“DUH” OF THE DAY — THREE ARTICLES EXPLAIN HOW SLEAZY SYCOPHANT BILLY BARR PUT HIMSELF AT THE CENTER OF TRUMP’S CORRUPTION — It’s No Surprise To Those Of Us Who Have Watched Barr’s “Ethics Free Zone” @ DOJ — Why Are Article IIIs Allowing This Biased “Political Hack” To Trash Justice In The U.S. Immigration Courts?

https://apple.news/AbSuy-8PHRYa0vX1p8I-F5Q

Sonam Sheth writes at Business Insider:

‘Pure insanity’: Intelligence veterans are floored by Barr’s ‘off the books’ overtures to foreign officials about the Russia probe

Intelligence veterans were puzzled by reports that Attorney General William Barr personally urged foreign officials to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. “This is unheard of,” one former senior Justice Department official who worked closely with the former special counsel Robert Mueller when he was FBI director, told Insider. The Washington Post reported that Barr had already made overtures to British intelligence officials about the

Read in Business Insider: https://apple.news/AbSuy-8PHRYa0vX1p8I-F5Q

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Harry Litman in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/01/did-william-barr-break-any-rules-only-most-important-one/

Did William Barr break any rules? Only the most important one.

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By Harry Litman

Contributing columnist

October 1 at 11:35 AM

Multiple news agencies reported Monday that Attorney General William P. Barr has had extensive personal involvement in the Justice Department’s investigations into the origins of the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

That involvement — including trips abroad for personal meetings with foreign officials — is certainly “fairly unorthodox,” in the words of a former Justice Department official. Is it also inappropriate?

After all, part of an attorney general’s job is to liaise with foreign counterparts. It’s not unusual to have in-person meetings, especially at the beginning of an attorney general’s tenure, both to meet and greet and to discuss mutual priorities.

Moreover, Barr is the head of the Justice Department. No department business is beyond his concern. Unlike, say, the barriers that are supposed to stand between the White House and the Justice Department, there is no out-of-bounds area for the department’s political appointees, much less the attorney general.

Thus, during Barr’s first tenure as attorney general, he personally argued a case in the Supreme Court, a task normally reserved to the solicitor general and his or her assistants. No one took him to task for weeding in the solicitor general’s garden.

So what, if anything, might be worrisome about Barr’s conduct now?

Well, plenty. For starters, while attorneys general do meet with foreign officials to cement working relationships and even communicate shared general priorities, transatlantic trips to ask for help on an individual investigation are beyond rare. It would even be unusual for an attorney general to pick up the phone to call a counterpart about an individual case.

Barr’s personal globe-trotting mission necessarily communicates that this one matter — of all the ongoing business of the Justice Department — is an unsurpassed priority of the department.

Second and relatedly, Barr already has appointed a respected U.S. attorney, John Durham, to undertake the investigation. Many Justice Department investigations require cooperation with our most important foreign friends, and there are established channels of communication for Durham to work through if he needs help from intelligence agencies of other countries.

Third, the attorney general’s personal involvement compromises the whole idea of Durham’s independence. How is Durham supposed to ignore the bear riding piggyback on his shoulders?

That would be so even if the attorney general had no particular prejudice or bias with respect to the investigation. But the next problem, larger still, is that this attorney general brings strongly held preconceptions into an investigation that is supposed to be free of them.

Barr has repeatedly expressed suspicions of impropriety in the initiation of the Russia probe, including his inflammatory suggestion that the probe constituted “spying” on the Trump campaign.

It is hard not to conclude that Barr’s driving motivation is to turn up some nefarious aspect to the probe’s origins, backed by the imprimatur of a foreign government. And of course, nothing would please President Trump more.

Which brings us to the next big problem with Barr’s unusual campaign. Its animating idea, in fact obsession, is simply wacky. No one has ever shown any satisfactory basis for the various conspiracy theories that Trump defenders have trotted out to argue that the investigation into Russian meddling was rotten at the core.

Indeed, the whole enterprise of trying to discredit the probe is half-cocked. The revelations in the Mueller report of extensive efforts by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election are beyond dispute and extraordinarily grave. It is fortunate that the FBI undertook the probe with the seriousness it merited.

Finally, the attorney general has not simply inserted himself into Durham’s probe. He has entered into a working partnership with Trump. Thus, we learned that the president’s recent call to the Australian prime minister to urge him to assist Barr apparently came at Barr’s urging. And again, that Barr asked Trump to contact other countries to ask them to introduce the attorney general and Durham to appropriate officials.

The president should not be within a million miles of this probe. Barr’s improper tag-team approach links the attorney general to Trump’s goal of smearing anyone involved in investigating him and can only further undermine public confidence in the department’s evenhandedness.

The overall rule that Barr has broken isn’t found in so many words in the Code of Federal Regulations or the Department of Justice Manual. But it’s the first rule for any attorney general: the rule of sound judgment and impartial apolitical administration of justice.

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Barr’s enabling of Trump’s corruption just got more dangerous

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By Greg Sargent

Opinion writer

October 1 at 10:42 AM

We are now learning extraordinary new details about the lengths to which William P. Barr is going in service of President Trump’s corrupt and all-consuming goal of making core truths about his 2016 election victory disappear.

But this isn’t a story that only looks backward. It also looks forward. And we need to ask whether these new efforts by Trump’s attorney general are aimed at the 2020 election as well.

Barr appears determined to discredit the special counsel investigation’s finding that Russia engaged in “sweeping and systematic” interference in our election on Trump’s behalf.

Which raises the question: What if Barr’s activities — whether by coincidence or design — end up chilling how intelligence officials respond to the next foreign effort to sabotage a U.S. presidential election on Trump’s behalf?

The Post has some major new reporting that documents Barr’s efforts to enlist foreign governments in his campaign to discredit the origins of Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Barr has made overtures to British and Italian officials, and Trump himself pressed the Australian president to assist in undermining the investigation’s genesis.

[Harry Litman: Did William Barr break any rules? Only the most important one.]

Barr has already claimed “spying” on Trump’s campaign occurred, feeding Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory of a “deep state” plot to block him from getting elected. The goal now appears to be to use the government’s investigative machinery to create the impression that the real crime was not Russian interference, for which a whole bunch of Russians were indicted, but rather the investigation itself — perpetrated by U.S. law enforcement.Current and former officials are alarmed by Barr’s direct involvement in the investigation into the probe’s origins currently being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. As one former official tells The Post, this is “fairly unorthodox” and undercuts any hopes that Durham will be permitted to settle this in a “professional, nonpartisan manner.”

Another worry about Barr’s involvement

In an interview with me, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), raised another worrisome prospect.

“This is designed to validate a conspiracy theory — that Russia didn’t interfere, and that the whole Mueller probe was a ‘witch hunt,’” Malinowski, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me. The goal, he said, is to paint the intelligence community and FBI as the “villains in that conspiracy theory.”

Malinowski argued that intelligence officials eyeing how to respond to foreign interference in 2020 might take cues from the aggressiveness of Barr’s ongoing investigation of the investigators.

“There’s a message to our intelligence community, which is, ‘Don’t go there,’” Malinowski told me. “They’re being investigated for doing their jobs the last time.”

What’s more, Malinowski pointed out, foreign intelligence officials and governments might take a similar message from Barr’s efforts to enlist them in his current internal review.

“Are you going to share intelligence with this administration next year if you pick up evidence of Russian interference?” Malinowski noted, referring to foreign officials, who will ask themselves: “How will such information be received by the Trump administration? Do you pass along something that is clearly unwanted?”

Making that point more salient, The Post reports that Barr has taken a “sustained interest” in a conspiracy theory holding that the European academic who originally alerted Trump adviser George Papadopoulos to dirt Russia gathered on Hillary Clinton — which led to the FBI probe — was actually a plant hoping to falsely entrap the Trump campaign.

And one source tells The Post that in his conversations with British officials, Barr “expressed a belief” that the investigation of Russian interference “stemmed from some corrupt origin.”

A second source denies that characterization. But it simply cannot be dismissed as a very real possibility.

No end to Barr’s enabling of Trump

After all, we already saw Barr publicly legitimize Trump’s corrupt attacks on law enforcement by validating the “spying” and “witch hunt” language. Barr has even appealed to us to take into account how victimized Trump felt by Mueller’s witch-hunting in evaluating Trump’s corrupt efforts to obstruct it.

What’s more, Barr’s initial summary of the Mueller report misled the country by dishonestly downplaying what it actually determined about Trump officials’ efforts to conspire and benefit from Russian interference, and by minimizing the findings on obstruction of justice.

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All this feeds into the ballooning Ukraine scandal as well. One key thing that Trump demanded of the Ukrainian president in the July 25 call is help validating a whackjob conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 email hacks. This, too, would magically make the truth about 2016 disappear — and in the call, Trump directed the Ukrainian president to work with Barr to make it true.

The Justice Department has denied any such Barr involvement. But here again, we already know that Barr’s Justice Department helped direct efforts to keep Congress from learning of the whistleblower complaint detailing that corrupt pressure on a foreign leader to interfere in the next U.S. election. Barr didn’t recuse himself from that, despite being personally named in the complaint.

Barr’s efforts in that regard are now being scrutinized by House Democrats as part of their impeachment inquiry. Which raises the question of whether these latest activities abroad will also come under House Democratic scrutiny.

Such efforts by Democrats, Malinowski suggested to me, would show that Democrats have the “back” of the intelligence community, so it isn’t dissuaded from investigating the next foreign attacks on our political system. After all, as Malinowski bluntly put it, this dissuasion appears in part to be Barr’s “goal.”

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Barr’s political bias and his gross failure to provide asylum applicants and other migrants with the “fair and impartial” quasi-judicial hearings guaranteed by our Constitution has become painfully obvious, just as it was under unqualified White Nationalist AG Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. The conflicts of interest, bogus legal rulings, ethical violations, and anti-immigrant bias simply scream out.

Yet, complicit Article IIIs continue to mindlessly accept the skewed and systemically unfair results of this corrupt and politicized “court” system largely without critical examination. Why aren’t life tenured Federal Judges performing their Constitutional duty to protect our individual Due Process?

PWS

10-01-19

DON KERWIN @ CMS: The Darkness Of Trump’s White Nationalist Xenophobia Descends Over Ronald Reagan’s “City On The Hill!”

Donald M. Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

https://cmsny.org/publications/assault-on-refugee-protection-kerwin-9-30-19/

The Darkening City on the Hill: The Trump Administration Heightens Its Assault on Refugee Protection

NEW ESSAY | CMS Executive Director Donald Kerwin

In 2018, the global population of forcibly displaced persons reached a record 70.8 million, including 25.9 million refugees and 3.5 million asylum-seekers. The United States led the response to past refugee crises of a similar magnitude, as, for example, in the aftermath of World War II and the Vietnam conflict. Yet although the United States remains the largest donor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,[1] the Trump administration has sought to steer the country in a different direction. The United States now seems poised to become the global leader in refugee responsibility shunning and of exclusionary nationalist states, whose leaders the president regularly praises, fetes and seems to emulate. The administration’s recent actions have been particularly damaging to the nation’s identity, to the millions of forcibly displaced in search of safety and a permanent home, and to the ethic of responsibility sharing set forth in the Global Compact on Refugees, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly last December.

