DAHLIA LITHWICK REVIEWS NEW BOOK “AMERICAN NERO” ON THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE RULE OF LAW AND AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS UNDER THE TRUMP REGIME! — Echoes Of Germany In 1939 — “[J]udges, prosecutors and democratically elected officials formed the very backbone of Nazi Germany.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/defending-the-rule-of-law-in-the-trump-era/2020/03/19/7dfac5d0-618a-11ea-845d-e35b0234b136_story.html

Dahlia writes in the WashPost:

There are, to vastly overgeneralize, two basic types of books written by critics of the Trump presidency: One class of books tells us things we never knew, such as how tyrannies arise or how Deutsche Bank operates outside meaningful scrutiny or control. The other tells us what we already know and seem to have forgotten. “American Nero,” by Richard W. Painter and Peter Golenbock, is very much in that latter category and serves to remind us, in icy, granular detail, of what has happened to constitutional democracy in three short years, and all that we have absorbed, integrated and somehow moved beyond. In some sense, then, it stands less as a unified argument than as a scrapbook of things that no longer horrify us.

The fact that it went to press just before the Senate impeachment trial, and thus cannot account for the near-collapse of an independent Justice Department, the capitulation of Senate Republicans who believed that President Trump had inappropriately sought Ukrainian election interference but who felt somehow helpless to hold him to account, and recent lawsuits against opinion journalists in major newspapers, actually only highlights the fact that even when one believes the situation cannot get worse, it always gets worse, and often in the span of mere weeks.

Painter, who served as White House chief ethics counsel under George W. Bush, and Golenbock, the author of several New York Times bestsellers, seek to chronicle the erosion of the rule of law in the Trump era, and in some ways, the most chilling parts of the book are not the descriptions of Trump’s lawlessness, whether in the form of attacking the press, benefiting financially from his presidency, obstructing the Mueller probe or fawning over despots. Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has tried to keep up with the events of recent years. But set against the context of historical precedent, the case becomes crisper. In their descriptions of the Salem witch trials, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the Palmer Raids and the pointless waste of the McCarthy era, the authors remind us that each of those actions was taken under color of law, effectuated by presidents, congressmen and lawyers.

Indeed they are quick to remind us, in a terrifying chapter on the rise of the Third Reich, that judges, prosecutors and democratically elected officials formed the very backbone of Nazi Germany. And that the transformation of Germany from democratic republic to bloody dictatorship took place in less than three months. In urging Americans to stand up for the rule of law — and its bulwarks of religious tolerance, guarantees of due process, truth, a free press and freedom from corruption — Painter and Golenbock archly make the more complicated case that law itself is often deployed to break the rule of law. As was the case in Nazi Germany, the breakdown can be progressive and can come in the guise of statutes, codes and court cases; these trappings do not make descent into autocracy lawful, they merely make it invisible.

. . . .

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

Read the rest of Dahlia’s review at the link.

Not to quibble too much, but Dahlia, like many liberals who aren’t immersed in the ongoing immigration disgrace under this regime, doesn’t really “get” the essence of Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, ascribing to him some minimum sense of ethics. No, despite his pretenses of great religiosity, Sessions, one of the most dangerous and committed White Nationalists of our time, has no discernible morality or ethics.

What he does have, however, is a driving racist commitment, combined with a mean streak of pure misogyny, to strip brown-skinned migrants, particularly vulnerable abused female refugees, of every vestige of their Constitutional and legal rights and to demean and dehumanize them: “Dred Scottify” if you will.

His “mistake,” was to put carrying out his White Nationalist program in front of the personal interests of the Trump Family. That’s how he found himself out of a job and on Trump’s “enemies list.”

Perhaps “Gonzo,” never the brightest bulb in the pack, actually thought that going “above and beyond” in carrying out Trump’s assault on migrants and their humanity would “compensate” for his lack of demonstrated public personal loyalty to the corrupt interests of the Trump Family. If he did, he was wrong.

Sessions saw himself as the attorney for White Nationalist Nation, first and foremost. And, to give him credit, he did as much damage to our Constitutional institutions and the rule of law in his relatively short tenure as anyone, including Barr, although Barr now perhaps has an opportunity to overtake his predecessor.

Additionally, Sessions probably realized that backing off on his promise under oath to Congress to follow the attorneys’ ethical code and disqualify himself from the Clinton investigation and his public commitment to follow DOJ Ethics advice and recuse himself from the Trump/Russia investigation could 1) lead to his eventual disbarment, and 2) might even subject him to criminal prosecution.

At a minimum, within the Department of Justice itself, acting against the ethics advice of DOJ Ethics’ Counsel deprives the actor of any “safe haven defense” based on following such advice. Consequently, self-preservation, rather than sensitivity to some moral code, was probably also a driving factor for Gonzo.

It’s also not like Gonzo didn’t unethically help Trump behind the scenes on both the Clinton and Mueller investigations. He clearly did, but got away with it. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/who-can-stop-jeff-sessions-from-breaking-his-recusal-pledge-probably-no-one/.

In line with observations in American Nero, accountability has all but disappeared from our crumbling Government institutions where Trump and his toadies are concerned. That’s why it’s probably going to be up to the “court of history,” especially where the role of Article III Judges like Roberts and his crew are concerned, to establish at least some moral and historical accountability for the unraveling of democracy and human values in the face tyranny.

“American Nero.” Yeah, that’s a really “spot on” description of Trump and the dangerous and immoral toadies surrounding him in the Kakistocracy.

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-22-20

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Beware of Billy Barr & His Minions — We Must Resist The Kakistocracy’s Vile “Power Grab”

Betsy Woodruff Swan
FederalLaw Enforcement Reporter
Politico

March 21, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 22

Today’s big news came from Politico writer Betsy Woodruff Swan, who broke the story that the Department of Justice has quietly asked Congress for dramatic new powers during emergencies… emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic. She has reviewed documents from the DOJ asking Congress to give top judges the power to pause court proceedings during emergencies. This would include “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.”

The executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Norman L. Reimer, explained that this “means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying,” he said. “Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”

The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, is extremely unlikely to pass any such measures, and Mike Lee, a libertarian-leaning Republican Senator from Utah, tweeted in all caps: “OVER MY DEAD BODY.” (This prompted reminders that he had voted to acquit Trump during the impeachment trial and thus keep him in office, so, as one tweet read: “If this happens you own it.”)

Lee demanded that Trump disown the idea– he did not– and the DOJ declined to comment on the story, so it may be a trial balloon, inaccurate, or even false.

But it has gotten attention because it dovetails with recent stories that suggest those currently in power feel it is their right, and maybe their duty, to run the country in their own interest, ignoring– or suppressing– dissent.

In the last two days, we learned that the administration and Republican members of Congress heard dire warnings about the coming coronavirus and continued to lie to the American people, telling us the Democrats trying to alert us were simply bent on undermining Trump.

We also learned that Trump has refused to use the Defense Production Act, passed under President Harry S. Truman, who used it during the Korean War. This law would enable Trump to demand that American industries produce the medical equipment we currently need so badly. Business leaders say the invoking the law isn’t necessary, and Trump claims they are volunteering to produce what the nation needs in a public-private partnership. Currently there is such a critical shortage of medical equipment that some hospitals are asking people to sew basic masks at home, but today Trump announced that the clothing manufacturer Hanes is retrofitting factories to make masks; it has joined a consortium that is expected to produce 5-6 million masks weekly.

These two stories reveal the same ideology that would underlay a law permitting arrest and imprisonment without trial: that society works best when it defers to a few special people who have access to information, resources, and power. Those people, in turn, use their power to direct the lives of the rest of us in larger patterns whose benefit we cannot necessarily see. We might think we need medical supplies but, in this worldview, using the government to force individual companies to make those supplies would hurt us in the long run. This ideology argues that we are better off leaving the decisions about producing medical supplies to business leaders. Similarly, we need leaders to run our economy and government, trusting that they will lead us, as a society, toward progress.

But there is another way to look at the world, one that is at the heart of American society. That ideology says that society works best if everyone has equal access to information and resources, and has an equal say in government. In this worldview, innovation and production come from people across society, ordinary people as well as elites, and society can overcome challenges much more effectively with a multiplicity of voices than with only a few who tend to share the same perspective. To guarantee equal access to information, resources, and government, we all must have equality before the law, including the right to liberty unless we have been charged with a crime.

For decades, now, America has increasingly moved toward the idea that a few people should consolidate wealth and power with the idea that they will most effectively use it to move America in a good direction. But the novel coronavirus pandemic has undercut the idea that a few leaders can run society most effectively. The administration’s response to this heavy challenge has been poor. And now we know that the very people who were publicly downplaying the severity of the coronavirus were told by our intelligence agencies that it was very bad indeed, and they were sharing that information with a few, favored individuals. Their leadership will literally, and quite immediately, cost a number of our lives.

But even as those embracing the idea of a hierarchical society have fallen down on the job, ordinary Americans are stepping up and demonstrating the power of the other worldview. State governors—Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Jay Inslee of Washington, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, David Ige of Hawaii, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Mike DeWine of Ohio—have distinguished themselves. (I’m sure I’ve forgotten some; please add them in the comments.) Not just governors, but also mayors and city councils have stepped up to the plate. So have business leaders and unions, figuring out ways to work from home and to pay workers whose jobs suddenly disappeared. Teachers have moved their classes on-line overnight; National Guard troops are delivering necessary supplies. Ordinary people all over the country are helping each other however they can.

