"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died horribly and needlessly. The Trump administration’s policy of deliberate, punishing cruelty toward Latin American migrants killed him.
That is the only conclusion to be drawn from a shocking report by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica about Hernandez’s death in May at a U.S. Border Patrol station in Texas. I assume the agents and health-care workers who should have given Hernandez lifesaving attention are decent human beings, not monsters. But they work within an intentionally monstrous system that assigned no value to a young Guatemalan boy’s life.
President Trump’s racist and xenophobic immigration policies are not grounds for impeachment; rather, they are an urgent reason to defeat him in the coming election. But at least six migrant children, including Hernandez, have died in federal custody on Trump’s watch. Somebody should be held accountable. Somebody should go to jail.
Hernandez died of influenza and neglect.
He had crossed the Rio Grande without documents with a group of migrants who were almost immediately apprehended by the Border Patrol. In keeping with administration policy, he was separated from his adult sister and processed at a notoriously overcrowded holding facility in McAllen, Tex., where a nurse practitioner found he had a temperature of 103. She diagnosed him with the flu and said he should be taken to a hospital if his condition worsened.
Instead, worried he might infect others at the McAllen center, officials moved him to a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco and locked him in a cell. That was on the afternoon of May 19. By the following morning, Hernandez was dead.
Border Patrol logs show that agents checked on Hernandez several times that night. But ProPublica obtained cellblock video showing that “the only way . . . officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking.”
The video “shows Carlos writhing for at least 25 minutes on the floor and a concrete bench,” ProPublica reported. “It shows him staggering to the toilet and collapsing on the floor, where he remained in the same position for the next four and a half hours.”
Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, claimed that Hernandez’s lifeless body was discovered by agents doing a morning check. But the video shows, according to ProPublica, that it was Hernandez’s cellmate who sent up the alarm.
“On the video, the cellmate can be seen waking up and groggily walking to the toilet, where Carlos was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He [the roommate] gestures for help at the cell door. Only then do agents enter the cell and discover that Carlos had died during the night.”
Let that sink in for a moment. A 16-year-old boy has obviously fallen ill and has a soaring fever. Instead of seeking medical care for him, agents of the United States government — acting in your name and mine — leave him to die on the cold concrete floor of a detention cell.
Hernandez’s death implies more than the apparent negligence of a few overworked Border Patrol agents. It indicts a whole system designed by the Trump administration to deter would-be migrants and asylum seekers by punishing those who do make the journey.
In Hernandez’s case, the fatal punishment was meted out illegally. He had been in custody for six days when he died, but the Border Patrol is only supposed to hold children for 72 hours, at most, before transferring them to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Trump administration instituted a shockingly inhumane policy of separating migrant parents from their children, who in many cases were sent hundreds of miles away. Thousands of children were warehoused in cages, like animals. Toddlers and infants were absurdly expected to represent themselves at immigration hearings whose nature they could not begin to understand.
It is true that officials have had to deal with a flood of migrants who overwhelmed border facilities and personnel. But the Trump administration responded to the surge not with compassion but with purposeful callousness. It is horrific that six migrant children are known to have died in Customs and Border Protection custody since September 2018. It is even worse when you realize there were no such deaths, not a single one, during the eight years of the Obama administration.
According to ProPublica’s report, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez was a bright and engaging boy who captained his school’s soccer team in the village of San Jose del Rodeo. The Border Patrol assigned him the alien identification number A203665141. His body was shipped home for burial.
So why are racist White Nationalist policies that kill kids and then cover up “OK?” Why are Kelly, Nielsen, “Big Mac With Lies,” “Gonzo Apocalypto,” and others responsible for human rights violations running around making big bucks off their misconduct, giving speeches as if they were “normal” former senior executives, and even running for public office rather than facing charges for their misconduct? Others like Chief Toady Billy Barr and “Cooch Cooch” remain in office while spreading their authoritarian lies and attacking our democratic institutions.
And what about complicit Federal Appellate Judges and Supreme Court Justices who have let Due Process, fundamental fairness, and human decency die while looking the other way?
Human rights criminals like Trump & Miller need plenty of “go along to get along” accomplices to carry out their abuse.
Thanks, Eugene, for speaking out when so many others in privileged positions of supposed responsibility have been so cowardly and complicit in the face of tyranny that intends to destroy our democracy and that has already undermined our humanity.
Opinion: Court decisions are falling Trump’s way on a bad immigration policy
Just because two of three pending appeals have gone Trump’s way, that doesn’t mean his ‘public charge’ rule for immigrants is good policy.
Two down, one to go.
Federal judges in three separate circuits issued injunctions — two nationwide, one limited to the 9th Circuit — against President Trump’s pending “public charge” rule, which would make immigrants ineligible for green cards if they sign up for certain public benefits.
On Monday, the 4 Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., joined fellow jurists in the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in lifting injunctions after the federal government persuaded them that it likely had the legal authority to adopt the new restrictions.
That leaves the 2 Circuit Court of Appeals, which is mulling an appeal of a nationwide injunction issued in October by a district court in New York City, as the last barrier.
The lower court decisions hinged on complaints by immigrant advocates and several state attorneys general (including California) that the government violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act by adopting an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that exceeded its authority under immigration law. But two appellate courts now say the government likely had the authority to do what it did.
Even if that is true, that doesn’t make the new rule good policy. Much like the government’s effort to require potential immigrants to prove they could cover anticipated healthcare costs (that also has been held up in the courts), the public charge rule is clearly aimed at reducing the number of poor people admitted to the country and increasing the ranks of the wealthy.
You know, fewer people from those infamous “shithole countries” in Africa, South American and the Caribbean, and more from wealthier nations in Europe, such as Trump expressed favorite, Norway (good luck with that, as my colleague Paul Thornton once pointed out).
In typical fashion, the White House used the Monday decision as a point of attack.
“The 4th Circuit’s lifting of the lawless nationwide injunction imposed against the administration’s public charge immigration regulation is a major step forward for the rule of law,” the White House said. “It is our hope that the 2nd Circuit will, like the 9th and 4th Circuits have already done, lift the meritless nationwide injunction a New York district court has imposed against the rule so that it can be enforced, consistent with the plain letter of the law, for the benefit of all citizens and lawful residents of this country.”
But the “public charge” rule is not a benefit to all. It makes life tougher for people who have already immigrated and who are hoping to be joined by their families — allowed under decades of U.S. policy — and it counters our national economic interest.
“The government estimates that the new regulations would negatively affect 382,000 people, but advocates say that is likely an undercount. And the rules would keep people from coming to the country who economists say are vital for the nation’s future economic growth. President Trump’s xenophobic view of the world stands in sharp contradiction not only to American values, but to the nation’s history. We are a country of immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and as a maturing society we will rely more and more on immigration for economic growth. Research shows that even those who start out in low-wage jobs, and thus are likely to get some financial help from the government, often, over time, learn or improve skills that move them into higher income brackets and help the overall economy.”
So in the administration’s efforts to reduce immigration of all stripes, it continues to push policies that appease Trump’s narrowing base while working against our collective national interest.