On September 26, 2019, the White House released two long-anticipated decrees. Its Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement requires that both states and localities consent to the resettlement of refugees in a particular locality. If either refuses to consent, the Order provides that “refugees should not be resettled within that State or locality,” except in very narrow circumstances that include prior notification of the president. States could bar refugee resettlement, for example, in cities that have been renewed by refugees and that badly want and need them. The Order purports to ensure that “refugees are resettled in communities that are eager and equipped to support their successful integration into American society and the labor force.” Yet significant coordination already occurs, and it can be strengthened without creating a state and local veto that would hamstring the federal government’s administration of this program. For many years, media sources and politicians, including the president, have railed against the refugee program’s putative insecurity and the burdens it imposes on communities. If implemented, the Order would further politicize refugee protection and diminish resettlement opportunities. Evisceration of the refugee program (not integration) seems to be the Order’s purpose, and would certainly be its result.

In addition, the Order seems to require states and localities to take an affirmative step – as part of a yet-determined process – to consent to refugee placement. In other words, they must “opt in” to the program. If they do not, then the federal government would deem the jurisdiction unacceptable for resettlement. In these circumstances, the enhanced federal consultation with states and localities and their “greater involvement in the process” of refugee placement would consist of nothing at all.

Also on September 26, the administration released the President’s annual Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020. This document announced the administration’s decision to limit refugee admissions to 18,000 in FY 2020, the lowest number in the 40-year history of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), lower even that the two years following the 9/11 attacks.[2] The Refugee Council USA explained the implications of this decision as follows:

This decision is unprecedented, cruel, and contrary to American humanitarian values and strategic interests. Historically, the United States has been the global leader on refugee resettlement, setting an average refugee admissions goal of 95,000 people annually. To slam the door on persecuted people while the number of refugees displaced globally continues to rise to historic levels upends decades of bipartisan tradition. It also abandons thousands of refugees in need of resettlement, leaving them in precarious, often life-threatening situations.

The Refugee Council USA also pointed out that the forthcoming Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for FY 2020 – which constitutes formal notice of the refugee ceiling – will further dismantle “the community-based infrastructure in the US, which has long welcomed the most in-need refugees and provided them the opportunity to rebuild their lives in safety.” This infrastructure – which has been decades in the making – will take years to rebuild.

The administration’s rationale for historically low admissions are specious. The Report to Congress makes the obvious point that it would be more impactful to “resolve” refugee-producing conditions, than to resettle large numbers of refugees. Yet there is no reason why the United States cannot administer a robust resettlement program and address the causes of displacement through diplomacy. These two strategies complement each other. Resettlement is typically available for a relatively small number of particularly vulnerable refugees. UNHCR reports that 68 percent of its refugee submissions for 2018 “were for survivors of violence and torture, those with legal and physical protection needs, and particularly vulnerable women and girls. Just over half of all resettlement submissions concerned children.”

Moreover, the Trump administration has failed to wield US “[d]iplomatic tools – for example, foreign assistance, economic and political engagement, and alliance-building” to resolve refugee-producing conditions or to create the conditions that would allow refugees to return home safely and voluntarily. To the contrary, it has been consistently dismissive of these tools and has failed to create any new legal avenues for desperate persons to migrate. Instead, it has cut foreign aid to states that have generated the largest numbers of asylum-seekers in recent years, and it terminated the Obama-era Central American Minors program, which allowed qualifying children from Central America’s Northern Triangle states to enter the United States legally as refugees or parolees in order to join their legally present parents.

The Report to Congress also lauds the US commitment to asylum and to other protection programs, which it argues make the United States “the most compassionate and generous nation in history.” Yet the administration has systematically sought to weaken the US asylum system and its “temporary and permanent protection” programs for “victims of trafficking, humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, and special immigrant juvenile status.”

In particular, it has sought to rescind Temporary Protected Status for the overwhelming majority of its beneficiaries. It has used the cruelty of family separation and detention to deter asylum-seekers from coming. It has reduced due process protections by expanding the expedited removal process. It has also corrupted the expedited removal process by allowing Border Patrol agents – who lack sufficient training in refugee protection and who tend to be deeply suspicious of asylum claims – to assume the role of Asylum Officers and to determine whether asylum-seekers possess a “credible fear” and thus can pursue their claims. It has adopted numerous strategies to prevent and deter asylum-seekers from reaching US territory such as criminally prosecuting and detaining them, and limiting access to the system, including through interception in transit, crude turn-backs at the border, and metering (scheduling) requirements in Mexico for insufficient interview slots in the United States.

Other administrative initiatives will force asylum-seekers to abandon their claims. Under the Return to Mexico program (misnamed the “Migrant Protection Protocols”), for example, US asylum seekers need to wait in dangerous Mexican border communities, while their cases slowly wind through the US immigration system. Early reports indicate that the United States has returned some asylum-seekers to Southern Mexico, making it impossible for them to pursue their claims. The Trump-era Attorneys General have also tried to reject, by fiat, certain common asylum claims (such as those based on gang violence) and have sought to diminish the independence and rigor of the immigration court system. The administration has also sought to weaken protections based on child welfare principles – which it sees as enforcement “loopholes” – for unaccompanied refugee and migrant minors, and for other vulnerable groups.

As it did in announcing its (then) record low admission ceiling for FY 2019, the Report to Congress for FY 2020 argues that the “current burdens on the U.S. immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large number of refugees.” It is true that asylum applications to the United States have spiked in recent years. Yet as Susan Martin has argued, the United States has historically been able to meet significant demands on its asylum system and to resettle substantial numbers of refugees. In the early 1980s, for example, it received and settled 125,000 Cubans and many thousands of Haitians who had reached Florida’s shores. It also resettled more than 207,000 refugees in 1980 and nearly 160,000 in 1981. By FY 1994, it faced a backlog of more than 425,000 pending asylum applications, but it still resettled 113,000 refugees in 1994 and nearly 100,000 in 1995. Martin concludes that the Trump administration either is “far less competent than its predecessors in managing complex movements of people so it must make a tradeoff between resettlement and asylum” or, more likely, “it is using asylum as a thinly veiled excuse to reduce overall immigration admissions.”

Finally, the Report to Congress claims that the president “is taking new steps to make sure that the refugees that the United States welcomes are set up to succeed.” In support of this claim, it references the Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement, which (as discussed) effectively bars resettlement in states and localities that object or do not affirmatively consent to it. This measure, combined with the administration’s pitifully low admissions ceiling, will deny the possibility of admission and, thus, integration to countless refugees. The Order allows for the resettlement of “spouses and children” following to join refugees. However, the admissions cap will keep many resettled refugees indefinitely separated from their families and, in this way, will impede their integration.

As it stands, refugees have been remarkably successful in the United States without the administration’s “reforms.” A 2018 study by the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) compared 1.1 million resettled refugees who arrived between 1987 and 2016, with non-refugees, the foreign born, and the total US population. It found that the labor force participation (68 percent) and employment rates (64 percent) of the 1.1 million refugees exceeded those of the total US population (63 and 60 percent), which consists mostly of US citizens. Refugees with the longest tenure (who arrived between 1987 and 1996) had integrated more fully than recent arrivals (from 2007-2016), as measured by: households with mortgages (41 to 19 percent); English language proficiency (75 to 55 percent); naturalization rates (89 to 24 percent); college education (66 to 32 percent); labor force participation (68 to 61 percent); employment (66 to 55 percent); and, self-employment (14 to 4 percent). Finally, the study found that refugees who arrived between 1987 and 1996 exceeded the total US population in median personal income ($28,000 to $23,000), homeownership (41 to 37 percent) and many other metrics.

To cap off the worst month in the 40-year history of the US refugee protection system, the US Supreme granted a stay on September 11, 2019 that ensured that the United States would, at least temporarily, reject most asylum claims from migrants who have passed through a third country (not their own) on their way to the US-Mexico border. It stayed a lower court order that enjoined the implementation of an interim final rule that will allow claims from such asylum-seekers to proceed only if they can show that they first sought and failed to receive asylum or Torture Convention protection in a third country.[3]

In the best of circumstances, the US asylum process is arduous and uncertain, and many persons who have fled violence and other dangerous conditions ultimately do not prevail in their claims. However, the rule would make it far more difficult even to access this system. It would bar most asylum claims to the United States, including almost all from Central America and other nations that have been the source of most US asylum applications in recent years. Although described as a “safe third country” measure, the rule evinces no concern for the safety of asylum-seekers, for their aspirations, or for the ability of refugee-producing states such as Guatemala or El Salvador to accommodate additional asylum requests. It also violates international law. The stay means that the rule will now go into effect, while the underlying legal challenges to it run their course. If upheld, the rule would eviscerate the US asylum system. In fact, this seems to be its purpose.

The administration’s policies raise the question: Why does the United States offer protection to refugees and asylum-seekers at all? In passing the Refugee Act of 1980, which established USRAP and harmonized US asylum standards with international law, Congress recognized “the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands,” and it encouraged “all nations to provide assistance and resettlement opportunities to refugees to the fullest extent possible.” For decades, there has been a bipartisan consensus that saving lives – as the US refugee program undeniably does – reflects and projects US ideals to the world. Moreover, refugees do not threaten or burden the nation: They renew it by exemplifying core US values, such as courage, endurance, and a love of freedom. Most refugees passionately identify with the United States, having found in it the security, opportunity and freedom denied them elsewhere. Robust refugee protection policies, the consensus held, serves the nation’s interests in global stability, diminished irregular migration, and increased cooperation on US diplomatic, military and security priorities. The program has also saved countless persons who risked their lives to work for and on behalf of the US government.

In his July 30, 1981 statement on US immigration and refugee policy, President Ronald Reagan committed to continuing “America’s tradition as a land that welcomes peoples from other countries” and that shares “the responsibility of welcoming and resettling those who flee oppression.” He also acknowledged the importance of these policies to the nation’s interests. In his January 11, 1989 farewell address to the nation, Reagan spoke of the United States as a nation that had always stood as a beacon of freedom to the world’s refugees, but that this identity needed to be “rediscovered.” It needs to be rediscovered now as well, and before the Trump administration succeeds in fully dismantling one of the nation’s defining and proudest programs.

[1] The lion’s share of the UNHCR’s budget – more than three-quarters – goes to its refugee program.

[2] As is its wont, the administration skirted the law in setting the refugee ceiling prior to its statutorily mandated consultation with Congress on admissions. It insists that it still plans to consult with Congress, but to what substantive end is not clear.

[3] The administration misused the previously rare procedure of issuing an “interim final rule” to allow the asylum rule to go into effect prior to formal notice and comment rulemaking, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Thanks, Don, for shedding light on what will go down as one of the darkest chapters in modern U.S. history.

Also, as Don so cogently points out, support for refugee admissions used to be a bipartisan issue. Now, the ugliness and counter-productivity of Trump’s racist xenophobia has overtaken the GOP and made it an anathema to America’s future.

What would RR think? His optimism and braver view of America’s role in the world stands in sharp contrast to the darkness of Trump’s White Nationalist cowardice, ignorance, and weakness.

