as an “effort to share the distribution of hundreds of thousands of asylum claims.”
The deals — also referred to as “safe third country” agreements — “are formed between the United States and foreign countries where aliens removed to those countries would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” according to the federal notice.
The expansion of the policy to families could mean many more asylum seekers being forcibly removed to Guatemala.
Experts, advocates, the United Nations and Guatemalan officials say the country doesn’t have the capacity to handle any sizable influx, much less process potential protection claims. Guatemala’s own struggles with corruption, violence and poverty helped push more than 270,000 Guatemalans to the U.S. border in fiscal 2019.
Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Molly O’Toole is an immigration and security reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy covering the 2016 election and Trump administration, and a politics reporter at the Atlantic’s Defense One. She has covered migration and security from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf, and South Asia. She is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU, but will always be a Californian.
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To be an Article III Federal Appellate Judge or Supreme Court Justice these days seems to belittle more than a license to take a “what me worry approach” to Due Process, immigration, asylum, racism, and the human tragedy unfolding around us every day. As long as it isn’t their kids and families being harassed, abused, allowed to die in prison, or unlawfully sent to potential “death camps” in some of the most dangerous regions of the world, who cares?
Abuse of others, particularly the less fortunate and most vulnerable: “Out of sight, out of mind.” As long as the paychecks keep coming and the security is good in the ivory tower, the legal gobbledygook and spineless task evasion will keep flowing until our nation finally goes out of business under Trump’s anti-Constitutional authoritarian onslaught.
Will it affect those lifetime judicial pensions? Just don’t let the screams of the abused, tortured, and dying keep you up at night judges! But do authoritarian dictatorships really need “judges,” even subservient ones?
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr sharply criticized on Monday the F.B.I.’s decision to open the Russia investigation, undercutting a major finding in a long-awaited watchdog report and at the same time showing his willingness to act as President Trump’s vocal defender.
The report, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found that the F.B.I. had adequate reason in 2016 to open an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia. Mr. Horowitz broadly rejected Mr. Trump’s accusations that F.B.I. officials conspired to sabotage his campaign, but Mr. Barr highlighted findings that underscored his and the president’s shared view that investigators were nonetheless overly invasive in scrutinizing people associated with a presidential campaign.
“The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Mr. Barr said in a statement.
Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer
John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor whom Mr. Barr appointed to run a separate criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, backed Mr. Barr’s findings in his own highly unusual statement. “Last month, we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the F.B.I. case was opened,” Mr. Durham said.Read the Inspector General’s Report on the Russia Investigation
The Justice Department’s inspector general released this report into the early stages of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.
The statements from the Justice Department’s top official and one of his key investigators gave Mr. Trump’s supporters ammunition to dispute one of the key findings in the long-awaited report by Mr. Horowitz that excoriated the F.B.I.’s handling of a wiretap application used in the early stages of its Russia investigation.
While the report was searing in its conclusion that the wiretap application process was marked with errors, it exonerated former bureau leaders of accusations by the president and his allies that Mr. Trump was the victim of a politicized conspiracy to sabotage his campaign and his presidency.
Mr. Horowitz concluded that the F.B.I. had sufficient evidence in July 2016 to lawfully open the investigation and to use informants. But he did note that the bureau’s standards were very low.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @ktbenner
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Billy is desperately trying to put Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and “John the Con” Mitchell in the rearview mirror in the race to be the worst Attorney General in U.S. history!
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship. In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller sheltered the captain behind the ship’s conning tower. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower. Miller had not been trained to use the guns because, as a black man, his naval assignment was to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
That night, America declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, Italy and Germany both declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and Nationalist Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the mongrel Americans had been corrupted by Jews and “Negroes,” and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War One inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
This system of government was called “fascism,” after the Latin word “fasces,” which were a bundle of sticks bound together. The idea is that each stick can be easily broken alone, but as a bundle are unbreakable. (It was a common symbol: in fact, Lincoln’s hand rests on fasces in the statue at the Lincoln Memorial.) Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War Two to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men from 18-50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that Hitler’s codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t— but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Based in the principle that all men are created equal, democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities—a mongrel population– the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
In June 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that democracy is obsolete. He believes that a few oligarchs should run the world while the rest of us do as we are told, and he is doing his best to destroy both American democracy and the international structures, like NATO, that hold it in place. The interests of reactionary American leaders and Russian president Putin run parallel. Astonishingly, that affinity has recently come out into the open. Some of our leaders are publicly echoing Putin’s propaganda, apparently willing to work with him to undermine the principles on which our nation rests so long as it means they can stay in power.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality. He did so until 1943, when he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the U. S. S. Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank in minutes, taking two-thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the oligarchs will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
Who would have thought that Putinist fascism would take over such a large portion of the U.S. Government without firing a shot?
“Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?” Interesting question on which, unfortunately, the jury is still out.
Anyone who watched Ted “Out Of Cruz Control” (R-RUS) suck up to and double down on V. Putin’s & Trump’s favorite false narrative about the Ukraine on “Meet the Press” yesterday couldn’t be too optimistic for the survival of our democracy if the GOP has any say in the matter! Chuck Todd was left almost speechless by Cruz’s outright lies and Putinist propaganda!
You hear it constantly: President Trump is a “Russian dupe.” Republicans spreading lies about Ukrainian interference in 2016 are Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiots.” By getting Trump to adopt those lies rather than admit to Russian interference, the Russian leader has skillfully played on Trump’s “ego.”
As the impeachment inquiry heads into its next phase, such phrases will be everywhere. In a New York Times editorial that excoriates Trump and Republicans over the Ukraine lie, we get this: “In Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin found the perfect dupe to promote even the most crackpot of theories.”
It’s time for a reconsideration of this concept. We need to be much clearer on why Trump himself is doing these things — that is, on his true purpose in employing these lies to serve his own corrupt interests.
And we need to grapple with the implications of this alliance with what you might call “Putinism” in a way that doesn’t treat it as a fleetingly useful political tactic, but rather as something with serious real-world consequences.
