"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.
TORNILLO, Texas — Having immigrant teens live in the “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, was always supposed to be a temporary solution, after the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border meant the government didn’t have enough beds in the shelter system.
It opened in June, and the contractor running the site had a 30-day contract. At that time, 326 children were being housed there.
But four months after its opening, the shelter 30 miles outside of El Paso has grown into a bustling town. It now holds nearly five times its initial population — roughly 1,500 teens — and its contract has been extended until at least Dec. 31.
The tent city’s purpose has changed as well. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for the care of unaccompanied child immigrants, say none of the teens currently housed there were detained as a result of family separations. It now holds immigrant children who crossed the border without an adult, in theory as a last stage of their stay in the vast US shelter bureaucracy.
And as the shelter expands, administrative issues have cropped up concerning legal representation and FBI background checks — extending many teens’ stays longer than what HHS says is the average.
Tornillo now has a new football field, math and English classes, and more than 100 tent structures. Staffers zipped around in carts between dozens of portable offices offering mental health services, emergency medical care, legal services, and even a barber. A huge emergency tent has been turned into a sleeping hall for 300 teenage girls, decorated with paper chains and lanterns.
BuzzFeed News toured the Tornillo facility for the second time on Friday, as part of a group of reporters. Like the first and only other tour, instructions were strict. No photographs or recording devices were allowed, and reporters were not permitted to use the names of employees or speak with the teens living at the camp — though HHS was more lenient on the last rule during Friday’s tour. The only photos were provided by the government.
HHS
The facility in Tornillo, Texas.
“I frankly thought we were done here in July,” the facility’s incident commander, who works for the contractor BCFS, told reporters Friday. He spoke from a new command center that is nearly triple the size of the office he occupied in June.
“I’m still here, ’cause otherwise, where are these kids going?” the commander said.
Only children between ages 13 and 17 stay at the Tornillo facility, which is now the largest in the HHS’s nationwide system. Pregnant teens, and teens requiring behavioral medication, are not allowed — “we’re too big, too high-profile,” the incident commander explained.
Officials said the average length of time that teens spend at Tornillo is 25 days. Yet many of the teens living at the camp have spent weeks or even months in HHS shelters before arriving at Tornillo. In order to clear out those other facilities, teens are sent to the tent shelter to await final processing before they are released to a sponsor in the US.
“This is a last stop, if you will,” said Mark Weber, a spokesperson for HHS.
Ten teens in Tornillo BuzzFeed News encountered had spent between three to five months in government detention — significantly more than the 59 days that HHS says is the average stay for an unaccompanied immigrant minor in its care. That average is up from 48 days in 2017, and around 30 days during the Obama administration.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
And even after arriving in Tornillo, the young occupants find themselves facing a fresh final set of administrative hurdles that threaten to complicate or delay their stay in the US shelter system.
One of the teens BuzzFeed News spoke with last week, a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala, told reporters that she’d been in Tornillo exactly one month on Saturday. Before being transferred to Texas, she had spent four months in an HHS shelter in Miami, meaning she’d already spent five months in HHS care. She was uncertain how much longer she’d remain there.
Her brother, who lives in Texas and had been in the US for a decade, is trying to sponsor her, which should secure her release. But he is undocumented, and he told her that her caseworker is not sure if he will be able to act as a sponsor.
She didn’t want to go back to Guatemala, where her parents are. “I suffered a lot in the journey [to the United States], and what, for nothing?” she said.
Another teenage girl standing next to her told reporters she’d also come to Tornillo from the Miami shelter at the same time, and that she’d crossed the border four months earlier.
The delays stem in part from a new requirement — that the FBI perform a fingerprint background check — imposed by the Trump administration on family members and other adults who wish to sponsor an unaccompanied immigrant minor.
Those changes are delaying how long kids are staying in care, and have created the ongoing need for Tornillo to operate as a temporary shelter to handle the overflow from permanent HHS shelters, said the incident commander. He added that more than half of the children at the Tornillo shelter are there because of FBI delays.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
“It is the extra precaution that HHS has put in place for sponsors,” said the incident commander on Friday. “That is absolutely what has caused this, without any question whatsoever.”
While he applauded the extra care HHS has taken to ensure the safety of unaccompanied minors, the incident commander criticized the length of time the FBI takes to do fingerprint checks. On Friday, 826 of the kids in Tornillo were still awaiting the results of fingerprint checks, the final step needed before they are released, he said.
“I think it should be done quickly,” the incident commander said. “I don’t understand why it’s taking so long. It seems like a system issue. … That is frustrating to me.”
He noted that it takes time to do background checks, but said that HHS is “working through the process [with the FBI] and working to speed it up.” He did not provide further details.
Asked if the teens who end up in Tornillo spend longer than the average stay in the shelter system, Weber replied: “I don’t think that’s [true]. … These kids are very close to being released.”
Weber also argued that the need for the Tornillo facility is “driven by the number of kids crossing the border” — which this year, he said, is set to be the third highest on record. Around 50,000 unaccompanied minors are expected to cross the border this year.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
On Thursday, BuzzFeed News visited the juvenile immigration proceedings in downtown El Paso. Eleven teenage boys from the Tornillo facility, aged between 15 and 17, had been given notice to appear in court on that day.
The boys were dressed in new, matching navy and white polo shirts, denim jeans or khakis, and black, braided leather belts. They had fresh haircuts.
The judge asked the boys if they had copies of their Notices to Appear, a charging document issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing them of removal proceedings, and read the date on which each NTA had been issued. Dates ranged from June 6 until July 1, meaning the teenagers had been in HHS care for a minimum of over three months — longer than the average stay.
None of the boys had legal representation at the court hearing — they were just accompanied to court by a BCFS employee. All of them asked the judge to delay their cases so they could find an immigration lawyer. They were given until late January to do so.
The HHS spokesperson said it’s just not his agency’s job. “Yes, children are appearing in court, but that is not part of HHS’s responsibility,” Weber told reporters on Friday. “Those legal options are pursued basically after they are released from us.”
Juveniles facing immigration proceedings do not have the right to a government-appointed lawyer. Weber said the children who appeared in court would absolutely have received legal help beforehand.
Everyone in HHS care receives a “Know Your Rights” training, Weber said, and upon arrival to Tornillo, the teenagers are again reminded that they are able to speak with a lawyer. Ten legal representatives — a combination of lawyers and social workers from different legal organizations — are on hand on weekdays in Tornillo to meet with children.
But those lawyers don’t formally represent them. They offer advice to the children.
And those representatives only meet with detainees if the teen specifically asks to see a lawyer, the incident commander said. He estimated that of the approximately 3,100 teens who have been housed at Tornillo since it opened, only about 400 had requested and received a meeting with a legal representative.
Christopher Smith / HHS Photo Christopher Smith
Moreover, to organize a meeting with the lawyers, the children must fill out a form — a difficult task for many of the children at Tornillo. The incident commander said most of the facility’s residents are at a fourth-grade learning level.
Asked how children in the care of HHS with very little education were supposed to be able to navigate the legal system alone, or even the process of arranging and interacting with a lawyer, Weber acknowledged that “negotiating the legal system is incredibly difficult.”
Although the incident commander is hopeful the facility will close on Dec. 31, Weber didn’t commit to that deadline. “It depends how many kids come,” he said.
The facility — its population peaked at 1,637 on Sept. 28 — has 1,400 beds on standby in two giant tents. This is in case the Homestead shelter in Florida — another temporary facility that opened during the family separation crisis — needs to evacuate due to a hurricane.
In immigration court Thursday, Judge Robert S. Hough, who oversees all juvenile immigration proceedings in El Paso, asked the BCFS employee assisting the children before him about Tornillo’s supposed Dec. 31 closing date.
“Hurry up and wrap it up before you get any bigger,” suggested the judge.