PWS

10-01-19

HOW CORRUPT? — Billy “The Smirking Sycophant” Barr Aiming To Overtake “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions & “John The Con” Mitchell As Most Lawless & Corrupt AG In My Lifetime! — Federal Courts Share Blame For Deterioration Of Ethical Standards! — Judicial Complicity Has Real Life Consequences!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/opinion/trump-william-barr.html

Michelle Goldberg writes in the NY Times:

Just How Corrupt Is Bill Barr?

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

SEPT. 26, 2019

TwitterFacebook

By now you have probably read the opening of the whistle-blower complaint filed by a member of the intelligence community accusing Donald Trump of manipulating American foreign policy for political gain. But the whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

. . . . The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.

Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration.

In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.

The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.

According to Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, any lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens. Barr’s office insists that the president hasn’t spoken to Barr about the subject, but given the attorney general’s record of flagrant dishonesty — including his attempts to mislead the public about the contents of the Mueller report — there’s no reason to believe him. Besides, said Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.

That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”

I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.

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Another serious transgression: This shockingly biased and corrupt Trump political toady is literally running the U.S. Immigration Courts into the ground while neither Congress nor the Article IIIs have the guts to require that migrants receive the “fair and impartial” adjudications to which they are entitled under the Due Process Clause of our Constitution.

Sure, Billy Barr is “the pits!” But those in Congress and the Article IIIs who are “letting him get away with murder” are equally to blame. Bullies like Barr take advantage of the “go along to get along” cowardice of those charged with holding them accountable.

Another example of how Barr’s DOJ has become an “ethics free zone:” Yesterday, before Judge Dolly Gee in the Flores litigation Barr’s DOJ lawyer August Flentje presented a totally disingenuous position.

“How can you as officer of the court tell me that the regulations are not inconsistent with the settlement agreement?” the judge asked a Justice Department lawyer. “Just because you tell me it is night outside does not mean it is not day.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/migrant-children-flores-court.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

But in the end, even Judge Gee, no “shrinking violet,” merely expressed her displeasure and ruled against the DOJ.

Why weren’t Flentje and his supervisors, all the way up to Barr, referred to their respective state bars for ethical violations and knowingly trying to mislead the court by presenting a frivolous “defense?” Would private counsel’s dishonesty before the court have been treated as leniently? At one time DOJ lawyers were expected to have higher ethical standards than the minimum. Now they have become ethical scofflaws.

But, as long as Federal Courts are unwilling to hold Barr & company ethically accountable, the dishonesty and disrespect for the system will continue to grow. When the Article IIIs find themselves in the middle of a morass of frivolous litigation and outright lies presented by the DOJ, they will have only themselves to blame for the deterioration of civility and ethical standards.

Indeed, the Supremes’ own shameful performance in Barr v. East Side Sanctuary Covenant, where they allowed the Solicitor General to unethically “short circuit the system,” dissolved a proper stay issued by a U.S. District Judge, and allowed an unconstitutional, illegal, not to mention immoral, program of racially targeted elimination of asylum opportunities sends a strong signal that the Supreme themselves have become part of the “ethics free zone.” Trump and Barr and their sycophantic subordinates have taken notice.

Chief Justice John Roberts might disingenuously moan the loss of civility and the dysfunction in the Legislative and Executive Branches. But, fact is, his Court’s unwillingness to fulfill their oaths of office by enforcing the Constitution and standing up for the rule of law by reinforcing it against Trump’s arrogant overreach is a major part of the problem. He and his spineless Supremes’ majority have essentially left America defenseless against the tyranny and corruption of Trump, Barr, and company.

And, as asylum applicants are abused, human lives are ruined, the Immigration Courts dissolve, and Trump’s betrayal of our nation unfolds each day, we see that there are “real life consequences” to the Supremes’ complicity.

09-28-19

THE UN-AMERICANS: Under Trump & His Neo-Nazi Lieutenant Stephen Miller, Our Nation Projects The Ugliest Side Of History: “The Trump administration has systematically acted to bar as many refugees and asylum seekers as possible, virtually from its first day, supplanting America’s traditional welcome to the world’s desperate people with a spirit of xenophobia and bigotry.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/opinion/editorials/trump-refugees.html

From The NY Times Editorial Board:

President Trump’s latest assault on immigration, cutting the number of refugees accepted to a mere 18,000 from 30,000 last year, is better than the complete ban that some of his aides were seeking. But looking at mere numbers misses the point.

This is the administration’s latest message to anyone dreaming of a freer life in America: that they should just stay away. The Trump administration has systematically acted to bar as many refugees and asylum seekers as possible, virtually from its first day, supplanting America’s traditional welcome to the world’s desperate people with a spirit of xenophobia and bigotry.

Led by Stephen Miller, a zealot who has planted lieutenants throughout the government, the Trump White House has made its anti-immigration campaign something akin to a crusade, with “the wall” along the Mexican border as its symbol.

The administration has tried to scare away Central Americans by separating children from their parents when families arrive at the border seeking asylum; it threatened to end “temporary protected status” for people escaping natural and other disasters in a number of countries, including Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan; it suspended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which let undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children stay and work; it has dramatically deported immigrants without regard for their ties to family and community; and it has enacted a system that would prevent migrants from seeking asylum if they passed through another country without first seeking asylum there.

Any question about the mind-set guiding the administration should have been put to rest by President Trump’s icy explanation to reporters earlier this month for why he was barring residents of the hurricane-battered Bahamas from taking refuge in the United States.

“I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members, and some very, very bad drug dealers,” he said. He offered not a shred of proof of any such danger, while the shattering evidence of Bahamians’ needs still lies everywhere.

The limit announced by the State Department on Thursday is far below the 110,000 refugees a year that President Barack Obama said in 2016 should be let in. Most of the 18,000 slots, moreover, are already filled by Iraqis who worked with the American military, victims of religious persecution and some Central Americans. That would leave only 7,500 slots for families seeking unification, like parents of Rohingya children who have already been admitted.

The proffered reason for the cut was the huge backlog in immigration courts as the number of people seeking asylum is expected to reach 350,000. Most refugees trying to enter the United States, though, have already been cleared. So it’s not immediately clear how lowering the annual limit will help ease the backlog.

There are enormous backlogs, and the United States cannot let in everyone who wants to come. But the severity of the cutbacks makes clear that the administration’s rationale hides its real motive: to score political points with a base of voters fearful of immigration by seeming to keep out as many people as possible.

This shortsighted politicking denies a fundamental virtue — and key advantage — of America’s democracy: that it is a land of immigrants and refugees. It ignores the contributions of immigrants to the greatness of the United States.

There is no sensible argument for opening the borders to everyone. Any refugee or asylum program needs a solid vetting process. But Mr. Trump’s approach is not the answer. Congress should have stepped in long ago with serious immigration reform. But that failure is no reason for Americans to be taken in by Mr. Trump’s fear-mongering and evasive explanations.

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

The New Due Process Army is out there courageously standing up against racist cowards like Trump, Miller, “Cooch Cooch,” and their sycophantic minions like “Big Mac With Lies,” Matt Albence, and the totally corrupt and immoral Billy Barr!

Due Process Forever — Trump, Miller, & Their Corrupt Cronies, Never!

Go New Due Process Army!

PWS

09-28-19

CNN: WHITE HOUSE CONFIRMS KEY PART OF WHISTLEBLOWER’S “COVER UP” CHARGE – Yeah, Just Like the WB Said, WH Aides Tried To Hide The Improper Conversation With Ukrainian President In The Classified Docs System!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/27/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript-white-house/index.html

Pamela Brown reports for CNN:

Washington (CNN)The White House acknowledged Friday that administration officials directed a now-infamous Ukraine call transcript be filed in a highly classified system, confirming allegations contained in a whistleblower complaint that have roiled Washington.

In a statement provided to CNN, a senior White House official said the move to place the transcript in the system came at the direction of National Security Council attorneys.

“NSC lawyers directed that the classified document be handled appropriately,” the senior White House official said.

White House officials say the transcript was already classified so it did nothing wrong by moving it to another system.

Four days that pitched America into an impeachment nightmare

The admission lends further credibility to the whistleblower complaint description of how the July 25 transcript with the Ukrainian president, among others, were kept out of wider circulation by using a system for highly sensitive documents.

But the statement did not explain whether anyone else in the White House was part of the decision to put the the Ukraine transcript in the more restrictive system.

Nor did it delve into an accusation in the complaint that other phone call transcripts were handled in a similar fashion.

The suggestion that officials sought to conceal the content of the phone call — during which Trump suggested to his Ukrainian counterpart that he order an investigation into Joe Biden and his son — has led to accusations of a cover-up. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son.

The transcript of the Ukraine phone call — which the White House released publicly on Wednesday — did not contain information like intelligence secrets or military plans that might ordinarily merit moving it to a highly classified system.

Officials familiar with the matter say Trump and others at the White House sought to restrict access to phone calls with foreign leaders after embarrassing leaks early in the administration.

The White House’s statement on Friday indicates an effort to paint the practice as sanctioned by lawyers and overseen by the National Security Council, rather than a politically motivated attempt to keep Trump’s conversations from becoming public.

Trump himself lashed out against the whistleblower on Thursday for revealing information about his phone call to relevant authorities.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said during a private event in New York. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

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

Once again, the crack political analysis team at immigrationcourtside.com was out in front on this one by observing yesterday that there was little, if any, reason for the GOP to be attempting to sow doubts about then “second hand nature” of the Whistleblower’s factual allegations, since their credibility had already been largely confirmed by the White House’s own releases. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/09/26/betrayal-of-america-what-on-earth-are-trumps-sycophantic-gop-defenders-talking-about-the-evidence-of-wrongdoing-released-by-the-white-house-confirms-the-whistleblower/.

This is further proof of what I said yesterday. The facts here are actually much clearer than they are in any “normal” investigation of wrongdoing. Trump acted inappropriately, broke the law, endangered national security, lied about it, and the GOP is trying to help him “cover-up” (hard to do, since the damning facts are public) or “obfuscate” to maintain their minority political power. In other words, the “Trump Doctrine” of corruption, unbridled greed, and selfishness, driven to a large degree by racism, taken to its logical conclusion.

Speaking of being “”out front,” it finally dawned on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Attorney General Billy Barr has “gone rogue.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-whistleblower-impeachment/2019/09/27/55b99276-e0a8-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html.

That’s hardly “news” to faithful readers of Courtside! https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/09/26/doj-is-a-national-disgrace-under-trump-the-race-to-the-bottom-started-under-white-nationalist-zealot-gonzo-apocalypto-becomes-a-death-spiral-under-shamelessly-corrupt-trump-toady/.

To me, it doesn‘t look like both the Trump Presidency and our nation can survive in the long run. Our next election will be about what we really want as a people: a Constitutional Republic committed to humane values and the rule of law; or a corrupt, selfish, cowardly racist charlatan who seeks to seeks to replace that republic with a “Cult of Personality.”