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Wonder who’s going to stand up for the legal rights of anti-democracy judges like Wilkinson and Niemeyer once Trump and his White Nationalists no longer need the courts? Would their immigrant ancestors have passed Trump’s nativist tests?
A few times a week, attorney Jodi Goodwin walks across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to a refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, to meet with asylum-seekers. Her clients are among the more than 2,500 immigrants crammed into tents while they wait for U.S. immigration hearings ― often stuck for months in dirty and dangerous conditions.
The forced return to Mexico of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. is one of President Donald Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, yet it hasn’t received nearly the attention that his family separation and prolonged detention practices have.
Since January, under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” initiative ― also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) ― the U.S. government has sent at least 54,000 immigrants to wait for their court dates in Mexican border towns. Instead of staying with relatives in the U.S., families are sleeping in tents for up to eight months, in unprotected areas where infections spread within crowded quarters and cartel kidnappings are commonplace. Family separation ended a year ago. But Trump’s mistreatment of asylum-seekers continues in a different form.
Some parents are so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending their children across the bridge alone, since unaccompanied kids who arrive at the border cannot be turned away under MPP. Since October, at least 135 children have crossed back into the U.S. by themselves after being sent to wait in Mexico with their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In Mexico, many of these migrants don’t have access to lawyers and are forced to plead their cases in makeshift tent courts set up along the U.S. border where overwhelmed judges conduct hearings via video teleconference. The courts have limited public access ― lawyers and translators say that they have been barred from attending hearings. Migrants’ advocates argue that the tent courts violate due process, and immigrant rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the use of videoconferencing.
Goodwin, who has 42 clients, said there is a serious shortage of lawyers willing to represent immigrants staying in another country where crime is rife. She spoke with HuffPost about why the Remain in Mexico policy is even more traumatic than separating thousands of families and why it hasn’t sparked public outrage.
AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAWYERS ASSOCIATION
Jodi Goodwin (center) at the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico.
HuffPost: Immigrant parents forced to wait in Mexico are making the heart-wrenching choice to send their kids to the U.S. alone. What are the conditions like at the camp in Matamoros?
Jodi Goodwin: It smells like urine and feces. There’s not enough sanitation. There’s 10 port-a-potties for thousands of people. Up until recently, there was no potable water available at all. People were bathing in the Rio Grande river, getting sick and, in some cases, drowning. People were seriously dehydrated.
The camp sounds completely unfitting for any human being, let alone children.
It’s a horrific situation to put families in. It’s great to live in a tent for the weekend when you’re going to the lake. It’s not great to live in a tent for months at a time where you don’t have basic necessities.
Are kids getting sick?
The kids are sick every day. I’ve seen all kinds of respiratory illnesses and digestive illnesses. I’ve seen chronic illnesses like epilepsy. I saw a baby that appeared to have sepsis who was forced to wait on the bridge for more than three hours before being taken to a hospital.
And what about the kidnappings? Have you heard of families being taken by cartel members who then try and extort an immigrant’s U.S. relatives for money?
About half of the people I’ve spoken to in Mexico have been kidnapped. The cartel knows if they can grab an immigrant, they’re likely to be able to work out a ransom. If they don’t, then they just kill them.
Any specific examples?
I dealt with one case where a mom from El Salvador and her 4-year-old son were kidnapped within an hour of being sent back to Mexico under MPP. They were taken for eight days before her brother in the U.S. paid the kidnappers $7,000.
The lady was terrified. She was sleep-deprived, food-deprived and water-deprived. She said that the people who had kidnapped her were extremely violent and hit her kid. They were drinking alcohol and raping people at a stash house where several other people were being held.
LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS
Migrants, most of them asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico from the U.S. under the “Remain in Mexico” program, occupy a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, on Oc. 28, 2019.
The last time we spoke, you were on the frontlines of family separation, visiting detention centers where mothers were hysterically crying after being ripped apart from their children. How does the trauma of MPP compare, particularly for parents who are sending their kids across the border alone?
It’s way worse. I can’t with any confidence say that they will ever see their children again.
Why not?
I knew there were legal ways to get out of family separation. We were able to talk with our clients and didn’t have to go off to another country. And for those parents who got through their interviews or their court hearings, we were able to get them back with their kids.
With MPP, the assault is not only on human rights but also on due process within the court systems, which has completely hijacked the ability to be able to fix things. The parents can’t even get into the country to try to reunify with their kids.
Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. Do you think a similar number of families will be ripped apart because of Remain in Mexico?
It could be more. Over 55,000 people have been sent back to Mexico. I’ve talked to so many parents who have sent their kids across. It’s a heart-wrenching decision process that they go through. How do you give up your baby?
It reminds me of Jewish parents who were captives in Nazi Germany and had to convince their kids to get on a different train or go in a different line to save their own lives.
Have you witnessed these separations firsthand?
In November I saw a little boy and his 4-year-old sister sent across the bridge with an older child, who was about 14 years old. The teenager carried the baby boy, who still had a pacifier in his mouth, and the girl was holding onto the older kid’s belt loop.
I was standing on the bridge between Matamoros and the U.S. and I turned around to look down at the bank of the Rio Grande river. Every single parent who has sent their kid to cross tells me the same thing: As soon as they say goodbye and hug their kids, they run to the bank to watch them. [Her voice breaks] I knew there was somebody probably standing on that bank hoping those kids made it across.
Do you still think about those kids?
Oh yeah. The green binky that the little baby was sucking on is knitted in my mind.
VERONICA CARDENAS / REUTERS
The Mexican National Guard patrols an encampment where asylum-seekers live as their tents are relocated from the plaza to near the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros on Dec. 7, 2019.
You’ve been working hundreds of hours a month to try and help people stranded in Matamoros. This work must take a toll on you personally.
I’ve been practicing law for 25 years and the last four to five months of practicing law has broken me.
I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. [Her voice breaks again] It sucks. How do you explain to people that you know they thought they were coming to a place where there’s freedom and safety and where the laws are just, but that’s not the situation? I’m very mad.
Family separation resulted in massive outcry from the public, which eventually pressured the government to end the zero-tolerance policy. Why is MPP not getting the same attention?
There is no public outrage because it’s not happening on our soil. It’s happening literally 10 feet from the turnstile to come to the U.S. But because it’s out of sight and out of mind, there is no outrage. What ended family separation was public outrage. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It had everything to do with shame, shame, shame.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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I’m with you, Jodi!Thanks for your dedication to justice for the most vulnerable!
What’s wrong with this scenario: life-tenured Federal Judges who won’t stand up for the rule of law, Due Process, and Equal Protection in the face of an arrogantly and overtly lawless White Nationalist Regime; DOJ and other U.S. Government lawyers who defend immoral and disingenuous positions in Federal Court, often, as in the Census Case and the DACA Case using pretextual rationales and knowingly false information; dehumanization, with overwhelming racial and religious overtones, of those who deserve our protection and rely on our sense of fairness; undercutting, mistreating and humiliating the brave lawyers like Jodi who are standing up for justice in the face of tyranny; GOP legislators who are lawyers defending Trump’s mockery of the Constitution, human decency, and the rule of law and knowingly and defiantly spreading Putin’s false narratives.