And then there are the health care workers. What they are doing, leaping into the breach to save us all, despite their dire lack of protective gear, is heroic.

This pandemic, and the accompanying economic downturn, are a turning point. Just as Americans have done in other crises in our history, we are rediscovering that our greatest strength is not in how rich and powerful we can make a few, but rather in all of us, working together. It strikes me as no accident that it is at this moment a report has surfaced that Attorney General William Barr, a leading member of this administration, has asked for the ability to arrest and imprison people without trial, for to preserve a hierarchy under these conditions will require an extraordinary assumption of power to suppress dissent.

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/doj-suspend-constitutional-rights-coronavirus-970935/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-supplies.html

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hanes-start-making-masks-health-care-professionals-treating/story

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

No surprise to me that the amazing Betsy Swan Woodruff, now of Politico, is breaking this story.

The warnings about Billy Barr and his schemes come as no surprise to those of us in the New Due Process Army and the Round Table. We have been resisting the Sessions, Whitaker, Barr White Nationalist, neo-fascist, kakistocracy’s attack on Consitutional rights, the rule of law, and human decency since “Day One.”

I also appreciate Heather’s “outing” of the disgusiting disingenuous behavior of GOP Senators like Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) who claims to stand for one thing but actually voted to overlook the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s abuse of his office and enable his continuing existentially dangerous tenure.

Due Process Forever! Billy Bar & The Kakistocracy, Never!

PWS

03-22-20

CLEAR AS MUD: Politicized Immigration “Courts” Continue To Bobble The Message In The Time Of Plague, Endangering Their Own Employees, Attorneys, & The Public! — America’s Clown Courts 🤡☠️ Enter A Deadly New Phase As Feckless Article III Courts Watch The Show Go On! —“I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.” — DUH!

https://apple.news/Af7cWvYFbT5CO7qZKyldm3w

Dara Lind reports for Pro Publica:

Interviews with 10 workers at immigration courts around the country reveal fear, contradictory messages and continuing perils for the employees.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On Tuesday night — over a day after several Bay Area counties issued shelter-in-place orders barring most people from leaving their homes — the San Francisco immigration court sent an email to staff: Hearings were being postponed nationwide for most immigrants, so the court would be closed starting Wednesday. (The text of the email was provided to ProPublica.)

On Wednesday, however, employees were directed to get onto a conference call, according to two participants. There they were told the Tuesday night email was wrong. The court wasn’t closed. They would have to come into the office — or use their vacation time to stay home. When staff asked about the shelter-in-place orders, the response was that the Department of Justice, which runs immigration courts, took the position that those were local laws and didn’t apply to federal employees.

The Trump administration has reduced immigration court operations in the past week, by postponing hearings for non-detained immigrants and closing a handful of courts to the public. Those actions came after the unions representing immigration prosecutors and judges issued a rare public call for courts to close.

The reduced court operations came after weeks of employees raising concerns privately and, they say, receiving few and unhelpful answers. And because the closures are determined solely by whether a court is hearing cases of detained immigrants, rather than by the level of health peril, employees still feel they’re putting their health at risk every time they come into the office as instructed.

That’s the picture that emerges from interviews with 10 federal employees who work at immigration courts across the country. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity. Many said they had raised concerns internally about their exposure to COVID-19 to their managers or hadn’t been informed of potential exposures.

“When I signed up for this job, I thought it might be morally compromising at times,” one immigration court employee told ProPublica, “but I never thought it would be compromising of my health and safety.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the DOJ agency that oversees immigration courts, told ProPublica that agency headquarters was responsible for deciding when courts closed, but it did not confirm or deny specifics of the employees’ allegations, saying, “We do not comment on internal communications or internal personnel operations.”

In Denver, one prosecutor interviewed by ProPublica was alarmed by a judge’s frequent coughs during a hearing last Friday. “Don’t mind my coughing,” the judge said, according to the prosecutor. “I don’t think it’s coronavirus.” The following Tuesday, the prosecutor noticed that the judge was out for the rest of the week and emailed a court staffer in concern: Was it the coronavirus? Should she be taking precautions? The staffer’s reply: For privacy reasons, the prosecutor’s questions couldn’t be answered.

Only after news broke to the public on Tuesday night that a judge at the Denver immigration court had been diagnosed with COVID-19 (the disease caused by the new coronavirus) did court officials follow up with the prosecutor and confirm her suspicions. Other attorneys the judge had been in close contact with were notified the next day. The court remained open through Thursday, when the entire building it was housed in was shut down for deep cleaning by the General Services Administration. (It’s currently set to reopen Monday.)

In New York, legal aid groups sent a letter to immigration court officials saying that two of their attorneys had symptoms of COVID-19 and a third had been exposed to someone who’d tested positive. All three attorneys had appeared in court the past week, and all had hearings scheduled the following day. The courts didn’t say anything to their employees about the letter, according to multiple sources.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has pressured the immigration courts to process as many immigrants as quickly as possible — pressuring judges to hear more cases and complete them within a year, and making it harder for immigrants or attorneys to postpone hearings. Now, they face a public health crisis that requires everyone to reduce person-to-person contact.

Immigration court workers have two concerns. The first is that the courts are often crowded and require close contact with members of the public. The second is that, like most employees of any type, especially those who take public transit, they are exposed every time they leave their homes to work.

Employees remain concerned about their exposure over the past few weeks, while courts were running as usual. Employees in New York and California — the states hardest hit by the pandemic to date — told ProPublica that their requests for “deep cleaning” were rejected by managers, and that they were bringing their own Clorox wipes and disinfectant spray to the office.

Most immigration court business happens in person. Even trying to postpone an immigration hearing (for example, due to illness) requires an attorney to file a paper form with a clerk. And if an immigrant doesn’t show up for a hearing, they’re at risk of getting ordered deported in absentia. In at least one New York court, according to two people who work there, the chief judge told employees Monday to issue absentia deportation orders if immigrants weren’t showing up, even if the coronavirus was the suspected cause.

Policies the Trump administration introduced before the COVID-19 pandemic put considerable pressure on judges and prosecutors not to allow immigrants to postpone their hearings. Judges face a “performance standard” of completing 80% of their cases within a year — a standard over 90% of judges don’t meet, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges. But the more than 150 judges who have been hired in the past two years are still in their probationary period, where they could be fired for failing to meet performance standards.

While many judges have been lenient in granting coronavirus-related postponements, others have not. Last week, according to one California immigration court employee, a judge took a break from a hearing to tell colleagues that the immigrant’s attorney claimed to be sick, but because he wasn’t coughing, the hearing would move forward.

One email sent by the chief prosecutor at the Miami court Tuesday, read to ProPublica, told prosecutors that if an immigrant or her attorney claimed to be sick, any postponement should be counted against the immigrant (preventing them from requesting another postponement). If the immigrant didn’t want to postpone, and the judge wasn’t willing to hold the hearing by phone, the prosecutor was instructed to contact her manager — who would assess the claim of illness himself before deciding what to do. (A call to the chief prosecutor in Miami was not immediately returned.)

Most communication, though, has been oral. In at least two courts, chief judges were asked to put policies in writing and declined.

Employees have been in the dark about who, exactly, is making the decisions about which courts are open and when employees are allowed to work from home or take leave to stay home. “The word is that it’s out of their hands. Everything is out of everybody’s hands,” Fanny Behar-Ostrow, president of the union representing immigration prosecutors, told ProPublica Wednesday. “I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.”

An email obtained by the Miami Herald, written by the assistant chief immigration judge in charge of the Miami immigration court on Wednesday, said that closure decisions were ultimately being made by “the White House” — something that employees at other courts also said their managers had suggested. But chief judges gave conflicting explanations about which decisions were subject to White House approval; one chief judge told employees that the White House had to be involved in decisions about remote work, while other chief judges made those decisions themselves.

It’s not clear who at the White House is involved or how. Immigration officials told the Herald that the ultimate decision was made by the Office of Management and Budget. However, according to the employees ProPublica spoke to, some immigration court officials used “White House” to refer to policies set by the Office of Personnel Management. The assistant chief immigration judge (the judge in charge of a given immigration court location) for one California court told employees on March 12 that they’d had a phone call with staff for Vice President Mike Pence, who’s running the official coronavirus task force.

But to many employees, the specter of “White House” involvement raised concerns that the administration’s immigration policy priorities were getting in the way of its public health obligations.

. . . .

Read Dara’s full article at the link.

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

The confusion engendered by politicized immigration enforcement in support of a White Nationalist agenda doesn’t end with the Immigration Courts. Despite, or perhaps because of, a number of public statements by DHS political hacks, there’s still plenty of uncertainty and angst about DHS’s enforcement and detention policies. Chloe Hadavas over at Slate sets out what happens when politicos take over law enforcement and justice.

Chloe Havadas — Chloe Hadavas
Intern Reporter
Slate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/ice-halts-immigration-enforcement-coronavirus.html

Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced on Wednesday that it will halt most arrests and deportations, focusing only on individuals who are “public safety risks” and who are “subject to mandatory detention based on criminal grounds,” as the coronavirus sweeps across the U.S. and public health officials scramble to limit the virus’ spread.