PWS

09-27-19

BETRAYAL OF AMERICA: What, On Earth, Are Trump’s Sycophantic GOP Defenders Talking About? — The Evidence Of Wrongdoing, Released By the WHITE HOUSE, Confirms The Whistleblower’s Complaint!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for Immigrationcourtside.com

Sept. 26, 2109

Congressional Republicans continue to spout utter nonsense about the Whistleblower’s admitted lack of “first hand evidence” of Trump’s inappropriate conversations with the Ukrainian President that were both criminal and a threat to our national security.

But, the White House released a “transcript” that clearly shows that Trump improperly asked the Ukraine for a “favor” — to investigate political rival Joe Biden and his family in return for improved relations. Not the least among the latter was release of the Congressionally appropriated defense funding that Trump had put on hold and then lied about his reasons. His initial claim that funds were withheld out of a concern about “corruption” (this, from the most corrupt President in US history who recently closed bogus immigration “Safe Third Country Agreements” with the notoriously unsafe and blatantly corrupt Governments of the Northern Triangle) was later contradicted by an equally incredible claim that he was trying to get European Governments to pay their imaginary “fair share.”

The same transcript also shows Trump “pressing” the Ukrainian President about a fabricated right wing conspiracy theory relating to the non-existent Democratic Party “server” as well as making completely inappropriate and unethical references to Attorney General Barr and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in connection with investigating the Biden family. (In fact, Hunter Biden was cleared of wrongdoing by a previous Ukrainian investigation, and there have never been any credible allegations of wrongdoing by Joe Biden).

In other words, the heart of the Whistleblower complaint was confirmed by Trump’s own evidence of his own misconduct.

So, in this context, the lack of first-hand information is totally irrelevant. Trump himself has corroborated the Whistleblower’s major concerns.

That GOP sycophants keep raising irrevancies as bogus ”defenses” merely confirms what everyone outside ”Trumpworld” already knows: There is no defense for the President’s illegal and unethical conduct and the GOP’s continued support of this sleazy charlatan.

PWS

09-26-19

BELOW THE RADAR SCREEN: Trump Uses UN Speech To Urge Return To Unbridled, Racist, Xenophobic Nationalism That Caused Two World Wars, The Holocaust, & Fueled The Rise Of Communism, While Killing 80-100 Million People! — He’s An Existential Threat To Civilization!

https://apple.news/AiFomr1e1Tni878bxZd4OKw

Letters to the Editor [LA Times]: Trump’s U.N. speech extolling nationalism was frightening

President Trump’s speech at the U.N. dismissing globalism and praising nationalism endorsed the very ideologies the U.N. was formed to combat.

To the editor: In his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump called for rejecting everything the United Nations stands for and a return to nationalism. Great.

This is what comes from someone who is ignorant of history — and fairly recent history at that. It was nationalism that brought us the two most catastrophic wars in human history. It is nationalism that has been at the root of many conflicts since then.

The U.N. was created to combat this most destructive of ideologies. For the most part, it has been succeeding, but in small, incremental, not often seen ways.

Now, the man in the White House wants to throw it all away. And for what? Self-aggrandizement? Profit for defense companies? Or just to give fodder to his followers?

Stephen McCarthy, Monrovia

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

Stephen McCarthy “gets” it. Unfortunately, Trump, the GOP, and their enablers don’t!

Will the electorate “wake up” in time. Or, will we repeat the worst mistakes in history with America as the main culprit?

PWS

09-26-19

“I’M HENRY VIII, I AM, HENRY VIII, I AM, I AM” – Unhinged Trump Confuses Himself With The State, Threatens “Whistleblower” Sources With Treason – Will “Drawing & Quartering” Be Next? — Audience “Stunned” By Latest Evidence Of Unfitness for Office!

I’m Henry VIII

Herman’s Hermits

I’m Henry the eighth I am
Henry the eighth I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
She’s been married seven times before

And every one was an Henry (Henry)
She wouldn’t have a Willy or a Sam (no Sam)
I’m her eighth old man, I’m Henry
Henry the eighth I am

Second verse same as the first

I’m Henry the eighth I am
Henry the eighth I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
She’s been married seven times before

And every one was an Henry (Henry)
She wouldn’t have a Willy or a Sam (no Sam)
I’m her eighth old man, I’m Henry
Henry the eighth I am

I’m Henry the eighth I am
Henry the eighth I am, I am
I got…

Source: LyricFind

Maggie Haberman
White House Correspondent
NY Times

Henry VIII
Former King, England
Executed Those Who Wouldn’t Swear Personal Allegiance

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/us/politics/trump-whistle-blower-spy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Maggie Haberman reports for the NY Times:

By Maggie Haberman

President Trump told a crowd of staff from the United States Mission to the United Nations on Thursday morning that he wants to know who provided information to a whistle-blowerabout his phone call with the president of Ukraine, saying that whoever did so was “close to a spy” and that “in the old days,” spies were dealt with differently.

The remark stunned people in the audience, according to a person briefed on what took place, who had notes of what the president said. Mr. Trump made the statement several minutes into his remarks before the group of about 50 mission employees and their families at the event intended to honor the mission. At the outset, he condemned the former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s role in Ukraine at a time when his son Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to the whistle-blower and condemned the news media reporting on the complaint as “crooked.” He then said the whistle-blower never heard the call in question.

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

The complaint, which was made public on Thursday morning, said the whistle-blower obtained information about the call from multiple United States officials.

“Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort,” the complaint stated. It described concerns that the president was using his phone call with the Ukrainian president for personal gain to fulfill a political vendetta.

Full Document: The Whistle-Blower Complaint

The complaint filed by an intelligence officer about President Trump’s interactions with the leader of Ukraine.

Some in the crowd laughed, the person briefed on what took place said. The event was closed to reporters, and during his remarks, the president called the news media “scum” in addition to labeling them crooked.

The ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Knight Craft, was in the room.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An intelligence whistle-blower law protects intelligence officials from reprisal — like losing their security clearance or being demoted or fired — as long as they follow a certain process for bringing allegations of wrongdoing to the attention of oversight authorities.

The whistle-blower followed that process — filing a complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community. The Trump Justice Department later proclaimed that the information the whistle-blower put forward did not qualify under the intelligence whistle-blower law, raising the question of whether the official was still protected from reprisal. The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has said he would not permit the official to suffer retaliation, but the inspector general has pointed out that this personal assurance is not a legal shield.

Moreover, whistle-blower laws are aimed at channeling complaints to certain officials with oversight responsibilities — Congress, supervisors or inspectors general — and do not protect officials who provide information to other people without authorization. For that reason, these laws almost certainly do not protect the officials who told the whistle-blower about the call in the first place.

Mr. Trump spoke as the director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was testifying before Congress that the president had never asked for the identity of the whistle-blower, whose complaint was initially withheld from Congress by the Trump administration.

At a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street in Manhattan immediately after the United Nations event, Mr. Trump walked out before the crowd of several hundred donors clutching paper in one of his hands and said, “This is the call.” He then said it was “the greatest thing” to happen to the Republican Party because they had raised so much money off the controversy.

In a Twitter post later in the day, Mr. Trump referred again to the whistle-blower having “second hand information” and called the inquiry “Another Witch Hunt!”

Editors’ Picks

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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

Those of us who have been saying for some time now that Trump’s conduct makes him a “clear and present danger” to the continued existence of our nation have been proved right again. Not, of course, that it means that Trump, with lots of help from the GOP and complicit courts, won’t succeed in destroying American democracy. Democracy is “on the ropes” while Trump is still in office.

What would Thomas More, former Lord High Chancellor of England, say about Trump’s rhetoric? More was famously executed in 1535 for refusing to recognize Henry VIII as the head of the Church in England.

In a time where Trump, Barr, McAleenan, Mulvaney, Pence, Graham, McConnell, Pompeo, the majority of the Supremes, and many others illustrate the complete absence of integrity and ethics in Government, the “Whistleblower” reminds us that there still are are some persons of integrity left in our Government. Sadly, they appear to be an “endangered species.”

Voters have a chance to save our nation by throwing Trump and his GOP scoundrels out of office, at every level, in 2020. Whether they are “up to the task” or not remains to be seen.

PWS

09-26-19

DOJ IS A NATIONAL DISGRACE UNDER TRUMP: The Race To The Bottom, Started Under White Nationalist Zealot “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Becomes A Death Spiral Under Shamelessly Corrupt Trump Toady Billy Barr! — “Malicious Incompetence,” White Nationalism, & Anti-Democracy Are Institutionalized @ DOJ, Enabled By Feckless Article III Courts Pretending To Look The Other Way Rather Than Standing Up To Tyranny & Assaults On Our Constitution & The Rule Of Law By The Trump Administration!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/william-barr-trump-and-ukraine-the-doj-hit-a-new-low-to-bury-the-whistleblower-complaint.html

Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate:

As more details emerge about Donald Trump’s whistleblower scandal, it’s clear the man standing in the way of any investigation into the president’s actions, once again, is Attorney General William Barr. The House’s now formal impeachment inquiry may be the last remaining tool that Barr cannot tamper with.

Barr has already successfully stymied one investigation of presidential misconduct: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. The attorney general released a misleading “summary” of the report before its publication, one that rankled Mueller himself. He also devised dubious legal standards to find insufficient evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Barr then prefaced the report’s release with an appalling press conference that painted Trump as the real victim. In congressional testimony, he trashed his own Justice Department to further defend Trump. Later, Barr took pains to hide the full Mueller report from Congress, deploying a baseless legal theory to conceal key redactions from lawmakers.

With each new development in the Ukraine scandal, we are seeing the Trump administration run the Barr playbook all over again. But there is an important difference. When Barr took the reins at DOJ, the Mueller investigation was near its end: Barr could not interfere with the probe itself; he could only run damage control once it concluded. This time, Barr has been in control from the start. And his Justice Department has blocked every avenue through which Trump might be held accountable.

Notes on the telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky suggest Barr is implicated in Trump’s dirty work. (The memo is not a transcript, but rather a compilation of “notes and recollections” from officials listening in.) Trump mentions his attorney general six times as a resource for Zelensky. The president urges Zelensky to investigate his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden—referring to unsubstantiated allegations that, as vice president, Biden used his position to quash a Ukrainian investigation into his son. “[W]hatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump adds. He also told Zelensky that he would have his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani “give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.”

Barr has been in control from the start.

The Justice Department released a statement Wednesday claiming that neither Trump nor Giuliani have spoken with Barr about pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son. But there is ample evidence that Barr played a substantial role in protecting Trump from a whistleblower complaint over the call. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has already insisted that Barr recuse himself “until we get to the bottom of this matter.” House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff also sent a letter to Barr Wednesday saying the DOJ’s involvement “raises the specter that the Department has participated in a dangerous cover-up to protect the President.”

Before Barr’s possible involvement in the Ukraine affair had even been made public, the DOJ stepped in to mute the whistleblower complaint over this call. Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, or ICWPA, whistleblowers in a federal intelligence agency must send their complaint to Michael Atkinson, Intelligence Community inspector general. The law tasks Atkinson with deciding whether the complaint is credible and of “urgent concern.” If it is, Atkinson must send it to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. ICWPA states that Maguire, in turn, “shall … forward” the complaint to congressional intelligence committees within seven days.