Obviously, there has been a severe failure in our legal and ethical education programs and our criteria for Federal Judicial selections, particularly at the higher levels, and particularly with respect to the critical characteristic of courage. Too many “go alongs to get alongs!” I can only hope that our republic survives long enough to reform and correct these existential defects that now threaten to bring us all down.
Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Where’s our humanity?
We should also remember that many asylum seekers from Africa, who face extreme danger in Mexico, are also being targeted (“shithole countries?”) and abused as part of the Regime’s judicially-enabled, racially driven, anti-asylum, anti-rule-of-law antics at the Southern Border. https://apple.news/AyYSWSXNfSdOm63skxWaUTQ
Also, morally corrupt Trump Regime officials continued to tout “Crimes Against Humanity” as an acceptable approach to border enforcement and “reducing apprehensions!” Will machine gun turrets be next on their list? Will Article III Judges give that their “A-OK?”
We’re actually paying Article III Federal Judges who are knowingly and intentionally furthering “Crimes Against Humanity.” Totally outrageous!
Retired Judge Jeffrey S. Chase, leader of our “Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges” reports:
Waterwell’s wonderful play The Courtroom, in which the script is an actual transcript of an immigration court hearing, and in which three of us (Betty Lamb, Terry Bain, and myself) so far have acted along with stars of Broadway, TV, and film, was named today by the New York Times to its “Best Theater of 2019” list!
Waterwell plans to hold a performance a month through next September or so, so if you are coming to NYC, you can still see it (or maybe act in it!)
BTW, the role played by some of us was the judge performing the naturalization ceremony at the end of the play, in which the entire audience stands and takes the oath. The best anecdote I have heard so far was after a performance at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where a non-citizen audience member asked a member of the Waterwell staff if that was a real judge performing the scene. When told yes, it was, the audience member replied “Well, then I guess I’m a U.S. citizen now!”
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Here’s the link to theNY Times and the summary of “The Courtroom” by Laura Collins-Hughes:
One of the most heart-gripping shows of the year could hardly be simpler: It’s not even a full production, just a staged reading of trial transcripts.
Michael Braun and Kristin Villanueva in “The Courtroom.”Credit…Maria Baranova
In Waterwell’s “The Courtroom,” the accused is an immigrant in danger of deportation, her unassuming American life at risk of being torn apart over a mistake she insists was innocent. The sneaky thing about this riveting re-enactment, though, is that in watching it, we citizens are on trial, too. What kind of a nation are we? How cruel have we permitted ourselves to be?
That work, recently returned for monthly site-specific performances around New York, is part of 2019’s thrillingly vital bumper crop of political theater — shows that implicate the audience with bracing artistry.
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Some of you have probably heard me say that being an Immigration Judge was “half scholar, half performing artist.”
Congrats to Waterwell and to “Roundtable Drama Stars” Retired Judges Jeffrey S. Chase, Betty Lamb, and Terry Bain, all formerly of the NY Immigration Court. Proud of you guys! There are so many ways in which our Roundtable contributes to the New Due Process Army’s daily battle to restore Due Process and save our democracy, beyond filing amicus briefs throughout the country (which we do almost every week, with lots of pro bono help from our talented friends at many law firms)!
Many of those contributions are through the arts. SeeJudge Polly Webber and her triptych “Refugee Dilemma” fiber artwork, which has received national acclaim and recognition. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-48d As I said just today in an earlier blog about the disturbingly poor and tone deaf performance by three life-tenured judges of the 11th Circuit, this really is not about different legal views any more. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-4RO
It’s a moral and ethical battle to preserve our democracy and its commitment to humanity from the forces of evil, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, corruption, and White Nationalism that threaten to destroy it.It so happens that courtrooms are among the most visible battlegrounds. But, it goes far beyond that – to the very fabric of our society and our values — to our very humanity and how we view our fellow human beings.
That’s why complicit judges are so dangerous to the system. As with “Jim Crow,” there is only one “right side of history” here! We deserve better performance from America’s judges, particularly those with Article III protections!
As Laura so cogently said in her review:
[W]e citizens are on trial, too. What kind of a nation are we? How cruel have we permitted ourselves to be?
“The Courtroom” should be required viewing for every judge, law professor, judicial law clerk, law student, legislator, congressional staff member, and immigration bureaucrat in America!
Opinion | The racism behind anti-immigration rhetoric is palpable to every immigrant. Including me.
America is such a young country: It’s only a few hundred years old, and no one who has been here for only a few generations is without an immigrant connection. So, from the outside — from a place like Europe — the idea that Americans are not connected to immigration and our immigrant pasts seems like we are denying ourselves. We sound very self-hating about the very notion of immigration, but we’re actually just confusing racism with a desire to fix the immigration system.
I see that all the time: Things that are being said about immigration and the ideals of immigration are basically just being used as a thinly veiled form of racism. It’s so blatant. The president himself actually said he doesn’t mind people coming from countries like Norway — white people; it’s the people from “shithole countries” he doesn’t want. It seems almost pedantic and obsolete to actually have to talk about the fact that it’s racism.
The contributions of all immigrants has been so derided by our present administration, so I felt that I needed to celebrate immigration rather than have it openly derided. Also, I wanted to try to make people stand back and just see the anti-immigration propaganda that they were being fed, and understand instead how this country is what it is because of immigration. That was the genesis of my cabaret show (now an Audible book) “Legal Immigrant.”
The whole point of the show was to tell my experience from my perspective as immigrant, but also to show that I’m feeling these negative things about being an immigrant and I’m a white man of privilege; I can’t imagine what it must be like for people of color or Muslims. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I would say that, the day I became an American, at least 75 percent of the other people being sworn in with me were people of color.
So I wanted to try and make people stand back from this vehemence and have some fun while analyzing what was going on. I don’t want to be didactic, though: I understand that there are problems with the immigration system; I understand there’s a massive refugee problem in the world. But I will not condone racism or bigotry as part of that debate.
That doesn’t mean I’m not open to dialogue. I like when people engage, that’s why I do theater. I don’t want to just be behind a screen; I actually enjoy the fact that I can hear how people are reacting to me. And I’ve been heckled doing the show — from both sides. I want to hear what people have to say and I totally engage with some people. A couple of times it got quite rowdy, but that’s why I wanted to do these cabarets. They’re good ways to get people to engage and be provoked, and to maybe change their minds … or at least consider other options. And, at the end of the show, I make everyone in the audience sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” so I’m obviously someone who likes bringing people together, even though I also like provoking them.
There’s a thing in this country right now: Any dissent against the president or any disagreement with his views is seen as a red flag and people immediately respond in an aggressive way. People are just screaming at one another right now; it makes it very difficult to engage. And so, aside from trying to celebrate immigration, I’m trying to get people to also stand back and try to not let the tropes of this awful rhetoric blind us to what is actually going on.