The problem with the ‘dupe’ formulation
The occasion for this reevaluation is the devastating new House Intelligence Committee report detailing Trump’s extortion plot toward Ukraine and the Judiciary Committee’s consideration this week of whether Trump committed impeachable offenses.
On one level, the problem with the “Trump as Russian dupe” formulation is that it implicitly but dramatically downplays the severity of Trump’s corruption and the threat it poses to the country.
The new House report vividly dramatizes why Trump undertook his corrupt plot to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do his political bidding and what that says about Trump’s intentions toward our government and democracy going forward.
For Trump, the utility of getting Zelensky to announce an investigation validating the lie that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in 2016 wasn’t simply that it would salve his bruised ego over his need for Russian help to win.
This false narrative would also help Trump confuse the U.S. electorate with disinformation obscuring his own corrupt efforts to coordinate with and benefit from that sabotage of our political system. This in turn could facilitate benefiting from the next round of such sabotage, which he has openly invited.
In short, the report demonstrates that Trump’s profiting off Russian sabotage last time, and his efforts to extort Ukraine into helping him again, are the same story — one that will continue.
Trump was emboldened by getting away with the first installment, and when the second installment was unmasked, Trump blithely said in reporters’ faces that Ukraine — and China — absolutely should launch an investigation of potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden, his other extortive demand.
On top of this, the report demonstrates how numerous cabinet officials and extensive government resources — and the conditioning of multiple official acts — were placed at the disposal of the whole corrupt scheme.
Taken together, the report concludes, this “presents a clear and present danger that the President will continue to use the power of his office” to corrupt the next election on his own behalf, and that in so doing, Trump recognizes no legitimate “limitation.”
We now know that the lie about Ukrainian interference has been a mainstay of self-absolving Russian propaganda for years. But Trump hasn’t been duped into spreading it. He explicitly recognizes an alliance of his own interests with those of Russia in doing so (and in procuring whatever other outside help he can) in corrupting U.S. liberal democracy for his own malevolent self-interested purposes.
This has implications for impeachment. As Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman will argue to the Judiciary Committee, impeachment binds the president to the rule of law, as a remedy against abuses of power to advance nakedly corrupt self interest.
Which leads to the bigger point.
This has broader consequences
The Post reports that much of the GOP has now adopted the false narrative about Ukraine, in league with Trump. But many quoted ask too narrow a question: Whether this means the GOP is dropping its previously “hawkish” posture toward Russia.
It’s worth asking whether something more consequential is happening.
A broader approach was suggested to me by foreign policy scholar David Rothkopf, who argues that we should think about “Putinism” as a “worldwide movement” that allies various ethno-nationalist and illiberal authoritarian leaders against Western liberal democracy, the rule of law, international institutions and the commitment to empiricism in the face of disinformation.
“Trump, his administration and the GOP have made a conscious choice to align themselves with Putinism,” Rothkopf told me. “It is not unwitting.”
It’s not easy to say how committed Trump is to these tendencies. He yearns to operate more fully as other illiberal authoritarians do. But for all his bluster about our current alliances, it’s unclear how much damage he will do to them in the long run.
Still, it’s obvious that Trump — and, increasingly, many of his GOP defenders — are to some untold degree operating in sync with Putinism and are acting against the interests of our liberal democracy.
This also has ramifications for Democrats. The Post piece reports that some strategists “see a possible opening” for the eventual nominee to win over “hawkish Republicans and independents who are wary of the Republican drift on Russia.”
But Democrats need to go bigger. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg suggested to me, party leaders must argue that the GOP’s “embrace of the Ukraine fiction” is not merely a matter of domestic political expediency. Rather, it’s time to ask whether we’re seeing the beginnings of a “realignment” with this global right wing movement against the values and even the interests of “the United States and the West.”
“Democrats must step up here and explain to the country the gravity of the moment,” Rosenberg says.
Trump’s degradations have forced us to grapple with the correct language to describe the moment in all kinds of ways. It’s time to do away with the “dupe” formulation as well.
Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.
Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) said Sunday that both Russia and Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite the intelligence community’s assessment that only Russia did so.
The comments mark Kennedy’s latest attempt to shift the focus away from the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia worked to help elect President Trump, following a Fox News Channel interview last week from which he later backtracked.
They also come as Democrats press forward with their impeachment inquiry into Trump, with the House Intelligence Committee expected to meet Tuesday to approve the release of a report on its findings on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
WATCH: @ChuckTodd asks @SenJohnKennedy if he is “at all concerned that he has been duped” into believing that former Ukraine president worked for the Clinton campaign in 2016 #MTP#IfItsSunday@SenJohnKennedy: “No, just read the articles.”
Asked about conservative columnist Michael Gerson’s criticism of his incorrect claim to Fox that Ukraine, not Russia, might have been behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, Kennedy said he disagrees with the suggestion that he’s turning a blind eye to the truth.
“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” Kennedy told host Chuck Todd on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Todd pressed Kennedy on whether he was concerned that he had been “duped” by Russian propaganda, noting reports that U.S. intelligence officials recently briefed senators that “this is a Russian intelligence propaganda campaign in order to get people like you to say these things about Ukraine.”
Kennedy responded that he had received no such warning.
“I wasn’t briefed. Dr. Hill is entitled to her opinion,” Kennedy said, referring to former National Security Council Russia adviser Fiona Hill, who testified in the impeachment inquiry last month.
In her public testimony, Hill warned that several Trump allies had spread unfounded allegations that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services,” she said.
Kennedy argued Sunday that Ukraine’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 campaign have been “very well-documented,” citing reporting by the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Examiner and others.
“Does that mean that Ukrainian, the Ukrainian leaders were more aggressive than Russia? No. Russia was very aggressive and they’re much more sophisticated. But the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton,” Kennedy said, referring to former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
Despite Kennedy’s claim, there is no evidence that the Ukrainian government engaged in a large-scale effort to aid Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Todd responded to the Louisiana Republican’s remarks with disbelief.