This process worked as intended—until the DOJ stepped in. Atkinson received the whistleblower complaint and found it to be a credible allegation of “urgent concern.” So he sent it to Maguire. Instead of sending it to Congress, as he was legally obligated to do, Maguire asked the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which makes law that binds the executive branch. The OLC declared that he could not pass it on in an opinion later released to the public in modified form, holding that the whistleblower complaint did not pertain to a matter of “urgent concern.”

This opinion is bizarre, because the law does not allow Maguire—and, by extension, the OLC—to overrule Atkinson’s assessment of a whistleblower complaint. It tasks Atkinson with deciding whether the complaint meets ICWPA’s standards, not Maguire. OLC claimed a right, on Maguire’s behalf, to independently determine whether the complaint constitutes an “urgent concern.” No such right exists.

The OLC then followed a different law, which requires executive branch officials to notify the attorney general if they discover potential “violations of Federal criminal law involving Government officers.” So instead of going to Congress, the whistleblower’s complaint went to the DOJ and, apparently, to Barr himself. The DOJ then assessed whether Trump may have committed a campaign finance violation, since it is a federal crime for any person to “solicit” any “thing of value” from a foreign national in connection with an election.

On Wednesday, the DOJ released a statement announcing that the agency had determined that “that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.” It reached this finding by deciding that dirt on a political opponent is not a “thing of value”—disagreeing with Robert Mueller, who believed opposition research could qualify as a “thing of value.” The DOJ’s contrary conclusion theory of campaign finance law is far-fetched if not outright incorrect, ignoring the immense value that Trump and Giuliani evidently saw in a Biden investigation.

We don’t know for sure that Barr’s fingerprints are on this decision. But the OLC purported to follow a statute that required the whistleblower complaint to be “expeditiously reported to the Attorney General.” Thus, Barr was, at a minimum, presumably aware of the criminal referral. Moreover, there is no indication that Barr recused himself from the whistleblower matter, even though Trump invoked him on the call at the center of the affair.

In short, Barr’s Justice Department first manipulated ICWPA to prevent Maguire from sending the whistleblower complaint to Congress. It then manipulated campaign finance law to determine that Trump had committed no crime and refused to open an investigation. And the Attorney General himself, who appears to be implicated in the whistleblower’s complaint, almost certainly played a role in quashing any probe into the president.

Faced with this stonewalling at DOJ, House Democrats have no choice but to pursue impeachment if they want to get to the bottom of this scandal and punish Trump accordingly. Barr and his allies at the Justice Department certainly aren’t going to do it. To the contrary, the Justice Department seems eager to shield the president from any consequences. Under Barr, the DOJ has defended Trump’s refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas into his personal finances. It has even intervened on behalf of his former campaign chairman, convicted felon Paul Manafort, lobbying for him to receive special privileges behind bars. The Justice Department has all but announced that it will aide Trump’s allies and fight his enemies.

Barr will do whatever he can insulate Trump from federal law. We can certainly expect his DOJ to fight the House’s impeachment inquiry by attempting to stop executive officials from testifying, as it has before. But there is one important power that Barr lacks: He cannot stop Congress from concluding that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.

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

Stern doesn’t even get into the equally serious problem of Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” mis-management, his intentional misconstruction of immigration law, and his promotion of biased, xenophobic, anti-asylum applicant decision making in the failing U.S. Immigration Courts which, despite their clearly unconstitutional structure, continue to operate as an appendage of DHS enforcement within the DOJ, as the Federal Appellate Courts disgracefully (and spinelessly) pretend to look the other way. History won’t be so kind to the “enablers” on the Federal Bench.

PWS

09-26-19

TWO MORE FROM HON. JEFFREY CHASE EXPOSING TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & HOW THE COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS FURTHER THESE ABUSES! — “How innocent women and children resigning themselves to being severely beaten, raped, and killed in their home countries constitutes all problems being solved is beyond comprehension.”

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog

https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/9/16/the-cost-of-outsourcing-refugees

The Cost of Outsourcing Refugees

It seems perversely appropriate that it was on 9/11 that the Supreme Court removed the legal barrier to the Trump Administration’s most recent deadly attack on the right to asylum in this country. I continue to believe that eventually, justice will prevail through the courts or, more likely, through a change in administration. But in the meantime, what we are witnessing is an all-out assault by the Trump Administration on the law of asylum. The tactics include gaming the system through regulations and binding decisions making it more difficult for asylum seekers to prevail on their claims. But far uglier is the tactic of degrading those fleeing persecution and seeking safety here. Such refugees, many of whom are women and children, are repeatedly and falsely portrayed by this administration and its enablers as criminals and terrorists. Upon arrival, mothers are separated from their spouses and children from their parents; all are detained under dehumanizing, soul-crushing conditions certain to inflict permanent psychological damage on its victims. In response to those protesting such policies, Trump tweeted on July 3: “If illegal immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detention centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!”

How innocent women and children resigning themselves to being severely beaten, raped, and killed in their home countries constitutes all problems being solved is beyond comprehension.

Those in Trump’s administration who have given more thought to the matter don’t seek to solve the problem, but rather to make it someone else’s problem to solve. By disqualifying from asylum refugees who passed through any other country on their way to our southern border or who entered the country without inspection; by forcing thousands to remain exposed to abuse in Mexico while their asylum claims are adjudicated, and by falsely designating countries with serious gang and domestic violence problems as “safe third countries” to which asylum seekers can be sent, this administration is simply outsourcing refugee processing to countries that are not fit for the job in any measurable way. Based on my thirty-plus years of experience in this field, I submit that contrary to Trump’s claim, such policies create very large, long-term problems.

I began my career in immigration law in the late 1980s representing asylum seekers from Afghanistan, many of whom were detained by our government upon their arrival. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Afghans constituted the largest group of refugees in the world. At one point, there were more than 6 million refugees from Afghanistan alone, most of whom were living in camps in Pakistan. Afghan children there received education focused on fundamentalist religious indoctrination that was vehemently anti-western. The Taliban (which literally means “students”) emerged from these schools. The Taliban, of course, brought a reign of terror to Afghanistan, and further provided a haven for Al-Qaeda to launch the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The outsourcing of Afghan refugees to Pakistan was the exact opposite of “all problems solved,” with the Taliban continuing to thwart peace in Afghanistan up to the present.

Contrast this experience with the following: shortly before I left the government, I went to dinner with a lawyer who had mentioned my name to a colleague of his earlier that day. The colleague had been an Afghan refugee in Pakistan who managed to reach this country as a teen in the early 1990s, and was placed into deportation proceedings by the U.S. government. By chance, I had been his lawyer, and had succeeded in obtaining a grant of asylum for him. Although I hadn’t heard from him in some 25 years, I learned from his friend that evening that I had apparently influenced my young client when I emphasized to him all those years ago the importance of pursuing higher education in this country, as he credited me with his becoming a lawyer. Between the experiences of my former client and that which led to the formation to the Taliban, there is no question as to which achieved the better outcome, and it wasn’t the one in which refugees remained abroad.

In 1938, at a conference held in Evian, France, 31 countries, including the U.S. and Canada, stated their refusal to accept Jewish refugees trapped in Nazi Germany. The conference sent the message to the Nazis on the eve of the Holocaust that no country of concern cared at all about the fate of Germany’s Jewish population. The Trump administration is sending the same message today to MS-13 and other brutal crime syndicates in Central America. Our government is closing the escape route to thousands of youths (some as young as 7 years old) being targeted for recruitment, extortion, and rape by groups such as MS-13, while simultaneously stoking anti-American hatred among those same youths through its shockingly cruel treatment of arriving refugees. This is a dangerous combination, and this time, it is occurring much closer to home than Pakistan. Based on historic examples, it seems virtually assured that no one will look back on Trump’s refugee policies as having solved any problems; to the contrary, we will likely be paying the price for his cruel and short-sighted actions for decades to come.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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https://www.jeffreyschase.com/blog/2019/9/14/former-ijs-file-amicus-brief-in-padilla-v-ice

Former IJs File Amicus Brief in Padilla v. ICE

The late Maury Roberts, a legendary immigration lawyer and former BIA Chair, wrote in 1991: “It has always seemed significant to me that, among all the members of the animal kingdom, man is the only one who captures and imprisons his fellows. In all the rest of creation, freedom is the natural order.”1 Roberts expressed his strong belief in the importance of liberty, which caused him consternation at “governmental attempts to imprison persons who are not criminals or dangerous to society, on the grounds that their detention serves some other societal purpose,” including noncitizens “innocent of any wrongdoing other than being in the United States without documents.”2

The wrongness of indefinitely detaining non-criminals greatly increases when those being detained are asylum-seekers fleeing serious harm in their home countries, often after undertaking dangerous journeys to lawfully seek protection in this country. The detention of those seeking asylum is at odds with our obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which at Article 31 forbids states from penalizing refugees from neighboring states on account of their illegal entry or presence, or from restricting the movements of refugees except where necessary; and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees at Article 9, para. 4 the right of detainees to have a court “without delay” determine the lawfulness of the detention order release if it is not.

In 1996, in response to an increase in asylum seekers at ports of entry, Congress enacted a policy known as expedited removal, which allows border patrol officers to enter deportation orders against those noncitizens arriving at airports or the border whom are not deemed admissible. A noncitizen expressing a fear of returning to their country is detained and referred for a credible fear interview. Only those whom a DHS asylum officer determines to have a “significant possibility” of being granted asylum pass such interview and are allowed a hearing before an immigration judge to pursue their asylum claim.

In 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent decision stating that detained asylum seekers who have passed such credible fear interview are entitled to a bond hearing. It should be noted that the author of this decision, Ed Grant, is a former Republican congressional staffer and supporter of a draconian immigration enforcement bill enacted in 1996, who has been one of the more conservative members of the BIA. He was joined on the panel issuing such decision by fellow conservative Roger Pauley. The panel decision was further approved by the majority of the full BIA two years after it had been purged of its liberal members by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. In other words, the right to bond hearings was the legal conclusion of a tribunal of conservatives who, although they did not hold pro-immigrant beliefs, found that the law dictated the result it reached.

14 years later, the present administration issued a precedent decision in the name of Attorney General Barr vacating the BIA’s decision as “wrongly decided,” and revoking the right to such bond hearings. The decision was immediately challenged in the courts by the ACLU, the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and the American Immigration Council. Finding Barr’s prohibition on bond hearings unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman issued a preliminary injunction blocking the decision from taking effect, and requiring bond hearings for class members within 7 days of their detention. The injunction additionally places the burden on the government to demonstrate why the asylum-seeker should not be released on bond, parole, or other condition; requires the government to provide a recording or verbatim transcript of the bond hearing on appeal; and further requires the government to produce a written decision with particularized determinations of individualized findings at the end of the bond hearing.

The Administration has appealed from that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On September 4, an amicus brief on behalf of 29 former immigration judges (including myself) and appellate judges of the BIA was filed in support of the plaintiffs. Our brief notes the necessity of bond hearings to due process in a heavily overburdened court system dealing with highly complex legal issues. Our group advised that detained asylum seekers are less likely to retain counsel. Based on our collective experience on the bench, this is important, as it is counsel who guides an asylum seeker through the complexities of the immigration court system. Furthermore, the arguments of unrepresented applicants are likely to be less concise and organized both before the immigration judge and on appeal than if such arguments had been prepared by counsel. Where an applicant is unrepresented, their ongoing detention hampers their ability to gather evidence in support of their claim, while those lucky enough to retain counsel are hampered in their ability to communicate and cooperate with their attorney.