Undocumented immigrants are often afraid to seek medical care for fear of deportation. And even as state and local officials encouraged anyone who needed medical treatment to seek help, ICE officers continued to make arrests, including in areas hit hard by the virus. But in the temporary change in enforcement, ICE also said that it won’t carry out operations near health care facilities, including hospitals, doctors’ offices, and urgent care facilities, “except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” the agency said in a statement. “Individuals should not avoid seeking medical care because they fear civil immigration enforcement.”

Immigration experts said ICE’s decision was somewhat unexpected, though they remain cautious about how to interpret it. “I’m always surprised to hear that they’re going to scale back on their efforts,” said Jennifer M. Chacón, a UCLA law professor who focuses on immigration. ICE’s statement marks a distinct shift from the agency’s operations under the Trump administration. Both Chacón and Karla McKanders, a law professor who directs the Immigration Practice Clinic at Vanderbilt University, said that it reminded them of the “felons, not families” immigration policy of the Obama administration. “You read it and it basically looks like the Obama-era enforcement priority statement, and you just wonder why it takes a pandemic to get ICE to think about prioritizing resources and focusing efforts on public safety,” said Chacón.

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

You can read the rest of Chloe’s article at the link.

“I don’t know who’s making the calls, but they’re wrong.” Kind of “says it all” about how the regime treats its own employees and the public good.

Meanwhile, Article III Courts, which have had more than ample opportunity to put an end to the constitutional farce taking place in Immigration Court and also to direct the DHS to take overdue steps to release non-dangerous (that is, most) immigration detainees before the epidemic sweeps chronically health-endangering immigration prisons in their New American Gulag (“NAG”), have once again “swallowed the whistle.” The Gulag, where kids are caged and put in “iceboxes,” families separated, and folks sometimes left to die, all for no reason other than “we can do it and nobody’s going to stop us” will haunt not only those corrupt public servants who established and operated it, but also those like legislators, judges, and public health officials who failed in their duties to end the human rights abuses.

Perhaps the Article IIIs are “running scared” because without the ongoing clown show in the U.S. Immigration Courts, the Article IIIs would be in line for the title of “Americas’s Most Dysfunctional Courts.”

Also, I think it’s time for Slate to take “Intern” off Chloe Hadavas’s title and ink this “up and coming talent” to a full time contract covering immigration and justice issues.

Due Process Forever. Dysfunctional Courts That Endanger The Public, Never!

🤡☠️

EYORE — “Eyore In Distress”
Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”

PWS

03-21-20

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

UPDATE: Gullible, complicit U.S. Judges in their ivory tower bubbles with plenty of hand sanitizers might be willing to believe DHS’s claims that everything is “hunky dory” in the New American Gulag, but the truth is stark, ugly, and predictable for anyone familiar with the regime’s immigration antics, lies, and cover-ups:

“The cells stink. The toilets don’t flush. There’s never enough soap. They give out soap once a week. One bar of soap a week. How does that make any sense?”

Read the latest from Vice News, as hunger strikes break out in three New Jersey detention facilities:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkew79/immigrants-are-now-on-hunger-strike-in-3-ice-detention-centers–fears

Meanwhile, Courtside has been receiving reports from multiple sources in New Jersey about rapidly deteriorating conditions in Immigration Courts and the Gulag, failure to follow Federal health guidelines, possible positive coronavirus tests among ICE employees, and efforts by the the regime to keep the truth about about the growing health risks for detainees, judges, lawyers, and other personnel forced to deal with this dangerous, broken, and totally dysfunctional system “under wraps.”

I have also received disturbing, yet credible, reports of continuances for “at risk” attorneys being denied by some Immigration Judges, while other judges have received “no assurances” from their management “handlers” that the regime’s due-process-mocking “production quotas” will be waived during the health emergency! ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

PWS

03-21-20

SORRY, FOLKS, IT AIN’T YOUR DADDY’S ARLINGTON IMMIGRATION COURT ANY MORE: Under The Thumb Of The Trump Regime, Asylum Denial Rate Goes From 29.4% To 51.7%, Even As Worldwide Conditions For Refugees Continue To Deteriorate! — Think This Is “Using Best Practices To Guarantee Fairness & Due Process For All?” Guess Again!

“Courtside” recently received this from an “inherently reliable source:”

Click here to get the latest “asylum denial rates” for Arlington:

ArlingtonCourtasylumdenialrate

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Before Trump, Arlington was a “model court” where Immigration Judges, with the help of the ICE Chief Counsel and the private bar, developed “best practices” and asylum seekers got a fair shake. In just a few short years under the Trump regime, it has moved steadily in the other direction toward the type of “denial factory” that the Trump regime wants to be the model for all Immigration Courts. Of course, Arlington isn’t close to the 100% denial rate that the regime wants and that is close to realization in some other courts. But, the deterioration of due process and fairness in Arlington is still disheartening.

We should always remember that the unconstitutional “weaponization” of the Immigration Courts is continuing to happen right under the noses of a feckless Congress and Article III Judges who should long ago have ended this abomination. Everyone responsible for this life-threatening mess will have much to answer for in the “Court of History.”

In the meantime, congratulations and appreciation to those judges who keep interpreting and applying asylum law in the generous way dictated by Cardoza-Fonseca and Mogharrabi. You are heroes in an age that where all too many show cowardice and a willingness to “go along too get along” in the face of great tyranny!

Due Process Forever! Judges Who Won’t Stand Up For Asylum Seekers, Never!

PWS

03-19-20

INSPIRING AMERICA: TIRED OF VILE RACIST ABUSES HEAPED ON THEM BY PEARCE, ARPAIO, BREWER, THE GOP, & DEM FECKLESSNESS, ARIZONA HISPANICS TOOK CONTROL, USING THE SYSTEM TO CHANGE THE RULES OF THE GAME — FOREVER! — It’s Past Time For The Dems To Take Hispanic Issues Seriously All The Time, Not Just Every Four Years When They Need Their Votes!

Alejandra Gomez
Co-Director
Living United for Change in Arizona

Tomas Robles Jr.
Co-Director
Living United for Change in Arizona

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opinion/sunday/latinos-arizona-battleground.html

From the NY Times:

By Alejandra Gomez and Tomás Robles Jr.

Ms. Gomez and Mr. Robles are co-executive directors of LUCHA, a grass-roots organization in Arizona.

PHOENIX — First there were seven. Then 50. Then thousands of people, mostly Latino and many undocumented, who held a vigil on the lawn outside of the Arizona State Capitol in the spring of 2010, praying that Gov. Jan Brewer would not sign an anti-immigrant bill, the most punitive in generations, which had sailed through the Republican-controlled Legislature.

A dozen undocumented women, the “vigil ladies,” set up tents and a four-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary, borrowed from a church. Students walked out of their classrooms and marched for miles to the Capitol. Abuelas put out traditional Mexican food: pozole, tamales, frijoles. At night, around 50 people slept on the lawn. In the morning, they pulled grass out of their hair, clasped hands and prayed.

The two of us were part of these protests, and we had good reason to be angry — and afraid. One night, Ku Klux Klan hoods were placed near where people prayed. Anti-immigrant groups patrolled close by. Such menaces had long found a haven under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who ordered his deputies to target Latinos in traffic stops, workplace raids and neighborhood sweeps. Some were later deported.

Opponents of Arizona’s new immigration law prayed outside the Capitol in Phoenix in 2010.

Credit…

John Moore/Getty Images

Despite the enormous opposition to the “show me your papers” bill, which essentially turned the state’s police officers into immigration agents, Governor Brewer signed it. Arizona Republicans no doubt hoped the law would chase out every immigrant, documented or undocumented. Some did leave. But many more stayed, determined to turn their fear and anger into political power.

In less than a decade, many organizers who first cut their teeth fighting that bill are now lawmakers, campaign managers and directors of civic engagement groups like Mi Familia Vota and the Arizona Dream Act Coalition. While it’s easy to dismiss mass protests as short-lived eruptions of anger, Arizona offers a model for how this energy can become real electoral power: It happens when people learn to work with one another, build deep connections and create something bigger than themselves.

In the wake of the vigil, we built an organization called LUCHA, short for Living United for Change in Arizona, that serves as a political home for people of color. We talk to working-class families about the issues important to them and how to get involved in politics. Civic groups and political parties used to do more of this work, but they have become disconnected from real people, too focused on donors and elite influence.

Image

One of the authors, Alejandra Gomez, at Alhambra High School.

Credit…

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

While the anti-immigrant bill was propelled into law by Republicans, Democrats were also to blame. They have long treated communities of color as instruments of someone else’s power rather than core progressives who should be instruments of their own power. This neglect created the space for the bill to pass so easily.

. . . .

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

Contrary to the right-wing propaganda and the beliefs of many Dems, Trump’s cruel, racist, xenophobic, expensive, and counterproductive immigration policies are not popular with the American public outside Trump’s “base.” Democrats should make inclusive, tolerant, humane, and market-sensitive immigration reforms that will stop wasting money on misdirected immigration enforcement and help our now-sagging economy recover, a key and visible part of their program going forward.

Immigrants, of all kinds, also play an outsized role in health care, particularly for senior citizens. Maximizing the potential of all migrants and their tax paying ability will be keys to a healthy future and a robust economy for all Americans.