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Once the smokescreen of all the Trump lies and racism clears, how could we ever explain to future generations what we have done to the most vulnerable among us and to children, young people, and young families that are our world’s future? I guess it will go along with explaining how have we let Trump and his grifter buddies destroy, pollute, and poison the universe that also belongs to future generations.
Elsa, a Guatemalan living in Southern Mexico, knew something was wrong. Her husband began traveling a lot without explanation, and physically abusing her and their two kids. When she eventually figured out that he’d gone to work for a cartel, she left him. But in 2016, the gang came after her to collect on debts the ex-husband had skipped out on. She fled to other Mexican towns, but the cartel men tracked her down. Then she went back to Guatemala, but they found her there, too. Finally, in September, Elsa decided to gamble on Uncle Sam — but the foot of the Reynosa-Hidalgo bridge was as far as she would get.
The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that asylum-seekers should follow the rules by turning themselves in at ports of entry. Elsa tried to do just that. As a legal Mexican resident, she even had proper documentation for herself and her two children. Still, a Mexican customs agent stopped her at the turnstile and told her she couldn’t pass. He yelled at her that they were abusing their Mexican status by seeking asylum in the United States, and he threatened to tear their papers to shreds. Scared, the family slunk back into narco-ravaged Reynosa, and into total uncertainty.
The story of Elsa, whose name the Observer has changed for her protection, was included in a petition filed last week with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a 59-year-old organization based in Washington, D.C., that investigates abuses in the Americas and issues recommendations to offending nations. The petition, filed by immigration attorneys working in the Rio Grande Valley, describes a systematic conspiracy between U.S. and Mexican customs agents to prevent asylum-seekers from requesting protection. The attorneys are asking the commission to tell both nations to stop stonewalling the law-abiding migrants.
U.S. customs agents blocking entry at the international boundary line on the Gateway International Bridge, Brownsville, July 2. COURTESY/FILING WITH THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Since June, the lawyers allege, Mexican customs officials along the Texas-Mexico border have been doing something virtually unprecedented: stopping asylum-seekers from entering the bridge, and if the migrants lack proper Mexican travel documents, the Mexican agents detain and even deport them. If an asylum-seeker makes it onto the bridge, U.S. customs officials call their Mexican counterparts to retrieve them; the Observerdocumented this phenomenon in a June story cited in the petition. In Nuevo Laredo, according to sworn affidavits from two Central American asylum-seekers, Mexican agents have demanded bribes of $500 per person to get onto the bridge. And in September, in Reynosa, they also started rejecting people, like Elsa, with Mexican papers.
“This petition highlights the reality of the U.S. working hand in glove with the Mexicans to completely shut down bridges, in violation of a number of human rights prohibitions,” said Jennifer Harbury, a longtime Rio Grande Valley attorney. Harbury has spent months documenting problems at the bridges and provided the majority of the information in the filing. According to Harbury and an affidavit from longtime Brownsville activist Mike Seifert, the international collaboration began after public outcry over long lines of asylum-seekers baking in the sun for weeks on the U.S. side of the bridges.
Harbury says in the filings that numerous Mexican agents at the Reynosa bridge have privately told her that the two governments are working together, and they’ve expressed frustration at doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Two other witnesses — a journalist and an activist — wrote similar affidavits. But U.S. customs agents have told Harbury that the Mexicans are acting alone, and a September letter she sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has gone unanswered. The United States began pressuring Mexico to stop migration at its southern border in 2014, and last month, Trump signaled he would redirect $20 million in foreign aid to beef up Mexico’s deportations. Neither U.S. nor Mexican immigration officials responded to Observer requests for comment.
The United States is unlikely, Harbury said, to heed the eventual request from the human rights commission. For one, the U.S. government rejects the authority of the commission’s enforcement arm, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. (The same court recently ruled that many Latin American countries must recognize same-sex marriage.) But Harbury has higher hopes for Mexico, which is subject to the court and has an incoming leftist president in Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “I think the new president of Mexico is not going to want the commission saying they’re running dogs for Uncle Sam,” she said.
If Mexico stops its collaboration, then the United States would have to do its own “dirty work” of stopping asylum-seekers, and hold all liability for the potentially illegal actions. In California, a lawsuit was filed last year after border agents briefly turned away asylum-seekers all along the U.S.-Mexico border on the false premise that Trump’s inauguration had abolished asylum. That suit continues to play out.
In turning the bridges into hostile territory for asylum-seekers, the Trump administration has made a mockery of its own stated immigration goals.According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the point of the “zero tolerance” policy was to force families to use official ports of entry instead of crossing illegally. But U.S. customs agents started stonewalling asylum-seekers at the bridges. Now, with the threat of separation gone and the bridges still a dicey proposition, families have responded accordingly: More are crossing the river illegally to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Immigration officials, in turn, are using this apparent spike to sound the alarm about another border crisis.
Meanwhile, many asylum-seekers from Central America, Africa and the Caribbean remain stranded, paralyzed by uncertainty in dangerous Mexican border towns where gangsters prey on refugees. In an affidavit, one would-be asylum-seeker wrote that she hears “shooting day and night” in Reynosa; another simply wrote, “many people die here.” As Harbury, the attorney, put it, “they’re like a snowball in Hell down there.”
Gus Bova reports on immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border and grassroots movements for the Observer. He formerly worked at a shelter for asylum-seekers and refugees. You can contact him at bova@texasobserver.org.
Jeff Sessions is a key part of this legal charade and scofflaw behavior. He disingenuously asserts that individuals should be using the legal system while doing everything in his power to make it impossible for individuals to present their asylum claims at ports of entry and have them fairly heard by fair and unbiased judges in Immigration Court.
The results of these shortsighted, cruel, illegal, and ultimately ineffective policies are to: 1) enrich smugglers, 2) make the trip more dangerous for asylum seekers, virtually insuring that more will die or be abused during the journey, and 3) to enlarge and promote the already robust “extralegal system” for immigrants and refugees. When orderly processing and the legal system for immigration are shut down or made less “user friendly,” the result is unlikely to be less overall immigration; just less immigration through legal channels and more “extralegal immigration” driven by Trump, Sessions, and their fellow White Nationalists.
Remember, we can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are doing so under Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, & Miller), but that won’t stop human migration!
Many thanks to Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis Immigration Community for forwarding to me this timely and excellent reporting.
Nick Miroff, Josh Dawsey, & Maria Sacchetti report for WashPost:
The White House is actively considering plans that could again separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to reverse soaring numbers of families attempting to cross illegally into the United States, according to several administration officials with direct knowledge of the effort.
One option under consideration is for the government to detain asylum-seeking families together for up to 20 days, then give parents a choice — stay in family detention with their child for months or years as their immigration case proceeds, or allow children to be taken to a government shelter so other relatives or guardians can seek custody.
That option — called “binary choice” — is one of several under consideration amid the president’s frustration over border security. Trump has been unable to fulfill key promises to build a border wall and end what he calls “catch and release,” a process that began under past administrations in which most detained families are quickly freed to await immigration hearings. The number of migrant family members arrested and charged with illegally crossing the border jumped 38 percent in August and is now at a record level, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.
Senior administration officials say they are not planning to revive the chaotic forced separations carried out by the Trump administration in May and June that spawned an enormous political backlash and led to a court order to reunite families.
But they feel compelled to do something, and officials say senior White House adviser Stephen Miller is advocating for tougher measures because he believes the springtime separations worked as an effective deterrent to illegal crossings.
At least 2,500 children were taken from their parents over a period of six weeks. Crossings by families declined slightly in May, June and July before surging again in August. September numbers are expected to be even higher.
While some migrants worried about separations, others felt seeking asylum was worth the risk
For some seeking asylum, family separations were worth the risk: ‘Whatever it took, we had to get to this country’(Zoeann Murphy, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
While some inside the White House and DHS are concerned about the “optics” and political blowback of renewed separations, Miller and others are determined to act, according to officials briefed on the deliberations. There have been several high-level meetings in the White House in recent weeks about the issue. The “binary choice” option is seen as one that could be tried out fairly quickly.