This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak. The idea that if you’re pro-immigrant, you’re anti-America, and if you’re anti-immigration, you are pro-America is completely wrong. That’s not just my opinion; if you stand back from it and look at the history of this country, you can’t deny that is the truth.
I really do believe that people have lost the power of analysis in this country because of the duality of the political system: Politics in this country is a team sport. I also think that, with people like Betsy DeVos running the Education Department, it’s going to take a long time before we have a generation who can regain the powers of analysis. It’s all a multilayered effort to dumb us down, in order to be able to brainwash us and feed us propaganda. We need to stand up and take heed before it’s too late.
As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.
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Yup!
It’s hard to have a “debate” or a “dialogue” when one side is wedded to myths and bogus narratives, rather than facts: when one side is driven by what it wants to believe, egged on by those who find it politically advantageous, rather than truth.
One of the worst of the many horrible things about the Trump Regime is that supposedly responsible public officials spread the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee White Nationalist myths and false narratives (see, e.g., “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, “Cooch Cooch,” Mark “Fund My TGIF” Morgan, Matt Albence, EOIR, etc.).
The president would always like to be the president. And he’s bending the law to his will to do so.
November 27 2019 4:41 PM
It is a Thanksgiving tradition to spend time thinking about what one is thankful for; a healthy practice that reminds us to see the world in a positive light. Gratitude is good for us and we should not take it for granted. This year, though, I feel compelled to spend at least a bit of time focusing not only what I am thankful for, but on what I am freaking out about. And the thing that concerns me greatly these days is simple: The president seems to have no intention of leaving office and we seem to have no meaningful plan to address that.
The growing hysteria about imaginary past Ukranian election interference, a ludicrous impeachment defense, will be used to deflect from the emphatically certain future Russian election interference (as well as interference from other nations who reasonably want in on the fun). The Mitch McConnell-dominated Senate has declined to do anything to protect against that certainty and instead is building a judiciary that will permit it. Please consider, as well, that the geniuses among us who claim that we should ignore Trump’s effort to conscript Ukraine into working on his 2020 presidential run, and just defeat him roundly at the polls, are forgetting that Donald Trump’s entire raison d’etre, his past and future destiny, is to manipulate presidential elections in ways that preclude his round defeat at the polls. That is why he worked—as we now know—with Roger Stone to distort the outcome of the 2016 elections, it is also why he withheld almost $400 million in appropriated aid to Ukraine this summer. Insisting that we will let the voters decide this matter in a free and fair election in 2020 has to be the Lucy-football-est move ever, in a three-year festival of Lucy-footballing.
Don McGahn thinks someone else is responsible for taking care of all this, as, evidently, does John Bolton. Robert Mueller made the same mistake last spring, when he decided it was Congress’s responsibility to act on what he had found. And so, to be frank, did most of the impeachment witnesses, many of whom only came forward to corroborate the whistleblower’s anonymous report, and some of whom only came forward only pursuant to a subpoena. Everyone seems to assume vast quantities of courage in other people that they cannot seem to find in themselves. Yet somehow, our greatest worry in the coming days will be how to remain civil with one another over a large bird and its cute little cranberry accessories. The president believes that he is above the law and has foreclosed any attempt to prove otherwise. The president seems unable to conceive of himself losing an election. The president is counting on all of us to merely hope that something somewhere gets done about all this stuff at some point, but to never actually do anything ourselves beyond passing the stuffing around. This year, what I am most thankful for is the people who are trying to do that something themselves.
I’m most thankful for all of my wonderful, dedicated colleagues in our Roundtable of Former Immigration Judges, an important “brigade” of the New Due Process Army. The NDPA does more than “merely hope that something somewhere gets done about all this stuff at some point.”
We’re out there leading “the Resistance” (yes, Billy Barr, not everyone is a sleazy sycophant like you) and fighting the forces of White Nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and “legal nihilism” every day in every possible way! Thanks for all you do my friends and colleagues for America, American justice, and to see that the most vulnerable among us get the rights to which they are legally entitled but which are being denied by a fundamentally dangerous and dishonest regime assisted by complicit courts.
Due Process Forever; Legal Nihilism & Complicit Courts Never!
It was never about protecting the border, rule of law or the U.S. economy. And it was never about “illegal” immigration, for that matter.
Trump’s anti-immigrant bigotry was always just anti-immigrant bigotry.
There’s no other way to explain the Trump administration’s latest onslaught against foreigners of all kinds, regardless of their potential economic contributions, our own international commitments or any given immigrant’s propensity to follow the law. Trump’s rhetoric may focus on “illegals,” but recent data releases suggest this administration has been blocking off every available avenue for legal immigration, too.
Last month, the number of refugees admitted to the United States hit zero. That’s the first month on record this has ever happened, according to data going back nearly three decades from both the State Department and World Relief, a faith-based resettlement organization.
So what happened?
The problem wasn’t that the 26-million-strong global refugee population lacked a single person who met America’s strict screening requirements. No, our admissions flatlined because Trump announced and then delayed signing a new refugee ceiling for the 2020 fiscal year. This delay led to a complete moratorium on admissions.
Hundreds of flights were canceled for approved refugees who had waited years or decades to come — once again, legally — to our shining city on a hill. As the moratorium dragged on, some refugees’ eligibility expired. At least four were minors who have now turned 18. This means they’ve aged out of the resettlement program they were accepted under and now must get back in line, perhaps indefinitely, to reapply under a different system as adults.
By the way, when Trump finally did sign off on that new fiscal 2020 refugee ceiling, it was for a mere 18,000 admissions. That too is an all-time low. The Trump administration has also thrown up other roadblocks for refugees, such as allowing states and localities to veto any resettlements within their borders. (This policy is being challenged in court.)
Trump supporters might argue that, whatever our moral obligations to the world’s destitute and desperate, the president is merely keeping immigrants out to protect our economy.
They are wrong.
The Trump administration’s own research — which it attempted to suppress — found that refugees are a net positive for the U.S. economy and government budgets. That is, over the course of a decade, refugees pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.
The Trump administration is also turning away categories of legal would-be immigrants who are historically admitted because they are economically valuable.
Last week, for instance, we learned that enrollment of new international students has fallen more than 10 percent over the past three years, according to the Institute of International Education.
This is a shame. Higher education has been one of our most successful industries, adding $45 billion to the U.S. economy last year alone. International students spend money in the local economies where they study — on lodging, food, books, entertainment. They are also more likely to pay full freight in tuition. This means they cross-subsidize American students, especially in states where public education funding has fallen.
International students are also more likely to major in high-demand STEM fields, providing U.S. employers with a pipeline of talent that supports the jobs of native-born Americans.
New international student enrollment is declining for a number of reasons, including high tuition and fear of campus gun violence. But the barrier most frequently cited by universities lately is problems with the visa-application process. Meanwhile, other developed countries, such as Canada and Australia, are poaching students who might otherwise have contributed their talents here.
These are hardly the only signs we’re discouraging or denying legions of desirable and legal would-be immigrants.