These problems are compounded by two other recent Attorney General decisions, Matter of A-B- and Matter of L-E-A-, which impact a large number of asylum claimants covered by the lawsuit who are fleeing domestic or gang violence. Subsequent to those decisions, stating the facts giving rise to the applicant’s fear can be less important than how those facts are then framed by counsel. Immigration Judges who are still navigating these decisions often request legal memoranda explaining the continued viability of such claims. And such arguments often require both a legal knowledge of the nuances of applicable case law and support from experts in detailed reports beyond the capability of most detained, unrepresented, newly-arrived asylum seekers to obtain.

Our brief also argues that the injunction’s placement of the burden of proof on DHS “prevents noncitizens from being detained simply because they cannot articulate why they should be released, and takes into account the government’s institutional advantages.” This is extremely important when one realizes that, under international law, an individual becomes a refugee upon fulfilling the criteria contained in the definition of that term (i.e. upon leaving their country and being unable or unwilling to return on account of a protected ground). Therefore, one does not become a refugee due to being recognized as one by a grant of asylum. Rather, a grant of asylum provides legal recognition of the existing fact that one is a refugee. 3 Class members have, after a lengthy screening interview, been found by a trained DHS official to have a significant possibility of already being a refugee. To deny bond to a member of such a class because, unlike the ICE attorney opposing their release, they are unaware of the cases to cite or arguments to state greatly increases the chance that genuine refugees deserving of this country’s protection will be deported to face persecution

The former Immigration Judges and BIA Members signing onto the amicus brief are: Steven Abrams, Sarah Burr, Teofilo Chapa, Jeffrey S, Chase, George Chew, Cecelia Espenoza, Noel Ferris, James Fujimoto, Jennie Giambiastini, John Gossart, Paul Grussendorf, Miriam Hayward, Rebecca Jamil, Carol King, Elizabeth Lamb, Margaret McManus, Charles Pazar, George Proctor, Laura Ramirez, John Richardson, Lory D. Rosenberg, Susan Roy, Paul W. Schmidt, Ilyce Shugall, Denise Slavin, Andrea Hawkins Sloan, Gustavo Villageliu, Polly Webber, and Robert D. Weisel.

We are greatly indebted to and thankful for the outstanding efforts of partners Alan Schoenfeld and Lori A. Martin of the New York office of Wilmer Hale, and senior associates Rebecca Arriaga Herche and Jamil Aslam with the firm’s Washington and Los Angeles offices in the drafting of the brief.

Notes:

Maurice Roberts, “Some Thoughts on the Wanton Detention of Aliens,”Festschrift: In Celebration of the Works of Maurice Roberts, 5 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 225 (1991).

Id. at 226.

UNHCR,Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status Under the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees at Para. 28.

Copyright 2019 Jeffrey S. Chase. All rights reserved.

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Thanks, Jeffrey, my friend, for courageously highlighting these issues. What a contrast with the cowardly performance of the Trump Administration, Congress, and the ARTICLE IIIs!

I’m proud to be identified with you and the rest of the members of our Roundtable of Former Judges who haven’t forgotten what Due Process, fundamental fairness, refugee rights, and human rights are all about.

Also appreciate the quotation from the late great Maurice A. “Maury” Roberts, former BIA chair and Editor of Interpreter Releases who was one of my mentors. I‘m sure that Maury is rolling over in his grave with the gutless trashing of the BIA and Due Process by Billy Barr and his sycophants.

PWS

09-24-19

BLOOD ON THEIR JUDICIAL ROBES! — WHEN A CORRUPT, XENOPHOBIC, RACIST GOVERNMENT IS ASSISTED BY COMPLICIT FEDERAL COURTS, HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIVES OF THE REFUGEES THEY ARE BETRAYING: “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.”

https://apple.news/AHwi8LL9GT8qKZ3YHhAPcrQ

Leon Krauze reports for Slate:

The World

Mexico’s Capitulation to Trump Has Put Thousands of Lives in Danger

The Mexican foreign minister says his government has nothing to be ashamed of. He’s wrong.

September 20 2019 4:51 PM

In recent months, at least 3,000 immigrants have been sent back to towns along the Mexican border between Tamaulipas and Texas, one of the country’s most dangerous areas. What they have faced there defies the imagination. The city of Nuevo Laredo is a well-known hotbed of extortion and kidnapping. Immigrants make easy targets. “These people have been thrown into the lion’s den,” local journalist Daniel Rosas told me recently.

According to Rosas, President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program has been particularly harmful, placing thousands of immigrants in imminent danger. “If even us locals are going through a very difficult time dealing with violence here, just imagine what life is like for an immigrant who doesn’t have a home and doesn’t know anyone. This place is completely unsafe,” Rosas told me. In the city of Nuevo Laredo, Rosas described a Dantean scene in which people working for cartels are tasked with identifying and abducting immigrants, who are then taken away to safehouses where they are held for ransom.

“In Tamaulipas, migrants are the most vulnerable. They suffer every kind of abuse imaginable,” he told me. Rosas seemed particularly worried for women and children in Tamaulipas. “They are completely defenseless,” Rosas told me. “When they were waiting and trying to rest under the bridge, there were kids sleeping on cardboard, without any help. They live through sheer horror,” he said.

This nightmare is the predictable result of recent actions by governments on both sides of the border. Three months ago, faced with Trump’s tariff blackmail, Mexico’s government capitulated and agreed to a series of unprecedented measures to reduce the flow of Central American immigrants reaching the United States. Terrified by the possibility of a trade war, President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s administration deployed thousands of troops along Mexico’s southern border, gave control of the country’s immigration authority to an expert in incarceration and enforcement, and pledged full cooperation with some of Trump’s more controversial immigration policies. As part of the deal, Mexican government officials agreed to return to Washington every few months with evidence of results, a recurrent humiliating pilgrimage in search of Trump’s approval and a renewed deferral of the looming tariff threat.

Ten days ago, after his first assessment in Washington with Trump’s inner circle—and, briefly, the president himself—Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard gave a victorious but ultimately unfortunate news conference. Ebrard claimedthat the much-touted downward trend in the number of immigrants reaching the United States would likely be “permanent,” although historical trends suggest the flow of immigrants will likely increase during the fall. Ebrard then said the Mexican government had demanded new and strict gun control measures in the United States. The goal, Ebrard boasted, was to “freeze” gun trafficking along the border. This is disingenuous. Ebrard knows any sort of significant reduction in gun smuggling from the United States would require legislative measures that the Trump administration and the Republican Party will not pursue.

Ebrard then concluded by saying the López Obrador administration had nothing to apologize for on immigration. “We do not regret anything of what’s been implemented,” Ebrard said. “We haven’t done anything we should be ashamed of.”

He is wrong.

The Mexican government’s cooperation with Donald Trump’s punitive immigration strategy has created a calamity along the country’s northern border. Of the many complications, none is more potentially catastrophic than the broad implementation of Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The measure forces potential refugees to wait for months (or years) in Mexico for a slim chance at asylum in the United States. It has opened the door to the creation of a massive community of rootless and marginalized immigrants living in perilous limbo in some of Mexico’s most dangerous areas. There are now close to 38,000 immigrants waitingin Mexico because of MPP. After meeting with Ebrard, the White House announcedthe program would be expanded “to the fullest extent possible,” dramatically increasing the number of potential refugees returned to Mexico, many to regions of the country where they face almost certain peril.

No place seems safe, not even shelters run by religious organizations, one of the few reliable options in other border towns like Tijuana. In Nuevo Laredo, organized crime knows no bounds. Just last month, local pastor Aarón Méndez, who runs the “Casa del Migrante AMAR” shelter in the city, reportedly tried to protect a group of Cuban migrants from a group of abductors. They kidnapped Méndezinstead. No one has heard from him since.

Things aren’t much better in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. In recent years, the city has seen “open warfare” between rival cartels. American attorneyKristin Clarens, who has been traveling to the region over the past few months to assist potential refugees and make sense of the dire situation in the region, told me she has never met an asylum-seeking immigrant who felt safe in Mexico. “To the contrary,” Clarens said, “most of the people I’ve met described routine and regular acts of violence, such as kidnapping, assault, and extortion.” According to Clarens, migrants in Matamoros, like those in Nuevo Laredo, are facing a full-blown humanitarian crisis. “The heat is intense and unrelenting, and they lack access to sanitation, water, shade, food, and basic shelter,” she told me. “People hike down to the river and use the river to clean themselves, wash their clothes, and occasionally drink. Children and adults are sick and covered with bug bites and lesions.”

Like Rosas, Clarens believes “Remain in Mexico” has complicated the already formidable immigration challenge in the region. “The MPP sends people back to Mexico, where many have been repeatedly victimized by organized criminals or other dangerous groups,” Clarens said. “Their access to the legal system in the U.S.—which had already been severely reduced by the Trump administration—is effectively cut off. MPP will force people to remain for a significant period of time in one of the most vulnerable and dangerous living situations they’ve ever imagined experiencing.” Clarens thinks the crisis will likely worsen. “I know that Mexico can be a safe and stable place for many people, but impoverished and incredibly vulnerable Central Americans who are desperate for security and are leaving their countries of origin for the first time are not able to stay safe,” she told me.

If Mexico continues to quietly go along with the radical expansion of the MPP program, the number of immigrants waiting for asylum in the country could reach the hundreds of thousands. With Mexico’s official refugee agency operating on a ridiculous $1.3 million yearly budget, the López Obrador administration is not remotely ready for such an undertaking. The consequences could be severe. If that happens, Ebrard should be asked again if Mexico really has nothing to be ashamed of.

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Those who should really be ashamed are the cowardly life-tenured judges of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit who as a group have utterly failed to protect migrants’ statutory, Constitutional, and Human Rights from lawless, invidious, and very intentional abuse by Trump’s White Nationalist regime and his DHS and DOJ sycophants.

Article III Federal Judges are absolutely immune from liability for their wrongdoing and abuses. But, they shouldn’t be immune from shame and the judgment of history for abandoning our system of justice and the most vulnerable it is supposed to protect at their greatest time of need. That’s basically the definition of legal incompetence and moral cowardice.

PWS

09-22-19

BRET STEPHENS @ NYT: “Blessed Are The Refugees” — Damned Be Trump & His Cowardly Group Of Refugee Abusers & Their Enablers!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/opinion/refugees-trump-america.html

A woman and her young daughter, no older than 6 or 7, are shopping for groceries in a corner store of a bombed-out city. It’s sometime around 1947. The war is over, the Germans are gone, the Gestapo is no longer hunting Jews. Some of their local henchmen have been imprisoned or shot. Many just took off their uniforms and returned to their former lives.

The mother speaks with the trace of a foreign accent. As she reaches for her wallet to pay, the grocer says: “Why don’t you people go back to where you came from?”