“Career law enforcement professionals in the U.S. government are working to analyze and evaluate options that would protect the American people, prevent the horrific actions of child smuggling, and stop drug cartels from pouring into our communities,” deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in an emailed statement.
Any effort to expand family detentions and resume separations would face multiple logistical and legal hurdles.
It would require overcoming the communication and data management failures that plagued the first effort, when Border Patrol agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and Department of Health and Human Services caseworkers struggled to keep track of separated parents and children.
The Trump administration believes it is on solid legal ground, according to two officials, in part because U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, who ordered the government to reunite separated families in June, approved the binary-choice approach in one of his rulings. But a Congressional Research Service report last month said “practical and legal barriers” remain to using that approach in the future and said releasing families together in the United States is “the only clearly viable option under current law.”
‘Administration officials said the CRS report cited earlier legal rulings. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which launched the separations lawsuit, disputed that interpretation and said it would oppose any attempt at expanded family detentions or separations.
“The government need not, and legally may not, indiscriminately detain families who present no flight risk or danger,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in an email. “It is deeply troubling that this Administration continues to look for ways to cause harm to small children.”
Another hurdle is that the government does not have detention space for a large number of additional families. ICE has three “family residential centers” with a combined capacity of roughly 3,000 parents and children. With more than four times that many arriving each month, it is unclear where the government would hold all the parents who would opt to remain with their children.
But Trump said in his June 20 executive order halting family separations that the administration’s policy is to keep parents and children together, “including by detaining” them. In recent weeks, federal officials have taken steps to expand their ability to do that.
In addition to considering “binary choice” and other options, officials have proposed new rules that would allow them to withdraw from a 1997 federal court agreement that bars ICE from keeping children in custody for more than 20 days.
The rules would give ICE greater flexibility to expand family detention centers and potentially hold parents and children longer, though lawyers say this would be likely to end up in court.
Officials have also imposed production quotas on immigration judges and are searching for more ways to speed up the calendar in its courts to adjudicate cases more quickly.
Federal officials arguing for the tougher measures say the rising number of family crossings is a sign of asylum fraud. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has blasted smugglers for charging migrants thousands of dollars to ferry them into the United States, knowing that “legal loopholes” will force the administration to release them pending a court hearing. Federal officials say released families are rarely deported.
Advocates for immigrants counter that asylum seekers are fleeing violence and acute poverty, mainly in Central America, and deserve to have a full hearing before an immigration judge.
“There is currently a crisis at our southern border,” DHS spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in a statement, adding, “DHS will continue to enforce the law humanely, and will continue to examine a range of options to secure our nation’s borders.”
In southern Arizona, so many families have crossed in the past 10 days that the government has been releasing them en masse to shelters and charities. A lack of available bus tickets has stranded hundreds of parents and children in Tucson, where they sleep on Red Cross cots in a church gymnasium.
At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Nielsen that migrants were “flooding into the community” and that authorities there had “no ability to do anything about it.”
Nielsen said lawmakers needs to give DHS more latitude to hold families with children in detention until their cases can be fully adjudicated — a process that can take months or years because of huge court backlogs.
DHS officials have seen the biggest increase this year in families arriving from Guatemala, where smugglers called “coyotes” tell migrants they can avoid detention and deportation by bringing a child, according to some community leaders in that country.
On Friday, Nielsen called for a regional effort to combat smuggling and violence in the region and to “heighten our penalties for traffickers.”
“I think there’s more that we can do to hold them responsible, particularly those who traffic in children,” she said in a speech in Washington at the second Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America.
More than 90,000 adults with children were caught at the southwest border in the first 11 months of fiscal 2018. The previous high for a single year was 77,600 in 2016
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My recollection is that 1) the DOJ conceded in court that a policy of intentionally separating families is unconstitutional; and 2) Federal Courts have held that detention of individuals who are neither security risks nor likely to abscond for the primary purpose of “deterrence” is illegal.
So, if this facially illegal program is put into action, why shouldn’t Stephen Miller go to jail and be held personally liable for all the damages he causes with his scofflaw racist policies? Why shouldn’t Nielsen, Sessions, and others who are part of the Miller White Nationalist scheme also be held personally liable?
More cruelty, more wasting of taxpayer resources, more abuse of the judicial process by the Trump Administration.
Oh, and by the way. although today’s out of control U.S. Immigration Court backlogs began with “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” during the Bush II and Obama Administrations, Sessions and the Trump Administration have pushed them to astounding new levels with their incompetence and anti-asylum bias. Don’t blame the victims for the Government’s irresponsible actions!
If folks who believe in human decency and the rule of law don’t get out and vote, these abuses and degradations of our national values will continue.
Recently I got involved in explaining how one could respond to this “restrictionist editorial” from Investor’s Business Daily, asserting that any Democrat who refused to buy into the Trump Administration’s draconian, and often illegal, immigration enforcement program was in favor of “open borders” and claiming to provide some (actually highly bogus) examples. “https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegal-immigration-democrats-open-borders/
Gotta hope that these dudes do a better job on investment news than they do on immigration policy! So here are some “talking points” that I prepared to help set the record straight!
Since Congressional Resolutions are nonbinding, they commonly are used as a political stunt by the party in control of a particular branch of Congress. The idea is to force members of the opposition party to “vote no” so that can be used against them in political campaigns. (Sadly, many voters have no idea what a “Resolution” is, so they are misled into thinking it’s opposition to an actual bill or law.)
So, given the bad reputation of ICE immigration enforcement, it’s hardly surprising that Democrats (and perhaps some thoughtful GOP legislators) don’t want to be “hoodwinked” into a political scheme of carte blanche endorsing an agency and its employees who have credibly been accused of many abuses.
Democrats don’t deny that civil immigration enforcement (apprehensions and removals) is necessary. But, it is certainly debatable whether ICE as currently structured, staffed, “branded,” and led is the right way to go about it. Even then, the “Abolish ICE” movement has not gained majority support among Democrat politicians. To view it as the “policy” of the Democratic Party or the majority of Democrats is simply wrong and misleading.
It’s possible to debate whether President Obama deserved his “Deporter-in- Chief” title.It’s also possible to debate the immigration enforcement strategies his Administration adopted. But, it’s beyond reasonable debate that Obama 1) gave immigration enforcement a very high priority; and 2) was in some enforcement areas, from a purely statistical basis, more effective than his predecessors and than Trump. Here’s a good analysis of the Obama immigration enforcement program: file:///Users/paulwickhamschmidt/Documents/The%20Obama%20Record%20on%20Deportations:%20Deporter%20in%20Chief%20or%20Not%3F%20%7C%20migrationpolicy.org.webarchive
Contrary to the false scenarios and manipulated statistics presented by the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice, and immigration restrictionists, the Government’s own statistics show that when released from detention and represented by counsel, asylum seekers show up for their hearings nearly all the time: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-family-asylum-20180817-story.html
In those cases where they don’t appear, it is often because of defective notices from overwhelmed Government immigration agencies or because nobody has clearly explained their rights and responsibilities to them in language they can understand. Indeed, many “in absentia” removal orders are subsequently vacated and reopened by the Immigration Courts.
Even in this highly anti-asylum administration, applicants who actually manage to get a hearing on the merits of their asylum claims win about one in three times, certainly a high enough chance of success to encourage most to show up.
Detention is both incredibly expensive and dehumanizing. DHS detention is tied up in numerous court cases. Since asylum applicants as a group are seldom either security or flight risks, looking for ways to process them outside detention makes more sense than building more expensive and substandard private jails.