“I mean, my goodness, wait a minute, Senator Kennedy,” he said. “You now have the president of Ukraine saying he actively worked for the Democratic nominee for president. I mean, now come on.”
Todd then displayed a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the text of remarks Putin made at a “Russia Calling!” economic forum in Moscow on Nov. 20. At the event, Putin expressed pleasure that talk of interference in the 2016 U.S. election has shifted away from Russia and to Ukraine during the impeachment hearings.
“Thank God,” Putin said. “No one is accusing us of interfering in the United States elections anymore. Now they’re accusing Ukraine. We’ll let them deal with that themselves.”
Todd then pressed Kennedy: “You realize the only other person selling this argument outside the United States is this man, Vladimir Putin. … You have done exactly what the Russian operation is trying to get American politicians to do. Are you at all concerned that you’ve been duped?”
“No, because you — just read the articles,” Kennedy replied.
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This article illustrates a continuing problem: you can’t have a real discussion or dialogue about impeachment with any Republican because they just keep repeating the Putin/Trump “party line” of demonstrable lies.
One of the reports cited by Kennedy, a 2017 Politico article, has since been largely debunked:
After the Politico report came out, other media outlets went to work examining the allegations and found there wasn’t anything to them. The Washington Post reported in July 2017:
“While the Politico story does detail apparent willingness among embassy staffers to help Chalupa and also more broadly documents ways in which Ukrainian officials appeared to prefer Clinton’s candidacy, what’s missing is evidence of a concerted effort driven by Kiev.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed his intelligence agencies to hack into and release private information from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. That effort included hackers from two different intelligence agencies which spent months inside the DNC network before releasing thousands of pages of documents to the public.
…“
By contrast, Politico’s report details the work of one person who was researching Manafort with help from inside the Ukrainian Embassy and who, at some undetermined point, provided info to the Clinton campaign, though she worked for the DNC as a consultant until shortly before the party conventions. That, coupled with the Manafort ledger revelation, is the full scope of the Ukrainian plot that’s been revealed. A weak link to the Ukrainians and a weaker link to the Clinton campaign.
On the July 17, 2017, edition of CNN’s New Day, David Stern, co-author of the original Politico article, said the questions about the involvement of some Ukrainian elements were not equivalent to the many stories about Russian government actions in 2016.
From the July 17, 2017, edition of CNN’s New Day:
“But when you dig down into the details, they’re very, very different,” Stern said, “and it’s important to note the difference there. Now, we said in our article … that we don’t have, as far as we can see, the type of top-down and wide, broad attack on the American election that was being alleged.”
So, between the credible testimony of Dr. Fiona Hill, supported by the U.S. intelligence community, and a debunked report from Politico and others, Kennedy chooses to believe the latter over the former. Go figure! No doubt Putin is thinking “useful idiot” whenever he sees Kennedy peddle his Kremlin propaganda on TV.
There was a time long ago when the GOP would have been all over any politician helping Russia undermine America’s electoral process and national security. No longer. Now the GOP is the “Party of Putin,” actively working to destroy our nation.
Once, folks would have been aghast at an American President spreading Putin’s false narratives. Now, it “just another day in the Oval Office.” Just one of the many ways in which Trump has demeaned our nation and our political processes. And, it doesn’t even “move the needle” among Trump’s supporters who have abandoned our country and our national interests.
It was never about protecting the border, rule of law or the U.S. economy. And it was never about “illegal” immigration, for that matter.
Trump’s anti-immigrant bigotry was always just anti-immigrant bigotry.
There’s no other way to explain the Trump administration’s latest onslaught against foreigners of all kinds, regardless of their potential economic contributions, our own international commitments or any given immigrant’s propensity to follow the law. Trump’s rhetoric may focus on “illegals,” but recent data releases suggest this administration has been blocking off every available avenue for legal immigration, too.
Last month, the number of refugees admitted to the United States hit zero. That’s the first month on record this has ever happened, according to data going back nearly three decades from both the State Department and World Relief, a faith-based resettlement organization.
So what happened?
The problem wasn’t that the 26-million-strong global refugee population lacked a single person who met America’s strict screening requirements. No, our admissions flatlined because Trump announced and then delayed signing a new refugee ceiling for the 2020 fiscal year. This delay led to a complete moratorium on admissions.
Hundreds of flights were canceled for approved refugees who had waited years or decades to come — once again, legally — to our shining city on a hill. As the moratorium dragged on, some refugees’ eligibility expired. At least four were minors who have now turned 18. This means they’ve aged out of the resettlement program they were accepted under and now must get back in line, perhaps indefinitely, to reapply under a different system as adults.
By the way, when Trump finally did sign off on that new fiscal 2020 refugee ceiling, it was for a mere 18,000 admissions. That too is an all-time low. The Trump administration has also thrown up other roadblocks for refugees, such as allowing states and localities to veto any resettlements within their borders. (This policy is being challenged in court.)
Trump supporters might argue that, whatever our moral obligations to the world’s destitute and desperate, the president is merely keeping immigrants out to protect our economy.
They are wrong.
The Trump administration’s own research — which it attempted to suppress — found that refugees are a net positive for the U.S. economy and government budgets. That is, over the course of a decade, refugees pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.
The Trump administration is also turning away categories of legal would-be immigrants who are historically admitted because they are economically valuable.
Last week, for instance, we learned that enrollment of new international students has fallen more than 10 percent over the past three years, according to the Institute of International Education.
This is a shame. Higher education has been one of our most successful industries, adding $45 billion to the U.S. economy last year alone. International students spend money in the local economies where they study — on lodging, food, books, entertainment. They are also more likely to pay full freight in tuition. This means they cross-subsidize American students, especially in states where public education funding has fallen.
International students are also more likely to major in high-demand STEM fields, providing U.S. employers with a pipeline of talent that supports the jobs of native-born Americans.