Denial rates for H-1B visas — awarded to high-skilled workers — have more than doubled since Trump took office, according to tabulations from National Foundation for American Policy. Processing delays for citizenship applications have doubled. Naturalization and visa fees have skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, when families apply for their legal right to asylum at the border, we tell them to await processing in Mexico, in a region so dangerous that Americans are instructed not to visit. (“Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common,” the State Department website advises.)
There, asylum seekers live outdoors, in filthy, flooded, freezing tents. Agonized parents send sick and frostbitten toddlers to cross into the U.S. alone, because they fear they’ll die waiting in Mexico.
And if these desperate families don’t like living in squalor, we tell them they should just return home, get in line and apply through another legal route into the United States. Perhaps as refugees, students or workers.
As though there were still such routes to be found.
It’s institutionalized hate, racism, sexism, lawlessness, and cruelty.
One of the worst things is that’s it’s basically enabled by Federal Appellate Courts who see the same problems as many U.S. District Judge do, but “go along to get along” by “normalizing” Trump’s disgraceful racist behavior and “deferring” to pretextual Executive actions that are merely facades for a dishonest, illegal, and unconstitutional White Nationalist agenda. Sort of reminds me of the bogus “separate but equal” doctrine of judicial cowardice.
Apparently, too many life-tenured Article IIIs in the ivory tower think that they and their privileged circles will escape the gratuitous harm being inflicted on our nation and on vulnerable individuals by a scofflaw executive. Certainly, not unlike the enabling white male judges and Supreme Court Justices who “looked the other way” and thereby enabled Jim Crow regimes to corruptly use our legal system to disenfranchise, murder, oppress, and otherwise abuse African American citizens.
Where has judicial courage among the higher levels of our Federal Judiciary gone?
IN THE TWO YEARS AND 308 DAYS THAT DONALD Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from Texas to California, there is no blockade of unscalable steel slats in heat-retaining matte black, no electrified spikes, no moat and no crocodiles. The animating force of Trump’s entire presidency—the idea that radiated a warning of dangerous bigotry to his opponents and a promise of unapologetic nativism to his supporters—will never be built in the way he imagined.
And it doesn’t matter. In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall.
In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.
Before Trump was elected, there was virtually no support within either party for policies that make it harder for foreigners to come here legally. For decades, the Republican consensus has favored tough border security along with high levels of legal immigration. The party’s small restrictionist wing protested from the margins, but it was no match for a pro-immigration coalition encompassing business interests, unions and minority groups. In 2013, then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment that would have lowered the number of people who qualified for green cards and work visas. It got a single vote in committee—his own. As a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security observed, “If you told me these guys would be able to change the way the U.S. does immigration in two years, I would have laughed.”
. . . .
In November, Cuccinelli was promoted to DHS deputy acting secretary. Kathy Nuebel Kovarik became acting deputy at USCIS and Robert Law, the former FAIR lobbyist, ascended to the head of the policy office. The agency has promised a new flurry of major policy changes before the end of the year. And in what is perhaps the purest expression of the administration’s intentions so far, it started sending Central American asylum seekers to Guatemala with no access to an attorney, no review by an immigration court, far away from the border infrastructure of activists and reporters and lawyers or any form of help at all.
IT’S EASY ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE NONE of the Trump administration’s reforms are entrenched in law, they can be overturned as quickly as they were introduced. And yet even though, in theory, the policy memos can all be withdrawn, the “sheer number of both significant and less significant changes is overwhelming,” said Jaddou, the former USCIS chief counsel. “It will take an ambitious plan over a series of years to undo it all.” Formal regulations, like the third-country asylum rule and public charge rule, if it succeeds, will be especially hard to unravel.
The institutional implications run deeper. The backlog of delayed cases will likely take several years to get under control. The administration has promoted six judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates to the Justice Department’s immigration appeals court, including one who threatened to set a dog on a 2-year-old child for failing to be quiet in his courtroom. Those appointments are permanent.
The refugee program, too, will take years to rebuild. The plunge in admissions caused a plunge in funding to the nine resettlement agencies, which have closed more than 100 offices around the country since 2016. That’s a third of their capacity, according to a report by Refugees Council USA. “The whole infrastructure is deteriorating,” said Rodriguez, the former USCIS director. Because the application process is so lengthy, even if a new administration raises refugee admissions on day one, it would take as long as five years before increased numbers of people actually make it to the United States. Consider that in January 2017, the State Department briefly paused in-bound flights for refugees who had finally made it through the gauntlet of health, security and other checks. As of this summer, some of those refugees were still waiting to leave. While the flights were grounded, they missed the two-month window during which all of their documents were current. When one document expires, it can take months to replace, causing others to expire and trapping the refugee in what the report called “a domino effect of expiring validity periods.”
Even harder to repair is the culture shift within USCIS. New visa adjudicators will remain in their jobs long after the political appointees have gone—kings and queens of their own offices. Employees who were promoted for their skeptical inclinations will stay in those positions, setting priorities for subordinates. The multitude of changes at USCIS are the product of an administration that regards immigration as its political lifeblood. There’s no guarantee—or indication—that any of the potential Democratic nominees would apply the same obsessive zeal to overturning them.
Back in 1924, Johnson-Reed’s supporters never anticipated the Holocaust, and yet they expanded its horrors. We don’t know where our own future is headed, but we live in a time of metastasizing instability. Last year, the United Nations’ official tally of refugees passed 70 million, the highest since World War II. Mass migrations, whether because of violence or inequality or environmental calamity or some murky blend of factors that don’t conveniently fit existing laws, are the reality and challenge of our era. There aren’t any easy solutions. But already, what started as a series of small, obscure administrative changes is resulting in unthinkable cruelty. If left to continue, it will, in every sense, redefine what it means to be American.
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Read Rachel’s entire, much longer, article at the link.
Building Due Process and fundamental fairness is a painstaking incremental process that takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve. Destroying it can happen basically overnight.
This should never have happened if the Supremes had stood up to the Administration’s unconstitutional, factually bogus, racist, religiously targeted “Travel Ban” instead of green-lighting the return of “Jim Crow 2” under a clearly pretextual and fabricated “national security” facade. Judicial complicity and task avoidance enables cruelty and the destruction of democratic institutions (including, ultimately, the independent judiciary). That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is in it for the long run!
Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!
Due Process Forever. White Nationalism Never! Complicit Courts Never!
In the Video Op-Ed above, a former asylum officer reveals why he resigned: to protest President Trump’s policy requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.
Doug Stephens had been an asylum officer for two years. But two days and five interviews that resulted in sending asylum seekers back to danger shook him. He drafted a memo detailing his legal objections to the policy, and circulated it to 80 of his colleagues, his supervisors and a member of Congress. And then he quit.
Mr. Stephens is not the only asylum officer who has grappled with following orders. In interviews with a half-dozen current and former asylum officers across the country, The Times learned of individuals leaving their posts, requesting job transfers and falling into deep depression.
The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
To date, Mr. Trump’s remain in Mexico policy, officially known as one of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has left nearly 58,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico.
Doug Stephens, a lawyer, resigned his post as a Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officer in San Francisco in August.