The needs and ambitions of “core progressives” like the Hispanic and African-American communities have much in common with the bulk of white working-class America that has been left behind by the Trump GOP’s obsession with making the rich richer, the poor poorer, working people less healthy, running up huge deficits, cutting the safety net, destroying valuable government services, letting our infrastructure crumble, undermining education and the environment, imposing harmful tariffs, and promoting hate and racial divisions among our population.

For the sake of America, we need all communities to work together for “regime change” this November!

PWS

03-17-20

GROUND-BREAKING PROFESSSOR GABRIELA LEON-PEREZ BRINGS THE FULL IMMIGRATION STORY TO UNDERGRADUATES @ VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY (“VCU”) IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA – Educating America For a Better Future For Everyone By Understanding The Critical Importance Of Immigrants & Social Justice!

I Speak To Professor Gabriela Leon-Perez’s Class @ VCU, Professor Perez on my left, Richmond Attorney Pablo Fantl on my right
Feb. 20, 2020

From VCU News:

Immigration course provides VCU students with a better understanding of a national issue

The sociology course, taught by Gabriela León-Pérez, examines the history of immigration and how the current debate ties to the past.

Gabriela León-Pérez’s class, Immigration and American Society, provides students with a more nuanced understanding of the current immigration debate. (Getty Images)

By James Shea

University Public Affairs

https://news.vcu.edu/article/Immigration_course_provides_VCU_students_with_a_better_understanding

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Immigration has always been a controversial topic in the United States. In the late 19th century, over 2 million Irish immigrated to the U.S. Most were Catholic and that created conflict with the largely Protestant U.S. population. The first comprehensive immigration law, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1882, contained provisions specifically designed to discourage European immigrants.

“This is not the first time the country has had anti-immigration policies, but the scapegoat group has changed over time,” said Gabriela León-Pérez, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies immigration policy.

León-Pérez wanted to give her students an understanding of the current immigration debate so she developed a course called Immigration and American Society, which covers the history of immigration and immigration policy and examines where the current debate fits into the past.

“It presents students with a context on the state of immigration today,” León-Pérez said. “A lot of people have opinions about immigration but most of them are not based on facts.”

A class to cut through the noise

When designing the course, León-Pérez wanted to be able to address current events in the news. The course uses some textbooks, but it also incorporates podcasts and blogs. The goal is to have the discussion revolve around the current state of the immigration debate.

“It definitely evolves based on current events,” León-Pérez said. “The first time I taught it was 2018, and there have been a lot of changes since then.”

John Lees, a psychology major, believes the class has given him a better understanding of immigration history. The class specifically looks at the immigration policies of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Lees believes he now has a well-rounded perspective on the subject.

Yessica Flores, who is majoring in psychology and sociology, signed up for the class because she hears a lot of information about the subject and knew a class would help her cut through the noise.

“We are living in a world where the media is everywhere; where false news is frequent news,” Flores said. “I enrolled in the course with hopes of becoming educated in this area to help educate, inform and encourage others to better understand the reality of immigration within American society.”

As part of the class, León-Pérez teaches students how to find accurate information about immigration. The students learn to access official government data and other reliable sources. (Kevin Morley, University Marketing)

At the start of the class, León-Pérez teaches students how to find accurate information about immigration. The students learn to access official government data and other reliable sources.

“I try to present both sides of the debate,” León-Pérez said. “I want the students to have a well-rounded understanding of immigration and the debate. I don’t want them to shut down a side of the debate.”

Many students, she has observed, only understand the immigration debate from a particular vantage point. The class is a “light bulb” moment for them, and they realize that immigration is a complicated and nuanced topic. In general, immigration often comes down to economics, León-Pérez said. People against immigration are worried that new residents will take jobs, but people who support immigration say immigrants will do the type of work that many residents will not. Immigrants are looking for opportunity.

“Immigrants tend to complement American workers,” León-Pérez said. “Immigrants tend to work at lower-skilled jobs.”

Protecting due process

León-Pérez brings in guest speakers to enhance the curriculum. In February, she invited retired immigration judge Paul Schmidt. In previous semesters, León-Pérez has invited an immigration attorney as a guest speaker. This time, she wanted students to get the perspective of the person on the other side of the bench.

Schmidt served as an immigration judge from 2003 until he retired in 2016. Before that, he served on the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals. Since retiring, he has been talking about the state of the immigration courts and the lack of due process given to asylum seekers.

“The immigration courts are going through an existential crisis,” Schmidt told the class.

He understands that people have different opinions about immigration, but the courts must follow a process that protects the due process rights of asylum seekers, he said. The court functions as a division of the Department of Justice and Schmidt believes it is not given the resources to function properly. Everyone within the justice system should share a common interest in seeing the courts functioning in a fair and equitable way, Schmidt said.

Retired immigration judge Paul Schmidt speaks to León-Pérez’s class. (Kevin Morley, University Marketing)

“The immigration court now is structured in such a way that it is nothing more than a whistle stop on the road to deportation,” he said.

Schmidt offered several suggestions to the students on ways to help people who are going through the immigration courts. Immigrants, unlike citizens, are not required to have an attorney. Many do not understand the immigration process. Schmidt said students could volunteer and help them navigate the complex immigration system in the United States.

“You can join the new due process army,” Schmidt said.

Flores said she has found the class to be informative, and has enjoyed the guest lecturers. The class has not necessarily changed her views about the subject but has motivated her to become more involved.

“I have always disliked the way the immigration cases have been handled, especially the ones involving immigrant children,” Flores said. “I must say that my feelings toward being more involved in promoting change and awareness have changed in the sense that I have developed a much greater interest in getting more involved in the form of a future career.”

Subscribe to VCU News

Subscribe to the VCU News newsletter at newsletter.vcu.edu and receive a selection of stories, videos, photos, news clips and event listings in your inbox every Monday and Thursday.

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And, here’s some information about one of America’s most talented and innovative professors, Dr. Gabriela Leon-Perez, who brings her rich background and scholarly research combined with innovative “student-centered, real life” teaching methods to perhaps the most important and “undertaught” subject in undergraduate, secondary, elementary, and even adult education today! Her teaching incorporates fairness, scholarship, timeliness, teamwork, respect, and lots of self-direction by the students themselves.

Professor Gabriela Leon-Perez — Gabriela Leon-Perez
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Virginia Commonwealth University

https://sociology.vcu.edu/people/faculty/leon-perez.html

Gabriela León-Pérez, Ph.D.

Education

2018 Ph.D. in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

2015 M.A. in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

2012 M.A. in Sociology, Texas A&M International University

Teaching Areas

Research Methods, Immigration, Health Disparities

Research Interests

International Migration, Internal Migration, Mexico-US Migration, Immigrant Health, Health Disparities

Biography

Gabriela León-Pérez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on Mexican internal and international migration, the experiences of immigrants in the United States, and health disparities.

The underlying goal of her research agenda is to clarify the role of social, structural, and contextual factors in creating health and social inequalities, as well as to identify resources that improve the outcomes of immigrants and other marginalized populations. In her most recent project, she investigated the health trajectories of return US migrants, internal migrants, and indigenous migrants from Mexico. Other on-going projects focus on Mexican skilled migration to the US and the effects of stress, legal status, and state immigrant policies on the health and well-being of immigrants. You can read more about her current work on her personal website.

Select Publications

León-Pérez, Gabriela. 2019. “Internal Migration and the Health of Indigenous Mexicans: A Longitudinal Study.” SSM-Population Health 8(August).

Donato, Katharine M., Gabriela León-Pérez, Kenneth A. Wallston, and Sunil Kripalani. 2018. “Something Old, Something New: When Gender Matters in the Relationship Between Social Support and Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 59(3):352-370.

Young, Maria-Elena, Gabriela León-Pérez, Christine R. Wells, and Steven P. Wallace. 2018. “More Inclusive States, Less Poverty Among Immigrants? An Examination of Poverty, Citizenship Stratification, and State Immigrant Policies.” Population Research and Policy Review 37(2):205-228.

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I’ll lay it on the line. If more Americans, and particularly more potential younger voters, had understood the true role of immigration and refugees in building America’s past and propelling us into an even greater future, and the dangers to them, their classmates, communities, friends, families, and colleagues posed by Trump’s race baiting “Build That Wall” and “Lock Her Up” chants – certainly pages out of the Third Reich and Jim Crow “playbooks,” – then the modest number of additional votes might well have been there to save lives (perhaps those of loved ones) and to preserve our democratic instiutions and justice system from the vicious and corrupt attacks being waged by the Trump regime, its allies, and its enablers.

We could be working together to build a better future for everyone in America, rather than engaged in a desperate struggle to save our nation and our world from authoritarianism, ignorance, wanton cruelty, and environmental and societal degradation. And, unfortunately, the “enablers” include those who don’t agree with Trump but failed to cast a vote for Clinton in the last election. Simple as that. Every vote counts. Elections have consequence. And, defeating Trump and his GOP in November could be our last clear chance to preserve America as a democratic republic!

Following the class, I did a Spanish language radio show with my good friend Pablo Fantl, Esquire, of Richmond, who was kind enough to translate for me.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

03-12-20

COURTSIDE HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF EXPOSING THE “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” COMMITTED BY THE REGIME AND THE MORAL CULPABILITY OF THOSE WHO WILLFULLY CARRY OUT & ENABLE THESE ATROCITIES — The “Mainstream Media” Is Now Channeling Courtside! — “In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.”