New international student enrollment is declining for a number of reasons, including high tuition and fear of campus gun violence. But the barrier most frequently cited by universities lately is problems with the visa-application process. Meanwhile, other developed countries, such as Canada and Australia, are poaching students who might otherwise have contributed their talents here.
These are hardly the only signs we’re discouraging or denying legions of desirable and legal would-be immigrants.
Denial rates for H-1B visas — awarded to high-skilled workers — have more than doubled since Trump took office, according to tabulations from National Foundation for American Policy. Processing delays for citizenship applications have doubled. Naturalization and visa fees have skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, when families apply for their legal right to asylum at the border, we tell them to await processing in Mexico, in a region so dangerous that Americans are instructed not to visit. (“Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common,” the State Department website advises.)
There, asylum seekers live outdoors, in filthy, flooded, freezing tents. Agonized parents send sick and frostbitten toddlers to cross into the U.S. alone, because they fear they’ll die waiting in Mexico.
And if these desperate families don’t like living in squalor, we tell them they should just return home, get in line and apply through another legal route into the United States. Perhaps as refugees, students or workers.
As though there were still such routes to be found.
It’s institutionalized hate, racism, sexism, lawlessness, and cruelty.
One of the worst things is that’s it’s basically enabled by Federal Appellate Courts who see the same problems as many U.S. District Judge do, but “go along to get along” by “normalizing” Trump’s disgraceful racist behavior and “deferring” to pretextual Executive actions that are merely facades for a dishonest, illegal, and unconstitutional White Nationalist agenda. Sort of reminds me of the bogus “separate but equal” doctrine of judicial cowardice.
Apparently, too many life-tenured Article IIIs in the ivory tower think that they and their privileged circles will escape the gratuitous harm being inflicted on our nation and on vulnerable individuals by a scofflaw executive. Certainly, not unlike the enabling white male judges and Supreme Court Justices who “looked the other way” and thereby enabled Jim Crow regimes to corruptly use our legal system to disenfranchise, murder, oppress, and otherwise abuse African American citizens.
Where has judicial courage among the higher levels of our Federal Judiciary gone?
The White House has directed the Department of Homeland Security to implement a deal to send asylum-seekers to Honduras by January, the second in a series of controversial agreements made with Central American countries to deport immigrants seeking protection at the southern border, according to a government document obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Implementing the agreement has been met with a series of issues that appear to be complicating the January deadline. The deal with Honduras was initially signed in September — at the time, agency officials did not provide many specific details about its implementation — and is part of the Trump administration’s strategy to deter asylum-seekers from coming to the US border.
Critics say the Trump administration is forcing people who are fleeing violence and poverty to go back to countries in what’s known as the Northern Triangle that have weak asylum systems and are unable to protect their own people, let alone immigrants.
Last week, DHS officials implemented a similar agreement to send adult asylum-seekers picked up in the El Paso area who are from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala.
In October, DHS officials traveled to Honduras to discuss details about implementing the unprecedented plan, called the Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA), according to briefing materials drawn up for acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The discussions in Honduras appear to have hit a few roadblocks. First, Honduran officials requested that no one convicted or accused of a felony crime be sent to their country, a proposal that was seen by DHS officials as “operationally unfeasible given the expedited nature of the removals.”
They also wanted asylum-seekers to “manifest their conformity,” or express their agreement, to being transferred — something DHS officials recommended rejecting or clarifying because it was “not legally or operationally feasible.”
And third, Honduras wanted transfers to start only once both countries “provided notification that they have complied with the legal and institutional conditions necessary for proper implementation of this agreement.” But privately, DHS officials viewed that request as an attempt to get out of the deal if they wanted to.
“This reads as GOH’s escape-hatch not to implement the ACA given its lack of ‘institutional conditions’ or as the hook to demand more assistance” from the US or non-governmental organizations, the officials wrote.
The Central American country also wanted a definition of what would constitute a “public interest” exemption to deporting someone to Honduras. The vague exemption is also being used in the plan to deport asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala.
But in their recommendation to Wolf, DHS officials said the request should be rejected since “it gives the US government more operational flexibility not to define what we consider the ‘public interest exemption’ for when we chose not to remove an alien pursuant to the ACA.’”
DHS officials have previously said that more than 71% of those apprehended at the southern border in the 2019 fiscal year were from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.
Honduras had a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000 people in 2017, while Guatemala’s was 22.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, among the highest in the Western Hemisphere, according to InSight Crime.
The “third country”-like agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, paired with policies that force asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico for the duration of their cases in the US and a rule that bars asylum for people who cross through Mexico to get to the southern border, would nearly close off the US to people fleeing persecution in Central America.
The functional end of U.S. refugee and asylum laws without any participation from Congress which had enshrined them in statute will go down as one of the most disgraceful and cowardly acts of a disintegrating republic now ruled by a White Nationalist regime.
MATAMOROS, Mexico — In the middle of the largest refugee camp on the U.S. border — close enough to Texas that migrants can see an American flag hovering across the Rio Grande — Marili’s children had fallen ill.
Josue was 5. Madeline was 3. The small family was huddled together in a nylon camping tent with two blankets last week when the temperature sank to 37 degrees. The children started coughing, Marili said. Then their fingers and toes turned bright red. The camp’s doctor had begun to see cases of frostbite.
Like most of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers at the informal camp, Marili and her children had crossed the border into the United States this summer only to be sent back to Mexico to await their asylum cases — part of a year-old U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols.
In recent weeks, dozens of parents have watched as their children, sleeping outside in the cold, have become sick or despondent. Many decided to get them help the only way they knew how — sending them across the border alone. As Josue and Madeline grew sicker, it was Marili’s turn to make a decision.
These cases illustrate the human toll of the Trump administration’s policy and suggest the United States, Mexico and the United Nations were unprepared to handle many of the unforeseen consequences.
Marili, fleeing gang violence in Honduras, knew that unaccompanied children were admitted into the United States without enduring the MPP bureaucracy and the months-long wait. The 29-year-old mother — who, like others here, asked not to be identified by her last name, for fear it could affect her asylum case — believed that returning home would be suicide. So she bundled up her children in all of their donated winter clothes and scrawled a letter to U.S. immigration officials on a torn piece of paper.