“Sanctuary Cities” is largely a misnomer, because all jurisdictions provide some degree of cooperation to DHS consistent with law. Two things drive this phenomenon. First, courts have held that detainers issued by DHS for civil removal purposesare not legally enforceable because a judicial official does not issue them based on probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Second, ICE’s enforcement efforts aimed at non-criminal community members have sown fear and mistrust that has undermined local law enforcement. Victims are afraid to report serious crimes and individuals are unwilling to cooperate with local police or be witnesses in criminal prosecutions because of fear of deportation. Consequently, many localities have limited cooperation with DHS to that legally required: cooperating in the apprehension and removal of serious criminals, answering specific requests for information, or honoring criminal warrants issued by Article III Federal Judges.
Actually, it’s the Trump Administration not “Sanctuary Jurisdictions” that are scofflaws, engaging in illegal actions.
Whether or not all residents of San Francisco should be able to vote for school board is a local matter that is not indicative of any national position of the Democratic Party. All children in the United States, regardless of their status or the status of their parents, are entitled to public education under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe; and many undocumented individuals pay taxes, and nearly all would if there were a better system to allow them to do so. Therefore, on it’s face letting all residents have a say in how the local schools are run is hardly an unreasonable approach, regardless of whether or not it’s the best approach.
Moreover, what’s happening in San Francisco is by no means indicative of what Democrats elsewhere in the country think. Neither the Democratic Party nor the majority of Democrats has specifically endorsed letting undocumented individuals vote for school board.
Approximately 11 million individuals reside in the US without documents. The vast majority are law-abiding, productively employed members of our community, many with relatives who are citizens or Green Card holders. While those who have committed serious crimes or mean our country harm should of course be identified and removed (which has been a priority of every Administration over the past 50 years), the vast majority of the rest are not going to be forcibly removed no matter how nasty and cruel immigration enforcement policies become.
Therefore, developing some type of “earned legalization” that would either give them a path to citizenship, or at least make it possible for them legally to live, work, pay taxes and raise their families in the US makes more sense than forcing them to live in an underground status.
Unlike massive, ultimately ineffective enforcement programs, legalization programs are “self-funded” through application fees so they don’t add to the deficit like expanded enforcement programs.
In the long run, we need wiser leaders who will implement a larger and more realistic legal immigration system that gives more credence both to the forces abroad that force individuals to come here and the U.S. market forces that make employers in the U. S want and need to employ immigrants.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are not going to stop human migration; however, we could harness its power to maximize use of our legal immigration system, minimize the number of future migrants who come by way of the “extra legal” system, and make immigration enforcement more reasonable, achievable, and publicly acceptable.
Here’s an excerpt from Justine van der Luen’s much longer article “A Culture of No,” published in the Fall 2018 issue of VQR (quoting me, among many others).
. . . .
“Here in the US, there is democracy, but we still have fear,” he said. “I got asylum but if they want to make a problem, they can do it.” He was terrified that the smallest misstep, no matter how apparently meaningless, how accidental or random, could signal the difference between freedom and imprisonment—and from there, between life and death.
To beat the extreme odds in El Paso, Isaac had spent fifteen months in detention and paid thousands of dollars in legal fees to an elite lawyer who then worked dozens of pro bono hours on his appeal. This feat required an enormous amount of translated and notarized evidence discretely sent overseas by family members in Syria, the emotional and financial support of his brother and his lawyer, and the wherewithal to withstand a complex, taxing, humiliating process. How many asylum seekers could or should have to endure such an ordeal in order to gain internationally recognized rights meant to protect the persecuted?
As Isaac started over in America, other asylum seekers I had been tracking were less fortunate. Jesus Rodriguez Mendoza, the Venezuelan, had been transferred to a notorious detention center in Miami, which his legal team believed was punishment for his public protests; he remained on the El Paso docket, but now was physically separated from his lawyers, his fourth parole request denied. Berta Arias, the Honduran grandmother whose relief Judge Abbott had granted and then quickly rescinded, lost her appeal and was deported without the granddaughter she had raised. The Central American man whose brother, with an identical case, had won protection in New York City, remained in the Camp. It wasn’t only those from the Americas who were out of luck. Cambodians, Cameroonians, Guineans, and Kenyans I’d followed all had their claims denied; they had since been deported or were waiting on appeals.
One young Central American woman who had been repeatedly raped had managed to win relief, but only after her lawyer, unable to bear the thought of her client being sent home to be violated yet again, paid over $2,000 from her own pocket to fly two expert witnesses into Texas to clinch the case.
“I think in El Paso, they want to see that people died,” a young Salvadoran asylum seeker told me. He was an Evangelical Christian, who preached to local kids. Members of MS-13 had shot at him with a machine gun, killing a pedestrian who happened to be standing nearby, and kidnapped and murdered his fifteen-year-old friend who had joined him in proselytizing. The young man, his mother, and his brother made their way to the US. Despite having a devoted pro bono lawyer, he lost his asylum case, as well as his appeal, on the grounds of credibility (the judge believed he was simply an economic migrant who had invented the threats); his mother also struggled to find legal relief in El Paso.
“Maybe if I died, and then my mom asked for asylum, maybe then she can get protection,” he told me calmly. “They tried to kill me, but I didn’t die, so it’s not good enough for them.”
Justine van der Leun is the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things (Random House, 2016), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Spectator Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in theNew York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and Oprah Magazine. She is an International Women’s Media Foundation reporting fellow and a grantee of the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
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I encourage you to read the full article at the above link, which is accompanied by some great original illustrations by Alan Vest!
Justine highlights the real role of attorneys in our asylum system. Many of them are working on a pro bono or low fee basis or actually paying out of their own pockets! They persist under horrible working conditions and often rude, insensitive, and unprofessional treatment from judges and other government officials that would persuade most other professionals to take up another line of work. The cases are complicated and (unnecessarily) fact intensive, often requiring not only extensive research and legal knowledge, but also skilled use of expert testimony and sources translated from foreign languages.
In courts like El Paso, getting a fair result in an asylum case too often depends on making the record below and then taking an appeal — the latter itself a time-consuming “hit or miss” proposition depending on the BIA “panel” (it could be a single judge) or the Circuit in which the case arose (sadly, the 5th Circuit is notorious for taking a cavalier and tone-deaf attitude toward the law and fundamental fairness in immigration matters).
Indeed, conscientious, dedicated attorneys are far more interested in making the system function in a fair and efficient manner consistent with our Constitution than the DOJ politicos who run today’s broken court system.
Compare the reality with the intentionally false and totally disingenuous picture painted by our White Nationalist Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He refers to “dirty lawyers” who are “gaming” the system.
Apparently, Sessions’s view of “gaming” means providing vigorous and effective representation and forcing him and some of the anti-asylum judges working for him to comply with asylum law!
It’s also painfully clear that no unrepresented asylum applicant would have any chance whatsoever of receiving fairness and Due Process in El Paso.
But, instead of working with the private bar to facilitate representation and repair the damage to the Immigration Courts, Sessions has gone to great lengths to prevent effective representation of asylum seekers. He has arranged for the detention of asylum seekers in horrible conditions in obscure places where there are no lawyers; he has “speeded up” the system to make it more difficult for lawyers to effectively represent their clients; he has used unconstitutional intentional family separation to duress individuals with valid claims into abandoning them; he has made pejorative remarks about asylum seekers and their lawyers in front of Immigration Judges; and he has manipulated the substantive law against bona fide asylum seekers.
Yes, many, many Immigration Judges “buck the odds” to honor their oaths of office and guarantee fairness and Due Process for asylum seekers and other respondents. Justine points out how results differ dramatically in Immigration Courts where judges apply the law and treat respondents and their lawyers in a fair and impartial manner.
So, how can I be such a strong advocate for independence of a system that I know is badly flawed? Those of us who have actually worked in the system know that it can’t be fixed overnight.
But, getting the system out of the hands of Sessions and the DOJ politicos is an absolutely essential first step. With the advent of a true merit judicial hiring system, such as that recommended by Professor Andy Schoenholtz and others, and the establishment of a more diverse and representative Appellate Division that acts like an independent Federal Court to rein in those judges who are unfairly treating asylum applicants and force them to correctly and fairly apply the law, there will be a return of meaningful judicial dialogue and deliberation which leads to progress over time.