Where, precisely, would that even be? The woman had fled Moscow for Berlin as a girl, after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and arrested her father, who was never to be heard from again. Later, when still in her twenties, she had fled Berlin for Milan, sometime between Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 and Mussolini’s enactment of the racial laws in 1938.

She and her daughter were citizens of no country, living under a made-up name. They had nowhere to return, no place to go, no way to stay, and nothing they could do about any of it. To go back to the Soviet Union would have been suicidal. Israel did not yet exist. Germany was out of the question. America’s doors were mostly shut.

This was the life of a refugee in postwar, pre-reconstructed Europe. It changed dramatically the following year, when Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, marking the first time that U.S. immigration policy became actively sympathetic to the utterly dispossessed.

Thanks to the law, mother and daughter arrived in New York on Nov. 13, 1950, with only $7 between them, but without the weight of fear on their backs.

What Truman did became precedent for decisions by subsequent administrations to admit other refugees: Some 40,000 Hungarians fleeing Soviet tanks after 1956 (including a young Andy Grove, later the C.E.O. of Intel); hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Castro’s repression after 1959 (including a young Gloria Estefan); as many as 750,000 Soviet Jews fleeing persecution by a succession of Kremlin despots (including a young Sergey Brin).

There were so many others. More than a million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians after the fall of Saigon. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians after Khomeini’s revolution. Over 100,000 Iraqis since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Similar numbers of Burmese. Altogether, some three million refugees have been welcomed by the U.S. since the Refugee Act of 1980, more than by any other country.

By almost any metric, America’s refugees tend to succeed, or at least their children do. Whatever they do to enrich themselves, they enrich the country a great deal more. Empirical data on immigrant success overwhelmingly confirm what common sense makes plain. People who have known tyranny tend to make the most of liberty. People who have experienced desperation usually make the most of opportunity. It’s mainly those born to freedom who have the knack for squandering it.

But beyond the material question of enrichment is the spiritual one of ennoblement. Of what can Americans be more proud than that we so often opened our doors to those for whom every other door was shut?

All of which makes this a moment of unique shame for the United States.

The Trump administration has made no secret of its xenophobia from its first days in office. The number of refugees arriving in the country plummeted from around 97,000 in 2016 to 23,000 in 2018. Last week, The Times reported that the White House was considering options to cut the numbers again by half, and perhaps even bring it down to zero.

As if to underscore the spirit of cruelty, the administration also declined to grant temporary protected status to Bahamians devastated by Hurricane Dorian. And the Supreme Court issued an order allowing for a new rule that effectively denies asylum protections for refugees arriving through a third country — a victory for executive authority when that authority is in the worst possible hands.

Critics of this column will almost certainly complain that the United States can’t possibly take everyone in — a dishonest argument since hardly anyone argues for taking in “everyone,” and a foolish argument since America will almost inevitably decline without a healthy intake of immigrants to make up for a falling birthrate.

Critics will also claim that “very bad people,” as Donald Trump likes to say, might take advantage of a generous asylum and refugee policy. Here again I’m aware of nobody advocating a “let-the-terrorists-come-too” immigration policy. Only a person incapable of kindness — a person like the president — can think that kindness and vigilance are incompatible, or that generosity is for suckers.

The mother and daughter whose story I told at the beginning of this column are, as you might have guessed, my own grandmother and mother. I thank God it was Harry Truman, not Donald Trump, who led America when they had nowhere else to turn.

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

There will be no America if Trumpism prevails, Bret.

PWS

09-14-19

SUPREME DISGRACE: Instead Of Protecting The Individual Rights Of Our Most Vulnerable Asylum Seekers, The Supremes’ Majority Joins The White Nationalist Assault On Refugee Laws & Human Dignity!

Azam Ahmed
Bureau Chief, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean
NY Times

https://apple.news/AzVf9gcH2QyOC67VugroXQg

By Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas

MEXICO CITY — Thousands of people fleeing persecution, most from Central America, line up at the United States’ southern border every day hoping for asylum. They wait for months, their names slowly crawling up a hand-drawn list until they are allowed to present their case to American immigration authorities.

After the United States Supreme Court issued an order this week, almost none of them will be eligible for asylum.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the Trump administration to enforce new rules that bar asylum applications from anyone who has not already been denied asylum in one of the countries they traveled through on their way to the United States.

The rule is among the most stringent measures taken by this administration in its battle to halt migration, upending decades of asylum and humanitarian norms. It is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of migrants traveling through Mexico to reach the United States: Eritreans and Cameroonians fleeing political violence. Nicaraguans and Venezuelans fleeing repression.

And the largest group of all: Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans escaping the twin scourges of poverty and gangs.

“This takes away all hope,” said Eddie Leonardo Caliz, 34, who left San Pedro Sula in Honduras with his wife and two kids three months ago to try to escape gang violence, and spoke from a shelter in southern Mexico. With measures like this, he said, the Trump administration “is depriving us of the opportunity to be safe.”

The new rule, which has been allowed to take effect pending legal challenges, is consistent with the Trump administration’s posture of hostility and rejection for those seeking protection in the United States.

Whether by separating families of migrants, by drastically limiting the number of asylum applications accepted on a given day or by returning those entering the United States to Mexico to await their hearings, the administration has shown a dogged determination to discourage migration.

Central American migrants at the Amar shelter in Nuevo Laredo in July.

Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

And it has put tremendous pressure on Mexico to help meet its goal, threatening months ago to escalate tariffs on all Mexican goods if the nation did not buffer the surge of migrants heading to the United States from Central America and elsewhere.

Mexico responded. This week, when Mexican and American officials met in Washington to discuss progress on the issue, the Mexican delegation took great pains to show how its crackdown along its border with Guatemala and throughout the country has reduced migration flows to the United States by more than 50 percent in the last three months.

Mexico’s actions, though applauded by Trump administration officials this week, have overwhelmed its troubled migration system. The number of individuals applying for asylum in Mexico has already skyrocketed in the last few years, as the United States has tightened its borders.

This rule could add to that burden, with many more applying for asylum in Mexico, despite the danger of remaining in Mexico. Violence there has soared to the highest levels in more than two decades. Stories of migrants kidnapped along the border abound, as criminal organizations await their return from the United States or pick them off as they attempt to cross the border.

Several migrants who are making their way north said in interviews on Thursday that the new rule would not deter them. For most, the hope of a new life in the United States outweighed whatever legal worries might lie ahead.

“I know things are getting more and more complicated in the U.S.,” said Noel Hernández, 21, who was staying at a migrant shelter in Guatemala after leaving his home in Tegucigalpa, in Honduras, a few days ago.

“It’s like flipping a coin,” he said. “I either win or I lose.”

Others said they would try to make it in Mexico, despite the violence, or in Guatemala, a nation with a barely functional asylum system.

Oscar Daniel Rodríguez, 33, from San Salvador, has been in Guatemala with his wife and 3-year-old son for a month now, and says he will apply for asylum there.

He had applied for asylum in Mexico during a previous trek, and was rejected. If he is denied in Guatemala, he will try again in Mexico, he said. If they deny him again, he will try the United States.

Migrants from a caravan, along with organizers and legal observers, at the pedestrian crossing that will lead them to the U.S, in 2018.

Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

“No matter how long it takes, and how long we have to wait, what we want is to give our son a better future,” he said.

Mexican asylum applicants, who don’t have to transit through another country to reach the United States, are not impacted by the new policy.

Like past efforts by the Trump administration to curb migration, Wednesday’s order could prove a burden for Mexico.

A senior Mexican official who spoke anonymously because the government has not addressed the issue publicly said that, for now, individuals who seek to apply will not fall under a previous provision, called Migrant Protection Protocol. That provision sends those applying for asylum in the United States back to Mexico to await their hearings.

Instead, migrants will either have to apply for another form of relief in the United States — with a higher bar for acceptance and fewer protections — or be deported back to their home countries.

Mexico is already playing host to tens of thousands of migrants awaiting their asylum hearings in the United States. Its migrant detention facilities can be overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary.

Asylum applications there have soared in the last year, reaching about 50,000 through August, compared to fewer than 30,000 applications in the same period a year ago. This has placed a strain on Mexican society and on a system ill-equipped to handle such demand.

“We see detention centers crammed with migrants and children, riots, social problems arising, human rights abuses, and rising xenophobia among Mexicans,” said Jorge Chabat, a professor of international relations the University of Guadalajara. “The Mexican government has then little to no other choice but to design long-term migration policies to deal with the large number of migrants coming and staying now in Mexico.”

“There is not much else we can do,” he added, ruefully, “besides maybe lighting a candle for the Virgin of Guadalupe and praying for Trump not to be re-elected.”

Raftsmen wait for clients at a river crossing between the Guatemala-Mexico border.

Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

The initial rule to block asylum sent shock waves among immigrant rights advocates when it was issued by the Trump administration in July of this year. It was almost immediately challenged in lawsuits.

The initiative was a unilateral move by the Trump administration after failed negotiations with Mexico and Guatemala to reach deals, called safe third country agreements, that would have required those countries to absorb asylum seekers who passed through them on their way to the United States.

Though Guatemala eventually caved to the administration’s pressure, and reached a safe third country agreement with the United States, Mexico remained firm in its refusal.

Now, with the Supreme Court allowing the asylum rule to go into effect, some feel the United States got what it wanted anyway — without the other countries’ consent.

“This is the latest step in terms of Trump’s policies to push Mexico to become a safe third country, and to make a big chunk of the migration flow stay in Mexico permanently and deter them from traveling north,” said Raúl Benítez, a professor of international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The Mexican government, for its part, insists the move is not the same as a safe third country arrangement, which would require a bilateral agreement and would automatically send the majority of asylum seekers back to Mexico for good.

Neither Mexican officials nor independent experts believe it will lead to an immediate influx of returnees to Mexico. Instead, it could leave those who have been returned to Mexico while they await hearings more likely to stay because they will not be granted protection in the United States.

While the new rules will inhibit most migrants from applying for asylum, there are other forms of protected status that remain open to them, though the bar to entry is much higher.

Under current asylum law, individuals must show a credible fear, which is figured to be a 10 percent chance that they will face persecution if sent back home. The threshold for the two remaining protections now — so-called withholding status and qualification under the convention against torture — is reasonable fear. To qualify, the applicant must show a probability of being persecuted back home that is greater than 50 percent.

“The people affected by this policy are the most vulnerable — those without lawyers and those without knowledge of the system,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration attorney with the Immigration Council. “Those without lawyers are being asked to meet a standard almost impossible for someone uneducated in asylum law to meet.”

Daniele Volpe contributed reporting from Guatemala City.

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

So, just why are Justices like Breyer and Kagan tarnishing their legacies by joining with their White Nationalist enabling brethren in this all out assault on the Refugee Act of 1980, the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the U.S. Constitution, Human Rights, and human dignity?

The latest Trump Administration illegal absurdity encouraged, aided, and abetted by the Supremes: Honduras, one of the most dangerous and corrupt refugee sending countries in the world without a functioning asylum system, as a “Safe Third Country.” Obviously, the actions of an Administration confident that the majority of the Supremes share their corruption and cowardice when it comes to enforcing America’s long-standing human rights obligations.