“My children are very sick and exposed to many risks in Mexico,” she wrote. “I don’t have any other way to get them to safety.”
She pressed the letter into Josue’s hand, she said, and pointed the children to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the middle of the Gateway International Bridge, the span across the Rio Grande that connects Matamoros to Brownsville, Tex.
“Josue told me, ‘Please don’t send us,’ ” Marili said, crying at the memory. “But as a mother, I knew it was the best decision for them.”
Then she sprinted to the bottom of the bridge and watched through the fence as her children turned themselves in, weeping and wondering when she would see them again, hoping they would find their way to her husband. He had entered the United States and applied for asylum before MPP was implemented. He was allowed to stay.
In the past three weeks, migrants and aid workers say, at least 50 children have made the same crossing. The Washington Post interviewed the parents of 20 of them. On Tuesday morning, three more children were sent over. On Wednesday, another three. From tent to tent, families now talk openly about whether and when they will send their children.
More than 47,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico since MPP started in January. Through September, 9,974 cases had been completed; only 11 migrants, or 0.1 percent, had received asylum, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University.
“It’s becoming clear to us that this whole thing is a lie,” said Reyna, 38, who sent her 15-year-old daughter, Yoisie, across the border last week. “They tell us to wait and wait and wait, but no one here gets asylum.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not return calls seeking comment.
Asylum seekers began sleeping out in the wooded field here at the base of the international bridge in August. They receive no assistance from the United States or the United Nations. They rely instead on tents, clothing and food donated by a group of American retirees and medical attention from a nonprofit group whose one doctor sits under a blue tarp.
U.N. officials say they were told months ago that the migrants would be moved by the Mexican government to better conditions. It hasn’t happened.
“We started hearing about the situation, but we just didn’t have enough capacity to help,” said Dora Giusti, the head of child protection at UNICEF in Mexico. “And the Mexican government kept saying [the migrants] would be moved out of the state, so we were waiting to see if we could respond there.”
The U.N. refugee agency says border cities in Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, “are among the most insecure and dangerous in the country, which has limited our actions on the ground.”
The municipal government opened a shelter at an indoor basketball court last month. With a capacity of 300, it’s already full. It’s also miles from the bridge, making it more difficult for migrants to reach the border for their court dates, or to meet with pro-bono lawyers. Every day, the U.S. government sends dozens of migrants to Matamoros under MPP. They are taken directly to the encampment and often sleep outside until they find a tent.
The camp consists of hundreds of tents clustered together on a spit of sidewalk and a stretch of scrubland along the Rio Grande. There are only a few showers, so many people bathe and wash their clothes in the river. Once a dead cow floated by and became lodged next to the camp. Another time, the headless corpse of a man washed ashore.
A cold front settled here for three days last week. Immediately, children started getting sick.
Gabrielle, 15 — from San Pedro Sula, Honduras — started coughing. Sarai, 12 — also from Honduras, from Santa Rosa de Copan — was vomiting. Valeria, 5 — from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa — developed a fever and became despondent.
Global Response Management, the Florida-based nonprofit that runs the small medical clinic under the blue tarp, saw a surge in patients, most of them children. The most common cases were respiratory illnesses, said Megan Algeo, the doctor on call at the time. In one case, Algeo said, she persuaded U.S. immigration agents to admit a child for emergency care.
Parents in different parts of the camp decided it wasn’t fair to keep their children here. Some joined a Facebook group called Mothers in Search of Asylum to discuss their options and what would happen if their children crossed the border alone.
“I kept thinking, my daughter is going to die here,” said Blanca, Valeria’s mother.
They all had relatives in the United States. Their idea was to send their children to live with spouses, siblings, cousins while they waited in Matamoros to complete the asylum process. They worried about another cold front, or another flood (there was one in September), or cartel-sponsored kidnappings.
Gabrielle walked across the bridge alone, carrying a plastic bag with her asylum papers. Sarai went with a friend. Valeria and her sister, Anahi, 7, crossed together, holding hands.
All are now in shelters in different parts of the United States. Under U.S. policy, children who enter the country unaccompanied are taken into government custody until authorities can connect them with relatives to whom they can be released.
Glady Cañas, who runs Helping Them Triumph, one of the few humanitarian organizations at the camp, tries to persuade parents not to send their children alone.
“Why did you send your child?” she demanded of Israel, Gabrielle’s father.
Israel, 40, stared at the ground. They were standing in front of his blue tent.
“She was sick,” he said. “We were desperate. A child can’t wait here for a year like this.”
Cañas hugged him.
“I personally don’t agree with what they are doing,” she said later. “A child needs their parents. But when you look around here, you understand the desperation.”
For many families here, the children — and the threats against them — were the reason they fled their countries in the first place.
Victor, 28, left El Salvador with his daughter, Arleth, now 10, after she was sexually assaulted by a man affiliated with a local gang. Victor pressed charges. He carries court documents and hospital records that substantiate the case in alarming detail. The man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “sexual aggression of a minor,” one court transcript says.
As soon as he was sentenced, Victor said, gang members came after the family. In August, they fled.
Victor and Arleth were sent back to Matamoros on Aug. 28, before tents were available. They spent 15 days sleeping outside. Eventually, he found a job in a Chinese restaurant earning $7 per day. He saved up and bought a camping tent.
But after two months, Arleth was sick, vomiting all the time. Their tent had flooded twice in the rain. After her assault, she struggled to remain calm in large groups of people, and she hated walking across the camp to use one of the portable toilets.
Victor took her several times to the Doctors Without Borders nurse who came to the camp twice a week. But she never improved.
In late September, on Arleth’s 10th birthday, Victor bought her a cake and five candles. He asked someone in a neighboring tent to take a picture of them smiling.
When her health did not improve, Victor asked her what she thought of crossing alone.