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See the video at the above link.
Doug “gets it,” and it didn’t take him long. My Georgetown Law students “got it.” They kept asking me how this could be happening when it seemed to be clearly illegal and a violation of the Fifth Amendment as well as international treaties.
But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority of the Supremes don’t get it? A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit didn’t get it? The Ninth Circuit ruminates for months on a question that a District Judge already answered in short order and that most first year law students could figure out in a few minutes. Circuit Courts keep signing off on removal orders produced by a clearly unconstitutional “kangaroo court” system where applicants are denied a fair and impartial decision-maker and the Chief Prosecutor can and does reach in and change results favorable to the applicant that he doesn’t like?
Something is wrong with this picture. And, it starts with intellectual corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our Federal Judiciary.
Trump has never made any secret that he hates refugees and migrants for unconstitutional racial, ethnic, and political reasons, that he intends to keep them out, and that he really doesn’t care about the Constitution, due process (except for himself), the Refugee Act, or international norms. He has utter contempt for Federal Judges and for Congress.
He tried, with spectacular lack of success, to get Congress to change the immigration and refugee laws by holding “Dreamers” hostage. Failing, he just went ahead and plowed through the Refugee Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the UN Convention, harming and killing folks in his wake. Just like he illegally reprogrammed money to build an unneeded, yet politically significant, “wall” that Congress had pointedly refused to fund. Never let the law, the national interest, or democratic institutions get in the way of the Trump White Nationalist political agenda.
The Court’s response: Let’s look the other way, like we did in the “Travel Ban Case.” We’re sort of offended by your unpresidential conduct, but, hey, as long as it doesn’t affect us and our families we’ll just hope you’ll tone it down because we really don’t want to confront you. But, if you “double down” instead, we’ll pretend like it’s never happened. Oh, and by the way, perhaps we can help you heap further abuse on your “Dreamer hostages.” What’s a little more pain and suffering on kids that we can cover up with legal gobbledygook.
One of Trump’s biggest “dissings” of the Supremes: His Administration’s total disregard and effective overruling of the Supreme’s landmark INS v. Cardoza -Fonseca case requiring the Government to implement a generous interpretation of the “refugee” definition for asylum to conform to the plain language of the statute as well as the Congressional intent behind the Refugee Act. Donald Trump and his immigraton thugs don’t even recognize what “generosity” is, and he has basically wiped out the Refugee Act and its asylum provisions without any changes in the law. How’s that for contempt of Court!
Roberts can blabber his head off about whether there are “Obama Judges” or “Trump Judges.” But, actions speak louder than words; until he and his fellow GOP appointees on the Court actually stand up to Trump’s abuses of the law, his babbling will be drowned out by Trump’s tweets.
Trump’s not right about much. But, maybe he has a point in his contemptuously arrogant attitude that the Supremes and most Circuits won’t dare require him to follow the laws or operate within the Constitution, particularly as his continues to “pack” the Federal Courts with his guaranteed judicial toadies.
That’s going to be the legacy of the “Roberts Court” if our Chiefie doesn’t wake up some morning with a new backbone and start joining his liberal colleagues in putting some breaks on Trump’s outrageous scofflaw conduct in the immigration and asylum area and saving some innocent lives in the process.
And the process should start with emphatically rejecting the Solicitor General’s unethical and often factuallyinaccurate and legally defective attempts to invoke the Supremes’ aid in short-circuiting the system any time the Big Baby Boss is upset with lower courts properly reigning in his illegal actions and making him follow the rules like everyone else.
Trump’s “malicious incompetence” often doesn’t accomplish much. He’s a divider, not a uniter.He’s only President of his base. The majority of the Americans can just “go pound sand” as far as he’s concerned.
But one thing he might eventually unite Americans on, for differing reasons, is contempt for spineless Federal Courts who won’t stand up to tyranny. And, that won’t be good for the future of our Constituitional Republic.
Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!
That’s why the “New Due Process Army” could be the last, best hope for American’s survival. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! The “blood of the innocents” will be upon their spiffy robes if the “privileged life-tenured ones” don’t get out of their “ivory tower hazes” and have the guts to do their jobs!
This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a bombshell article revealing troubling emails that White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller sent to editors at Breitbart News, the far-right media outlet previously led by Steve Bannon.
Marie Yovanovitch says state department fails to fight ‘corrupt interests’
The emails, which were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh and predate Miller’s period in the White House, show Miller’s obsession with immigration and his seemingly successful attempts to get Breitbart editors to write anti-immigration stories, some of which were based on openly white nationalist sources like American Renaissance and V-Dare.
The widespread public outrage in response to the revelations is understandable. Miller is the longest serving senior advisor to President Trump who is not related to the president, and is believed to be the architect of the White House’s draconian anti-immigration policies, which doesn’t just target “illegal immigration” but also aims to return to the country to the infamously racist immigration policy of the early 20th century.
In its response to the leak, the White House tried to discredit the source, SPLC, which has had some internal and external problems recently, but is overall a very reliable authority on the US far right (full disclaimer: I regularly collaborate with the SPLC). One White House spokesperson went full “alternative facts” by accusing SPLC of antisemitism, because Miller is Jewish. By doing so, the White House displayed a complete lack of understanding about what antisemitism is, which is no surprise, given that Trump considers himself “the least antisemitic person you’ve ever seen”.
The Democratic responses were predictable and swift as well. Of all the 2020 candidates, Julian Castro went the furthest in condemning Miller – he called him a “neo-Nazi” – but all agreed that he should resign from the White House.
But would Miller’s resignation change anything? While Miller might be behind the concrete policies that harm immigrants, he is not the main white supremacist in the White House. And Trump can easily find someone else to do Miller’s work, particularly now that almost the whole Republican party has fallen in line with their president.
It also externalizes white supremacy, as if it lives in the margins. But it has been hiding in plain sight within the Republican Party for decades. Miller wrote the emails to Breitbart when he was still an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been a consistent voice of white supremacy in Congress since 1997. And the Alabama Senator was not alone in Congress either. Representative Steve King has been the most open and unapologetic voice for the cause since 2003. Others, like representatives Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher, might not be as open in their support, but they all encourage white nationalism to varying degrees.
But white supremacy in the Republican party is not limited to just these individual congressmen and women. It runs much deeper than them. White supremacy was at the core of the “Southern Strategy”, dating back to the unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which was formative for the future conservative movement. Perfected by President Richard Nixon, with the help of speechwriter Pat Buchanan, dog whistles to white supremacy have been at the heart of virtually every Republican campaign since the 1970s.
Talking of Buchanan, more than 25 years ago he gave his now famous “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention. While the term has become mainly linked to the religious right, Buchanan is at least as much a white supremacist as a Christian fundamentalist. In many ways, he is the intellectual father of the Trump administration, personifying Mike Pence and Donald Trump in one.
This is why calling for Stephen Miller’s resignation wouldn’t change much. Neither Miller nor Bannon “made” Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief. And Trump is not the only problem either, as Joe Biden seems to believe. He won the Republican primaries, and presidential elections, not despite white supremacy but because of it.