Notably, in Isaac’s case, the system actually worked! After many months of expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary detention and an incorrect decision below, the BIA summarily corrected the Immigration Judge’s clearly erroneous denial of Isaac’s asylum case. But corrective action by the BIA to bring anti-asylum judicial “outliers” under control is exactly what Sessions has disabled in his decision in Matter of A-B-. He basically encourages “worst practices” and enables biased Immigration Judges while criticizing the BIA’s modest attempts to bring legality and order to an out of control system. What an outrageous perversion of justice and Due Process by someone who constantly makes bogus claims to be “enforcing the rule of law!”
Additionally, by returning control over dockets and court administrationto sitting judges, rather than non-judicial DOJ politicos and their agency subordinates, an independent Immigration Court can make progress toward reducing backlogs while promoting, rather than “demoting,” Due Process.
The current Immigration Court System is a farce that should outrage and disgust every fair-minded American! It will continue to malfunction and deny Due Process until we have an independent Immigration Court where all judges are required to respect the Constitution and the individual rights of those coming before them.
Join the “New Due Process Army” and force the Immigration Courts and the Article IIIs to live up to their unfilled promise of “guaranteeing fairness and Due Process for all!”
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
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The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbusterNew York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
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I could see it in the mindless clapping, revolting laughter, and sickening glee in the eyes of the ugly, overwhelmingly White crowd (many of them women, although a few of the women didn’t seem amused) behind Trump as he denigrated and mocked Christine Blasey Ford this week.
Also in the angry, distorted snarl of Sen. Lindsey Graham as he absurdly called the Kavanaugh hearings “the most unethical” performance (LG, my man, where were you when Mitch, you, and your colleagues totally stiffed a much better qualified Obama appointment, , without even giving him the courtesy of a hearing?).
Also in the incredibly arrogant, partisan, rude, condescending, and openly misogynistic way that Kavanaugh treated Senator Amy Klobuchar’s totally reasonable inquiry. Would Senator Susan Collins still have voted for “BKavs” if he had treated her that way? I doubt it! But, I guess her women colleagues don’t matter. And, it appears that “Chairman Chuckie” Grassley doesn’t really need or want any GOP women on his “Old Boys Club” (a/k/a Senate Judiciary Committee.) Only Democrat women can hack the stress and workload of serving on a daily basis with the GOP misogynists.
What do you call a party whose “base” glories in the pain and suffering of others? The 21st Century GOP!
It’s an existential threat to the future of our country! If decent folks don’t start using the ballot box to remove the GOP from power at every level, it might be too late for the majority of us to take our country back from the misguided minority who have taken power! Get out the vote in November!
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown at the border this spring was troubled from the outset by planning shortfalls, widespread communication failures and administrative indifference to the separation of small children from their parents, according to an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the government’s first attempt to autopsy the chaos produced between May 5 and June 20, when President Trump abruptly halted the separations under mounting pressure from his party and members of his family.
The DHS Office of Inspector General’s review found at least 860 migrant children were left in Border Patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts, with one minor confined for 12 days and another for 25.
Many of those children were put in chain-link holding pens in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. The facilities were designed as short-term way stations, lacking beds and showers, while the children awaited transfer to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
U.S. border officials in the Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest for illegal crossings along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, held at least 564 children longer than they were supposed to, according to the report. Officials in the El Paso sector held 297 children over the legal limit.
The investigators describe a poorly coordinated interagency process that left distraught parents with little or no knowledge of their children’s whereabouts. In other instances, U.S. officials were forced to share minors’ files on Microsoft Word documents sent as email attachments because the government’s internal systems couldn’t communicate.
“Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report found.
Based on observations conducted by DHS inspectors at multiple facilities along the border in late June, agents separated children too young to talk from their parents in a way that courted disaster, the report says.
“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file,” the report said.
“It is a priority of our agency to process and transfer all individuals in our custody to the appropriate longer-term detention agency as soon as possible,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, said in a statement. “The safety and well-being of unaccompanied alien children . . . is our highest responsibility, and we work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement to ensure the timely and secure transfer of all unaccompanied minors in our custody as soon as placement is available from HHS.”
In its Sept. 14 response to the inspector general’s report, DHS acknowledged the “lack of information technology integration” across the key immigration systems and “sometimes” holding children beyond the 72-hour limit.
Jim Crumpacker, the DHS official who responded to the report, said the agency held children longer mainly because HHS shelter space was unavailable. But he said transferring children to less-restrictive settings is a priority.
On June 23, three days after the executive order halting the separations, DHS announced it had developed a “central database” with HHS containing location information for separated parents and minors that both departments could access to reunite families. The inspector general found no evidence of such a database, the report said.
“The OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not,” it states. “DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”
Inspectors said they continue to have doubts about the accuracy and reliability of information provided by DHS about the scope of the family separations.
In late June, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,500 children taken from their parents, but three months later, more than 100 of those minors remain in federal custody.
The inspector general’s report also found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) restricted the flow of asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and may have inadvertently prompted them to cross illegally. One woman said an officer had turned her away three times, so she crossed illegally.
At one border crossing, the inspection team saw CBP attempt to increase its detention space by “converting former offices into makeshift hold rooms.”
The observations were made by teams of lawyers, inspectors and criminal investigators sent to the border amid concerns raised by members of Congress and the public. They made unannounced visits to CBP and ICE facilities in the border cities of El Paso and McAllen, Tex.
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Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Isobel Thompson give us the “skinny” on how the self-created “Kiddie Gulag” that Sessions, Stevie Miller, and Nielsen love so much has turned into total chaos, with the most vulnerable kids among us as its victims. We’ll be feeling the effects of these cruel, inhuman, and unconstitutional policies for generations!
Three months after Donald Trump gave in to global opprobrium and discontinued his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border, the stark impact of his zero-tolerance directive continues to unfold, with reports emerging that, in the space of a year, the number of migrant children detained by the U.S. government has spiked from 2,400 to over 13,000—despite the number of monthly border crossings remaining relatively unchanged. The increase, along with the fact that the average detainment period has jumped from 34 to 59 days, has resulted in an accommodation crisis. As a result, hundreds of children—some wearing belts inscribed with their emergency-contact information—have been packed onto buses, transported for hours, and deposited at a tented city in a stretch of desert in Tornillo, West Texas. According to The New York Times, these journeys typically occur in the middle of the night and on short notice, to prevent children from fleeing.
The optics of the child-separation crisis have been some of the worst in history for the Trump administration, and the tent city in Tornillo is no exception. The facility is reportedly run according to “guidelines” provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, but access to legal aid is limited, and children—who sleep in bunks divided by gender into blocks of 20—are given academic workbooks, but no formal teaching. In theory, the hundreds of children being sent to Tornillo every week should be held for just a short period of time; the center first opened in June as a temporary space for about 400. Since then, however, it has been expanded to accommodate 3,800 occupants for an indefinite period.
Again, the lag time is largely thanks to the White House. Typically, children labeled “unaccompanied minors” are held in federal custody until they can be paired with sponsors, who house them as their immigration case filters through the courts. But thanks to the harsh rhetoric embraced by the White House, such sponsors are now in short supply. They’re often undocumented immigrants themselves, which means that in this environment, claiming a child would put them at risk for deportation. In June, that risk became even more acute when authorities announced that potential sponsors would have to submit their fingerprints, as well as those of any adults living in their household: data that would then be passed to immigration authorities. Matthew Albence, who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unwittingly illustrated the problem when he testified before Congress last week that I.C.E. had arrested multiple people who had applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. Almost three-quarters had no criminal record.