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=17e4b3b6-8350-4ef2-86b2-45242bddfa52&v=sdk

From the LA Times Editorial Board:

The U.S. betrays migrant kids

Kevin Euceda, a 17-year-old Honduran boy, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border three years ago and was turned over to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services until his request for asylum could be decided by immigration courts. During that period, he was required, as are all unaccompanied minors in custody, to meet with therapists to help him process what he had gone through.

In those sessions, Kevin was encouraged to speak freely and openly and was told that what he said would be kept confidential. So he poured out his story of a brutalized childhood, of how MS-13 gang members moved into the family shack after his grandmother died when he was 12, of how he was forced to run errands, sell drugs and, as he got older, take part in beating people up. When he was ordered to kill a stranger to cement his position in the gang, Kevin decided to run.

His therapists submitted pages of notes over several sessions to the file on him, as they were expected to do. But then, HHS officials — without the knowledge of the teen or the therapists — shared the notes with lawyers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who used them in immigration court to paint the young migrant as a dangerous gang member who should be denied asylum and sent back to Honduras. In sharing those therapy notes, the government did not break any laws. But it most assuredly broke its promise of confidentiality to Kevin, violated standard professional practices — the first therapist involved quit once she learned her notes had been shared — and offended a fundamental expectation that people cannot be compelled to testify against themselves in this country.

Kevin, whose story was detailed by the Washington Post, wasn’t the only unaccompanied minor to fall victim to such atrocious behavior, though how many have been affected is unknown. The government says it has changed that policy and no longer shares confidential therapy notes, but that’s not particularly reassuring coming from this administration. It adopted the policy once; it could easily do so again.

Last week, Rep. Grace F. Napolitano (D-Norwalk) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced the Immigrants’ Mental Health Act of 2020 to ban the practice, which is a necessary preventive measure. The bill would also create a new training regimen to help border agents address mental health issues among migrants and require at least one mental health expert at each Customs and Border Patrol facility. Both of those steps are worth considering too.

That the government would so callously use statements elicited from unaccompanied minors in therapy sessions to undercut their asylum applications is part of the Trump administration’s broad and inhumane efforts to effectively shut off the U.S. as a destination for people seeking to exercise their right to ask for sanctuary. Jeff Sessions and his successor as attorney general, William Barr, have injected themselves into cases at an unprecedented rate to unilaterally change long-established practices and immigration court precedent.

They have been able to do so because immigration courts are administrative and part of the Justice Department, not the federal court system, and as a result they have politicized what should be independent judicial evaluations of asylum applications and other immigration cases. Advocates argue persuasively that the efforts have undermined due process rights and made the immigration courts more a tool of President Trump’s anti-immigration policies than a system for measuring migrant’s claims against the standards Congress wrote into federal law.

Of course, trampling legal rights and concepts of basic human decency have been a hallmark of the administration’s approach to immigration enforcement — witness, for example, its separation of more than 2,500 migrant children from their parents. Beyond the heartlessness of the separations, the Health and Human Services’ inspector general last week blasted the department for botching the process. Meanwhile, the administration has expanded detention — about 50,000 migrants are in federal custody on any given day, up from about 30,000 a decade ago — and forced about 60,000 asylum seekers to await processing in dangerous squalor on Mexico’s side of the border.

There are legitimate policy discussions to be had over how this government should handle immigration, asylum requests and broad comprehensive immigration reform. In the meantime, no government has the right to treat people with such abject inhumanity. History will remember Trump for this, but it will also remember the people who enable such atrocious acts.

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The LA Times is ”on top” of the grotesque perversion of the Immigration “Courts” under nativist zealot Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and Trump toady Billy Barr to carry out a White Nationalist political agenda:

They have been able to do so because immigration courts are administrative and part of the Justice Department, not the federal court system, and as a result they have politicized what should be independent judicial evaluations of asylum applications and other immigration cases.

Who’a NOT “on top” of what’s happening: The GOP-controlled U.S. Senate, Chief Justice Roberts, a number of his Supremely Complicit colleagues, and a host of Court of Appeals Judges who allow this unconstitutional travesty to continue to mock the Fifth Amendment and the rule of Law, while abusing and threatening the lives of legal asylum seekers every day!

This was even before yesterday’s cowardly, wrong-headed, and totally immoral “Supreme Betrayal” of the most vulnerable among us in Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/11/let-the-killing-continue-predictably-supremes-game-system-to-give-thumbs-up-to-let-em-die-in-mexico-brown-lives-dont-matter/ As MLK, Jr., said “Injustice anywhere affects justice everywhere.”

With 2.5 Branches of our Government led by anti-democracy zealots and cowards, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is our only remaining bulwark against tyranny! Capable as she is, she can’t do it all by herself!

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Other Immoral Enablers, Never!

PWS

03-12-20

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE LYNN S. ADELMAN CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — BLASTS ROBERTS & COMPANY FOR AIDING THE FORCES SEEKING TO DESTROY OUR DEMOCRACY — “Instead of doing what it can to ensure the maintenance of a robust democratic republic, the Court’s decisions ally it with the most anti-democratic currents in American politics,”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/11/lynn-adelman-roberts-trump/

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

Lynn S. Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, has riled conservatives by publishing a blistering critique of the Supreme Court’s record under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., focusing on a string of decisions that he argues have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Adelman also criticized President Trump, who he wrote ran as a populist but failed to deliver “policies beneficial to the general public. … While Trump’s temperament is that of an autocrat,” Adelman wrote, “he is disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”

The article by Adelman was all the more unusual because it went after the chief justice directly. Roberts, he said, was “misleading” in his 2005 confirmation hearing testimony when he pledged to be a passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.

Adelman called that metaphor a “masterpiece of disingenuousness,” saying the court under Roberts “has been anything but passive” as its “hard right majority” has actively participated in “undermining American democracy.”

As president, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused federal judges of being political and beholden to the presidents who appointed them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

The article, entitled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy,” is scheduled for publication in an unspecified forthcoming issue of the Harvard Law & Policy Review, which describes itself as the official publication of the liberal American Constitution Society. It was published in full at SSRN this month.

Adelman, appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is a former Democratic state senator in Wisconsin and Legal Aid Society trial lawyer. Perhaps his best-known decision nationally was a 2014 ruling striking down Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

His broad critique of the Roberts court, with particular reference to its decisions on voting rights and campaign finance by corporate interests, is not an uncommon one — coming, that is, from liberal scholars or political leaders, including former president Barack Obama.

But coming from a sitting federal judge in a journal article accompanied by such a blunt attack on Roberts, not to mention Trump, it has attracted uncommon attention.

. . . .

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Read the complete article at the link.

So I’m not the only one to note the Chiefie’s “Taneyesque” performance, particularly on issues involving the rights of migrants, refugees, Muslims, and other persons of color. He has joined the regime in “Dred Scottifying” those with brown skins who are entitled to the protection of our Constitution and our laws, which Trump has eliminated without legislation, relying largely on transparently fraudulent “national security rationales.”

But, Roberts hasn’t been much good for African Americans or other minorities either, joining his right winger activist colleagues in disingenuously dismantling key parts of civil rights and voting rights protections and turning an intentionally blind eye to partisan gerrymandering carried out by the GOP to disenfranchise minorities. Election results get skewed and folks actually die as a result of these intentional miscarriages of justice to further a toxic right wing agenda aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions, promoting inequality, and institutionalizing privilege. As Judge Adelman said “the transformation of the Supreme Court from what he described as a defender of ordinary people and ‘subordinated groups’ to an enabler of an ‘anti-democratic’ Republican agenda.” Right on, Judge A!

I also found this comment telling:

Adelman was unapologetic. “I think it’s totally appropriate to criticize the court when there’s a basis for it,” he said. “Judges are encouraged to comment on the law because we have a particular interest, knowledge and familiarity.”

Compare that with the “muzzling” of the Immigration Judiciary by the Executive reported recently on Courtside. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/03/🤡🤡clown-court-report-as-due-process-goes-into-death-spiral-regime-muzzles-immigration-judges/

And, as I constantly point out, the Immigration Courts aren’t “courts” at all. They are blatantly unconstitutional “star chambers” run by the Executive Branch with the complicity of the Article III Judiciary who see their work daily and know full well that they are often “rubber stamping” final orders sending folks into potentially life-threatening exile with only a transparently thin veneer of “due process.” But, according to Roberts and his gang, brown-skinned refugees aren’t entitled to even access this process in a reasonable manner, let alone receive the fair hearings to which they are entitled before being “orbited” to potential death in foreign lands. What if it were his wife and kids? I’ll bet their lives would get more consideration.

I also appreciate Judge Adelman’s “spotlighting” the disingenuous testimony of Roberts and other right wingers under oath before the Senate when they “feigned impartiality” to disguise their anti-democracy agenda (without, of course, losing the support of the rightest Republicans who were “licking their chops” at finally getting their long-awaited “judicial wrecking crew” in place).

As one of my esteemed Round Table colleagues said recently: “In the words of Balzac, ‘to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.’”

Unhappily, thanks to Roberts and other complicit Article IIIs, we’re there. Which is exactly how Trump and his supporters want it!

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

So much for the bogus ”passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.”