In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia
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Mudde’s conclusion is worth repeating:
In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy. It is the basis of its electoral support and this will not change in the near future. By focusing on the most brazen examples, like Stephen Miller, Democrats strengthen the misguided belief that the Republican party is a good party with some bad apples. Ultimately, this will help the Republicans more than the Democrats.
Let’s take a real life example. Joe Biden clearly would be a huge upgrade over Donald Trump as President, whether or not he’s your “first choice.” But, one of Biden’s “selling points” has been his long experience in the Senate and his good working relationships and mutual respect with GOP Senators.
Yet recently, Trump has shamelessly slandered and blatantly lied about Biden while besmirching his character. This is all without a scrap of actual supporting evidence.
Under the circumstances, you would certainly expect some of Biden’s long time GOP colleagues to speak up in his defense and vouch for his character. Almost all Republicans know that Trump is a chronic liar and everything he says about Biden is untrue.
Yet, not a murmur of support or sympathy from the GOP for their “old buddy Joe.” That would cast at least some doubt on Biden’s optimism that he could work successfully with Mitch McConnell and the GOP in the Senate to get bipartisan things done for the country.
More likely, the GOP would treat him exactly like they treated his former “boss” President Obama. That means opposing and mischaracterizing everything, regardless of merit, in an attempt to make Biden a one-term President and to play to the “Trump base.”
Even if Trump loses the next election (by no means a given), his white supremacist base will remain critical to the GOP’s future. Without its enthusiastic support, they become perhaps a “20% party” until they finally cease to exist.
With it, the GOP has a decent chance of imposing some semblance of minority rule over the majority of Americans for decades to come, even if they don’t always control the White House. Given the GOP’s strength in lesser populated states which are “over represented” in the Senate, they also have a decent shot at indefinitely controlling the Senate and therefore the appointments process as well as the judiciary.
Consequently, Trump or no Trump, there is little incentive for the GOP to abandon white supremacy as their fundamental identity. Perhaps that counsels a Democratic strategy of less hand wringing about how to reach out to GOP voters and more of a focus on how to get new Democratic voters registered, get out the Democratic vote, hold the party together (note that the GOP’s “hard right” under Trump didn’t by any means split the party as many pundits had predicted), and use their potential numerical advantages, their wider appeal to a diverse America, and their more positive message to restore at least some semblance of majority rule.
Recapturing the White House certainly won’t solve all of America’s problems. But, it’s an important start.
It could be America’s last chance for survival as a Constitutional Republic.
Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.
The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”
Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)
Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.
But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.
Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)
Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.
The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.
Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.
Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives
As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.
“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.
The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”
. . . .
Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.
. . . .
“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
. . . .
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Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.
Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.
“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”
Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.
“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”
President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.
Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.
Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.
Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”
Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.
As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.
The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.
Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.
Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.
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Mary Papenfuss Contributor HuffPost
Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:
Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.
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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.
Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?
One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!
But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.
Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.
George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”
Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.
But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.
Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.
Republican lawmakers seem to be having self-esteem issues.
The legislature, after all, is an equal branch of government with constitutionally granted powers. Lately, nearly all of those powers have been siphoned off by the president and his team of unelected bureaucrats. Yet, again and again, GOP lawmakers meekly submit to this constitutional castration.
To wit: Congress’s power of the purse? Gone. Regardless of how much money Congress appropriates for, say, a border wall or military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has made clear that he’ll ignore the number and pencil in his own.
Congress’s power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? Hijacked by a president who cites bogus “national security” rationales to impose tariffs whenever he likes.
Congress’s duty to “advise and consent” on major appointments? Cabinet and other senior government posts that require Senate confirmation have been atypically littered with “acting” officials instead. In fact, while immigration is ostensibly the president’s signature issue, Trump hasn’t had a single Senate-confirmed director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since he took office. And though Democratic lawmakers may complain, nothing will change as long as Republicans control the Senate.
Which brings me to the most significant power Trump has stripped from Congress: its lawmaking authority. This is best illustrated by the administration’s actions basically rewriting immigration law wholesale, with nary a peep from GOP legislators.
Sure, on some immigration matters, Congress has relinquished its responsibilities, effectively giving Trump the ability to contort immigration policy as he sees fit.
Consider the “dreamers,” the young immigrants brought here as children who know no other country than the United States. They have long been in a legal limbo. Congress could resolve that limbo swiftly and easily by granting the dreamers permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship. Thiswould have the support of majorities of voters from both parties, and the Democratic-controlled House has already passed such legislation.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate wrung their hands and watched helplessly from the sidelines as Trump announced his decision to kill the Obama-era program that protects the dreamers from deportation. Based on a hearing this week, the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold the president’s decision. Yet, despite claiming to care about the issue, Republicans remain unwilling to act.
Similarly, Congress long ago gave the president authority to set the annual cap on refugee admissions. Not surprisingly, if disappointingly, the Trump administration has used that authority to ratchet the ceiling down to a record low of 18,000. For context, during President Barack Obama’s last year of office, the ceiling was 110,000.
But there are other areas of immigration law on which Congress has acted, definitively and clearly, with legislative language that leaves little room for maneuvering by the executive. The Trump administration has flouted these laws anyway.
Take asylum law.
“Refugees” and “asylum seekers” both refer to immigrants fleeing violence or persecution, but, technically, “refugees” apply for sanctuary while still abroad, and asylum seekers apply while in the country of their destination. Unlike with refugeeadmissions, there are no legal caps on the number of people who may qualify for and receive asylum. The law does not allow the executive branch to set them, either.
But the Trump administration has effectively set its own limits.
Last year, for instance, the Trump administration tried to ban people from applying for asylum if they crossed between ports of entry — as most asylum seekers are now forced to do, because the administration has severely throttled (or “metered”) the number of people who may apply through a given port of entry per day.
This “asylum ban” was blocked by the courts — because Congress has explicitly said asylum seekers can apply whether or not they entered the United States “at a designated port of arrival.”
“The law is crystal, crystal clear on this,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
With virtually no pushback from Republicans in Congress, Trump administration then implemented a sort of asylum ban 2.0. This one disqualifies asylum seekers who passed through another country on their way to the United States without first applying for asylum there. A separate legal challenge — one among many — is now working its way through the courts.
A host of other changes designed to serve as a backdoor limit on asylee admissions have also been announced in recent weeks. Last week, the administration announced a new processing fee for asylum seekers, which would effectively disqualify families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This week, it proposed a rule denying many asylum seekers authorization to work while their cases are being adjudicated, which can take years. This will force more immigrants into the shadows, contrary to Congress’s intentions.
The Trump administration keeps scolding desperate immigrants to shape up and “follow the law.” When will cowardly members of Congress insist that the president do the same?
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Catherine and some other reporters “get it” as to what Trump is doing to the law, our democratic institutions, and our Constitution. How come Federal Appellate Judges, Supreme Court Justices, and GOP legislators stick their collective heads in their sand and pretend not to understand the true long-term ramifications of what they are letting Trump do? Why aren’t they protecting our Constitutional and civil rights, not to mention human rights?