Over time, the number of detained children is only expected to increase. According to The Washington Post, the flood of Central American immigrants moving north, driven by “hunger, joblessness, and the gravitational pull of the American economy,” shows no sign of abating. The number of men who cross the border with children has reportedly risen from 7,896 in 2016 to 16,667 this year, while instances of migrants falsely claiming children as their own have reportedly increased “threefold.” “Economic opportunity and governance play much larger roles in affecting the decision for migrants to take the trip north to the United States,” Kevin McAleenan, a border-security official, told the Post, adding that “a sustained campaign that addresses both push and pull factors” is “the only solution to this crisis.”
Given the attitude of the current administration, such a campaign seems unlikely to materialize. With Congress poorly positioned to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and a suddenly swamped detention system draining money and resources and damaging the mental health of thousands of children, the escalating crisis seems poised to become an ever more serious self-inflicted thorn in the president’s side. Although the White House is confident that, as hard-liner Stephen Miller boasts, it can’t lose on immigration, it will at some point be forced to acknowledge that its draconian strategy has morphed into chaos.
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Wonder if any of these evil dudes who along with Sessions helped plan and implement the “Kiddie Gulag” knowing that it was likely in violation of the Constitution (in Federal court, DOJ lawyers didn’t even contest that a policy of intentional child separation would be unconstitutional) took out the “Bivens Insurance” offered to USG employees at relatively low-cost (I sure did!).
The only good news is that they are likely to be tied up in law suits seeking damages against them in their personal capacities for the rest of their lives!
So, perhaps there will eventually be some justice! But, that’s still won’t help traumatized kids whose lives have been screwed up forever as an illegal, immoral, and bogus, “deterrent” by a racist White Nationalist regime.
A proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census reveals the dependency between older white voters and America’s growing young minority population.
By William H. Frey
Mr. Frey, a demographer, is the author of “Diversity Explosion.”
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A press conference held last April, when New York State filed suit against the Trump administration over the proposed changes to the 2020 census form.CreditCreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images
Since the early days of his campaign, from his proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border to his discredited committee on voter fraud, President Trump has declared war on America’s changing demography. His administration has followed through on that strategy with a proposal to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship. If the question remains on the form, millions of households, particularly Hispanic and Asian-American, could skip the census, leading to an overrepresentation of white Americans during this once-a-decade count.
Six lawsuits seeking to remove the proposed question are moving through the federal courts, with the first trial likely to take place this fall.
If it is added to the census form, the citizenship question will distort our understanding of who resides in the country. What this selective underenumeration will not do is make America’s growing racial minority populations disappear. The losers from this undercount include members of Mr. Trump’s older white base, who will suffer from lost investments in a younger generation, whose successes and contributions to the economy will be necessary to keep America great.
The demographic trends make this plain. America’s white population is growing tepidly because of substantial declines among younger whites. Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is a result of both low fertility rates among young whites and modest white immigration — a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.
The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others — most of whom are born in the United States.
Indeed, the only part of the white population that is growing appreciably is older people, the same group to whom Mr. Trump is appealing. Thanks to aging baby boomers, the older retirement-age white population will grow by one-third over the next 15 years and, with it, the need for the government to support Social Security, Medicare, hospitals and the like. Revenue for these programs will have to come from the younger minority population. If the census does not accurately count this population, then all the services that support children and future workers, such as public education, Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid, will be shortchanged.
Although the slowly growing, rapidly aging white population will be accurately counted, the fast-growing minority school-age and young adult populations that represent the nation’s future will not get their due — demographically, politically or economically.
An in-house Census Bureau analysis based on 2010 survey data found that the inclusion of a citizenship question reduced the response rate among households that have at least one noncitizen individual. While 7 percent of United States residents are themselves noncitizens, 14 percent live in households that include one or more noncitizens. The latter figure rises to 46 percent among all Hispanics and to 45 percent among Asian-Americans, compared with just 8 percent among blacks and 3 percent among whites.
Let’s assume that one in three people in Hispanic and Asian noncitizen households refuses to answer the census. If that’s the case, the Hispanic share of the United States population would drop by 2.1 percentage points (from 17.3 to 15.2 percent) and the total white population share would rise by 2.2 percentage points (from 62 to 64.2 percent).
This imbalance would influence congressional reapportionment, hurting large, immigrant-heavy states. It will also shape how congressional and state legislative districts are drawn, favoring rural and small areas at the expense of large metropolitan areas, since noncitizen households are far more prevalent in the latter.
The underenumeration of racial minorities would also misallocate billions of dollars in state and federal funds for housing assistance, job training, community development and a variety of social services that should be distributed on the basis of census counts. It would provide a faulty framework for surveys that will inform thousands of policy and business decisions, such as where to locate schools, hospitals, employment sites or retail establishments catering to different population groups, over the next decade.
Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities. Forcing an inaccurate accounting of who resides in the nation will have long-term negative consequences for everyone.
William H. Frey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”
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Yup! Racist bias and bigotry are always the enemies of truth, justice, and intelligent actions.
Trump’s immigration policies have especially affected women and domestic violence victims
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
The Salvadoran woman could not escape her ex-husband’s abuse. Even after their divorce, he tracked her down in a town two hours away, raped her, and separately had a friend and his police officer brother threaten her directly. So she snuck into the US and applied for asylum.
Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions used her case to make it extremely difficult for her and women like her to get those protections.
The identity of the woman in the case remains anonymous. But her story is too familiar for the advocates and attorneys who work with thousands of immigrant women and immigrant women victims seeking the right to stay in the country.
Despite their stated objectives of cracking down on criminals and fraud, many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have especially impacted the vulnerable and victims.
One policy change that could deter women victims from reporting their crimes takes effect Monday as the Senate deliberates whether to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh amid assault allegations against him, which he has vehemently denied.
Some of the changes were barely noticed. Others, like Sessions’ overhaul of asylum law, have generated numerous headlines.
But the sum total of those policies could put an already particularly vulnerable population even at risk, advocates who work with women say. And that could empower abusers and predators even further, they add, making everyone less safe.
The policies
A policy takes effect on Monday that could increase the risk of deportation for undocumented immigrant victims or witnesses of crimes. The agency that considers visa applications will begin to refer immigrants for deportation proceedings in far more cases, including when a person fails to qualify for a visa. The policy would also constrain officers’ discretion.
The new US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy specifically applies to visas designed to protect victims of violent crime and trafficking, including some created under the Violence Against Women Act. Those visas will give legal status to victims who report or testify about crimes.
The result: Victims who apply for the special visas but fall short, including for reasons like incomplete paperwork or missing a deadline, could end up in deportation proceedings. Previously, there was no guidance to refer all visa applicants who fall short to immigration court for possible deportation. Under the new policy, it’ll be the presumption. Advocates for immigrants worry the risk will be too great for immigrants on the fence about reporting their crimes.
In the Salvadoran woman’s case, Sessions ruled in June that gang and domestic violence victims generally don’t qualify for asylum, and the Department of Homeland Security applied those rules to all asylum seekers at the border and refugees applying from abroad.
Other policies that especially impact women and victims include:
‘I wouldn’t wish it even on my worst enemy’: Reunited immigrant moms write letters from detention
By Tal Kopan, CNN
The women say they were treated like dogs and told that their children would be given up for adoption. They lied awake at night, wondering if their kids were safe.
But even after being reunited with their children, they say their nightmare has not ended.
Their anguish is conveyed in a collection of letters written from one of the few immigrant family detention centers in the country, where some moms and children who were separated at the border this summer are now being held together while they await their fate. The mothers’ writings reflect a mix of despair, bewilderment and hope as they remain in government custody and legal limbo, weeks after they were reunited.
“My children were far from me and I didn’t know if they were okay, if they were eating or sleeping. I have suffered a lot,” wrote a mother identified as Elena. “ICE harmed us a lot psychologically. We can’t sleep well because my little girl thinks they are going to separate us again. … I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone.”