“She told me: ‘Dad, I just want to be out of this place. I want to be in the United States,’ ” he said.
Lawyers working in the camp have recently become aware of the many parents choosing to send their children alone.
“These parents have been forced to consider an unthinkable choice — to save their children by sending them into the U.S. alone or to keep them in northern Mexico, where they will be exposed to severe illness, kidnapping, torture and rape,” said Rochelle Garza of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
During the last week of October, Victor walked Arleth to the edge of the international bridge and watched her shuffle toward U.S. immigration agents.
“We had never been apart,” he said later, crying. “Her entire life, we had always been together. . . .
“People might hear what I did and think I’m a bad parent. But it’s the opposite. I did this for my daughter because we had no other choice to save her.”
For a week he didn’t hear from her. Then she called his mother back in El Salvador. She was at a government shelter somewhere in Texas. The details were hazy.
His mother recorded a message from daughter to father.
“Don’t worry, Dad. I’m okay,” she said. “I hope that soon you’ll be with me.”
He played the message over and over and cried.
“The truth is I don’t have much confidence that my case is going to work out,” he said. “I’m fighting it for her. But I don’t know.”
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The Trump Administration response: Expand the “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico Program” to additional locations near Tucson, Arizona.
It’s a national disgrace unfolding before our eyes, getting worse every day!
US immigration officers implementing a Trump administration plan to deport asylum-seekers from Central America to Guatemala were provided materials this week detailing the dangers faced by those in the country, including gangs, violence, and killings with “high levels of impunity.”
The “resource guide” on Guatemala was given to asylum officers as part of materials to implement a controversial policy to deport adult asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala. The guide, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, relies primarily on public sources: academic publications, research from Human Rights Watch and other organizations, and news reports.
A Human Rights Watch report from 2018 that was included in the guide for asylum officers, said “Violence and extortion by powerful criminal organizations remain serious problems in Guatemala. Gang-related violence is an important factor prompting people, including unaccompanied youth, to leave the country.”
The research provided to the officers confirmed some of their worst fears about sending people to the country.
“Being told to send asylum-seekers to Guatemala without even a screening on their claim while also being given research explaining, in detail, the incredible danger that exists throughout the country is extensively frustrating,” said one asylum officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “This agreement feels like a pretext to get rid of as many asylum claims as possible.”
Emilio Espejel / AP
Central American migrants wait at the El Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico.
The Trump administration began this week carrying out its controversial new policy of deporting to Guatemala adults from El Salvador and Honduras who have sought asylum at the southern US border. DHS officials confirmed an initial flight to Guatemala in a Thursday press briefing.
The Trump administration says the plan is a key element in its strategy to deter migration at the border and another method to restrict asylum-seekers from entering the US. Advocates and asylum officers previously told BuzzFeed News that the unprecedented plan lacks legality and organization, and will lead immigrants to be placed in dangerous circumstances.
“Data from Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office shows that nearly 8,400 extortion complaints were filed in 2017, but less than 700 convictions made,” reads one research paper linked in the guide to asylum officers on extortion issues in the country. “Amid such high levels of impunity, fear of reprisals for not paying extortion demands is a huge concern among victims.” A link to a Guardian article titled “Guatemala in grip of ‘mafia coalition,’ says UN body in scathing corruption report,” is also included, among other stories detailing major safety issues in the country.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials included the guidance in an email to asylum officers across the country Wednesday morning in a notice that implementation of the policy would begin, according to a copy of the email provided to BuzzFeed News.
Under the policy, border officials in the El Paso, Texas, area will refer a small number of adult asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras who have recently arrived at the border to asylum officers for interviews, according to two sources with knowledge of the process.
BuzzFeed News recently revealed that, up until late last week, Department of Homeland Security officials were still scrambling to resolve critical details about the Guatemala plan. “There is uncertainty as to who will provide orientation services for migrants as well as who will provide shelter, food, transportation, and other care,” read a DHS brief drafted for Acting Secretary Chad Wolf in the run-up to a meeting Friday with Guatemala Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart.
Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and has the sixth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world. Nearly half of the country suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the prevalence reaching about 70% in some indigenous areas, according to a 2018 report from USAID.
The country has struggled with violence but has seen a drop in murders in recent years, with a homicide rate of 22.4 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the US had a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000.
“We are being asked to violate human rights,” the asylum officer told BuzzFeed News.
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Summary: Government officials routinely and openly violate human rights of asylum seekers and other migrants with impunity.
Sounds like something out of the Country Reports for some of the repressive states that I used to deal with in deciding asylum cases as an Immigration Judge.
Now, it describes the United States.
Even before Trump, the U.S. had a rather poor record of holding human rights violators accountable. The folks who mapped out the clearly illegal “torture program” during the Bush II Administration were never held accountable. Indeed, several of them were actually rewarded despite their involvement in immoral and illegal actions.
MATAMOROS, Mexico — The stench is overpowering. During the day, it seems to bake on the squalid concrete. At dawn, it seeps into the cool air — a suffocating mix of human waste and campfires.
Just steps from Brownsville, Texas, a makeshift tent city is growing next to the international bridge. More than 1,200 migrants — many from Mexico and Central America, others from Cuba — are waiting.
This year, the Trump administration enacted what it calls Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. Also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it requires U.S. asylum-seekers to stay in that country while their claims are processed. Before MPP, families would be allowed to wait for their court hearings in the United States.
More than 55,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under this policy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said — and it’s become a bottleneck at the border.
“This is 100 percent a humanitarian crisis,” Jodi Goodwin, a Texas immigration attorney, said. “These policies are not implemented in a vacuum and there are very real human consequences.”
Carlos, from Honduras was among the migrants who spoke with NBC News and asked not to have his last name used for fear of reprisals. The 27-year-old said he’d been at the makeshift camp for four months with his 2-year-old epileptic son — and he’s struggled to find medical care.
“The most difficult part is when my son has convulsions and I’m alone in the tent,” he said. “It’s happened twice at night and I can’t do anything.”