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

03-11-20

AS THOSE CHARGED WITH PROTECTING JUSTICE “TOADY UP” & ENABLE TRUMP REGIME’S “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,” ONE GROUP OF CIVIL SERVANTS HAS THE COURAGE TO STAND UP FOR DUE PROCESS, THE RIGHTS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS, & SIMPLE HUMAN DIGNITY: USCIS ASYLUM OFFICERS! BONUS+: My Latest Monday Essay: “Heroes & Enablers”

https://apple.news/AOKo5byofRfKem24qSuLsaA

Joe Jurado reports for The Root:

The immigration policies executed by the Trump administration have been, to be succinct, f***ed up. That’s not even just me saying that. The people who have to execute his policies are saying it too.

The New York Times reports that a union of federal asylum workers has filed an amicus brief stating that a policy from the Trump Administration that diverts migrants to Guatemala is unlawful. The union, National CIS Council 119, represents 700 asylum and refugee officers of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The brief states that international treaty obligations are being violated as a result of having to deport migrants to a country where they will likely face prosecution. The Trump administration made a deal with Guatemala that allows the United States to deport migrants seeking asylum in the States to Guatemala. The union believes that these new rules are forcing them to violate the laws they were trained to uphold.

. . . .

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Read the complete report at the link.

HEROES & ENABLERS — Judges Who Aid The Trump Regime’s Deadly Oppression Of The Most Vulnerable Among Us Will Eventually Hear The Voices Of Those They Abandoned & Dehumanized — Even From The Graves Of The Oppressed, History Will Pass Judgement On The Smugly Powerful Who Abuse The Weak!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

March 9, 2020

USCIS Asylum Officers are the “NDPA Heroes of the Week!”

So, one group of courageous civil servants is willing to put their careers on the line to defend the Constitution and the rights of the vulnerable. But, others in more protected positions, like, for example, Supreme Court Justices and some Court of Appeals Judges, are afraid to stand up to Trump and defend the rule of law and the humanity of those whose only “crime” is to trust in our legal protection system. The courage of one group contrasts with the willful ignorance and cowardly complicity of the other. What’s wrong with this picture?

At some point, there will be “regime change” in the Executive as well as the Senate. When that happens, our system needs a complete re-examination of the immigration scholarship, commitment to human rights, and the moral leadership of those we are giving lifetime appointments to the Federal Bench, particularly the Supremes.

Obviously, the system has failed when two current justices choose to use their power and privileged positions disingenuously to rail about the “bogus horrors” of nationwide injunctions, and thereby spur the regime on to even grater abuses, while papering over the real issue of the actual grotesque legal, constitutional, and human rights violations inflicted on migrants and others by a White Nationalist would-be authoritarian regime that would eventually do away with almost all of our legal rights.

In the future, perhaps we should consider elevating more Asylum Officers with law degrees and a record of fair adjudication and speaking truth to power to the Article III Judiciary, including the Supremes. There are younger members of our Round Table of Former Immigration Judges who were forced by the regime into “early retirement” who could bring scholarship, fairness, practicality, and justice back to the Article IIIs. How about some pro bono lawyers, clinical professors, and NGO leaders who combine scholarship with real life experience and whose proven creativity and problem solving skills far exceed the pedestrian and wooden approaches we see all too often from today’s failing Article III Judiciary. Although their efforts are mocked, disrespected, and undermined by complicit Article III Judges, like the “J.R. Five,” these courageous “defenders of democracy and the rights of the weak” are the ones who are in fact keeping our legal system afloat in the face of Article III willful ignorance and complicity in tyranny.

And, we definitely need fewer corporate lawyers (except those who have extensive pro bono immigration/human rights experience), prosecutors, and right wing “think tankers” occupying the Federal bench.We have an oversupply of those folks on the bench right now, and our rights are suffering for it. It will take years, perhaps decades, to repair the damage they are causing and to bring the Federal Judicial system back into a proper balance.

These aren’t “liberal/conservative philosophical questions.” They are black and white questions of moral courage and the willingness to enforce Due Process and protect those whose lives are endangered by the Trump regime’s cruel and lawless programs and constant racially-inspired lies, naked bias, and misrepresentations. Sending folks back to dangerous countries without functioning asylum systems is wrong as a matter of law. Period. Making them “Remain in Mexico” is wrong. Period. A so-called “court system” run by a transparently biased, disingenuous, “uber enforcement” official like Billy Barr does not provide the “fair and impartial adjudications” required by Due Process. Period. Separating families and putting kids in cages and “kiddie gulags” is wrong. Period. Those initiating and carrying out those policies should be chastised and held accountable, not enabled. Period.

Actually, many courageous and scholarly U.S. District Judges have gotten these straightforward legal questions exactly right and promptly entered life-saving injunctions. A number of U.S. Immigration Judges have also courageously adhered to the rule of law in the face of excruciating and unethical pressure from DOJ politicos and their toadies to cut corners and railroad individuals out of the country without due process.

It’s the Supremes and too many Circuit Court Judges who who have “rolled over” for the regime’s cruel and inhuman nonsense. By doing so, they essentially “pull the rug” out from under those judges who have the encourage and integrity to “just say no” to the regime’s constant overreach. In doing so, the Federal Appellate Courts and the Supremes are actually engaging in undermining the system they serve and encouraging “worst practices” and even worse results. What truly reprehensible “role models” for upcoming lawyers. Fortunately, many newer lawyers are members of the New Due Process Army and are ignoring the poor and immoral examples of judicial spinelessness set by their supposed “elders.”

Life tenure protects the jobs and paychecks of Article III Judges. But, it won’t protect them from justified criticism and the ultimate judgement of history. Bashing the oppressed in behalf of those in power might seem like a good short-term strategy. After all, the deported, the abused, and the dead don’t normally get to “write history.”

But others are watching this travesty unfold and are pledged to “give a voice” to those silenced by the gross dereliction of legal duties and ignoring simple human decency and values by many with power who could have put an end to these obscene human rights abuses. Chief Justice Roger Taney might have been hailed by the White Supremacists of his age for his opinion in Dred Scott. But, he hasn’t “weathered the test of time” too well! Nor will Chief Justice Roberts and others who have been “going along to get along” with cruel and illegal abuses wantonly inflicted by the White Nationalist regime on the most needy and vulnerable among us.

Congrats and much appreciation from all of us in the New Due Process Army to USCIS Asylum Officers for your courage and integrity in the face of tyranny!

Due Process Forever; Complicity & Enabling Cruelty Never!

PWS

03-09-20

WASHPOST EDITORIAL CHANNELS COURTSIDE! — Calls Out “Wolfman” & Other Cowardly Trump Toadies Who Lie & Gloat About Abusing Vulnerable Asylum Seekers! – “In fact, the human suffering caused by Remain in Mexico, a policy Mr. Wolf has promoted, is what has truly been “grave and reckless,” and an insult to American traditions and values.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-real-border-crisis-is-trumps-remain-in-mexico-policy/2020/03/06/02d6964c-5cd8-11ea-9055-5fa12981bbbf_story.html

By Editorial Board

March 7, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST

WITH CHARACTERISTIC bombast, the White House denounced a federal court ruling the other day that threatens the administration’s policy of shifting migrants across the border into Mexico while they await the outcome of their asylum claims. The ruling, said press secretary Stephanie Grisham, could “reignite the humanitarian and security crisis at the border.”Too late, Ms. Grisham. As a direct result of the administration’s policy, known as Remain in Mexico, a full-blown humanitarian and security crisis already has been raging at the border since last spring. But since the victims, violence and costs of that crisis happen to be just south of the border — sometimes nearly within view of it — U.S. officials have successfully averted their eyes. To the Trump administration, a crisis of its own making is out of sight and therefore must not exist.

Sadly, it does exist. Some 60,000 migrants, mainly from Central America, have been returned by U.S. officials to Mexico over the past year to await adjudication of their asylum claims. Many have given up. Those who remain, stranded in squalid shelters and tent camps along the frontier, are easy prey for Mexican crime cartels. More than 1,000 reported cases of kidnapping, rape torture and other violent crimes targeting migrants waiting in Mexico have been documented by Human Rights First, an advocacy group. Independent journalists have also confirmed such cases, often involving Mexican criminals who use the migrants as leverage for ransom demands aimed at their relatives at home or in the United States.

The mass victimization of asylum seekers runs afoul of U.S. law and this country’s treaty obligations, which prohibit subjecting asylum seekers to such risks. “Uncontested evidence in the record establishes that [migrants returned to Mexico under the administration’s policy] risk substantial harm, even death, while they await adjudication of their applications for asylum,” wrote Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled against the policy but let it stand pending further appeals.

. . . .

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

Read the complete editorial at the above link.

It’s great to be on the right aside of history here. But, it would be better to make history by getting essential “regime change” in November – across the board.

DUE PROCESS FOREVER!

PWS

03-08-20

AMERICA’S HOMEGROWN TORTURERS: Physicians For Human Rights Confirms What Many of Us Have Been Saying For Years: Trump Regime Tortures Families With Children With Impunity!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/trump-family-separations-children-torture-psychology?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Amanda Holpuch reports for The Guardian:

The trauma Donald Trump’s administration caused to young children and parents separated at the US-Mexico border constitutes torture, according to evaluations of 26 children and adults by the group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

The not-for-profit group’s report provides the first in-depth look at the psychological impact of family separation, which the US government continued despite warnings from the nation’s top medical bodies.