The letters reflect the scars inflicted at the height of family separations this summer, when thousands of families were broken up at the border and kept apart for weeks to months at a time. They also reflect the ongoing uncertainty and emotional recovery for the families that are still detained.
The letters were collected at the Dilley detention center in Texas. They were provided via the Dilley Pro Bono Project by the Immigration Justice Campaign, a joint effort by leading immigrant advocacy and legal groups to provide access to legal support in immigrant detention centers.
The mothers speak with the Dilley Pro Bono staff in visitation trailers in the evenings and had expressed a desire to tell their stories to the public. The staff suggested writing them down, and the mothers agreed to write the letters, translated from Spanish, under pseudonyms.
Yup. Don’t let all the BKavs commotion distract you from focusing on the daily intentional and gross abuses of human rights and fundamental decency being committed by the Trump Administration.
Think a partisan Trump sycophant like BKavs would ever impartially uphold the rule of law against the abuses of the Trump Administration, particularly when it comes to treatment of women? Not a chance! He’s being put on the Supremes because Trump & the GOP are confident of his predetermined extreme right-wing agenda, his lack of objectivity, and his demonstrated inability to think outside the “box of privilege” which has allowed him to succeed and prosper (often at the expense of others).
Bucking history: Trump’s asylum policy does not represent America
BY BRUCE A. BEARDSLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/30/18 04:00 PM EDT 199
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
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Do we know who we are as a nation?
Nursing infants separated from their mothers. Children warehoused in cages, then moved to tent cities without parents. Thousands of youngsters unaccounted for after separation at the border. Officials fumble and point fingers trying to lay the blame elsewhere. America’s human and humane dimensions seem lost. Is this who we are as a nation?
Even before American independence, settlers in the New World frequently saw themselves as morally superior: residents of the “city on the hill” serving as a beacon to others. While this beacon sometimes dimmed, we usually regained our moral compass with the passage of time — and a period of historical reflection.
Refugees and asylum seekers proliferate in the world as we close our doors to them. What has been our historical record?
The persecution of Jews in Germany was well known before Europe exploded in war in 1939, even though the death camps had not been established. Just before combat began, thousands of Jewish parents were able to send their children to safety in Great Britain and Canada. The Czech Kindertransport alone saved 669 children. These acts of hospitality by other countries are now almost universally praised — in contrast to the nearly insurmountable barriers erected then by the U.S.
After World War II, America did resettle some hundreds of thousands of refugees collected in Europe’s Displaced Persons camps. We did so while trying to avert our eyes from refugee surges in Asia. After the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Czech revolt, we helped resettle many of those who fled their native land via West Germany.
Closer to home, as Castro’s grip on Cuba tightened, thousands of Cuban youngsters came to the U.S on the “Peter Pan” flights (1960–1962). They came without their parents, and with no assurance of being reunited with them. Our country was (and remains today) at odds with Cuba politically, yet we welcomed these children and integrated them into our society.
In the two decades following the Vietnam War we resettled over a million refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I know because I was in charge of elements of those programs, intermittently from 1975 to 1989.
The Vietnam programs had a separate category for unaccompanied minors. We worked closely with refugee camp administrators in countries of first asylum to afford these vulnerable children special protection in the refugee camps, and the potential for rapid resettlement in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yes, we were aware of, and dealt with, attempts at misrepresentation. And yes, we suspected that some refugee parents may have callously risked a child’s life to provide an “anchor” for the parent’s future migration. But the child was there.
When I was with the refugee programs in Malaysia and Thailand, my duties included urging the host countries to treat all asylum seekers humanely. In that we proudly led by example. U.S. policy then was dictated by the greater good of protecting minors who were at risk through no fault of their own. Now, decades later, many of those refugees who entered our country in poverty have become personally successful, greatly contributing to our country. They include doctors, teachers, senior military officers, scholars and job-creating entrepreneurs.
Today, on our southwest border, we are confronted by a similar challenge. Today our response is much different, and contrary to our basic values. Rather than offering asylum seekers a cloak of protection, our government seems to purposely make their lives as harsh as possible (and at great expense). Is separating families, caging children, and pressuring people to request removal who we are? Now the pretext of investigating the suitability of placing a minor in a relative’s home in the U.S. has become a vehicle for finding more deportees!
This is, alas, done to the cheers of a minority of people in America. Does it make our nation “great”?
Who are we as a nation anyway? Do we know?
Bruce A. Beardsley is a retired U.S. diplomat. During his 31 years in the Foreign Service, he oversaw what were then the U.S.’s largest refugee (in Thailand) and visa (in Mexico and the Philippines) operations.
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Do you want to leave an inspirational legacy to future generations of Americans? Then, rise up and vote the Kakistocracy, put in place by a minority of voters, out of office!
In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.
Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.
But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.
These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.
The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.
To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.
The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.
“It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.
Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.
“The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system,” Ms. Stauffer said. “Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system.”
But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.
The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.
The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.
Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried “to the greatest extent possible” to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, “but there are some ways in which that’s difficult or impossible to do.”
Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.
At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours’ notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.
The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worker replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.
Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.
The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.
Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.
Children who are deemed “unaccompanied minors,” either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.
The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.
“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.
“This cannot be the right solution,” Ms. Chavla said. “We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”
The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.
Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.
Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.
“Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals,” Mr. Albence said.
Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.
The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.
Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.
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If you don’t want to turn back the clock to 1939, get out the vote to remove this scofflaw, White Nationalist, racist Administration from power before it’s too late!
Yes, youʼve heard about the family separations. Youʼve heard about the travel ban. But there are dozens of ways the Trump administration is cracking down on immigration across many agencies, sometimes in ways so small and technical it doesnʼt make headlines. This week, the quiet bureaucratic war that’s even targeting legal immigrants.
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Long, but highly documented, compelling, and well worth the listen if you really want to know about the ugly, depraved policies of Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, Cissna, Gene Hamilton, and the rest of the White Nationalist Racist Brigade.
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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greetings. In August 2018, Immigration Courts remained overwhelmed with record numbers of cases awaiting decision. As of August 31, 2018, the number had reached 764,561. In July, the number of cases awaiting decision was 746,049 cases. This is a significant increase – up 41 percent – compared to the 542,411 cases pending at the end of January 2017, when President Trump took office.
California, Texas, and New York have the largest backlogs in the nation at 142,260, 112,733, and 103,054 pending caseloads respectively. While California is the state with the most pending cases, New York City’s immigration court topped the list of immigration courts with highest number at 99,919 pending cases at the end of August.
To view further details see TRAC’s immigration court backlog tool:
In addition to these most recent overall figures, TRAC continues to offer free monthly reports on selected government agencies such as the FBI, ATF, DHS and the IRS. TRAC’s reports also monitor program categories such as official corruption, drugs, weapons, white collar crime and terrorism. For the latest information on prosecutions and convictions through July 2018, go to:
Even more detailed criminal enforcement information for the period from FY 1986 through August 2018 is available to TRACFed subscribers via the Express and Going Deeper tools. Go to http://tracfed.syr.edu for more information. Customized reports for a specific agency, district, program, lead charge or judge are available via the TRAC Data Interpreter, either as part of a TRACFed subscription or on a per-report basis. Go to http://trac.syr.edu/interpreter to start.
If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:
TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
At approximately 20,000 more backlogged cases per month, the “Gonzo-ized” version of the US Immigration Courts are on track to jack the backlog up to 1 million by the end of FY 2019! Talk about self-inflicted, totally unnecessary chaos!
Hiring more new Immigration Judges won’t solve the problem because 1) if they do the job right, they will be slow and deliberative, 2) if they are slow, they will be fired, 3) but if they do it “Gonzo’s way” and give Due Process a pass, many of their cases will be sent back by the Courts of Appeals, adding to the mess.