According to CBP, apprehensions at the Southwest border have plummeted from 144,116 in May to 45,250 in October. That’s a 68 percent drop.
“Migrants can no longer expect to be allowed into the interior of the United States based on fraudulent asylum claims,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of CBP, said at a White House briefing last week. “We’re sending a message to their criminal organizations to stop exploiting these migrants.”
The Trump administration has argued the change is working because in essence, the Remain in Mexico policy has served as a deterrent for migrants as well as human smugglers.
But immigrants advocates argue that claim is dubious and has merely increased desperation and fear on the Mexican side of the border.
In Matamoros, the Mexican government recently opened a shelter about a 30 minute walk from the international bridge in response to the influx of migrants. But many of the families refuse to stay there because they fear a growing threat from the cartels.
One man, Josué, told NBC News his two young daughters were sexually assaulted by a man he believes was a cartel operative. The girls had been washing themselves in the Rio Grande when he touched them, Josué said. He showed NBC News a police report he’d filed.
“Matamoros is controlled by the cartels and the bad people,” he said. “When I got here, I was really scared.”
So volunteers are taking action. Every day, a group called “Team Brownsville” is among those who bring food and supplies across the border.
As the sun begins to set, migrant families line up for a meal.
“It breaks my heart to see the need here,” said Mary Vanderhoof, a volunteer from New Jersey. “There’s no reason that people should be living like this.”
Sergio Córdova, one of Team Brownsville’s organizers, said he’s been coming here since the summer of 2018. What started as just a few migrants with donated cots has exploded into a full-blown tent city.
“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”
Gabe Gutierrez is an NBC News Correspondent based in Atlanta, Georgia. He reports for all platforms of NBC News, including “TODAY,” “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and NBCNews.com.
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Check out the video at the above link.
“How can you look away?” he asked. “Are we going to be a country that says ‘We looked away?’ Or did we do something?”
Sergio Cordova “gets it!” How come John Roberts and his tone-deaf “conservatives” who looked the other way at gross legal, Constitutional, and human rights abuses in East Side Sanctuary Covenant and the irresponsible judges on the Ninth Circuit panel that “greenlighted” these specific “designed to kill and abuse procedures” in Innovation Law Labs don’t?
How would anybody subjected to this type of cruel and inhuman treatment possibly be able to present their asylum case? Many, in fact, don’t even receive proper notice or timely access to their hearings, a fact patently obvious but ignored by the Ninth Circuit panel. Others shouldn’t even be in the program or receive knowingly “fake hearing notices” from a lawless DHS unleashed by feckless Federal Appellate Judges who won’t do their jobs.
Several U.S. Immigration Judges and a whole bunch of Asylum Officers have put their careers on the line to “just say no” to these outrages! What’s the excuse for the cowardly performance from those given the privilege of life tenure?
The grotesque derelictions of duty by the Supremes and the Ninth Circuit not only enable individual human rights abuses like these every day, but also their failure to require adherence to the Constitution, the Refugee Act, and our international obligations has emboldened the Administration to enter into totally fraudulent “Safe Third Country” agreements that will “orbit” asylum seekers to some of the most UNSAFE countries in the world, without credible asylum systems and without any procedures in place to guarantee their safety and fair treatment.
Due Process Forever! Complicit Federal Courts Never! Remember my “5Cs” — Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Make those who are trying to “look away” confront the legal mess and human carnage stemming every day from their irresponsibility and failure to stand up for justice for the most vulnerable among us.
Trump Is Sending Asylum-Seekers To Guatemala. His Administration Privately Admitted It Had No Idea What Would Happen To Them Next.
BuzzFeed News Reporter
A group of Guatemalan migrants deported from the US arrive at the Air Force base in Guatemala City on Sept. 5.
In the final days before launching a controversial plan to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala, Department of Homeland Security officials were still scrambling to figure out critical details, including how those seeking protection would obtain shelter, food, and access to orientation services, according to government briefing materials obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Despite the questions, the documents indicate that DHS planned to send 12 asylum-seekers on the first flight to Guatemala, a Central American country that has struggled with violent crime, and was tentatively scheduled to depart on Tuesday.
The materials, drawn up last week for newly appointed acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, suggest that department officials were trying to finalize key details regarding the implementation of a complicated proposal to send asylum-seekers arriving at the US border to Guatemala as part of a deal similar to a safe third country agreement.
The plan has been highlighted by the Trump administration as a key element in its strategy to deter migration at the border and another method to restrict asylum-seekers from entering the US.
“There is uncertainty as to who will provide orientation services for migrants as well as who will provide shelter, food, transportation, and other care,” read the DHS brief, drafted for Wolf in the run-up to a meeting Friday with Guatemala’s Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart. The implementation plan spelled out that Guatemala would provide the services but recently there had been “confusion” as to whether that would happen, according to the materials.
Wolf was urged to raise the issues with Degenhart in their meeting and clarify the outstanding issues.
“The U.S. needs confirmation from the [Government of Guatemala] that they will provide shelter, transportation, and food,” the briefing materials read. “If not, the U.S. and [Government of Guatemala] need to brainstorm other avenues of assistance.”
It is unclear if the planned flight is still scheduled to take off.
Trump administration officials have said that partnering with countries in Central America ultimately benefits the US by cutting down on the number of asylum-seekers attempting to make the journey to the US. Advocates counter that such agreements place vulnerable populations in countries that lack systems for adequate asylum processing and have high murder rates and rampant crime.
Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and has the sixth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world. Nearly half of the country suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the prevalence reaching about 70% in some indigenous areas of Guatemala, according to a 2018 report from USAID.
The country has struggled with violence but has seen a drop in murders in recent years, with a homicide rate of 22.4 per 100,000 people. By comparison, the US had a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000.
A recent United Nations report also found that about 98% of crimes in Guatemala went unpunished in 2018.