“As a clinician, nobody was prepared for this to happen on our soil,” the report co-author Dr Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser at PHR, told the Guardian. “It is beyond shocking that this could happen in the United States, by Americans, at the instruction and direct intention of US government officials.”

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Legal experts have argued family separation constituted torture, but this is the first time a medical group has reached the determination.

PHR volunteer psychiatrists evaluated 17 adults and nine children who had been separated between 30 to 90 days. Most met the criteria for at least one mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder “consistent with, and likely linked to, the trauma of family separation”, according to the report.

Not only did the brutal family separation policy create trauma, it was intensified by the families’ previous exposure to violence on their journey to the US and in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

All but two of the adults evaluated by PHR said they had received death threats in their home countries and 14 out of the 17 adults said they were targeted by drug cartels. All were fearful their child would be harmed or killed if they remained at home.

Almost all the children had been drugged, kidnapped, poisoned or threatened by gangs before they left. One mother told investigators she moved her daughter to different schools in El Salvador several times so gang members couldn’t find her and kill her.

In the face of these threats, parents tried to move within the country, change their phone numbers, meet extortion demands and go silent on social media. Ultimately, however, the report said: “Parents were confident that the journey to the United States would result in protection for their children.”

This is not what happened at the border.

The Trump administration instituted a policy in April 2018 that formally enabled the mass separation of children and parents at the US-Mexico border. Trump ended the policy in June 2018, but it has since been revealed that the administration separated thousands of families before and after the policy was in place.

There was also no system to reunite the families, according to an internal government watchdog. The Trump administration also ignored warnings from the nation’s leading medical organizations that family separation would traumatize children and adults.

How Trump’s immigration policies hurt people’s lives – in pictures

People who experience trauma, especially as children, have higher rates of medical conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. They also have an increased risk of psychiatric disorders and detrimental coping behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse.

“Something like that does not just resolve once you’re reunified with your parents, it’s something you carry with you possibly forever,” Mishori said.

One Honduran father described how badly his son reacted the four times a psychologist came to their apartment for treatment in the report: “Each time the son would refuse to cooperate and would throw things at the therapist … It appears his son was afraid of strangers, afraid they will take him away from his father.”

Kathryn Hampton, a senior officer in PHR’s asylum program, said the group PHR had assessed was small but represented separated families from different detention centers and foster homes across the country over a two-year period.

“This is a really disparate group of people and yet their stories are practically identical,” said Hampton. “So that’s very disturbing, to see that level of consistency.”

Amid the despair, PHR has seen an outpouring of support in money and volunteers. Hampton said since the beginning of 2018, its Asylum Network had more than doubled to 1,700 clinicians who provide free medical and psychological evaluations to asylum seekers. There were also three times as many medical school clinics partnering with the organization in that period.

Dr Stuart Lustig, a California-based psychiatrist and longtime volunteer, evaluated a seven-year-old girl from Guatemala. He said when he and the girl did a common evaluation tool called the Squiggle Test, she had one of the more inhibited reactions he had seen in 20 years.

“These kinds of separations were filled with uncertainty, there was no information about where people are going, so it is not surprising at all that these separations ended up being extremely traumatizing for kids and parents,” Lustig said.

In November, a federal court ordered the US to compensate for the trauma separated families faced at the hands of the government. Lustig said there were many treatment options for children who experienced this deep level of trauma in the US, but he and PHR were concerned about how these families would have access to them.

Lustig said: “Part of the work is simply building trust in humanity again.”

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We are diminishing ourselves as a nation; but, in the end, it won’t stop human migration. While the purpose of torture is dehumanization and degradation of the “other,” torture actually increases the humanity of its victims while dehumanizing the torturers and their enablers.

It’s also worthy remembering the next time “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, Kelly, ”Gonzo” Sessions and other noted torturers want to “clean up their images” and capitalize on their misdeeds by speaking to an organization to which you belong or attend. Remember who they REALLY are beneath their facades: unpunished perpetrators of “Crimes Against Humanity.”

PWS

02-26-20

“BABY JAILS” — Georgetown Law Professor Phil Schrag Releases New Book Taking You Inside America’s “Kiddie Gulags” & The Continuing Fight To End The U.S. Government’s Official Policies of Inflicting Child Abuse On The Most Vulnerable Among Us!

Professor Philip G. Schrag
Georgetown Law
Co-Director, CALS Asylum Clinic

Here’s a great “mini review” of Phil’s new book from Professor Kit Johnson on ImmigrationProf Blog:

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Thoughts on Baby Jails by Philip G. Schrag

By Immigration Prof

Kevin has already posted about Baby Jails, the new book from immprof Philip G. Schrag (Georgetown) that explores the detention of migrant children.

I write today as someone who recently devoured this book. Let me start by telling you two things about myself: I hate flying and I am not much of a fan of nonfiction books. Combining these two things, I tend to read a riveting YA novel while flying in an effort to distract myself from how many feet I am unnaturally suspended above the earth’s surface. Yet I recently read Schrag’s book over the course of 3 flights. It was utterly engrossing.

The book is jam-packed with law and yet manages to read like a narrative. You get a feel for characters (Jenny Flores, certain attorneys and judges) and find yourself rooting from the sidelines even as you know victories will frequently fail to live up to their promise.

The book included numerous vignettes and insights that were entirely new to me. For example, did you know Ed Asner was responsible for Flores’ legal representation? Yes, the grumpy old man from Pixar’s Up set out to help his housekeeper’s daughter who was housed with Flores and connected the young women with Peter Schey, founder of the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights (now the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law).

Here’s another one: Leon Fresco represented the government in a 2015 lawsuit brought by Schey to enforce the Flores settlement — arguing that the settlement didn’t apply to children traveling with parents and that the agreement was “no longer equitable.” Leon Fresco! I wrote about him a few years back — he was a key player in the failed 2013 comprehensive immigration reform led by the Gang of Eight.

I’m also impressed by how comprehensive the book is. I recently spoke to a friend who is on the cusp of publishing a book and we talked about how, at some point in the writing process, the publisher will charge by the word for additions of any kind. Yet Schrag’s book must have been edited and added upon right up until the last moment of publication. There is nothing of current import that is left behind (remain in Mexico, asylum cooperation agreements, third country transit).

This book is marvelous. A tour de force. I recommend it to everyone — even terrified flyers. Instead of gasping at every bump in the jet stream you’ll be scribbling away in the margins, furious at what our nation has done to children in the name of immigration enforcement.

-KitJ

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

Thanks, Phil & KitJ, my friends and colleagues. Both of you are amazing inspirations to all of us in the “New Due Process Army.”

The Trump regime seeks to take child abuse many steps further to effectively “repeal by administrative fiat” all asylum protection laws, to insure that as many families and children as possible suffer, die. or are forced to remain in life-threatening conditions outside the U.S., and to abandon any effective cooperative efforts to improve conditions in “refugee sending” countries.

Meanwhile, many complicit Article III Judges (U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee being a notable exception) simply “look the other way” — not THIER kids and families being tortured and killed, so who cares what happens to them — and a depressing segment of the U.S. public just doesn’t care that the Trump regime is putting America among the most notable international human rights abusers. After all, THEY have jobs, THEIR kids aren’t the Trump regime’s targets (yet), and the stock market is going up. So, who cares what dehumanization, intentional human rights abuses, and violations of legal norms are taking place in their name?

Still, I think that Phil, Kit, the Round Table, and many other members of our “New Due Process Army” are clearly “on the right side of history” here. It’s just tragic that so many innocent folks, many of them children, will have to die or be irreparably harmed before America finally comes to its senses and restores morality and human values to our government.

We’ve got a chance to “right the ship” this November. Don’t blow it!

Due Process Forever; Government Child Abusers & Their Enablers Never!

PWS

02-25 -20

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Feb. 24, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JAMELLE BOUIE @ NYT: Is Trump Bringing Back Jim Crow? — This Time All Persons of Color Are Targets For Dehumanization! — “[W]e might be on a path that ends in something that is familiar from our past — authoritarian government with a democratic facade.”

Jamelle Bouie writes for The NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/opinion/trump-authoritarian-jim-crow.html?referringSource=articleShare

When critics reach for analogies to describe Donald Trump — or look for examples of democratic deterioration — they tend to look abroad. They point to Russia under Vladimir Putin, Hungary under Viktor Orban, or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump, in this view, is a type — an authoritarian strongman. But it’s a foreign type, and his corrupt administration is seen as alien to the American experience.

This is a little too generous to the United States. It’s not just that we have had moments of authoritarian government — as well as presidents, like John Adams or Woodrow Wilson, with autocratic impulses — but that an entire region of the country was once governed by an actual authoritarian regime. That regime was Jim Crow, a system defined by a one-party rule and violent repression of racial minorities.

The reason this matters is straightforward. Look beyond America’s borders for possible authoritarian futures and you might miss important points of continuity with our own past. Which is to say that if authoritarian government is in our future, there’s no reason to think it won’t look like something we’ve already built, versus something we’ve imported.

Americans don’t usually think of Jim Crow as a kind of authoritarianism, or of the Jim Crow South as a collection of authoritarian states. To the extent that there is one, the general view is that the Jim Crow South was a democracy, albeit racist and exclusionary. People voted in elections, politicians exchanged power and institutions like the press had a prominent place in public life.