Gonzo’s recent “My Way or the Highway” speech to new IJs where he unethically urged them to violate their oaths of office by ignoring relevant humanitarian factors in asylum cases (which actually are supposed to be humanitarian adjudications) and just crank out more removal orders to carry out the Administration’s White Nationalist agenda is a prime example of why more judicial bodies can’t solve the problem without a complete overhaul of the system to refocus it on Due Process — and only Due Process.
Someday, the Immigration Courts will become independent of the DOJ. That should include a professionally-administered, transparent, merit-based, judicial selection and retention system with provision for meaningful public input. (Such systems now are used for selection and retention of US Bankruptcy Judges and US Magistrate Judges.) When that happens, those Immigration Judges who “went along to get along” with Gonzo’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant, ignore Due Process system might be challenged to explain why they are best qualified to be retained in a new system that requires fair, impartial, and scholarly judges.
This court system can be fixed, but not by the likes of Gonzo Apocalypto; also, not without giving the Immigration Judges back authority over their dockets and leverage to rein in a totally undisciplined, irresponsible, unprofessional, and out of control ICE. (Responsible, professional, practical, humane leadership at DHS and ICE is also a key ingredient for a well-functioning and efficient court system.)
Dan Carter and Paul Stekler write in the LA Times:
Then Alabama Gov. George Wallace, wearing suit at left, is shown on June 11, 1963, standing at the door of Foster Auditorium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., as he tries to block the admission of two black students to the then- all-white University of Alabama. (Calvin Hannah / Associated Press)
In late September 1968, presidential election polls showed that third-party candidate George Wallace’s campaign was surging. With the support of a quarter of white voters, Wallace was within single digits of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s dominance in Southern states threatened to prevent any candidate from securing an electoral college majority, throwing the November election into the House of Representatives.
His was an extraordinary rise. In his inaugural speech as Alabama governor just five years earlier, Wallace had promised “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He then gained national attention by personally standing in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block the admission of two black students.
By 1968, he seldom used explicitly racist language, but instead demanded “law and order” and railed against “crime,” “drugs,” “welfare mothers,” “forced busing” and “big city thugs.” He created the racially encoded language that still haunt our politics.
So when President Trump whips up rallies with his thinly veiled racist attacks on brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims and unpatriotic blacks, it is not a new development. The racial divide has been a political tool for those willing to use it for 50 years. As former President Obama pointed out in his Sept. 7 speech, “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”
In 1968, the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement and the ’60s urban riots drew voters to Wallace. But others took note — particularly Richard Nixon’s campaign advisor Kevin Phillips, who, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” saw the potential of a major partisan realignment. Over the next six years, President Nixon adapted a more subtle version of the Wallace message, appealing to what he called “the silent majority.” In the years that followed, white voters in the once solidly Democratic South became the bedrock of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party’s Southern Strategy initially focused on shifting voters with a segregationist bent to the party, but it proved adaptable to other whites uneasy with the increasing role of minorities in American life and politics. These appeals resurfaced many times over the years, most memorably in the infamous Willie Horton ad during George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, but also in the symbolism of Ronald Reagan’s decision to make his first 1980 campaign appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With the election of Obama and a growing awareness that whites will eventually be a minority in America, the ground for such appeals has stayed quite fertile.
When Trump descended from Trump Tower in 2015, he immediately set himself apart from the gaggle of GOP presidential contenders by replacing the coy racial language of his predecessors with an unfiltered bullhorn. He has railed against prominent black leaders and athletes, talked about brown-skinned immigrants as murderers and rapists, and insisted dark-skinned Muslims constitute such a threat that we need to ban travel from entire countries.
Wallace’s bid for the presidency faltered in its final weeks, but a very small shift of voters in four states would have deadlocked the race. Wallace poured gasoline on the fire of racial division first, but Trump managed to carry that flame all the way into the White House. Who would have predicted that 50 years after the 1968 election, polls would show that more than half of Americans think their president is a racist?
Many factors have contributed to today’s tribalistic politics, but race remains the bedrock of that division. Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.
Historian Dan Carter, author of the George Wallace biography “The Politics of Rage,” and University of Texas filmmaker Paul Stekler collaborated on the PBS documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”
Folks like Trump, Sessions. Miller, Bannon, and the GOP enablers, are not “Making American Great Again.” No, they’re bringing back one of the darkest chapters in our post-WW II history: “Making America Racist Again.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, 54, is a lawyer living in Maryland and New York. She became the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund just after President Obama was sworn in for his second term. Below, she discusses our current political situation, what gives her hope and more.
On the Justice Department under the Trump administration: “During the Obama administration I was trying to push [Obama] further than whatever the administration was already doing in the civil rights space, because that’s kind of my job. But there’s no question that the Obama administration really worked in many instances as a partner. That is not the case now. Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has made clear that he has no intention of investigating police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. The Justice Department has essentially all but abandoned civil rights as a priority, and so they are no longer working as a partner with us.
That means that our work has increased. We have had to function as a kind of private DOJ, trying to take up the slack. The DOJ and the attorney general should be the chief enforcer of the nation’s civil rights law. But what we see with Attorney General Sessions is no attempt to prioritize civil rights. In fact, to the contrary, working against us, working against civil rights implementation, working against the progress of civil rights that we’ve achieved.”
On what she would say to President Trump if he invited her to the White House: “I cannot imagine what the circumstance of that invitation would be, so it’s an impossible question to answer. I don’t do ceremonial visits. I’m interested in substance. So there would be a lot I would have to know in advance about what was going to happen. The president has been so explicitly hostile to civil rights and racial justice that I would have to have a very clear understanding of what reversals he was prepared to make to his policies. And in the absence of those, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would attend such a meeting.”
On Trump’s comments that black Americans are doing better economically than ever before: ”He does state that, and I think the figures that he uses are convenient in terms of job numbers. But look more closely at wage stagnation and, in fact, wage decreases. Look at the ways in which the failure to invest in infrastructure has left African American communities stranded in terms of transportation. Look at the voter suppression that disempowers African Americans from being able to even control their own destiny in the places where they live. Look at the assault on education and the ways in which the Department of Education is prepared to leave students who are victims of for-profit colleges stranded. Look at the ways which they are seeking to fight and undercut affirmative action. All of these are also part of economic opportunity. And the president conveniently leaves that out of the narrative. Those are things that are necessary to give African Americans a chance.”
On her book about the legacy of lynchings in America, and what the country needs to heal: “What America does not need, in my view, is one national conversation. The book really makes the case for the importance of local communities engaging in truth and reconciliatory processes. The recognition that racial discrimination, and particularly acts of racial pogroms, which essentially is what happened in the period in which lynching was so prevalent in this country, that those local communities need to deal with that, grapple themselves with that history and themselves take on the responsibility for how you stitch back together a community that has been broken for decades, how you confront a painful truth.”
On what gives her hope: “I’m excited to see the continuous mass mobilization that people have engaged in, beginning with the Women’s March and continuing since then, in which people understand the need to come out of their homes to see one another and to say what they believe in. I’ve also really been encouraged by the ways in which the rule of law, for the most part, has held despite President Trump’s excesses. The crisis of this administration’s governance has compelled people to reimagine what it means to be a real citizen in this country. And that gives me optimism, because I think the other way was not sustainable. The benign citizenship performance that most Americans were engaged in was simply not sustainable. Now people understand that they are needed. Their voice is needed, every vote is needed, their engagement is needed.”
Undoubtedly, our Civil Rights Laws were passed to protect African-Americans and similarly situated individuals so that they could enjoy the same advantages and benefits once accorded only to Whites. But, Jeff Sessions believes that civil rights are just about protecting White Power & Privilege against African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and other “uppity” minorities.
Similarly, the Bill of Rights was adopted to protect individual rights against Government overreach. But, Jeff Sessions believes that the right of police to enforce the law using brutality and unnecessary and indiscriminate force is superior to the individual Constitutional rights of people of color.
The solution to restoring reason and the true rule of law (not the perverted “rule of Sessions”): regime change!