It’s all part of “Dred Scottification” – the degradation and dehumanization of individuals while stripping them of their rights combined with a constant barrage of outright lies and false narratives. And, contrary to the apparent belief of many “Trump Toadies” throughout our system and the electorate, once Trump turns on them, which he eventually will, the rights they counted on for protection will be long gone. The total lack of empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate the pain and suffering of others, is perhaps the worst aspect of the Trump kakistocracy.
Thanks, Catherine, for your courageous and insightful writing!
Across the years of a presidential administration, the churn of politics and policy brings certain men and women to the top of U.S. politics. The past few days have demonstrated the paths to preferment and influence in the Trump years.
First is the case of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump and the administration’s unofficial liaison to the alt-right world.
Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.
All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.
Second, there is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the tireless, tendentious, often bellowing chief defender of Trump during the impeachment hearings.
Jordan is not, of course, alone in his heroic sycophancy. GOP Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.), Mark Meadows (N.C.) and others try to equal him. Together they update Alexander Pope: Fools rush in where Mick Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani fear to tread.
But Jordan has mastered the art of talking utter rubbish in tones of utter conviction. His version of the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry? Rather than committing corruption, Trump was fighting corruption. Military assistance was suspended, in Jordan’s telling, while the president was deciding whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “legit” in his determination to oppose corruption. When Trump found that Zelensky was the “real deal,” the aid was released.
This is a bold but flimsy lie, of the type Trump has made common. Why, in this scenario, would Trump try to secure specific commitments from Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and to examine Trump’s conspiracy theory about Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election? Are we supposed to believe that Trump employed these as random, theoretical examples of corruption that a worthy, crime-fighting leader would root out? And was the release of U.S. aid just two days after Congress was notified about the whistleblower report a coincidence as well?
Jordan asks us not to accept additional facts but to live in a substitute reality. Almost everyone who participated in these events — both professional staff and political appointees — has affirmed that Trump was employing leverage to secure his political objectives. It is the plain meaning of the reconstructed transcript of Trump’s call to Zelensky.
But none of this matters to Jordan or his colleagues. Consistency and coherence are beside the point. Their objective is not to convince the country; it is to maintain and motivate the base, and thus avoid Trump’s conviction in the Senate. The purpose is not to offer and answer arguments but to give partisans an alternative narrative. And the measure of Jordan’s success is not even the political health of his party (which is suffering from its association with Trump); it is the demonstrated fidelity to a single man.
The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.
Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.
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Let’s hear that again:
Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.
Yup!
This also confirms what we already knew about Miller’s “role model,” his former boss and White Nationalist nativist “mentor’ Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. He’s someone who should have been disowned by the GOP ages ago and who has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” his total unfitness too hold public office!
The 81-page report released Thursday compiles whistleblower accounts and media reports to provide an overview of the administration’s crackdown on migrants seeking asylum in the United States and attempts to curb migration to the southern border.
In one email, dated August 12, 2019, and obtained by Merkley’s office, an asylum officer denounced one of the administration’s policies as “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States.” The email was first reported by The Washington Post.
<img alt=”Trump administration proposes rule that would deny work permits to some asylum seekers” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190813111158-ken-cuccinelli-presser-uscis-081219-large-169.jpg”>
The officer was referring to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols program, which requires some migrants to stay in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. The program is being challenged in court, but has been allowed to proceed for the time being.
It’s not the first time asylum officers have expressed frustration over the program, which advocates argue puts migrants, many of whom are from Central America, in harm’s way.
In June, the union representing US asylum officers asked a federal court to end the policy, saying the directives are “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”
Merkley’s report, titled “Shattered Refuge,” emphasizes the frustrations held by some officials in the administration who are responsible for carrying out its policies and raises alarm over departmental actions that it alleges exacerbated the crisis at the southern border.
The report included details about:
Six pregnant women in Customs and Border Protection custody were sent back to Mexico in May to await their immigration proceedings despite being several months pregnant, according to whistleblowers. The report cites a letter the American Civil Liberties Union directed to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general in September elevating concerns about the placement of pregnant women in the Migrant Protection Protocols program.
The former head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum division, John L. Lafferty, was pushed out by then-acting Director Ken Cuccinelli. Whistleblowers perceived this to be “the result of acting as a committed, civil servant who played it by the book,” according to the report.
In April, US Citizenship and Immigration Services moved to raise the standard for credible-fear screenings, the first step in the asylum process. A lawsuit was filed in June challenging the change.
The Trump administration assigned CBP agents to conduct credible fear interviews in what appeared to be an attempt to curb the number of asylum applicants, the report states. (More than 50 Border Patrol agents are conducting credible fear screenings, according to USCIS. As of October 2019, Border Patrol agents have completed around 2,000 credible fear determinations.)
The report states that limiting entry at CBP ports of entry, a practice known as “metering,” has led to long wait lines and put migrants at heightened risk.
“America should be a land of hope and refuge — the place President Reagan called a shining city on a hill. We’ve seen the betrayal of that vision by the Trump administration’s intentional infliction of trauma on children and families as a warning to others to stay away,” Merkley said in a statement. “Their draconian actions were so contrary to American values and law that at least one whistleblower felt they could not morally or legally carry out their orders.”
The Trump administration has argued that the nation’s immigration system has incentivized people to journey to the southern border. President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department and DHS in April to propose regulations to staunch the flow of migrants, many of whom claim to be seeking asylum in the United States.
Within the last week, USCIS, an immigration agency within DHS, has rolled out proposed changes that would deny work permits to asylum seekers who cross the border illegally and apply a charge to asylum applications, among other things. Immigrant advocates and lawyers have pushed back on the proposed regulations, arguing that the rules penalize a swath of migrants who are seeking refuge in the United States.
Merkley’s report acknowledges the proposed changes to the asylum system and also resurfaces documents that found the controversial policy that led to the separation of thousands of families at the US-Mexico border was intended to deter migrants from coming to the border. It also reflects on the overcrowding at CBP facilities over the summer.
Here’s the information on the House Oversight hearings of “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico,” dishonestly referred to by DHS as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”):
EXAMINING THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF DHS’ ‘REMAIN IN MEXICO’ POLICY
Make no mistake about it, the bogus MPP never had anything whatsoever to do,with “protecting” migrants! No, it was designed specifically to harm (kill on some occasions), punish, and “deter” asylum applicants from exercising their rights under U.S. and international law.
Immigration Judge Daniel Gilbert apparently stood up & walked out of court today. He reportedly quit in protest after nearly twomonths of seeing the human carnage that the regime has unleashed through its #MigrantPersecutionProtocols described below
Hero.
Here’s more:
Adolfo Flores
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Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the immigration judges union, didn’t offer details on what led Judge Gilbert to take another job at DHS but said he “Has accepted a position with DHS and due to conflicts issues…he can no longer preside over a docket.” https://twitter.com/immcivilrights/status/1195026305449746432 …
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Sadly, I’d have too wonder how long Judge Gilbert will last at USCIS in the age of the “Wolfman” and “Cooch Cooch.”