The government posted regulations on Monday that clear the way for asylum officers to begin screening asylum-seekers under the plan. The interim final rule, which takes effect Tuesday, creates a process for asylum-officers to screen migrants thrust into the plan. In short, unless an asylum-seeker can prove it is “more likely than not” that they will be persecuted or tortured in Guatemala, they will be removed to the country to obtain protections there.
Administration officials have previously told congressional staffers that more than 200 individuals had applied for asylum in Guatemala, but only 18 had been processed.
While DHS officials have in the past heralded the involvement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in helping build up Guatemala’s nascent asylum system, the briefing materials suggest that those efforts have been rocky, at best.
“It is our understanding that for some time now there has been friction between the [Government of Guatemala] and UNHCR regarding UNHCR’s role in the implementation” of the plan, according to the briefs. The UN has told US government officials it would provide orientation services for asylum-seekers who have been sent back to Guatemala.
But Guatemalan officials have told the US that UNHCR would not have access to their “reception centers and asylum programs.”
On Saturday, Reuters reported that US officials said asylum-seekers forced into the plan would not be flown to remote areas of Guatemala, an option the Central American country had proposed.
“All airports are being analyzed,” Degenhart told Reuters. “There are some that’ll qualify but others that won’t.”
The agreement could be one way for the Trump administration to attempt to safeguard a potential court overturn of its policy banning asylum for those who cross through a third country.
While the Supreme Court allowed for the policy to continue while the case continues in a federal appeals court challenge, it’s unclear whether the justices or the federal appellate court will ultimately side with the Trump administration.
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So, the Supremes and the 9th Circuit are “ruminating” about these issues while folks are dying or being sent off to oblivion by an Administration notorious for its operational incompetence and its bad faith approach to immigration and asylum laws. How is that a “Safe Third Country” or a “right to apply for asylum regardless of status?” How is that performing the judicial duties for which they supposedly are being paid?
Meanwhile, corrupt immoral Administration officials are out there touting these programs as “deterrents” — not a means of fair adjudication or actual protection under our laws and international Conventions. So, why are Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices so oblivious to truth?
Hopefully, law schools are bringing up a new generation of lawyers that pay more attention to ethics, take the time to understand the human side of the law, and who will be courageous enough to stand up for individuals’ human rights against Government overreach. Obviously, too many of the preceding generations of “lawyers turned appellate judges” flunked on all counts.
Maybe a period of time representing migrants pro bono should be an absolute requirement for future Federal Judicial appointments. No matter how you look at it, we’re experiencing an institutional meltdown in the Federal Appellate Judiciary that, when combined with a lawless authoritarian Administration run wild, is endangering both our country and humanity.
U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention: U.N. study
The United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention, including more than 100,000 in immigration-related custody that violates international law, the author of a United Nations study said on Monday.
Worldwide more than 7 million people under age 18 are held in jails and police custody, including 330,000 in immigration detention centres, independent expert Manfred Nowak said.
Children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest time possible, according to the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
“The United States is one of the countries with the highest numbers – we still have more than 100,000 children in migration-related detention in the (U.S.),” Nowak told a news briefing.
“Of course separating children, as was done by the Trump administration, from their parents and even small children at the Mexican-U.S. border is absolutely prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I would call it inhuman treatment for both the parents and the children.”
There was no immediate reaction from U.S. authorities. Novak said U.S. officials had not replied to his questionnaire sent to all countries.
He said the United States had ratified major international treaties such as those guaranteeing civil and political rights and banning torture, but was the only country not to have ratified the pact on the rights of children.
“The way they were separating infants from families only in order to deter irregular migration from Central America to the United States to me constitutes inhuman treatment, and that is absolutely prohibited by the two treaties,” said Nowak, a professor of international law at the University of Vienna.
The United States detains an average of 60 out of every 100,000 children in its justice system or immigration-related custody, Nowak said, the world’s highest rate, followed by countries such as Bolivia, Botswana and Sri Lanka.
Mexico, where many Central American migrants have been turned back at the U.S. border, also has high numbers, with 18,000 children in immigration-related detention and 7,000 in prisons, he said.
The U.S. rate compared with an average of five per 100,000 in Western Europe and 14-15 in Canada, he said.
At least 29,000 children, mainly linked to Islamic State fighters, are held in northern Syria and in Iraq – with French citizens among the biggest group of foreigners, Nowak added.
Even if some of these children had been child soldiers, he said, they should be mainly treated as victims, not perpetrators, so that they could be rehabilitated and reintegrated in society.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Why is Trump not being held accountable for leading the “race to the bottom” while littering the track with illegalities and trampling on our Constitution?
This is how we will be remembered by future generations!
Contrary to the rants of dangerous subversive Billy Barr, “The Resistance” may be the only thing that can save American and our national values.
And, let’s “lose” all the GOP/Fox News BS about “reversing election results.” Not only is impeachment an authorized Constitutional process, but, in fact, removal of Trump would result in his replacement by his hand-picked GOP stalwart successor VP Mike Pence. Hardly a “reversal” of results.
As I’ve said before, in some ways Pence could be worse than Trump, because he’s much more competent and knowledgeable on how Government actually works. Where Trump often trips over his own two feet (or, perhaps, “tweet”), Pence might be able to get things done even where they aren’t in the national interest. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t stop anyone from voting to remove Trump, because it’s the right thing to do. Unlikely to happen, though, given the blind commitment of the GOP to Trumpism and its ugly messages of cruelty, intellectual dishonesty, and dehumanization.
Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.
The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”
Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)
Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.
But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.
Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)
Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.
The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.
Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.
Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives
As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.
“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.
The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”
. . . .
Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.
. . . .
“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
. . . .
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Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.
Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.
“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”
Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.
“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”
President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.
Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.
Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.
Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”
Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.
As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.
The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.
Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.
Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.
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Mary Papenfuss Contributor HuffPost
Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:
Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
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Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.
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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.
Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?
One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!
But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.
Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.
George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”
Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.
But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.
Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.
Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.
The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.
To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.
Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.
Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.
Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.
Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.
Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. Thiswould have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.
Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.
But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.
Take asylum law.
“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.
But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.
Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.
This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”
“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.
A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.
The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?
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Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?
It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.
Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!