There’s a strong case to be made that this is wrong. “To earn the moniker,” argues the political scientist Robert Mickey in “Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972,” “democracies must feature free and fair elections, the safeguarding of rights necessary to sustain such elections — such as freedoms of assembly, association, and speech — and a state apparatus sufficiently responsive to election winners and autonomous from social and economic forces that these elections are meaningful.”

By that standard, the Jim Crow South was not democratic. But does that make it authoritarian? A look at the creation of Jim Crow can help us answer the question.

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

Jim Crow did not emerge immediately after the Compromise of 1877 — in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in return for the presidency — and the end of Reconstruction. It arose, instead, as a response to a unique set of political and economic conditions in the 1890s.

By the start of the decade, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued in his influential 1955 book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” opposition to “extreme racism” had relaxed to the point of permissiveness. External restraining forces — “Northern liberal opinion in the press, the courts, and the government” — were more concerned with reconciling the nation than securing Southern democracy. And within the South, conservative political and business elites had abandoned restraint in the face of a radical challenge from an agrarian mass movement.

Mickey notes how the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party “clashed with state and national Democratic parties on major economic issues, including debt relief for farmers and the regulation of business.” What’s more, “A Colored Farmers’ Alliance grew rapidly as well, and held out the possibility of biracial coalition-building.” This possibility became a reality in states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, where Populists joined with a majority-black southern Republican Party to support common lists of candidates in “fusion” agreements against an explicitly elitist and white supremacist Democratic Party. Populists and Republicans won their greatest victories in that era in North Carolina, where they captured the state legislature and governor’s mansion, as well as local and county offices.

Democrats, among them large landowners and “New South” industrialists, responded with violence. Democratic paramilitary organizations — called “Red Shirts” — attacked Populist and Republican voters, suppressing the vote throughout the state. In Republican-controlled Wilmington, N.C., writes Mickey, “Democratic notables launched a wave of violence and killings of Republicans and their supporters, black and white, to take back the state’s largest city; hundreds fled for good.”

This basic pattern repeated itself throughout the South for the next decade. Working through the Democratic Party, conservative elites “repressed Populists, seized control of the state apparatus, and effectively ended credible partisan competition.” They rewrote state constitutions to end the vote for blacks as well as substantially restrict it for most whites. They gerrymandered states to secure the political power of large landowners, converted local elective offices into appointed positions controlled at the state level, “and further insulated state judiciaries from popular input.” This could have been stopped, but the North was tired of sectional conflict, and the courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the Democrats.

The southern Democratic Party didn’t just control all offices and effectively staff the state bureaucracy. It was gatekeeper to all political participation. An aspiring politician could not run for office, much less win and participate in government, without having it behind him. “What is the state?” asked one prominent lawyer during Louisiana’s 1898 Jim Crow constitutional convention, aptly capturing the dynamic at work, “It is the Democratic Party.” Statehood was conflated with party, writes Mickey, “and party disloyalty with state treason.”

Southern conservatives beat back Populism and biracial democracy to build a one-party state and ensure cheap labor, low taxes, white supremacy and a starkly unequal distribution of wealth. It took two decades of disruption — the Great Depression, the Great Migration and the Second World War — to even make change possible, and then another decade of fierce struggle to bring democracy back to the South.

It’s not that we can’t learn from the experiences of other countries, but that our past offers an especially powerful point of comparison. Many of the same elements are in play, from the potent influence of a reactionary business elite to a major political party convinced of its singular legitimacy. A party that has already weakened our democracy to protect its power, and which shows every sign of going further should the need arise. A party that stands beside a lawless president, shielding him from accountability while he makes the government an extension of his personal will.

I’m not saying a new Jim Crow is on the near horizon (or the far one, for that matter). But if we look at the actions of the political party and president now in power, if we think of how they would behave with even more control over the levers of the state, then we might be on a path that ends in something that is familiar from our past — authoritarian government with a democratic facade.

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“[T]he courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the [Jim Crow] Democrats.”

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In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

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Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants. There is nothing “fair and balanced” about the court’s double standard that favors the government over everyone else. And, as Sotomayor implies, this flagrant bias creates the disturbing impression that the Trump administration has a majority of the court in its pocket.

—Mark Joseph Stern in Slate.

COMPLICITY WATCH: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out “Men In Black” For Perverting Rules To Advance Trump/Miller White Nationalist Nativist Immigration Agenda! February 22, 2020

PWS

02-23-20

COMPLICITY WATCH: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out “Men In Black” For Perverting Rules To Advance Trump/Miller White Nationalist Nativist Immigration Agenda!

Mark Joseph Stern
Reporter, Slate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/sotomayor-trump-wealth-test-bias-dissent.html

Mark Joseph Stern reports for Slate:

. . . .

Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants. There is nothing “fair and balanced” about the court’s double standard that favors the government over everyone else. And, as Sotomayor implies, this flagrant bias creates the disturbing impression that the Trump administration has a majority of the court in its pocket.

Read the full article at the above link.

Here’s a link to Justice Sotomayor’s full dissent in Wolf v. Cook County:

SotomayorPublicChargeDissetn19a905_7m48

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Here’s a “key quote” from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:

These facts—all of which undermine the Government’s assertion of irreparable harm—show two things, one about the Government’s conduct and one about this Court’s own. First, the Government has come to treat “th[e] exceptional mechanism” of stay relief “as a new normal.” Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting from grant of stay) (slip op., at 5). Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming lim- ited Court resources in each. And with each successive ap- plication, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, its behavior relating to the public-charge

6 WOLF v. COOK COUNTY SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting

rule in particular shows how much its own definition of ir- reparable harm has shifted. Having first sought a stay in the New York cases based, in large part, on the purported harm created by a nationwide injunction, it now disclaims that rationale and insists that the harm is its temporary inability to enforce its goals in one State.

Second, this Court is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process. That is because the Court—in this case, the New York cases, and many others—has been all too quick to grant the Government’s “reflexiv[e]” requests. Ibid. But make no mistake: Such a shift in the Court’s own behavior comes at a cost.

Stay applications force the Court to consider important statutory and constitutional questions that have not been ventilated fully in the lower courts, on abbreviated timeta- bles and without oral argument. They upend the normal appellate process, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won a stay. (Here, the Government touts that in granting a stay in the New York cases, this Court “necessarily concluded that if the court of appeals were to uphold the preliminary injunctio[n], the Court likely would grant a petition for a writ of certiorari” and that “there was a fair prospect the Court would rule in favor of the govern- ment.” Application 3.) They demand extensive time and resources when the Court’s intervention may well be unnec- essary—particularly when, as here, a court of appeals is poised to decide the issue for itself.

Perhaps most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This Court often permits executions—where the risk of ir- reparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.” Mur- phy v. Collier, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (second statement of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 4); see also id., at ___ (ALITO, J., joined by THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., dissenting from grant of stay) (slip op., at 6) (“When courts do not have ad- equate time to consider a claim, the decisionmaking process may be compromised”); cf. Dunn v. Ray, 586 U. S. ___ (2019) (overturning the grant of a stay of execution). Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances— where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision making process that this Court must strive to protect.

I respectfully dissent.

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Of course, the regime’s use of manufactured and clearly bogus “national emergencies” or fake appeals to “national security” is a perversion of both fact and law, as well as a mocking of Constitutional separation of powers. This obscenely transparent legal ruse essentially was invited by the Roberts and his GOP brethren. Roberts somewhat disingenuously claims to be a “student of history.” But, whether he takes responsibility for it or not, he has basically invited Trump & Miller to start a new “Reichstag Fire” almost every week with migrants, asylum seekers, Latinos, and the less affluent as the “designated usual suspects.”

Powerful as her dissent is, Justice Sotomayor actually understates the case against her GOP colleagues. Every racist, White Nationalist, nativist, and/or authoritarian movement in American history has been enabled, advanced, and protected by morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest jurists who have intentionally provided “legal cover” for those official misdeeds. How about “states rights,” “separate but equal,” “plenary power,” and a host of other now discredited legal doctrines used to justify everything from slavery to denying voting, and other Constitutional rights including life itself to African Americans? They were all used to “cover” for actions that might more properly have been considered “crimes against humanity.”

Who knows what legal blather Roberts and his four fellow rightist toadies will come up with to further promote the destruction of humanity and the disintegration of American democracy at the hands of Trump, Miller, Barr, Putin, and the rest of the gang?

But, courageous “outings” like those by Justice Sotomayor will help insure that history will be able to trace the bloody path of needless deaths, ruined lives, wasted human potential, official hate mongering, and unspeakable human misery they are unleashing directly to their doors and hold them accountable in a way that our current system has disgracefully failed to do.

Trump was right about at least one thing: There are indeed “GOP Justices” on the Supremes wholly owned by him and his party. They consistently put GOP rightist ideology and and authoritarianism above the Constitution, human rights, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and simple human decency. Other than that, they’re a “great bunch of guys!”

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

02-22-20

Due Process Forever!

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🤡☠️

“The cells stink. The toilets don’t flush. There’s never enough soap. They give out soap once a week. One bar of soap a week. How does that make any sense?”

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Gabriela León-Pérez, Ph.D.

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Due Process Forever!

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“[T]he courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the [Jim Crow] Democrats.”

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