Although it might not have occurred to the geniuses of the Trump Administration, and certainly not to the Supremes’ majority who apparently believe themselves exempt from the practical consequences of their actions, each of the failed states in the Northern Triangle has a seacoast which would allow ocean transit to the U.S. without touching any other country. So, the Trump White Nationalists and their Supreme enablers could be triggering another “Golden Venture” debacle or the type of even more dangerous sea exodus that happened in the Mediterranean when the EU restricted asylum applicants at its land borders.

Or, it’s possible that smugglers will simply “sell” refugees on the very plausible idea that the U.S. refugee system and our commitment to the “rule of law” is nothing but a joke. In that case, smuggling individuals into the interior of the U.S will become an even bigger business. No way they will ever all be caught, even with ICE acting as Trump’s “New American Gestapo.” Higher risk means more profits for smugglers, more death and exploitation for migrants, and more unscreened “extralegal migration” into the U.S.

Up until Trump, the U.S. had been lucky. Most asylum seekers presented themselves at ports of entry or nearby Border Patrol Stations and trusted themselves to the U.S. asylum system for orderly processing. Even those who managed to enter the U.S. usually “affirmatively applied” through the USCIS Asylum Offices.

The current mess in the legal system was almost entirely self-created by the “malicious incompetence” on the part of the Government’s immigration enforcement authorities. The “new message” is clear: only fools should use the US legal system, which in the case of asylum now more closely resembles a Third World dictatorship.

Once folks abandon the U.S. legal system, all of the land and sea borders and indeed the entire land mass of the U.S. will potentially “come into play” for smugglers and their desperate human cargoes of forced migrants. No wall will be long and high enough, no jail cells big enough, no child abuse severe enough, and no extralegal Supreme Court endorsed racist program nasty enough to control the flow of forced migrants seeking shelter. It might well lead to an internal police force that will trample the individual rights of all Americans. But, it won’t stop human migration until the U.S. downward spiral finally reaches the point where we are no better than the “sending countries” from which people are fleeing.

The other possibility is that conditions in the sending countries improve over time so that most folks will stay put. But, the Administration has shown no interest in investing in long term solutions to forced migration.

Immigration is a sign of a strong country; xenophobia a weak and cowardly one. Unhappily, the Supremes have have abandoned the former vision and become front and center in encouraging and enabling the latter.

PWS

09-13-19

BILL McKIBBEN @ TIME: Imagine A World Not Led By Trump & His Fellow GOP Climate Change Deniers! — Humanity Would Have At Least A “Fighting Chance” For Survival!

https://time.com/5669022/climate-change-2050/

BY BILL MCKIBBEN SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

IDEAS

McKibben is the author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and a co-founder of 350.org

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an underappreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the change we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of McKibben’s essay at the link.

The 2020 election might be America’s and the world’s last, best chance for salvation from Trump and his anti-science, climate denying GOP cabal that is bent on destroying our air, water, resources, and health.

PWS

09-13-19

SUPREME TANK: COMPLICIT COURT ENDS U.S. ASYLUM PROTECTIONS BY 7-2 VOTE — Endorses Trump’s White Nationalist Racist Attack On Human Rights & Eradication Of Refugee Act Of 1980 — On 09-11-19, Supremes Celebrate By Joining Trump’s Attack On America & Humanity! — Only Justices Ginsburg & Sotomayor Have Guts To Stand Up For Constitution & Rule Of Law!

Death On The Rio Grande — Supremes Sign Death Warrants For Vulnerable Refugees, Trash Refugee Act of 1980

19a230_k53l

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 1 SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 19A230 _________________
WILLIAM P. BARR, ATTORNEY GENERAL, ET AL. v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY [September 11, 2019]
The application for stay presented to JUSTICE KAGAN and by her referred to the Court is granted. The district court’s July 24, 2019 order granting a preliminary injunction and September 9, 2019 order restoring the nationwide scope of the injunction are stayed in full pending disposition of the Government’s appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of the Government’s petition for a writ of certiorari, if such writ is sought. If a writ of certiorari is sought and the Court denies the petition, this order shall terminate automatically. If the Court grants the petition for a writ of certiorari, this order shall terminate when the Court enters its judgment.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins, dissenting from grant of stay.
Once again the Executive Branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution. Although this Nation has long kept its doors open to refugees—and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher—the Government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law. After several organizations representing immi- grants sued to stop the rule from going into effect, a federal district court found that the organizations were likely to prevail and preliminarily enjoined the rule nationwide. A

2 BARR v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
federal appeals court narrowed the injunction to run only circuit-wide, but denied the Government’s motion for a complete stay.
Now the Government asks this Court to intervene and to stay the preliminary decisions below. This is an extraordinary request. Unfortunately, the Court acquiesces. Because I do not believe the Government has met its weighty burden for such relief, I would deny the stay.
The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security promulgated the rule at issue here on July 16, 2019. See 84 Fed. Reg. 33829. In effect, the rule forbids almost all Central Americans—even unaccompanied children—to apply for asylum in the United States if they enter or seek to enter through the southern border, unless they were first denied asylum in Mexico or another third country. Id., at 33835, 33840; see also 385 F. Supp. 3d 922, 929–930 (ND Cal. 2019).
The District Court found that the rule was likely unlawful for at least three reasons. See id., at 938–957. First, the court found it probable that the rule was inconsistent with the asylum statute, 94 Stat. 105, as amended, 8 U. S. C. §1158. See §1158(b)(2)(C) (requiring that any regulation like the rule be“consistent”with the statute). Section 1158 generally provides that any noncitizen “physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States . . . may apply for asylum.” §1158(a)(1). And unlike the rule, the District Court explained, the statute provides narrow, carefully calibrated exceptions to asylum eligibility. As relevant here, Congress restricted asylum based on the possibility that a person could safely resettle in a third country. See §1158(a)(2)(A), (b)(2)(A)(vi). The rule, by contrast, does not consider whether refugees were safe or resettled in Mexico—just whether they traveled through it. That blunt approach, according to the District Court, rewrote the statute. See 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 939– 947, 959.

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 3
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
Second, the District Court found that the challengers would likely prevail because the Government skirted typical rulemaking procedures. Id., at 947–951. The District Court noted “serious questions” about the rule’s validity because the Government effected a sea change in immigration law without first providing advance notice and opportunity for public comment. Id., at 930; see also 5 U. S. C. §553. The District Court found the Government’s purported justifications unpersuasive at the preliminary-injunction stage. 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 948–951 (discussing statutory exceptions to notice-and-comment procedures).
Last, the District Court found the explanation for the rule so poorly reasoned that the Government’s action was likely arbitrary and capricious. See id., at 951–957; 5 U. S. C. §706. On this score, the District Court addressed the Government’s principal justifications for the rule: that failing to seek asylum while fleeing through more than one country “raises questions about the validity and urgency” of the asylum seeker’s claim, 84 Fed. Reg. 33839; and that Mexico, the last port of entry before the United States, offers a fea- sible alternative for persons seeking protection from persecution, id., at 33835, 33839–33840. The District Court examined the evidence in the administrative record and explained why it flatly refuted the Government’s assumptions. 385 F. Supp. 3d, at 951–957. A “mountain of evidence points one way,” the District Court observed, yet the Government “went the other—with no explanation.” Id., at 955.
After the District Court issued the injunction, the Ninth Circuit declined the Government’s request for a complete stay, reasoning that the Government did not make the required “ ‘strong showing’ ” that it would likely succeed on the merits of each issue. ___ F. 3d ___ (2019), 2019 WL 3850928, *1 (quoting Hilton v. Braunskill, 481 U. S. 770, 776 (1987)). Narrowing the injunction to the Circuit’s borders, the Ninth Circuit expedited the appeal and permitted

4 BARR v. EAST BAY SANCTUARY COVENANT SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
the District Court to consider whether additional facts would warrant a broader injunction. 2019 WL 3850928, *2– *3.
The lower courts’ decisions warrant respect. A stay pending appeal is “extraordinary” relief. Williams v. Zbaraz, 442 U. S. 1309, 1311 (1979) (Stevens, J., in chambers); see also Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1302 (2012) (ROBERTS, C. J., in chambers) (listing stay factors). Given the District Court’s thorough analysis, and the serious questions that court raised, I do not believe the Government has carried its “especially heavy” burden. Packwood v. Senate Select Comm. on Ethics, 510 U. S. 1319, 1320 (1994) (Rehnquist, C. J., in chambers). The rule here may be, as the District Court concluded, in significant tension with the asylum statute. It may also be arbitrary and capricious for failing to engage with the record evidence contradicting its conclusions. It is especially concerning, moreover, that the rule the Government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere—without affording the public a chance to weigh in.
Setting aside the merits, the unusual history of this case also counsels against our intervention. This lawsuit has been proceeding on three tracks: In this Court, the parties have litigated the Government’s stay request. In the Ninth Circuit, the parties are briefing the Government’s appeal. And in the District Court, the parties recently participated in an evidentiary hearing to supplement the record. In- deed, just two days ago the District Court reinstated a na- tionwide injunction based on new facts. See East Bay Sanc- tuary Covenant v. Barr, No. 4:19–cv–4073, Doc. 73 (ND Cal., Sept. 9, 2019). Notably, the Government moved to stay the newest order in both the District Court and the Ninth Circuit. (Neither court has resolved that request, though the Ninth Circuit granted an administrative stay to allow further deliberation.) This Court has not considered

Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 5
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
the new evidence, nor does it pause for the lower courts to resolve the Government’s pending motions. By granting a stay, the Court simultaneously lags behind and jumps ahead of the courts below. And in doing so, the Court side-steps the ordinary judicial process to allow the Government to implement a rule that bypassed the ordinary rulemaking process. I fear that the Court’s precipitous action today risks undermining the interbranch governmental processes that encourage deliberation, public participation, and transparency.
***
In sum, granting a stay pending appeal should be an “extraordinary” act. Williams, 442 U. S., at 1311. Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal. Historically, the Government has made this kind of request rarely; now it does so reflexively. See, e.g., Vladeck, The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket, 133 Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming Nov. 2019). Not long ago, the Court resisted the shortcut the Government now invites. See Trump v. East Bay Sanc- tuary Covenant, 586 U. S. ___ (2018). I regret that my colleagues have not exercised the same restraint here. I respectfully dissent.

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

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent says it all, but, alas, in vain.

09-11-19 will be remembered as the day that justice, human rights, and human decency died in America!

Shame on Justices Breyer and Kagan for “going along to get along” with the dismantling of the Refugee Act of 1980. The “blood of the innocents” will be on their hands and the hands of their five colleagues.

The “Dred Scottification” (or “dehumanization”) of immigrants, Latinos, and other minorities that Justice Breyer once predicted, yet lacked the guts to speak out against in this case, is now in full swing. It will increase unabated, now that the Supremes’ sellout to authoritarian racism is assured. And don’t expect “Moscow Mitch” and his gang of toadies to put up any opposition.

The American justice system has been dismantled. But history will remember the roles of each of those “Black Robed Cowards” who participated in its demise.

With this atrocious decision, the Supremes have basically made themselves irrelevant to the battle for fairness and individual rights under the Constitution. As I have suggested before, self-created irrelevance might come back to haunt them.

PWS

09-11-19

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